Some Comb The Connections

Requiem for refreshment, ill met by the roadside. The real refreshment: Geigelmaus on fire. He of the shortened trousers, the tattooed lip and the confident, cockeyed stare. Now ablaze, after a fashion, smouldering as always and always a hot catch on one of those cloudless, starlit nights when, you know, the cool and the warmth from the moon can take you away from this, even for a moment, and leave you lingering somewhere in that. Oh, you know - aching for that.

Geigelmaus the showman was almost as tall as his publicity shouters proclaimed. He cut a dash all right and made his way through the throng with impressive, enviable ease. (Or, wait. He cut through the crowd like a mallard – or a heron, or any appropriately graceful water wading bird – cutting through the still, moonlit water of a limpid lake. Pond. Or like a knife sliding through butter. A rocket thrusting its way through the night of the sky. A torch light slicing through the darkness.) The point is that his grand entrance involved, at some point, a passing through a crowd that, as you might imagine, was made up of swooners, fawners, sycophants and douchebags. No wonder he held them so. By the time he made the stage his performance was complete. The rest of the evening – the whole four fucking hours of it – was a mere tread through the motions. You could almost hear him sleep.

Geigelmaus, however, remained unmoved. I am, he said, little bothered at all about the way you portray me. I yam what I yam and if it’s good enough for Popeye (he giggled) it’s good enough for me. You see, in the end I always have the last laugh on account of the fact that the magic I do will either bring you great pain or bring you the happiness you have long desired. Which of the two you get is, of course, the choice I make. The point, if I really need to bring it home, is that I am the one deciding how you end up. Oh, the power. I can feel it in my bones. It’s the title, in fact, of my long-awaited autobiography: I Can Feel It In My Bones.

Excerpt: Born in a back-to-back terrace on the great Red Pipe-stone quarry, overlooking the mountains of the prairie. It were a grand life to begin with and we lived like pigs – like pigs – scratching about in the fucking muck and shitting all over each other. But I knew, oh yes I knew, that I was destined for other, better, things and soon it was that I was plucked from the muck and deposited on a soft straw bed of gold spun and pleasure, treated like a young prince with anything I could handle. And so, in time, I grew and soon outgrew my princely status, flowering into a full blown king before, ah the tragedy, before the tragedy struck and I was reduced to the forlorn figure you see before you now, though success and riches comfort me.

If I Could, The Moon

His gaze, soft, and he’s on top of the song, but not too heavily. Making his way towards her, hobbling past the sellers, in the shadow of the clock, clacking on cobbled stones, the stench of fruit, meat etc. Over all, the song still somewhere upon his lips, buzzing around his head, as it goes. If he gets near enough (for which he will have used, surely, this morning’s quota of courage) he’ll maybe try to convince himself to let the song out, to let her have it, so to speak. But probably what he’ll do instead, this poor, drooling idiot, is allow her the freedom to guess at the song and also at its significance. If he’s lucky, she may also guess that he’s there, just standing there, holding himself from a fall.

They do say, don't they, that the heart speaks wonders that the mind has no

No care for? No matter. That his heart was speaking wonders or otherwise was, in itself, something of a miracle on account of his heart stopping two minutes earlier at the moment when she looked in his direction, directly into his eyes and possibly - maybe - with a look that at the least acknowledged his existence. Even - and he was quite prepared to entertain the possibility - if all it meant was that he was in her line of seeing and that her look was the look of simply not being able to literally see through him. Even if that was all it was, it was, of course, enough. Or did she, is it possible, did she actually see him? You know, really see him?

All this though, the indulgence of it all, was the evidence he needed of having it bad, as they say. He warned himself before they left that, well, he just warned himself and though he knew he would pay no mind to the warnings he was still here, the poor, drooling idiot, genuinely surprised at how, yet again, she'd caught him. Or rather, how he'd given himself to her so easily.

Exposition: Let's say, Florence. Or Vienna. Or maybe, if it's a better fit, Chesterfield. It is said that the Devil twisted the spire of Chesterfield's St Mary and All Saints church by sitting on it or lashing out at it from the pain caused by his newly clod feet. Hoofs. There's the market there, obviously, one of Europe's largest. Or, equally, it could be Florence's Saint Ambrogio market, or the Viennese Naschmarkt, the Nibbles market. No matter. They'd arrived here a few days ago, all part of a (Christmas) works do, a real treat for the staff, twenty of them. Our hero, Ben: twenty-seven-years old, recently married, a clerk or something, beside himself with absolute love and all of it for Sarah, his heart's very desire and the truth of all he is etc. of whom his wife knows absolutely nothing despite the fact that she's noted, of course, the signs, and how these past few weeks her husband has not been eating, has not been attentive, has not been quite the same. Sarah, equally, is as oblivious to Ben's desires as his wife is. She is also twenty-seven years old, single, lives alone, is dedicated to her job (career, as she calls it), has many good friends and enjoys her freedom at the same time as crying herself to sleep most nights from the sheer loneliness of it all. Her life, that is. And these two are, what, no different to anyone else? As ordinary and as dull as everyone else? Absolutely.

Ben: I think about you night and day, I need you 'cause it's true, when I think about you I can say, I'm never, never, never, never blue.

Except, of course, it's not true. Every time this poor, drooling idiot thinks about her - which may as well be all the time - he is far from being never blue. He will get her, he tells himself, because there's literally nothing else he can do, there are no other options. Anyway, in his confidence he has a useful friend/work colleague who doles out as much useful advice as he thinks he can comfortably get away with - before, you know, he gets found out. It all amounts to the same: tell her how you feel. Just tell her.

He would, Ben, of course, sooner see himself dead then tell her how he feels.

The mundanity of the situation, of us being here before - unrequited love and all that love is etc. - is at least given a bit of fire by the fact of it being so outrageously irritating. His friend is right. Just tell her, for God's sake, tell her.

It was the following night, as it happened. With the song in - where else? - his heart, he grabbed his chance at the karaoke and sang to her just enough for her to notice that he was singing directly to her. Or, rather, for her friends to notice. A few drinks later and they somehow found themselves alone and, well, it all came out. Everything. She was horrified, flattered, intrigued etc. You know. They spent the night together, walking the streets, swigging on a bottle, arm in arm, nothing untoward, not yet. And eventually, naturally, they embarked on an affair which went the way of all affairs, either one way or the other: a) they drifted apart and got right back to where they were before, or b) they made it together.

The funny thing is, it turned out to be b). Which, if nothing else, only goes to prove that affairs of the heart are often

You know, because the heart speaks wonders while the mind merely plots. Something like that.

That Breathes Upon a Bank of Violets

I’ll get you in my dreams.
It could, of course, be construed as something of a threat, this business of getting women, either in dreams or out of dreams. But construed as a threat by whom? By women who have no desire to be pursued, certainly. But also, perhaps, by women who go out of their way to read all kinds of black and white into the greyest shades of pure ambiguity. Besides, there’s a world of difference between a threat and a promise, right?

My smile looks out of place.
My mouth frothing. My stomach churning. My friends laughing. A Steradent tablet instead of an Extra Strong mint. Those guys.

Street signs you never saw.
Thy vacation Gods take you further, passing you neath underpasses and through hoops of entry until you are delivered to your destination of holidayness by fire and beach, the sea of the season, avast there ye lubbers, avast ye. Down there, to the left, the sunken pier of disappointed bridge and sticks of candy floss. Up there, to the right, all the slot machines you can handle plus, naturally, chips. And fish. Although you realise, don’t you, that the seaside life isn’t for the likes of you?

On that ship, I dream she’s there.
Stern, aye, the poop deck. Where they poop, these sailors. Emptying their bums of poop and cum.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.
Westdale 499287. Home. The back door is a block to the kitchen although entry can be gained, yessir, through the flap for the cats. They piss, those cats, and soak curtains and books, the bastards. In through the kitchen and into the hallway where there used to hang a Captain America print and where now there is nothing. Nothing. (That print, however, Captain America 106 where, as the headline attests, Cap Goes Wild! battling against himself in the form of a Chinese created replica, sanctioned by Mao himself no less, who in the end dies by the fact of his own unstable molecular structure and the fact of his fundamental lack, as Cap points out: No mere human replica can ever have a fighting spirit!) Further up the hallway there are the hallway pictures of us and the kids, the front room visible with its Grotesque in a frame and its Spider-Man/Beatles assortium, plus a signed postcard of Kofi Annan that is interestingly not signed with the blood from his hands. The Polish version of Breaking The Waves, Przelamujac Fale, the Laurel and Hardy mirror, the Beryl the Peril frame, No Laughing Matter. Cat piss too. Those bastards. This is where I used to live and where I loved you from the phone. Let it ring, let it ring, let it ring.

From up, from up above.
A skyhawk who swooped down and took, first of all, one of my chips. And then all of my chips. Plus a couple of fingers.
That man who landed in front of us. His head like a grapefruit exploding. Mush.
The dried, sucked-in, wrinkled remains of what was once a red balloon. All the way from Paris. Now a mere blob of disgruntlement in front of a shop doorway step.
Acid rain, as they used to call it. That burning sensation on my forehead. Is it the rain or is it my hairspray?
A frozen shaft of airplane piss. Straight through that old woman’s back. You, as I recall, pissed yourself from either shock or shucks.
The blessing of beneficence and all glad tidings on a fine Christmas morn. Oh Lord, protect us from greed and deliver us from hunger. A Bird’s trifle, yes.
That fat kid’s football was nowhere near as expensive as his violent dad claimed. Fifty quid my arse. Forty quid more like.

I got a bird that whistles.
As the perch backgrounds, the mirror foregrounds. Press your face against the cage, force your nose through the gap and wait either for the bird to peck at you or for you to realise, by looking into that mirror, how ridiculous you look and how, if you keep your nose there for much longer, you’ll have a couple of red lines on the end that could stay there all day. And how would you explain those to your boss or the vicar or your wife?

Several things resembling a thought.
We argued, once, as far as he was ever able to muster up the energy to argue, about the merits of that first Stone Roses LP. While I appreciated its lively pop thrill and its skilful rendering of the here and there, I couldn’t throw myself into it wholesale on account of the fact that the lead singer couldn’t sing and, moreover, often sounded like a deaf John Noakes. There were, however, many, many things that we did agree on. If he were alive today he would still be taking himself towards an early grave. Which is one of the reasons why I miss him so much.

As long as you don’t grab it.
Stick it out. As far as it will go.

Nothing else would matter in the world today.
That I’d never be worth the gravy on my vest was the song my father sang not only to me but also to my mother, my sister and my brother-in-law. Imagine the look of wonder and surprise on his face then when I stepped through that front door with sacks full of cash, thirty million dollars to be precise. Aw, he said, didn’t I always say my boy would amount to something? Why Paw, replied my mother, you’ve said a hundred times that he’d never be worth the gravy on his vest.

Conquered in a car seat.
And she was fourteen years old. And she was returning home from the fair. And I could not speak free. Paralysed by the fear of discovery maybe, paralysed in that car by the edge, along the boulevard.

Spending my dimes, wasting my time.
Callers were asked to, first of all, divulge their credit card details before divulging their personal details. And then those same fat, indolent fools, rolling around on top of pizza boxes, swilling piss and pressing their noses into their piss-stained carpets would call me to complain and call me, moreover, with the expectation that I would do something about their self-imposed predicaments. Aye, I would lie to them, just you leave it to me, I’ll sort it out for you, you fat fucks.

Would you walk out the door, like you did once before?
From this blue planet I could hear, as tests later confirmed, a certain new world calling me. We had, at that time, recently launched the first of our ever buzzing satellites that, for all the money in the world, could not have been, as far as we knew, improved upon. And yet, there he was, out there in his homemade laboratory, not only improving upon our technology but also destroying our technology’s concept of itself. Which is why, upon the moment of his unveiling, our satellite fell from the sky, a useless husk. And whereupon I, in what I thought was my madness, heard a new world calling me.

In reality, she doesn’t even know me.
Oh age, what have you done to me? I prick the few hairs I have left, on top, into a simulacrum of what used to be. I pretend that the shadow of me is, in fact, the real me. I pull in my stomach and don’t let on to the truth of my knees aching, my ankles creaking, my breath waiting. But, in spite of you, age, I will go on, yes, go on to appear to women as the very thing that they wish for.

Telling you things, but not telling you straight.
You could punish yourself with poverty. You could open yourself up to the possibilities of your imagination. You could be boorish with women younger than yourself. You could masturbate over any picture of any woman in any state. You could sing louder in the day time than you do in the night time. You could learn to ski if that kind of thing interested you. You could gain new friends if that kind of thing interested you. You could have fun for a change. You could, for instance, endure fancy dress parties or be the first one up for a dance. You could stop being yourself for one motherfucking minute and become something else entirely. You could see how it fits. You could, you know, just give it a go.

If you think you’ve lost your love.
My love was a cool blast against the hot torridness that was a frequent blow from my loins. Where we pressed together we created, of course, a kind of warmth where, in time, there grew the beauty of real love that was based outside of sex and free from sex. In that warmth we lived, resided, as poets and troubadours do, like they reside in their French mountain top cottages or somewhere either in Switzerland or Sweden. Or Ireland maybe. We grew, us two, and lived and basked in the warmth of our own creation. Subsisting on the energy and glow of the sexless love between us which melted us and brought us closer, allowing us to fold in on ourselves until we were as close to a single entity, a single unity, as any self-conscious and self-regarding couple had any right to be. Throwing out our rays of nausea we continued to simmer until we melted that mountain right into the ground.

The brand of kisses that I’d die for.
You only had ways of making me feel bad. You only had ways of making me regret myself, of making me short when I ached for tall.

Hypnotised by a strange delight.
A brain tumour. Or cancer maybe. A little stab of heart disease. You on the floor, obviously dying, in pain, as tourists and passengers – or people known to you – step over you. You are too weak to move, too short of breath to cry out so, instead, you internalise your next move. Which is why you stand, dust yourself down and make an announcement to the room (you are, for some reason, in the main auditorium area of Grand Central Station). You tell them (and yes, they are listening, are paying attention to you now) that you forgive them their indifference. You tell them that you understand why they ignored you. You go further, even, and tell them that if it were you, you would have ignored you too.

Went half crazy now and then.
My dearest, darling Curly
Yes, my current favourite record is Moon River. And yes, my current favourite film is West Side Story. But what about poor Marilyn Monroe and William Faulkner? Still, it was good to read Anne Sexton’s latest, All My Pretty Ones. Bully for John Steinbeck though, it’s good he’s been recognised. And hurrah for John Glenn and even Telstar!
But you know what? Most of all – even with all the great things that have happened this year – I love you, I love you, I love you. I mean, I really love you. Believe me when I say that. I will love you until the day you die, until the day they carry you out of this house.
Please find enclosed my picture which I want you to keep on your wall.
I love you!
Bonnie of the Blue Eyes and Thing

The most beautiful sore thumb I’d ever seen.
Watery graves are inaccessible to even the most diligent and tenacious explorers. There is, after all, only so far you can go down. Unless, that is, the watery graves are located in swimming pools, ponds, puddles, shallow lakes, shallow rivers, streams, babbling brooks, baths, Jacuzzis, toilet bowls, sinks, water tanks, reservoirs, barrels, fish tanks and aquariums. In which case, watery graves are extremely accessible.

You come running in on platform shoes.
I was down on that Murray Street. I was in need of an unofficial I Love New York T-shirt. I walked for a while, passing Yellow Rat Bastard and, unh, you know, Olgerian Jumpsuits. No, wait, Interior Chuckles. No, Industrial Light and Magic. Urban Outfitters, that’s it, Urban Outfitters. Before I knew it I was where? Outside Milton Glaser’s office, that’s where. Bloody miles away from the unofficial product. Instead at the very heart of the official heart of the I Love New York rebus. Where, I asked the receptionist, is the old man today? If by old man, the receptionist replied, you mean my boss Mr Milton Glaser of Dylan and New York notoriety, he is, at this very moment, examining the oily bird smears that keep appearing on his office window. He is, she continued, under the illusion that they are the work of greasy superheroes rather than greasy birds.

A cupboard with cans of food.
Those with children should lock their children out. Leave them to fend for themselves. Let them create a new society. What would they want with our lives of cold white and shining lights? They would ruin it for us. Now that we can live forever we have no need of children.

They don’t love you like I love you.
It’s true, they don’t.

They describe nice things as wonderful.
Have you heard the way Mick Jagger used to sing Just My Imagination in concert? Was he, with that kind of performance, asking for nothing less than a big fat kick in the face? The same goes for practically everything Joe Strummer ever did. Especially Redemption Song. I mean, Jesus Christ. What is it about these middle-class yahoos? What was it that Kevin Rowland used to say about them? Didn’t he once throw a cup of boiling coffee into the face of some prig whose accent he didn’t like? Better we do it to them than allow them to continue to do it to us. You know, as Kevin once said, what I’m talking about. And have you heard or seen that Victoria Brittain? What an odious, muddle-headed, freedom-hating, sycophantic, anti-Semitic cunt. I mean, really.

The great relief of having you to talk to.
I appreciate you more because I leave you so often. But boy oh boy, when I get home, the things I want to do to you.

The city is ours for the taking.
The Mayor: We are immune to your protestations, closed to your appeals.
Captain Burntstump: Mayor, I appeal to you…
The Mayor: Didn’t you hear what I said about your appeals?
Captain Burntstump: I must protest…
The Mayor: Or what I said about protestations?
Captain Burntstump: But I beg you - please hear me out.
The Mayor: Damn, I forgot to mention begging.
Captain Burntstump: Mr Mayor, I took a vow long ago to protect and defend the fair citizens of Olgeria. For the past ten years I have worked tirelessly to clean up this great city, to rid it of criminals, of terrorists, of scumbags and homos. And now, now that we have a city that is fit for us all to live in, you just want me to walk away? Why? Why should I abandon you so?
The Mayor: Captain, has it never struck you as odd that I’m not married?
Captain Burntstump: No.
The Mayor: Or that every time you see me I am in a state of undress, surrounded by gangs of gorgeous, big-cocked men?
Captain Burntstump: Aren’t they your sons?

Keep the sword hand free.
I will take into battle only this trusty old thing here. I will ride on horseback – a million miles, since you ask – until I reach my destination. I will never give up my flight, nor my fight, no matter what obstacles stand in my way. And when I make it there, I will send for you.