The Importance Of Magic In The Void

John Togher THE

IMPORTANCE OF MAGIC IN THE

VOID

IMPORTANCE MAGIC IN THE VOID

THE OF

John Togher

Illustrations By Anna F.C Smith

Copyright (c) John Togher 2009 Illustrations by Anna FC Smith Illustration copyright Anna FC Smith 2009 Book design by Anna FC Smith & Sean Doherty Published by The Mental Virus, UK

Contents 6. The Synesthetic Hour Starts With 7. You Say 8. Sunday Afternoon 9. Fall 10. A Man In The World 11. Dave’s Bird 12. Learning The Blues 13. Piccadilly 14. The Libido Works Fine On Weekdays 15. What Salvador Dali Said One Time 16. A Chance Meeting After A Ten Year Absence 17. To A Lover Overcome 18. Till Death Do Us 20. A Finely Placed Freckle 21. Pink Elephants On Parade 22. The Point 23. Look Mummy! That Man… 24. On A Blank Morning 25. How Great It Was To Make Love To Aretha Franklin Circa 1970 26. Watching You Masturbate In The Style Of The Old Testament * 28. Home & Away 30. Scoring The Oak 31. A Tribute To The Stray 32. Stop The Clocks 33. Déjà Vu 34. The Importance of Magic in The Void 36. The Fool Who Ate The Gruel 38. Ungalet 40. The I Of Today 43. A Small Collection of Illustrations from The Mental Virus

*based on the Film “Big Breaths” by Anna FC Smith (2006)

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The Synesthetic Hour Starts With Learning the alphabet again, but this time with Richard of York. Smelling the onion in your name, seeing the personality in your hair, with it’s dense wave of chestnut. Static from the vinyl throws a hundred tiny stars in my eyes. Overwhelming, the white flashes taste a little like fresh monk fish and I drown in the noise of our new start. You say to take a minute but as I sit and count to sixty I hear a symphony start up and I can’t sit still so I take your hand in mine and we dance till noon’s song.

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You Say Reading JD Salinger is like eating mashed potatoes. That vodka is the greatest kick in the teeth and whiskey holds the taste of the soul in its afterbreath. You skip through the radio screening the white noise of your thoughts. Mercury. Ingrained. Amplified. You ask promptly: “Was it Yeats who said that?” as windows, eyes grown on walls, look out continual, and back perpetual. You see the crushed light of Agnes, seventy-nine, who plays football with grandchildren in the park, Woodbine hanging from grey lips. You hear my call, dimmed by the wax in your ear and you turn, you circle you face up and see, for the first time, what it is to be free.

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Sunday Afternoon A radio plays forgotten people to lost people. Grandpa sits and chews his pipe. Sister chews and sits her hair. I watch from the corner, my mouth closed. Mother’s in the kitchen cackling with Auntie. Football on the TV inspires and deflates Dad. Overcooked chicken fills the air of the house and paints a hole in my stomach. I stand for attention but get in the way. The sun is out and we’re inside. Where’s Grandma? She’s in the bathroom, don’t disturb. Knock knock. Paul’s come round. Outside now, I bounce in the yard playing wall-y. Paul’s no good and I win easily hitting the last shot at an angle, falling over and scraping my knees. Mum won’t be happy. I’ll have concrete scabs for days.

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Fall The rusty leaves fall and crunch. All part of the cycle. Once more the trees twitter, some break in the wind. A twig tumbles into your hair as Life laughs again. The drips reign begins shortly. As time slows, the days end sooner and we all feel the weight of Fall on our shoulders, wet noses and cheeks while Life laughs again. The shape of things to come appears in the puddles. Splash. Another slip, a new break, one more Fall. Soggy papers discarded in streets. Life laughs again. A young girl sings in red while her mother avoids the blues. A splatter of wet on an old settee sees one more year fade into rain. “Again, again,” Life laughs.

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A Man In The World Ce Monde Est Plein de Fous Redthoughts swim round my head, ants jump in lines to a beat. She stares at the craze painted on my mouth. It’s the papers that tell me what to do. So I fill the crates one by one but my enemy empties them two by two. I and she look on with hands on heads and shake hips to a beat. Will I ever learn? Only she can help and answer that. I exist everywhere from dump to disco but without her I’m nothing but a man in the world.

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Dave’s Bird She seemed to hold the weight of a hummingbird and had the flutter of an owl in her eyes. Carrying fragile arms like sparrow’s wings, she reached out and touched my lips. She told me, not with a squawk but in a whisper, that the Devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

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Learning The Blues The things you have to say you must repeat. Say it twice. A reminder that when you’re sat at the crossroads, guitar in hand and dusty boots on your feet, the devil won’t be up for playing nice But if you sing softly into his ear with the help of a band, he’ll pass on the secrets of his own dark places. He’ll tell you of tormented souls and mystical connotations And lead you there by his blood red hand. You’ll pass through the circles of hell, see a dizzying array of depravity and torture. It’ll be a journey of hard truths and false hopes where he’ll make you promise, through song, to tell the stories of the lost ones, the lonely souls who scratch out their eyes, leaving sockets of torment, gaping black holes. ‘Sing!’ He’ll demand, of those who are mad to live and mad to die, Mad to create, to feel, to love and to hate. So join us, friends, join us foes, on this voyage, this dark and deathly cruise, as we search the backstreet Utopia with the devil For this thing they call the blues.

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Piccadilly I meet you at the statue on the hour and think of the drowning grip I have on your face. Your onion seed eyes are ablaze. I sigh, watch the feathered clouds disconnect above us. You give a tug on my sleeve, “We’re a clumsy version of a good idea, like pterodactyls.” I freeze-frame, see you entwined in bringing defeat, deaf to my melancholy. I stare at the chip in your front tooth.

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The Libido Works Fine On Weekdays Twelve years this has built up. A non-stop affair of the mind, her blouse tickling my brow as she leans over and licks the sweat from my skin. Salty, she says, as I feel for her waist but grasp only thin air. I first saw her next door, a girl with sand in her hair and brown in her eye. She smiles and waterfalls surge inside me. Boy, I’d love to take those little elbows in my hands and feel the bump of her funny bone appear, disappear. Within breathing distance to this girl I’d like to explore her circles and half circles, find out how her body works and lie in bed eating strawberries, wilting like flowers wrapped up in blankets. She walks past me in the mornings, a waft of her scent is overbearing.

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What Salvador Dali Said One Time “Beauty will be edible or there will be no such thing at all.” Ok, so yes, I do refer to you as that Welsh girl in the pink dress with the catcurl eyes and the Elvis lip. But what have you got against the Welsh my dear? I call you pig nosed too but you don’t seem to care about all that when I stroke your back, tickle your nape and flick my tongue. That silent glitter on your cheek does wonders. Everyday you overtake me. Hazelnuts weave through your hair. Caramel thighs drip. I kiss the vanilla swarms of your lips. Feel the velvet layer of skin, smooth over lean meat. Illicit apples, burning fires. Panting until breath is lost. I remember that time at your Mother’s house when I bit your lip; the blood fizzed on my buds as I swallowed. I was tempted to your heart, that fist of a pear that you held back. I waited till you slept then snuck out my blade.

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A Chance Meeting After A Ten Year Absence She holds a rosary in her hand yet keeps the devil up her skirt. She picks the hours of least interruption to dip her feet in the colours of the earth. He thought himself a king, holding a secret royalty in his chest; with the depth of his heart a kingdom and the curls on his head a crown. She sees him walking towards her one day, and a faint recognition ignites. He hasn’t a clue but is drawn to her eyes. She calls out, “If you are who I think you are, I’ve always wanted to make love to you.” “Well, who do you think I am?” he replies, remembering his social chameleon tendencies.

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To A Lover, Overcome To a lover, overcome with panic and lust, think back to that summer and that first song. Sinew inside the mind, a singing black slug, snug, leaving lines in the cortex, a tune of dementia. The ticks, tremors and sounds of envious children. A wilting, sad cluster of flowers, dropped. Motion half-thoughts into action as the song ends and steer vitriol through the violent seas of desire. But I’m shushed to the corner where the bagpipes howl a hundred notes of solitude, hunger and fear. Those whispered lies told when the day gave us up. Because that day ended without the slow sludge of thought.

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Till Death Us Do The moon lit-dimly his path. He finds her in the alley with her shoulders under another man’s hands. The guy grows a conscience and runs. She swallows, then zips. He approaches with grit in his teeth and the Devil’s music vibrating along his jawbone. She sees Vietnam in his eyes. He strikes, deep, through her cheap nylon blouse. She smoked the same brand as him and they both read Nietzsche, It was a fatal attraction, of sorts. But this didn’t stop him further twisting the knife. She’d ironed the soul from his shirt and he never forgave her for that. Brown eyes flick wide then close. In her white room he jitters over her. Beeps form the rhythm of her chest. He ties his breath to her heart with a knot. Then tears himself up inside.

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A Finely Placed Freckle A finely placed freckle on a beautiful young woman can send a shiver through my middle and mind. Imperfections interrupting the smooth run of skin. The pinpoint precision at the top of her thigh. The scattering madness of jazz on her nose in the sun. One lying, along the jaw-line, fingered when stressed. One secret, concealed, hidden between breasts. To place a kiss with the warm breath of a rose at the apex of her arm would leave a tingle, a tremor, a fervour on my lips.

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Pink Elephants On Parade I’m writhing after spending days and nights rolling, in and out of undressed dreams, with just a white flag for company and a hole, shot through the jeans. If it’s to be like this, Then pink elephants will parade. Bottles will pile and break. I make sure she understands and roll coins her way. ‘Soma,’ she says, like from that book. She asks again, ‘Soma. Do you have any?’ None, sorry, a white phase just now. No more pretty rhymes or perfect sins, just molecules fizzing, causing alarm whilst this apathetic homeland chimes in unison as the dead come in boxes. Yes, the dead come in boxes armed with their plastic artillery. And she knows the truth, she can squeeze it out of me like fat from a dead artery. So, with credit lost, we can’t recover from that period, that full stop of hard and easy. We reach for the shelf and things fall, things drop. But, forever now, forever now, forever, those pink elephants are on parade. And she just turns, circles, spins on her heel, arms - stretched in hope; sallow, fragile, below her, I kneel.

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The Point Try to unearth, explore the water-clock secrets of the moths. If really, they recreate the womb or merely, they masquerade their amusement. Like the cruellest home video there is deadness behind the laughter, and it was Beckett who wrote that nothing is funnier than man’s unhappiness. It grows on us like moss, this search for secrets. Unending shelves of spines, and Shakespeare folio, employed as makeshift pillow, have not so far revealed why the viola swells and inflates the unrequited. We’re left to search the rain-soaked cobbles looking with absent eyes for the clear line, the answer, the point.

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Look Mummy! That Man… This morning, being not any morning but a morning of magicians, I wake and find the room a chickenneck pink. The child sees no elephant’s dance. I turn and toss a breath to the clock and off. The shadow follows. Down the stairs, the hall sniffs of synthetic strawberries. Some new kind of air? I hurl my arms, I think of her.

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On A Blank Morning I downpour the sugar after the trees Felt pure in the morning of the glitter Take off a smudge on a stream of sadness A cold blank page by your clothes in winter I desire imbecile things most side on to The dark compromise of the twilight draft I draft most on a blank morning After a cold winter downpour I take a page to compromise The trees in a faint twilight smudge The side-glitter of your sadness In the dark sugar of the stream Our clothes off by the desire The pure felt of imbecile things

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How Great It Was To Make Love to Aretha Franklin Circa 1970 Travelling to meet at some motel along Route 66, or Highway 51. Passing children throwing stones at empty glass bottles, a satisfying tish every now and then. Arriving at the deepest hour, smelling the cedar-wood foundations, as some black cat pours itself from a fence to a path. Slipping in, like a delicate, dreamy fish, amberlamps glowing and leopard-skin prints. A baroque clock on the wall melts into the fuchsia patterned paper and the throat of the wind chokes outside. Seeing her gnaw on the wing of a chicken in bed, greasy fingers and lips; her nightdress, corners her curves, a silken red. Moving hands across her sand-coffee skin, kissing her rose of a smile and unfolding, until we build to that moment the only purest present. That moment, that moment, that moment of absolute orgasm… Collapsing, with the birds whistling outside, duped into daylight.

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Watching You Masturbate In The Style Of The Old Testament I admire your capacity of lung, the way you take in a breath, slyly fondle a breast and tickle a nipple into a nub of submission, while the blood of an ox trickles across your chest with the ease and flow of a biblical river. The lungs of a sacrificial ox lie mangled, entwined with your body, offered up to some God of Fetish. Your red lipstick puckers as a finger slips into a dark pubic place. Plenty, the juices of pleasure that drip into the void of barren dreamscapes, as the urban night terrors chase you to a place you find a guilty comfort. I watch as you writhe in blood, sinew and flesh, twisting your features through the ecstasy of a wicked soul, lost in a fantasy, alone, forever hiding your love in a desolate sanguine room of lust and perversion.

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Home & Away Home is the dimple I kiss on your cheek. The smile that greets day after day, week after week. Home is the nook and cranny of our familiar love, the soft space between your thighs toes touching toes the smell at your nape the tangle of your hair in my hands. Home is known, that recognisable shape groped in the dark. The quarterly strike of our Grandmother clock. Home is the citric scent of your piss. Sometimes, I want to give home a miss, to get away from it all, away, away, away, away. Away is the girl with the soft copper hair twirling through the night in her charity shop dress. Away is the bulge of her breast as she moves, the temptation of those unknown bumps and grooves.

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To explore the landscape of her body sends me away, away from home. To a land of false expectation where I dance to that French jazz in the Bande A Part Café with those two cool and friendly Cats bopping by my side. As the copper-haired girl starts to stare with those evil green eyes, her gypsy cotton ears twitch in anticipation. But the excitement of away soon fades and the pull of home plays a soft inviting tune in my head and I return, back to our comfortable habit, back to our comfortable bed.

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Scoring The Oak Stumbling with blood shot eye Mumbling to the leaf in palm Panic at the fall looming Call to empty space blooming Stoic bird-chatter blends amid bluebells Scant of breath up the moor, on the fells The Oak, calm, wise and alone Old, like the loop of the wind Carve with penknife and score the bark Preserve a name in the life of the tree Return at the sundown of years In a morning of Spring as the Winter clears

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A Tribute To The Stray It was just beginning to hit me how lonely everybody is when a woman with extraordinarily tweezed eyebrows, like birds seen in flight from miles away, bumped into me and told me I resembled a friend of hers from high school. She reminded me of my Mother, who struck up conversations with strangers on luminous Spring evenings when the clouds smudged the sky. The woman with the two birds winged away and I stared at the onion flowers spangled out across the grass and breathed in. The air was fresh and tight, like rain. Sounds of laughter blew down the street showing the distance between them and me. I pictured the only time I saw my Father cry. It was ugly and limp. I ran to him and put my hand on his and guided the phone back to its cradle. His voice sounded the way it gets when he hears a song he loves sung perfectly. I placed him in his sad bed and told him not to worry.

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But I forgot all that and moved my thoughts to another town. One where I rage against the heated winds and act like the son they wanted.

Stop The Clocks Time, by now, surely needs a rest, to deservedly put up its feet. after working long, hard and fast, without relative pomposity or frown, it’s due some sort of treat. A sugary, savouring pause, while the rest of us stop and give much praise and applause for Time’s endless countdown. its tick-tock clip-clop that has completed our days so far. It won’t be, for long, much missed. We’ll all just live in a perpetual haze, while Time goes out, on the town, and gets pissed.

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Déjà Vu As we walk by candyfloss trees, I catch the slant of perfume in her hair. She smiles with those bee-sting lips and takes flower petal steps unaware. Tonight, I anticipate her return to the cradle of my armpit, the nook and cranny of our new found love, back to our comfortable habit.

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The Importance Of Magic In The Void The ironblack eyebrow of Hughes raises an inch as I arrive and like a sad A Minor Chord Kundera sits in his corner as I walk through this place, the void.

In this room full of drunk writers we wait for the magic, that spark of inspiration, whether from absinthe or lovers, the devil or God, we need to leave the void.

I’m offered a whiskey tumbler; taste my soul in its afterbreath. Virginia Woolf, the curve of her intelligent nose running through her prose, gives a toasts to the void.

Then it happens, Herman Hesse, steering his canoe offers an escape through the canyon of dreams and we ride, ride on those rafters thinking through it all of the importance of magic in the void.

JD Salinger pours red wine, so that men, women and Gods can line their parallel hearts again. But the gloom continues, persists. I fear I’ll be lost in the void. I try to forget the fizzing cortex of regret, of the holes in our memory that are random and guilty, of the journey I have taken to reach here, the void.

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The Fool Who Ate The Gruel Last night I slept like a log. Like a log taken from the arse of the corpse of Marilyn Monroe, and kept on a satin pillow in a shiny glass display case in a museum of Fetish Bazaars. This morning I awoke and felt like a dog. I felt like the Greek dog Cerberus, with three swaying heads, a serpent’s tail of menace, a lion’s claw of words, and a mangled mane of snakes. I felt like Cerberus, guarding the Haides Gate to normality. To say the least I was a little confused. But after a drink or three I sang like a frog. I sang like a frog in the great McCartney Choir, then drowned my sorrows in a puddle of spawn, singing all the while I’m just a pawn

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I’m just a pawn I’m just a pawn I’m just a tiny pretty manipulated pawn. Every part of me has its own little door. I’d love to let you in, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t like the holes I keep in my socks or the false name I stitched in my underwear. But, at least a man on a passing horse wouldn’t look twice my way. Nevertheless, at the end of the parade I’ll be the one in the wooden clogs dancing amongst the pigeons, dodging the marching Mariachi bands forever to be acknowledged as the fool who ate the gruel.

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Ungalet Lashings of rain. We see a foetal beggar outside, forehead touching the rain-soaked cobbles of Prague, his bald patch tipping a copper plate, humble to the chink-chink of pennies. More lashings. We use yesterday’s Times as an umbrella of information. Golem underfoot chases us to Unglet. Stumbling, we enter with ink, black ink stained on our hands and sodden paper on our shoulders. A fog hits our eyes and we squint at little fires held, in warm fingers, glowing, lighting faceless shapes. We blink and we blink. Then the noise, seemingly chaotic, frenzied shakes, tinkles and toots, the pull of a long trombone, a skipping beat, looseness in the wrists, the gravity defying notes willing us to think and to think. We’re offered dark froth in glasses and dumplings on plates, so we sit in scotch-red seating. An electric-haired enthusiast in the front row takes a drink, takes a drink. His partner yawns, black caterpillars framing her eyes, as he nods and applauds hypnotically, robotically. I stare at the kink, that maddening kink

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In the eyes of the players. A bearded man approaches in an almost-clean white shirt, tells us, “You two should have been here an hour and five minutes ago.” We look at each other, eyebrows raised. The trumpets pipe down, the piano plays Morse code, and the lights, the hue, glows pink, glows pink.

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The I Of Today Gill Scott Heron said our favourite letter of the alphabet is I. I as in me. The satisfaction of self, of the Id, of I. I, in the seat I don’t give up I, in the places I don’t kneel I, in the stomach I fill I, in the stomachs I leave empty I, in the paint on my walls I, in the walls I leave unpainted I, as in habit I, in the fuel I burn I, as in the car I drive I, as in war I, as in hate I, the face in the clouds of explosions I, in the burning of flesh I, swimming in the rivers of blood of a hundred Holy wars. I, standing idly by.

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Then I turn to you. You, whose insides are stone. You, whose heart is just a grey pebble the world has left behind. You, whose memories are random and guilty. You, the dust collects on your soul Ready for the next generation to blow it away. You think you can organise freedom. You, whose secret hideout with yourself conceals The stolen fruits of Eden. You and your primal temptations. You stare up at twilight; see a thousand unsightly scars gathered on the moon, These are the wounds transcended from your war And one day, the creature that is yesteryear will reach With its hands of truth and grasp at your throat And choke you till your last breath, Your last gulp of air Your last satisfaction of self Your last affirmation of I. Gill Scott Heron said our favourite letter of the alphabet is I. I think he is right.

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A Small Collection of Illustrations from The Mental Virus

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Issue 3

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Issue 3

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Issue 4 46

Issue 6 47

John Togher is editor of The Mental Virus Magazine. He a Creative Writing & English tutor and is currently writing his first novel. He runs several arts based events in the North West. www.thementalvirus.com

Anna FC Smith is an Artist, Illustrator and Festival Organiser. www.annafcsmith.co.uk