Human kind cannot bear very much reality

it wallows, the end, skittering anywhere the eye can see - burning. It'd always felt like we were on the precipice, like everything was a step away from fading out. Now people disappear in the streets, vanish from their beds, burning houses more like wicker than brick.

Who knows how it started, a storm whistling like a scorched knife, ebbing the colour out of us, and we've been waiting for this from the days we were born, forests alight, skies deep red, it leered at us out of screens, gurgling, prognosticating sweating scientists burning

you've probably seen it now, a grainy photo of a chinese man in manacles beside a corpse - his baby child - and a pot of carrots.

A starved head covered in blood, expressionless, uncurious, propped atop its scattered limbs. Saturn stands chained, wearing an expression that I cannot quite explain

in famine or in war, in famine or to save a child from slavery, in famine or to save an entire carriage, stifling a crying child in a nazi search

children are slaughtered, thick love dripping from fingers, to save them from a world as awful as this one, as full of things worse than death and darkhoneyed sufferings

we've passed the stepdown regulator, again, the sky is leering.

Passed through, today pangs with yesterday's echo and there will only be more decay, here on out.

Lossy compression, the world is ending in instagram ads, koalas are burning and old men are sweating, playing golf, eventually the image will be lost entirely

a mess of noise, the president sees his reflection, offers a handshake to that lime surface. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, the thames revolts thousands are fed to the earth, in rockland

the image will be lost entirely. voltage petering out, strung by the womb on wire, strung by the womb by russian bombs, american bombs, the image will be lost entirely, my people will gurgle like static thronged by novel strains. Endless variations,

what's to stop it, this amalgam, this pile of us all, the square that is only ever increasing, the words that once scattered around hamlets, and now scatter on the everywhere of this, the echo of this hollow world, websites and datacenters, the idioms of gone ages mutate like the folkloric polyp, the mother goose, too intertwined to be dissected, fannie's your aunt, those who can't teach, blood and water, the cat in th'adage - what's to stop us, too, mutating, in all the search queries that populate the world with the answers sifted to the bottom Dunning Andy gives his take, languishing in the top result

It had been raging, for days on end, when we found it, slumped like some old man. It could speak perfect Spanish, attested our Mexican flatmate. He said it had been on drift for weeks, doing every substance under the sun. On one never ending party, an eternal bender, transcendentally inebriated. We spent some time drinking with it, exchanging translated words.

A week later it arrived at our house and asked for money. Degraded, and banging on the windows, repeating only the word dinero, dinero. We refused to let it in, and it keeled outside for days. After a while, I went out and saw it was no longer moving, though it was humming, a melody I hardly recognized but which intrigued me. I brought it in and spoke to it in English.

It responded in fragments over the next few days, mostly these were spoken in spanish to me alone, but occasionally I could understand its words. Over a few weeks, it spoke in riddles, moments which could be autobiographical, or nonsense. Mostly it was silent, but sometimes it would cry out, and sometimes it would hum its melody, which only decayed with the coming days, as if it was forgetting.

I kept it in the bath, though we had to move it to shower, and my flatmates complained that it watched them urinate but no one would take the step to remove it. Sharply, one night, I awoke to hear crying, from the bath it was babbling, slurring words, rocking back and forth. When I entered it took my eyes and pointed to the window, muttering sol, sol, though it was dark and the curtains were drawn.

some days when I'd skipped school my mum would take me with her to see her lecturer friend, a man who would drink one beer in the middle of the day and take a bus into town - but before then he'd sit and quibble on a bar seat and discuss, stuttering through sentences, art, the sciences, the romantics, chaucer, his voice catching on the midwords and the starts of sentences, protracting, the thoughts animating him and spilling, passion in his crooked, magnified eyes

he walked with a stick and grey hair, his posture hunched from a back broken diving, and when she said goodbye I'd see him meander out, and in the car driving away I'd glance him wait stood statuary at the bus stop, but I couldn't catch his eye

He'd asked my mum to marry him, years ago, and she says now that she wouldn't say yes, though my life would probably have been better, his kids have done well, she says as if that could possibly mean a thing.

at his funeral he was paid compliments by a whole room, his clear mind, his brilliant intellect, his kindness, the world music he listened to (and that then they played, the sounds of tabla filling the bright and echoing crem), his love. How holy, to hear praise of a man I never truly knew

and while I had to kill my own father, I'd never fathered the lecturer, never looked to see how a stammer could propound intellect, how his eyes, recalling sartre's, had taught, had been kind, had been not schizophrenic, had been alive until that day. A paradox of loss, that day benched in muddy wintered garden, to lose what had never been gained, could never have been,

It starts before you notice it. The foulness entrenches beneath your eyes, wiggles into place under sunlight, hideous and mesmerizing and scoliosed, the oddity, the grand beautiful atrophy creeps in its petty pace, walks in shadows

and before it bubbles to the surface it pops bones out of place and flickers hearts sans tempo for mere petty moments, dusk glimpses, hasty oversteps of the rotting goddess - tip-of-the-tongue, mad with anger, je ne sais quois, haven't I seen you before? -

and then like bile it rises, wholesale forgetting gangrenous beginnings - staring at a face too long, and having the features float, continental drift, the visage of a devil depersonalised and wailing. The end is bid and it pats the pillows, making its home -

and to save the limb we debride the soul - where there is pus, excise it - cauterize the wounds, sterilize your hands, and hope it will be enough. And hope it will be enough. Though of course, creeping, comes the idiot, the shallow death.

now or tomorrow, tomorrow or sometimesoon, it will tang in the back of the mouth, the rot will innoculate against your medicine and confusion will flood, the mould will bloom with magnificent stalks. Sepsis, the sickness unto death, that quiet, pathetic chaos, the overrunning treadmill.

Kerry Goodall, 1978-2018 Dearly missed Mother and Wife

Ken Gould 1915-1944 Son and Friend

Elizabeth Gould 1917-1984 Reunited

William Watford 1974-2020 Beloved Friend, Teacher, Father and Husband Blessed are the faithful (beside are electric candles, a chair, bottled bacardi)

Jude Walker 1999-2001 We will see you soon

Henry Patton 1926-2000 Dearly missed Father and Grandad

Dorothy Oscar 1870-1898 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God

air and dust petroleum in the wind beer garden cocktail party problem effervescing in clear skies, in unclear minds

the weather that makes me want to drink to emblematize lost years gone time today we ought walk backwards blurry, starry, whirling away

and cemeteries walking there with a dog now dead and composing shots of the sky, by sweltered obelisks, decomposing corpses, names now lost in their grain, days now unremembered, remains untended

and long holidays, yawning school gaps of tv and cloudy days, waste, and university lacunas, temporary unadultedness, and alone in a room with a computer videogames, videogames, videogames

ssri summer leering out at me in spring, burning, loretadine and lucid dreams, flies, melting chocolate, exams, sweat, the cruellest month and the boredom and the i want to die all wrapped up in a feeling

a pretty resounding clap into light, and here, what once was wasn't, and now we are new - the past our sequined dream, the boundary - a petty slumber for our little lives. Onward, there is much to do, much to be done.

But if you in that halflight dwell on it, you reflect in your pondlike mind the welly of cold bullets, the incorrigible sweetness of young love and old love, and so many little deaths, it barely bears a moment's thought

a spectacle of past life, dying with every waking second, closer ever to drifting out of sight until even the reflection shimmers out, and up, out, the world roars in anew daylight, carpets, alarm clocks and work

but in you, something cries to dream again, and so it will, soon, and so it will, it will be a new world, born out of what wasn't, and so our lives are selfsimilar fractals we beat ever outward, against the current

to give you a hint: I wouldn't forget the things I've done for you, the suffering the breaking my back, the gloaming infinite that fucked with me, you see, I cracked

the sky, thrust through gnosis, brought the physics to bear a miracle, like, a regular Jesus - that's me - I worked my sanity to the bone, and bare to the grind

you are just a piece of me she took and titch, I think every night of that witch that burned to core, tarot on floor I wish that I hurt her more, only more,

Johnson's first dictionary, democritus, a novel in progress by Plath, countless libraries, Torahs, necronomicons, Vedas, all consigned to flame

but what is the point of these words lost to time, when a robot could find them monkeys on typewriters, on those endless palimpsests, all literature is preserved by merely reconstituting permutations

so when the object burns, the work never dies, but in so doing becomes meaningless to us, meaningless to our human world, all of our words flutter and linger behind the eye yet so utterly beyond us. The answer to it all, if it exists, exists in Latin, Thai, Pidgin, Wingdings. That you can never burn,

I have never lied when it mattered and never scattered across kitchen floor dead matter, bony bits of war I never have done the felic thing to do spreading prey in dithering morning and rolling on my stomach, alive for love of god seems dying

and I am more than I was before though every day I am dying ebbing bits from my core while sky knocks and rat bones rattle festivalising under my kitchen boards that they are dying less than me alive is there, is there balm in gilead

for nothing here has bitten me before and I have never lied when it mattered to animals with blooded claws or to people who to me seem dead with their feet stuck straight in concrete mud I may have looked at them or past them but that that was never a lie, I thought

once more unto the breach and i must fail to make myself not the musing on drift the world swirls and reels in caterwauls shrieking shrike aggrandizing daylight pouring away into slipstream

lux, an ignominious cobble of alcohol fresh and fresher into an ethanolic world and I was not yet dead when I learned that some people run from sadness, over themselves and tripping

it is a dripping gauze - shying away - that non-existence calls from twilit inbetween- a place snuffed out, weightless and tetering

belching hunting light, the shrike streaks our petty border, the singularity's simple line between unalive and living timeless in that ungaudy horizon and here lies, on the one side, oblivion, and on the other only more of this

and so past light we have our ebb death, or more coffee? to run or to run and embrace, leaden with drunk rage begging after swiss death or slow drowning, this side's bottoms up

after all, what's the point? and in so doing we run ever more into bumps, a prolegomena to only future dithering, back and forth, we have the running from sorrow or its embrace both of which keep us in light for only so long, so long as the drips stay from the edges

in air that tanged alcoholic there was a diagram half human skeleton, half human muscle, plastic apparatus that could be popped off so now you can see inside the pectorals see the threading interweave of muscles, see the polymer heart

and seeing that, like a spark just flicked, the heart inside was carboniferous - the muscles were just plastic threads, the bones dry, open in the air people are plastic, bleeding out, people are organs, people are cells, people are atoms, but before they were just people

years yawn on the world is divested, the person dissected, cut open to see inside and find nothing to find that on bottom we are all deeply, deeply unalive the chaotic bustle of hormones and neutrons the tangled mess and no ultraomnipotence

the monster stopped to examine his hands, the tendons that stretch, the skin that covers, backlit by birdsong, nature leaning in on his head, and so hands become hands, the tendons just parts, the atoms just parts, castles are built on the sand, and they twist, simples shaped chairwise, now chairs that glimmer and twitch

I had found another one a red patch on kitchen floor This was half a one legs stuck out in a posture that would be funny if it had 4 and the culprit, a black round, staring with yellow eyes

a whitered mass peaked from the centre, a bulbous and deskinned spinal column, I thought, but when I unwrapped a nappy bag (smelling talcum powder) I found that the spine was no spine but a decapped cap

the white was grey, in fact: this brown and red shape held a folded cerebellum, that stared out of bone and skin. This head was alive, only hours ago, and its eyes would have moved, its head would be hypnagogic, its eyes would not have looked painted on, and its teeth maybe would have eaten something, were its lower jaw not mysteriously gone. So instead of a living, juvenile rat, we have a head, no bigger than the tip of my little finger, cone shaped and bold in its death and, very much dead

I picked up the latter half, which gleamed with slicked blood, and its guts thrown out to the side and left like the rest of it. It can't have been more than a fortnight old, but now it was ancient, now it was the atoms born with the universe, cold, squishy, dead

now it lies in a talcum tomb, I tossed it in its bag inside a wheelie bin, knowing it wouldn't feel the pain of its fall. but again I see my black round, the murderer who would be treated much the same if only he were so small, whose brain would peak out from behind his eyes, whose ribcage would be, strangely, missing, whose tail would be just about untouched.