Notes on the Author

I sit up in my unmade, dirty, bed and smoke cigarettes. They make me feel sick; swirling inside my gut, mingled with all the water and milk from the few past cups of tea, is all that smoke, rolling in the emptiness surrounding.
   My head spins nauseatingly slowly- heavy with the lumber of disarray as I swallow a load of spit that feels like its displacement could cause me to vomit at any time. I hang limp, and extinct of ideas like a ventriloquist doll; my joints equally stiff, my body beaten and muscles knotted- all tense and skinny, I feel dumb and low. Lost... Lost... And falling apart. Every breaking day should bring new promise. Uneasily, I creep from out of my bed. For many days and nights, now, I have not been stable- have not had rest. My wounds have not been treated; my sores never soothed- I have dragged on and on and on, perpetually tired and revolving I stumble without consideration; a worn-out motion with a lack of possession. I fall from duty to duty to duty, from drunk to drugged to a sleepless stupor full of failing courtesy and lack of common sense. It is important not to give up. Important not to slip and become overwrought by the mire that is left in your wake. Important to look only forwards, or else it all becomes worthless; a trick connived by Hades, no less. What is there before you, branching out from all the mess? Behind lay thick, rooted weeds that make you trip, thorns and vines that rip and whip and the stains of your seared flesh as you pass through hell. The cerebral plane tips, and all that was once grounded becomes sky. The self implodes so that the bones of the body can be worn on the outside; a carapace to deflect the startling affects both filial and communal, pulled away from the centre of love as though drawn by the four horsemen that end all. Plagued, Pestilent and left Dead after War. Just another vacuous member of a miserable horde. The mirror's image has long been forgotten; the fading painting was just a representation of an artist's dream. There is nothing you can grasp that has not been defiled by time. Only a semblance of what was had remains. It is picked and held softly, gently, and warmly, close- and finally it crumples into fine dust, as ashes.