Like regular comics but on the web

And I’ve been reading a few. Like Minus for example, about a little girl with magical powers. Some of them are utterly charming. The ending is crazy.

There’s Letters to a Wild Boar which is more arty than comicy. I was going to post the last one I read but it had a naked Josephine Baker dancing in her banana skirt so I thought maybe nah.

I got really bored and read through the archives of Perfect Stars which I have linked over there I am sure. It is arty more than comicy but there are comics about Hemingway and Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, Sylvia Plath, Pokemon and Joe.

I will say anytime he acts particularly big-headed this comic has sprung into my head.

Mostly I’m just avoiding tutorial work. Half of the text I must read for tomorrow is in Greek. I have a helpful sheet of words to help me but they are in Romanised Greek. This text is full on crazy alphabet shit. No clue as to what is happening. I will wear a low-cut top and my tutor will be too scared to look at me because he is older than time and has probably never even seen his wife’s breasts. Oh I am so moral but it is the fastest way to dodge questions.

On Hold

Elyse lived in a flat with seven others though the eight of them were rarely all in the flat at once. There were, however, always miscellaneous others invited back that seemed to get lost amongst the clothing waiting in stacks for their turn in the machine and the piles of university literature that was systematically studied and swapped around and boxes that would never be unpacked, still warm from mothers’ helping hands. It was impossible to clear a space even in her own room which could hold a roommate at sudden last minute notice should the couch be otherwise occupied. Every day she fell in a tangle of limbs on this one couch in the designated common area with no guarantee she would stand back up again.

Not one of the eight was what you could call an organised person. Tidy girlfriends and boyfriends sometimes appeared exasperated and organised an intense military tidy but it only lasted as long as the relationship. There was a commune festivity that was easy to get lost in, easy to be swept along by. Arguments were as regular as the click of the boiled kettle with make-ups over mass used tea bags and empty bowls of sugar. Philosophies and religious views clashed with sleepy apathy in ad breaks of shared tv preferences. On the whole, life in the flat was chaotic but comfortable and it was in this atmosphere that Tim found Elyse for the first time.

The flat was never host to parties. At least not parties in the conventional sense. There was always somebody new hanging around, always some form of alcohol flowing free, always something worth celebrating. It wasn’t unusual for several friends of separate roommates to turn up at the same time and it was natural to gather on the couch and share intimacies. But there was a general aversion to parties in some sense of the word; an unspoken worry about past evictions on the grounds of rowdiness. But for the sake of argument the scene is set at a party and here enters the second character.

Tim knew a girl called Molly. He knew her a little more than he was sure he was happy with after all. Molly had been living in the flat for three months, the newest addition and so the baby despite being older than the majority. That night there might have been twenty or so bodies in one sitting room, drinking from few cups and taking collective sips whenever a rim came near a pair of lips. Sighing recycled air Tim thought he just might be able to shake her off in the dense chatter.

“What’s the party for anyway?” He bent down to his tiny doll companion and she shook her thick black curls at him.

“Not a party,” and she bent in towards him as a group pushed past to the fridge. Tim shrugged and darted away as soon as someone caught her arm in excitement. He pulled a can of cider from a passing armful and scanned the flat for somewhere to sit that wasn’t occupied. And that’s when he sees her and maybe everything should die down a little, go into slow motion, quieten and darken so all he can see is her long hair hiding half her face that seems to flow into long legs dangling down from the shelf on which she sits. Maybe we should roll out a range of clichéd lust-tinted signals that this pixie is his new target but we won’t because he merely admires those long legs and turns into a conversation with a different girl with a full mouth that he will fill with himself in a sudden rush of sublime enjoyment.

“What’s this party for anyway?” He asked her as she was wiping the edges of her mouth with her eyes turned to the floor.

“Oh, it’s not a party really.” She pursed her lips in a compact mirror and waved her hand for him to go. He opened the door into a beer run on its way out and thus removed himself from the narrative for a time. And much as he may like to believe otherwise, the party and life itself went on quite uninterrupted by his absence.

Abandoned 2

The Postman Always Rings Twice (everyone else just waits like normal people)

1

I am not a morning person. If anyone of you have been unfortunate enough to see my morning hair you would know this already. But I make a conscious effort to appear like a morning person. I drag my ass out of bed at a reasonable time most days and then I begin the daily routine of attending to my vices. I pick up discarded glasses with discarded dregs of whatever bottle was closest. I pile up discarded articles of clothing and push out discarded bedfellows. I check my eyes for clumps of eyeliner, the corners of my lips for traces of lipstick and access the damage to my skin: scratches, bruises, the dreaded spot that must be burst with a satisfactory, climatic explosion in miniature, ink splodges, that sort of thing. Minty freshness enhances the fuzzy tastes in my throat and a beaded facial scrub reportedly cleanses and purifies my pores. The hair I generally leave until the last moment, it being the most disastrous result of the Night Before and requires the most attention. Or a hat, perhaps.

Then I move to the real vices. I count cigarettes, I count coins, count emails and deadlines and chocolate chip cookies. I count pills and recount the bruises, the scratches, the clumps of eyeliner. I recount the Night Before in bitter detail, this is helped by the presence of the previously mentioned bedfellow but their input is not always welcome. I was half-way through a cup of my heavily sugared number three vice (after arrogant bastards and a book with a good cover), when the doorbell rang.

“Ohhh. Dear.” The two smiling figures in crisp black suits held back a sycophantic sneer.
“We usually come in and talk over a cup of tea but,” the male suit turned to the female who finished his sentence for him: “Obviously this is a bad time.”

I tugged the bottom of my t-shirt a little further down and ran a hand through my hair, my fingers ensnared for a moment. After a pause I crossed my arms across my chest.

“Can I help you?” I croaked and they noticed I croaked with a wincing smirk.

“You can help yourself, if you’re open-minded,” and a leaflet was pushed into my hand before they turned and walked synchronised elitism and murmured vague curses at their matching backs.

Abandoned 1

Did you ever have those glow in the dark stars on your bedroom ceiling? Just about everybody I knew did when I was a kid. I’d lie flat on my back on fold out couches, pull out mattresses and unfurled sleeping bags and count stars on the ceiling after they’d fallen asleep. Jennifer’s ceiling held eight in no particular pattern directly above her bed. Emma on the other hand had plotted out constellations and a total of twenty-five of varying sizes panning the entire ceiling. Adam had only three; the largest of these was hanging by the flimsiest strands of blue tack but never quite fell. As they slept I stared hard until I could make the faint green glow disappear completely from their white background. I erased the artificial sky with my tired eyes. I stole their sickly luminance out from the noses of sleeping partners.

It worked the same for true celestial sparks. I wore out my sight this way one night, straining to see by the faint lantern light and the flare of spent matches. I wiped the night clean from dandruff specks and almost resented the presence beside me as he pushed my mind to think irrationally and my mouth to speak logically.

Bundled inside I turned my attention to the freckles adorning twisted lines of limbs and lines of frowns and lines of fading smiles until they too disappeared under sleepy scrutiny. Folded around a burning body I was pinned down by delirious murmurs and sweat-slicked hair tangled the thump inside my chest. When my eyes finally shuddered shut there was an explosion in the sky projected on the heavy lids. Pinpoints of light I had stolen from the ceilings of old friends’ and the blackened atmosphere and the bridge of his nose. I counted these borrowed stars on the lofty ceiling inside my head above every thought and every worry and every foggy notion as he sank a little heavier against me. On the brink of sleep I melted down until we moulded feverish plastic into one many-pointed heavenly body.

My ceilings are too high for glow in the dark stickers and the nights grow cold and lonely as the year drags on but there are nineteen freckles on my left arm. If I stare long enough I can erase them all to fill the cleared counter. I’ll start the hoarding process all over again until I find a new ceiling to plot out my foolish astrology upon.

Catchy, ain’t it?

THE MANIFESTO

OR Her Communist Manifesto
OR His Feminist Manifesto
OR Their Fascist Manifesto
Or A Declaration of Independence
WITH amendments by
3 ex-girlfriends
&
a jilted groom.

No one could say I can do that like that, stand back!

I should not start with a title but I always do. I come up with something and then think desperately of what that title should actually preface. My problem is I am not an idea girl. Heck it’s difficult to find anything I have ever written with some semblance of plot which is utterly depressing so let’s pretend I didn’t bring that up.

I lay in bed this morning and plotted ideas in my head which I do every morning and leads me fucking nowhere. But this morning I idly wondered if I could actually find a point for the previous post because I liked bits of it and it always seems a waste to leave these things to die. By the time I’d charted a relationship for the two of them, named one, broke them up and reunited them again, just before I created a history for one and discarded a future for the other, I realised what I had to do. I had to write something real and ridiculous and plot an actual relationship. The way you can fall in love over and over again and the way you plod along because it’s a relationship. Sometimes they are achingly boring because life is. There’s the shine of new and the muck of routine. And I wanted to write it. I wanted to write a romance separate from either of them because I fall in love with girls and boys everyday but all I write is male perspectives. Quite frankly, I ain’t one so it’s never gonna be right.

Now really this is just something to stop me going mad when I’m writing all the boring shit and because I need something new to do but I sure get a kick about writing the word Manifesto at the top of a page. I have so far plotted:

Her Communist Manifesto
His Feminist Manifesto
Their Fascist Manifesto
and a Declaration of Independence

Not that I’m writing actual manifestos, I just like titles.

Oh look at me I have written smut with no point

Her face bloomed ethereal cumulus as the chair swirled through the blue carpet sky. The wires connecting her ears to the stereo tangled around her outstretched arms as she took another turn on her pivoting axis. He moved at last from his position against the door jamb to unravel her and catch the dimming sun on her lips. He tasted half-whispered lyrics and gasps of bass lines. Her hands caught the beltloops of his jeans to rock his hips slightly to the pounding beat too audible through the cupped hands clamped on either side of her head.

“Where have you been?” She almost shouted it. In a fluid movement he had taken her place and now pulled her in tight on his lap.

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Here and there.”

“And what did you do here and there?” She darted out of reach of his quieting kisses.

“I took in the sights, I stretched my legs, I met some people.”

“What kind of people?”

He knocked the headphones down to her shoulders and ground her cheekbones between his thumbs so she couldn’t escape his answer: “Pretty girls.”

She bounced out of his lap with a catastrophic kick-off, scattering the chair and its contents across the floor. As he tried to disengage his legs from those of the chair’s the headphones were replaced to their previous position and twitched feminine shapes into a mocking, nonchalant dance of dismissal. Her tapping feet were slowed by the hands that clasped her ankles and slowly she took root as his immobilising fingers crept ever upward.

“I have an idea,” he murmured into her thighs and reverberated over the hollow sounds in her ears. “Let’s have sex.” Her eyes rolled his attentions away slightly, pushed out a little more haunting space, and stretched languid movements into sweet harmonies once more. She stopped only to catch her breath, keeping her eyes screwed shut against the uplifted corners of his laughing gaze. She didn’t see, then, when he moved toward her again to pull the curled wire away from her shuffling legs. Her flinch at his touch was masked by a sudden sway of her hips but they couldn’t ignore his sudden lunging affection in the direction of her right knee.

“Oh, alright,” and with a half-shrugged sigh she high-fived her lover’s outstretched palm as he buried his nose in her diamond navel.

Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill.

pretty sure the format will get messed up but oh well

Jack meets Jill in a photo booth as he ruins her passport straight face to hide from the man with a settling score
And a gun
In his pocket. Really it is the gun he is hiding from.
Darting in behind the curtain, Jack becomes acquainted with Jill’s lap and Jill’s shriek of
Unwanted molestation.
Jill is introduced to Jack’s twisting mouth to shush her, she’s introduced to the taste of his
Palm and memorises what his sweat smells of.
Leather cigarettes and tea with something sharp lapping at the edges that comes after
Running like fuck in the direction away from
The gun.
Two black pointed toes appear below the curtain and Jack shrinks into Jill’s chest.
‘Position your face within the oval. Make sure your eyes are level with the line. When
You are ready press the green button.’
Jack apologises to Jill, profuse and sincere. As profuse and sincere, in fact, as a man can
Be to a woman he holds hostage in a booth with a man waiting outside
With five bullets craving his own chest.
So the boy resorts to something he understands. He meets a pretty girl in a romantic Circumstance and he babbles his way into her mouth and presses the green button.
‘Please play along,’ he whispers through her breathless lips. ‘Please,’ he begs and she
Relents a little because ‘There’s a man outside.
A man with a gun.’
Everything stiffens in the little booth as one pointed toe shifts and then
Grinds a sigh of relief signified by the still-smouldering cigarette butt on the ground.

Jack pulls Jill through the train station, barely pausing to pick up their four pictures of
Scared passion.
Her skirt and her hair fly out confused in the rush, rush, rush and
‘Why is he after you?’
No time for explanations, Jill! but
‘What did you do?’
And Jack almost loses Jill halfway through dodging cars and buses and taxis and bicycles
And people, too many people, nameless, faceless but hers: unmistakeable.
Jack tells recaptured Jill it’s all a misunderstanding, hard to believe but true. He smiles a
Starry-eyed three smile lined grin with just a hint of hopelessness topped with sheer
Desperation and Jill takes Jack’s hand.

Instead of running away Jill leads Jack up the hill behind the church where you can see
The town in all directions.
Jill kisses Jack with her hand in his hair that caught the sunshine in its waves.
So Jack promises Jill a cloud of her own as they lie nestled in waves of green, he’d promise her the earth itself if he could wrest it out from under them.
Simply because she is there and the man with
The gun is not.

The two lie hand in hand relieved that for the moment nobody is going to shoot them.
Then from the sky comes a pailful of warning water before the rain drenches.
Shivering Jack and Jill sit on the hill and watch the sky unburden itself and laugh.
Jack drinks the rain from Jill’s white face and they bury themselves in wet night.
And though they can see every rooftop and every spire and every star through every cloud,
They never see the man approach.
Jack falls down with no time to shout, and smashes his head on rushing comets.
Jill catches the shriek in her throat; it barely gathers the momentum to spill
Before Jill falls down with a hole in her smoking chest. The man lets loose
A note on brown paper, fluttering like eyelids against tacky blood-stuck cheeks,
Down through sodden blades to sodden figures.
But Jack captures a cloud for Jill with a gasping breath and the both
Are blind in the fog to the reasoning, the apology, the
Necessity
of the gun’s actions.
With a vinegared laugh and a shake of the head
The man leaves Jack and Jill beneath the hill.
His gun comes tumbling after.

What’s in a title?

She broke my heart so I broke her bedroom window.

Sunsets with people you don’t love.

Once caught her changing the batteries in her halo.

My symbol for communism is a stack of dirty dishes.

You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.

One cannot help believing gentlemen with Roman noses.

So exciting you’ll puke balloons.

The tiresome adventures of Joan.

Peanut Butter and Strawberry Chapstick Sandwiches.

Kittens with cigarettes.

Porcelain breasted downfall.

Rebecca Stephany is saving the unsaid 86 years from now.

Don’t think you knew you were in this poem.

Eschatological Verification and You.

This is not for Milo.

The chronicles of red wool.

Like drinking coffee through a veil.

Regina Replica and the book of sleep.

Neon Notes to God.

Handstands on the Empire State.

And I have always wanted to write something with Manifesto in the title.