The Conger Alley

A sunbeam would light my cigarette if I still indulged in nicotine smoking that is. I put the stinking habit to the wall, blidfolded it and fired until its tobacco guts scattered to the wind as soon as I noticed ugly, yellow stains spreading on my fingertips.
But if I did indulge I would not use a lighter. Sparks from my flint teeth could light a cancer stick, or as I said first, a sunbeam.
The tar that clings to my lungs now will have to stay there of course but sometimes a cough feel like a tombstone in my throat. Well deserved too.
I dislike smokers, their illnesses are rightly earned. In fact if I were to speak honestly I dislike most people and distrust them even more.
I talk to books and walls nowadays (although I only speak to bricks if a wallflower grows on them), I find pages more reliable than society.
I ventured out into society once and was bitten by its ferocious jaw. I tried to cushion the roar of teenage engines, scruffy boy-girl scraps and corner street tarts with beer but it didn't work. At least not my advantage.
Every weekend hooligans with no idea what real trouble was would gather to form a frankeinsteinian garbage of smoking, swearing and fingering and myself always being drunk became known to them all as a rebel messiah with the devil in his eyes.
Each night I would stumble, denting locomotives with each step and the street greetings would shower me in a volley of teenage teething rings. Of course I was a poster boy to them, a certified lunatic of cool. A body of broiling snakes and leather fury.
It rankled that nobody really bothered to sit with me but the blame is with myself, too high-handed and separtist for my own good. In truth my hand had never fully plunged into the studded barrel of vandals, and whatever pinches I did manage to pull out of it were miniscule and not worthy of obssession. Still in my crippled thinking a half baked respect was better than solitude.
With a junkies warpaint blazing on my flesh I could crawl into certain notoriety and hide in the fragile shadow. I found no one there either.
The exaggerations and yarns I spun only dug me deeper into bony clutches and on sobering up regret would be upon me, flashing its pus.
On warm days the local harbour and sand dunes became my drinking haunts. Bitter sands like a pikanter sauce littered with driftwood, dried seaweed and lager tins. A ribald throne from where I could look across the sea where Gower and Rhosili rose, green forboding leviathans which you believed you could touch if your aim was true.
Sometimes I would lay back against the distinctive red topped lighthouse that locals seemed to love. It became my temporary headstone as I rattled through the gin, the horizon laid before my eyes like a celestial flatline.
There I would slip into dreams of Medusa and fire, ploughing onward into escape with unquenchable thirst. It was a comfortable place to doze, knowing that within twenty footsteps undiscovered sea creatures were chasing fish into conger alleys and deathly knooks.
But as is usual with good things they end, and I would be brought back to life either by a stray dog slobbering onto my rosetted cheeks or by the scent of a ladies hemline wafting into my airholes. Death has never had my full attention regardless of my perilous appetite.
The walk back from harbour to front door was short as the reaper flew but in baby steps, stitched by the devil, it was the longest walk imaginable. The space inbetween each lampost stretched for miles, allowing villains and psychopaths of all persuasion to assail my imagination as I clunked onward to the threshold I considered blessed at the time.
What disasters hid under the soles of my feet? What power was it that lifted me higher than the suckling mob? It stirred. It smirked. It curled its cataract lips over crooked mouth. It never once showed its wings, or revealed its plan, but it cared. It knew where I was heading before I did and it led me as long as I trusted.
Young cubs and vixens lined the pavement as I rolled my eyes down the street, following like a demon flexing its muscle. The tensing fist by my side made them talk amongst themselves, perhaps trying to decide whether I was drunk or mad. Maybe both as I passed unhindered.
I moved through drug dens, dog yards and scumparks filled with the diseased and perverted, never once bothered by the blades or affected by the moonlit barks. Bad people are aware of something worse, something wilder and whether this tic shines in my eyes I know not but I always reach my vertigo kingdom.
From harbour walls to castle dungeons, a legacy from the dark.