I want to own a distillery. I wanna see Mount Everest, and Victoria Falls. I want to try peyote. I want to be fit. I want to be strong. I want to go to Jerusalem. I want to go to Mecca, to Rome, to Varanasi. I want to be that garbage collector on the back of that rubbish truck, cheering to everyone that he drives past. I want to get a tattoo. I want to grow a beard. I want to shave my head. I want to strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to destroy my brothers.
I want to be a rock star.
I want to be a DJ, filling the nightclub with sex and motion. In fact I want to be the bass itself, driving the very movements of the dancers. I want to be the disco floor, feeling the rhythms of a thousand feet, unnoticed.
I want to be the sleeve wiping the beer froth from that Arab’s moustache.
I want to debase myself, to feel the perverse cocktail of pleasure and guilt. I wanna be the hotpants riding up that girl’s arsecrack. I wanna be that little Asian girl knitting, behind the cabinet full of sushi rolls.
I want to be the music in that chicks headphones, the kiss on that weathered old Greek woman’s cheek. I wanna have a drink. I wanna bring out my dead.
I want to feel silence between my fingers. I want to feel the difference in it’s fabric between the itchy hessian silence of the couple on the first date, and the comforting soft old-and-worn silence of the mother and the daughter.
I want to taste the thought that made that guy decide to walk through the Tuileries with no pants on, his balls hanging way lower that his wrinkled little penis. I want to be the spring in every cane chair on every sweeping Paris terrace on a summer’s day. I want to feel the numb addiction of absinthe again.
I want to try heroin. I don’t want to use a needle. I want to slash at my arms, and rub it into the wounds.
I want to drink of the guilty pleasure, the exquisite agony of rapture and desire. I want to feel the power of rape and murder, and the inevitable gambit of fear.
I want to be betrayed. I want to be martyred.
I want to slow an ocean swell into a sand dune. I want to hear continents crushing and colliding and jagging up mountain ranges. I want to eat to devour to taste to sample, to crave to yearn to long for to drink to scull to swill to sip to kill to butcher to execute to assassinate, to run to flee to chase to hunt. To kill someone who’s pissed me off, and to mutilate and disfigure the corpse so that their soul won’t be recognised as human at the gates of Heaven.
I want to quicken the acorn. I want to harden into oak. I want to die before the pleasure starts to fade.
I want to be an author. I want to stir the loins. I want to go out in a Norwegian whale-boat. I want to strike to the heart of the matter. I want to go back to the drawing board.
I want to carve out the Grand Canyon. I want to fuck every hot girl I see pretty much.
I want the weight of an ocean to crush the life from my lungs. I want to burn up on re-entry. I want to be ritually sacrificed, and to have my corpse eaten at a barbeque in my honour. I want to be killed rescuing a baby from an oncoming train. I want the iron vacuum of space to boil the moisture out of each of my cells simultaneously.
I want to walk every dirty pathway, to walk and to walk, until the footpaths and boulevards and promenades and alleys chew the soles of my shoes, my feet, and my bones grind on the dirty tarmac, and chip and snap away and keep walking until I am just a long sloppy red smear for you to slip up in, and for the flies, and for the stray dogs. I want to cling to the highest peak, and to possess everything, and, having possessed it, return it. I want to starve the beggars, and make the rich content, and not think it unfair. I want to beggar the fools, and to favour the bold. I want to write so that you claw at your own skin ; to love such that my own life becomes meaningless.
I want to feel an Olympic swimmer’s desire to win, and the hunger-sharpened senses of a slowly starving famine victim. I want to follow the path that leads you to the most depraved depths. I want to feel the desires that have you soaring like a descant. I want to blister in the desert, to struggle up a mountain, to founder on an iceberg, to freeze to boil to hear the crackling of the stars, to feel time warp into space, to hang in the non-space between electron shells.
I will, however, settle for a good meat pie.
honest dave