The truth is like a gnarled tree, made up of many layers that are twisted all around each other,
some layers holding others inside them, and sometimes being held.

- Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

​

I met Sebastian on the train going from Pimlico to Oxford Circus. I was reading a copy of The Tempest I’d taken from the office’s pulp shelf, he was reading The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame. He’d got on in Brixton; he never had a house the whole time I knew him, he just slept in the spare rooms of his rich friends from law school. I kept looking up from my book, looking across the aisle at him, trying to will him to look up from his book, trying to get him to make eye contact with me. I wanted to gaze into his eyes and give him a look that said “I know you’re reading porn, I know you’re reading gay fetish bara on the tube.” But he never did look up. He was serene, his lips cherubic and skin pale, and he cast his eyes down at his book, reading porn out in public, dressed all business casual, completely oblivious. 

 

We both got off at Oxford Circus, and I lost him in the crowd. I assumed I’d never see him again. In a way, I didn’t. I am always alone, I am always surrounded, everything is a joke to me until suddenly it isn’t. I tapped through the barrier, made my way down Oxford Street, pushing through the crowd as the sun began to set, then dipped off the main street down a narrow set of stairs into a back alley. The walls were lined with monumental photographs of destroyed houses, and across the street from the Photographer’s Gallery was my destination; the Gay Sauna. On Thursdays, under 25s get in for free, but I am no longer under 25 so I paid the full £20 for entry. They handed me my towel and buzzed me through to the changing room, as a queue of middle aged men shuffled impatiently behind me towards the porn actor manning the front desk. 

 

I stripped down into my towel and threw my work clothes and backpack into the locker, slipped past two men kissing passionately on the staircase, and into a strange corridor with mirrored walls lined with showers. I hate looking at myself in mirrors, I spend far too much time looking at myself in mirrors. Each time I see 

my reflection, my eye 

is drawn into something different. The way 

my eyebrows are thick in the middle 

then sputter out into balding 

whisps at their edges. The way half 

of my chest is square 

with a slight protrusion 

at the armpit, but the other side 

curves away from my heart 

in a breast-like bulge. The way my face

is textured with pickaxe scars 

and pigmentations, mixed in together 

and sprawling over the surface 

so that by the time I’ve examined

every millimetre of its surface, it seems 

to be covered in open, gaping wounds, gouged 

impossibly deep 

into the surface of my face. The 

way my nose 

is ridged at the top, and 

one nostril is slightly collapsed 

into the other, like a building 

mid demolition. I sighed, as I ran the cheap liquid soap through my hair, collected my towel from a handrail, and stepped past a pair of old men with slack jaws and bulging eyes into the sauna. 

 

Is this a love story? What follows is an apology for the way I am. 

 

It is my argument, succinctly put, that it is not possible to ever truly know a person, and that this incompleteness of understanding extends inwards into the very self. I have spent so much of my life trying to explain myself and never made any significant achievement towards my goal. Equally, I have spent almost the entirety of my life perplexed to distraction by the actions and existence of others. It’s like any attempt to formulate an understanding or identify a pattern is instantly met with a digression. It’s like everything is always slipping through my fingers, and the more I worry at it all the less sense its arrangement makes. 

 

I want, more than anything, to be able to speak to you in a way that makes everything clear between us but I have never been able to put my faith into the reality of a dialogue, only write myself into endless circles explaining everything and nothing to the empty theatre of an audience. I will not grow, I will not change; that is a promise; a realism, stopping short of outright criminality. 

 

The implication of the novel is that nothing is real, except to the extent it is real in the reality of the novel, and so the structure of a piece of writing acts like a defence mechanism. I could tell you a story; I could make a pretence at narrative and linearity as if my memories are not knotted and tattered within my head like newspapers ripped apart into the woven lining of a bird's nest. I could pretend my memories, my actions, my self are not a school of fish swimming in a vast, empty ocean. I could insist upon order and regiment and dialogue. I could lie to you; I could force myself into an acceptable approximation of a person. 

 

I want to explain to you the ways 

my body 

swells and bloats, 

its form and structure 

shifting under duress, 

its stability constantly in question. I want to explain to you the way the intentions of others are perversely disconnected from the actions of others, an anxious guessing game subsuming the minutiae of life. I want to explain to you how much you have hurt me, how much I have hurt you, how heavy the weight of being a human, living a life around other humans, can be; how the weight can be worked upon like the ripping of a muscle. 

 

In the same way there is a multiplicity of ‘you’s, I present a multiplicity of ‘I’s. Lawless rogue, charming anti-hero; a life as a disparity of vignettes, adding to some kind of understanding, adding to some kind of self. In the fragment, I may be known; in the fragment is only how any of us may be known. I cast myself into a structure, and hope you know what I mean in my doing so. 

 

I’m trying to explain to you what abandonment feels like, but even saying it like that, I roll my eyes at myself for being so fucking melodramatic. It’s how I feel every time I ask you a question point blank and you don’t reply. It’s how I feel when I tell you the fact I haven’t seen you in three months makes me feel like maybe you don’t want to see me and then all of a sudden I’m the bad guy for thinking so negatively of you. I can feel it coming every time you say hello. Every time I meet you for the first time I feel like it’s all going to end. Your existence is always collapsing, so that you can barely maintain your integrity in my life. I cannot picture your face, it shifts around too much, but there is a beauty in the kaleidoscope of your features much unlike the revulsion I feel for the shifting distention of my own. 

 

I did not meet him on the train, the first time I actually ‘met’ him was in the basement of that sauna, but the train was when I first saw him, and as time would decay my understanding of him, it became the same thing. It became like the way that he could send me 20 completely nonsensical images, warped post-modernities of memes, completely indecipherable, in response to a direct yes or no question, and that became a conversation. We never meant that much to each other, I’m sure of it, but we were desolate and lost and in need of distraction, and he confused me enough to consume me. As he sat naked on my floor waiting for me to return with a towel, his hair curled and when black, his eyes flashed blue, then green, his torso stretched and contracted, his stomach distended then constricted into his frame. The details are all that matters, the broader specifics will shift and change. 

 

Weeks later, I told Sebastian I had never been in love with a man while sitting in a pub on the riverbank, and he said “you’re wonderful,” then I never saw him again. But each time I never saw him again, he came back into my life, his hair longer and his legs shorter. Oh, we had adventures together, him and I. Interchangeable adventures with his perplexingly complex face. 

 

He had the words ‘PANTA RHEI’ tattooed below his nipple; he told me it means ‘you can never fuck the same man twice.’ He had the words ‘PANTA CHOREI’ tattooed above his clavicle and told me it means ‘every man is an orgy.’ In the many months it has been since I’d last seen Sebastian, I’ve met him hundreds of times. We both fuck and do not fuck into the same body, we both are and are not. He was you, he was I, he was we, he was he. In each instance, the result was the same. 

 

Downstairs from the tepidarium and the steam room, in the second sub-basement, the Gay Sauna gives up the ghost of pretending to be a spa. Instead there are rows of cubicles roughly the length of a prone man, with gym mats on the floors and bins bolted to the walls. There’s lengths of drain pipe sticking out at regular intervals, full of condoms and packets of lube. The light is low, the speakers on the wall play hypnotically nondescript mixes of minimal house, and men walk in circulations, looking each other up and down, trying to catch someone’s attention, and pull them through a cubicle door into the darkness. 

 

It was there I saw Sebastian again, his towel wrapped around his waist, his locker key on his ankle, leaning against a wall at the end of a corridor of cubicles. He was looking intently at the floor, as if he were studying it. There was a man at his shoulder, shouting something into his ear, and he muttered something in reply, which caused the man to shout again. He looked up at the man’s face and said something, and the man started to back away, then turned on his heel and vanished out of sight. I decided to take my chance. Quickly, a little too quickly, I walked down the corridor and then with a feigned easiness mimicking his own, I leaned on the wall beside him. 

 

“Hey”

“Hey”

“How’s it going?”

“Good, you?”

“Yeah I’m good…” An awkward silence. He briefly looks at the floor but then shakes his head and looks back up at me again. I don’t want to lose momentum, such that it is.

“So, you been here long?”

“No, not really, maybe an hour? You?”

“Yeah, same I think. Maybe an hour.” Silence again. I am bad at this. He keeps looking at me. Is it wishful thinking that leads me to perceive it as an expectant look?

“Can I kiss you?” I ask

 

He laughs, puts one hand on my shoulder and one on the small of my back and then we’re kissing and walking and the door closes and it’s dark. We’re kissing, there are hands everywhere, he asks me if I’m a top and I say that I am. He gives me a few stokes, up and down, looking at his hand as it moves, deep in thought. He tells me to stay right where I am as he gets up to leave. I do as I’m told, lying on my back in the dark on the cold gym mat, alternating red, blue, green lights from up ahead, the dull pulse of dance music, my head swimming inexplicably with the rush of the moment. It’s not like I’ve never fucked a stranger in a basement before, but there is something different in the weight of his body and the lightness of his voice. He returns, slightly damp from the showers, and climbs on top of me, straddling me, a knee beside each hip. He reaches up, and runs his hand through my hair, then whispers in my ear before kissing me as he adjusts the angle of his pelvis to engulf me. “Thanks for waiting, handsome.”

 

You and I are both composite characters. You operate more like a kind of folk demon than an actual person. How much detail is expected, required, uncomfortable in explaining a particular event? What is the sum total of a life, when given on paper? The laughter begins to sound like collective sobbing. My skin 

is elastic and transparent, you tug 

at its looseness like an office worker 

anxiously fiddling with a rubber band. You dream of a future where you rip off my clothes like the plastic film of a supermarket pizza, like a bland quotidian commodity, like an addiction. 

 

What is left to make sense of? What sense is there left to make? When you plan for your future, is there a future there that you are living in? The sky is on fire in the oil-slick magic mirror of my laptop. Have you ever noticed a bird singing? Ever? Even once? Have you ever stood on a leaf on the street and realised it was covered in mould? Blighted dead things underfoot. An aeroplane seems to hang in the air not moving as it heads directly towards you. Lick the meat clean from the wing of a bird, the blue shell of its egg in fragments at your feet. Your spine hangs from the sky like a rope, and I run my fingers over it, feeling its shape and texture, gripping it at the base and beginning to climb as you disintegrate. The sky begins to burn with rain, the earth is so dry, the water forms rivers in the splits. Walk with me through a city, the phallic remnants of crumbling towers, where you used to work. I have no brand loyalty, I’m a philistine, I’ll fuck you wherever you ask me to. 

 

I’m more of a suburbanite than you’ll ever be, I can’t go back there, you can’t make me. You say “I wouldn’t say we were rich, we were comfortable” and I say “I would say you were rich.” They bulldozed the field where my highschool PE Teacher called me a faggot to build a 5G aerial. I assign moral value to the abandoned sheets of plastic packing wrap I’m eating, knelt naked on the street and shoving them down my gullet until I am full. My distended stomach is inspected by a passing investment banker who shrugs and zips up his gilet as he wades through the flooded street in his Barbour wellies.

 

There was a nest of wasps in the general rubbish section of the bins, a hive of bees in the recycling half, both were tipped into the same landfill. Cut through my ring finger and carry it around with you on a string, like a lucky rabbit’s foot; catch me in a cemetery on a friday night and disembowel me on the marble crypt slabs. Poppies as white as blood plasma grow in the meridian strips as we take long, frustrating trips to France with the children fighting in the back seat, occasionally vomiting from motion sickness. Once there’s a name for it, it exists. 

 

It feels like you are happening to me through the glass of a fishbowl, like I’m detached from reality, where you live. The woman on the train is crying, her body heaving up and down with the violent force of her sobbing, her face crushed into a scarf, a flag abandoned at her feet. The sleep apnea mask whines like a life support. There’s rain on the roof, rain against the windows, but you haven’t slept in months, years. Sometimes, we work from the title outwards, and see that nothing can be argued with any coherency, because in the divinity of it’s existence, it only exists to change. Your smile is a nerve agent, your fingers insomnia, your absence tastes like melatonin, everything is a death. The largest fish is caught between the tank and the filter, and is eaten alive by the other fish, who swim through its ribs in soothing patterns. God, if you’re going to become obsessed with a war, at least choose a good one. 

 

I wanted to write an interview through my sleep, an essay in withdrawal from the realisation there was nothing left in the world worth thinking about. Your name weaves its way through my reality, scrawled on hundreds of pieces of paper beside the word sleep. I am captive here, in this house, and growing upon the walls like mould. I am fragmented, distraught, barely coherent in my experience, like a nightmare going about its day clawing at a semblance of logic. 

 

I defenestrate myself, feeling the wind in my hair like a silk scarf caught in the wheel of a motorcar. We have separate bedrooms, because we do not know each other, because we have never met. It fills me with horror to know you exist. Asleep, I grow upon you like a fungus. A cloud can be imagined into any shape, though not by moonlight. Parenthetically, roses grow over me as I sleep, my body a trellis, my flesh full of thorns. If beauty were the purpose, then nothing would remain of use to either of us. Like hammers knocking at the inside of my skull, causing it to ring like a bell. Fingers on the inside of my eyeballs, pushing from the inside outwards into the world. I do not mesh with the fabric of the universe, I jam uneasily like a needle through the weave. I hear a jingle of keys from outside the window. The trap shuts on a spinal column. I came back to consciousness. 

 

I don’t know how long we lay there, both of us covered in cum until it dried onto our skin. It was just easy, the kind of easiness that feels as though you’ve known each other forever but can only happen when you’re perfect strangers. We talked and laughed. I told him about a time I went to a sex club and the barman had just been dumped and was blasting his breakup playlist at full volume. A guy gave me head in a makeshift porn cinema while Moon Song by Phoebe Bridgers played at ear splitting volume. He told me earnestly, excitedly, about how he’d been to see her live a few weeks ago and now her music was his entire personality. He had a way of telling you a story so that you wouldn’t realise he hadn’t told you anything that might let you know something about him until much later. It felt like he was letting you in, but all the key details would be skewed out of place, the context never quite given. 

 

We spent all evening together. We sat in the steam room and he leant his head on my shoulder. We laughed in the hot tub as the man who was talking to him earlier sat across from us, glaring. We talked about our favourite TV shows, and quoted vines at each other; I told him about The Ghost Stories Dub and he told me about Thomas Tallis. We fucked two or three more times, it all began to blend together. But eventually it was getting late. I needed to leave but didn’t want to. We sat in the bar talking. I told him why I stopped drinking, he told me I was the most interesting person he’d ever met. I laughed, and he frowned. He never told me anything about himself, only let details slip, then bit his lip when he realised his mistake, and changed the subject. I began to ask him questions about himself; I asked him where he was from, and he told a half truth; I asked him what he did for work and he gave me a job title; I asked him his favourite book and he called me handsome. When Sebastian called me handsome I called him a liar. 

 

When my therapist challenged me on why I am unable to accept compliments, I dutifully responded that it was because I was criticised, heavily, at a young age, and so never developed the ability to think positive things about myself. The real answer was that I am not handsome. I hate 

the scarred and pigmented 

and venous skin 

on my face and I had the translucent 

skin on my torso, I hate 

the way my eyes 

are sunken and small but open 

too wide, I hate my patchy silver 

facial hair and the wiry brown 

hair growing from my moles, I hate 

my spindly fingers and oversized feet, 

I hate the hunch of my back 

and the way one shoulder 

droops down, I hate my chest 

and my string-like arms, I hate 

my flat drooping ass, I hate 

my massive forehead, I hate 

my bent nose, I hate my rectangular 

torso, I hate my 

distended stomach, I hate my love handles 

and how round

I look from the side, I hate the 

disorganised tangle of hair 

and the way it’s half way 

between blond and brown, I hate that I 

can never tell if it’s thinning 

or if that’s just the way 

it’s always grown, I hate the 

gaps in my teeth and the 

way they’re always off-white, I hate my

tiny wrists, I hate my

hairy nostrils, I hate my body and I think 

anyone who says anything 

nice about it is lying to my face.

 

My therapist asks me why I dismiss the positive, and why I always assume the worst, and I tell him that I’ve spent all my life having people lie to my face, and after a while it starts to become difficult to know what’s real. We walked through Soho hand in hand, making our way towards the station. Sebastian kept telling me that he could go if he was bothering me, and I kept telling him that he wasn’t bothering me. He was going to a party at his friend’s warehouse. I was on my way to a pub to meet some poets; I’d fucked him straight through the reading I was meant to go to, but felt the need to show my face. 

 

We got to the station and awkwardly put our numbers in each others phones and followed each other on instagram. While I had the app opened I noticed that two of my best friends had got engaged. It was a concrete detail of an event, linking our meeting to a particular point in time. But events expand and contract. It is not as simple as I would like to make it. Occasionally, someone will say “so, tell me about yourself,” and I’ll think of Annie Ernaux writing “there is no such thing as a lesser truth” before I start telling them some inane nonsense, some factoid of my life that is intended to contextualise my existence within how I conceptualise myself existing. Which truth would be considered true, when each bleeds into each other, moiréd rippling threads, the surface and the depth of the whole? 

 

According to traditional belief Sebastian was stripped naked and dragged into a field by his fellow soldiers, who bound him to a lone tree with lengths of rope. 

 

Sebastian was a soldier and the soldiers were soldiers, but there was a difference between them, and so a curve of archers notched their bows and fired volley upon volley of shafts into his flesh until he was so full of them that he seemed to the archers to be as much an urchin as a man, quills covering him like a sharp armour. 

 

Having left Sebastian for dead, the soldiers would not have given him a second thought had he not reappeared before the emperor later that week; Irene had gone to the field in the dead of night and, weeping and singing, removed the arrows from Sebastian’s flesh, nursing him back to health.

 

They beat Sebastian to death and threw him into the sewer. 

 

An image quickly loses control of itself; Sebastian is often shown bound to a tree or pillar. 

 

Occasionally, he is shown being tended to by Irene. 

 

Rarely, he is shown being thrown into the Cloaca Maxima. 

 

In the depictions of Sebastian, pierced through with arrows, his body is used as an excuse for pious figurative painters to show their knowledge of male anatomy, and so his muscles bulge and curve in idealised forms, his face rapturous. 

 

Eventually, subtext becomes context, and a joke forms; God Bless Saint Sebastian, Patron Saint of the Gays, Rammed Through with Shafts, in Holy Bliss. 

 

Subtext becomes context, accident becomes incident; the fear of an image is that an image is never just an image, but also an uncontrollable thing; the interpretation of an image, not bound by intention, but by the unknowable mind of another, and so as I look down at my body my gaze as intense as the purchase of an arrow, I lose myself to myself becoming an image, an object for interpretation out of my own control.

 

I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know what I’m saying, you roll your eyes up to the headboard 

as my chest and belly 

droop over you 

like the piercing of an arrow,

your body nothing

but the absence left by an arrow -

the understanding of our bodies 

in one image. 

 

I trace a line across the hair of your upper lip with my forefinger and lick the inside of your mouth; you halo around me and never look me in the eyes; your hair curls over in my grasp - you are bound, I am dying.

 

Everything smells of rotting mint in the misty prelude to a rain shower, where once we rolled in the dirt, but now in the distance of an image, you glow iconic, bathed in light, your arms tied painfully behind your back, leather gouging your skin, intricate tumbles of ivy, a trickle of blood dripping past your nipple from the puncture of my attention. 

 

You’re showing me all the vulnerability of a pair of fingers tapping on the rim of a glory hole, nodding your head onto your clavicle as if in sleep and not death, knock-kneed and delicately bound to a tree trunk, I notch another arrow. 

 

In the softness of divinity I run my eyes over your glowing skin, but in my bed I stroke your back and feel the sharp regrowth of hair. 

 

I don’t know what any of this means, make it mean something, please, please make it mean something; make it mean something, please, please; I martyr my attention in you, the presence of your body a greater cause; you are an image, a distant thing; you are a devotional item, you are an icon, your eyes never open, your skin is soft, your neck is so pale. 

 

An arrow through the pectoral, an arrow in the abdomen; I find a new way to love you and you vanish, beatified. 

 

You run your fingers over my chin feeling the peach fuzz and maybe there’s concern on your rough, prickly face, but I can’t be sure. It takes a long time to be able to tell when I’ve stopped shaving. There’s something fucking wrong with you but we can’t decide what. 

 

I’ve taken too much adderall, we’re both terrible people, I think I’m in love with you, why won’t you go to the doctor? 

 

You’ve made an attempt to clean your depression nest for me, the most you’ve ever done in terms of attempts. 

 

In a church in Germany, the skull cap of Saint Sebastian is covered in precious metals and detailed like a helmet, with a little window you can lift up to see the bone beneath; in your bedroom you lean out of the window, smoking and muttering to yourself, vague attempts to plan your day. 

 

I put my faith in the possibility of something greater than any of this, blindly. It’s something like this, I think, if not exactly like this; when I think about you, I’m able to focus on all the good things and leave out the bad, but when I write I do the opposite, and in seeing your body, neither occurs. 

 

There is a void between what is shown and what is understood, between the image and the interpretation, between how you act towards me and how I feel for you, there is a void between us, if not between our bodies.

 

Emma wraps herself in a shawl and leans back into the broken leather sofa on the stage; in a church in Spain an old woman encouraged her to rub the shin bone of Saint Sebastian, urging on “rub him, rub him…” 

 

The purpose, apparently, was to cure her of her joint pain but, she says, shrugging, and winking, it didn’t work;  “still disabled.”

 

I’m shitposting sentiments to soften the blow, like if I act like I don’t care maybe the arrows will hurt less, the dull impact of a sharp edge under anaesthetic where you feel the parting flesh but no pain, just sensation without context. 

 

It’s an excessive amount of arrows, a corpse that is unable to rot away into nothing, floating in deep blue suspension, the binding of wires around its body onto a white post as decadent and effusive as the wounds, timeless suffering. 

 

Seemingly every hour as we wander around the city hand in hand, you abruptly tell me that you think I put up with a lot, that you make me put up with a lot, that I put up with you a lot, and the reality is more so that I don’t think I put up with enough; should we talk about it? Apparently not. 

 

For a full year, we’ve been suspended in an endless state of beginning, where I keep meeting you but go no further. 

 

Shield me from the wind as I piss against a tree by the river and stumble with me through undergrowth back to the path; lick the blood from a wound in my thigh as I sit on a stump; find a way to be with me, as I am with pain in this space.

 

When I was a painter, you were tied to a tree with rough lengths of rope, the bloody shafts of arrows protruding from your body at strange angles; it was my version of events, if we understood them to have occurred at all. 

 

I saw you naked in the middle of the room under a pile of bodies trying to moan through the fullness of your mouth as with one hand you cradled a head against your crotch and with the other you tried to keep your body upright pushing down into the carpet.

 

When you were a painter, my head rolled forward on my neck in a blind haze, and you felt my pectoral 

where it was pierced through with a bolt, 

confusion and surprise 

swelled across your face 

as you threw back your head 

moaning. 

 

Let me rub Regaine[R] into your scalp as an excuse to play with your hair; we are too young for the deaths we permit. You hover over my shoulder with your phone, your breath in my ear and your hand on my waist, as you record the five strangers moving their lips over my cock in strange, disconnected rhythms. 

 

There is more pleasure in the brush of your fingers against my ribs than in an entire room of tongues. 

 

I sit down to look, and in looking, to think; to flex my muscles from my training in art history to work out what the fuck is going on with you; this has always been my struggle, the division between creative and critical, how do I locate one? 

 

Poems like paper aeroplanes, like cartoon aeroplanes on your flesh, in your flesh, your tongue reaching, grasping at the post you are tied to, fully erect, with your eyes being knocked off your face by the sensations of the moment, the sun as a halo, the sky is blue, exhaust me like a life, I am too tired to demand anything of you. Grotesque icon. 

 

In my literary training of course, equally, the opposite might be true, but it doesn’t matter so long as right there in the experience you experience something. 

 

In the haphazard binding of hands to shaft, human nature is a series of lines.

 

I can be wrong if I’m wrong or I’m right, it doesn’t matter, can we all move past it? 

 

Insert another arrow as I sleep bound to a tree, I’ll never know, I’ll let you have it, sleep easy knowing you are the angelic victim of this scene. I’ve never needed to feel like I’m right or make someone see things from my point of view, but my therapist says there’s 

something compulsive 

in the way I seek validation 

through my body 

and the bodies 

of others. 

 

Pay attention to me, god dammit, I’ll say anything you need to hear. It is in all manners interpersonal and so I drift away from it, I don’t know, it doesn’t resonate, where has all the colour gone? Wouldn’t blood be red? 

 

Does it matter to me how my own image is constructed? I am bound to a tree to die. 

 

I’m beyond caring, and so my heart opens like a wound, like a flower; in a wound, an absence is a thing that is felt and observed. The phallic quiver of arrows discarded on the floor as if that is all this meant, as if this wasn’t about that. 

 

Any you that can be constructed is not present with me, and I see their uncertain passions as real as if they were. The wound is the window to the soul, given that the body is the soul and there is nothing else; certain things must be established and questioned over and over again. When I am gone, and nobody is reading my writing, will my soul rot away? I am here and nobody is reading my writing, am I rotting away?

 

His body envelopes a tree, like bindweed and ivy, symbiotic, not parasitic; he says “I was scared you would leave me” and it is too intimate for two strangers fucking in a wood; he was shaking like a branch in the wind, reaching out to me.

 

The archer, in the corner of the frame, looks up in pity at his labours, a single arrow through the forearm, breath pulsating in the adam’s apple; this has all happened before, will do so again; the image proliferates with subtle differences, he will draw an arrow. You’re a fool if you don’t realise the arrows have always been metaphors, it’s right there in the martyrdom. 

 

I’ve been writing the same book for years, but it doesn’t seem like it would be important enough for me to be doing that. Episodes, fragments, moments in my life, held together, with no growth in the anti-hero’s character. I keep going back to you, you barely think about me. You don’t give me any material and that feeds my drive to make it into something, some people have real problems, we’re not dying. Why do you think poetry is all about plausible deniability and mutually assured destruction? Poems are / not important, there are real problems in the world to address. 

 

Look towards heaven, as if in anticipation. 

Let the vortex open 

in the sky, let arrows 

rain upon chalky flesh, 

let the definition of muscle 

be firm in its structure 

and quivering in its depiction. 

A moment where an arrow 

goes straight through the calf 

and protrudes the other side 

brings no pain; concrete action is needed 

for things to change. 

 

There is a lack of primary sources, obscuring the answer to the question; who is Saint Sebastian? A sequence of words allows in the difficulty; there is no one answer and I cannot get my thoughts straight enough to write them down. 

 

I’ve been writing the same book all year, in which I try to turn you into something more instantly recognisable, but any concrete sense of depiction is worried away from itself, overwrought and gilded unnecessarily. 

 

The bones of Saint Sebastian are bones, yes, this is true, the bones of a dead man. I am distracted, there are too many faces, and at many points in the process I cannot line up these faces with yours, although they are still the you of the poem. I just keep waiting for something to happen, waiting for the meaning of a sequence of events to reveal itself, waiting. 

 

You tell me to think of you only as a pit, an endless, dark place to empty myself into and instead I see you as a glowing, reverent thing, gilded with gold and shimmering with divinity. I tried to say “Kinkiness is a spectrum” but my phone tried to autocorrect, first to “loneliness” then to “kindliness.” You said “petulant” meaning “full of flowers” and you were wrong, but you were beautiful, and you were unable to love me back. 

 

It was that part of late summer when it becomes summer again and I stroked your hair with your head laying in my lap 

as we watched the sunset, your leg 

twitching occasionally in the grass, 

like the tail of a dying fish, 

both our knees caked in dirt. 

 

Every time you speak to me, it’s like coming across a mess of feathers and blood in the middle of the woods and knowing something terrible happened before the current stillness. The ancient loneliness of magnolia trees pollinated by extinct beetles. I carried a rock from London all the way to Italy in a groove on the sole of my boot then popped it out in the airport. I don’t want to be one of those writers who torture themselves but I don’t write when I’m happy and maybe don’t implies can’t, I don’t know, it hasn’t ever occurred to me to try. A lambent arching spray of arterial blood, from the precise puncture of an arrow. 

 

There are so many inconsistencies; 

in the bodies, 

the places, the narratives, 

that I can hardly tell who I 

am any longer. 

I look down at your flesh 

and try to decipher it; 

I follow the lines and markings 

and realise it is 

my own. 

 

St Sebastian, spiked through with arrows nonetheless survives, if only a little while longer, listening to the singing as he refuses to die. His form changes, the specifics of his history changes. In the relics of the saint we may see the possibility of anything, moving through his body. So is his holy corpse the centre of our devotion because of its specificity or due to its lack there of?

 

Sebastian lived near my mother. The summer between my first and second year of university, he came over at midnight while she was away for a week, and I answered the door in a flannel shirt and boxer shorts. He was an orthopaedic surgeon with a husband he claimed knew what he was doing. He let me fuck him on the livingroom floor. Over the course of the summer he would occasionally get me to come over when his husband was out. When I went back to uni he kept asking to visit me, but I didn’t want my housemates to see me letting a fifty one year old into my bedroom. Over the next two years he’d occasionally pop up on grindr, and we’d occasionally meet. 

 

When I was 23, after I lost my job, finished my master degree, and my housemate moved in with his boyfriend, I moved back in with my mum for a year, and he messaged me again on Grindr so we went for a drink. He told me he remembered when we first met, how I’d answered the door in my pyjamas, and he’d fucked me in my childhood bedroom, the summer after I’d finished high school. There was a hungry glint in his eye. I told him he had a lot of the details wrong, told him what I remembered happening. He gave me a disappointed ‘oh’ and took a sip of his pint. I drank from my coke. He didn’t invite me home; I wouldn’t have gone if he did. 

 

His husband had left him, but he’d kept the house. Years later, I saw him on Grindr while I was sitting outside a hospital waiting for a friend. His profile specified he was only interested in younger men, under 24. He was willing to pay.

 

Warm rigged woollen shepherd, I clothed myself like a hermit. I clothed myself in the summer sun, clothed like a hermit in the sun. Works wonder wide in the world; works wander to hear the hills; unholy in works to wonder wide in the world; works wander to hear the hills and marvel to befall of my weary wandering. To wonder me to rest on a broad bank of a brook of a bank of sleep under the broad wondering. To begin to dream, rigged woollen sun summer sleep, to wonder the wandering in wonder of the hills. To be a shepherd, to clothe myself in the hills, befallen weary of such men who thrive upon the sun between all manner of men. 

 

When I met Sebastian, he was a banker and I was technically still a child. He was American. He told me he grew up poor. He told me when I was old enough, I’d become motivated by money. He told me how much he’d paid for each work of art on his wall. I would go to his expansive apartment, with its view out over central London and its 12-seater solid-wood dining table, and he’d get me drunk on rum and coke. He’d never let me touch the whiskey; he said a bottle cost more than my family was worth. He told me, condescending, that once I’d matured a bit I’d realise that Ayn Rand had some really solid ideas about the importance of Great Men for the function of society. 

 

He’d strip naked, then throw his legs back while lying on a towel in a guest bedroom, and order me to fuck him, shouting “harder. Harder. HARDER.” and telling me not to cum. Once I turned twenty he stopped answering my messages. I still walk past his apartment. I still see him on Grindr. He’s still using the profile pictures he had a decade ago, still saying he was 38. His photos didn’t particularly look like him even back then. 

 

The keys are in the lock; it’s all completely hollow inside. You’ll find the hole when you call for me, climbing down inside a tree until you reach the bottom of everything. I am a void that my body flails around, expanding and contracting at whim. My eyes as big as a pair of mill wheels, sunken sullenly into my skull. I imagine there must be something you want, for you to have tumbled down this hole into nothingness.The city was lovely, full of lovely streets and lovely parks. We went into the loveliest inn and asked for their loveliest room and all the loveliest food they had, because now we had so much money that we could ask for anything. Outside the window, post-industrial wastes were transformed with a cacophony of competing structures. How many roses is a rose? The figures connect. 

 

Sebastian kept a list of men he’d had sex with in his phone. He said I was number 100. He asked me how long my list would be and I said there was really no way of knowing. I said I’d long since passed 100. He was genuinely confused as to how I couldn’t know. Most people don’t even stay long enough for me to get their name. Sebastian had been with his partner for nearly a decade. 

 

The separation between dreaming and waking is an expanse of nothingness. Sometimes, looking beyond what is present is necessarily and completely unachievable. This troubled atmosphere is everywhere. It’s almost oppressive how much nothing there is here; the fun part is that I am usually surprised by the result. 

 

We went out into the woods to uproot a tree, pulled a small tree up by its roots, then took it home for timber. We ploughed the fields, fed the animals, and warmed the house. One day, a wealthy man stopped by and harnessed the boy up to his carriage, which was piled high with wood. He beat his horse with a whip until it was dead, then mounted the boy and rode him down the road. There were wolves all around, but he killed them all. Show me the way home with a bright light; set the barn on fire. The entire world began to shake, the roots coming loose from the earth. The man and the boy slept together in the garden as fog rolled in, separating the sea and the land. 

 

I met Sebastian at a poetry reading. He had a sweeping fringe he was using to disguise his male pattern baldness, and his canines were prominent when he smiled. At the pub after the reading, waiting at the bar, he shoved his hand down the front of my trousers and cupped my crotch, winked at me, and then ordered another pint. We’d spend afternoons naked reading Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler to each other. He had a jealous streak. He thought contemporary poetry was shit, but still went to readings. He wasn’t a poet, he was just a connoisseur. 

 

He thought my writing sucked, and told me so. He thought my hair was weird, because he couldn’t tell what colour it was. He would tenderly stroke my cheek in bed, then dig a fingernail in on a zit, making me recoil away in shock and pain. He would chain smoke on the front steps and tell me I ate too much sugar while spooning me, his hands grabbing my belly as if to make a point. He fell in love with a twitch streamer and became an influencer. After three years of not speaking, he sent me a photograph of him and his husband both bent over splaying apart their butt cheeks with an address and no other context. I sometimes wonder if I’d have gone if I hadn’t been away when it happened. 

 

Snow was frolicking in the meadow, following a will-o-the-wisp. Some boys chased their dogs until they collapsed, exhausted and surrounded by dogs. The small creature was licking out the shell, which was made of silver, on a rocky slope. The cracked shells, more and more beautiful the more you looked at them, had been consecrated in their abandonment. What’s covered in writing lives up to the difference between writing and reality. We climb up the walls and the rain falls down from the skies. 

 

Sebastian used to mutter French phrases to himself under his breath; he did not speak French. He was reading Proust the entire time I knew him. He looked down on me for not having read Proust. I once pointed out that he hadn’t read Proust, he was reading him, and he didn’t talk to me for three days. He once sent me a selfie in a new leather harness he’d bought himself, which he was wearing upside down and inside out. 

 

He called himself a compulsive people pleaser, and used it as an excuse to displease me as much as possible, as regularly as possible, then called me aggressively critical when I tried to say he was upsetting me. He would lie about being sick and post selfies at extravagant parties on social media, then tell me he missed me. He would never say what he meant, and twist my words to his own ends, and say that I was making assaults on his character when I argued I hadn’t said the thing that he said had upset him. He went running four times a week and said I ate too much. I told Sebastian I never wanted to see him again and he set fire to a rose bush the old lady who owned the ground level flat below me had planted in her front garden. 

 

Have pity on me, a poor fisherman, catching fish to let go. They cut off my arm and kept it in a book. Whatever I know is home, they also know. One evening, I was forgotten between two rocks up in the woods on the mountain. There will be a price for staying here. I looked out towards the setting sun. The earth opened up. I didn’t blink, as it swallowed me whole. There was a village there, made of water. 

 

The more often they swam, the more beautiful they became. They came from different places to swim in the water; many of them drowned. The next morning, everyone was running, pushing and shoving to the point of exhaustion as they raced away from the fish scales. Waves rose up and washed into the village and a huge head, the huge head of a fish emerged from the water in an arc, as if it were a bridge back into the water, into the jaws. Swim in the lake. Go home to your fishing. How do we solve the book? They all went down to the ships on the beaches and drowned. 

 

Sebastian was a sommelier, and his breath smelled like death. When I told him I didn’t drink, he asked me if I breathed, if I fucked. He picked me up in a BMW and parked on double yellows outside a fancy restaurant. When I told him he couldn’t park there, he told me he could, they just made you pay a fine if they caught you. He got drunk and ordered a taxi home; he told me it didn’t matter because it was just linked to his dad’s card and his dad was fucking loaded. He kept trying to suck me off in the back seat and I kept batting him away. He threw up over his Vivienne Westwood loafers. 

 

The son was the source of much pain and sorrow. He met a man who asked a question, and the boy replied. Well, then, you are quite welcome to come with me. As if flies were swarming around him, the noise of the others buzzed in his ears. The man had a fiddle that could make everyone around him dance, and a rope, which he placed around the boys’ neck. They were whirling around madly, bumping into each other, and falling to the ground, exhausted from the frenzied movement. While people are dancing, other people drop dead. It was a lonely life without dancing. 

 

The boy and the man went down to the sea, which was as bright and dazzling as the sun. The sand was as radiant as the sun, and the gardens behind it looked like paradise. That evening, they asked for shelter, and a stranger in a white veil agreed on the condition they be allowed to throw themselves into the sea. But the water could not be disturbed; the waves knew nothing but the boy. 

 

Sebastian had injured his knee playing rugby, and hadn’t had sex in 3 months. The first time we met, he came to my house after his physio appointment, and we had sex. While chatting as he got dressed, he told me he was moving to Australia in 3 weeks. 

 

A woodsman had a son, and then died, and so the boy went out into the world. He ate, was overcome by thirst, and found a stream to drink from. The stream was nothing but love, turned into water by the world, and soon he had 7 sons who were not his sons and they were all in love with him. He kept a boy seated at every window in his house, and watched them through keyholes. Swirls of dust were his food, and he drank his tears, because his stream had dried up. Three young men, a tailor, a miller, and a soldier, were lost in the woods. It was dark and they could not find their way out. Memory has a history; she is the mother of the muses. Unreported, but pervasive, background noise. The above develops into a novel. 

 

Sebastian was a French student who’d just got back from his year abroad. He lived in the next town over on the other side of campus, but he’d walk to my house and sit on my bed, and we’d make awkward small talk until we had nothing left to say, and we’d start kissing. After a few months, he sent me an angry, drunken text message asking why I didn’t like him back, and I said that it hadn’t occurred to me he’d like to date or have a relationship. He’d never offered to meet anywhere other than my bedroom; he’d turned me down every time I’d asked to come to his. He never replied to another message I sent him, and shortly after began dating an opera singer from the music department. 

 

The men in the house were all young, and beautiful, and spent all their days burning. The boy went into the woods and fell asleep on a rotting tree stump. Every night of his life he’d dreamed of exquisite things to eat, but then when he saw them on the table, looking through the flaming door into the house, which was on fire, he suddenly wasn’t hungry. Standing on the tree stump, humiliated by the flames, he cast himself into them, and hugged and kissed everyone who was there, all made of gold, until their bodies were indistinguishable from one another in the fire. 

 

Sebastian wouldn't let me fuck him without poppers, and he inhaled their fumes like a fish dragged from the water. Lying on his back with his legs around my waist, he would clutch the bottle in his sweaty palms, bringing it to his nostril in ten second intervals, and breathing deep, as I arched my back up to jerk my head into a position where I wasn't close to them, where the world didn't smell like a swimming pool. 

 

Once, lying on his front, his back curved to raise his ass into the air, he lost sight of the bottle for a moment and began to panic, pulling me out of him as he scrambled through the pillows and blankets looking for it, clutching it to his chest when it came back into his hands, like he'd been digging around in the sand for some tiny, precious trinket. When I caught COVID and lost all my lung capacity, I never saw him again. 

 

We wander lost in the woods at twilight, purposefully, and no longer lost. We feel the earth move and the sky rip. There is nowhere else to go and nothing to pray to. Wiry stalks push through the cairn and lilies grow in the water where, beneath the surface, there are rocks covered with a horde of snails waving their appendages. A lovely big flower, exactly like a tulip, its petals closed tight – still a bud. A charming flower. Beautiful red and yellow petals, blue-violet petals, a rose petal, an entire wreath of flowers floating on the water, where the lily pads seemed just like islands. The little fish swimming in the water chewed through stems with their teeth. The sun shone on the water, floating downstream into evening, twilight, night. 

 

Sebastian was an unsuccessful artist. He leaned back in his chair, dangling one arm of the back nonchalantly. I thought he was deeply unpleasant and we didn’t get on. He’d ask me questions with a pointed edge, and I couldn’t quite work out if he was mocking me. He’d roll his eyes at my reply and when I asked him something he’d ignore me, and respond with another question. 

 

He went to the bathroom, and when he came back he spoke about their layout at length, the way there was a corridor of large, self-contained rooms with no stalls to look over and a heavy door to block out the noise. When I asked him, to clarify, if he was asking me if I wanted to fuck in the bathroom of a Nando’s, he didn’t reply, and we looked at each other for a very long time, in complete silence, with non-specifically ethnic Nando’s background music blaring at full volume. He told me that the best feedback he’d ever got on his art was from a woman who’d told him he made her uncomfortable, because he seemed like he was unhappy. 

 

None of this is to say who Sebastian was, only how I perceived him; how his presence felt to me as it fleeted through my life. It is not fair of me to do what I do, to treat Sebastian like a distraction and then to become upset when he fails to satisfactorily distract me. Just because I’m aware of what I’m doing, doesn’t mean I understand it. Just because I understand myself doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. I feel the weight of the world within my body, the uncertainty of the universe in my head like a whirlpool. When I attempt to view my life like a narrative, when I try to put it into a structure that might suggest order, that might suggest sense, it falls into something different entirely, and I lose myself in the motion of the different understanding knitting together. It would, perhaps, be easy enough to start at my birth and end at my death, but it would not be truthful, it would get close to an accuracy of how my life felt as I perceived it happening. 

 

I look back on myself and I feel the same, I know I am the same person, my sense of self is never what is in question. What changes is my body, my life, the way I understand the people around me, the particular hopeless feelings that overwhelm me at a specific point in time. How can a linear narrative ever attempt to explain how it feels to be electricity in a flesh prison, rotting and bloating and trying to be loved? 

 

I process my existence through words, through writing, but I remember my life through images, flashes of events, in non-linear sequence. They drift and shift, and place themselves into strange arrangements, and as I try to find their logic I can never be certain of their narrative coherence. Moments in my life do not follow each other, one by one, like lines of ants, but scatter across blank expanses like asterisms spread between constellations. I am truthful to a fault, but I am not infallible. 

 

Have you ever had that moment, when you share an anecdote and look up to see a sea of concern and horror across the faces of your companions, and begin to wonder what, specifically, about your life was so traumatic as to cause such shock this time?