Dolphindark

Raz. Razhel. She spells it that way to raise hell. Rayche. Rachel Rees. We named her Rachel Bree after 'the stinky cheese of aunty Fester's festering shame', one late stoner night when she mentioned how she would like to have lived in “Lord of the Rings Land, where pubs have names like the Prancing Pony, which is obviously a brothel with a name like that, when you read between the lines.” Raz was all about reading between the lines and omitting them, to get to the juice of it.

Raz suggested the species of Tolkiens masterwork are none other than descriptors of male and female genitalia. "From John Bobbits Hobbits, through poor, greedy Dwarves, grotesque Goblins, gay but gorgeous Elves and wild, sturdy Tree-trunk-men, from mysterious feral Easterlings to the Dark Lord himself. The one we all think we want is a Wizard but they're always old and barmy. You have to go to Roke for a young wizard of appropriate age to poke. Ursula was in on the joke." She pronounced it 'Erzuli'. Raz claimed to know about it all from personal experience and is a lot of fun to hang out with.

Raz was someplace between sleek-lady-goth and boyish street-punk. She could pull off both looks depending what she did with her long dark hair with its close-shaved sides, 'like everything on the side, they grow out too fast', which part of her wardrobe she wore, "a ward-of-robes or robe-of-wards, depending how you come at it", which in her case consisted literally of two small travel cases, one for each look. Also how long it had been since she had a bath and washed her costume, had a lot to do with it. Reference aforementioned cheese festers. She scrubbed up well. Swam like a dolphin born of dark waters, hence her 'dolphindark' moniker.

Raz can write. Raz writes like a legend inspirational to us all and deserving of a fame she would reject. She studied poetry and literature at The Anonymous Academy until they threw her off the course for writing porn. She pushed both forms into her own style, although she only really much wrote poems and lyrics. Said she wanted enough life experience first, to write a book about it, before even trying for that. She taught me a lot about writing. Her thing was to describe the descriptions. To indulge in getting side-tracked with that. The basic simple idea very soon builds itself beyond whatever you originally thought of, which hangs like a frame disguised inside the exploration. Her favourite writer is HP Lovecraft. Not for the story so much as how it is told.

Subsequently, Raz lavished her pulsing prose with additional adoration splendidly pushing it beyond the illustrious limitations of expressive expectancy into an ecstasy of privileged privation where only ardent hedonists dare follow, glorifying gorgeously in illustrative luxury of stretch-marks wrinkled as a floppy dogs maw, revealed when the buttons pop and the cotton springs unsprung, elastic doilies disentangling, a spiderweb spun in reverse. I can try copy her style but she does it best of all.

She spoke in local colloquial, loquocial low-key liquorice-lacquered loud as snickered gibberish for the gibbons of deliciously unsolicited literal to glutton in their virtual gutter vittles, uttering prayers of dismal libellous dismissals for the proxy literate to monkeypox their poxy clitorals, unelated by unelected elitorati.

Street slang and shortcut wherever she could and she would make words up, her favourite pastime of all. “Jabberwocky, not Alice,” she insisted vigilantly. Raz made up words which made sense despite the glossolalia she described as word-soup, while Kruschenyhk and Khlebnikov describe it as Zaum.

She built a blog of her own one time and gave me the key, but Google removed it on account of her slutty mind drooling out with blatant lewdity as unaccountable as her movements, as inexplicable as her lickable, cherry flavoured scrawl, overload to the senses the way a bad habit for occasional pornographic content can spawn in a discontent of social wellness.

Her bestie, Jin, gay as a daily pick-me-up before breakfast, decided the best thing for them both was to get themselves to the hippy dream of an abandoned remote village somewhere off-grid in Europe, and they went for it. I haven’t heard from either of them since. Perhaps they made it. She came back to say goodbye, after a while of the sorting their shit out and making some real money in the city to fund their adventure.

We made music together, a few tracks, a few gigs, one of which got semi-recorded because I actually had my shit together, at the time, and made some remixes in the studio. And sex, that 'ancient spirits reunited kinship sex' of a sort which inspires books of poetry, every emotion under the moon, and occasionally famous wars written about through history for thousands of years after the event, but in this case we managed to keep it sweet and lovely, best left underground, unspoken about in the world where other peoples curiosity doesn’t need to follow.