Inspiration

Story About How Poets And Authors Used To Get Inspired By Taking Drugs, I will Also Upload A Full Commentary To This Incase You're Interested :)

 

Swallow. Inhale. Snort. Swallow. Shoot? I lick at the binding gauze, tongue catching in each bump and depression, pink and red blooded tourniquet. Tastes like Iron, smells like rust.

The rain is falling in Manchester. The bedroom window is ajar and the precipitate augments on the pane and slithers down in coursing vessels. It drips from the frame onto the sill and pools in small clumps that catch my rippling reflection. I watch the stranger as he judges me. Sixteen years existing, twenty four sleeping, dreaming, writing, praying, crying and screaming.

Four novels, kept neatly in the centre of the grand fireplace. The bindings show my name ‘Harry J. Kent’ and the titles God in heart, The missionary, The cross she bore and A rural ritual, all in golden lettering. They’re of my penmanship; they are my successes, my chicken scratches in the sand. They represent a life of searching. There across four spines, through two thousand eight hundred pages I dwell, my mind laid bare and picked apart, delineated, pitched and published. I practice magic, it is only then that I can perform my craft. I will that God forgive me for it.

The magic cools on my late father’s silverware. I drill into my arm and it drills into my brain as I take it in. I’m wading into a frigid ocean as my feet begin to struggle, searching for the sand. It slips away and I am afloat. The water is warming around me, the cobalt sky shimmers with seams of gold. I search for a Sun, but there is none. I feel the temperate water rise in levels up my neck, feeding my mouth, blocking my nostrils and over my eyes. I see myself staring intently back at me through the blue, my pupils wide and my mouth agog. I feel the hot gel speed through every channel and gap in my hair, washing away the grease, unplugging every follicle.

I’m abruptly aware of my double. He thrashes and throws his limbs about. In each hand he is holding two volumes several waterlogged pages detach and float away as he flails.

“Hackwork!” he shouts.

He stops and begins to stare. The books are gone, sinking into the dark. He is suddenly close, twitching, his eyes plunge knives into me.

“You mother f**k!” he screams. I wince at the profanity, “why are you wasting your talent on Him?”

“What are you talking about” I gargle.

“God loved you as a child but he is yet to love you as a man.”

I can’t seem to understand this last statement. We stare for a few moments, before he addresses me again.

“You think that He would wish your potential so confined?”

I can’t speak. Until now I have been fine, no need for oxygen, some deep nuance of a thought had led me to think that I might have grown gills. As I look around, I notice how much higher the surface seems, how the water is turning hard.

“And you may think you did, but you didn’t need magic to cast these spells” he says, suddenly forlorn. He clutches my writings again. I watch as his position shifts, the books are weighing him down, dragging him down to the depths. He grabs at my forearm. His fingers are fountain pens with glinting gold nibs dragging down my skin.

I notice the crimson smoke erupting. My fingernails suddenly sting and as I examine them, I notice they are tattered and bloody. Skin particles flake off, probably more than I can spare. The flakes swirl around in the red cloud. My eyes are filling, I search through the gallimaufry of debris and I focus on the flakes, they begin to look like letters. They string together but form nothing coherent. I am still searching.

Swallow. Inhale. Snort. Swallow. Shoot? I’ve bloodied the carpet. The rags lie torn and discarded around me, blood is spewing from the wound. My nails are tattered, fragile, flaking.  I make my way to the dresser and clean up. Arm rebound, I stagger to the armchair across the room, using the bookshelves for support. As I move past, the names of those artists blur past, Rudyard Kipling, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Alan Poe, Jane Austen.

The magic floats on the air, mingles with my breath. Green, like alpine trees, flecked with grey. It fills me up. My lungs swell like balloons. My skin resists the stretching. I sustain it until my heart is pounding for air. I exhale. Repeat until my eyes glaze over.

The ceiling is textured. The white ceiling is textured. The ceiling, which is white as I have established, is bumpy and dotty and, and, what’s the word, what’s the word?

“Textured”

The ceiling is green. The ceiling is mountainous, encircled by dark rings. The ceiling is landscaped, dotted with volcanoes, dark vapour rises from the ubiquitous fumaroles. The ceiling is a jungle. I am in the jungle. I laugh.

There is a long road to the fuming carbuncle, paved with yellow brick and bordered with palm trees and tropical ferns. I turn around to see a field of golden corn, on the horizon I see the silhouette of a scarecrow being torn apart by an unkindness of ravens. A mounted elephant approaches. The mahout gestures for me to board. I climb the rope ladder and sit astride the great beast, its tusks are white, its ears flap in the heat, suddenly so hot. We trudge along the road, my feet are bare and dangling several feet of the ground, but I can feel the crevasses in the bricks.

My elephant is joined by a whole line of pachyderms, joined from tail to trunk as far behind me as the eye can see, disappearing into the dense foliage. They stomp in time, making the ground quiver. I feel it through my bones, every organ vibrating.

We reach the base of the volcano; it is surrounded by thin, meandering flows of lava. The mahout gestures for me to get down. I dismount; sliding slowly against the elephant’s wrinkled skin. It feels like sandpaper, but has a certain softness to it. The elephants turn on the spot and begin to march away. As the vibrations subside, I notice an abbey perched precariously on a slim rock plateau; the lava boils and rasps as it is diverted around it. I approach and cross a small bridge. The violet jacarandas that surround the Abbey walls are burning slowly. Glowing embers line the tops of the leaves and the underlying branches are soaked with ash. The brick road is eroded and crumbling at the entrance.

I step inside and am awash with holy feeling.

“This next bit might be useful, if you were me” It is my double, emerging from a dark corner. He smiles, examining his fingernails, full of hubristic accusation.

“This is meant to inspire?” I bite back

“If you were as enlightened as me, well let us just say, if you were as talented as me, or as open”

“I am you!” I shout

“You need to stop, get rid of your childishness, stop being so conservative”

“It’s all I know”

“You f*****g idiot, this really is hackwork!” he shouts and suddenly a shower of pages of my writing begins to fall from the rafters.

“Stop!” I shout.

“Hackwork!”

“Stop it! Harry, stop it!”

“Hackwork, f*****g hackwork!”

“Stop it you mother-f*****g c**t!” I seethe and the fire that burns inside erupts from me and consumes the pages and my double. I feel something break inside. The occupants of the stained glass windows watch me, they seem somehow different.

            “Hello” echoes a voice from in front of me. I turn, still filled with the dying embers of my rage. The word comes again, it resonates through the room. At the altar is a priest, his green eyes glimmering, his dark hair swept tidily to one side, a few pricks of facial hair poke through his golden skin. His robes are inscribed with letters and I know I have found what I have been looking for.

“Hello”

“Are you here for the service? I’m afraid it has just finished” he has a winsome smile, it hints at a secret yet to be told.

“I’m sorry I missed it” I reply. “I’d rather talk about you than Him anyway” I whisper. He grins and nods.

“What would you like to know?” he says and moves to sit down in the closest pew. I join him.

“What is going on in your life?” I ask. Suddenly I have a pen and am writing in an oversized book which flops over my knees.

“My name is Peter Nexis, I live here in the Abbey”.

“And what goes on here, what don’t I see?”

He breathes in deeply and hesitates before he continues. I feel the cogs turning and my mind racing.

“I am having an affair with one of the ministers here” he says in a low voice.

“And this is conflicting for you” I say, leading him on further.

“Well yes, I am told it is wrong, taught it is wrong” he sighs “I am told that you would burn for this sin, deep in the seventh circle”

“Why do you carry on? Why do you not resist it?”

“Because I don’t believe it.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t get me wrong, my love for God is eternal, but I just can’t believe that, what with Him being so metonymical with love, he should take offence to two of his followers practicing it, no matter what the circumstances” he stands and begins to pace in front of me.

“I get it” A wave of mutual understanding passes between us.

“You have struggled with such thoughts?” he says, retaking his seat

“Truly” I reply, he leans over and kisses my cheek. I do not recoil.

For what seems like several hours, he describes to me the details of how he became involved with the minister, how he came to reside in the Abbey next to the volcano and how he fears that it represents Gods fury. As each piece of information passes his lips they are presented with crystal clarity, often the images appear before me and I find that I am overwhelmed with sparks of inspiration. The magic has worked and I am no longer searching.

When he finally looks at me with a look of satisfaction, the inner most thoughts and secrets he held spilled out to me, the room seems to become unstable, wilting away into fragile sketches. The abbey, the volcano and the priest whirl away into coils of smoke. I linger on the priest’s face. I consider his facial hair, it is dark, spotted, covering the golden canvas.

The ceiling is golden, crimpled and prickly with smudged make-up spots. The ceiling is grey and flattening, becoming a vast plane of imperfections. The ceiling is white.

“Textured”

I am aware that I am no longer residing in my mind and I once again exist in the world. I notice that a small area of carpet is blackened. My muscles are sluggish as I attempt to rouse them into action. I grin as I find my way to my dark writing corner and illuminate it with a lamp. The magic has worked and evolved and there is a new and different type of spell now to be cast.

Author's Note

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Reviews

[deeps]

Myabe some poets do i can't be the judge of that, Some people have natural highs in life for inspiration.
I'm not saying that I don't like this, it's a very enjoyabel read. I like it. Such detail and imagery in this.
It reads very well. This is a very well written write. I like what You what written here. I like this alot.
This is very well written.

[TLK]

'enjoyabel'?