* * *

You pull a stitch from an old wound with your teeth. Phosphorescence escapes the lesion and where a portal momentarily bursts forth a carapace assumes the space and tightens around your presence. Throw the stitch up high into the black night sky. This has been referred to as the search for the tragic component in our modern monument. This morning I stepped over my mother on my way to the toilet. She was laid on the bathroom floor with a hypodermic appendage in her ligature. I watched her breathing subterranean as a bottom-feeder as I wiped my arse on my bloodied shirt-sleeve. We had a single black cat called Gilgamesh.

* * *

As a child I would hold the glass chalice in front of my face and view the world through the narcotic prism of the crack-pipe stereoscope. I saw a murky scute of dulled pastel life-forces encasing the quotidian plane and the smoke-world of hooved liminal-dwellers ensconced beyond its curse. I saw my mother and father, their bare bodies the colour of lava and their inheritance – a cleaver hanging from a hook, a slaughterman wiping red hands upon an abattoir smock – was present as I watched them fuck on a wooden bed beneath a shelf with a clock and a troop of pale porcelain dolls perched like ravens. Lockjaw and corsets, rosy-cheeked string-puppets and switchblades, ladies’ purse-pistols, albino foetuses in jam-jars and other emblems of Victoriana. Somewhere, somebody was pointing to my image in a sepia photograph of a depression-epoch ménage and recounting to a cowering child the cautionary yarn of the madhouse and the woodsman and the first girl to have her mind erased by the lecherous prince with glycerine and leering and lightning in his fists.

* * *

Neither of us in the netherworld, nor either of us urchins of it. Each time we light up a gun’s tongue, strike a note upon the crack-pipe clarinet, watch a puncture-lung classmate death-rattle in the playground to a gurgling sound, direct the vanishing point of a juvenile uterus towards an infant penis, our bodies are incinerated in a strange, dimpled light and we reach down, unhook our carcasses from the clutches of the pink and taloned ribbons of history. I cannot name one prime minister, or reason worth living. Is England an island? I thought it was a mesmeric, kaleidoscopic car-accident. I thought it was the chicken-foot worn around the chemist’s rubberneck. I was always last on school sports day. I knew I’d be the first to die.

* * *

Doctor, I dare you to diagnose me. Detect the noise and the noose in me. Nurse this inertia, this transistor static in my apex cortex, from loudhailer raw to whisper-testimonial. Deter the gnarled algorithms in my delirium emporiums with your glistening medicine. Douse the tortured torso in ketamine and kerosene, have my meridians bloom like plum-bruised wrists, aorta strangle-marks. Whatever demons enlarge upon my dew-ravaged tongue in their grotesque largesse and incant their incandescent trashcan propagandas, dangle their neon-green entrails from the burning spires of my little molten crown. Proffer them a platform, a megaphone, plait their hair, pet them, straighten their teeth on superlatives and sedatives. Purchase their myths and once those olden tales of breakdown doom and self-harm scars are told, bind them down upon a locked ward with a well-thumbed bible on a sterile side-table. All heaven’s angels appeared at the foot of my bed and told me how Our Father in Valhalla, with his silver tinsel glitterball and all-night disco inferno was a paedophile. How on the seventh day the seraphs and the cherubins sucked him parched, and I was born in a lightning storm. Singing my bomb-town ballad of gargantuan abandonment issues.

* * *

I forget the number of the ward now but I remember the morning it rained again and I climbed up onto the window-ledge and broke the glass with a red stiletto heel. I pushed both my hands out through the cracked threshold like jagged and jutting spastic branches marinated in blood, and two birds landed on my palms. I can catch sunbeams in my hands, fire dances on my fingertips, across my tongue, teeth, and translucent, albino skin. I am a magnet for the meandering emblems of incandescent oblivion. Please, show me what to do with all this light.

Miggy Angel is a South Londoner living in Nottingham, England. He is a full-time drugs worker, and facilitates a weekly writing workshop for people in addiction. He organises the monthly poetry event 'Speech Therapy', and his first collection of poems, 'Grime Kerbstone Psalms' is published by Celandor books. Miggy tweets here