The Takers and the Givers

Givers and takers

I think there are two kinds of people in the world;

Those who will take everything

and those who would give anything

© Kait King, 2015

Another Opportunity

opportunity

Yes love,

that’s exactly

what you do

Dust yourself off

once you’ve

pulled yourself up

and sing

dance

stand tall

Honey if you

think about it

it’s not the first time

and be sure

it will not be the last

You know the rights

from the wrongs

Don’t ever let them change

your song

With a Nelson Mandelian

grace

and a dignity dug

from the deep

You will triumph

and in a cloud of

dust, like a rolling

Pig Pen

You flagrantly walk

your walk into

another opportunity

© Kait King, 2016

Crystal Meth-I-Didn’t-Mean (Methamphetamine)

methididntmean-drugabuse_shutterstock-164052779-blowing-smoke-cloud-meth-fi

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

Fandamily

family-guy-3

I knew I loved this family

from the very start

It felt like I’d always been there

and we’d never been apart

With our delicious little secrets

and our family photo art

Boisterous family dinners

and cheeky, jeering remarks

Mum’s delicious orange chicken and

her cinnamon apple tart

I knew I loved this family

from the very start

© Kait King, 2016

I remember you Dad

I remember you Dad

I remember being only

knee-high to a grasshopper

and you would twirl me around

you let me stand on your feet

and danced with me

while I clutched at your

chino trousers or

the creases on your business suit

You never minded

we always danced

I remember pouring your drink

two fingers of Glen Morangie

two fingers being my index and little

but not really

I mixed that whiskey with two blocks of ice

and a dash of chilled water

I remember how you would savour it

in the South African sunlight

at the end of your day

I remember the love of words and animals

you gifted to us all

your funniness

and sense of justice

I remember you telling me

to eat my crusts

so that I would grow hair on my chest

and I did – eat them, not grow hairs on my chest…

I remember you used to type

business letters on my belly

and I was an old typewriter with a runner

and a “ding!”

which tickled the hell out of me

“Dear sir” you would type

I’m shrieking with delight

And the photo’s that I have

I remember you Dad

© Kait King, 2015

With love and dedication to my incredible father – the walking Encyclopaedia, the uncapped academic – I miss you, we all do xxx

Pre-Occupancy

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

Last thought in a Playground

playground thought

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

Sometimes a word

Sometimes

Touching many

or touching none,

the joy it brings

just touching one –

with a torrent of words

cleverly writ,

from the coolest phrases

in ancient Sanskrit

or perhaps a scribe in

a guttural foreign word

is the sweetest thing

anybody ever heard

And the English language

with it’s redonkulous rules

where no matter how good you are

it still makes you a fool…

sometimes

© Kait King, 2016

Kings Seat?… or Hell Hole… Part 1 and 2 now…oh and here’s 3 – ok I promise this is the last bit…no really…

KingSeat or HellHole

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….

Just because

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

Foot in mouth disease

foot in mouth

I loved university. I loved being up to my eyeballs in something I was fascinated with. The challenges and deadlines were all bonuses on top of the actual subject and I rose to greet each one. Anyway that’s by the by, so I’m in the lecture theater and the lecture is about to end. I know I’m getting a phone call very shortly so I excuse myself to go outside to wait for the call.

I get outside and there’s a kid doubled over, sitting pretty much folded over on the side bench. I wander to the bench, my phone out, texting and looking up as I walk. And I sit down on his right side. He shuffles over a little to make room. He is not moving much and my curiosity gets the better of me and I surreptitiously glance sideways at him. Yep, he is totally bent in half, but I do see his phone in his hand and he’s got his left hand side of his face plastered to his phone. Not the left hand side as in, his ear and talking, I mean like with his eye and not talking. Possibly taking a picture of his eye? Or the pupil of his eye? So without thinking for another second I pipe up with “I think you need glasses by the looks of things!” and chuckled a little, breaking the ice and everything. And this is my problem – my brain doesn’t engage with my mouth or vice versa – they work independently (against me!) so this is where I have ended up with this Foot in Mouth Disease – I’m a a frequent flyer.

Well, this kid looks up at me and one eye is covered with that cloud, the cloud that means that they can’t see much of anything out of that eye and the other one is scarred too.

He says, “It’s the only way I can see my texts – glasses won’t help…” I’m sitting there like an idiot. But I did what I usually do and chose not to ignore the elephant.

“So what happened to your eyes?” I asked.

He looked up from his phone again – well, as best as he could, and explained that he had been walking down Queen Street and it was winter. A super stormy day, and Queen Street can become like a wind tunnel on days like that. He had a jacket on that zipped up and as he grappled in the wind with it, the zip sliced across his eye, blinding him totally in his right eye and severely impinging on his sight in his left.

“I’m so sorry dude – really impressed you’re at university…I didn’t mean to be rude by the way….” I trailed off. He smiled, “It’s OK,” he says to me, ” at least you didn’t just walk away – that’s the worst. Everyone knows something’s up with my fricken vision. Lots of people don’t know what to do when they’re confronted with something unexpected…”

We were silent for a split second.

“I’m sorry this happened to you…. but I see in spite of a universal fuck-up in your life, you’re still here, still givin’ it all that!” he laughed at me and I laughed too.

“Often people so let the wrong things define who they are, or the worst things. The fact that you rise above this defines who you are.” He looked at me with a serious frown, somewhat created due to his lack of vision.

“Thank you for that, I needed to hear that right now…” he said.

I didn’t know his name but I did know much more about him than just some letters to identify him to his friends, family, fellow students and work colleagues. Not only that, but I found out even more about myself, or maybe about people. We all share commonalities – common likes, enemies, feelings, injustices etc. We all share bonds and those deeper threads of what make us who we are are far more interesting and important than your name, your clothes, your home, car, bank account…we truly are here to fill our souls and not our wallets. I take my soul with me when I go – I will leave my earthly belongings behind.

© Kait King, 2015

I Just Wanted

i-just-wanted

I just wanted

to be happy

As baffling as

that may seem

I just wanted to

spread Kindness

Remove the idea

of being mean

I just wanted

to have Peace

As impossible as

that seems

but it’s ok, they say,

to always have dreams

There is no need to

“stand your ground”

It isn’t yours, for a start

It will still be here

When we’re not around

It’s much better to leave

a piece of your Heart

© Kait King, 2016

Andy’s Addiction

Andy's addiction

Andy has a problem

he doesn’t know what to do

there’s a monkey glued to his back

and it’s really chewing through

his heart,

his bank account,

his tired soul.

Andy has a problem

he doesn’t know how to say

that he doesn’t want to be here

not for another single day

of hurt,

of frustration,

in an angered mind.

Andy knows this problem

he knows what he should do

but it wraps him up and chokes him

and he can’t see his way through

another single day

with no way

to feel.

Andy can’t reach out for help

that would just mean pain

How can he reach out for help

when his hand is trapped

by shame

and addiction

and fear.

© Kait King, 2015

Do the Right Thing

do the right thing

I saw a man dragging a puppy

that didn’t want to go

And everyone else in the street didn’t want to know

“Don’t get involved!” said a nervous Mr Hay

And he crossed over the street

to walk the other way!

I saw a brother pinch his little sister

on her tiny arm

How could anyone want to do

another body harm?

“Don’t get involved!” said a spiteful Miss Melissa

She won’t play with me at school

and is meaner than her sister

I saw a man shout

and push a woman to the ground

She bowed her head and was crying

but you couldn’t hear a sound

“Don’t get involved!” said a crabby Mrs Mend

And I wondered for over a month

if that poor woman had a friend

But now I’m older and I know better

I want to pass this message on

If there’s a body in need

you must always take heed

Because nobody wants to go through it

alone

© Kait King, 2015

Duty, Cathedrals and St Francis

Duty st francis and cathedrals

Please be kind to all animals❤️❤️

I walk in

I can’t speak

the reverence

sucks the air

out of me

candles glitter

in shapes of love

for all of the animals

bestowed from above

And if it is what

they say to be true,

if I’m shaped like the shape

of a god, just like you,

I know that I am duty-bound

to share that love for all

all around

© Kait King, 2015

Please Be Kind To All Animals