Remembering Macedonia. Chapter One. The Colosseum of Dirt.

Still remember the day I first met Alex. My eyes were blurred by the sweat dripping off my brow... The warmth of fresh blood as it spilt down the side of my face... The very exuberant vivacity of life and living - sweat and blood. I was chewing my moustache - a thick black caterpillar - my mind locked in contemplation. Locked in my vice of a palm, Fernand-o-whatever-fucker, his head look small, inconspicuous, unimportant. He was knocked out already. But that greasy-with-sweat unimportant head of his posed a very important question - as important as life itself, to take the next breath or not. Bar table or beer bottle?

Chewing moustache, contemplating this vehement question, my eyes - blurred with sweat and blood and life - were scanning the wreckage I had left behind. A dozen broken tables and upturned chairs. Half a dozen or so slumped bodies, with faces blotched an shirts in shreds. Beer bottles lay shattered on the floor, blood mixing freely with alcohol and flowing down in dirty veins of grime. The lighting was dusky and the creaky fans croaked in a cacophony of applause.

I was the Roman gladiator striding over this Colosseum of dirt. I was Jimi-fucking-Hendrix smashing his guitar on the amps. . I was the stench of sweat wafting up in the tropical sun. I was the taste of mud spiked with cashew liquor.
Bucephalus (Bu, as they called me). Ox-headed. Obstinate. Black-maned. I was whatever the fuck you called life.

Grey is bluer than you think

Good morning.

A weeping afternoon.

Not a wisping breath of wind.

The musty smell of tamarind

Trailing airy fingers through

Earth-soiled dew,

Rubber balloons and cigarette ends,

A dime and sixpence,

A few dropped tears,

Listless tingling fears,

Smiles and smirks

Embroidered into a book,

And a pistol in my hand that shook.

It is as simple as buttoning your sleeve.

Even simpler.

Idiot-proof. Sharp. Efficient. And no quivering quavering metallic heart.

One trembling finger

And a six-ounce slug

Explodes the silence in vehement self-conscious defiance

Cuts a straight line through the two inches of air

(A line too straight to be natural

Yet too straight to be man made either-

The lethal has a beauty that is incomprehensibly divine.)

And pounds into soft tissue

Crunching bone

And lodges itself into

Soft electric pulsating

Grey matter.

The body snaps out of synapse.

Acetylcholin.

Resounding echoes in an empty chamber

Of a sound that never registered.

Too quick.

Quicker that hopes and synapse hops.

Hops and barley and beer.

No thought, no regret, no fear.

Red blood. White bone. Grey matter.

The sky is grey.

And old and stale

As moulded out butter toast

With furry rhizophus spreading out black fingers into its very heart.

Black fingers.

Nerves of thought.

The wind is a faint reminder

Of a long forgotten secret.

Of words that made me smile.

Laugh. Cry. Fear. Long. Wish. Love. Yawn.

Feel.

The mould smells of the past.

Thick, sweet and balmy.

Like sweaty palms.

Warms me up.

The moment has passed.

The grey is blue.

Bluer than it seems.

The gun clangs on the floor as frail fingers let go.

Sweaty and warm.

Good evening.

Bad night.

Betraying the cause.

Causality

The relationship of cause and effect

The principle that nothing can happen without being caused

There was blood seeping

Tracing lines along the grains in the wood

And marking out the cracks in the floorboards.

Blood spewing out of his half-open mouth

And his bleeding nose.

His eyes were half-closed.

Half-open.

Staring aimlessly,

Trying to make meaning out of the rust patterns drawn into the bottom of the refrigerator door.

Trying in vain to substantiate life

And place pins, and hold it down,

And dissect its viscera

As he lay, dissected himself,

In a pool of blood.

His blood.

The blood of the cause.

The high-octane fuel that once charged

That turbocharged mind of his

Which identified, improvised, illustrated, illuminated.

No doubt he started it.

His mind was the manifesto,

And here lay, bread and wine,

And a thousand delusions which escaped the confining quotations

And puzzling citations within that psychical text.

Now with the knife staved deep in his chest,

It still was not easy.

Cutting a shredded line through his heart and his left lung.

Blood oozed out.

Filling the chest cavity.

Pulmonary oedema.

His lungs compressed, filling up with blood themselves.

As he choked on the high-octane fuel

That kept spilling though his breath now.

The blood wrote histories on the ground.

Stories he meant to achieve.

Walk in front of them, at the head of the procession.

His chest bared open to bullets

And cannon-fire.

Wrote tales of forgotten beds

And forsaken love.

The story of a cause

And how it made sense of the world to him.

How he tried to make them see it.

All they heard was a mad man's ravings.

All they saw was a path paved to their grave.

The knife plunged into his heart.

Soft and warm; and red with blood.