Hello my name is Billy Sticks

Tar baby stuck in the mud, cloying shit, time to get out from under the English oak transplanted here, 14,000 miles from home soil. Or thereabouts. I was born in the gutter. No, really. My mother was a gypsy witch from Donegal. I don’t even know where that is anymore. My father was a bloated trencherman who played the spoons with silvery alacrity.

Let that be a lesson to me.

Rhythm, it’s all in the rhythm. The rhyme and the rhythm, the grime and the schism. The schism that set us free.

Ma took to the fiddle. Swung her bow across the strings while I was expected to sing.

Sing for your supper Billy she said and my voice came out in a sweet falsetto that could charm the angels in the gathered crowd while Da drifted around lifting the wallets of the unwary. Cut purse.

As the notes left me mouth a choir of angels gathered and fanned me with their golden wings, poor things. They raised me up to the heavens that I might see the golden throne and God the Father sat upon it and his only Begotten Son there beside it and the fluttering Dove above and the Virgin Mary in all her glory slightly to the left of centre.

Twas a vision I could never forget. I see it now anytime I close my eyes and whisper a cautious Ave Maria or sing it out, sotto voce or acapella.

There below me was the Beast with Seven Heads and the Whore of Babylon, Scarlet Woman in all her glory riding upon it. Boiling thunder and lightning crack still makes my little pecker stand up straining veins and ready for the ride of me life.

Billy! Billy! Come back to Earth me mam cried.

And I floated down light as feather – eiderdown – back to the circle of onlookers stunned now into holy silence, eyes glazed and glinting in the reflected glory of the heavenly spheres, Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Geburah ,Chesed, Tiphereth, Hod, Netzach, Yesod, and Malkuth.

Boaz and Jachim

the pillars that hold up the firmament, planets and stars in holy gravity, straining together and apart to keep the universe in balance.

But now my feet were back on the ground I could feel the weight on the soles of me feet planted on the good solid earth with the soils and streams the plants and bugs, insect life and reptile, erectile hairs and mycelic connections, bacteria and virus, fermentation and incantation, two-legged, four-legged, millipedic, centipedic, centrifugal, buzzing bees among the flowers of the nested trees where flows the sap and the waters and the oils and the nutriments of the soil.

Let there be light.

My mother grabbed me and tried to smother me for Da was caught short with his fingers in the till and had fled for his life to the dunny. My face was still stuck in the pillow and the eiderdown. She forced the pressure on me face to catch and cut off the breath of me life.

Billy Sticks is my name and survival is the name of the game.

I called upon the angels and saints. I called up the occupants of the heavenly trees, I called upon the demons of the second perch and my veins ran with all the adrenal of desperation. I heaved her off me and tangled her in her own quilt and was off through the crowds and the wood lice, those grey-armoured bugs of countless legs.

I picked up sticks and with me bundle on me back I raced down the woodland tracks and left the town behind me, Ma and Pa, and the holy angels.

And I found myself beside a glittering lake of fool’s gold.

Ah, take me down to Barry Island. Take me down on the old steam train, the seats smelly of musty dust and stale smoke. Leather straps to pull the windows up and slowly let those window down. Film over film – transparent overlapping projections, over each other, over live bodies, over blank walls, cut-ups over cut-ups. Jumps in time.

Take me down to Barry Island, the wet sands and the wavy grime.

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Des Barry is a writer and performance artist. He lives in Melbourne. He’s written four novels, three under his own name and one with the heteronym David Enrique Spellman. He’s written nonfiction and reviews for 3:AM Magazine. Blue Sky: ‪@farsouthproject.bsky.social‬