Edit dated 06/04/06

Marcus Tullius Cicero: This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Leo Tolstoy: Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Jacob Bronowski: You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The decaying processes of nature reclaim material possessions and return them to their elemental forms; the raw materials of life recycled from inevitable death. In unavoidable truth, everything joined by human hands will divide and return to the all welcoming soil. Through the brief speck of time that our tiny lives inhabit, we witness nothing but the minor changes; when the bread becomes fur and when the pets become plant-feed. Invisible to us, even the concrete on which we stand will blow as sand into the futures eyes. In my brothers bathroom I witness the transitional state; the advancing wall of nature repossessing its pilfered resources.

A spray of dead flies fuse to the fibres of holed blue curtains, cast like peppercorns on a woven cotton sky. They lay dead from old age or physical exhaustion; through attempted escapes from the incarcerating filth. Fungus grows in moist ignored corners. A mat of greasy hair turns spirals in the bath plug hole; flicking in a stream of fresh eroding water. There are no dripping taps, but a constant run of transparent wash; like a sink taking pains to cleanse itself of shame.

I touch something solid, something metallic in my pocket, something with adhesive sinewy attachments. Fingerprint whorls and loops flap in fragments of skin like missing pieces from a scattered forgotten puzzle. A greasy metal relic carries the ‘jigsaw’ crumbs of man or woman; a trodden silvery fold, clipping together the remains of what was once probably a finger.

I throw the object in the shameful sink and let it sit for a while in the gushing flow. Soft fleshy pieces detach themselves from the solid mass and fall like snow into the depths of the earth. Stubborn traces linger behind and wait enclosed in the dull metal grip. I fiddle the bristles of my brothers toothbrush into the sheltering gaps... and pull out any remaining human. Gristly bits of something drop to the sink and circle down the rusting plug hole.

The object is finally free of sour organic mash but the smell of something dead still taints its shining surface. I find a bottle of mouthwash and swill the metal round in its cobalt blue liquid, making it rattle on the sides of the clear enclosing plastic. Odorous bacteria are exchanged for a sterile minty alcoholic freshness; a more suitable property to hold in the hand.

I return the mouthwash to the safety of a shelf and watch a particle sediment drift to rest at the bottom of the bottle. I will have to remember to avoid my brothers mouthwash in future. Bad breath is always preferable to a corpse in the mouth.

The mangled shine and flattened glister reveals its form, now free from the molesting human touch of finger traces. In an earlier guise this item of naked glint was a ring on a previous life; now reshaped from my shoe into common trash. Argentic and silvern in shade, this finger trinket shines like platinum, white gold or simple and worthless market-stall metal.

I run the object round my hand and feel the caressing friction of surface scratches; gouged and street scarred from its shoe-born transport. Filtered through the pavement scuffing, a string of symbols make themselves known; an exposure of order and design revealed through contrasting chaotic line. The symbols cluster into unintelligible groups, into ‘words’, into a sentence inscribed from an unknown language. This tarnished object of forgotten meanings, of wasted sentimental riches now exists but a few steps away from its elemental end; its transformation and return to ore.

The head that once cherished the thing, that once cried for joy at the gift of metal, now dehydrates in frozen air; a glittering rock of meat and bone. The metal will regress to a seam of oxide, the head will re-enter the carbon cycle; becoming soil – plant – animal – soil, until the earth burns from an exploding sun. I resist an urge to return the ring to its circular shape, its wearable form – in fear of any temptation to wear it. Jewellery torn from the hand of a cadaver would make a particularly useless lucky charm.

I wrap the ring in a blanket of tissue and put it to rest in a dry empty pocket. I lay myself down on my old stinking duvet and turn things over for a while. I think about distractions, about families of spiders, about religious iconography, about cheap second hand paperbacks, about going back to Prozac, about consumer electronics, about bodies dumped in a fucking freezer.

I close both eyes and stare at a memory of the crematorium chimney. A stream of ripped and twisting plastic bags ascend into the ozone, replacing absent fumes with fluttering black polyethylene polymers. Naked corpses strain at flapping plastic tails and sky-ride them into the charcoal atmosphere. Disposable bags and discarded people unify in the toxic airspace as dark and choking clouds of DNA/PVC.

The ‘Garden of Remembrance’ butt joins to the horizon as a complex carpet of serpentine ornament. Printed representations of lawns and pathways writhe through the distance like knotted veins. A singing child dances circles round a rose bush design, chanting ‘little girl’ skipping rhymes:

“Heaven is in the clouds, Heaven is in the clouds, Mary, Joseph, Luke and John. Donkey, Donkey, Donkey Kong. Where has baby Jesus gone?”

I walk the carpet lines and feel the pained avoiding movements of something shattered underneath. Fabric ripples ride over shifting hands and mouthing facial undulations. I step between the stillness and placidity of uninhabited spaces, sensing the adjacent motions of populated dirt. I tread carelessly down on a spinal curve and watch gravity warp and stiffen its resistance. Calcium gives way to persuasive kilograms. A dominated crack resonates on the airwaves.

The chapel interior spasms into vision with a lumbering switch of temporal existence. Time waits suspended in an irrelevant disposable nanosecond. I shamble forward on an underfoot stripe of smooth relenting textures; a spongiform fabric of warm and secretious donations. Perspective lines push triangular knives at a propaganda priest; solidified in shaping an infinite vowel. Black arachnid legs kick from his throat like quick broken springs; flicker walking limbs through a gossamer infected saliva.

I drag-heel over the lubricated floor and feel the cellular fabric baulk at my essence. In the priest’s open mouth an insect advances like a burning cancer, spreading crackle charred limbs over the god-giver’s tongue. I slip past the man and draw back the curtains from a once hidden door. The way ahead unfolds like a dead severed rose.

I glance to the rear and watch a brittle shadow; the sputtering shape from the mouth of a liar. Like hair, like carbon, like black razor wire; the sulphurous smash circumnavigates a cheek and invades the glaze of the preachers eye.

A taste of crystal sharpness sullies a once delicious oxygen; frozen vapour hangs thick in the air like nebulous cotton sheets. Clouds of claustrophobia invade the freezer’s vacuous spaces and grow in a broth of blown contributions. Shivers of tension thrash through my musculature in an involuntary stuttering body quake; taut exposed skin withers into dry cold rigidity.

I view the scene and witness it all just like before: the tarpaulin, the carpets, the balding head and the outstretched hand; everything as it was, and everything as it shouldn’t be. An impossible wind agitates the air; blowing gored plastic sheets into flailing banners. Brown frozen fluids cake to their surface like slogans drawn of rusting ice.

I hang my head low and see a baby in bucket; flushed and warm but so clearly out of place. A round living face ‘goo-goo’s and dribbles like a live baby should, with pink chubby hands mauling the rim of its old orange bucket. Somewhere inside its darling soft head an infantile thought transforms into a need, a want and an all consuming wish list. Primeval sounds evolve from its lungs; from a bubble to a blubber to a sophisticated squall. A gagging cry swells and multiplies in a plague of viral reverberations and infecting resonances. Hearing senses overload into alternative territories; from hearing to hurting, hurting to hunting.

I shout at the baby to make it all stop, but the omnipresent pain grinds in a surge. “Shut UP” again I shout, and nothing changes but cumulative pain. “SHUT UP”, again, “SHUT UP”, again. “SHUT THE FUCK UP” I scream, and the words rip at my throat like articulated knives. I stamp a foot down and shout in time to block out the noise. I stamp a foot down into the bucket. I stamp a foot down, down, down into the infant. The crying stops.

Far in the distance a familiar figure stoops over a bucket; it is me, viewed from the outside like an ape in a cage. I identify the filthy clothes, the clumsy stance and the stupid unshaven face; my own unvalued possessions, but I share no empathy with this bastard creature. I see what it has done; its mindless destructive acts and recognise a lack of any corresponding reason. Why did you do that? I ask. Nothing. Why did you do that? I ask again, more insistently. I refuse to answer.

I push the bucket aside and walk onto the mound of tarpaulin and carpet. Black plastic rivers course through bare ravaged valleys of Wilton and Axminster weave. I run imagined fingers through the contrasting textures; the rough itching touch of old natural wool and the soft cutting edge of polyethylene. Inside the coarse sarcophagi of material trash, I feel the stygian ripples of a bin-bag death mask.

I drag my nails through the coal-dark membrane and unveil the ashen bloom of marbled lividity. Dry leathered eyes glare from a waxen glaze; as distorted orbs, translucent and withdrawn to introspection. I cup her face in my grail of hands; a piteous rite of resurrection. Her sulphaemoglobin blush glows like sated chlorophyll. Nothing changes but incremental failure.

I hold the face of the cloud-eyed woman and welcome the weight of her head in my hands. My vaporous breath embraces her burden; envelops her affliction with cushions of warm dewy air. I stroke a line down her numb solid cheek and watch the epidermal film peel away in my fingers. A transparent slough of paper thin skin tears like ruptured cellophane.

In the cold sharp haze of exhalation, moisture folds into weaving cyclones of vitreous sleet. Strip refracted light stammers through a hanging suspension of crystalline lenses. Projecting through the prismatic broth, a revenant shade manifests into reality. A stone-faced woman motions dramatically from an open doorway.

Her mouth parts move in hushed parallel lines with synchronised words that resolve in unconsciousness. “Come home,” are the words she mouths. “Come home,” are the words for the deafened ‘cloud-eyes’. Through maternal tears the mother appeals: “Darling... darling, come home,” but the daughter is unmoved and remains. She doesn’t hear the emotive pull of distant crying. Her ears are dead and frozen into fragility.

I hold her body in a gesture of futility; forcing surplus living warmth into her frigid grey anatomy. Her tranquil head resides in the curve of my palm and sleeps inside a greater oblivion. Sparse twining grooves of jaundice yellow hair adhere to her scalp and weep with foul sebaceous meltwater. The soiled golden keratin strands unravel like sanity into dry broken threads and stale singularities.

I lean into her presence and brush at her mouth with the nerves of mine; a taboo touch precluded by the script of nature. I kiss in depths to her senseless lips and feel the gears of conventionalism grind an objection. Dark flaking pieces fall away into my mouth and I swallow the flavours of sour fermenting girl. A bitter culture dissolves and thaws into gagging new reality.