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Tuesday 24 October 2023



You said you loved loved
Loved the taste
Of the salt on my skin
So you drowned me in oceans of pain

You said you loved loved
Loved my tender heart
So you tore out a bite
Chewed me up and spat me out

Don't love me, don't love me no more
Set me free, let me be like before
I beg you don't love, don't love me no more

You said you loved loved
Loved the sound
Of my sweet voice
So you sang me a song of disdain

You said you loved loved
Loved my eyes
So you made me blind
So I couldn't see what was true

Don't love me, don't love me no more
Set me free, let me be like before
I beg you don't love, don't love me no more

Couldn't you love without pain,

Thursday 21 September 2023

Depression, anyone?

I forgot to refill my anti-depressant meds two weeks ago. So much to do etc, etc, I'm sure you all know what it's like. I'll do it tomorrow... Anyway, the point is I made a fascinating discovery. I'm not depressed -- I'm FUCKING FURIOUS. I, and I suspect millions and millions of women in their fifties worldwide are prescribed meds and told they are depressed when in fact they are FUCKING FURIOUS -- and they have every right to be. But since telling these women that they are FUCKING FURIOUS is going to spark off a worldwide socio-economic-political crisis without precedent in modern history they tell us we are DEPRESSED. When you are DEPRESSED it's all about YOU. There's something wrong with the way you are seeing/adapting/handling life. It's all your fault, really. The world is perfect, and you are the miserable cloud raining on their parade. When you're FUCKING FURIOUS you KNOW it's not your fucking fault, and you are ready, willing, and able to point fingers, quote statistics and get on with making sure things change for the fucking better. So don't drink the cool-aid, girls, have a Margarita, and get FUCKING FURIOUS! MC

Wednesday 17 May 2023

IF DEATH COMES KNOCKING

If Death comes knocking at my door I won't scream and bite and claw I won't beg for a stay Of just one more day If Death comes knocking at my door I think I'll smile And peek over her shoulders At all the beloved faces I'll run into loving embraces When Death comes knocking at my door

Tuesday 16 May 2023

Waking up today I realized I've been more than asleep, I've been drifting through my own life, the prisoner of an endless grief. The hole in my heart won't heal. I can't feel anything but the pain in me, and all my joys are fleeting, for others and never for myself.
We all need a little death in our lives.

Tuesday 6 December 2022

Visited by ghosts

SOAP 

Drek Kline is a German Jew - a bit of a scum bag - who lives from scams and small-time crime in Berlin, screws german women, drinks too much, sells cocaine. 

He is a thin and quick shyster in a sharp suit, brill cream on his dark hair, Clark Gable mustache, pale bulging blue eyes, long face, and big nose. 

He tugs at his earlobe when he lies, which is all the time. He is half Jewish - his mother was Jewish, his father German, but his mother died in childbirth, and his Grandmother brought him up much against her will, seeing him as a symbol of her daughter's falling away from her people. 

She calls him "drek" - human garbage - and this is how she treats him. When he is 13, after his Bar Mitzvah he runs away. 

Drek has forgotten what he is, denied his past. He is a made-man sharp and sly like a rat, a small-time hustler getting fat on war. He deals a little, steals a little, pimps a little, and buys jewels cheap from Jews and other desperate people wanting to flee the Nazi regime. 

Then one day he is sleeping in his bed with this big-tit german girl, sleeping bare-ass but in his vest and he hears screams from downstairs. He gets up, lights a cigarette, goes to the window, and sees downstairs the vans and the soldiers and it means nothing to him. 

Then they break down his door, screaming his name. He is naked in his vest with just his socks and his suspenders, his cigarette forgotten sticking to his lip. 

They drag him downstairs, and the German girl comes to the window in a flowered wrap, her thick breasts hanging like udders, her yellow hair sticking up, and screams: "Schweine, let him go!" 

And the officer says, "Would you like to go too?" and she shrinks back, mouth open wide, her startled tongue lapping at the icy air. 

They take him "JUDEN," and he doesn't understand WHY and they stick him in that van with scared and desperate people crying and sobbing, and he sits there with his shrinking penis dangling and the children staring, and some kind man takes off his long coat so he can cover his nakedness. 

He gets processed, shoved into a train, and taken to a camp in Poland. He is outraged; he does NOT consider himself a Jew - he complains, tries to talk to "someone in charge," and gets beaten for his troubles. 

He is deloused, given a uniform, and he gets a bunk next to a Rabbi who gets up every morning and whispers, "Next year, Jerusalem." 

The Rabbi is a small man with long sidelocks who chants each morning: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither" and "Next year, Jerusalem, next year..." and it drives Drek mad. 

His daily response is, "FUCK OFF!" They kept each other alive As the days and weeks progress, this old man becomes the symbol of the difference that is killing him, the inheritance he rejected and left behind and is now destroying him. 

Hating the Rabbi keeps him alive. The Rabbi has these very thin white feet, I don't know why. Drek would see them sticking out, these white feet, when everywhere there was dirt and mud, and they wore paper slippers - and he hated him even more - because he loved him, you see. 

One day they wake up, and the Germans are gone, but the Rabbi does not get up. So Drek screams at him, "Don't you die now, you fucker! Not now! Next year Jerusalem, remember? Next year Jerusalem!" 

The Rabbi holds his hand and tries to speak, and he dies. So Drek takes the Rabbi's star of David - the yellow rag of shame- and he hacks off his sidelocks with a shard of glass. The Americans come the next day, but Drek tells them to fuck off, drags himself through the open gates, and starts to walk from Poland to Jerusalem.

It takes him over a year, and he gets there, and he goes to the foot of the wall and gouges a hole in the dead ground and buries the Rabbi in the temple of Soloman. 

Then he goes and asks to fight. They tell him no. he can barely stand. He doesn't eat, you see, he can't. Everything he eats he throws up. So he does a scam. like he used to in Berlin. He steals a shipment of cigarettes, American chocolates, and nylon stockings and bribes a ranking officer in the new Israeli Army. He gets assigned to a battalion under the authority of Joseph Levi. This is Leila's Joseph (you will see him in the script) and he dislikes Drek, despises him, and calls him "soap". 

On the day of the battle for Jerusalem, the street and the house they are holding is bombarded, and Joseph is wounded, his legs crushed. Drek takes him out of the rubble and drags him to the nursing station and he keeps screaming, "You can't die now! Not now! Not now!" "You can't die this is Jerusalem, and it is ours." 

He takes Joseph to Leila, and he is dead already. No breath, no final words are said - but Drek lies. He tells Leila Joseph died with her name in his lips, struggling to live. Drek takes Joseph's gun, and goes back to fight, walking into the clouds of dust. He survives and stays.

He calls himself Joseph Soap; he stays and makes a life.

MC

Friday 9 September 2022

The Dictator's Slut Chapter II

The Dictator's Slut

Chapter II

I was taken to a quiet room with a soft carpet that hushed every sound, and thick drapes that softened the harsh light into a gentle glow.

I was laid on a bed and soon a bald man with spectacles and a doctor's long, delicate fingers was examining me, touching my head, asking embarrassing, intimate questions.

I mumbled "NO!" and tugged the skirt down, trying to cover my exposed thighs. I hated that skirt, and how vulnerable it made me feel. 

The man nodded, smiled, and gave me a pill and a glass of water. He went away and I was left in blessed silence. I tugged a cover over myself and slept. When I woke up, a smiling woman came into the room.

"Are you alright, my dear?" she asked kindly. "I hear you had quite a fright."

A fright? She called being battered and nearly raped a 'fright'? I didn't answer, I didn't know what to say, and that didn't seem to bother her.

"The Generalissimo has asked me to escort you home," she said gently. "What is your name?"

"Dita," I whispered. "Dita Hernandez." Was this woman really going to take me home? Was I free? I was and she did.

I was taken home in a long black car with fluttering flags. As we rolled slowly through the narrow streets of my barrio, people came to the windows and peeked from behind their curtains.

Curiosity was not something that was encouraged. It could be deadly. The car stopped in front of my door, and the woman helped me out and knocked on the door.

My mother was pale, and her eyes were swollen and red, her cheeks puffy and blotched. In that first moment, all she saw was me. 

"Dita!" she gasped, then she grabbed me and held me so tight it hurt. She started pouting an incomprehensible stream of words in my ear, her old language, something she only did when she was very upset.

Then she saw the woman over my shoulder in her elegant grey suit and her leather pumps and she stopped. "SeƱora," she said. "Forgive me, a mother's fears..."

"It's quite alright, Mrs. Hernandez," she smiled. "I quite understand." She stepped forward and offered my mother her hand. "I'm the Generalissimo's secretary."

My mother gaped, then glanced at me bewildered. "But how? Why..." she asked.

"Dita was accidentally caught up in a riot," the woman lied smoothly. "Dissidents. She was rescued by the Generalissimo himself! She is a lucky child."

My mother was nodding dumbly, disbelieving. "So lucky!" she gasped. "My precious baby..."

The woman smiled, and threw me a peculiar look, equal parts disdain and scorching envy. "Yes, indeed, a lucky child," she repeated. "We trust you will be more careful next time."

She smiled at my mother again, nodded at me, and left. We watched as the long sleek car drove away through the empty, dusty street.

It wasn't long before my mother's fear and relief turned to anger. She demanded to know what had happened, how it had happened.~

I told her nothing about the grey room or the man with the meaty hands. I repeated the woman's vague story about the riot, and my mother became very quiet. She knew it was a lie, she just didn't know why I was lying.

When my father came home, she told him the lie with a bright smile. "Imagine, mi amor," she exclaimed. "Our baby met the Generalissimo!"

Twenty years before, my father had been one of the men who'd come out of the jungle, following a charismatic young colonel to preach staccato revolution with a gun.

There were photos of my father in fatigues, with a cap perched far back on his head, cradling a machine gun. He had an insolent look in the pictures, an air of casual, arrogant violence about him.

That man didn't look like my father. My father was a stocky man with oak-brown, thick forearms, and surprisingly elegant hands.

There was no arrogance in my father, not since my brother Carlos had left. He was quiet, so quiet, except that sometimes late at night I'd hear his voice, talking, talking to my mother.

Sometimes he'd sob, and I'd feel a flush of embarrassment at his weakness. My father the freedom fighter, the hero of the revolution was long gone.

That night there was an uneasy silence at dinner. None of us wanted to break it. Breaking the silence might drag in the truth and the grey room and the man with the meaty hands.

No, we liked the silence, and most of all, we loved the lie.~

The next day I went back to university and everything seemed the same. No one seemed to be missing. I didn't see Pedro, but his roommate told me he had a broken nose.

I remember stifling a giggle, because, like all poets, Pedro was enormously vain. I giggled then, but now I know that by then, Pedro and a handful of the ring leaders were probably already dead.

Things went back to normal, isn't that so strange? No one talked about the silent march, it was as if it had never happened, then one day I went home and the black car with the flags was there.

There were also two men in parade uniform, one on either side of my door. I was so afraid. Were they here to arrest me? The door opened and my mother stood there.

She was smiling, and there was bright color in her sallow cheeks, but her eyes had a febrile gleam. "Dita," she cried. "You are honored, child!"

I stepped in and there he was, the Generalissimo. He stood there smiling, his head held high, his hands behind his back. "Hello, Dita," he said. "I wanted to know if you are well, after your fright."

I looked into his shallow, black eyes and glanced away again, quickly. I nodded. "Yes, sir, Generalissimo," I whispered. "I'm well. Thank you."

He placed a hand under my chin, tilting my head, and making me look at him. That frightened me more than the man with meaty hand's blows.

"What a pretty child, Mrs. Hernandez," he said smiling. "An angel..." It was then that I saw that the strange shine in my mother's eyes was fear.

MC