The Passion of the Posset

My passion died when I was salt, Alice-deep in tears. It was only young but it was warped, grown to the shape of its secret box, its tender bits rubbed to leather. It was wipe-clean and it frequented bars, drank pink drinks through straws and flashed its stocking-tops. It brought me out in a rash but it was hungry and it was strong. Then its batteries went flat and its sequins fell off one by one and clogged the hoover for weeks and it died runtish, bald and exposed. Oh it was cheap and oh it did not fit and it bit and it chafed but it was mine, I made it from things I found in bushes and oh I miss it so.

Now I need to grow a new one, well-fitting as fur, moulded to shape like witches’ wax. I need the taste again, the marzipan toad squatted melting on my tongue, the waves of brine and honey. I’ll have to bury clams at midnight outside the adult bookshop, eat nothing but popping candy and bathe in condensed milk. And then somewhere in the oubliettes inside, a poppet will stir, open its mouth and make a sound like herons.

A Brief History of Religion

Sometimes here it rains sluts, like elsewhere it rains sardines. They bank up in the gutters where they lie wriggling until the night comes and with it the baying men, scrumping for pussy, who catch them and bend them backwards and that is a hymn to me, my chalice and my ritual dagger. Sometimes one will leave behind a garter like a bejewelled slug and I will pick it up and take it home. Witches wear garters. I was probably a witch in another life, sucking skyclad on the devil's death-cold cock.

When I was younger I thought about making a god, and I collected toilet roll tubes and sticky-backed plastic and the pistachio nut shells that I see everywhere I go as though they have been laid out in a trail for me to follow. I cooked gods in my dingy kitchen, clambering goat-like over the mountains of filth. I whipped up a celestial smorgasbord; Hundreds and Thousands and asafoetida, cockles and offal and liquorice whips, gods scrambled or boiled down to stock, gods as the mock in my mock-turtle soup, gods salted and smoked and pickled and poached and then I licked the bowl clean.

I had gods of meat for whom I scratted in the bins, broke into butchers' shops, scarfed sausages raw and wore corsets of steak. I had deities of derelict buildings, cloaked in yellow newspapers, their eyes like boarded up windows. The winter-god came crabbed and skinning, beneath its caul of hoar frost grinning, backwards like the dead. When I worshipped winter I did it in a bath of ice, skin rucked to gooseflesh and teeth bared in a chattering rictus.

Then I decided to cut out the middle man and just worship myself. Easy peasy.

What I Did

Yesterday, in town with The Best Girl, we crowed over baubles and got drunk before noon. I drew a picture of some children flying a flatfish kite. Today I gave directions to a lost Ghost Train. I am not sure that I gave the right directions. This is probably an omen of some kind. In every room I have ever inhabited, there has been a slightly open drawer.

Now I am with the witches in an icy place, blubber on my breath and the conjuring lights. Seal-headed women touch me with ice-chapped hands, breathe out solid. In the cauldron, lichen, barnacle cocks and half-digested food from the baby birds’ bellies. My witch wife loosens my skins, slides bear fingers in, then whalebone, carved with wolves’ mouths and the feet of gulls, and comes the chill that warms until it kills.