(The perfect club) Where there was once inscrutable love, now, there isn't a thing left, anymore... Not one single thing that you could associate with being human, with being useful in any imaginable capacity. I had given up. Death itself could scoop me off the floor, but I'd just run through its fingers like dirty water, I knew it, id felt its shadow pass over me so many times before that the neglect had started to feel insulting, I guess there was nothing left worth taking? Looking up from the cold puddle of urine that had amassed about my prostrate frame, gravity pressed on my yellow eyes like a heavy mist, as a single thought danced through the swaying light of my contemptuous squalor, eating the silence like a brass parade, a thought that was honest, that was inescapably anguished - 'My heart had been broken'. (The ladder between two hells) Michael sat, patiently, drowsy within the dry heat that had accumulated from the rattling dashboard grills, radio silent, listening only to the freezing cold sleet that bounced off his windscreen in relentless torrents as he watched the minutes of his watch painfully ascend tick by tick - 16:47, 16:48... There was a moment where he felt an insatiable urge to leave the car, walk through the harsh February bite directly into the bank and cut this man's throat in front of everyone in the building, smiling in fulfilment as his gruesome life gushed from a severed artery that was only ever part of an unused heart. But for now, that dark fantasy would have to suffice, the feeling of his blade opening the flesh, the euphoric satisfaction that would intoxicate his reason the moment that warm blood was spilt from his slaughtered body, his heart twitched in anticipation, his thumb teased along the knifes edge that was concealed in his coat, pushing it harder against the sharpened tip with every recalled provocation. But for now, he would wait, with menacing fortitude he would bide his time until 17:00. (The house of turpitude) The year of my incarceration was 1981. Vague recollections of that crazy experience never fail to put a chill in my spine, whenever I'm inebriated enough to recollect the pungent smell of blood and urine that often poured through the cold hospital hallways, all the way up to the foot of my cell. I thought the place was a madhouse ran by professional lunatics. Dressed in stained white overcoats, concealing syringes that held the kind of juice to take a full week off your life, circling their prey delivering the line that they are assistants of rehabilitation, working towards the assimilation of anyone unfortunate enough to have found themselves consumed by the horror of its screaming walls. They would watch me through the peep hole of my steel chamber door, as analysts they would observe me in solitude, wrapped up by my attempts to piece together the fragmented chaos of the pervading insanity that called from within the structure that held me. They were our gods. Visions of the Shadow - Pictures of Heaven & Hell. A collection of Short stories and poems.