I would wake up aching (that was always the first sign) to the scar-tissue opening up like a friendly greeting. And then? Then the black star would bloom, fat in the throat and heavy on the chest, cold and alien, utterly unconscionable – and the koi carp would dance breathlessly on the belted patio-floor. The air raid siren would sound beneath a clear-blue sky. Rats would appear the same way as always, fly-specked and bloated, diseased and forgotten, all blank eyes on me. A terrible joke would spiral quickly out of control. A woodlouse, awarded in a frigid cup of tea, would spew its Delphic judgements. Sinew and tendon would dance and glisten in the early evening sun. Words would stumble on the tip of my tongue, dread would coil and seethe in the pit of my stomach. And all of those unspent goodbyes, left to moulder in the corner of some distant room? They would stand to attention and demand to be counted, one miserable regret after another, and I would stumble to my feet as woozy as a fading boxer.

And I would chew.

*

The black star is eternal, frigid and bitten, old bony fingers on the skirt of the soul. It is the constant reminder, it is the doomsday clock going tick tock tick tock tick tock tock, the impenitent, impertinent proof that this fleeting existence could all fall apart in a new york second. It is the egregious knowledge that this, our slapdash journey around a setting sun, could always, will always, so much worse. The black star is the awful aide-memoire of the catastrophic axe darkening each of our heads.

Because accidents do happen: rebellious cells can suddenly reject the sacred agreement multicellular organisms made so very long ago and return to the primitive and self-interested behaviours of their earliest forebears, consuming and dividing until we wither and die. Even our lonely little speck in the great cosmic dark, our pale blue dot of heroes and cowards, which idly burns as we idly burn what remains of our ancient dead, could be wiped clean by an errant solar flare or a methane burst or by our own dull-wittedness in the face of an absolute truth. The horror, the black star will remind us, never-ever cease.

Once upon a time our ancestors – cold and hungry – were cornered by those they considered their betters, snared by the sure-footed words of the hulking chieftain, inculcated by the divine right of vicious kings and ruthless queens, spellbound by the preternatural verse of the dour-faced pontiff. They were cuffed and collared and occasionally crucified, lead to the mouths of lions and worse. They were marched into dark satanic mills, howling workhouses, coffin warehouses and other atrocious debasements of our human nature. They were crushed beneath the heel of a gluttonous bourgeoisie, the sand and clay of cursed foundations.

Today? Today we are herded into apocalyptic industrial estates and charnel-house office spaces and other precarious labours, all offering little but a brief respite to an endless future of endless debt. Constantly exhausted and crushingly isolated, we watch feebly as rare scraps of warmth and decency are gutted and shredded and fed in an unholy abattoir strung together by plebs and serfs. This distorted monstrosity endlessly trumps economic nightmare-fuel, toytown jingoism and degrading slices of ‘reality’ TV, designed to keep us scared, keep us  angry. We are little more than light-starved pigs, half-blind and quietly deranged, perpetually lazy, perpetually fat. We have been atomised and demoralised. We have been gentrified and consumerized. We have been beaten.

We visit scorched-earth libraries and blitzkrieg-ed galleries, nostalgic for a future that never arrived, for a future purloined by pale Eton schoolboys, for a future sold to snag-toothed psychopaths in pristine suits. Joy and creativity and care and community, any remanent of the good life left to rot in the shadows of a glowering, glittering doom.

*

As Borrum dragged along a pitiful shower of unwanted gifts, a rattle of shrivelled leaves and yesterday’s garbage which skittered around my feet, I chewed. As the untamed buses passed with roars and rain turned quick to thunder, I chewed. As the days grew ever longer and my patience thinned and frayed, I chewed. Dragged to the bar on a slow Friday night, half-lost in the wild humidity of The Devonshire Arms, where locals I didn’t know stared hotly at their lagers and the bandit turned aglitter like an old and dying sun, the lads did everything within their power to avoid making eye contact as I chewed and chumbled and champed and gnawed. I was lost. I was lost as I kissed my wife goodnight. Even as I told her I loved her I chewed, chewed as I watched her search my churning teeth, chewed as she searched for some meaning to this nauseous self destruction – but the answers remained hidden if they even existed at all.

I slept and dreamt of mushroom clouds and grotesque wheezing walls, bloody lumps of grime and gore and greying  tufts of hair and more. I slept fitfully, lost in the unintelligible darkness of a tragic, Stygian sun. And I chewed.

*

The kettle rattled and wheezed as my wife made our morning coffee, as our son slept soundly in the room above our heads. The cat danced and mewled at my feet, looking for something, anything, which could halt his insatiable hunger. The autumn rain tip-tap-tipped at the kitchen window as all the things which revered the darkness crept back into their beds and their burrows and the boneyard.

The wound had opened up inside my cheek overnight. It looked a little like a waterlily except it hadn’t looked like a waterlily at all. It had looked like raw meat half-eaten. It had looked like a storm cloud black as a bruise and ready to spew. It had looked like sun-kissed shackles fastened to the bottom of a bone-strewn pit. It had looked like the kiss of a blade at Riley Square. It had looked like satirical news made tangerine flesh. It had looked like a withered clot in a porcelain sink. It had looked like death, it had looked like famine, it had looked like pestilence, it had looked like war. It had looked like that cough you couldn’t quite shake. It had looked like that odd lump on the base of your scrotum. It had looked like all of the things which had terrified you as a child, cloudy eyes and bloody noses and that terrible house at the end of Blackberry Lane, where the moon-eyed mannequin swooned and swayed and nestled in your dreams. It had looked like guilt. It had looked like grief. It had looked like tragedy. It had looked like a star in bloom.

The wound appeared to gently sob as I studied it in the bathroom mirror. The black star had began to set. I stopped my chewing and I brushed my teeth and I splashed a little water over my tired wired face. It is as easy as that, sometimes, to cast out a demon. You don’t always need a white alb and a purple stole. You don’t always need Saint Benedict and Archangel Michael steadfast at your side. Sometimes a demon will simply wither away like a nugatory memory. And the wound? The wound would eventually scab over because a wound has very limited choices: it can either fix up or bleed out. 

But if only things were so simple. That ignominious wound, the black star, it is the itch you can never quite scratch, the rat – always rats – gnawing away at the foundations. It could be stashed away for awhile, perhaps filed away in the same dusty corner of my mind where arithmetic and algebra reside, but it would return eventually and I would wake up aching (that was always the first sign) to the scar-tissue opening up like a friendly greeting. And then? Then the black star would bloom, fat in the throat and heavy on the chest, cold and alien, utterly unconscionable – and the koi carp would dance breathlessly on the belted patio-floor. The air raid siren would sound beneath a clear-blue sky. Rats would appear the same way as always, fly-specked and bloated, diseased and forgotten, all blank eyes on me. A terrible joke would spiral quickly out of control. A woodlouse, awarded in a frigid cup of tea, would spew its Delphic judgements. Sinew and tendon would dance and glisten in the early evening sun. Words would stumble on the tip of my tongue, dread would coil and seethe in the pit of my stomach. And all of those unspent goodbyes, left to moulder in the corner of some distant room? They would stand to attention and demand to be counted, one miserable regret after another, and I would stumble to my feet as woozy as a fading boxer.

And I would chew.

With thanks to Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan and Andy Prendergast.

You can listen to ‘You Can Hear the Sea From Here #2’ here.

Embrace the light. Thank you.