Sockets by Matt Broomfield

sockets

I

trussed in a harness: ass spat upon and slapped with lube. velvet sockets lock on the velvet sockets lock on the velvet sockets and on and on we conjoin without cease, poured together viscous and oozing, one cyclic digestive tract without form or end.

a bog-man torso slips above me, a lamprey in the dark.  I am dissolute and washed apart from each molecule of myself in the grease of his worn-down face, the slick fluid which runs from his balls, the gaseous flutter of his delicate eyelids. his suction-pumped cock turgid beyond all logic, plunging into me and expunging all excess liquid into the cracks behind my eyes where a cockroach could crawl and die and he pulls wholly out and crams the poppers to my nose and returns grinding into my utmost gut, sending all parasites and foreign bodies flooding into the red-tinged darkness of the night. suffusion of that body into this: temporary cessation of fear: confluence of mucophiliacs in hot wet congealing pools.

drowning men grasp at one another gorgeously amid torrents of a bitter, viscous drug, sold as paint stripper and stripping away much else, the lining of my throat and gut, the fretful tension of my ass, the years’ studied distaste in the clinical baptist hall with its mural of two lions and two giraffes and one man and one wife and the bright-eyed sun reaching for the boiling earth with grasping and tentacular solar flares, exerting occult influence after all on the butchery of blackened waves which lift the beat-up and covenantless craft towards a candy-cane rainbow, towards g_d. all this and all these thoughts effaced as that o was effaced by the ancient submission of men & my anus likewise tenderly collapsing below the influx of mass from on high, giving way in a cacophony of nerve endings and womanly gasps, o, o, oh my god.

II

swiped, the grindr homepage rebounds and the obscured faces and bared breasts of men within a given radius swirl and reappear, as though the shock of contact was too hot or too sweet and their flesh is recoiling momentarily from the flesh it is straining for. with a touch I can open up the bare fingernail’s span of an oily and instagrammed chest as wide as a gaping mouth, a sucking rectum, a whole torso torn at the waist and made hollow and the cocks of both the dead and the living plunged into it, bundled together as dead and green wood are bundled for burning.

a sweet and purifying smoke rises and I rise with it, departing the club and drifting eastward among the towerblocks of hackney which teeter but do not fall, frozen in the moment of their collapse by the wintry white flash of riches detonating from the ground zero of the city. I condense on some road or other beside a low concrete rise where i kneel and fumble a cracked card from my wallet, tamping out what little cocaine still clags to the turned-out sweat-soaked baggie I stole from some grad scheme half-wit blundering bloated around a back-room pub blowing scented vapour from his nostrils, a fattened heifer raised up and roasted on a bed of sage and fresh green faggots. come now. come soon? coming.

the towerblock in question rears before me, gaudless in the sodium light, a mighty and foreign object turning roughly in my rectum. I snort a line. this estate is called the palace but I count no kings, only some heavy-set youth up against a wall getting wanked off by his girl and watching the road for cops, his gaze bearing down on me and lifting the tower’s mass with it as he glances elsewhere, the iron-framed bulk collapsed, grown limp. to be borne upon by the weight of men. to be brave, or at least to be high. in my mind I bow to him as I pass.

pharmaceuticals conveyed darkly after dark by some other youth on a moped, his skull visored, his hands flaked with dead skin. google search: tetramethylene glycol as substitute for ghb. google search: inducing vomit to reduce wait time for initial dose. the youth a runner, dispatched by some distant druglord behind a cracked touch-sensitive screen, as responsive to the pressure of my fingers as the hard thighs and braced calves of the man whose cock I will presently bow before, as unyielding, as hardened with bliss. the dealer has grown hard off the bliss of others, I mean, dispatching young and acned soldiers across the city to peddle methamphetamine to the soft and the rich. the old men buy the drugs and we take the drugs and the old men take the drugs and we all die a little and are reborn, phoenixes writhing like rats through the muscular ring of a shaved and washed-out rectum, emergent from a corona of lube. google search: how much is too much.

III

the trite call it la petite mort, and they have it precisely wrong. there is nothing small about his load or the fatal ghosts that are in it, slobbering down my throat, dripping out of my ass. fainting fits and nervous spasms; growing light-headed on black market truvada and mistaking nausea for a buzz; the burst of white oblivion across the cortex at the dinner table two days after swallowing six bitter flaking valium: all these have the flavour of death, the gradual cessation of consciousness. here and now is something other, not some ecstatic and deathly break with reality but rather a divine upward vault of sensation and perception revealing what lies beyond, revealing precisely what lies behind, the roulette plunge of cocks yet to come and that impossible inevitable fatal load crouching toadlike in some balls yet unlicked.

they died. we do not die. we lock sockets and the fluids run and we drip with fluid and we do not die. thirty five million tiny skeletons emanate from the straining slit at the tip of his cock and my rectum must be stretched wide enough and wet enough to accommodate their bony joints and the bare ribs scratching at their translucent rotting skin and at the lining of my gut and throat, so many and so unique and boney-white and blinding that they overwhelm my vision utterly and become one blackened mass, as pixels form an image, as cells constitute the human form. only in this one moment are we alive, and then only since we are thrown into contrast by the innumerable dead who proceed us, a suddenly dark and ectoplasmic backdrop across which we are cast, shards of methamphetamine broken out of an electric skillet. we are exhausted, we croak meth from the pipe, i slap at my recalcitrant veins. lubricant floods from my out-turned anus. all liquid and all the skeletons in it, of which he is one or soon to be, swept wetly into the roaring dark.

their sores broke open and their cankers swelled for us. for this? this surrender of peer-reviewed logic, this gutless acquiescence to the plague which bore so many howling into the aforementioned dark? I suppose so, though it does not feel like it. thin blue and pink and antiretroviral line broken in by many cocks. the virus suffered sanctuary to mutate by my inability to complete a 28-day course of post-exposure prophylaxis without lapsing. kaposi's sarcoma to my thoughtless ear sounds like an ape, an orchid, a fancy parakeet. erotic murmur of cassius on the eve of battle: antony, the posture of your blows are yet unknown. honey greases the passage conjoining reason to death.

IV

a gentle man soaps me. g sags my limbs and I touch my lip to his metal-clenched nipple. dry shit is scoured from the cracked walls of my innards, worked loose by hot jets of water and expelled in stinking brown gushes as I rock a little unsteady and he blows back a hot cheekful of meth smoke into my soft wet mouth. with it fall the dissolved ghosts of those who went before and the ghostly egg sacs they implanted in my roiling gut, shaken loose and terminated. we touch and continue to touch and are alive and the more heavily we press upon one another and the more weight we bear the less we are and the lighter, our bodies I mean, the more we press and writhe the more we are not there. by the gush of crystal through my chest, by the spatter of the hot water across my sore back and shoulders, I am compelled to surrender all resistance. he soaps my anal cavity, my chest, my feet.

he is amazed that I sleep with women. perhaps revolted, certainly aroused. when? he asks. did you enjoy it? he fucks me doubled-over on the balcony, both smoking cigarettes. he washes his hands in me like a real man washes his hands in his woman. he shoots photographs from behind on his iphone and I say no face no case and I cry high feminine cries as he thrusts upward through coils of muscle and presses down on the arc of my back till it snaps and precum bursts from the rupture. later I will steal his versace jock strap and he will wander into the bedroom moments after and I will pretend I am slipping him the phone number I use in my waking life and he will pretend to believe me. he is kind to me, as I do not deserve. he keeps moving the g from my reckless grasping hand and takes no advantage of my condition beyond sliding his fist up my anus as I stoop sloppily to snort drone. what do you like he says I’ll do it to you. what makes you hot. anything.

what makes me hot? so many things. the branding of my cheek with hexagonal mesh as I am forced against it by the blows of his shanks. the miserable splendour of the high-rises around liverpool street, their ommatidiac glass, their blistered lights. the way these sights grow waxy as tears leak across my eyes, ground up from my gut by the ceaselessness of his cock in me and his rough hand at my smooth back. the cold space before me and the sensation of falling into it and being torn apart by the youths selling drugs hand to hand around the frosted grass far below who rise up like raptors and claw apart my skin, by the gushes of cold air on which they coast carefree but which chill my flesh, by the way he whispers do you want pipe and I dont know if he means meth or dick I dont know I dont know.

the leatherman comes, so suffused with lust that his skin is turned to leather, his hide soaked, limed, bated, bleached, by g, t, whips, drone. his cock pump wheezes and blood rushes into it, his cock I mean, not the drained space around it, the vacuum which I must fill. did anything dirty happen to you when you were younger he whispers. did anyone touch you when you were small.  slung in the harness, spun back and slippering across the seam-split binbags sodden with lube. hot consanguinity of pores and glands. they did he whispers they did. transferred from one to the other to the other to one, sucked up through the seal of the heaving penile pump into the void within from which all sweat and precum and pollutants are effaced, drawn out by the rushing rushing air which sucks me with it, into the fleshless soundless dreamtime, into the airlessness, into the dark.  

viagra when taken with cocaine can stop the heart, but do all things not have this effect, in their own way, in their own time?

time reddens infernally through the windows, as unbearable as the welts raised across my buttocks, as suffused with blood. inadvisable dosages. sockets applied to sockets. mechanistic inducement of penile engorgement. google search: can you get high on doxycycline. google search: how to get home.

V

stepping from the chillout into the white-gold light. foxes cross the frosted grass, as bright as the drops of blood in the white seat of my pants. flecks of spat blood, disseminating viral load through the cuts of the city, scratching at one another in alleyways and yipping demented at the noxious moon.

young clear-eyed and high on the most incredible mdma on a similar bright white night in oxford, we clambered into the university parks as the sun rose. at this time I was struggling colossally with the expansion of that underscored blankness in the heart of g_d to my outermost extremities and I was hungry for any vaguely humanist substitute, I suppose, desperate to take anyone and anything waferlike on my tongue in absolution for unreal sins. in any case I was so powerfully overcome that I wept at the sensation of all the living things around me, grass bugs bacteria men, all straining though they do not know it to survive, to persevere, to be. fresh frosted green blades without consciousness or reason reaching up blindly towards the surpassing holocaust of the sun hung so far from us in the chill blankness of space for no reason other than their desire to pass on their bundled genes, to give life to generation on generation of future grasses to do the same, the life that does not know it lives, the life that lives only to live.

looking now across the unsanctified span of the common, still spun out and starry on the methamphetamine, it comes to me as though always known that the very mechanism of this eyeless, grasping urge is death. Coetzee has O’Hearne make an error: dying is, for an animal, just something that happens, something against which there may be a revolt of the organism but not a revolt of the soul. and the lower down the scale of evolution one goes, the truer this is. to an insect, death is the breakdown of systems that keep the physical organism functioning, and nothing more.

the insects will outlast us. that much is commonplace. decapitated cockroaches can respire for weeks through the thorax and do not systematically drink to excess. but their plodding dominion over the earth was not achieved through mere force of will. it was bought, terribly bought, with microliters of invertebrate blood spilled across three hundred thousand crawling millennia. just something that happens? it is precisely through the death of cockroaches that the cockroach can thrive and endure. no breeding organism could ever revolt against this most necessary condition of the soul’s onward passage, not the animals, not the grasses, not the pink-cheeked couple sleeping snug in their marital home. each blade and each bug and each bridal suite is haunted by the million million succeeding and exceeding it, each faint evolutionary flicker and each false trail to oblivion bought with the mown-down heel-crushed lives of so many, so many, uncandled and not sung for as they wink into the dark. flies laying eggs in the carcasses of flies: all we are, all we can be.

those who go forth and multiply have killed and will kill again. did you enjoy it? the gentle boy asks. there is no answer. witless, blind, it cannot be helped. here and now, far from such husbandry, we elide fleshly in the dark. we may die or we may not die and we caress death’s mystery regardless in every gasping and abased and life-giving touch of skin, of sockets. for this we are called sinners, revolting of body and soul. when a man or men discharges a load of unknown toxicity in my throat or gut, I moan these words: breed me. breed me.

here on these lube-drenched binliners the bleak w_rd handed down from the high places of the fertile crescent to that mural-painted baptist hall in the drab west midlands to that green and living park alike is finally unwritten, the procreative function refused as more deathly than any virus and effaced in a deluge of saliva and semen. the breakdown of systems that keep the physical organism functioning, and nothing more. what more could there be? for what else do we live? like everything else alive we are fucking to our death, and our sorcery which so sickens the world is that we alone accept it, we alone harbour no delusions and kiss through the liquefying flesh to the hard and immobile skull below, we alone feel those who have gone before us crawling under our skin, flooding out of our wet and open sockets into the sockets of those still living, whom we love.

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Bio: At the time of writing Matt Broomfield was living in a warehouse in Tottenham, North London. He was smoking methamphetamine and having unprotected sex with strange men: he sometimes vomited. He currently lives and works in Lesvos, Greece, supporting the thousands of refugees still trapped there in their own struggle for bodily autonomy. 

His prose has been published by Litro, the Mays and Cherwell, and his poetry by the National Poetry Society, the Independent and Bare Fiction. His work was last year displayed across London by Poetry on the Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year.