Propelled By The Speed Of Its Own Shrinkage

My flame is out, I’m helpless.
I have a burn my love and now extinguished, this burn, I feel the cool lost flavour of your ice heart as my friends warned me of your ice heart and your coldness to the touch. In time we may be reunited beneath a cold stone grave but the meantime is taken up with this mausoleum of love, my escape from your tomb and my push against your eiderdown of entrapment. Soon I will be free my love and then who will you be, my love?

You will see, for the first time.
Old London town. There is, what, gas? Fog, lamplight. A doctor with a built-up shoe, a street doctor, a shilling a phial. For the moment he stands tallish, hiding from the emerging mechanisation/industrialisation that will, in time, destroy him. In the meantime, however, there are blind matchmaker girls who will try anything that this withered little bastard has to offer.

If he reaches the water he’ll become invincible.
Because fish fuck in it. Is what WC Fields said when asked why he didn’t drink water. The truth, of course, is that fish don’t, in fact, fuck in it. It’s mostly down to external fertilisation – ovopartity, as they call it. Which is why a more apt response would have been: because (male) fish wank in it. That said, it’s worth remembering that the great man’s response was intended as a joke and was, for its time, outrageously offensive. So it seems somewhat mean-spirited to attempt to pick through his answer from the viewpoint of a pisciculturist who, as everyone knows, are picky little bastards. Just like those short-legged Victorian street doctors who fed off working-class misery – like whatsits, those little sucker/cleaning fish things that hang around whales. Or sharks.

The diabolical duo join forces.
Who? George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan? Harold Pinter and Tom Paulin? Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Victoria Brittain and Margaret Drabble? Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman? David Cameron and Nick Griffin? Gordon Sumner and Paul Hewson? Adrian Ramsay and Cat Dorey? Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore? Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda? Lorry drivers and farmers? Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Hassan Nasrallah? Patti Smith and Michael Stipe? Jonathan Franzen and Tobias Wolff?

We escaped just in time.
On the one side of the highway: pockets of dust and tornadoes of crisp packets. On the other side of the highway: gleaming diners and shopping malls. The highway cuts right through them. You pass, quickly, silently, without seeing either. They don’t see you. But imagine, for a moment, that it is night, dark, and your eyes are fixed on the perpetual lights up ahead, the lights that seem to be always racing closer, coming to face you down. No matter how fast you go, the lights never get nearer. Why? Because they are ghost flames? Fireflies? The reflection of your burnt out eyes? Keep going – one day you’ll get there.

Obey me, my puppets.
Bismarck Van Randun, fat loser of corporate bent and endless shiny shoes, finally decided to open the wooden box he’d been staring at for the last six hours. (Top grade birch ply wood, twenty-five inches wide, sixteen inches deep, ten inches high, extruded brass plate lock with screwed brass cap, brass bolt and link. Plus two steel take-apart hinges.) He opened the box, with nary a creak, and looked in at four of the most wonderful marionettes he had ever seen. (Blonde hair, blue dungarees, chalk-white porcelain faces, grins as wide as their heads, swastika armbands.)

What’s going on here?
The Fat Loser gang was the gang to be reckoned with. They had all the best grub, all the best drugs, and all the best women (fat losers, after all, always do well with women). They also had many other things that none of the other, slimmer, gangs could ever have. Such as the vastly increased chance of high blood pressure, diabetes, strokes, abnormal blood fats, osteoarthritis, sleep apnoea, cancer, gallstones, weak muscles, breathing problems, fatigue, body odour, fungus skin, bad breath, liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure, brain failure, blood circulation problems and all-round general (physical and spiritual) discomfort.

Sooner or later I’ll get my mitts on you.
As soon as I saw you, I knew. As soon as I heard you, I knew. You were magnificent and handsome. You had an air of authority and a bearing that was at first, I admit, disarming. You reminded me of many things I admired but couldn’t quite say. You were intelligent, beautifully spoken, your words chosen like a poet. I was deeply impressed. I thought that, at the least, we could make a connection. But a closer inspection, just a little more time, revealed just how gorgeous you are. Admiration? Too much beyond admiration. Far beyond admiration. I wanted you. I want you.

He wants us to attack him.
With sticks, with stones. Although a better idea, surely, would be to attack him with words? Go on, write down that his mother’s a cockeyed cunt.

A lofty new pinnacle of greatness.
This is the culmination. This is what I have been waiting for. Me in my lucky blue suit.