Bully

bully

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

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

I just want it to end

i just want it to end

So I’m sent back and forth

and around again

to specialists and surgeons

who say it’s in my brain

the wiring’s fucked

Is what they say

because a butcher unfortunately

hacked away

at your hope

your dreams

your aspirations

your purpose

you

Forgiveness and acceptance

words to deal with

spilling your guts makes you better

I think that’s just a myth

to stop me

hold me

trap me in belief

I just want it to 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

Creepy Creep Creeping

Creep_Film_Still-570x380

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

I can wait some more

So now, sick of being shoved from pillar to post and being basically bullied into corners, we have decided to go legal….My sister has been an incredible force. There is no way in heaven or earth I would have been able to do all the paper work and appointments on my own – or at all actually. She took all of that worry and confusion away from me.

We were fighting for me to have the correct amount of a serious medication called Pregabalin, AKA Lyrica – and I need the most you can take and a little Morphine thrown in here and there, just to keep those pain centres quiet. And I’m like “Hell yeah! Shut those fuckers down!” Hoping for a miracle and getting as close to that as I could with a lot of the “noise” pain being dampened. I still have severe pain in my back/hip/sciatica and the odd chest pain that incapacitates me too, but certainly not the constant stabs all over the left hand side of my body that was exhausting. And my right eye socket was so incredibly painful I couldn’t open my eye and I wanted to literally rip it out, or smash my head in. I used to pinch the skin next to the internal pain in my chest where the nerve damage is and also dig my thumb deep in to my eye socket to at least change the pain. I know I can’t be free of it at this stage, but at least not have the same gnawing hits. Anyway, I digress…so we go to see this lawyer and he’s fantastic. He’s onto it, he knows what needs to happen, what we need to get or locate etc. This is great as we needed this guidance and the clout that the lawyer gave us. The hardest part – well, there were two to be perfectly honest. The first hard part was actually going to talk to this lawyer – with such a complicated case there is so much information that needs to be assessed. And this is the firm to be doing this, but I was so fragile BeFoRe I left the bloody house! I felt overwhelmed, I cried and had to put my mascara back on – it didn’t help. I think I was in disbelief that after all these years and after all of our struggle on our own, someone was going to listen and possibly help.

Anyway, the second part is this; while you are the client/patient/victim/however you wish to see yourself, people get so involved in the complications of my case that they talk as if I am no longer present.My sister and the lawyer started chatting, I’m on so much medication and in so much pain I lay on his couch with a glass of water as my meds give me major cotton-mouth. So the hardest part of all of this (and it sounds sooooo not hard), but was listening to my sister and the lawyer “discuss” my case which made me feel like I wasn’t even there – and to be perfectly honest, I’m not when I’m on such medication.
But it also didn’t change the fact that I had to listen to how permanent my situation is, that there is nothing anyone can do and it’s just a matter of medicating her, sorting out what help I need and the physio required to “rehabilitate” me – world’s largest joke if that is supposed to be happening right now…because all I have felt is re-victimised, unworthy of help, forgotten and just a number. It’s not ok, the 2 medical misadventures I’ve had, it’s not ok to be abandoned by your so-called insurance company, it’s not ok when someone botches something, that they never have to own up – ever. The guy who ripped my nerves in my chest in 1989 is now the “golden boy” of thoracic surgery….how the hell did that happen? And I often wonder to myself if he would remember me – more than likely not. I daydream about getting an apology – a genuine “so sorry I fucked up” apology. I have waited since 1989 – I can wait some more….

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

A Theft of Burglars

A theft of burglars

A theft of burglars

crept into the night

they knew where

they were going

they had a place in sight

As they scuttled through

the darkened street

you could feel their energy

tense…

but upbeat

They were not all that young

in fact they were nearly all forty

and had been slapped on the wrist –

many times,

told they were naughty.

They all knew this time

that it was not the same

They were tired of pilfering

the small stuff

and wanted

bigger game

So the hunters they clambered

and climbed over a wall

Avoiding CCTV cameras

and a police phone call

Entering the darkened house

gold and cash

was all they saw

It hadn’t really dawned on them

there were people there

at all

So when the mother,

who was all alone,

got out of bed to

defend their home,

The burglars, they

did not take flight

the burglars, they stayed

and put up a fight

The burglars, they took off

as murderers into the night

and the murderers, they knew

that they had taken

a life

© Kait King, 2016

Being the Ogre

being the_Ogre

You promise

you’ll be home tonight

to kiss the kids and

hold me tight

You tell me it won’t be

the same

until it happens

once again

You say I am

the only one

and what’s been done

can’t be undone

I stay quietly alone

all through the day

watching our kids

grow and play

and when the door opens

later at night

they think you’re home,

that they are all right

But bedtime comes

and they can’t wait up

I am the ogre who’s

taken their pup

Little do they know

you don’t give a damn

Fathers’ like you

shouldn’t be called men

© Kait King, 2015

Changeling

Changeling

With a chattering

anxiety

A rattle pill-filled

state

the brain-numbing

chemicals

change the look

on

my face

That’s just

on the

outside

inside

it gets bad

Outside

is just a

cosmetic push

Inside –

you can’t change

sad…

© Kait King, 2016

No Problem

no problem

Any time and everywhere

when you’re thinking people stare –

you’ve got a problem

If it doesn’t matter what they say

And you think yours is the only way –

you’ve got a problem

When you think you’re doing fine

Everyone else says you’re out of line –

you’ve got a problem

And if you think it stops right here

I don’t think you’re thinking clear –

you’ve got a problem

When a lover walks on out

saying your’e just a lay-about –

you’ve got a problem

© Kait King, 2015

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

In spite of

inspiteof

I don’t believe you have nothing to say

that you don’t want to stand up

and shout

“don’t treat me that way”

I don’t believe you can keep quiet

for very much longer

the hate in you grows stronger

even though you deny it

it kills you every day

I don’t believe there is happiness in you

that you skip through every day

that your glasses are a rose-colored hue

that you are not reliant in almost every way

but that’s just not true

You drag yourself through every day

knowing that he will

punch you

humiliate you

control you

and you want to kill him

for killing you –

you try to think of another way

but nothing else will do

you have no money, no car or hope

this mean,

ugly-spirited human

says you can’t cope

in the real world

But you know that’s not true –

right?

© Kait King, 2015

Does it Sting? – aka Pointless

skeletal mona lisa

Does it sting?

Can you feel

my hate

my anger

blistering at you?

Inflamed and furious

that not even the

Herculean strength of my own

sanity will tie it down

My bitterness seeps out

of my pores

leaving a trail of

achingly sad tearful

nights and aimless lonely

days

Does it sting?

Can you feel me

loathing you from afar?

My hate for you is so

giant – it has to be visible

surely you can feel this

surely you know I am hating you

betrayed by you, unforgiving

of you – surely….

What do you mean, he’s got another girlfriend?

© Kait King, 2015