Usernames
Candysugar is female, she posts really sweet
comments and laughs at everyone’s jokes by
Posting 😀 repeatedly, it’s published as a
yellow grinning smiley. She posted a pic
of her cleavage and someone wrote that they
could see ‘a hint of nipple’. She wrote lol.
She doesn’t mind that and is a good sport.
Ziggy could be male or female. Ziggy hasn’t
included gender in her/his about section.
He/She is either an enlightened man or an
aggressive feminist. Ziggy is a very political
anti-Fascist left-wing vegan anti-capitalist.
She is either a crazy extremist or he is an
erudite respected poster who is well-read.
Shapeshifter posts opinions that will make
other members angry. I mean it’s so obvious
what he’s trying to do but they take the bait
especially the newbies. On one thread he’s
praising the monarchy and on the next he’s pro
IRA and posts a You Tube clip of Streets Of Sorrow
by The Pogues. He’s had 18 bans for trolling.
BillofWrites is mostly drunk when he logs on.
Well that’s what he claims. There are a lot of
spelling mistakes, your instead of you’re, noone
instead of no one. He punctuates with swearwords.
AriesRising flounced when he stalked her across
the messageboard and posted rows of green
rolleye smilies after every comment she made.
When I chose a username it had to be unique.
Which isn’t like real life at all. My first three
choices were taken. The Captcha was almost impossible
to decipher and I chose the wrong answer but in the end
I was human and I ticked that I agreed to the terms
and conditions even though I hadn’t read them
and I immediately posted pictures of kittens.
My Crimes
What I did is set a fire
I like to watch the flames
The parasitic yellow air
Searching for a cave
Cameras film my hand aloft
The thumb that spins the flint
they pixilate the charcoal smoke
Saving this on disc
When I saw the paper burn
orange and ashen grey
A cataclysmic final plan
Emerged in front of me
Glowering up at CCTV
I wouldn’t even blink
The cigarette entered my mouth
and I sucked away its breath
Shoreditch
like seaweed left by the sea.
In the sky the moon sent translucent messages
To the tiny circles of shell in the concrete
and they eddied and lit up like a carpet of tiny diodes
Before my eyes as the music met the alcohol,
flowing like a water tributary,
Shoreditch disappeared, and I was at the beach
So drunk that I had no address, my mind was full of echoes and my ears were unsteady within
themselves,
the drums stumbled along their canal
Or was it residue, an echo of an earlier hallucination, mashed up psychedelia and psychosis
still lurking in my veins.
My eyes trembled in their sockets, knocking the bones of the skull,
my focus was made up of hundreds of beads, part of a hand-held kaleidoscope,
but I had been lost for a while
giant black rats stared at me from the walls
demonic and possessed, witnesses to my downfall
When I closed my eyes, the sun shone blood hued through my eyelids.
And the city towers in the distance began to change into tidal waves
and before I drowned you took my china chipped mug away
This is how I recognize you. I know you are the personality of the person who spoke to me
and I have found your black spiked hair working in a café
made of sand
© Elle Pryor
Elle Pryor is from the UK and her poems and short stories have been published in numerous journals and magazines including The New Writer, The Cannon’s Mouth, South Jersey Underground and several print anthologies. She has recently gained a Distinction for a Masters in English Literature and Creative Writing and is working on a novel.
The Loch Raven Review 