I cry
I cry and I cry
for what I am not
What I am perceived as
is not what they got
I grieve
I break and bend
for what has a future
that already knows the end?
© Kait King, 2015
I cry
I cry and I cry
for what I am not
What I am perceived as
is not what they got
I grieve
I break and bend
for what has a future
that already knows the end?
© Kait King, 2015
Look at me
waffling on
happy as a bee
Look at me
skipping through life
thinking I’m free
Look at me
that wistful child
once so wild
and now independent
and grown
Look at me
with 3 under 3
and a house I don’t
even own
Look at me
shared weekends
if we’re lucky
And I know you’ve been
sucking
someone else’s cherry
lip gloss
Look at me
bitter days
long nights
spent watching crap TV
Never to be
free –
the very unhappy
divorcee
© Kait King, 2015
Crystal Meth
An addicts’ breath
Inhales a
smoky dream
In reality
You’re never free
Just a brains’
endless scream
Crystal Meth
Talk in depth
Required by any means
Close to death
That last crystal breath
It’s not as great as it seems
Crystal Meth
Families bereft
Bury a loved one, crying
Cold caress
This Crystal Meth
And our children
keep on dying
© Kait King, 2016
Life suspended in a web-like hammock
the coffee smell not as nostril-curling as in the past
a homeless man stumbles along wet walks
dragging his sorry arse along the splinter lit street
a reflection a sad life in a hard city,
his city a place where he lost his wife and his job,
a home, his family
where he nearly took his own
when things were darker than ebony
and he had to walk his walk alone
A bunch of aggro school kids
too brash and way too loud
disrespect his foul figure on the skids
he had no room to be proud
He seeks a place that’s dry
it won’t be warm,
he knows a place where he can cry
and his aching tears won’t show
© Kait King, 2015
Sometimes I
feel like
my Soul is
desperately
trying to
escape…
Tap
Tap
Tapping
at the top
of my skull
“There’s
somewhere
else I’m
supposed to
be
Let me
out!
Set
me
free!”
© Kait King, 2018
02/04/2018
“Humans are like the weird sea creatures of the Earth,
Change the pressure and we can burst.”
Kait King 2017
Pre-Occupancy
So nobody’s home
Just cardboard cut-outs
posed in my brain
Memories I can’t let go
Pre-Occupancy
A way to survive
Somehow to numb
the pain
Somehow to stay
the child
Pre-Occupancy
Merely a distraction
Something to hide
any connection
Anything to avoid
taking action
Pre-Occupancy
© Kait King, 2017
She’s beating the
crap out of me
I want to be
retaliatory
But I can’t find a gap
to even try
and hit back
She kicks me in
my side
Everyone there wants to see
me cry
I can hear their
jeering calls
of magnified echoes
charging through halls
This strange metamorphosis
in sound
is my ticket off
the gravelly ground
And I can see myself
lying there
The group of bystanders
shout and cheer
My body, I see
crumpled like
a sack
And I never even got a chance
to throw a punch back
© Kait King, 2015
My laugh is empty –
it’s lost it’s guts
I feel myself falling
into one of those ruts
That long
dark hole
I think I’ll never come back from
That “odd-one-out” feeling
that I really don’t belong
© Kait King, 2016
She’s listing
dangerously –
hair unwashed
no make-up on,
even the Captain
abandoned her
uninteresting,
over-weight and
needy
Stuck in the
iceberg
solid
icy
cold
unwanted connection –
The dark will soon
be upon the wreck
alone
lonely
lost
In the dark
© Kait King, 2016
The words that fall off your fingers
as you tip tap text
to me
are untrue, hurtful
and dangerous
You’re acting like
a bully
I don’t want to do that
but you threaten
me with this
You lied and said I fucked him
when it was just a kiss
Why are you so
mean to me
What makes it ok
that you and
your so-called friends
hang me
and then
watch me sway
I couldn’t find anyone
I felt I could talk to
See everyone thought
it was true
But now I’m not here
any more –
I hope that’s better
for you…
© Kait King, 2015
This is mostly a true story!!
A long, long, loooong time ago….well it certainly feels like that, I sort of stumbled along into acting and modelling. That had to be said as I was doing some extra work on a vampire movie out in an area I live not far from now, Kings Seat. Typical film day, we had to be on set at 4-fricken-am, and in make up after signing in. So it’s cold and wet and windy. The location is an abandoned insane asylum. Big luminous floodlights are set up inside and outside of the main empty building. Spitting rain plays invisible/visible as it passes through the light – gusts of dark wind causing frenzied flurries – mesmerising, hypnotising, vampirising – so yeah, it was perfect for filming a horror/vampire movie.
A bunch of us headed up to the gloomy entrance of the building – I was desperate to take a look around and needed to find a partner in crime. Somebody else who liked having the begeezuz scared out of them. Everybody clattered into the front hallway and across to where the lamps could be seen and bizarrely enough, the smell of bacon was coming from. Trestle tables were scattered in some haphazard order, if that’s even possible and there was hustle and bustle going on where breakfast was being prepared. The area was huge, with warped wooden floors – dusty as hell, doors hung off hinges as did cobwebs off every corner and chandelier or light fitting. I wasn’t hungry at 5 am but I could do with coffee and anyway I needed to convince someone to come exploring with me. Someone who didn’t mind if they missed getting picked for some opportune moment in the movie because they were missing…
So I settled in next to someone who looked friendly enough and sipped on my coffee – it sucked, it was not real coffee and I don’t do imitation anything if I can help it – and coffee is a miracle and should be treated as such. Anyway, I’m listening quietly to the discussion I’ve intruded on. I recognise a few faces, the “usuals” and I guess I was one of them too… we swap a few early crinkled grins and raised eyebrows as acknowledgement of each other. Fuck knows what your name is but I usually don’t forget a face.
So it turns out, besides an abandoned insane asylum being creepy enough, it was haunted too. Haunted with psyche nurses who had killed themselves apparently in absolute despair. Now there were two kinds of people sitting around sipping crap coffee listening to the ghost stories. People who get more and more creeped out and just want to cling to the fluffy teddy-bear image they have of life, and then there’s people like me. People like me become more entranced and fascinated with a bad, never done before, you will never make it, you can’t do it, story… and I was sold. When you’re wired like this, you learn to pick out others who see the sick fascination in everything bizarre, unusual and usually incomprehensible. And there they were – two of them who seemed to know each other already. I had never seen them around any of the other jobs I’d been on. So I kept quiet and watched and listened and learned. They were funny and adventurous, curious and tough – I liked them and we all clicked as soon as we started chatting. I introduced myself and as we chatted away and started talking about the creepy old place, a very effeminate, obviously gay man dropped into the conversation and also fitted in perfectly with our twisted fascination of ghosts and things not of sound mind, or body for that matter.
So we slunk off to have a look around at this grey stone, intimidating building. We were in one of many – there was a place where only children were kept. The bunks lined the wall, not two up – but three. The bunks were so close together you would have to be a pretty skinny kid to squeeze your way down to the floor. The so called play ground was a fenced area with one dead, leafless tree or a twisted skeleton was sitting sadly in the middle of a patch of dirt which had become mud now, in the drizzle. The area seemed way too small for all the kids that might have filled all of those bunk beds at one time…even half of them would be a crowd. You could almost see them standing in the rain, clothes dripping, hair clinging to their unloved unwanted skulls. A great sadness hung around this area and it made us all pause and be grateful that we were on the other side, even though Kings Seat was empty – even though it didn’t quite feel like that.
Behind us was the building for the criminally insane. Razor blade wire sat on top of a chain link fence glinting dangerously at us in the flickering lights from afar. I wondered how many desperately crazy people had dreamed of being able to slice their arms on that wire and escape the hell they were in. This place was for those charming individuals who danced around with their mother’s skin draped over them in the moonlight – naturally Ed Gein springs to mind.
We held our mobile phones up to see where we were going and to read or look at things that caught our attention. We moved up to a general patients building. Were they just generally insane? Or did they generally behave under medication? Generally harmless? There was a broken window at the back above a walkway area – possibly made for wheelchair access. We all managed to clamber in after chunking bits of glass off the windows’ edge with a stone. It was incredibly dark and scary. The four of us clung together like shit to a blanket – I didn’t care if I was the blanket or the shit, I just wasn’t letting go come hell or high water.
So there we huddle, like a pack of startled rats. I wanted to make a circle out of us, y’know so we just could shuffle around but our backs were always protected. This started out as a good idea but became obvious very quickly that it was impossible to move through doorways, use stairs or get down hallways with any stealth or logic. We file behind each other and end up in a big open room with huge dormer windows. Bird poop, dust and time had smeared the windows to a level where it wouldn’t have mattered if the sun was shining, nothing was getting through those. The rain against the windows didn’t even manage to make a running pattern against the concreted bird shit and grime. Scattered over the floor were pictures, pictures that had been drawn by the patients who had once lived here. As we wandered through the open room and our eyes became a little more acquainted to the bad light we could see pictures still pinned to the walls. Tendrils of wallpaper hung around the pictures pinned indiscriminately with sometimes only one pin. The paper was yellowed and brittle, the pictures childlike – perhaps used as some sort of therapy. The room looked as if someone had just torn loads of pictures off the walls or out of cupboards and scattered them over the floor, leaving just the odd cluster of those who had time to be pinned. As I looked through some of the pictures I noticed some that were drawn in black, red and purple crayon – angry, hurt drawings. It was weird, standing there, looking into personal demons of strangers. Wondering why there are so many stories of the people who care for the crazy ending up crazy themselves or worse still, dead.
You could almost see a body hanging in a doorway, someone scratching on a wall, another rocking back and forth in some vortex unknown. We took our leave and headed back out through the window and out into the dank dark morning. As we crunched our way around the weed riddled gravel roads we came across a pen type building. There were hoses attached and metal bars that looked like they would pin a human against the wall. We all agreed that this felt like a place where people had been forced to be cleaned or washed. It felt desolate and wet, cold and unforgiving. As we moved through the property we found ourselves in a very oppressive place. We walked through a heavy metal door, we didn’t want to touch it and all of us managed to squeeze through it’s unwilling opening. I stood in the dusty darkness, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was in a narrow low corridor, about ten rooms ran opposite each other with steel doors on each. The rooms themselves were all made of cement – the floor flowed into a cement bed, up into a cement wall and a grater type covering sat over a small oblong window. You wouldn’t be able to put your face up to it or look out onto anything. The whole room was cement, nothing movable. I could feel so much pressure on my body it was weird. As we walked down looking into the rooms we found sad memento’s of those forgotten. A filthy comb on a cement bed, a piece of hopeful rope, a blood smattering, or smear in just about every room. These dungeons stank of pain, sadness and death – death of spirit…
It was so oppressive we all became desperate to get out, panicky – overwhelming stuffiness and cloying glue air. Clambering and squeezing through the impossibly heavy door we fell out of the corridor into an open room and looked at each other, exclaiming how awful that was. We had all been frightened by this creepy old building and the grounds. We had all felt the sadness and suffocating oppressiveness but for some reason it was overwhelming in that close, dark corridor of cement rooms. We made a hurried journey back to the main building, strangely quiet in the slowly iron grey morning. Once we got there amongst the lights and bustle we kind of relaxed a little. The thought of anyone being locked up in those cells made of cement, like a tomb, it was incomprehensible. So with a hot drink in our clutches we tried to warm up a little. Some of the people who had been chatting to my new found friends came over to our huddle and asked us where we had escaped to. After telling them in great detail about our scary travels around Kings Seat we were all called to set and had to stand around for a while in silence most of the time – very tiresome. Anyway at morning tea it seemed that a little tour guide gathering had decided we were going to take them to the creepy tomb-like cells where the insane must have thrown themselves against the walls, clawed at the grater windows till they bled, banged their heads against those concrete walls and some would have killed themselves in there too, no doubt.
We arrived at the huge concrete and steel door into the corridor to the cells. We couldn’t move the door either open more or closed so those who were able and willing, slipped through the gap and into the squashing atmosphere of the tomb. There were lots of ooOOoo’s and aaahhh’s – a shriek and giggling. Slowly people dripped back out of the tombs’ corridor and into where I was standing, unable to go back in after the way I had felt there. No one seemed to be too fussed, I think there were too many of us to feel or allow anything to feel.
We returned to the main building – the adventure had been creepy and mysterious to all of the others but they had not felt what we had felt. The four of us had made surreptitious eye contact, realising that no one else had experienced that suffocating horror, or silent desperateness to get out. None of us had spoken while we had been in that corridor, looking into the cells – it was almost out of some religious or spiritual reason or respect that we were unable to do anything initially and then just want to escape a split second later, with absolute needy desperation…it was strange.
We continued filming after the morning break and lunchtime rolled around. One of the research guys from the crew invited me to sit and have lunch with him. We had met before and he always knew what was going on and when. So I told him what we had been up to and that I thought the place where the psychiatric nurse would have committed suicide would be in that tomb room that the four of us had felt strange in. He looked at me with a slightly confused look on his face.
“Which psyche nurse was this?” he asks
“Well, I think there was more than one who committed suicide because of the patients…” I said, trailing off. He was shaking his head. “Uh uh…that’s not what happened there. You have the wrong story.”
So I ask him to tell me the real deal. Apparently that cement cell block held the most dangerous patients – and was generally full at any one time. The ratio for patient and nurse was one on one due to the nature of the beast. Somehow one of the patients overwhelmed his nurse, a male psyche nurse and suffocated him. He then stealthily crept to the next cell and helped the next patient kill his nurse and so on and so forth until all ten severely violent and disturbed psyche patients were free. As the gathering group moved down the cell block the killing became more and more frenzied as they realised there was nothing that the nurses could do when there was seven of them and only 3 nurses left. Some patients threw bodies against walls and smashed the victims heads open, dangled brains over themselves and ran around screaming.
No one would go in there. The staff believed they would calm down when it came around to meal time and the nightmare could be dealt with then. Well the patients managed to hole up in there for 5 days, eating the bodies of the dead nurses. Then they turned on themselves. That is why there is no Kings Seat Asylum for the Mentally Insane any more – they ate the staff and the clients – real bad for business….
The End
© Kait King, 2015
Just because he’s fat
you can’t leave him out
like that
And even if it’s so
inside he’s like you,
y’know
And even when we’re angry
and think we are not wrong
it’s best to love and forgive
and learn to get along
Just because she’s different
and cannot see by choice
take a moment to listen
to her gifted singing voice
Because everyone’s born perfect
from different points of view
and the world would really be
quite boring
if they were all like me
and you
© Kait King, 2016
She didn’t want to know,
y’know
She didn’t want
to see
Her man had been
behind her back
creepy
creep
creeping
Another in denial,
sat
She really couldn’t
believe
He really couldn’t
have done that
creepy
creep
creeping
Your heart
is not safe
it says
your children
are in danger
the man you thought
was ‘dad’ material
turns out to be
that stranger…
creepy
creep
creeping
© Kait King, 2016
Pretty Girl
With a trail of heart break
Pretty Girl
Chances they all take
Pretty Girl
If not for their own sakes
what will it really take
Pretty Girl
Now
Lonely Girl
Why’d you give it all?
Lonely Girl
Was it far to fall?
Lonely Girl
Leaving hearts so small
If you have a heart at all
Oh Pretty Lonely Girl
© Kait King, 2015
Oh what to do
when someone
cheats on you
Oh what to say
that even though –
you want them to stay
And how do you choose
how you want to lose –
you know he knows
he’s won –
and he’s already started
and nowhere
near
done
© Kait King, 2016
Every time my phone beeps
I’m wishing hard it’s you…
Kait King 2017