With clean poetic syntax creating a compelling gothic world, #itchysilk writer Jacklyn Janeksela embraces melancholia with relish.
How quickly I slip away into cocaine-induced roamings of Bogotá nights
Listening to Nick Cave while carving flesh with a safety pin secures a place in goth heaven, should you even believe in death. Nick Cave trumps Belgrade, but nothing beats the Plastique Noir except maybe And Also The Trees or Softkill*.
It’s my private Prague. I’m slipping between the cobblestones because that’s what remixes of goth music does to this body. Seething towards the river, I become the soundwave of all the dead bodies that have come before me. The streets, like the veins of some goth queen, carry me to the source, run blood like rain, like emptying, like turning me cold, back to my natural self, serpentine and herbal. The ghosting of brief shells, the temperance of it all. Is that the river whispering to me as I brush it with my energy waves? Since when did trees recognise my presence? Goths love nature.
How quickly I slip away into cocaine-induced roamings of Bogotá nights, the city of the darkest hour. The hour when I’m my worst, which means my most gothic ever. I am going to die. And no other city reminds me of my goth, my death like Bogotá does. Forever grateful, eternal, a pile of shit on the shoe of the street dweller looking for one more bottle, to recycle, to drink from, to cut self. If but a sliver. Life is that anyways. If you’re faintly goth or non-goth, you know. You know we are fading, that star twinkling a relative transmitting, the signal weakening daily. We are the streetwalker and the street, we are the inky boot stepping in shit again.
This is the smallest manifesto I could find inside this shadowy heart. The manifesto is slight enough to write on a switchblade, on the inseam of the dirtiest jeans in the closet; stich it to the eye and blink. Be thee deft, build a shrine unto it.
#6 sex
You should be friends with death. You should have made love to her at least a few times by now.
#6 wellness
Who should I tune into, turn to, turn into. The raven, of course. The black cat, maybe. The serpent, yes. I am the serpent, I am the goddess, the snake ring you glorify, the sharp fang tapping at the vein. The snake twisting a yogi spine towards the sweetest death.
#6 shopping
The lexicon reaches beyond words, even sounds –chimes into sound, creates tupla, something out of nothing. The best thing on the market.
#6 music
Listen to the raven cry. It’s not crying, it’s laughing. It’s laughing at you. At us. It echoes lithe life as we drift into states that resemble death.
#6 fashion
It says, Just because you’re goth doesn’t mean you must drench in black. Although black dominates all other colors, no matter what any guru says. Gurus are more goth than we realize, so interlaced with the birth-life-death-rebirth cycle (sat-a-nam-a). Goths, in reminding ourselves the sequence, elevate to such a state of death we vibrate. We perpetuate. Wear all the colors, wear the colors full of color and missing color.
#6 self-care
Let the heart run on its own. Let the breathe be the spirit animating body. Let. Be absent of.
#6 friends
Be alone, that is your best ally –loneliness and the lack of other bodies.
#6 fitness
Dive in the water. Sink, then swim –only if your appendages say so. Dry off, but stay drenched.
#6 wellness
I’m in no mood. What screeches from these itchy fingers defines my life.
Colossal, I’m falling into the inky pit of a sister who I call darkness. She may or may not be goth, but kindred and a queen of pools so dark we are light. That’s how life works. Go deep enough and find the pinprick-I am that pinprick refusing a life without the pinhole, without a prick, without wounding, the wormhole. I dug it out with these bare hands, these talons. What do you call a blade that infects –a finger pressed on the pulse of life. Life or something like it.
The promise of horn pulling and teeth grinding –this is the life I want. In this lifetime, I strain to distinguish elated states from others. My goth vessel steading itself just long enough to finish this piece, this body.
*I don’t mention The Cure or Joy Division only to reject certain standards and crowds. But seriously I’ve made the saddest love to Robert and Ian in every bed I’ve ever slept in, this hand holds the gothest voices, candles waxing.
Featured image by Aykutay Dogdu.