The Scattered Thoughts of a Deviate

By R. Nield Schneider

The Scattered Thoughts of a Deviate is a self-portrait of Prisoner 541 in which he reveals his crimes, and those committed against him, crimes which have precipitated dangerous views of sedition and treason, apostasy and blasphemy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483512211

Book preview

9781483512211

1

Mirrors…Tomorrow my day comes…

I stare blankly, scarcely caring for the smoke-ring clouds of the past, or of an uncertain future.

I stand before the mirror, dripping from the cold that has ended the hottest shower I can stand (I've always done this; hot, hot, hot–cold, colder, coldest!) my greying body draggle-tailed where once my now atrophied muscles bulged;

salt scrape seeping pustules clean too, I do, Job.

I search the reflection looking for something–some anything!– to show something resembling some perfection–anything?, some thing to comfort me: my crooked nose, shaded with blackened pores, sickens sight; my scrotum-sagging face, skin crazed and turkey-chinned, flags too much extra baggage; my too, too fleshy lips, sarcasm-curled for too long over these horsey teeth, warm only pity; the ghost of a liver spot has migrated from the back of my hand to my temple; the blue-grey colouring my crow-foot eyes piggy-squint from behind a gypsy roadmap mask; I swear the lobes of my ears have swelled and drooped, and now sprout wiry tufts where once was clean and pure!

I smile stupidly.

The headache scrunching my brow under the skin is not visible in the lying glass. I cannot be grey; I'm not so smooth as curmudgeonly covered. I am a costive, straining my arse to the porcelain; I cannot pass even the flattest wind. I am ulcerated, draining bottle after bottle of milk of magnesia. I am acid reflux, biting my tongue, the rising bile thrown up with no good reason.

Smile stupid!

*

Stress? Strain?

I strain?, for the softest, the smallest result; a rabbit scat, a sheep's marble does not even splash a ripple in the glass. I throw up a bleeding puke that burns my throat. I am surprised how calmly the face in the mirror views my rancour; like a remote and impassive disinterest, it ponders me…

as a stranger, an alien, I rub my fat stomach, kneading the swollen bell with my whitening knuckles, burst acid belch again.

I? stress?

The mirror doubles the four blank walls around me, giving more space, more rooms for me to inhabit; more walls to surround me, hold me within myself, away from the polite society out there, beyond the walls.

That I should die?, that I should suffer from the pain of living?

*

Which to stress? Now, let me think…

*

The voices in my head grunt abuse in monosyllabic mutterings that echo your absence. The deepest drain oozes my smallness; I am a study in miniature. I imitate a feral cat marking out its territory, pace backwards and forward, the mirror silent, no eye contact possible any more but to talk about the weather, a lonely cloud wandering, cold adventures scattered like piss in the wind.

I yearn for your touch, catch myself thinking of you in the morning, at night; and the time inbetween gladdens words, but cannot measure sadness. Even now, no! I look out the front window; hope the car in the street will turn into my drive. So wholly pain drunk am I; I can no longer bare this loneliness alone. You, your cheek on my shoulder, you lying in my arms, your naked, breathy voice and sparkling eyes, the perfume of your hair. My days long for the solitude of night, my nights are tossed with grief too, Job…

for I am sure I shall never see joy again

but to lie at your feet again

lose myself, my life, my soul

so wholly drunk…I hide myself away in shame; I wish to be so small as to not be seen. I don't wish to be in the way; my fervent hope is to disappear, to go back into the bleak silence of half forgotten nursery rhymes.

*

to lie at your feet again…

Oh Mother! how I’ve let her down…

I want to call. The telephone accuses me, stares blankly silent; expectation and desire talks a one-sided dialogue with your memory.

You meant something kind of good to me…

*

torpor's toe nudges me; the mangy rat infiltrates my thoughts to turn my world black with disapproval. Don't argue with me. Can you not hear my thick voice, my wheezing breath belch discontent? I am drowning in the sewer of immovable vomit rising from the rubbish pit of my imagination. I am overtaken. You turn your face from me as if fetid curses burst from my mouth, yet still I fall across your feet. I stand as a pale, unstable flower, waiver, grope around the shadows. The loathsome drudgery of my life awaits your daily smiling touch upon my lips. I stand begging, this remonstrance my last and only hope. I take the bit between my teeth, speak bluntly a fearless plea, my hand across my heart:

Come back, come back home…

*

There was a time when I looked in the glass sure it was that I was. Now, if I look hard, I am startled, staring at a stranger human animal than I can conceive of by my thoughts, my inner feelings, a complex parody of the child I once was, a sad, dishevelled caricature of long lost possibility glaring back at yawed away youth, stooped in dim surmise, my eyes, pulled by the weight of scornful scolds of wrinkled flesh, drooping slightly at the corners, startled in drained surprise at the hang-dog face of slack mouthed astonishment.

I cannot look for too long…or too closely; I cannot bear the prolonged scrutiny, the truth of it, the lies…I sit at the window and watch the day darken, scumble raddled towards the poverty of despair. A derisory laugh in the night… is carried in the moon-dark, back through the air, across roofs of tiles and tin, through walls and ceilings, looping stairs and bedposts, but I am lost in a silence that stumbles on my head like the threat of a death sentence, a wish, not knowing what to say, or think, or what has been said or done, my humid night-time fantasies tinted by the faint blue aroma of sex; the fists that batter fury.

Involuntarily, I hunch over as if pulled by the constriction of my stomach muscles; it requires an effort of will to straighten. The past sours inside my chest like a second heart, while I, the gormless and stunted Gollum, glare from behind my parboiled eyes, certain that I cannot disguise that I am a losel-faced dog, a wordless fury carried in the moon-dark like some battered baggage clutched in those clenching fists.

*

I waif away in horrent air, bristling. I flee caustic accusations. I stare blankly at a whistling, thumping Heaven that I can't know outside my own private dirt-box. I can no longer dream; a lover's expectation is denied me. I can no longer respond.

and I shall never see joy again…

* * *

11

My tie is choking me.

Can I say nothing to make you see how unhappy I can become? I can't go back. I can't retrace the steps to find a time when I could plait your hair; and you could babble about all the sad and exciting things, of birds and trees and air.

I can't relive the time when all my kisses and caresses could really calm your cares; to find the time to tie a ribbon in your hair; and you would crease my heart with your smile.

I can only know what you could show me, and

I shall never see joy again…dust bloodied by the desert

all the harsh words,

all the hurt and pain that I have caused you

dispraised

my grudged-out, green-eyed jaundice!

and I, a stupid, arrogant, raw rat-catcher!

Shit! dross from an illiterate, itching, grasping, eagle-eyed churl!

a bunch of…

dispraise me

say it! They all do; you know you want to:

What do I know? Who the hell do I think I am?

calling out to Jesus in the night…

*

Is 222 the third part of the triumvirate of evil, of 666?, the Unholy Ghost? the Slutty Son? the Divine Incontinence? three Devils in the one Demiurge? Impotent? It is 2.22am, and I am awake again; sure it feels evil to me. In the garden, at 2.22am, Jesus curses a revenant Gethsemane, a tarry reek ruderal in his recreant thoughts.

He and I together in strangury.

*

I want to cry but I can't find a reason, I can't think of a reason. I start glossing for expositions–oh Jesus save me!– the words constantly fail me. I shake inside and out. Out of a thought comes a single word, which vaguely resembles a single emotion that I can't remember once it's past; there is just an emptiness pulling darkness over my eyes. I want to sleep–I feel so tired–but I can't avoid the blankness,

the single empty word;

and–Jesus help me!– can I not agree?, is this blankness, the empty word not me?

I am afraid…

of you. I am afraid of me, of the voices in my head. I am afraid this empty flush will pale and I will be revealed: the eviscerated child, wide eyes bulging in ewe-necked wonder, pregnant with the snap of distress and screaming through the press down night, stripped naked as a protozoon on the end of a coat hanger. I am afraid I am a half-demolished, burned-out, dullsheen vinyl soul…

I go to bed missing you. Yes! I am afraid that I can be so fickle.

In my mind, I am flying beyond the filth of the fifth floor balcony towards the light, the soft light over the rainbow, a warrior not a perpetrator, while swinging a yellow yo-yo through the darkest recesses of thought like I don't give a damn. I count the hours–the count of three cannot end at two! loudly, so purposefully, powerfully insistent!–climbing the precipice, falling down in the long grass, under bench and shadow touched, invisible, running barefooted over gravel, the rock, wanting, needing, the light, the unassailable dark, upside down and inside out…revealed.

Can I be so brave? leap? catch up? There is no silhouette in the morning, no shadow for the noonday sun; only the siren wailing warning beyond the detour and the arrogance of introverted passivity, and I, pulling on a stogie, inspired by Bourbon, listening to Hendrix while mulling over the state of life in the smoking cafe full of older men and the stale odour of neglect and longing;

the checked tablecloth hides my lies in its filth.

Wait for me; I am afraid…

*

I'm tired; I lean, weary against drowsy eyelids, sleepwalking through daily chores, adrone in routine, an endless, mindless array. Hooray!

memories…

Memories catch in my throat like a gasping, gulping, gagging… spasm me by their noose hold back into past sins, past failures, past disasters.

Memories are like worms, teeth-bared, exiting my wounded vanity, grinning, hungry still; they look to eat the soft underbelly of my discontent–the fly-blown gruel–writhing blithely through my churning bowel, in a euphoria of driving greed to speed feed on my dis-ease.

Memories blow sandpaper skies a thousand thoughts wide and deep as tissue paper; and flies as large as crows with bulbous eyes smiling stupidly as the vertical hold slips.

They are smoking butts off the street;

they smell of stale prawns and cheap red wine;

they are the swollen tongue, the ache stained, crimson teeth bleating underlying love to cobbled stones.

*

And that? my life,

is filled with the clear and certain knowledge of what it is to regret the darkest corners, the furthest holes in the back of my head;

the failures,

caught in the craw of my throat, beyond the capacity of any reasonable man to exhale, choke me. For I have allowed–for one reason and another– my actions, the focus of my time, to be to my detriment. I can blame no one but myself.

*

In a dark blue world… I'm in a bit of a pet;

and the pettish humour rasps down on a dipper of delight for he who will take shrill interest in the swart temper of my enveloped mind; and he,

who will roister over the roily eyes of my crimpled loss, the cold beauty that was once desire in the dark blue world, to ice my chirruping wings must finally see, like me,

it's not so hard being dead;

but flying by the seat of your pants? over a twinkle in time to the cascading waves that run away, depart the dark blue world and the stinking dishrag of stammering thought sinking into the shadows like the patina of a winter's breath giving motion to a thousand disjointed doubts pitching on a sea of uncertain sleep while feeling like rufous desertion before the waxen fear of pitched darkness inside the falling storm?;

that all my thoughts remain sterile, subdued inside the hope-scarred landscape of my mind, collecting the dampness in the vortex of whispered words just spoken in the bubbled breath of the night to chock my forward motion, raising the vile phantoms of a threadbare logic from the liquid allusions left behind in the vapour across the gaps of reason, pretending to be a rightful fustigation with the wind-flattened birch before some gold, tea-leafed dawn in a dark blue, crapulous world?

Is that easy?

*