The Whistling Glass

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2010-12-07T00:48:00.002Z

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An Implication of Standards

2010-11-28T00:57:00.004Z

No assault of hands or tongue:
I see spots, bobbing gently, on broken walls. To the left of the room, just left of centre, the fireplace behind which I keep my treasures. Above, the mantelpiece, where I keep the secret leaver (in the form of a candlestick or a black marble falcon, I forget which) that leads me to those treasures. Those treasures do not contain my heart. This is not poetry. This is banal description. See there the rise of the carpet. Over there the tugged corner of wallpaper. The stain of hands, the pressure of tongue.

Build the falling castle:
It crumbles like rice. Like the rice castle I tried to make once, years ago, at the dinner table, emulating, of course, the potato spaceship or whatever it was in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The rice, though sticky and coagulated, was not enough to stand firm. It fell. Toppled. Leaned for a moment then toppled. It was an insignificant moment which I’d forgotten until now.

The blue smoke rising:
I am, she said, sailing away. For the south. Where riches of golden and many things of bounteous wonder await me. Where everything abounds. I am taking, she said, my green eyes with me. My emerald eyes which I know you have noticed but which you have so far failed to comment on. My emerald eyes, she said, like the sweet green sea. They are sailing with me for they help me to see. Adrift, I replied, you will leave me adrift.

Littered with remembered kisses:
I was out one night, roaming the parks, looking for love. I found swings and trees and rusty disused water fountains. I found dustbins and benches and paths that led to gates: the gates I also found. I found love hidden deep within the bushes.

We ask and waste the question:
Low bass rumbles as the buses pass. We stand beneath Thurland Bridge. The buses pass above and I mention how years ago we used to cast our fishing lines over the bridge which caught cars and passers by. I remark upon the quick drop of the fog and how if she stood two steps back I wouldn’t be able to see her. To prove my point, she takes two steps back and I pretend that I cannot see her. But I can see you, she says. Yes, I reply, because the fog is facing your way.

With shadows of the poor:
They are with us, the poor. They huddle in doorways and scurry along the gutters. Their rags are home to children, mice and lice.

Model ourselves upon the enemy:
The enemy is rich with confidence. He is rich with riches. He is dressed, today, in a grey, all-in-one figure hugging leather outfit that accentuates his muscles. He wears a black cape. On his head a mask that is much like a balaclava though decorated with yellow stars. On his forehead the letter V which stands for villainy. He wears, as you will have noticed from this letter V, his villainy with pride. Kill him good.

From Where I Carry You A Feather

2010-08-24T16:23:00.001+01:00

There is something I would do. I would take away your eyes if it meant you would stay with me. I would keep your satchel in brine, keep it full of flood, if it meant you wouldn’t fill your satchel in an attempt to remove yourself from me. I would slit your heels to prevent you running, to stop you walking. I would bolt your knees and tether your arms. I would tether you overall, now that I think of it, to my bed. I would keep your eyes in my bed, close to my pillow. I would keep your eyes, don’t you worry, safely inside your head. I would keep your head securely strapped to your body. That is: I would do you no harm. Only some harm.

Yesterday, while you were out, I pissed in your socks and then dried your socks. Do you recall the smell when you returned? Have you, you said, been pissing in my socks? No, I replied.

I would take you outside and defend you to the death from those who would mock you. They would, these mockers, pour scorn on your potato flecked hair. You recall how I threw the dinner plate at the wall, screaming about the lack of salt? I weep now when I think of how you wept.

Your wrist resting on the edge of the wall. Your elbow resting on the other edge of the wall. I batted your elbow so that you fell, rapidly, down and towards the wall, your face cracking on to the top of the wall. The crunch of teeth, the split of flesh.

The Life That Lasts a Little Longer

2010-07-26T15:52:00.002+01:00

There is a castle, a monster, a scientist. There are peasants outside, at the bottom of the castle rock, marching through the village. The burgomeister leads them. In a house in the distance lies a swooned and fallen bride. The silly fucking mare. This is a pure story. It begins, it middles, it ends. Sterotypes are reached. Not stereotypes, archetypes. There is a hero. And a dwarf. A hunchbacked dwarf who stole the wrong brain. The little fucking idiot.

At some point in the story, towards the end, the monster reaches out – stretches out – to grab the bride. Before he can reach her, before he can tug at her gossamer bra, he receives a face full of kerosene lamp. Thrown by the hero. Aaagh, my face! my face! the monster expresses. Expresses, of course, because he has no voice. He staggers through the patio doors, falls quickly through the night, to the woods, his head and face still aflame.

Patio doors? Of course. And a conservatory.

Scientist: What happened to your face?
The monster gesticulates wildly.
Scientist: Someone threw a parafin lamp at you? Who?
The monster gesticulates again. Wilder this time.
Scientist: Oh, a kerosene lamp. Right. So who…
The monster gesticulates.
Scientist: The hero? What hero?
The monster gesticulates.
Scientist: I don’t understand. You are saying ‘hero’ right?
The monster nods.
Scientist: Hero? What, you mean he’s your hero?
The monster gesticulates.
Scientist: A hero? Just a hero?
The monster nods.
Scientist: Don’t be daft. You don’t just call someone a hero.
The monster gesticulates angrily, wildly.
Scientist: All right, all right. Calm down. Fucking hell.
The monster sits down.
Scientist: Here, let me put your face out.

Earlier in the story, an old woman walks in on the monster as he’s strangling the man she keeps house for. She screams and stays screaming at the door while the monster lurches slowly towards her. As his fingertips touch her throat she pulls away and runs down the stairs, arms flailing, screaming hysterically. We stay with the monster as he watches her through the window running towards the village, still screaming hysterically. She is, in a few ways, comic relief.

But short-lived comic relief as the monster goes back into the room, the door swinging slowly shut behind him, giving us just enough time to see him tugging at the corpse’s belt buckle. The implication being, of course, that he’s going to indulge in a bit of necrophilia. Made all the more distasteful by the fact of the monster being made up largely of dead tissue.

Expectations overturned: later we see the monster wearing the strangled man’s distinctive checked trousers. And now that we recall, the monster did tear his old trousers. That’s right.

Just to be clear, the monster doesn’t look like Boris Karloff. You can’t have everything. Ours looks more like Charles Ogle. Look him up.

So the bride’s there, mooning at the window, hoping her monster-hunting fiance is safe. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that she would hide somewhere? After all, we’ve already seen that the monster has intentions towards her. She had never seen an erect penis that big before. Nor as disgusting. Stitched together from the cocks of five dead men. A monster indeed. And no, really, she wasn’t intrigued by it. It didn’t open up her repressed sexual yearnings. None of that crap. She was disgusted by it, as I said. Five dead men’s cocks. Imagine.

Anyway, so there she is mooning at the window and because she’s mooning at the window she fails to see the enormous shadow that darkens the room. The tension. His hand into frame, gently stroking her hair before she freezes and slowly turns. Of course, she faints. Into his arms. And just above that enormous throbbing, rotten penis.

Expectations met: In the sequel the bride gives birth to a monster child. Or maybe we just see her later: walking funny, grimacing.

The resolution is that the monster is trapped within the burning castle which collapses into the rock below. Everyone cheers. Except for the hero.

Who doesn’t cheer because, obviously, his heroness is defined solely by his relationship to the monster. Without the monster, the hero isn’t a hero. He’s just a man. A future husband.

It all ends with happiness. With just a hint of unhappiness.

City of Crime, City of Magic

2010-04-19T20:08:00.002+01:00

I am as close, perhaps, as it is possible to be to the Batman. I am, to get to the point, a nocturnal crime fighter cum detective who dresses up as a bat. I am not, however, a billionaire, a handsome bachelor or an orphan. Nor do I own a cave, a fancy car or a trusty retainer. With me it’s all in the bat bit.

I have throughout the city cultivated many enemies. Low-lifes mainly of the pimp cum drug dealer variety. There is, however, an impressive threat in the form of a kingpin of crime who I would liken to Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis. Or to the Kingpin, one of Spider-Man’s foes. It is a shame, I think, that despite his formidableness and tricksiness, my kingpin of crime enemy is not a little more in the mould of some of the Batman’s nemeses: The Joker, The Penguin, The Riddler. Those guys.

I have fashioned for myself a number of gadgets and weapons. Some are copies of the Batman’s gadgets and weapons: a steel boomerang, a grappling hook and a can of debilitating spray. I also have gadgets and weapons that cannot, I believe, be found within the vicinity of the Batman: smoke bombs, webs, an enchanted hammer, jet thrusters, fireballs, an indestructible adamantium shield, stingers, X-ray vision and ice breath.

We play, my kingpin of crime nemesis and myself, a game of cat and mouse. We have mulled it over, privately to ourselves and publicly to each other, that perhaps we need each other in order to survive. That perhaps we are two sides of the same coin. This is, of course, text book superhero/supervillain stuff. Let’s not dwell on it here.

I live by a certain code that is somewhat similar to the Batman’s code: I want to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers but I don’t want to kill them. So there is this dichotomy thing where I am both liberal and fascist. I dress, of course, like a fascist.

I am not, unlike the Batman, a friend to the police. My relationship with the police is more akin to Spider-Man’s relationship with the police: they regard me as a menace. They seek me here, they seek me there.

I have been doing the superhero thing for almost three years now. In that time I have smashed six drug rings and two paedophile rings. I have rescued two kidnapped children. I have saved hundreds of women from violence and sexual assault. I have foiled seven bank robberies, eighteen shop robberies and ninety-seven burglaries. I have caught twenty-three murderers, seventeen rapists and seven blackmailers. It is, even if I do say so myself, a fairly good record.

Flashing More Than A Wing

2010-03-03T01:39:00.008Z

She steps out into the day. Sun. Squints a bit. An insect or two. And all the while – as this drama unfolds – he’s upstairs in the bath, resolving yet again to do something about his stomach. Resolving while singing My Way with all the wrong words.

That is, with his stomach, reduce it a bit. He doesn’t think he’s fat. He doesn’t look fat. Not with his clothes on. Just when he’s

He accidentally wets the toilet roll which sits at the end of the bath, on the ledge. He’d forgotten to remove it, to put it on the floor: away from the bath and the threat of displacement. You’d think, perhaps, that wiping your arse with wet toilet roll might be just the thing. But it isn’t just the thing. It breaks quickly, easily, and your fingers end up scraping at shit.

I hope you die, he says out loud as he climbs out of the bath, thinking about an acquaintance who had earlier announced to the world on Facebook that she was having the greatest time on holiday in Thailand. Did he really hope she’d die? Of course not.

(Lose the reference to Facebook.)

She’s in the day now, well into the day. Halfway to the city, upstairs on the bus. She’s remembering when she was younger, much younger, and how you used to be able to smoke on a bus. And how you could look down the mirror shaft to see the top of the driver’s head. It was like a little loft down there, above the driver’s head. Isn’t it funny, she thinks, the silly things you remember?

Later, and he’s been out of the bath for a while. Brushed his teeth, had a wank and drank a mug of tea. It’s a Sherlock Holmes mug. One of those Penguin Classic mugs: The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. He ejaculated, if you must know, over a picture of a rather plump girl bending over and pulling her arse cheeks apart. You know, in the way that plump girls often do.

Stepping down from the bus she

How do they do it, these writers? How do they stretch this thin stuff into something even thinner? More to the point, why do they do it?

So his character is: well, he hangs around the house all day, wanking. He’s what, early thirties, been to university, left liberal, a bit of a hipster. He does something in advertising, marketing, graphic design. The funkier end. Glasses, shaved head. Innocuous cunt although he really thinks he isn’t.

And she: fairly lovely. Early thirties. She works, full-time, in something related. PR or something.

Their story takes place through some kind of angsty examination of a modern relationship in contemporary Britain. But no, wait. He’s a banker instead. Laid off. She also works in finance.

He falls apart, she rises. As the country slowly climbs out of recession she slowly rises. As he sinks. It’s like a window on the world. It’s very, very thin stuff.

They have a baby girl. Disabled in some way. She’s another element. He, it turns out, has to become her full-time carer. Can he do it? Can he let go of the wanking, the cocaine, the hookers, the twat friends? Can he rise to the challenge of his daughter? Who knows?

Who cares?

Better that they find themselves, him and his daughter, in the clutches of some kind of mad scientist who had earlier promised to cure the girl of whatever ailed her. He’s into cloning and creating new life and is a right fucking ringer for Frankenstein.

So a monster. A castle in Bavaria. Flaming torches. Peasants.

And suddenly all’s well with my world.

Against The Flesh, The Gold

2010-02-04T23:47:00.008Z

Surely it is clear to anyone – to everyone - to even the hopelessly blind, how much he suffers for her? Suffers because of her? Surely it is etched deep into his stupid, stricken face the pain he has endured and will continue to endure forever and always? Do they not see it in the way that he walks, in the way that he clenches his fists, in the way that he reaches deep into his pockets or wipes away an itch or a small hair? Can they not deduce – is it really so fucking difficult – that he is crippled by her? Can they not see?

----- ooOoo -----

The darks nights are the worst. As opposed to, of course, the light nights. The dark nights that are darker inside perhaps than they are outside. He knows what he means. Those dark nights when all there is is a chair in the centre of the room. The edge of the bed. Curtains. A broken lamp. Perhaps a picture on the wall that he cannot see but can well imagine: a foregrounded figure staring out to the rolling hills beyond that are in grey, betraying their green, and on horseback, haloed by the moon, a maiden in flight or on her way to something, or someone. A telephone whose brokenness is all the explanation for the fact that it never rings. He perches either on the edge of the bed or on the edge of the seat of the chair. Maybe, he thinks, she will knock at the door. If I’m quiet enough. If I stay still. Maybe she’ll knock at the door.

----- ooOoo -----

She is, it goes without saying, a reach for perfection. She is, it is understood, his embodiment of everything she should be. She is, naturally, doomed to failure yet, somewhat to his credit, he fully understands this. It is not so much a pedestal as a higher rung or a higher step. She is on the balcony, he is here, right down here, in the bushes.

----- ooOoo -----

He lost weight. A few pounds. Someone commented on it, after he’d mentioned it: yes, I see, in your face. He’s like a poet now. A skinny poet.

----- ooOoo -----

He lent her a book, his favourite book, and said how he thought she might like it, that it’s one of his favourites but, you know, you might like it, see what you think, and a few weeks later (weeks! how he agonised every single fucking day hoping she would read it and love it and recognise that his love of this wonderful book signified his whole correctness for her and how wonderful he too must be for loving such a book that he, unlike her idiot husband, understood and appreciated!) she handed the book back to him (didn’t she know that it was a gift?): I read the first few chapters and got bored. Through his heart, a rusting dagger.

----- ooOoo -----

It’s all the modern now and he follows her in ways that, years ago, would have been unimaginable, through the internet and mobile phones and through the selective network of what he couldn’t really call friends that allow him to keep tabs, if tabs is the right word, on her at nearly all times.

----- ooOoo -----

He had heard, through friends, that her husband was, in general, a fairly nice, as they said, guy. She spoke of him, reasonably often, as they chatted away their lunch breaks in the company of other colleagues, those unwitting chaperones. He imagined this husband, this guy, as having teeth and a smile, shoulders and probably shoulder length hair, casually confident, easygoing and mostly likeable. That is to say, an utter, utter cunt. She spoke of him often and he waited for her to say how he’d once raped her or beaten her or how he had an unhealthy interest in children who he masturbated over every night while she pleaded with him to come to bed.

----- ooOoo -----

It’s the feeling of connectedness that he feels she must also feel. So that when he closes his eyes and descends into his anguish she can feel his anguish as keenly as he feels it and feel that there must be something she can do. That is, when he presses himself hard against his pillow, weeping against his pillow, he is really waiting for her soft touch on the back of his head. One day, he tells himself, it will come. I should close my eyes harder, I should feel harder.

----- ooOoo -----

He aimed for cliché, sought refuge in cliché. He felt right at home there, where it was safe, where he was understood and pitied and encouraged. Does he really need originality at this point?

----- ooOoo -----

How do you, he asked himself, turn something like this into art? For this, surely, is the very furnace of art. Yes, of course, poetry and music and painting. The expression of without. But what of the within, the raging furnace – furnace again – that cries out, if furnaces can indeed cry (or crack or pop), that surely makes him his own work of art, no need for expression, just the simple state of being as it is, as he is. So he attempts, clumsily, to walk in beauty like the night.

----- ooOoo -----

It is reckless, this pleasure.

----- ooOoo -----

He attempted to formulate, to a smirking friend, how he’d been unable to, as they still say, rise to the occasion during their first, as he carefully described them, grapplings. It was, he went on, to do with, he was sure, the whole elevation thing, the way he had pushed her so far towards perfection that it was virtually impossible for her to be regarded, by him at least, as a sexual object. And there, his friend slyly intimated, is your clue. He had put her beyond the grubby business of being fucked and also beyond easy objectification.

This is, of course, easy stuff and does nothing to explain why a grown man should behave in such a way.

Like Sound It Comes Around

2009-12-03T13:28:00.002Z

I was coursing through fields of daisies. Up to my neck in happiness. On the horizon a low hanging sun, resplendent in golden, a big sappy smile on its stupid golden face. It winked at me, that sun, beckoned me onwards with orange, fiery arms.

Orange? What happened to golden?

And so there comes a point, as there must always come a point, when you stop and take stock. Or, as happened to me, fall in a hole. I had an important statement to make – this was going to be the one. But the hole took me.

I woke the other morning with the following sentences (below) whispering through my head. My intention was to take them and turn them into something. But I couldn’t be arsed. And anyway, I like them as they are:

For rivers, bridges. For mountains, holes.

That’s the thing though - you have to write something. It doesn’t always have to be about mountains and rivers. As I said to myself the other day: there’s no such thing as autobiography. I also said: it’s better to evade than invade.

See, with me you get these vague hints at profundity which, if you imagined them as balloons, would burst at the slightest touch. When I say balloons, of course, I mean bubbles. Big, greasy bobbing bubbles.

Thomas Szasz said there was no such thing as mental illness. He didn’t just say it; he made a whole career out of it. Years ago – many years ago – I was very interested in him and his arguments. My copy of his book, The Myth of Mental Illness, had scorched edges from the frequent page turning. But the thing is, I can’t remember much about it. Except that I agreed with his hypothesis. Hypotheses.

(I’m not sure that the frequent page turning and scorched edges thing works. And I hate that I used the word hypothesis. And hypotheses.)

Wait. All that stuff about language and power. All that Foucault type bollocks that I was also, for a very brief period, faintly impressed with. The problem with Foucault is that he was such a fucking dick.

I’ve just looked Szasz up. He’s still alive. 89 years old and still alive. Good for him.

But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that after the birth of my twin girls – and particularly because Maggie is in such a terrible state – I’d have something else to say instead of twatting about with all this random crap. You’d think that maybe I could somehow mine all that heartache and tragedy and turn it into something meaningful, fiction-wise. For me and for any readers out there. My fans, as I like to call them. But I can’t do it and I won’t do it. Because I couldn’t do her justice. So it’s going to be more of the same with perhaps, every now and then, a hint at things. You know, little stabs of Maggie.

Which puts me in mind of Len Lye and how, years ago, I sort of did culture and exhausted it all. After high modernism where do you go?

Which puts me in mind of that rubbish joke that only works if you mispronounce, like a fucking idiot, Foucault’s name: as Fuckall.

Which puts me in mind of the time I mispronounced Camus’s name as Caymuss. Gah. I’m usually so careful to get things like that right.

So where are we? Where do I go from here?

Stories about monsters are always good. Maybe I’ll just do that. I’ve come to realise that subconsciously I’ve always had a thing for things Frankensteinian. I like raised pitchforks and flaming torches and peasants and misunderstood monsters. I also like castles and gothic Bavarian landscapes. I should maybe analyse this and see what comes out.

The film version of Frankenstein, the Universal/James Whale/Boris Karloff version, is far superior to the book. I was enthralled by that film as a kid. And it’s funny the things you remember – like the frame-by-frame Frankenstein picture book by Richard J. Anobile that I pored over for hours and hours. I lived in a world of Spider-Man, Beryl The Peril, horror films, musicals and The Beatles.

I’ve just ordered a copy of Anobile’s Frankenstein book. Cost: 1p. Plus £2.75 postage and packing. Published October 1974. My birthday is in October. I would have just turned seven. More copies available here.

And from there? Well, there’s always sex. Or, rather, my juvenile portrayals of certain kinds of women. Me objectifying and sexualising them and, through a certain kind of persona, telling of all the things I’d like to do to them. Big women mostly, with big knockers and welcoming thighs and open arses. You know. They are mostly all that I think about. They are what prevents me from getting things done. Or, rather, my obsession with sex and women is what has prevented me from getting things done. I have a mind full of it; it increases with age.

(These days I am more open to using the semi-colon, as ugly as it is. Professionally as well, in the crap I knock out for people who couldn’t even begin to knock out the crap I knock out for them. Of semi-colons, Kurt Vonnegut said: “They are transvestite herm-aphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.” I agree. I’ll never use them again.)

One thing I’ve discovered these past eight weeks: there’s a very good reason why nurses are low paid. As for midwives: I’m amazed they get paid at all.

Nurses though. I’ve never been one for the whole uniforms thing. It smacks of being something that those not very interested in sex would be into. Fetishists and weirdoes who need that extra lift to get themselves going. Asexual dickwads, as we call them in our house.

Which puts me in mind of a thing I wrote a couple of years ago (Refuel on a Fun-Filled Portion):

“I was talking to this lesbian who. Well, who first of all told me that she wasn’t, in fact, a lesbian. She said: You know the Richard Briers character in Ever Decreasing Circles? You remind me, she continued, of him – what with your petty bourgeois notions of sexuality and your desire to remain in your narrow, and narrow-minded, comfort zone where all is as it should be and where straights like you (did she say straights, really?) force on to people like me your strict and reductive definitions of who we are, either gay or straight or maybe bisexual, but I’m none of those, I refuse to be boxed in, especially by the likes of you. Get fucked, I replied. Anyway, this lesbian had a girlfriend who, she said, made leather fetish gear, bondage rubbish, all that. Me: Yada, what, the sort of stuff, you mean, that only people who don’t like sex go in for, people who, you know, need to dress up like clowns in order to be able to enjoy sex, who also believe, with absolutely no good reason, that their dopey costumes and cretinous antics somehow make them radical, alternative, transgressive and who also believe that their pathetic preferences and dismal shebangs are something other than witless, clichéd expressions of their repressions and anxieties, rooted as they are in their utter conservatism, despite what they believe to the contrary?”

And now, look. I’m reduced to repeating myself.

Which Steals Men's Eyes

2009-09-30T17:19:00.000+01:00

Oafish whistler is balanced somewhere between out and in, hovering over the threshold, whistling tunelessly from his fat fucking face and straight into mine. Spittle and sweat. The stench of three day old bacon caught between his fat, at the back, teeth. He’s letting me out or letting me in, the sensory spray causing this confusion as I too hover and, for a second, look into his eyes and then to his lips and then, inexplicably, I’m overcome with the urge – desire isn’t the right word – to kiss him, to kiss him hard.

WC Fields said, of the city: “It ain’t a place for women gal, but pretty men go there.”

There was also – the whistler incident has just reminded me – the time I popped into an upmarket hairdressers to ask if they carried the brand of hair wax I favoured. Fudge, as it happens. On my approach to the reception area I thought to myself, upon spying an attractive young girl: “I’ll ask that bird there.” But she wasn’t a bird, she was a man. A pretty young man, thin and athletic, eye shadow and rouge, a hint of chest hair curling out from his low cut T-shirt. Beautiful hair. For a moment I was flustered. By what? My initial mistake? By his undeniable loveliness? By homosexual panic? Odd though that I had no urge to kiss him.

There’s a theme emerging here.

I was out cottaging one night, years ago, when cottaging had this subcultural bent that made it attractive to the likes of me in my cultural vultural mode. I was out cottaging one night and doing my usual thing of taking things so far then backing off before things got too gay. You know, like with knob touching and kissing and any other kind of touching. I was out cottaging and, because back then I was young and quite attractive with hair and no gut and a jawline that at least had some definition even in the dark, I was able to entice – if entice is the right word – quite a few men into the toilet where I would look them up and down, walk around them, and declare either yea or nay. Mostly nay. I enjoyed seeing their crestfallen faces as these men, mostly fat middle-aged types let’s not forget, were denied my obvious charms and pleasures. And to those to whom I said yea I took it only as far as suggesting they go into the cubicle and wait for me. Which is where they waited until realising I’d gone on my way. Or been arrested.

For using the phrase ‘yea or nay’ I should be arrested. Really.

Perhaps The Ice Will Hold

2009-07-27T00:36:00.002+01:00

The stars were out the day I gave blood. They were out and laughing as the blood drained from my veins and poured into the veins of a monster. A monster of my own creation.

Not two weeks before.

Not two weeks before, we, the monster and I, had greeted each other like a new father and son. Me the father, he the son.

A bit of background: me a scientist in a big castle atop a rock overlooking a gothic Bavarian village.

Me the father, he the son. I say he, and I say son, but the truth is that the monster was of indeterminate gender. Neither male nor female. But because I’d drawn a huge moustache in black marker pen neath his huge potato nose, I tended to think of the monster as a he. Plus there was the big flappy penis I’d stapled between his legs. Not a real penis, of course. Just a limp courgette I’d sprayed with a pink lacquer in order to prevent decay.

So me the father, he the son. And in the first flushes of our time together we enjoyed shared activities that included the likes of: football, swimming, boxing, looking at ladies, fighting bees, reading comics, watching telly, waltzing matildas and taunting the burgomeister’s big fat daughter. Fat but sexy. You should have seen her in her too tight jeans and her too tight top with her big fat knockers spilling out all over the place. Yum.

I had created the monster, my son, to prove that I could create new life. He was, in effect, a two fingers to all those colleagues, contemporaries and detractors who had, over the years, poured scorn on my work. Mad, they called me, and I vowed to prove them wrong. However, all those colleagues, contemporaries and detractors were dead by the time my son was born. Killed by my own mad hands. Metal hands, fashioned from steel following my accident in Japan. And when I say accident, well, you can guess what that really means.

There was once a wife. My memories of her blocked to prevent the pain. But still, she crept through sometimes and in particular in times of distress. For instance, as I lay on the makeshift gurney, the life draining from my veins. My pretty blue veins. And as the distress grew, so too the memories of my wife. Such as:

Wife Remembrance 1:
We were married in a church. On a Sunday. By the burgomeister who, back then, had no daughter to speak of, fat or otherwise. I remember well his words: “On to you both I cast the ancient curse of the village and ask all the witches and ghosties in the room to join me in enforcing and supporting this sacred sentiment.”

Wife Remembrance 2:
We honeymooned in a small Bavarian village that was much like our own but on the other side of Bavaria. The burgomeister there was much nicer. So much nicer that my wife and I agreed to annul our marriage so we could be re-married by this newer, friendlier burgomeister. I also remember well his words: “You two do plenty of fucking and stuff and you will one day be blessed with a son who is as far away from a monster as tis possible to get.”

Wife Remembrance 3:
The problem was that my wife and I did very little fucking and stuff which led to my little swimmers drying up. They were, my little swimmers, fossilised and pressed against the inner walls of my testicles and the first centimetre of my shaft until they, the shaft swimmers, were gradually washed away by my endless pissing as a result of drinking too much water.

Wife Remembrance 4:
With fossilised, dead swimmers I was, of course, unable to contribute to the natural creation of a child. My wife berated me on this even as I pointed out to her that the lack of fucking and stuff, that led to my dead swimmers, was solely due to her reluctance to do fucking and stuff with me. She was, however, more than happy to do fucking and stuff with other men. Including the burgomeister of our village, the horrible one who had married us the first time.

Wife Remembrance 5:
She disappeared one night, my wife. Her body discovered months later, strapped to a car at the bottom a lake, her throat open and her hair billowing in the fronds. Yes, just like Shelley Winters in The Night of the Hunter. Except for the fact that, unlike Shelley Winters, her brain had been removed. And her eyes.

My son was born without the aid of any swimmers and was, instead, the result of some phantasmagorical tinkering that took in all of the major arts: physics, mechanics, alchemy, engineering, chemistry, marketing and astrology. Melded together and mushed up in a metaphorical pot, I magically created new life from elements that to all intents and purpose were without life. I put them together, injected the spark and stood back as my son stood up to life. And stood up for life.

As previously stated, our first moments of time together were full of joyful fatherly and sonly activity, free from the pressures of suspicion, hatred and jealousy that led to me being strapped to a gurney with the life draining from my veins. Draining from my veins while being watched by my son the monster, the burgomeister and his big fat, but very sexy, daughter. An older daughter, of course, somewhere in her early twenties.

If you have guessed that my son’s betrayal had something to do with my dead wife’s missing brain and eyes then you have guessed correctly. That is, to be plain about it, I stuck my wife’s dead brain and eyes into the head of my monster son. Which meant that he thought like my wife and saw like my wife. Plus, of course, he possessed, somewhere inside, the memory of her death and of the person who had killed her. Me, I had killed her. It was only a matter of time before my wife’s brain would recall what had happened and seek revenge. I was an idiot for not anticipating that. In fact, it was only as he was strapping me to the gurney (that’s three uses of the word gurney - four now) that I realised what was happening: it was my wife, within the form of the monster I had created, exacting her revenge.

Anyway. As I am writing this now, you might also guess that I somehow prevented the draining of my veins. You are, of course, correct if you guess that to be the case. But you would not be correct if you guessed that I prevented the draining of my veins as a result of the following occurrences:

Strapped to the gurney I thought: I am done for and Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me? And I thought those things through the din of laughter that emanated from the big fat faces of the burgomeister and his sexy fat daughter. A strange thing: even as I lay dying, passing in and out of consciousness, cursing my killers and calling for divine aid, I was still able to imagine how nice it would be to sample a bit of the burgomeister’s fat sexy daughter. With some degree of effort I even managed to turn my head so I could watch her fantastic great knockers jiggling as she laughed at my plight. It was small consolation and comfort, I admit, but consolation and comfort nonetheless. Still, it didn’t prevent me from finally giving up all hope and accepting my fate. However, during the last remaining seconds of consciousness the door to the attic burst open, the room crowded with rescuers and heroes of all stripe and faith. Quickly they overpowered my son, the burgomeister and his big fat daughter and threw back the lever that operated the machine responsible for draining my veins. That is, they put the machine into reverse so that the blood flowed back into my veins. In a few minutes I was back to full strength and ready to confront my would-be murderers. But too late as my son threw off his shackles and snapped first the necks of the burgomeister and his big fat daughter, followed his own slender neck, held together by only a few stitches and a blob of Superglue.

But as I said, you would have not been correct if you had guessed that that’s how my predicament came to an end.

Turn Left at Phobos

2009-07-05T23:08:00.001+01:00

The Martians, they.

They drifted for a while. I mean, floated. Hovered. We watched them as they hovered outside.

It was night time, although not yet dark. What do they call it? Crepuscular? It was night time, evening, and the Martians, they. They kind of just hung around. Outside. What did they want? What did they fucking want?

We were tired so we left them to it. By morning they were gone. No, wait, perhaps they weren’t gone. Maybe we just couldn’t see them in the light. I say that because they were back again, at night. When it grew dark. In exactly the same place.

My husband said they reminded him of some kind of crepuscular bird. The twilight tweeter or somesuch. I said they were nothing like birds. Look at them, I said. Do birds have those? Or those? Can birds do that? I don’t think they can. I’ve never seen a bird do that.

The Martians, they. They were there the following night and the night after that and the night after that. As far as I know they’re still there. We don’t look that way anymore, so I can’t be sure.

Rumble The Grass, Clip The Clop

2009-07-01T18:04:00.002+01:00

I will always be poor. I will always have a violent temper. And I will always hanker after big arsed women in boots. In boots.

It was my birthday last week and my family - four children, one girlfriend, one parent, two sisters and two ex-wives - thought it’d be a great idea to treat me to an executive day at the races. At Newmarket Races. Two things struck me about this: I can’t stand horses and I can’t stand being out in the fucking sun. It was a shit gift but I considered, for a moment, keeping my mouth shut and pretending to really love the gift. But my aforementioned violent temper soon took hold and, within minutes, I had most - two children, one girlfriend, two sisters and one ex-wife - of my family in tears.

But because I’m not a complete fool, I took the gift anyway with the intention of spending the day eyeing up big arsed women walking around in boots.

I was out in the sun looking at the horses and the big arsed women in boots. I had eaten cheese on toast for breakfast. A glass of beer for lunch. Plus a hot dog with mustard, ketchup and cheese. A small glass of lemonade. I was out watching the big arsed women in boots while pretending to keep an eye on the horses. I was there with my girlfriend so I had to keep up a certain amount of propriety. She doesn’t normally care about my obsession with big arsed women in boots but even I can tell that it must sometimes get a little wearing.

Where was I?

I was at the races looking at the big arsed women in boots when it occurred to me that horses have big arses too. Of course, I’d always known that horses have big arses. I’d just never really considered it before.

The next bit here, I suppose, could be about how I suddenly started having a thing for horses, and specifically for their smooth, shiny big arses. But that didn’t happen. It was just something I observed: how amusing it was that I was surrounded by a load of big arses courtesy of both the women and of the horses. A whole shebang of big arses. And even funnier when I factored in the fact that most of the men there, at the races that afternoon, were also big arses. Big arses everywhere, as far as my eye could see!

But as it was my birthday I decided, eventually, to at least show some gratitude and to at least put on a show of enjoying the day for what it was supposed to be about: the racing.

I’m a poor man, as I’ve already stated, so I could only afford a couple of pounds on each of the horses I gambled on. Ten pounds in total. I walked out of there, later that afternoon, with an extra forty-two pounds in my pocket. Still poor but not quite as poor.

Bringing News From Far and Near

2009-06-21T09:41:00.000+01:00

Channeling the spirit of adventure I once wrote “All postmen are cunts” on the envelope of a letter I addressed to myself. It arrived safely, on time and fully intact, at my home the very next day. Which just goes to show that either: a) postmen are highly professional at all times and have thick skins and bear no grudges, b) postmen take notice of nothing on envelopes except for house numbers and street names, C) postmen agree, and/or are happy to accept, that they are, in fact, cunts or d) the postman on my round was, in fact, a woman, a postwoman, who agreed that postmen, the males, are indeed cunts or felt, because the insult was directed specifically at postmen, that it had nothing to do with her, what with her being a postwoman. Then again, what of the males who work in the sorting office? Are they also known as postmen even though their job, strictly speaking, has no posting element to it? Does the ‘post’ bit of their title have more to do with the fact that they work for the Post Office than it does with anything specifically relating to their job? But then, it’s not called the Post Office any more is it? It’s called Royal Mail. So maybe they should be called royalmen. And royalwomen, of course.

Or mailmen.

Which reminds me: I once took a job as a postman during vacation from university. Well, it was better than walking the streets. (And when I say vacation I really mean holiday. Obviously.)

On that theme: I once walked the streets as part of a mob that had gathered together for the specific purpose of hunting down paedophiles (or other, similar, bad guys). Because we were in the city we felt it was neither necessary nor appropriate to go as far as carrying flaming torches. And because we didn’t live in the countryside, few of us had access to pitch forks. Which is why we were content, out of necessity as much as anything else, to walk around armed only with flashlights, guns and knives. (And when I say flashlights I really mean torches. Obviously.) We were out tramping those city streets for what seemed like hours and hours but was, in reality, only two hours. Two hours and between us, with our mob of around fifty people, we had not so much as a sniff of a single paedophile. So we agreed to split up, to go our separate ways, in order to better increase our chances of digging them (the paedophiles) out. What we hadn’t thought through, obviously, was that by splitting up we had ceased to be a mob. Which meant that in the event of one of us finding a paedophile and stringing him up from a lamppost (or meting out other, similar, rough justice) it would not be attributed to the actions of a mob, thereby weakening any moral justification - e.g. the strength in numbers thing - we might have had for meting out such rough, and instant, justice. What to do? As it happened, none of us, together or apart, came across paedophiles or any other similarly-styled bad guys. Which meant that we avoided having to deal with the aforementioned mob/strength in numbers/justification dilemma thing. Phew.

Once, while I was employed as a postman, I was caught, by the owner of the (soon to be mentioned) milk, drinking the milk that had been left, not two minutes before, on his doorstep. I had been caught red-handed - or, rather, white-lipped - in the act of swallowing the milk with the bottle pressed tightly against my lips. When I quickly pulled the bottle away from my mouth, out of a mixture of embarrassment and fear, I, of course, had a big ring of white circling my lips (as previously mentioned). It didn’t look good. The owner of the milk calmly took the two-thirds empty bottle from my hand and told me to fuck off. When I returned to the depot (the sorting office) I discovered that the milk owner had telephoned my supervisor to tell him what had occurred. My supervisor - a long-standing actual out on the beat walking the street postman (and therefore a cunt) - sacked me on the spot. The cunt.

I was a postman. And they gave me the sack. The irony.

I was a postman. Which meant, of course, that I too was a cunt. Albeit for a brief period.

Mind you, it was a pretty good job, all in all. I enjoyed, most of all, delivering letters to the many female recipients on my round. But I enjoyed, even more than that, regularly emptying my sack into their flaps.

(Oddly, two of the stories above - the milk-drinking thing and the emptying-my-sack thing - come from two of my friends, both called Rob.)

Anyway. During my time as a milkman I also had cause to empty my sack into the flaps of quite a few women. And because I was a milkman rather than a postman, what I mean is that I had cause to have sexual intercourse with these women that resulted in me ejaculating inside them: that is, emptying my sack into their flaps. If I’d have had the time, inclination or wherewithal, I would have constructed some euphemistic phrase that pertained specifically to my status as a milkman. Pouring my milk into their urns? Creaming into their pots? Making a delivery of white liquid? Something along those lines. Anyway. During my time as a milkman I had cause to have sex with quite a few women. A wide variety of different women of all shapes, sizes and colours. It was great.

I always liked the punchline of that joke/riposte: because every time I fuck your wife she gives me a biscuit.

Because, obviously, quite a few of the women on my round - that I made love to, to coin a phrase - were married women. Which made it all the more sweet. I even made a point of going round to see the wife of the bloke who had told my supervisor, during my time as a postman, that I had been drinking his milk. Remember? As it turned out, his wife was quite the looker with a fabulously full figure, boasting large, creamy white breasts, grabbable hips and an arse you could really sink into. Unfortunately, however, she was immune to my charms. Actually, it was more to do with the fact that she was extremely happy with her husband and so, unlike most of the women I was attending to, she had no need - out of loneliness, frustration etc. - to turn to me. For those other women, it wasn’t so much that I had charms - it was more that I was willing and available. Good for me. And good for them.

One Night Through a Broken Window

2009-06-16T13:40:00.001+01:00

Because we still live in old times, there is something of the modern about double decker buses and the chimes of the church clocks.

Neath Thurland Street bridge, with endless cigarettes and watch glances, Jack Tuttle also known as John. Ex Navy and boxing booth denizen, wilted red carnation stuffed in lapel, heavy pin stripes stroking the tops of black patent leather shoes. Trilby. Tommy Trinder minus the laughs.

The pealing of the city clocks. Six o’clock, twilight and time, for most, for home.

Jack Tuttle tips forward his hat, his face sinking deeper into the twilight of brim shadow. Illuminated for a few seconds by the flame from a match. Which is when she spies him, Nan Taylor, from the other side of the canal. A nip over the bridge to join him there.

The rattle of a trolley bus.

This Nan Taylor is the fancy of Jack Tuttle’s eager eye. He watches her from afar, at work, where she is the daughter of the foreman. With whom he has what they would later call an uneasy relationship. On account, really, of this foreman/father believing (erroneously, as it happens) Jack to be much the same type of character as he himself is: an eye for the ladies, something of a rogue, a bit of a dandy, a tendency to violence. Judge not forsoever lest thou be judged oneself or whatever.

They huddled together neath the arc of Thurland Bridge where he lighted two cigarettes at the same time. Like, of course, Paul Henreid in Now Voyager. But with a little cough and Nan’s cigarette not quite burning properly. But still.

And still, at last, the sound of the evening air. Rattles, footsteps and tired voices easing off towards the distance. Peripheral irritants, along with low bass rumbles, long a source of dismay to Jack’s sensitive ears. It is, an otologist once told him, the result of ear canals that rise up instead of down, that stretch far too long.

From the neath of Thurland Bridge and stepping on to the still cobbled street towards Rope Hill. A view of the city centre, lit by streetlamps and trolleybus trails. She did that thing he likes, feeding her arm through his as he kept his hands inside his pockets, fag hanging from mouth. Chatting all the way as the smoke stung his eyes and he struggled slightly, without letting on, to breathe and smoke at the same time.

The Blue Bell. Glazed brick work, green. And blue. The landlord greeting Jack by name. Fag still in mouth as those were the days.

There it is all warm and colourful, neath this blanket of smoke and knees pressed hard against small circular tables. Safe. You would happily spend four hours perched on a small circular stool, your back arching out like the arch of Thurland Bridge. Edges of velvet and bends of brass, picture frames stuffed with black and white photographs of canals and barges and barrel-chested men standing next to beer barrels. A big picture of a trolleybus, the number 40 to Wilford Road, right in front of Griffin and Spalding.

And it’s true what they say. Everything was better then.

The Hum of the Pool

2009-05-16T15:08:00.001+01:00

I was a slight nudge at the top of the stairs. You know what I mean. There you were, peering down, reassured at the apparent ease of your descent when that slight nudge made you question all that you had previously thought to be true. Well, not all that you had previously thought to be true. It was only a slight nudge, after all. Enough to make your heart twitch, to make you reach for, and grip, the handrail.

It was more, I suppose, that I was a small surprise. A pleasant surprise. Something you expected but didn’t quite expect.

No, wait. I was everything you expected. I was a neurological twist, a clip round the ear. It was why we made good.

Now Turned To Low

2009-05-02T17:16:00.002+01:00

Exterior. House. Day. Morning. There is but nothing. That is, nothing but the sound of birds tweeting, wings flapping and leaves rustling as they twist when they fall. It is coming up to Autumn. Soon Autumn. There is sun in the sky but not much. Enough for us to see. We see - we spy - a yellow front door. The front door of the house.

Why is this door yellow when I specifically asked for a red door? It interferes with the light. Not interferes. I mean, it doesn’t sit well with the light. I need that door to stand out. When the curtains open, after we have seen the house, I want them to see the pull of that front door. Change it. Change it to red.

Exterior. House. And the red front door is just glowing. Were it not for the brass knob, letterbox and numbers (eleven) you would think, perhaps, that there was no door but rather a fire blazing away in a doorless doorway. You would think that the house was on fire. And thus be placed into entirely the wrong mood. The tone of it would be all wrong. It is not a fire, it is the crisp glow of bright red paint. Burning almost.

And so to a green door. Exterior. House. Morning etc. The door opens and stepping out into the morning light, a shirtless man. He is, what, mid-fifties, a full head of short cropped brown to grey hair, chest hair also greying, little breasts like little deflated rugby balls rolling down, hanging over the top of his stupid fat stomach. Put a shirt on, for God’s sake.

The man, we’ll call him Bob, walks towards us, towards our point of view, looking straight ahead as if he were aware of our presence. But then, maybe he is aware of our presence on the other side of this third wall or whatever they call it. Quick, hide.

We see, for the first time - it’s odd that we hadn’t already noticed - that Bob is pushing a wheelbarrow. We can’t be sure but that sure looks like a gathering of various body parts in that wheelbarrow. We become surer the closer he gets. Maybe, we ask ourselves, they are the parts of a showroom dummy or something, something not real. But no, as he gets closer.

Bob tips the body parts into a previously unnoticed - like a ha-ha - hole. Clearly there are too many body parts to belong to just one person. And when we say body parts we mean hands, feet, arms and legs. Two things we can take from this: That more than one person has been mutilated and/or killed. That they may not even be dead. They may be on the other side of that green door, in that house, limbless but alive. We ponder this as we watch Bob begin to shovel earth and bracken into that hole, on top of the body parts.

Cut to. Interior. House. The same house. We know this because through the window, through the stained (with shit or mud) window, we can see Bob at his previously mentioned toil, i.e. burying those body parts. We pan the room. The dusty and relatively bare room that has a small wooden table in the centre of the floor, two chairs and an extra long black leather couch, long past its best days. It is extra long, that couch, in order to accommodate the row of three limbless women. They are all alive. All with long blonde hair and all with spotted handkerchief gags over their mouths. It is, honestly, like something out of a horror film. And they are all naked, of course. Do they look terrified? Most certainly they do.

Cut to. Exterior. Bob burying. We look into that hole and see that Bob is almost two-thirds done. How does he look, Bob? How does he seem? He seems somewhat panicked.

Cut to. Exterior. Country lane with trees lining it, with crows sitting in the trees, with anything that gives it the added sinister touch. A car. A 1950 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon (here). In fantastic condition. Either we’re in the early nineteen-fifties or that car is extremely well-preserved.

Cut to. Interior. Car. Driven by a man in his early fifties. Attire: grey fedora, trench coat, etc. Either we’re in the early nineteen-fifties or the man likes to dress as an archetypal movie detective. We shall see.

Cut to. Exterior. The tree-lined country lane, the car travelling it. It pulls up at what appears to be some kind of junction. A few moments pass before it makes a left turn into a smaller, tighter lane. As we follow the car we see the house, Bob’s house, to which it is surely headed.

Exterior. A sweaty Bob. The last bit of dirt into his hole. He starts, slightly, at the sound and then sight of the 1950 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon driving down the lane, towards the house. Bob stops. He watches. The car gets closer. Bob sweats harder. The car passes. A relieved Bob.

And later, back in the house, interior, Bob has just finished dousing those torsoed women with petrol. By the door he lights, and then tosses, a match towards them. He leaves quickly, slamming the door.

Exterior. Beyond the shit or mud stained window an orangey glow. It is dusk now. Time has passed. The orangey glow glows harder and against the grey of the dusk is quite a sight indeed. It grows, that glow, soon consuming the room. Do we hear doomed, faint screams? We most certainly do. As Bob, a smile on his thin villainous lips, steps into a car - a red 2006 Chevrolet Monte Carlo (here). A moment or two later and he drives away. Out through the gate, into the lane and then down that other lane, off towards uncertain freedom.

The detective? In fancy dress. On his way to a Buick Roadmaster Owners’ conference or something.

As The June Light Turns To Moonlight

2009-03-29T17:44:00.002+01:00

The pitter patter of tiny feet. Or the pitter patter of the rain. It taps, this thing, somewhere in the background, threatening to make things never quite the same.

His wife complains about the ticking of the clock. It has been there for some years, that clock, on the mantelpiece, ticking away, and for years his wife has complained about it. I make a point, he says, of winding the clock up because I know it winds you up. Overcoming the urge to take the clock and break the clock, preferably over his head, she leaves the room. She retreats, is the word she often uses to her friends, to the safety, as she often thinks of it, of the kitchen. And yet it’s still there, for both of them, even in their separate rooms, that pitter patter of either tiny feet or of the rain.

The following morning and their modest garden, all trimmed lawn, tiny flowers and teracotta thingies, is awash with flood. Gone are the tiny flowers. Destroyed, maybe, the lawn. She is at the kitchen window looking into the garden. From our outside vantage point, peering above a teracotta thingy, we cannot tell whether tears are rolling down her cheeks or whether those tears are, in fact, rain drops trickling along the glass. If tears, her response is a tad excessive. The garden will recover, after all.

So Dark, Up Above

2009-03-20T16:13:00.001Z

The best thing I felt when I was asked what to feel was the sensation of falling rain drops falling on the back of my neck and then rolling, like little streams, towards the crack of my arse where, after a while, they made my arse wet, especially the hole, so that it felt as though I’d shit myself, a wet shit obviously, and a cold wet shit at that.

After a few days of that they locked me up and beat me endlessly, or so it seemed, for daring to shit myself even though I explained, over and over, how it wasn’t shit but rather the amassed puddle of rain water that had run from my neck and down to my arse and, through the washing over of the dirt on my back, came to bear the appearance of shitty brown water so it could, granted, seem as though I’d shit myself.

The beating stopped and I was allowed to go free.

But the outside world is cruel. And wet. The rain water, it terrified me and so I spent the next few years indoors, felching, if that’s the right word, off my mother and sipping endless bowls of soup through plastic, curly straws. I lost pounds and pounds and soon my own mother didn’t recognise me. Although, of course, she did. It was just something she said. An expression, she called it, a figure of speech. It’s me mum, I’d say every morning when she brought in my soupy, gruelly breakfast. I know son, she’d say, I know.

She had no tears, my mother, and wept nothing at all as I relayed to her my predicament at the hands of the evil fellows who carried me from my bed that night, subjected me to the rain water falls and then claimed I’d shit myself, wet shit, even though I hadn’t.

She stayed calm and collected. Her face a stone image of her face. Sometimes it cracked though, into a kind of smile. Grimace, as she called it.

Some years later, after I’d got over being skinny and gone back to being fat, I spotted, out on the street, bold as brass, one of the evil fellows who had taken glee from the fact of subjecting me to all that rain water and shitting myself bollocks.

But I was too fat to give chase. Mother, I said when I returned home later that day, we need to go back to the soup and straws.

But now, now that I am relatively at peace and calm over the fact of my predicament, I can, at last, enjoy the rain once more and sometimes I lean from my window, easing my head out, catching drops on the back of my neck but this time preventing their descent with the too tight towel I have already wrapped around my now slightly more slender neck.

Reinforce The Torn Places

2009-03-07T16:58:00.001Z

Twenty-five years and they passed, like that. The next twenty-five years will, of course, also pass like that. It’s why he spends his days these days taking pictures of buildings, rather than people.

She said something about green issues which became the moment he stopped listening. Or stopped pretending to listen. No need for the nods and smiles now, no need for the frequent, but not obviously uniform, uh uhs. Green issues she said and he felt something biting.

The photograph in the silver frame, edged with complications of tendrils, showed at least the last time he could stand to look at himself. It helped that it was dusk, that he was partially covered by a tilting umbrella, that the taker of the photograph hadn’t kept the camera still. It had, he fancied, a slight touch of the Doisneau about it.

Terror ripped through the dorm room. Eighteen eighteen-year-old girls, without their nightdresses, dancing in panic. If he had only switched the light on.

She said something else about green issues, the environment and even, almost unbelievably, about saving the planet. This from a woman who had, as far as he could tell, no previous inclinations towards anything remotely altruistic. But, of course, it had nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with her. He had noticed this in others, too. It was something of a trend.

He photographed local politicians for a book he was writing or, rather, putting together. They sat, most of them, with an absence of feeling or force. He worked hard with the lighting. He took many shots in the hope of capturing something.

The headmistress used the word pandemonium. Never in all her career. The girls, she said, were genuinely frightened.

And sometimes when I’m alone, she said, when the kids are at school and my husband is at work, I weep over the fate of our planet. I do. I really do.

There was a pavilion. An old boating lake in a kind of art deco style. Great slabs of concrete with a tint, or hint, of yellow. Early frost and just the right amount of moisture. The sun rose and bounced off everything it should have bounced off. It couldn’t have been more perfect. Except for the twat with the boats and his fat mental son.

Doisneau my arse.

It bothers him perhaps more than it should. What was it? The lack of thought? The infantile posturing? The grandstanding? The easily adopted superiority? The sheer twattiness of it all? The sheer middle-classness of it all? You wouldn’t have time to make yourself worry about all of this, he said, if you had something genuine to worry about. Or even a job.

This idiot he knew, from years back, had recently contacted him to alert him to the fact of his, the idiot’s, recent questioning by police after his, the idiot’s, female friend made allegations about stalking and text messaging and all sorts of other nonsense. The idiot was once a friend, some years back, but had been discarded for being a nauseating, bed-wetting, self-pitying, self-aggrandising dickwad of a man. The last time they spoke, oh many years ago, he used the word dickwad to describe the idiot. And even then it seemed somehow lacking. Cunt would have been better, more appropriate.

He spends whole afternoons checking out, as the vernacular has it, his competitors’ online portfolios. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that gets on there.

He put the coffee on the table and listened as the boy in the pantry took ice cubes out of the tray. The headmistress emerged from the library, closing the door calmly behind her, her scalp and thinning hair all too apparent beneath the harsh hallway light. I think you should leave, she said, the girls don’t trust you any more, we’ll find someone else who can do the job.

It was surely no coincidence that the idiot from his past, who had, it turned out, been stalking an old mutual friend of theirs, shared the same green issue type views as the woman he now recalled, dimly, from somewhere in the less distant past. He remembered nothing about how she looked and nothing about how she was in bed except that when he came, he made a point, for some forgotten reason, of ejaculating on to her thigh. It was somehow a comment on all the green bollocks. The satisfaction came from the mild look of disappointment that crossed her face.

Among Us Walks A Goliath

2009-02-01T22:32:00.002Z

Defeat The Sinister Spells
We watched him as he ran, backwards, raging forwards, lost to the horizon. He became, finally, an etch on the moon.

Armed With a Fantastic Power
Never one to blow his own trumpet he was caught one day, nevertheless, making grand claims about his abilities, his powers. What powers? they asked, those inquisitors of gloom.

One of The Greatest
Never the like of him shall we see again, not in this life.
True, though surely the time has passed, been reached, where we can perhaps move on, make our own way?
No, the time is not ready, not right. We must first receive the signal.
The signal?
The sign.
What sign?
The sign that tells us he is ready to return, to save us, to deliver us into salvation.
Not that again.
Not what again?

Lives Again
He was, to all intents and purposes, no longer of this life. We had buried him, for a start. But then, now that I think of it, there were those who claimed, right to the last, that he was, in fact, still alive. How he survived three weeks in that box, six feet in the ground, we will never really know.

Invasion of The Lava Men
Here they come, the little ticklers. They gather at the foot of the bed. My favourite is Swimp, the little one. The littlest one. He has buck teeth and roaming eyes. I never know where he is looking. Or what he is thinking. One day, I’m sure, they will mount the bed. And then I will be done for. Consumed by their flames, their all-consuming heat. Roar. Etc. But until then, I am more than happy to bask in their orangey glow.

Please Don’t Frustrate Us
We wait at the foot of the bed in the hope of a glimpse of that girl’s thighs and her breasts and all the other forbidden bits that we are even forbidden to think about let alone mention. She sees us, we’re sure, but she seems to see through us and just lies there contently drawing something from our heat like she is on the beach or under a sun lamp or something. We wouldn’t mind so much, we all agree, if she didn’t just lie there with all her clothes on. We keep wracking our brains, thinking of what we can do to get her to take her clothes off and maybe writhe around for a bit. We can’t turn up the heat because any more would consume her. We are reminded, some of us, of the story of the wind and the sun and the competition they had to see which of them could cause the man to take his coat off and, of course, the sun won because the more the wind blew the more the man held his coat, pulled it on, even tighter. The sun won and we cannot understand where it is that we’re going wrong.

Waiting To Pick Up the Pieces
I am cupboard hider. When all burnt I will scrape up warm flesh that cling to bed clothes and decorate cupboard walls. Turn heat up you stupid little things.

Wait Till You Learn
You will reach my age one day and discover the truth of growing old. You will, believe me, weep at the news of it.

Wonder Man
Terrifying battles and carnage as the city falls to the crash and thunder of two giant robots. They arrived, only hours ago, from Planet Robot, these two adversaries of clang, now using our city as an arena for their metallic slugging. Through the crunching of gears and the whirling of whirligigs we can just about hear their terrible words. The things they say to each other, the grievances they have. No wonder they fight.

Truly Different Villainy
He will box your ears for you. If you’re not careful.

Co-Starring: Spider-Man
The fates have come to tempt us, dear Spidey. You on the ledge there, high above, me looking up, wishing I were you. Remember the time you caught me as I fell from my window washing lift contraption thing? Twenty stories I fell and, of course, assumed I was a goner. But there, at what seemed like the very last moment, you caught me. Carried me away in your thin though powerful arms. I would have your children Spidey. Believe me, I would.

The Gift That Stops Giving

2008-12-23T17:38:00.001Z

Not only alone but now also, he is fascinated to discover, without the power (and it is a power) to throw the snowball that’s slowly melting in his frozen, though adequately besocked, hand. He lets it drop, the snowball, which is instantly lost within a something of white. Blanket. Sheet. Expanse.

His father, behind him, as he gazes at his reflection within the golden Christmas tree bauble, says something about how you can’t help but resemble Pete Townshend when you look into a bauble or into the back of a spoon. Pete Townshend, he says again. You know, he did those songs you like, Magic Bus and Happy Jack.

Though The Night Was Made For Loving

2008-10-25T16:02:00.006+01:00

Oh moon. By the light of your orbish sad face we blow our whistles and wave in the last of the rowers. Be careful there son, as you step gingerly from the boat, you don’t want to slip and splash and make a fool of yourself. Not in front of your girl.

Oh moon and bats. As I lock the gates for the last time this year. It will be frozen soon, our lake, and, were they allowed in, the public would see all manner of gaggles of ducks and geese gliding. The children would love it although the council would not. This lock is rusty, a new one for next year I think.

Oh moon and trees. Your glow flitting in and out from behind the branches as I brisk my way home. Crunching down streets and slipping slightly up lanes. My breath ahead of me, suspended in front of me as mist.

Oh moon and sixpence. As I lay down six whole pounds on the beeroff counter. A bottle of wine. Riches enough for two.

Oh moon. Furtive through the scullery window, appearing almost as two. Watch over her tonight, see for me that she’s right.

Oh moon.

Get Hip To This Kindly Tip

2008-10-07T16:07:00.001+01:00

Lightly stabbed, wheezing and gripping the steering wheel, I saw you in the parking lot, your hair flying out, covering the face of your husband. Your groceries bagged, your be-hatted husband carrying them. Blood through my fingers, now dripping on to the seat, I shifted slightly, painfully, and watched as you passed.

Ice cream soda, twenty-nine cents. Beneath the panoply of lights, gaudy tubes of gold and red, she took our order. Just the one? she asked as I, quickly checking the coins in my palm, nodded in affirmation.

Denny’s. As we pulled out you saw the sign for the slots and told me how you’d never played the slots. I considered stopping and later regretted that I didn’t.

Just the two of them, Mac in shades and a cape, against the wall, both smoking. Meet us outside Ken’s you said, and bring cash, plenty of cash. Pete with his hat, complaining about the cold. Get in, you shouted. Get in and shut the fuck up.

Ines Grocery, beneath a sign for Coca-Cola, Mr Bojangles and his troop of minstrels, coal-faced and sooty-mouthed, tapped out a serenade involving bicycles, a fire hydrant, a store alarm and a great big puddle of dog piss.

There is, as the sign rightly states, no place on earth like this. One thousand animals, linked together by people clothes and people paraphernalia: pipes, cigarette holders, cars, eyeglasses, pinwheel hats, banjos. Inside, one thousand animals led by llamas and followed by racoons, bears, deer, badgers, cougars, moose, rabbits and banjo-playing chipmunks. In the shop, yours for twelve dollars, stuffed and genuine baby polar bears. Put them on your dashboard. One thousand animals, dead at Lake Placid.

Take it, they said, as we drove into town: take the sky up above, it’s all yours.

Breakfast 7am, Howard Johnson’s. Still dark enough, just, at that time of the morning to justify the neon sign. Is it too early, you asked, for cocktails? Cocktails and ice-cream? What flavour? What flavour what, the cocktails or the ice-cream? The ice-cream. What flavours have you? We’re right out of chocolate. I’ll have chocolate then. No, I said we’re right out of chocolate. I know, I heard you.

Smorgasbord, a home for antiques and deer heads. Moose heads when they can get them. At front, in front of the store, a couple of Texaco pumps and a billy shed for taking a leak. You drive in and the bell rings. They can guess, usually, by the state of you and your car, whether you’re looking for gas, antiques or a place to piss. They also serve coffee, hot, with a Coke machine out back.

It was the swimming pool that did it, and the promise of hot water. A night in this motel. Free TV and full carpeting throughout.

A couple of girls, no more than your age, parading about on the lawn dressed in tutus and tight tops, carrying between them a huge placard that read: Beautiful Cypress Gardens and All Kinds of Grass and Unusual Trees This Way. With an arrow pointing the way. Who wants to see that? I asked myself out loud. I want to see the sausage tree, you said. So I made the turn.

Lurleen B Wallace, wife of George Wallace, the only female governor of Alabama, for one year only. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, her husband said, a few years earlier. He later changed his mind.

From Monkey Island it’s a short trip to either the lagoon to the left or the lake to the right. You can go by steamer or by yacht or by dinghy. The choice is yours. Don’t forget to spend some time in the newly-refurbished amphitheater where you can watch cartoon characters of various stripe and popularity tear up the stage with their riotous antics and mouldy old dough. The restaurant, surrounded by, oh boy, the snack bar and the souvenir shop (curios only ten cents each), is home to fries, burgers, steaks, hot dogs, coffees, chowders, shakes and lobsters. Run from here, after you’ve finished eating, and climb aboard one of the fine airplanes we have standing on our private airstrip.

Jerry’s Restaurant sells shrimp, scallops and oysters. We will, I believe, partake. Have you a no smoking section? No? In which case, we’ll move on to Paul’s Restaurant, just five miles along on Route 23.

Past the hockey fields and down towards Lake Tannakeneekie, Florida’s Original Cars of Yesterday where continuous shows, roaring all day long, proudly show off the likes of the Chevron Bumblebee, the Cadillac Nicknack and the Lincoln Subaru. And if you ask nicely, the owner of Cars of Yesterday, a certain Marvin Friedman, will let you sit behind the wheel of one of those rare beauties and bounce to your heart’s content. Good old Marv.

You went through the door marked Lionesses to take a piss. I went through the door marked Lions to take a piss. No, wait, I had a shit.

In Shannon County, South Dakota – somewhere around there at least – we stepped out to spend time at the Badlands National Monument. What we saw there was 64,144 acres of wilderness that, we were told, was full of wild things and bad things, hence the park’s name. American Indians, a firing range, fossils and homesteaders all there too. Do you recall, Shannon, how when we were in Shannon County we laughed at the similarity between it and your name? It reminded us, as we said at the time, of the time we ate lunch in Paul’s Restaurant on Route 23. Burgers wasn’t it? And a couple of shakes. Anyway. In Badlands Monument do you remember how you picked up that rifle and accidentally shot dead that black-footed ferret? Fucking hell. How were we to know it was America’s most endangered mammal?

It Brings On Many Changes

2008-09-22T00:03:00.001+01:00

I shot myself in the head and missed. Sort of. It, the bullet, cut a groove right up my forehead, parted my hair and lodged itself into the bathroom wall behind me. Tiles, and crumbs of tiles, everywhere. I wasn’t dead but it hurt. And I looked a right state too, a right idiot.

The day I hanged myself was the day my wife decided to come home from work early. Me hanging there all red-faced and gasping and she, initially, rolling her eyes. Another of my practical jokes, right? Ten seconds later and she’s grabbing my legs, pushing me up, screaming and shouting, putting the window through with her foot, alerting a neighbour, cutting me down.

I’d swallowed enough pills, the doctor said, to kill a dinosaur. A dinosaur? Yes, something big, bigger than you at any rate. An elephant? Certainly an elephant. A gorilla? A gorilla, yes. A grizzly bear? Is a grizzly bear smaller than a dinosaur? What? A grizzly bear is bigger than a dinosaur, yes? Yes. So if all those pills you took could kill a dinosaur, I’m sure they’d have no trouble killing a grizzly or an elephant or a gorilla. I see. Yes. What about a blue whale?

Like an idiot, flapping about on the side of the bus, slamming my face against the window, some of the passengers screaming, some of the passengers laughing, my trousers somehow caught on the roof of the bus, the bus I’d meant to jump in front of, not on top of. Idiot.

A thin metal rod rammed into the plug socket, my wet hand on the other end. Result: Darkness. And the video clock having to be re-set.

I threw myself from the Ditherington Flax Mill Tower. I landed in a vat of flour.

Etc.

Enhance Your Outdoor Space

2008-09-12T01:02:00.002+01:00

Western blocks are there, look, just on the brow of the hill, smoke rising from the chimneys which must be the sign for breakfast. Coming?

For breakfast? With him? Coming?

I checked my watch, fiddled with my hat, muttered something about wanting to do a piss. And then walked away. Walked right away.

The spatter of bacon leaves. Fat, I mean. The spatter of sausage juice, its spray from fork holes even though I expressly told the girl, that girl there, not to prick them. What did I tell you about the fucking sausages? Eh?

I only meant to turn the sausages. They kept slipping. So I gently stabbed them, that’s all, just so I could get a grip. Under my breath: moaning fat cunt.

As it turned out, I did, in fact, need a piss. Which was lucky as I saw him looking out at me from the window, from the Western block. So I showed him. Turned and pissed on the grass, just for him to see. Steam too, that was good. Piss spatter. He waved his sausage at me.

Rows of tables, benches running just beneath. Knees tight together and bare, in shorts. Metal plates, forks and knives, plastic cups. Sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs, tea and toast. And boiled tomatoes. Mushrooms. Black pudding. Marvellous.

After breakfast we decamped (decamped, I ask you) to the borders. Where we waited. The usual thing. We waited, we watched, we listened. Nothing. A slight rustle maybe. The wind. One of those birds from the nearby aviary. We should have shot it down.

And so, later, the smoke rising from the chimneys in the Western block - a good indication of dinner. Look, he said, there’s smoke rising from the chimneys of the Western block. It must be time for dinner. Coming?

When Lonely Gambols Tire

2008-08-17T22:47:00.000+01:00

We control this part of the forest, where the stream flows under the stone bridge. In the foreground, grass and leaves, spiky stalks and white buds. Out of focus slightly, crossing the bridge, us in tunics, petticoats and bonnets, big Victorian dresses. We conjure up, for sure, fairies and a whiff of the occult. Ghosts.

Back at the house, in the pantry, a shelf of cooking apples wrapped tight in lace doilies. A hand breaks the darkness, reaching in, selecting one of the apples and pulling it from the row. Clues include: sugar sprinkles on the sleeve, flour dust on the back of the hand. A female hand: the cook, probably.

It gets darker in the forest, colder. As the light fades a girl in a short brown dress, deep red hair, bobbed and shoulder length, a large yellow belt around her waist – with square silver buckle – knee-high black leather boots. A picture of this: Jean Shrimpton. She holds keys and is in search of something. A foreground frog leaps into the stream as her high heels pass. The sun sinks lower. We hear her breath, her rapid panic.

A gate at the bottom of a huge garden, mainly lawn but bushes and trees. A policeman stepping off his bicycle. The house, distance, is suitably backlit by the emerging moon. Overall blue with appropriate silhouettes. And music.

Two of us at the piano touching out a mournful, though surprisingly lively, tune. Two others elsewhere: by the fireplace, seated and reading - on the sofa, lying down and facing the ceiling. A knock at the door stirs us. Tension. Palpable.

Creak of door and slight hallucinate. At the same moment a rattle at the window. On one side a hand reaching around the door, reaching for the light switch. On the other a hand tapping at the window. Ghosts. As we said: a whiff of the occult. The lights fall. Darkness and screams.

By morning light there are cobwebs undulating on windowsills. The sun, yellow and frosty, somehow sinister. At the bottom corner a flash of glare, star like, as a shadow passes quickly on its way. The room empty. Almost empty. But we’re all still in there, all of us. By her yellow belt, by her neck, swinging gently, undulating like breeze driven cobwebs, the Shrimpton girl, though we cannot see her face. Boots, of course, and as far as the buckle cutting into her throat. At the bottom of the garden, visible by the gate, the policeman’s bicycle. Crumbs of apple pie thrown about the table. Crumbs on our lips.

And the hands at doors and windows? Ghosts. A whiff of the occult.

Without Invulnerability He Is Sure To Be Killed

2008-07-30T01:30:00.001+01:00

I, under a bushel, far from light, tucked away my powers, stored them even, so that they, in conjunction with me, could no longer do harm.

Hidden away like that, I was, without powers, of course, fair game for all shade of crackpot and villainous menace, particularly those with whom I had previously tangled and who, as a result, bore me at least some level of grudge. They, my past tanglements of villainy and evil, were by far the worst. Their viciousness, flamed by revenge, aimed in my direction where I, for all the world powerless, could do nothing more than hide in much the same way as I had hidden my powers. Rays and bullets skimming the top of my head, singeing my hair as I ducked down or dived away in just the nick of time. For I have failed to mention so far, haven’t I, that I retained, in anticipation of such a state of affairs, the power, if you can call it that, to sense – at least sometimes – danger. Actually, now that I think of it, it was this particular power, the ability to sense danger, that caused me to retain this power, sensing, of course, the danger I would face after hiding away all my other powers. Ah.

But my, I must have been a particular kind of stupid – my friends said – to have tucked away my powers like that. Where, they asked, was the good in packing off powers such as the ability to fly, to walk on walls and ceilings, to shoot laser beams from eyes, to breathe underwater and in space, to grow as big as the moon, to lift a thousand times more than my own weight? Eh? they asked. And I, with a sigh, or a sorry shake of my head, a slight turn of my eyeballs, replied how the deaths of all those innocent people and bystanders was becoming far too much to bear. And what, I asked, turning the tables a little, am I to do with the fact that my wife was murdered by my arch enemy, thrown from the Brooklyn Bridge and I too slow, too dull-witted, to save her? Why, I asked again, must I shoulder this burden of great power and why should the responsibility to do good at all times be one I must adopt at all times? What, I continued, if I wanted, just once, to be bad a little, to live not bad but as a human being with flaws and weaknesses and a whole host of other puny, wretched shit? What then? I asked.

My powers then for a spell, a long spell, nestled neath hedgerows and overgrown from view and soon even the villains, even they, grew bored of the easy chase and hunt with the final frustrations of their inevitable misses. And I, too, then, also became bored of a life without terror and, considering that one option of suicide was not even really an option, I opted instead to don cape, mask and flashy garb, and tread once more the pavements where I, long ago, embedded fear and bullets into the hearts of evildoers and baddies everywhere. My powers, of course, dusted off and shaken down, reattached to their previous owner where, although a little rusty, they revved and spat as if nothing had taken them from their course. I was, as the newspapers gleefully declared, back.

Next ish: The Red Streak Rises!

Elastic Braces Go Twang

2008-07-24T17:04:00.002+01:00

This clown type sez: Merry Criz. He sez: Keep yr hand in. He sez: Over and over, yer gotta pull over. The clown is anti-me.

His long shoes hung up. Back of the wardrobe, still warm, twitching off the peg. He lies down, hands behind his neck, fag in mouth. There is a bare, swinging lightbulb, caramelised at the bottom, dead flies stuck to it. What looks like piss drops hanging from the ceiling. The yellow ceiling. Traces of make-up on his face, including: eye shadow, red lipstick, white pancake, reddish nose, strands of ginger plastered to his sweaty forehead. He has ruffles rising up around his neck. Big puffy sleeves. Tied trousers, striped with endless pockets. White socks, holes and confetti. Fag in mouth.

What clowns dream of when they sleep is holes burning deep into their faces. They dream of flames licking around their heads, the make-up chemicals keeping them, the flames, alive. When they wake, the clowns, they are distressed to see charred, smoking skulls in the mirror. Charred, smoking skulls aren’t funny. Children don’t like them.

There was this clown with Tourette’s whose speciality, of course, was children’s parties.

Why Not Take Flight?

2008-05-13T13:41:00.001+01:00

From the ships to the stars, not afraid. We looked down, back at what he had left behind, and saw the blobs of the giant eggs. We had escaped just in time. Not so lucky, however, our family and friends. And the rest of the people we didn’t know on our now almost dead planet.

This producer of giant eggs was either a giant bird or a giant insect. We could not be certain. Wings it had and some kind of plastic type beak. Its wings flapped and blew us over, the trees down, the cities down, the waves up. In a matter of minutes: utter destruction. And all in the blackness caused by this flying thing’s giant shadow. No wonder we took to the stars.

Our luck had ensured that at the moment of the first flap, we – my wife and I – were polishing the instruments in the cockpit of the starship vessel. Another few minutes either way and we could have been mopping floors or scrubbing toilets on a different deck. At the first flap we were pulled into our seats and readied for take off. By the fifth flap we were cutting a streak through the sky, ready to populate planets.

Net Result: Swagger

2008-05-01T14:31:00.001+01:00

Flexibility is the key here. You need to bend, bend, bend.

We were speaking, earnestly, about the newer modes of style. We indicated, without explicitly stating, our uncomfortableness in the face of these latest onslaughts. All shiny and new, praised for their newness. Not like the old days. Not like the old days at all.

We could see, both of us, through the tops of the olive stabbers rising from our glasses of Vermouth, perfect visions of the city. Perfect versions of the city.

We were speaking about the need to accommodate, the aforementioned need to bend, and how it is a requirement. Without it, that accomodation, you could well find yourself on your knees in an alley somewhere, no more backward glances allowed.

The morning crept in. It rose, the sun, far over there, climbing out from behind the skyline, those silhouettes of skyscrapers one by one. It rose and smiled, the sun, blessed our golden flakes, kissed our bare ankles and gently warmed the creases in our sheets. And behind thin closed eyelids, the certain movement of balls.

Flexibility is definitely the key here. We were bending and flitting all over the apartment. In one room, the sun. And empty bottles of vermouth.

Curds versus Whey

2008-04-30T14:51:00.003+01:00

Dear Bobby

Here is a cheese. It is a stinker and roll down hills nicely. When I rub it on my feet the smells cancel each other out so that both my stinky feet and this stinky cheese are odourless. No smell at all and that is a good thing, believe me. My feet stink, yes. But not as much as my nob. Or is it knob? I rub cheese on my nob - in fact, I fuck the cheese - and the cheese stink cannot even begin to compete with the nob stink. The nob stink win. It contaminates the cheese and fills it with disease and bigger stink. But still, my customers cannot tell. The stinkier the better they say. And only two of them have died.

I hope you enjoy cheese. Maybe you could fuck it too. Fuck it good.

Love

Tango Inparis
Cheese Bangs & Bungs Ltd

And Rest Can Never Dwell

2008-04-19T04:42:00.000+01:00

Lost, west. I took a steering direction from the wrong person. From you. It’s my own fault.

We cruised through towns and villages, avoiding cities and motorways. We saw post boxes and post offices. Duck ponds and small, functional bridges. We saw planted trees and boxes of tomatoes on windowsills. We passed horses and bos-eyed rabbits. Nature couldn’t touch us.

Through windscreen, past broken fly bones and red smears, we viewed tiny paths of escape. The best thing about it all? The pubs. The best thing about anything? The pubs. We drank until we were drunk and ignored the locals. We drove, drunk, taking the risk of colliding with goatherds. The devil took us.

And we drove like devils through the vast joyless grubs of new eco-towns. Eco hamlets. Me mashed on the finest lager, you destroyed by the shittiest cider. We hoped – openly, loudly – that we would never get lost again.

There's Nothing You Can Do

2008-03-12T16:41:00.003Z

The World May Mock
Climb inside this skin, this suit I wear, and see for yourself how I, immistakeable in this rotten garb, have to negotiate the taunts and terrors thrown my way by the widest range of evildoers, baddies and villains. No wonder I sigh mid-flight. No wonder I cry.

They Don’t Suspect My Real Power
I have green fingernails that scratch, sometimes, at the nape of my neck. I have soreness upon all parts of my body. My rashes and boils are legion. The marks on my face are lesions. In time, when all pressed together, this grab bag of putrescence will form together as one. From the tiniest pimple to the largest oozing wound they will take their places within the designated order of things. And when they are quite ready, I will emerge, phoenix-like, from my cocoon. I mean, from my ashes. And I will bring down the very stars, those stars from afars.

Trapped By The Terrible
There is a walk that takes you from one end of the hallway to the other. Passing hanging picture frames, small occasional tables, yellow telephones, black and white photographs in stainless steel frames, plug sockets, a mahogany hat stand and friezes of varying stripe and shade, you will eventually alight upon the first step towards your certain doom. Take it. Please, take it.

Far Greater Than Yours
Listing, we bobbed along in pretty much the usual, ordinary fashion until we reached dry land. The beach, stained red from the blood of mown down pirates, offered among its treasures a magnificent church built mostly of sand. From within we could hear the cries of sailors demanding salvation and protection, pleading their all, denying their stati as pirates. One by one, they were thrown from the doors, onto the beach, where they were felled by unseen and deadly rifles. We, here, on our gently bobbing dromond, took sight of one another, took sight also of our captured booty and spoils, and decided, wisely, that we would continue bobbing on our way. Behind us the screams. Could we tell, or not – I fail to recall – whether they were the cries of men or the screeches of seagulls?

Don’t Dare Miss
In watchtower, supposedly watching, Denzil had to prise open his eyelids with three of his tiniest fingers. His co-watcher that night, Maurice, implored him to keep steady his eyes, to keep them open so they could have a better chance of making it through the night - without knives or machetes being plunged deep into their heads. But Denzil, though reassuring Maurice with his vigorous nods, had no intention of keeping them from harm through wakefulness and open eyes. He was waiting, instead, for Maurice to vacate his watch so that he could put into practice his newly-invented night time killing machine that specifically picked off those who would dare, at night, to bring harm to Denzil and his good pal Maurice. Let them come, thought Denzil later as he, for the very last time, took that slow walk down into sleep.

What Chance Have You?
With that gaggle of fuckable women. Really, what chance?

Take Over All Of Earth
On sunlit yellow morn I decided along with my fellow nitwits to rope myself to the house of commons better to make my protest against the plans this government has to let more people fly something I vehemently disagree with hence my appearance on chat shows and youtube-ish vids where if nothing else I get to expose myself as the middle-class twit you guessed I would be with my floppy hair rubbery lips and pale dead skin all the while making specious points and trotting out guaranteed rousing slogans and stuff that are guaranteed to win the minds of the halfwits I so dearly wish to appeal to as I call for them one by one on this fine and yellow morn as we make our way past the cabbages who populate the streets with their earth-murdering vehicles like sheep as they sit there idly taking in all the crap the government feeds them so they can go home to their televisions and entertainment and gape bovine-like at things that keep them in a stupor while I along with my similarly well-heeled toerag cunts of friends and associates do battle on their behalf to do nothing less than to save the planet and moreover to save the people from themselves it’s the very least we could do.

Too Sure of Himself
Night falls and this rain spattered street offers up the chance of pointed reflection and/or illumination to the hangdog heads of the broken Victorian street lamps dotted somewhere above. A pair of leather spats, clacking (from stomped on steel Blakeys) on slight cobbles and/or shattered paving slabs, step ominously toward the weathered front door step of Doctor Vignette Alcarne. Over there, across the street and tucked into, ever so slightly, a black alley, the dappled shallow face of a female observer, clearly beautiful and clearly in some state of agitation. Will she cry out? She will not. For the moment she stands, immobile, watching as the owner of the aforementioned spats takes first one step then two more before reaching the very step that allows him to reach out and pull, hard, on the brass doorbell that sits with some authority before him. The house rattles from the clanging of bells, almost drowning out the sound of the clacking spats as they quickly race back down the steps and off into the night, closely followed by the female we had earlier spied who now passes flashing between the above street lamps as she gives chase to the figure in spats. Up ahead, leaning against a coiled iron lamp post, our spats-wearer wheezes and laughs, almost hysterically, as the female flies into him, the two of them in tight embrace as he twirls the girl around. It's your turn next, says Spats, your turn to ring and run away.

Tribute To Teenagers
A fifteen-year-old boy kicked and stamped to death a woman because she was dressed as a Goth. The court heard her facial injuries were so severe, paramedics did not know what sex she was. Tests indicated she had been kicked and stamped to death, with the pattern of some footwear still on her head. The accused had started the violence, with a flying kick to the head of her boyfriend. The gang, encouraging each other and laughing, punched, stamped and jumped on his head until he was unconscious. As the woman kneeled down, cradling her boyfriend's head on her lap and calling for help, the accused turned on her. A second boy kicked her in the head, with the accused joining in. Paramedics found the couple lying side by side, covered in blood and unconscious.

A Scene You Will Never Forget
I don't know if I like it out there any more. I like it in here, sitting in my pants, staring at this screen. I can control the world from in here. I can keep myself in check in here. Outside I hear the wind and see the sunshine but still I prefer it in here. Except, of course, for those moments when I venture outside. That's when I like it outside and wonder why I prefer to spend most of my time inside. If it is a day where I plan to leave the house, it takes me all of the morning to put on my socks. It takes me all of the morning to shower and shave. I nominate a time when I should leave the house. One o'clock in the afternoon is good. That way I can get out and beat the crowds of young mothers who clog up my Somerfield aisles. At three o'clock in the afternoon I like to be back home. It gives me two or three hours before I'm joined by my family. I sometimes pick them up from work and take them to the pub where we stay for another three hours. Drink, food and then bed. Drink, food and bed and sometimes sex.

Such Merciless Foes
Lifeless, empty veins, oh fatty. There be his death. Of boiled meats and sweets. He crammed then in, without thinking. Jars and wrappers all over the house. The police called, shouting through the letterbox. No answer. Is he always like this? He would swing from a high beam but the beam would surely break. He would drown himself in the bath but he would never fit in the bath. He would hurl himself in front of a train but he would never have the strength to hurl himself anywhere (and besides, as his had son pointed out, the train would surely bounce off him). He hacks then at his wrists with a meat cleaver that is still dripping with the blood of that animal thing he's just gorged himself on. When the police, many weeks later, break down the door and discover the scene, they at first think they have stumbled across some kind of bloodbath murder. Oh, you disappointed police.

The House of Ideas
That gaggle of fuckable women were passing my house and they gave me the following idea: I will invite them in, ply them with poisoned pussy juice and then take advantage of them sexually as they lie there, not quite comatose, conscious enough and uninhibited enough to respond, in the desired way - that is, in a good way - to my depraved advances. The fun I will have. What an idea!

Not A Dream
The real world was a realm. Not just a figment. I could see it, beyond the planets, hovering on what can only be described as the horizon. The black horizon. The real world, to my surprise, had rings around it, thin yellow ones. They were tight to the real world's surface and I could see, by stretching my telescopic neck as far as it would go, that the real world occupants were having a world of fun playing on those rings. Some used them as cycle tracks, or racing car tracks, while others picnicked upon them, or simply walked around them, enjoying the view. While spying the real world it became apparent to me, through my circuits and wires, that I would perhaps find a better home there than the home I have here. Do this, do that, command my masters and I am hardwired to comply. But this glimpse of the real world has given me a certain hope, sparking life into so far unused electrodes and fuses and bits. If I keep looking I am convinced that the real world will give me the energy I need. Then they will be sorry, my masters of too much hair and silly green faces.

Who, or What, Is He?
He is a cunt, the bloke next door. Sitting at his table, writing his essays. His black bags, full of garden shite, still blocking our shared passageway. I would approach him about this but I know, just judging from his ugly cunt of a face, that he will give me lip. A fight will ensue and I will do and say things I will later regret. Plus, now that the wind in the weather is picking up, I find it doubly annoying that the little bearded cunt can't even be arsed to pull the latch down on his back gate which slams shut every twelve seconds. I would close it myself but I know, just judging from his ugly cunt of a face, that he will give me lip about this. A fight will ensue and I will do and say things I will later regret. I should move house and leave him to his life of unbridled cuntiness.

You’re Not Seeing Things
No, you're not seeing things. That really is a gaggle of fuckable women doing all manner of wonderful things to me. And without so much as a sniff of my poisoned pussy juice.

It Was Tough and So Was Love

2008-02-18T01:00:00.000Z

My meagre surrounds are a humble beginning where the sheep, outside the window, can be heard whispering, the moon rustling. In that I was born I was the first of seven and my grandfather and grandmother were of foreign extraction, immigrants no less, who arrived at these shores with nary a nickel to their breeches. Their first born too, my father, met my mother while rodeo-ing or shipbuilding or standing lucklorn by black and white factory gates, Victorian spikes asplendour. They met, married, just in time for me, soon joined by varying degrees of sibling, some female, others male. I was a shy kid but also a cocky kid, mostly alone but also often surrounded by gangs of people. Women mainly who gave me the keen understanding of the world and its surrounds as I now understand it and filter it through my work. I’ve said it a million times and I’ll have to say it again: women know stuff and do stuff that men, well, you know. It marks me out, right?

And I was a quiet, industrious kid, special in many ways but normal in many other ways, happy to run with the gang, no shoes, holes all over, empty stomachs and railroad cars. There was a tragedy, an incident, which set me on this course for life, although I am far too young to recall it, it set me here for life. My brother crushed neath the fall of iron girders as we strode the flips and flies of the new monuments to American dominance, the skyscrapers. We climbed them high these beacons and while we were mere scraps of kids, me seven perhaps, my brother five, I knew then, even as I cannot remember it now, that the American dream was twofold and double-edged and you had to be careful while on that climb because the American dream could literally crush you to death. How very fucking profound. And so there, forged, me and all you need to know about me and my attitude to life, to women and to work. You should, I would recommend, deploy a permanent bookmark here.

So, of course, things were never the same and though I cherished my brother’s memory I was guilty for most of the while due to the influence of some religion or other, thrown down on me by grieving parents who sought solace in the faith of their youth and sought also to solace some for us. Well, girls and masturbation and dreadful, dirty thoughts that caused me all kind of magnificent conflict as I dashed between good and evil and thought for a while how I would become a professional practitioner of my faith – I took the exams and everything – but looming, and I’ll cut to the chase, my teenage years and early adulthood where I, poet and painter, dived the delights of art and women and never once looked back. Except now, except for here.

In those early days it was better, naturally, and everyone was so young and free, unlike today where they are old, even the young, and bound in all manner of metaphysical and otherwise chains. Smoking cigarettes and whiskey, the freedom push of jazz, it was, from my one-room, rat-infested apartment, mouldy bread and a roll call of all the names you know now but didn’t know then: Happy Stamper, Rick Neck, Todd Refoli, Gordon Zola, Benedict Benson, Fisheye Lens, Nathan Foley, Ichabod Dent. They were in their youth then and death, which took them all too young, was mere years away and how cruelly they were taken, me documenting their demise through song, poetry, painting or photography, whatever took my fancy. Happy days indeed.

As for love, my first wife was a skinny lovely, the girl of sort of next door who, in high school, I promised too soon I would marry. There was a pregnancy, an abortion, a cause of some distance between us. She took it at first, this living, but soon grew tired of the endless art and the endless nights of bohemian fancy, I’m sure you have the picture. I met and fell in love with someone else, a ridiculous one-sided love which took me to Europe for a while where I almost met my end in either the Seine or the Thames. And then an endless stab of girls, each with their own merits, plus a brief dabble with homosexuality where I took it up the ass like a thoroughbred man. But the truth of this journey through love is that only now, in the past twenty years, have I found someone who knows me and fills me and completes me and all that bullshit, where we live, the two of us, surrounded by our stories of the past, our collections of, ha, imaginary snapshots, occasional visits from our children who are, of course, money-driven disappointments or somesuch and not the free spirits we pushed them to be, the irony far too ho-hum to mention. But we fade here as we’ll surely slip away.

At around the same time, in those early days, my first book was published, or my first exhibition exhibited. I became, almost overnight, the hottest new sensation. And this, as you’ll know, is from hereon the stuff you know. Wait, if you can then, for the joys of volume two. Amen.

It Leans Sometimes, Thataway

2008-02-11T02:34:00.000Z

Me through the kitch. And was making my way through the kitch, late one night, picking off shards of Bourneville from the fridge. When I spied a grey puddle of unspecified wetness on the floor, tight to the skirting board, right neath the little radiator that mostly warms the cat. That radiator, I thought, needs fixing.

Unexamined radiator, painted shade of cream, sat in that kitch safe and unmolested. Old rectangular length of shit. It sat, moreover, in the company of other neglects: the dead television set in the middle of the floor, the upturned bicycle before the patio doors, the broken legs of the piss-stained settees, the broken frames of the piss-stained settees, the small table on wheels encrusted with cum, mountainous black bags of filth blocking the back door. Endless snatches of disorder and dirt, forms of discarded clothes, plates, dried stuff, liquid spills, spatters of moists. Tread it carefully, if you must tread it at all.

The puddle reflection neath that radiator, glows of the kitchen spotlights, shades of nuance through colour and lesser lights. A view of the kitch, caught in gentle waves of shimmering grey. The kitch in miniature, distorted, its sea view if you like. Spoilt in irregular taps by drops of falling radiator liquid, grey. My Bourneville in it, darker, more dangerous, somehow more alluring.

Every Light is King

2008-01-10T11:50:00.001Z

And Christmastide was gently roving beyond the braw brichts, moonlit nichts and crisp promises of Hogmany fun. Frosted pies, nutmegged wine and three goes on a pulling cracker. Ach, oy, rows of Chinese puzzles, palms of curling fishies, fists of minipacksacards. All a wrapped and all a ready to go.

Though, course, the New Year revelations were not without their moments of stillness, their endless leagues of dullness. Despite the hats and the blows, the curling things with feathers on the end. Even in spite of the stars on the actual night and the frost and the promise of better things yet to come. We rang it in and it oozed past us with the softest kind of whimper.

Revelries and resolutions.

Better for being free, costing nothing, the tree stood tall in the back room, dominating the back end of that room, shadowing out the light that shone through beacon like from the back neighbour’s security lamp, the selfish ugly cunt. It stood, that tree, wrapped glorious in glistening silver fur, coiled with tiny coloured lights, its branches a bobbin even as they swayed from the weight of brittle chocolates and mirrored baubles. Atop, at summit, precarious on spiny steeple, the silverest, brightest star that your eyes did ever aglow. And glorious further, blessed even, by cunt neighbour’s selfish, blinding light.

It stands, still, proud and greenish, two and a half weeks later. You take it down. No, you take it down.

The advantage is sort of mine this start to the new year in that I am free, free I tell you, to come and go as I please and touch myself as I please in places where I dared not have ventured before. Ever before. That is, I sit in my pants and as I sit in my pants, my underwear, attending to this and doing that, I allow myself a roam, as unconscious a roam as possible. Given my previous fastidiousness in this type of area this is quite somewhat of a movement forward for me as I roam and caress and touch myself in places that I’d previously dared not dare. I am, as we speak, reduced to lightly tickling the hairs on my toes.

But the past is just that and I have learned to put Christmas and the New Year revelries behind me and march forward with a determination that was borne, I admit, from the whole business of it being a new year. My one small concession, a tradition we go through every year, is to leave the tree standing, bedecked in all its festive jewels, even as we mutter in front of it that it will shortly have to go. The end of February is enough for it, is enough for me.

House, Plus Environs

2007-11-27T16:34:00.000Z

What hi, with bread on the side, a bread knife still sharp by the bread board. Crumbs, of course, appropriately and decoratively scattered, also on the side, some on the bread board, a kind of formation of a symbol or a clue, something that could point us towards. It has a sheen, this bread, a definite cover, shiny and hard, you could, if you leaned in close, see your face in it. The bread knife, sharp and ominous, is placed somehow, its position a kind of perfection. It too points. And disturbing somewhat, more clues, a tea cup and saucer, the tea cold and surfaced, half drunk, lipstick on the edge, the lip. Then a small tin, a small watercolour, bales of hay in a field somewhere caught full by the sun. Shadows on the side. Missing throughout: a burning cigarette or, at least, a stub with its museumed, tell-tale, length of ash.

Thus the kitch. Where The Poet, as he insists I call him, spends at least a good half of his day. Surprisingly, as I say, to note that amid all the significant kitch detritus there resides nothing that could point to his status as a poet or, rather, The Poet, that is, to wit: nothing in the way of pens, paper, quills, stationery and similar bundles etc. No dictionaries nor reference books. Nothing to indicate the full life of vital life that The Poet quite clearly inhabits at some point in his travels, given his dexterity and skilfulness in relaying the rich, writerly life that fair burns the pages of his slender tomes, soaring them into a rich, full life as vital and as urgent as his own. In fact, he says at one point, he hopes his death in this house will be a death in the kitch for where else better to die than inside the obviousness – the obvious – richness and fullness of my killer kitchen, replete with gadgets and formulations, that help me to serve up writerly dishes beyond the kill of other good men if, indeed, any such good men do, in fact, still exist and I doubt they do. His opinion on the war: We shouldn’t have gone in and we should have tried Bush and Blair as war criminals, not Saddam, who of course was disgusting but let us never forget who put him there in the first place and who the real mass murderers are.

Just fucking eat it! he suddenly shouts to his teenage daughter, Marie Celeste, who has spent the past twenty minutes turning over the contents of a small ready-to-eat salad bowl with the wrong end of a plastic ready-to-use fork. She is sat, as all of his family sit, at the far end of the kitch, away from the rich, full life that The Poet inhabits there at the ripe end of the kitch. It is, he says, if you’ll forgive the pun, poetic justice, this familial arrangement. Anyway, he says, she’s a compulsive salad tosser that one.

Waves Wash Over It

2007-10-17T16:28:00.000+01:00

Down the entry, past the nappies, the old shit and the piss-stained gay pornography, there’s first of all a faint smell of death. There are low walls, kicked down in parts, kids in nappies running around. In one of the yards a Sikh fella holding down a chicken. He takes off its head with an axe while the body, naturally, runs around the yard spraying out small spots of blood. The children are delighted. Despite the death, it is all somehow removed from death on this bright and significant morning.

Tapping at the window there’s Mad Tony and he’s dancing, if that’s the right word, to the music from our front room: Bad Company’s Feel Like Makin’ Love. His sister, Angela, says that my dad plays rubbish music. Strange music, she says. She eases Tony away even though I tell her it’s fine for him to continue pressing his big ugly retarded face against the glass of our window. The spittle, the slime, it’s fine.

Early 1973, Spidey has lost his mask and is forced to steal a replacement from a fancy dress shop that specialises in superhero costumes. Thwipp and he pulls it through the skylight. Of course, this mask being a mere novelty, it doesn’t have the ingenious white plastic sheets that cover his real mask’s eyeholes. For the duration of his battles with Doctor Octopus and Hammerhead we are witness to Peter’s baby blues, staring through.

Rummaging through the sack of clothes to get to the bottom, to remove the small pieces of lead that were put there to increase the weight so they’d get a few pence more, maybe an extra quid, for this sack of clothes. He chides the kids, ticks them off with relative good humour, the sort of thing he used to do himself when he was their age but tailed with a warning: make sure that this first time is the only time. His eyes brighten when he spies the folding white stick, fingers it and offers the boy two pounds for it. Yes, says the boy, glad of the money and, of course, unaware of the stick’s antique and Edwardian status.

Every Twig is Laden

2007-10-01T17:14:00.000+01:00

Bless the corners, he’s a-coming round the mountain, his preferred route home, avoiding the highways and byways, the shop signs and caravan parks. I, he says every time he steps triumphant through that front door, once again traversed those mountainous cuts through snowy glades and jags in order to be here with you in a state that’s purer, by far, than the state I would have arrived in had I taken a different, warmer, more urban, route. And thus he spakes, this Morton Whistler, civil servant of government depts and socials, traveller of spectacular, scary views.

And though these curved journeys were outwardly blessed by Gwendolyn, Morton’s fair and naked wife, she kept hidden her dismay at the thought of how these scenic routes kept him away from her by a matter of at least three hours every evening. Hours they could have spent together, embracing and naked, making love by the fireside and piano after the kids had gone to bed. It had, actually, bugged her somewhat for years the question of whether her husband’s protracted icy journeys were, in fact, a way of avoiding the warm embraces she so fervently craved.

Gwendolyn’s dismay was open somewhat to at least a few of the friends she kept and valued who, of similar spousal neglect and hue, were appropriately sympathetic and cooing to her hot complaints. Mine, said one, prefers women of the larger knockers. Mine, said another, runs a Scout group three evenings a week and is away during the summer. Mine, adds a third, likes to stay at work, working all hours, to bring home the crusts, the crumbs and the bacon that he thinks we expect. The point, chips in a fourth, is that we all have our crosses of burden.

And what of Morton’s spark, his journey through twinkling crevasses, through ice bright glow and steely glace? Shelves shift as he passes, the hot burst of exhaust and stabs of chemicalled poison as they slowly collapse, those icy shelves, blocking old trails, creating new grooves, every different day new and unexplored, unspoilt vistas for him to tread down, to cut a lonely path through.

Gwendolyn, her adventure: rises one morning to raise his breakfast and kids, to get them packed to school early to give her the chance, while her husband organises his hat and scarf combo, to sneak unseen into the boot of his car where she’ll remain all day accompanied only by her small knapsack of torch, book, snacks and water. Warm clothing, of course.

She is discovered minutes later when Morton throws his briefcase into the boot.

Through Footless Halls of Air

2007-09-12T23:35:00.000+01:00

Laughter-silvered wings.
It began with violence in the sky. A great crash and a fill of the black sky, certain splashes of violence illuminating, for split seconds, the horses on the wall, the strange circus scenes, all sorts of previously unnoticed angles. He cowered sometimes beneath the sheets. Brave at other times, even as far as stepping slowly across the room – as if they might see or hear him – to watch from the window. From the outside you would see a boy’s face, perfectly framed, dazzled by the horror but lit up all the same.

The tumbling mirth.
All of his dreams had long since vanished. Of course. But as he remembered himself as a younger man, he struggled to recall what those dreams were, the dreams he had claimed to have lost. That is, he struggled to remember his real hopes, his real aspirations, and not just the ridiculous imaginings that, truth be told, still peppered his mind. It’s like, he said, it’s like I’ve just sat there.

I have danced the skies.
I watched, once, as they fought in the sky. I was at the window, my face cold against the warmth of the glass. It was dark and I should have been asleep. My mother and father downstairs, beneath the table, behind the settee. A fighter pilot is all I wanted to be.

Wheeled and soared and swung.
I dreamt last night that I could fly. First through the streets of London. I willed myself, knowing myself to be in a dream, knowing I could do just as I liked. I took to the London streets, soared, rose a bit, flew down, then, into the streets of Manhattan. The Chrysler Building my beacon. And the noise, the people. Me the flier. I flew.

Chased the shouting wind.
Distant music, a rumble. Perhaps a crash through the clouds. Up there, in the sky, a great grey superhero whizzing by.

The long, delirious burning blue.
As these walks into parks, the countryside, along the beach attest, they offered the blankness of sky, the canvas if you like, on which he could sketch his dreams that were, at least for a small part, not so ridiculous after all. There in the big skies. Plus full observance of the things that fly. To nature he turned.

Of sun-split clouds.
Aviation shifts, notebooks of style: Progress of lift, a poor start. First a wave, the faintest shimmer, then the slightest rise. We have, as they say, lift off.

Wind-swept heights with easy grace.
First it was The Time Bider. I always hated the name, suggested by my first wife. A master of the past, the present and the future. He could fly, of course, and fly through time. His name though, as I tried to explain at the time, implied stasis, stillness, rather than motion. She had, my first wife, very thick legs. In fact, I’m not sure that I even liked her.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
Then The Red Kite. Who flew, or floated, while attached to the mains via a long electrical cable. When the days weren’t windy he didn’t go out.

My eager craft.
At secret gatherings in glorified sheds behind dunes they hatched, him and his new-found friends, in the late nineteen-fifties, newer ways of flight, taking to the beach with various contraptions, flight like Orville and Wilbur Wright. Soared majestically, as they always say, some of them, while others spluttered and coughed, coming down to earth with hard bangs even as their engines sang. A mixture of wings and flapping, rotating jiggups, gliding canvasses, rocket engines, the power of the wind. Good stabs at flying saucers.

The surly bonds of earth.
At that height, with that kind of damage, your only choice is down. You imagine, for some reason, as you fall back towards the earth, that you will survive. It’s as if the earth is calling you down, telling you to stop being so foolish, reassuring you that she will look after you. So even though you know you would be better remaining in the sky, you tell yourself that the earth, where you truly belong, could never be so cruel. And at the moment when you resign yourself to that irresistible pull from below, your engines hack themselves into life. Not today mother, not today. And away you go.

High in the sunlit silence.
Hiding behind clouds bent into shapes like circus animals, coloured slightly from the previous night’s debris, the aftermath of battle wow. You should have seen it. Up all night, some of us, observing from terra firma those black dots of birds in flight crashing into each other, some of them spiralling down. We saw parachutes we think. We saw flames. Some of us saw the terrified faces of soon to be dead pilots or maybe not. It was, after all, night. But this morning the wash of the sun and you’d really expect scorch marks or clouds in the shape of death signifiers instead of this canvas of circus animals coloured, of course, by the sun.

(Titles taken from the poem High Flight by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr.)

Cut Brutally Into A Sky

2007-08-24T16:59:00.000+01:00

There was, fortunately, the familiar clink and the raising of glasses. Me at the back of the room, wry smile, cigar, dolly bird on each arm. My glass, as it were, spilling over. A toast to me, of course, a toast to me and my fifty successful and distinguished years as Interstellary Ambassador to Terraform of Plastic Waves. Captain, so to speak, of that wondrous and artificial planet made, as its name implies, from plastic.

But first.

I arrived there in blast rocket, cascaded down the ladder to dusty floor of fibreglass rocks and bits. Blue, strange, luminous. Cough, ack, from hideous chemicalled spores, my breathing apparatus grabbed, strapped on. Bounding, with gigantish bravery leaps, I posted fast my flag and searched out through supersonic binoculars the rendezvous crater where I was to meet my nemesis, arch enemy, the fellow who was for a time the leader of that other plastic planet before we erased it completely from the skies. Stimorol, that’s him. We met in that crater, I offed him quickly as he begged for his life. I was a sight more ruthless then and, in truth, I regret Stimorol’s death. We could, as many later suggested, have become good friends and even, maybe, brought a little bit of peace to the universe. Or, at least, to our little part of it.

Halten you swine, you will obey me. Are the words I used thereafter when addressing my cosmological adversaries. Of which there were plenty. No dead though, never again. Halten you swine, magic space words, always doing the trick.

I was in the vastness of space on my brand new planet and the brainwave I had was to create, from its very plastic, a kind of world that mirrored the look and feel of New York from the nineteen fifties. If I had to pick a specific year I would have said 1954, a little before the advent of rock and roll and at a time that captured in the hearts and minds and false memories that perfect picture of affluent America with its big shiny cars, gleaming teeth and polished hair-dos. Chrome, lots of chrome. And a boldness in design, especially typography. So that’s what we did. This planet, Terraform, a lot like New York of the nineteen fifties. Its plastic ensured, of course, a degree of permanence and sparkle that could not be found in the drear fade of, say, Cuba and all those funny little places stuck/lost in the memories of time. It was then, my planet, a simulacrum of something much better. I still miss it.

My plastic New York planet was orbit spinning in territories unknown. A bright plastic beacon, skyscrapers beaming, a gleaming attract to vast leathes of pirates, space filth and kidnappers. No wonder then we were captured, for a while, by the Tendril Bugs. Bastards, the lot of them. Big bug eyes, loads of tendril type tentacle things of indeterminate length, snaking through everything, down drains and alleyways but also up nostrils, in sockets and straight through skin pores. Millions of dead, our planet almost destroyed. What to do but take a stand? So I did.

And here I am now, being honoured by my peers and plentiful admirers. These dolly birds, avaricious little bints, aching my arms. The cigar choking my throat. But I smile still, faintly, the distance between me and them heavily implied.

Blurred Clusters Beat Your Soft Rimming

2007-08-09T15:36:00.000+01:00

Procession of mankind, Gavilast gulping, threading its way to the park, squeezing tight through iron railings. A path through the grass, tamped down by tiny footsteps making their way to the bandstand: mankind without the bile, free from indigestion and heartburn, free from the pull of stomach acid.

The lovers are walks in the park, delicate whispers of grass and the gentle breeze of the sun. They are crickets chirping, glasses clinking, ducks clucking. In the middle of the pond a couple of lovers on a boat are held up by a gang of youths, also in a boat. They, the youths, steal the male lover’s watch, the female lover’s handbag: mobile phone, lipstick, condoms, notebook, pen, iPod nano (plus Philips earphones), chapstick, Wrigley’s Extra. A few weeks later the youths are in court, charged with piracy. The lovers are, of course, elsewhere, tamping down the grass.

My desire, such as it is, is to go back to college and do something creative, something in the arts. I have such a need, such a desire, to express myself. Failing that, I might set up my own business. Sell my house, buy another house, in the country somewhere, express myself through my living. Through, I mean, local crafts and the creation of a big community noise. I could shout down the well, cross streams on stepping stones, fall down dead from the effects of cloudy cider. Engage in rimming parties, get myself rimmed in the pond.

As the poet, he dreams, stares at the ocean or the sky, loses himself in the rural, the pastoral. Beneath his feet, trapped on the soles of his boots, smaller snatches of nature breathing their last. A rhythm as he marches the hills. His tongue, like his pen, firm but pliant, wet, explorative, intrusive.

What flies through broken windows, a growth of midges perhaps, a swarm of mosquitoes, a bevy of bees, wasps and flying ants, small birds, ladybirds, dragonflies, mayflies, various beetles, hummingbird hawk-moths, ginger tappers, mosquitoes, fruit flies, house flies, pollen flies, butterflies, horseflies, crane flies, fungus gnats, sandy flies, deer flies? No, tiny flying robots. In the shape of pterodactyls. Coming through broken windows in order to cause me pain.

Damn their knife-like heads and pointed jaws. Said the zoo keeper/gateman in charge of locking the gates of the dinosaur adventure park as the pterodactyls, to a man, flew out, one by one, nudging the gatekeeper into myriad bruising and eventual collapse, heaped upon the ground. Get up you twat. Said his boss and arch-rival (that is, arch love rival) as he prodded him, the gateman, repeatedly with the wrong end of a brush. That is, the handle end of a brush. Grabbing it, the end of that brush, twisting it from his boss’s hands, the gateman rammed it, the brush, deep through the top of his, his boss’s, head, the entry point through his mouth, up through the roof of his mouth. The pterodactyls, frozen in horror, gazed hungrily at the blood that flowed quickly, prettily, down the brush handle, over its head, dripping lazily from the hairy filaments stitched into the brush’s head. Dripping on to the gateman’s hands. The pterodactyls licked their spiny, shiny lips, whistled through hollow, lazy bones.

Overenthusiastic rimming from a pierced tongue. In the hot tub, in the countryside, right outside the shed/shack with the broken window access for gangs of flying thingies. The water, pink.

I sold my poetry collections at local craft fayres (note, as they say, fancy spelling) and fetes. Published by local small press, Gradgrind (publishers of local small press type poets), I was featured on the back page both pictorially and through the biographical blurb that touched on my love for nature, my passion for green politics and my taste for real ale. The photograph, taken by my ex-wife some many years ago – black and white - depicted me thinner, sans beard, more hair, no glasses. My dalliances in those days with all kinds of fascinating, arty women: big tits, long hair, freckles. You can’t beat them. Really.

Pneumatic powered supergirl, The Red Streakess. Sky flyer, shape shifter, brain scanner. Strength of both body and mind. Freckles, fantastic breasts, legs as long as the days, hair as bright as the sun, breath as cool as the breeze. You would die for her as she would die for you, for all of us. As she did, blown to, as they say, smithereens, carrying a bomb, a device, out of harm’s way, protecting the children. The night sky a full streak of her goodness and purity, her spirit a soar into the heavens, a flicker to the stars. Blessed her being, remembrance our joy.

Refuel on a Fun-Filled Portion

2007-07-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

I bore myself sometimes. I bore others sometimes, most times. I was talking to this stripper who said that her job, as she saw it, was to get me (that is, all men) to want to touch her. Good job. She also said – and I was listening, believe me – that she and the other girls (that is, the other strippers) take delight in the fact that the men they warm up, so to speak, will be thinking only of them (that is, the strippers) while later fucking their girlfriends/wives. It’s why I do it, to fuck other women over.

I was talking to this lesbian who. Well, who first of all told me that she wasn’t, in fact, a lesbian. She said: You know the Richard Briers character in Ever Decreasing Circles? You remind me, she continued, of him – what with your petty bourgeois notions of sexuality and your desire to remain in your narrow, and narrow-minded, comfort zone where all is as it should be and where straights like you (did she say straights, really?) force on to people like me your strict and reductive definitions of who we are, either gay or straight or maybe bisexual, but I’m none of those, I refuse to be boxed in, especially by the likes of you. Get fucked, I replied. Anyway, this lesbian had a girlfriend who, she said, made leather fetish gear, bondage rubbish, all that. Me: Yada, what, the sort of stuff, you mean, that only people who don’t like sex go in for, people who, you know, need to dress up like clowns in order to be able to enjoy sex, who also believe, with absolutely no good reason, that their dopey costumes and cretinous antics somehow make them radical, alternative, transgressive and who also believe that their pathetic preferences and dismal shebangs are something other than witless, clichéd expressions of their repressions and anxieties, rooted as they are in their utter conservatism, despite what they believe to the contrary?

You’re boring me, she said, this lesbian. Well, I said, you can’t have everything.

But I was talking to this lesbian stripper who said that she really liked getting the straight girls moist.

Moist?

Why would I pay you good money if I can neither touch you nor touch myself? If you danced naked in front of me – privately, in that booth you were talking about – I’d want to fuck you. And boy, would I be annoyed and frustrated if I couldn’t. Why would I want to put myself through that?

So you can think about me later, she said. Didn’t you listen to what I told you, earlier?

The stripper collapsed at the table, drunk. She wasn’t in the middle of stripping. She was off duty, in the pub. She was, in fact, out with her very good friends who love her and respect her and who, as it turned out, quite rightly took offence at the way I was referring to her, objectifying her, stripping her of her personality, reducing her to the status of mere sex object when, of course, I should have treated her with the respect that was, of course, her due, beyond her status as a stripper which, of course, I should have realised was a mere nothing as far as this girl was concerned, what with there being so much more to her than the business of taking her clothes off and telling me all about it. Of course. My apologies sweetheart, my apologies.

Collapsed at the table like that I imagined myself in quick scenarios where I was watching this girl, objectifying her to within an inch of her life. I put her in a cab. Home, you need to go home to your house of sin and debauchery. You need to ease yourself through beaded curtains into your boudoir of ill repute, satin sheets, soft lighting, music, perfume, a sick bucket, a drawer full of dildos. Sleep beauty, sleep ye, and I will touch you while you sleep. No, wait, I will masturbate over you, over your sleeping form before realising that I cannot even touch myself. How could I debase myself so? How could I think of you, stripper, in that way? Beast, rapist, disrespecter of women, foul fiend.

The next morning I heaved dry air and tiny scraps of stomach wall, green slime. I nibbled toast, drank tomato juice long and deep. Down bile, down.

Lesbians also. My apologies. Your oppression is widespread. Your grab for the good times, for acceptance, has been a long grab, so far a loose grab. But that grab will tighten, it will, someday, become a grip. They will have to prise you from all that you have grabbed and gripped, gotten hold of. Don’t let go, whatever you do. O sisters.

This lesbian walked into the pub. I waved as she passed, raised my glass. She repaired to a table behind me, joined her girlfriend, the fetish bird, sat down. I turned, smiled, raised my glass. She smiled, weakly, the lesbian, barely a smile, maybe a grimace, probably a grimace. She stood, went to the bar, leaving her girlfriend alone. I pulled up a stool and asked: how fares the fetish game? The leather fetish game, your bondage and all that?

Repaired?

Me, the phallocrat. Not the me me, of course. The this me, the me here, the me that bores sometimes, most times etc. The me who says things like:

I was in, late at night, fucking my wife when she popped in, the stripper, large as life, drunk at the table. Wake up, I pleaded silently, wake up, do the dance, help me out here. What you need, she said, is some of this leather gear here. It was spread out on the table, all manner of comedy get ups. I need, I replied, a pill of some kind. Aspirin maybe. It thins the blood. I was still fucking my wife, hanging in there, angling slightly, pressing in so that she wouldn’t notice. Give me a minute. Come on, I pleaded, dance. Say my name, she said, say it loud.

I was fucking my wife with this stripper right in my head. I stopped. Fiddled about a bit, brought her off elsehow. Sensitive me, different me. That fucking stripper, fully clothed, slumped at the table, home in a cab. Popped in.

Like Walking on Flower Dust

2007-07-06T16:02:00.000+01:00

Jack Poole, new shoes, jacket, outside in the springness, taking in the first stroke of that warm spring air. A dog by his side, attached by a lead, his dog, Curtel. Down boy, Jack says, when approached slowly, sneakily, by Greymat, the old town’s fat town crier. What be you off down here for? asks Greymat while also glancing at his watch (as if the time, too, were a crucial element in the strangeness, according to Greymat, of Jack being down there). Why, says Jack, I’m taking in the spring air is all, giving Curtel some exercise and also exercising – that is, taking out for a trial run – this here new jacket and this new pair of shoes, sports shoes as you can see. Adidas shoes I see, says Greymat. Aye, replies Jack, I don’t normally like a sport shoe but this pair of Adidas here will do me right fine. Aye, says Greymat, I reckon they will.

Greymat, later, in the town square: Hear ye, hear ye! Jack the Poole, the town fool, has himself a new pair of right fine shoes! Next time you pass, look down at his feet to be in for a treat!

Tender evening squeezing in and there’s Jack snug in the snug of The Bestway, his best girl by his side. Martha, the finest pair of breasts this side of Clappenhorn, known far and wide for them and the very reason why all the fellas this fair evening cram themselves into the snug whenever they order a drink. And what will you be having Martha my love? they ask, cockily, cocking a peek at those peaks as Jack tries his best to cover them, tenderly, without raising her embarrassment. Because, ah, it’s true, young Martha there is sublimely unaware of the effect of her magical young breasts.

What, Jack? they say, to Jack, as he mumbles for his cigarettes. Two of them, old sisters, sucking mints behind the counter, unable to reach for cigarettes even if they wanted to. Their son/nephew, Brian, over the back somewhere, behind cereal boxes maybe, or stacking egg cartons, bald and vaguely stupid, piss-stained jeans and a nose as big as his neck. But at least he can reach for cigarettes. There you are Jack, your Benson and Hedges gold packet of twenty, it’s a good job I’m here, right? Yes, mumbles Jack, it’s a good job you’re here. What, Jack? chorus the sisters, pulling faces, we can’t hear the man Brian, he’s such a fucking mumbler. Shh now, don’t upset our customers. Say, Jack, can I have a look at your new Adidas shoes? Ah, there they are. Oh, they’re real beauties them. How much?

How much? says Jack, his terror obvious even to the teenager behind the counter/on the floor. Sixty nine ninety nine. Sixty nine ninety nine? Sixty nine ninety nine, yes.

I’ll. I’ll take them.

Soft march across concrete, jags of grass, through the whatsit, the quadrangle, on his way to see Martha of tender large breasts and magic. The boys in the park, tower block boys, taunt him from a distance, mindful of Curtel whose eyes grow with his growls. Soft tread though, despite the taunts, and courtesy of the Goodyear soles complete with his Adidas shoes. Adidas? the boys shout, you’d have to be a mooncalf to wear Adidas! He’s got though, Jack today, his steel skull rings on his fingers and he wants to give them a dusting, give those boys a busting. He says to them, when he’s this close: I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass - and I’m all out of bubble gum. I’ve got some, offers one of the boys, holding out a shabby packet of Hubba Bubba Max. Meanwhile, at a flat window high above, young Martha is pressing her magical breasts softly, but deeply, tight against the glass. Look up Jack, look up. What did he say? says one of the boys, as Jack marches fast on his way. I have no idea, says another, something about gum.

True Love Travels

2007-06-26T18:22:00.001+01:00

What is love but a push in the wrong direction? We took a left turn, a right turn - whichever it was that sent us in the wrong direction.

And I was never impressed by horses. As I stood with you, once, on the laneside while they passed - my disdain, you thought, reserved for the riders. What was I doing there, anyway? Why was I out in the woods? The open air, the countryside, the animals - a similar stink.

We had, next to the fireside, a gathering of sorts, a sing-song as they told us, insisted that it was - we should all join in. My fixed grin, for hours, staring into the fire, praying it would end. Sea shanties, Irish ballads, English lullabies, Celtic madrigals, sung in fine and clear rural working-class voices by people who knew nothing of the working-class. I mean, nothing – not even of its myths. And the rural, the sheer nausea of it all, the lost maidens, the death motifs, black crows and stuff, birds in flight, ghosts - always with the ghosts. Drifting out over the fields, carried for miles.

We followed the flow of the river, climbed fences, walked bogs, fell in holes. It was, as you insisted, some kind of adventure. Romantic. Upstream, down dale, against the current, the fish, whatever. A meander, naturally. The river took us nowhere. We ended, for all the difference it made, where we had started. Across the water, the same bank, the trees, the lines of the bushes, the odd cow, sheep. Your trouble, you said - as you strode quickly away, the way we had come - is that you don’t like anything.

Girls on blankets, by the edge of the woods, just inside. On towels. By the bracken, next to the bluebells, the snowdrops. They lie there, these girls, gazing up through the tree tops, giggling at cloud shapes, waiting to be fucked. Made love to. Oh, if only, as your elbows press into sharp stones, the dents in your knees, the flies and the heat. You’re a sweater, after all. What does she expect?

Fly corpses in the kitchen. Dogs running around in the courtyard - noisy bastards, howling. Warm milk for breakfast, a push to at least appreciate the balance, the essential connecting link between the contents of the fridge and those things shuffling about outside. From this to that, it’s all part of some wonder. Except, of course, it isn’t. She mentions, again, your incompatibility, the likelihood of these tiny conflicts affecting your future happiness. Which is why you eventually point to the sky and remark, profoundly, on the beauty of the sunset. Right, she says.

What girls on blankets?

These girls are kneeling on blankets, caressed, lightly, by their short summer dresses. Bare legs, those tan-tie leg sandal things, small tattoos. They are, obviously, the very best thing about the summer. Lying next to them their bikes, hinting at summer thighs, the wind, their hair, all that. Blackberries tumbling out of baskets, half-finished daisy chains, small corked jugs of mead. Mead?

Before the night was through, the midges descending, de-swarming as the old farm hand said, as he passed and laughed, on his way to the pub. The light of the night shortening, the howls diminishing, a big long fucking fade into the blackness and the cold. Into roaring fires and tepid water, a night cap of some old shit, flavoured with honey, milkish and vile. Cold bed. Rattles and creaks.

She said, first thing in the morning: listen to the clops, the horses. Don’t you just love the horses?

Between Moon Dust and Wave Splash

2007-06-12T17:10:00.001+01:00

Awash with the taste of my boyfriend I failed to care that yes we were men and in danger of upsetting (and maybe overturning) the various sensibilities that brooked no truck when it came to the issue of homosexuality and all its mad environs. Oh picture us there lips on lips eyes closed kissing like we’d never kissed before. My boyfriend said I wish we were here forever on this night bus hurtling through the something streets of Lewisham and beyond past the smoking stack of the peshwari Cutty Sark. The what streets I asked the what streets?

Through streets of south London the burning bins, the burning dogs. Wait, and the roasting chestnuts where, more campfire than camp, certain groups of scout leaders are taking charge of the whole children situation. You need to wrap, they say, your potatoes in silver foil. You need to sprinkle your chestnuts with honey or something sweet, or even the other way round, perhaps a twist of salt. The scouts themselves, gangs of them, make mocking faces, move their untroubled lips to the sound of their leaders’ endless fucking drones. Will they ever shut up, will they ever keep quiet?

What’s critical here, says Ben, is that we foster that feeling of unease that comes just before, and is often the spark for, the riots and the storms. And just what, asks Mike, are we fighting for? Fighting for? replies Ben, you must be mistaking me for someone else, yourself perhaps. I don’t quite, says Mike, understand. It’s fighting against, nitwit, fighting against. Fighting against? muses Mike, why are we fighting against?

Because my bootstraps were too tight and my brain was too small I ventured out on that sunny Saturday morning to the capital’s streets bearing aloft all manner of curious banners and slogans that betrayed my previous and oft-mentioned descriptions of myself as, in various times, a left-winger, a liberal, a good-hearted, well-intentioned doofus who knew all about soup and bicycles and how best to bring up children. I was even, for a short time, a fixture in alternative bookshops and poetry readings where I mingled with likeminded johnnies and took part in various sexual and liberating thingies that had the effect of freeing both my body and my tiny mind.

His eyes a reveal of pain and future death and in that altercation he decided to take his revenge or somesuch on the barrelling figure of the big fella who had diagnosed him there on the street as he prepared to stick a knife between his ribs, his shoulder blades, his gullet, his gizzard. Oh but really, he turned up later at the fella’s house and (rather gently, as it turned out) terrorised his family, fell down the stairs and tied up all manner of loose ends. Etc.

In attempting to pass off the poem as my own I made the mistake of underestimating the cultural intelligence of my listener who immediately seized upon the fact that the poem was, of course, not my own. We sat in silence for the next hour or so as he pondered my deceit and I pondered how on earth I would be able to worm myself out of this maddening situation where, yet again, I had been exposed as a charlatan, a liar, a huckster, a thief. You know what? he finally said. What? I asked. You’re a real fucking idiot.

That gap between the moon and the waves. I fill it. First with sperm. Then with spit. Finally with urine. It bubbles up, in the gap, spills out to the sea. A refreshment of new life and a boon to the humans of the human race. And to the men in the moon.

We climbed the celestial rope ladder, stopping off at the moon. There the moon fauna blended sweetly with the imported earthly vegetation that gave the moon its greenery and its scenery. And maybe, in time, its air. Sitting down among the rocks, our feet soaking in cum-filled craters, we marvelled down at the beauty of the earth and wondered, for a moment, why we had left it. Truly, we must have been fucking idiots.

Zoom in, quick, a whizz through the moon’s telescope back down to earth into the lobby area of the newly-opened Cheese Hotel that sits within the skirting board in a room within the Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Square, London. Greeted, first of all, by a mousey commissionaire who squeaks his thanks as you press a newly-minted cheese coin into his furry palm (do mice have palms, furry or otherwise?). You take a look around the hotel and see that it’s full of mice scurrying all over the place, like they do in mousetown, dressed in their various dopey costumes that mimic their human type counterparts. Which is to say: just think of a busy hotel and replace all of the people with mice. So you’re taken up to your room by the bellboy – the bellmouse - who also receives the coin in his palm etc. and scurries on his way. Wait a minute. What are you, are you also a mouse? You look into the cheese mirror and are relieved to see that you’re still you, albeit much smaller, much cuter. And your companion? Jesus, she’s a mouse. And you’re not going to fuck a mouse. Are you?

Awashed, I was also abashed, somewhat drenched in cum, reaching blindly, groping for the door. Not cum, liquid cheese, hot fondue. I should have known.

Except For Stone and Smoke

2007-05-20T22:29:00.000+01:00

How can these pistols protect us? They are just illustrations.

At the bottom of the case, two sheets of dry, yellowing paper, each bearing a drawing of a pistol crudely rendered in charcoal. How, as they reasonably asked, could these daubs be anywhere close to the hope that was, just two minutes ago, promised to them?

By, of course, magic. Or faith. No, not faith. Escape?

Here’s a story: it was summer and the two girls were tired of death. Their parents were gone, carried off, as the saying goes, in the middle of the night by men with hidden faces. They were surprisingly gentle with the girls, these men, speaking softly when they told them they could be raped, killed or burnt if they breathed a word of this to anyone. Where are your parents? they were asked. Gone, they replied, gone. It was, of course, well understood.

What can’t they have, these girls? They can’t have everything.

It is now coming to the end of the summer and, what, there are leaves falling from trees, the days are getting shorter, it is colder at night. The usual. These two girls are doing the best they can. They have a younger brother to take care of, not much more than a baby who has neither a mother nor a father but, perhaps in his sisters, both. They are his only hope. The death that surrounds them is just another part of it. They don’t fear it any more but sense how to avoid it. Get through this and what, for what? Neighbours, friends and relatives – all disappearing, presumably to death. There are the rumours, of course, but these girls know better than to waste their time with rumours. Unlike the older women, the older girls, for whom rumours, stories and hearsays are all part of the getting through it. More power to them.

In Berkeley, CA, legions of brave and principled cyclists block the roads.

And in the north of England, or the midlands, there are eighteen thousand or so single mothers who cannot afford nice bicycles. Nor can they afford the time and patience required to sail the streets on billowing clouds of self-righteousness. If only they could, maybe one day they could. For the time being these young women wallow expertly in their ignorance, love their children against all the odds, rail incoherently at the threats and dangers they don’t quite understand but know are there. To be sentimental for a moment: they sometimes do this with tears in their eyes. They sometimes do it, also, at the wrong end of a bottle. Or at the wrong end of a man, any man. More power to them.

Another setting: it was three o’clock on the morning of the coldest day of the year and the two girls were huddled together beneath a blanket of sorts, their brother between them at last asleep, still shaking from the cold. It would have been perfectly understandable were it just the cold that was keeping them awake, or just the stench, or just the scraping of the rats, or just the barking of the hundreds of stray dogs on the streets. But it was the sound of the guns, of the screaming, of the heavy footsteps on stairs, the kicking down of doors, the pelting of the streets. Beneath that blanket, though it was much too dark to see, these girls had tears in their eyes.

How many young black men have been killed on the streets of London, Birmingham, Nottingham or Manchester? Is it enough or not enough? Would one be one too many, as the saying goes? Or would a hundred be a hundred too many? How do they compare to, say, the issue of SUVs and their apparent dominance of our roads? Could bicycles save them, these young black men? Which is the bigger problem and oh, which do we tackle first? Or is that not the point? Whenever else do you hear of young black men? To be sentimental for a moment: you never hear of young black men. Except maybe after they’re dead.

Or when do you hear of these two girls, far away from Berkeley and bicycles, who have decided, foolishly maybe, to make an escape? They are, whatever else they are, young enough and daft enough to want to make mistakes. Good for them. No pistols in the case, no help from the men who had promised them help, who had taken from them and used them with their filthy, empty promises. They are, of course, devastated but not surprised. Yet there he is, picture it, their gorgeous little brother stuffed deep inside his makeshift pram, surrounded by old clothes, by battered tins of food, by all manner of useless old shit whose utter meaningless betrays its absolute meaning. To be sentimental for a moment: try to take it away from them and see what happens.

Never mind bikes and streets. It’s your marbles you need to reclaim.

Behind them, long behind them, ashes. Where once they sang and danced for food is now just blackened remains, burnt glass and wood, bent metal. The incineration of entire buildings, of cobbled streets, the rubble strewn alleyways. Bodies, of course, just on the edge, on the outside, in mass graves or tossed down wells. Mostly, somehow unbelievably – unexpectedly, as they later said, over and over - women and children. The girls did well to leave, as foolish as they were.

And now forensics, tents, computers, generators, armoured vehicles, small weapons, new people. Americans, the British: soldiers much too late and heavily burdened and broken by this failure. If they knew, our girls, they might go back, bury their dead, say goodbye to their parents. But they’re not going back. They are lost and free. How is it better to die at home? It isn’t better to die at home. To be sentimental for a moment: the girls skip, lightly, singing to their brother who gurgles, happily, from somewhere deep within his makeshift pram. More power to him.

Propelled By The Speed Of Its Own Shrinkage

2007-05-08T10:54:00.000+01:00

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.

May Your Nose Be Red and Shiny

2007-04-23T10:50:00.001+01:00

Look there Mama, there goes the good tramp, the happy tramp. See that red spotted handkerchief at the end of his stick? It is full of shit. I mean, actual human shit. But not tramp shit, not his shit. Clown shit. The shit of a clown.

Binko Constant, leaping between bushes, darting behind grey boxes of electrics and bits, follows his friend the tramp as he follows his calling toward the horizon, treading neatly the rotting wooden slats that sit between endless parallel lines. That is, following the railway line towards the horizon’s new sunset, as tramps often do. And yes, he is but a small silhouette against the dazzle of the sun. But what wood, out of interest, the sleepers? Ah, Teak, Cape Iron, Mahogany and Panga Panga.

This Binko Constant, better known as Binko the Clown, is a notorious shitter, the art of which he often incorporates – depending on the audience – into his act. A tent full of kiddies? No shit. A tent full of braying middle class city boys who may as well be at the dog track for all the fucking difference it makes? More shit than you can poke a stick at. (And for each of these city boys later, at home, a discovery of unlimited pocketfuls of shit that just keep on giving.)

As for magic shit. The gift from Binko to his friend the tramp is a handkerchief full of magic shit that, depending on how it is used, will protect him from danger and even, possibly, bring him a good degree of good fortune. It is Binko’s vanity that causes him to follow his friend, to see how the magic of his magic shit will pan out. And to be there for when the gratitude, the plaudits, and the expressions of undying love come his way.

But first.

Ah my wife, our boy has disgraced himself yet again with his disgusting toilet habits and pooping. Why the newspaper all over the floor? Why does he still refuse to take the toilet? Do I not pay good money for that toilet? Already six-years-old and he poops like a drunken pig. I should give him to the circus. But no, wait, don’t cry, I too love him. Together we will make him change. We will not abandon him or kill him as my father tells me to do. We will sort him fixed, I swear. We will sort him fixed and then once again we will hold our heads up in the street.

What Binko’s parents failed to spot was the sheer magic of their boy’s shit. Quickly flushing it away or screwing it up in newspapers, they didn’t see the small cities of wonder that sprang up in the sewers, on the beach, at the processing plants, or wherever Binko’s shit happened to land. Or how everything in those crumpled newspapers sprang to life: the advertisements, the stories, the cartoons, the editorials - each one of them taking on brief existences on small, unnoticed stages.

Binko, Binko, where yer gonna go-e-o? as his playmates used to shout, referencing Jim Reeves’ 1956 hit song, Bimbo. To which Binko would of course reply: I’m going down the road to see a little girl-e-o. Except he wasn’t doing that at all. He was going down the road, more often than not, to see a little shrink-e-o. Whose job it was to cure him of his extraneous shitting activity.

The short of it was: the magical properties of Binko’s shit soon became apparent to the psychiatrist who made false claims about the boy’s sanity in order to have him taken into care - whereupon the psychiatrist abducted him, faked his death, and took him on the road as the major attraction in his brother’s travelling freakshow. Surprisingly, Binko was treated very well by the psychiatrist which, naturally, led to the inevitable father and son type bond growing between them. But then, wouldn’t you know it, the psychiatrist’s crooked (as it turned out) brother snatched Binko away one night with the intention of selling him to a Russian circus. And while the psychiatrist arrived just in time to save the boy from the evil clutches of Ringmaster Rompiski, he met his own end at the hands of Lempulio, the circus strongman. Binko, now fully aware of his shit’s magical properties, restored the psychiatrist to life just long enough to tell him how much he loved him. And moments before the psychiatrist’s second, and final, death, Binko promised that he would return to his parents. Of course, it later transpired that Ringmaster Rompiski was, in fact, his father in disguise, while his mother was the bearded lady. Trapped by his promise to the psychiatrist, as well as by his understandably confused familial feelings, he eventually decided to stay with his parents’ circus and become – as he most certainly did – the greatest shitting clown the world has ever known.

And his friend, the tramp? He marches on, red spotted handkerchief dripping with shit. But what does he wonder, this pathetic old tramp? From where does he come?

The origins of the tramp, as a recognisable cultural force, are by no means contentious. They are, however, before we become too complacent, fraught with all manner of small difficulties. The most obvious arises when we consider the popular image of the tramp: the gentle, big-hearted, down on his luck loner who would never, for instance, stuff his hands down the pants of a twelve-year-old girl. Neither for him, this product of popular contemplation, the drugs, the blowjobs for drugs money, the violence, the alcoholism, the mental illness, the aggressive begging, the torture, the thieving, the animal abuse, the vandalism. But rather the helping hand to the damsel in distress, the befriending of crippled kids, the revelation that he is, in fact, the wealthy, handsome son of a ruthless industrialist who he, the tramp, has helped to uncover and expose. Our tramp, as it happens, is none of those things. Fade.

Cut to:

Park. Exterior. A beautiful summer’s day. It is full of people, all enjoying the sun: kids playing football, young couples strolling hand in hand, families taking picnics, old people feeding the pigeons etc. It is a postcard picture of a perfect day. This idyllic scene is suddenly disturbed by the appearance of a gang of around thirty clowns, all brandishing guns. The clowns quickly run through the park, terrorising people and demanding cash and valuables. Everyone, of course, is much too scared and much too sensible to do anything but what the clowns tell them to do - everyone, that is, except Big John Martin who, when approached by one of the clowns, simply pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head. The rest of the gang quickly rush over, firing their guns. Amazingly, Big John stands his ground, the bullets bouncing off him. He picks off the clowns one by one, smiling to himself every time they go down. In a matter of minutes, all of the clowns are dead. Cut to:

Park. Interior. Shed. Through the dusty window we can see the commotion in the park. People are running and screaming while Big John steps over the clowns and makes his way towards the gates. Moving into the foreground, and blocking the view through the window, shuffles a certain Charles Blakely. Admiring himself in the mirror, he adjusts his scuffed bowler hat, straightens his wilting yellow carnation, taps his cane against his right leg, lifts his feet one after the other, touches his tie and smiles.

CHARLES (to himself):
Perfect. Now I can truly call myself a tramp.

He lifts his hat to the mirror, winks and heads out of shot. We can tell, by the way the sunlight floods in and quickly disappears, that he has left the shed. We see him a few seconds later, through the dusty window, heading down towards the park gates, a spring in his step. Fade.

What happened was this: Binko was part of that clown gang but was there as a mole, an undercover agent. But, of course, he hadn’t reckoned on Big John Martin. Luckily for Binko, Big John’s bullets hadn’t reckoned on Binko’s magic shit which, oozing out of his arse as he lay there breathing his last, slowly began to restore him back to life. And because it was Binko that the shit was working its magic on, the life restoration thing - instead of being a fleeting shout - was permanent and fully effective. And as Binko lay there, slowly recovering, Charles (who had, as you may recall, just decided to become a tramp) lifted him up and carried him back to his shed. Over the course of the next few days, he helped to nurse Binko back to full health.

Firm friends then. With a whole cavalcade of crime-fighting adventures. The years pass.

Until the day came when Charles, too old and too tired, decided to give it all up and, at last, hit the open road. Just like a proper tramp. The indication to his good friend that this journey would be his last (i.e. I’m going off somewhere to die) was enough for Binko to press upon him the red spotted handkerchief full of magic shit. Because he knew – because he knew his friend well – that when it came to the actual business of facing death he would want to reach out for life. Even if it meant reaching out for a handful of shit.

Crumbs Into The Shallow

2007-04-15T22:18:00.000+01:00

Consider the mass, the rise of his twelve daily checks. Consider, no, instead, his obsession with pornography, his pathological aversion to cigarette smoke, his whole checklist, in fact, of contrived oddities and singularities that he imagines mark him out, by some degree, as a man to be wholly reckoned with. Yet he’s the sort of fellow, as they say in those kinds of circles, who would happily let the spilt juice from a bowl of baked beans simply dry on his thigh. Rarefied circles, that is.

One of his dictums: How to avoid becoming the victim of a road rage attack. Don’t drive like a cunt. Don’t drive like a pussy.

You know, a dictum for victims. Or, rather, potential victims. Such as you and I.

Wait though. So there he is, moving in his circles, making certain names for himself, and he’s spreading himself so thin and so wide that there will, at the end of it all, be no such thing as the complete picture of him. You would have to press him together, slice by slice, to get the full measure of the man. Like a jigsaw puzzle, also. Or a brick by brick wall. A set of encyclopaedias, lined up in line, volume by volume, so we can dip into him from time to time, look him up etc.

To one group, then, he appears as something removed from the way he presents himself to another group. He is a man of many faces. He is a complex gathering of small mysteries tied up inside a bag of discarded magicians’ handkerchiefs. Stick your hand in and it’s a different selection every time.

Okay. So he’s a mass of this and that. Who isn’t?

Actually, he isn’t. Not really.

The flow of the river beneath the bridge was enough, at last, for his mother to decide to drop him into the warm rush that she hoped would carry her baby boy to a future she knew she couldn’t provide. Oh, the things she imagined. A doctor maybe, a footballer or a pop star, a writer, an architect, a saver of souls, a lawyer, a shopkeeper, a lover of women, a father to children, a man about town. But what would she have done had she known that he would become merely who he is now, with his pornography, his cigarette smoke aversion, the baked bean juice dry on his thigh? With nothing, that is, that could dress him up as the man she might have envisioned. Envisaged. She would, what, have snatched him from the water, cut him off at the next bridge? Or drowned him, body and soul?

Had she known that, caught in the bulrushes mere yards from his water entry, he was fished out, so to speak, by a kindly, elderly couple who took the boy in, raised him as their own, taught him the folky virtues of simple middle-class people, of piety and goodness and all that nauseating countryside villagey, churchy, bourgeois bullshit, she would, maybe, have hung on to him. But as it was, there he was, raised in the ways of the countryside and thus removed from anything that might have led to a development of character or personality. Which explains why the baked bean juice on his thigh makes it as one of the few things to say about him. There really is nothing much else to add. Except for the public school thing and how he, like so many others like him, confidently took a place at university that should, by rights, have gone to some smart working-class kid who could have, well. You know.

The Moses allusion, such as it is, is quietly apt. Because they love all that don’t they? The Old Testament stuff with the lessons delivered and the lessons learnt. Have a look down the country lane or in the church car park the next time a Sunday service is in session. You won’t see any horse-drawn jalopies or rusting pram wheels there. No sir. It’s the money that does it, the reward for their goodness. And gosh, they really do go for that whole richness of the soul bit.

Anyway.

So yes, he was brought up by Ma and Pa Kent out in the country somewhere, the shimmering fields of wheat, the setting yellow sun, the rhythm of the crickets. It was heaven on earth for a while, those distant planets be damned. Metal plates of piping hot beans burning circles into bare beshorted thighs. No wonder the juice, to cool them down. Ah, take him back. Take him back.

A Broom Against The Clouds

2007-04-04T12:47:00.000+01:00

Except when he’s walking. Through the rain. Or through a whole (drunken) pit of validation: Hello, please love me. He is no different, he says, from all the other schmoes out there, all looking for love. He uses the word schmo, neither knowing nor caring whether his hearer is familiar with its meaning. What’s a smo? she asks, later, as they dance upon the balcony.

Too frequently these days he finds himself addressing the ceiling. Or talking to the walls. He would, as he often used to do, talk to himself through the mirror. But he can no longer stand to look at what insists on talking back.

And here. A terraced street in grey, black and white, a train somewhere in the background, a flick of chimney stacks, a cobbled street or two. You know. A wash, a smell, of obvious decay. Corners curled and picture frames cracked, the obligatory ticking clock on the mantelpiece, a collection of brass below. On the arm of the armchair, a mug of tea, and he leaning forward, fag in hand, cocking an ear to the radio which is, of course, speaking the shipping forecast. What, he cares about the ships now does he? He cares about the sea?

A crowd gathers as he lies on the ground, straddling the kerb and the road, somehow twisted within his bicycle. The driver of the car stays behind his wheel, gently shaking his head, weeping. The man trapped within his bicycle is, as it happens, the leader of the local Green party. He is known far and wide for his unswerving opposition to the motor car. Which is why, despite the pain, he is estimating the mileage he might be able to wring out of what could, in fact, turn out to be a very useful incident. Until, that is, he hears somebody say: That’s that twat from the Green party - I hope he dies.

He hangs around cemeteries sometimes. Especially in the summer. He steals the flowers and spray paints the grave stones. Today he has added the word ‘paedophile’ to George Trellis, loving father, grandfather and friend who fell asleep on January 23rd 1986 and who will be very greatly missed.

Religion had nothing to do with him. Had no part to play in him. It was an absence he was always glad of. But all of the other atheists seemed to have stories to tell about religion, of religious parents maybe, of spiritual inclinations, Sunday schools, church services, childhood fantasies. The point of these stories, of course, was to showcase the uniqueness and bravery of these now enlightened atheists who courageously stood up for themselves, finally saw the light, refused to be fooled any longer, took on those inner demons. He always said to them: But you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Somebody called for an ambulance. They pulled him up, laid him flat on the snooker table, cushioned his head with his jacket. He lay there for a while, oblivious to the panic around him, staring into the light, wondering why nobody could see to turn off the light. Did they want him to go blind as well?

Blake’s legacy, he started to say. But stopped when he saw the look of derision on her face. What? he asked. Nothing, she replied, quickly checking herself, removing that look from her face. Blake’s legacy, he repeated, is here for all of us to see, especially here, now, in the very streets of contemporary London. Is it? she said, is it really? Oh please, please tell me more.

Thick fog. Howls of some kind. Swirling thick fog. A distant tapping getting closer. He has been here, at the railway station, for well over an hour. He is waiting to be collected by his new employer, Lord Gaslight, international explorer and good vampire. His duties will include assisting in the making of a new television programme with the working title of: How I, a typical public school cretin, travelled the world many, many times and how, now that I am too old and enfeebled to travel any longer, want to spread the message that it’s not okay for you to travel the world in the same way, what with the damage to the environment that you and your fellow oiks would cause. At the same time, however, I also want you to marvel at all of the great things I did and saw.

His karaoke wife, notorious rule bender and fag hag, withdrew the few remaining scraps of their savings and treated herself to all of the things that women tend to treat themselves to. You know, a massage, a facial, bags of chocolate and make up, clothes, party hats, chips, peas, gravy, jewellery, flowers, fine wine, cheeses, vodka, orange juice, tonic, dildoes, pasta, tequila, herbs, spices, cookery books, dopey novels, crystals, spiritual thingies, mushrooms, cigarettes, bread makers, pepper grinders, handbags, carrier bags, candles, sea salts, bath salts, perfume, melting balls, lorry drivers, fortune cookies, blueprints, gargles, mouthwash, eventides and bowling balls. At the end of the day, with all of their money gone and all of her needs (as she called them) satisfied, she returned home to tell him what she’d done. Can you imagine how unhappy this made him? Can you not guess the levels of dismay to which this pretend wife drove him?

Wistful, past his old house, the top left window the site of activity that would now, now that he has become who he is, cause him a relative degree of shame and discomfort. But ah, he thinks, you can’t turn back the clock and who would want to, after all? Behind him, in the shadows, his old nemesis The Black Fog, chuckling, loudly enough for him to hear. The Red Streak, quickly off his toes, turns, rises slightly, and treads the cool night air.

His father, the cure for dyspepsia. A barrel of ice, a clatter of rusty saws and a touch from the mysteries of electricity. Blam.

His repertoire of boxing stories ran the whole gamut, from the few victories through to the many crushing defeats. His days in the navy, during the war, when he fought and beat the soon-to-be world champion. Leaving work at five-thirty on a Friday evening, travelling miles to make the seven o’clock bell and the promise of a five pound purse. The prison battles, plus earning a few guineas in the boxing booths, pretending to be a gyppo.

How many more times would he be forgotten, erased like the dead? The fact of his existence, here in the Blodent Field, was often taken for granted and he was required, like so many others before him, to will himself to life, to make the right noises, to be noticed and catalogued, to be much more than himself. For out here, where even the wind seeks to avoid you, there is no room for those that sink.

He moves in mysterious ways. Is what she often says to excuse him of the terrible behaviour that has caused unimaginable pain and anguish to at least four other girls. Women. And also, of course, to sprinkle upon him a kind of God-like quality that might offer an explanation as to why she continues to stay with, and excuse, this ridiculous little man.

Some Comb The Connections

2007-03-27T14:19:00.001+01:00

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

2007-03-12T00:20:00.000Z

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

2007-03-07T18:45:00.000Z

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.

Chisels of the Long Streets

2007-02-26T00:38:00.000Z

Nipper.
He couldn’t have known, back then, that he would eventually become a notorious homosexual, battered to death in a shit-stained back room, bleeding to death on a piss-stained mattress, becoming the embodiment of what you used to get for being a homosexual, if not dead, then at least shamed in public toilets, caught with your hands down a teenage boy’s pants, a bigger shame perhaps even than death. How many of them, back then, knew that he was a homosexual? How many would know now, would care now, now that things are different, better?

Pete.
He had a brother called Tank, back occasionally from the army, who we would glimpse at the scullery window, from his waist up to his chest, scrubbing himself with carbolic soap on a Friday evening, his crisp white shirt behind him, hanging from the knob of the door. His brother Tank hanging over us, and most especially over anyone who crossed him, as a threat, as a man who, naturally, could kill another man with one deadly blow, using special techniques known only to soldiers.

Cress.
Whether he would have carried out the threat or not, there was the understanding – by all parties – that he at least had the right to gently press the pliers against the boy’s nostrils and whisper, as low as he could, that those same pliers would be firmly rammed up his nose the next time he, the boy, threw stones at his door or kicked his milk bottles over or whatever it was that caused him to wait behind the door, night after night, pliers tight in his hand.

Peter.
Big, glassy eyes, came all the way down from Hartlepool, a dead dad or something, with his littler sister who, not looking so much like Peter Lorre as he did, nor as snivelling and as wretched, could coax out of some of the boys a little money on every day of the school holidays in return for a flash of her fanny, as they called it then, its pale, perfect mystery holding them in thrall until the next day’s sixpences or pennies came tumbling out.

Julie.
Hands reaching for hands beneath desks, in dinner queues, through the fence, what the hell. He sang If I Fell for her, in the back entry, as she listened, or giggled, on the other side of the gate. He sang it high and soft in the same way as he sang it for her at night, alone, his mother listening from the bottom of the stairs. She lived on Birkin Avenue, with no apparent father.

Tim.
It was well-known and much commented upon that his mother had taken a lover who somehow lived upstairs, with her, while his father was trapped downstairs battling whatever illness it was that prevented him from rising from his bed of pain, from doing anything at all about the intolerable situation above.

Shaun.
Demanded a croggy from Tukes, ordering him to carry him to the bottom of the hill but didn’t make the bottom of the hill on account of being struck by an emerging car. Massive head injuries, six months lying in hospital, touch and go for a long while and nobody, it seemed, cared. There were those even who were pleased, who, further, loudly, stated their wish that he had died: he was an odious cunt after all. When he returned, however, he was visibly not quite the same, slower somehow, his eyes emptier, definitely not the same, not so much of a cunt.

Karen.
The quiet ones, as they always say, are by far the worst. The photographs doing the rounds, her happily sucking and happily being fucked, with a group of older men, it clearly being her in the pictures, at some legendary party, according to the select few who had actually held these photographs, had seen them with their own eyes. This quiet, well-spoken girl, top in everything, clean, careful, something of a snob.

Carl.
Discarded fabric in the giant skip at Farmer Faggots provided the perfect fuzzy felt adventure park except for the times when a) the lid, the caged roof, came crashing down and narrowly missed his head by millimetres, landing on his shoulders, cracking his collar bone and b) the time when the security guard kept him in there, taunting him, stamping on his hands whenever he tried to pull himself out, forcing his head beneath the lengths of fabric, swallowing the felt, the suede, the velvet like the velvet of his dad’s jacket.

Nathan.
In later years, due to his giant size and his quadriplegia, he succumbed to what his wife had warned the police about, choking to death, his heart stopping while in custody in his cell, the police at a loss with what to do with this ridiculous man who, with compensation money, built up his tiny little drug empire that was enough, despite its size, to cause pain and misery to a good number of people who already had their share of pain and misery. This ridiculously fat, immovable man who, like so many before him, had dived into the kids’ pond at Highfields, had not heeded the warnings and had landed crack on the top of his head. He was lucky, or unlucky, that he didn’t drown there and then.

They Don't Suspect My Real Power

2007-02-03T15:29:00.001Z

The tricks I played on women did not necessarily guarantee that I would be able to trick them into fucking me. Occasionally, yes. But whether that had anything to do with the tricks themselves is, I must admit, something of a moot point. That is, it could have been the tricks – along with the skill, the daring, the absolute thrill of surprise – but it could also have been my easy charm, my stunning good looks and my fabulous collection of Spider-Man comics (especially the British ones, including every issue of Spider-Man Comics Weekly from 1973 to 1976). After all, who needs tricks when you’ve got comics?

The tricks I played in bed, once I got these women into bed, usually involved some kind of superhero activity. Mostly to do with Spider-Man. So, for instance, if I was fucking them from behind I would press my hands and feet against the headboard and pretend I was clinging to a wall. Or if they were riding me, straddling me as I lay on my back, I pretended I was unconscious, knocked cold by Dr Octopus’s merciless adamantium arms. I mean, tentacles. Granted, they weren’t tricks as such – more like poses. But on one occasion I did wrap a woman in a makeshift web, leaving the appropriate hole exposed so I could fuck her as she hung from the ceiling. That, at the least, took a good deal of skill, as well as a small degree of contortionism.

The tricks I played on women, however, were not exclusively played on the women themselves. They were sometimes played on the men, as a means of getting to their women. These tricks included, for instance, locking the men in cabinets while I undressed their women with a deft, as they say, flick of the wrist. Or hypnotising the men into insisting that I fuck their women. Or, perhaps my favourite trick of all, transmuting my soul, my very essence, into the bodies of the men in order to fuck their women.

But as I said, my tricks were not always guaranteed to succeed. And neither could I be sure that the women I fucked as a result of the tricks I played on them were not, in fact, just playing along with the trick angle in order to hide the fact that it was my fabulous collection of comics that drew them to me. That is, that they were just pretending to be tricked into fucking me. After all, is it better to be tricked into being fucked, or is it better to be fucked as a result of being turned on by somebody’s fabulous collection of comics? That said, I can fully understand why my fabulous collection of comics would have exactly that effect on women. I mean, if I was a woman I’d rub myself sore just thinking about them.

Etc.

A Bubble of Despair

2007-01-29T01:20:00.001Z

It may, of course, have something to do with what happened to her as a child. Or, perhaps, to do with the more recent traumatic event that ended, as part of the rehabilitation process (as she called it), with a deep familiarity with the writings of Sting. That is, the lyrics of Sting. She said, to barely concealed hilarity: I don’t know, it’s something about him, about what his music says to me. She is currently, as you may imagine, nursing a giant-sized oil-painting of no particular reason or bent. She has much to say.

Such as on the subject of betrayal. And how to bounce back from betrayal and, you know, become all the stronger from the experience. To be happier, even. How to learn to wear those scars with pride, like they say.

In gala force, tonight, the players of stage and screen. Light they may be, but heavy their tread on the carpet. They preferred it though, as they never tire of telling us, when they were happier in their anonymity, playing to crowds of three, tiny gangs of four. They know what becomes of art when you spread it too wide, when you take it too far.

And of craftsmanship. What can one say that hasn’t already been said?

How gently goes that long walk into the.

Into the what? The unexplored dark reality of night time and fog where your artistic blatherings are all of an accord with the whispers in the scrubs? Somebody, you feel, should turn on the lights. As the popular indie magazine Crudup has it (circulation 300): there are leading lights this year who will be up while last year’s leading lights will be down. It is to this year’s winners, this year’s leading lights, that you should be making your overtures. But quick. The magazine is called Trait, obviously, not Crudup.

There are the telephone calls, the submissions, the grant applications, the corners of desks ringed with coffee cups and the memories of when you used to smoke. A leather chair and, for measure, an Olivetti typewriter next to the computer in the corner. Postcards. Half a bottle of whiskey. Blasts of old stuff, the rip of new stuff. A long lingering look when, in the evening, you lock the door and leave just moments after turning off the light. How sweet the scent of the air this evening.

So what happened to her as a child?

As a child, I was six, seven, I was a very what you might call these days precocious child, very solitary and bookish and, you know, shy and nervous with few friends except for my friendship with books who kept me, even at that age, from the edge. My mother was a what I suppose can only be described as a socialite, very beautiful and popular and very proper, very aloof even, distant, maybe not cold as such but not what you would call warm. My father was of a similar nature, from the same sort of background, and I saw him even less as he was often away on business or somesuch while my mother entertained at home. My basic needs, such as they were, were catered to by a nanny who my mother had hired seemingly in foresight of the moment when all of her world crashed down around her head and we spat, nanny and I, all over her as she writhed in the flaming acrimony and projected fire and bile that was her due, I wanted her dead and cared nothing for her as she lay dying, felt absolutely nothing, as the months of agony caused her to reach out for her daughter but too late, too late, as she finally died in front of me, sort of in my arms, and all I could do was laugh, giggle, telling my father when he returned home that I wished that he too were dead, dead like my mother, so I could bury them both in the garden and dance on their graves, my reach for the dramatic in those days as acute as it still is now, and my father disowning me, no more distant than he’d always been, packing me off to an aunt in Yorkshire whose outrageous lesbianism and commitment to the betterment of the working-classes provided me with a cliché of embarrassments that was intoxicating, in many ways, for one so young. Oh, I thrived there, oh how I thrived.

And what of the brother who told her, years later, that their mother had, in fact, lived, had created the whole death scenario in order to get her daughter removed from her? The brother who had been loved and cherished by her mother in a way that she had never been loved and cherished? How much damage did this revelation, all those years later, do to her? What did Sting say?

After the rain has fallen,
After the tears have washed your eyes,
You'll find that I've taken nothing, that,
Love can't replace in the blink of an eye.

Said Sting.

And her brother, as he was about to leave, commented on the small sketch of a face, the face of her old lover that she had knocked from the wall in her anger, in her pain. Here, he said, you should do something with this, with your talent. What else could she do but believe him? Her poetry too, great old gobs of verse that spilled from her, from deep inside, the words literally scorching the paper upon which she laid them and bade them to do their worst.

Which, of course, they did.

With Nobody In It

2007-01-23T13:45:00.000Z

Cold-blooded in the moonlight, as it streamed in through the pantry window. By any definition: two men staring at a door. Waiting by the door. Nattily turned out in thick, tree-lined jumpers, they stood and waited, blew into each others’ ears - thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process. You know, said the first, this could be our chance to make amends. How do you mean? asked the second. Minutes passed, the silence held them. Until, finally: Well, said the first, we could walk away from staring at this door and amuse ourselves in other fashions, perhaps somehow relating to all that business of blowing into each others’ ears. Hmm, said the second, let me ponder it and let me get back to you.

Later, hours later, the door long stared at, came the reply from the second: We could, I suppose, make amends as you say - but what would become of that door with no-one to stare at it? You mean, asked the first, as in sort of relating to that old philosophical conundrum of what if a tree falls and there is no-one around to hear it? Yes, said the second. Well, rejoined the first, the door would not cease to exist nor lose its essence of doorness, so to speak, on account of us, or anyone, not staring at it. Are you sure? asked the second. I am, replied the first.

They turned their stares then, for the first time in many a day, to each other. At which point, of course, the door disappeared.

Luminous Tendril of Celestial Wish

2007-01-17T00:08:00.000Z

The modern voices of cosmology are bent out of shape, twisted into heliocentricish patterns that, quite literally, make no sense. Thus, as an example, the bird-like warblings of Janus Durkharden and his absurd postulations about the form and nature of the fourth universe. Plus, also, the kind of intuitive grasping that is carried out in the absence of cablis firma and is, at the least, part of the suppression of the desire to be part of what used to be called the bigger picture. As a result, it has recently been felt by the cosmological community that it (the cosmological community) and its attendant offshoots would benefit greatly from an attempt at extrapolation that takes into account some of the more neglected areas of study: metaphysical eschatology, universe denial theory, spiritual cornering, cosmogony barks, andro-physics.

The Moon.
Okay, the moon. It is the receptacle for all manner of devices and thingies, aimed from below out of the poor tired hearts of young lovers and old lovers. And, of course, these days also from the hearts of poofers and other derivations thereof: lesbians and stuff. The moon, sure of its glow, hangs there still, inviting salutations and worships that would, quite frankly, be rather vulgar were they aimed at some of our more spectacular heavenly bodies. You wouldn’t, for instance, see Sirius basking in such ersatz warmth.

Celestial Cracks and Thunder Bolts.
Captains of the Clouds and Thor-like thunder Gods are a common sight above the common where they play out their ritual pitch battles in preparation for the true test of whatsit, Ragnarok. But for now, sited somewhere between Midgard and the old school playground, these monster gods are a scene for all eyes. But beware, Mjolnir has been known to slay even the innocent.

Divinity Dry Puss.
A: This is the way here, yes. To the back. In the corner over there, beneath the small table. This the kitty you look for. Yes?
B: Yes. My Divinity Dry Puss who, possessed of nine tenths of the universe’s evil, is enough to destroy us all here. Except for you, of course, our underworldish guide who has led us here in the best of all good faith.
A: Yes, all good faith.

The Big Bang.
As the universe rapidly expanded in less than the lessest blink you can barely imagine, all of it was there, as is, formed and fantastic and much more than the likes of you could possibly comprehend. Before the existence of the universe there was merely emptiness and nothing, and much less even than the nothing that resides inside your head. Less than the nothing that dwells within your barren loins. The universe gave birth to a monster and the monster’s name was you. I mean, the monster was you.

Human Naturists.
And God said: I will strip you from out of the earth and airbrush you out of the bigger picture. I will teach you not to hide the loveliness that I have created and that is my whim to gaze at whenever I deem.
And man said: Fine. Pass me my pants.

Ghosts #1.
Apparitions at the bottom of the stone steps. I fetched my torch to them and they scattered. Later, as I slept, my wife was carried from her bed by unknown hands and placed upon the kitchen table. Her screams when she woke were enough, as they say, to raise the dead. Gone before I could reach them, the hideous things seemed to match the description of my stone stepped apparitions. Years later, after my wife had passed, I discovered that the house had been built upon the site of a former Victorian workhouse. Whoooh.

Ghosts #2.
My wife is prone to all manner of silliness.

Cups That Brimmeth Over.
They are either half full or half empty, depending on how you look at the world. It’s either a clean glass or a dirty glass, depending on who you’re trying to impress. (In The Road to Utopia, Bob Hope adds the following line to his request for a glass of lemonade in order to give the impression that he is, in fact, someone to be reckoned with: “In a dirty glass!”. He wants, in fact, to be thought of as Sperry. Or McGurk. I forget which.)

The Fourth Universe.
Paralleled, somehow, to our own universe (the first universe), the fourth universe is either a huge cosmic gamble or a metaphysical kick in the teeth. Containing fully functioning mirror replicas of all aspects of our own universe, it exists – if it exists at all – as a kind of astronomical yardstick by which we can measure and, moreover, better ourselves. Do you see the ‘you’ over there, caring for the sick and the disabled, discovering the cure for cancer? It could be you here. If we only had the know-how. If you only had the brains.

Immortality Plays.
When the Big Bang banged, I was there. When the universe implodes/explodes, I will also be there.

Fragments of a Rainy Season.
The water falls and all bodies not yet wet avoid the drops through careful mapping and lightning speed. Why they would want to avoid the water is anyone’s guess.

Heathens in Heaven.
You can catch the canticles at broadcast and, you know, spirits would lift you as you trod the clouds and bounced the celestial sphere, where would it take you, where would you go outside the Pearly Gates where Peter waits you on call with a list of your past sins and outside games the way you touched people badly and presented yourself as other to what you really were, did you imagine you could make the escape with all this horror and hatred stacked against you?

The History of the World.
From when it began in Roman times and even well before, the world was a seething hot ball of filth, badness and evil. In time, over two thousand millennia, man walked the earth and bade the fearsome forest before him a stately goodbye. Thus scythed and burned, man proceeded gingerly through the remnants of wood and fossil, picking apart the past and making himself a tool of history. Soon, hamlets and villages, gatherings on the banks of rivers. Then cities and civilisations. Come the kings and their bad queens, ruling nations and people, taking their crowds by the hand through the twists of philosophers, artists, architects, musicians, writers, computer technicians, landlords, illusionists, medicals, scientists and tailors. And then, the whole world at man’s feet as he took on the skyways and rode the celestial mechanics higher, higher until the very stars. Goodbye cruel world, so long!

Wisps.
I see faces in the sky, I see faces rolling by.

The Time Lords Make It.
We are trapped, all of us, within this realm of uncertainty. There is forwards and there is backwards. There is right here. Movement is possible. But not recommended.

Ex-planetary Notes.
They left, the last race, boarded their ships and left. Neither trace nor hair. The planet’s surface as smooth as the surface of a ping pong ball. Rocky terrains and deepest undulations rendered irrelevant by the sheer terror of scale. As their ship sped on, as the residents looked back, the palpable waves of regret enveloped them. By the time they reached us they were stone from pain.

Cars and Planes.
Man crawls, walks and drives. He flies. He flies higher and further than the birds.

The Coming of the Climate.
Over a period of twelve thousand billion years the earth’s temperature will rise to nine months above the lateral sea level of carbon footprint dating and analysis. Which is to say that if we don’t stop using tea bags and breathing out too quickly we will very soon reduce the planet to a nothing mess of ash and fire. Or, alternatively, it may be reduced instead to a ball of yellow ice as cold and as impersonable as those piss ice cubes in my freezer. If we don’t get a grip and return to our caves, become one with mud and rediscover our affinity with all the noble thingies that can barely crawl, that have been the victims of our greed and oppression, we will perish like the pissant, backward-looking drones we truly are. See the stars? Fuck them. Fuck them good.

Money Makes The World Go Around.
Or does it? There was a report the other day that suggested that what, in fact, makes the world go around is young men and their sexually frustrated fuelled aggression. By 2010 it is reckoned that there will be 30 million young Chinese men who, by sheer force of mathematics, will be without partners, sexual or otherwise. And all that negative energy, they say, will have to go somewhere. But where? As for the rest of the planet’s young men, they will surely continue in their time-honoured fashion of not only committing violence and other bad things but also creating the very best of the very best that has ever been written, made, thought or said. Young men? Please fuck them good.

Tiny Tears.
Visible even from space.

How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’.
I was sitting down at the table, sipping my first coffee of the morning, when I, Jack Cole, came up with the idea of Plastic Man, an ex-baddie who, by dint of his new-found super powers, decides to become a superhero. A flawed superhero. An insane superhero, of sorts. Immeasurably powerful. Will go on and on until the end of time. His powers: the ability to become anything he wants by stretching and manipulating his endlessly pliable body. And you would think, wouldn’t you, that the name Plastic Man would be easy for people to recall? Not at all.

The Sun.
Life giving. Hot. Yellow. Avuncular. Round. Afire. The centre of all the known universe. The thing that burns the back of your neck. Hides behind clouds. Once got into a competition with the wind to see who could get the man to take his coat off. Sometimes puts his hat on. Is a symbol of goodness, of happiness, of purity, of life. Is worshipped by all sorts - from the backward retards in the jungles and the deserts, to the city-slickered sophisticates who make our capital metropoles so great. Rises in the day time, sinks at night.

Ghosts #3.
A ghost descends the stair case. The assembled throng see it yet see right through it. The room goes cold. Somebody falls dead. Caskets are unearthed and centuries of family history are pored over. Who could it be?

The Rich, Their Money and Why They Are Cunts.
The rich have the spoils of all at the expense of decent working men and women and would grind you and your children to dust for the mere sake of making even more obscene amounts of money in order to keep their stupid fat faces ever-filled and grinning. They hate you more than you hate them. We have one life and they have it. Take it from them. Take it from them now.

Science.
In yes and the arts are all but diminished save for the remnants of art. The power of art: absolutely no good.

Religion.
Religion is the refuge of backward pea-brains such as birds and worms. Religion is a cool comfort to fiery-tempered bigots and sex-obsessed lunatics. Religion is where hearts are cut open and eyes are blinded. Religion is where you could go at any time to have yourself reduced.

Poetry.
Through the ages of man, a word here, some music there. No rhymes though, please.

The Triumph of Death.
It flirts, death, with life. That is, it plays at the edges of life, encroaching enough to remind us that the paths we travel will one day come to an end. Ah, some kind of keep off the grass analogy. Maybe another mention of the scythe. The bitter end.

A Caravan of Falling Stars

2007-01-07T02:29:00.000Z

There is the flat screen, the media, the engagement with the processes. The point is that we are all connected, plugged in, to this wider frame of matrix basics and science fiction crap. The trick is to disengage, to stop using terms like engage and disengage, to stop imagining such things as processes.

Odd things burning in the background there, in front of the three red suns that bob above the horizon. Behind the village, full of cloth-eared trolls and hairy beasts, there is the familiar collection of gleaming super structures and flying gizmos. Robots maybe. Maybe it’s a robot society. A hybrid human-robot society that frames the village below, in front, to get across the differences between the two modes of living. Which would you sooner be: a mud skimming, shit-kicking, flea-ridden pisser living off rats and peas, or a highly evolved future sentinel who has long since transcended all notions of perfection?

For instance, she said, we don’t do niggers up here, as our elevator descent carried us down, down through the stars. Below, before we could crush them, a collection of the outside trolls, brandishing banners, scattered into the open ducts, the airways and the gutters. As I said, she said, we don’t do niggers up here.

In the rockets, their blasts heard from even up here, great gangs of people out for some kind of salvation. A rocket ride wasn’t cheap, not even back then, and now, as they make their moves through space, they must surely be rueing the day they forked out. The society we have here is of monkeys, robots, ethereal wisp things, life forms that can only be understood as thoughts, spider-like encasements, blobs of energy, organic tree forms, rays of desire, computer codes, gender-free humanoids, little fat possessors of wisdom, birds, splashes of water, giant rocks and small torches of hatred. Those people in the rockets, we wouldn’t know what to do with them except, maybe, to eat them. Or, rather, to avail them of themselves and send them back empty, husks.

As envoy for StarFleet Extran-Plauno 7, it is my duty to report back at intervals that I deem to be timely. Ten thousand years or so, give or take a century. I am, it has to be said, showing signs of wear. And of weariness. There is something inside me, sometimes, that longs to be hairy. And I ache from a longing to breathe the air. Even though it would kill me. I have certain forbidden dreams of tomorrow.

Here is the story: I am an envoy from a distant planet that is distant in terms that are neither measured by time nor space but rather by attitude. My seven hundred thousand years here have so far been, relatively, short. I am here to study the differences between the two societies that sort of co-exist but only through various processes of ignorance. Neither society, until (relatively) recently, has engaged with the other. My mission, such as it is, is to bring them in contact with one another. It was I who smuggled in the trolls, who gave them an awareness of all they had been missing. I, if you like, gave them fire. And soon I will be punished for it. Yes, punished like Prometheus. But between myself and the trolls there is something more than scientific curiosity and cosmic meddling. And what do you think? I discover humanity, the last vestiges of it, outside, in the shit and the mud, lurking within these troll things, these dirt poolers, these wilderness grubbers. Not within, not inside with these silver robot types who pose as gods. Salvation comes to me, at the last moment. But is it too late? Will I regenerate?

My distant rocket, fashioned from the wires and bits surrounding the gleaming liquid towers, carries me out into the deepest of space. I have left behind the surrounds of protection. I have relinquished my immortality and have chosen to live with the troll things. With one in particular, my wife, who, as we see when we pull out into space, is radiant with our child. Within them both lies hope. And behind lies further hope in the shape of rockets full of blackies, glad now that they’d forked out for their fare.

A Substance in a Cushion

2007-01-03T23:45:00.001Z

How my nice middle class life began, I cannot say. Or will not say. One thing, however, is for sure: I do, oh boy, enjoy my nice middle class life. I would have to be a mooncalf not to.

My nice middle class life is an entail of first thing in the morning to last thing at night. I begin with a light breakfast of fancies and canapés and end the day on a grouse or a pheasant or something that is, you know, quite particular. I did, of course, say middle class. Which is why I would like to revise my menu to, first of all, something organic and healthy like orange juice and natural yoghurt plus cereal and, lastly, with a slice of something also organic, like pate and maybe a dark chocolate of some kind, additionally a red wine. It begins and ends that way with many nibbled diversions that are both tasty and wholesome and leave me under no illusions as to who I am and what I, as they say, stand for. And yesterday, while lunching at that vegan café, The Greenhouse (where they also sell books and a whole raft of hilarious anti-American postcards), I sat, quite by accident, next to the delightful Mr Adrian Ramsay of local Green Party fame and fortune. Hence my foregrounding of food and the mention of the organic treats that I have mentioned here today.

In time as my existence is all about, I also, naturally, harbour children and bring them up the best I can and how to behave as best as they can and, mostly, how not to, as I tell them, give myself and them also a bad name. There are two of them: Freddie and Freya, we liked the alliteration. They are both young enough still that we can put off yet the struggle we are sure to have on whether they should go to public (that is, private) school or whether we should send them around the corner to the local school that is, of course – given who we are and where we live – perfectly adequate. But, you know. They, my children, have all of the books and oh God, are we truly as awfully ill-drawn here to state our preferences vis a vis the Harry Potter books not being quite good enough now that they’re so popular, we prefer Phillip Pullman, plus choice entries such as Where The Wild Things Are and that gorgeous book about the sisters, what was it called? The Three Incestuous Sisters, with its wonderful illustrations although, you know, we wouldn’t really approve of comics, this book really is quite something else. We also like, myself and the children, those fridge magnets that are words, that enable us to form sentences that, in our minds at least, are a kind of poetry. We also send them to and demand: piano and dance lessons, plus pottery, horse-riding and to book clubs: children’s’ book clubs. I would love to tell you all about it, as I’m sure that they would too one day, when they’re grown.

Anyway, my politics are as you might imagine. I won’t dwell on it too much here except to say that I never miss an episode of Robert Fisk and regard that angel of light Mr Noam Chomsky as a kind of easier to swallow antidote (is antidote right?) to the vulgar buffoonery of Michael Moore, as correct as he may be in many, many things, especially about American foreign policy and all things, you know, arrogantly western. I read a letter in today’s local newspaper that said that after hanging Saddam perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty in our judgments especially when we have in our midst a man who, along with his puppet or poodle Tony, is not only a kind of monkey but is also the world’s greatest living terrorist and the world’s greatest threat to world peace, the American president of course, I cannot even bear to say his name. I shed tears I do. Real tears. For all the children.

We have here in our little pad, as we like to call it, a range of scented cushions and pillows that have, at one time or other, held soft the tight backsides of the floppy fringed cabaret marks who make up the latest current crop of bright hopes in the firmament world of acting, in drama and big on the screen. They are young, perfect complexioned and nattily jumpered, with sleeves and cuff links and an air of cool that you just can’t learn on the stage although that is, of course, precisely where they learned it. My husband, you see, is a director or photographer or media beat who, in good fortune through his father, landed this job – through his own talent and skills, of course – whereby he meets and entertains all kinds of new marks, actors like I say, who, on occasion, are here with us here in our town pad, as we like to call it, where I feed them organic and dote on them in a kind of motherly fashion although Justin, my husband, of course, is always telling me off and telling me to leave them alone, stop fussing you silly old thing. But if you’ve seen them in the style pages or in the end of year profiles you will see that they all look somehow the same and smell the same, where do they come from? We know where they come from. In their jumpers and rolled-up sleeves, wrapped in their scarves and teetering atop those perfect pointy shoes.

Our travels take us abroadish mostly where we indulge through happenings: wine picking and grape stamping, carolling and big cavorting, watersports and ski lodges, nesting, barrow boys, curling and drag. Where the sun travels we travel too, except when we pack deep into the snow. Brrr. Luckily the winter warmers and the fireside glow. At Christmas, in particular, we rise.

In cinemas we are last to arrive, impatient for the starts. As we claw, that’s the word, through the hushing throng we are at least comforted by our superiority in matters of this. That is, we would not dream of shushing and sighing were the boot, so to speak, on the other foot. Time means little to us. Or, rather, on time means little to us. We can’t always be there when we have to be here. If you know what I mean. So that the waiters and hoteliers who, in converse, treat us with that respect lacking towards others who, for instance, keep clock or make much of the fact of being waited on. Waiters, in particular, can smell this, can seek out those for whom being waited on is something of a treat and therefore a rarity and therefore then something that is not, if you like, within them, part of them. They are, it has to be said, little that is much worth attending to. No wonder their bitterness, their shouldered chips.

When to visit the library, when to smoke the cheese, when to curl up to the rabbits, when to tend to the graves, when to cobble the stones? These are, and we know this to be true, the questions that hold us fast here in our nice middle class life that has so much more to give and so much more to say for itself than you would find here with the easy mocking tone and the easy kicks. As Justin said, on first proofs: any fool could do that. Before he jet-skied into the horizon and rose, some days later, a whirligig of Martinis and dolly-birds. What about the children? I asked. What about them, darling? he replied.

Crispy The Christmas Clown: One Year On

2006-12-20T00:04:00.000Z

Hollyhocks and Boon, terrored through the twilight, was afire and aglow, blazing away from the delicate touch of burning peasant torches. The werewolf landlord, trapped inside with his old regulars the Mistletoe Twins and Half Barry, screamed the last of his lungs and vowed a certain type of Christmas vengeance to be visited upon said peasants in future years to come. At the same time, outside in the snow, Crispy the Christmas Clown caught those vows, juggled them with an abandon that suggested equal measures of skill and confidence, and threw them deep into the bowels of his reddest Christmas sack.

In the previous days, in the moments leading up to this pyromanic parade, Crispy had been engaged in the pre-preparation preparations indulged in by Santa and his eight mordant elves. After last year’s rescue mission, whereby Crispy saved the day through the last minute delivery of presents, glad tidings and unspeakable horror to boys and girls worldwide, Santa had judged it only fair that Crispy should, for a time, enjoy the spoils of being his number one helper. And boy, did he enjoy them. All the brandy curls and cokes he could drink, endless mince pies, the finest sprinkling of the finest sparkling glitter and the company of a certain gang of female elves who were small and big in all the right places. No wonder Crispy glowed so.

But with Crispy out of the festive picture, so to speak, our werewolf landlord, in full cahoots with his resident regulars (the likes of Sooty and Snow, Sid Sleigh and his gorgeous wife Giddyup, Sancho Hup, Dave and Ansel Collins and the aforementioned - and now burning - figures of the Mistletoe Twins and Half Barry) took it upon himself to more regularly change into his wolfish aspect in order to gain a tighter rule over the village through his unadulterated lycanthropic terror. That is, he tore through the village late at night, ripping at throats, laughing at authority and touching the ladies. What a life. And his plan may well have succeeded were it not for the unwitting, though timely, intervention of our real hero, a certain Crispy the Christmas Clown, who responded, unwillingly, to the desperate cries and calls of the mere citizens and chattel of the village. Why did Crispy do his duty? Because Santa told him to.

Now, with his adventures already the stuff of legend, it was but a small leap for Crispy to surround himself with his likely crew of elves, reindeer and other hardy bods from in and around Santa’s workshop and factory. These elves, equipped with specialist low stature skills, quickly took on board personal bodyguard status, willing and able to take a bullet, or a fang, should the occasion arise. The reindeer, minus Rudolph but consisting of Prancer, Dancer, Duncan and Heartache, told Crispy that they too would leap in the way of bullets and fangs but would also be better employed as navigators, sleighpullers and hoof stompers. And so, with all these folk and figures in tow, Crispy the Christmas Clown set off from Lapland with the sincere best wishes (and secret good riddances) of Santa and his jolly wife, Muscatel, ringing hard and fair in his snowy white ears. Goodbye yon Crispy! they cried, goodbye you grotesque clown!

Having heard of Crispy’s imminent departure and plans, the werewolf landlord of the Hollyhocks and Boon took himself out into the glassy black night and gazed up at the moon in order to affect the appropriate werewolf change. Which is to say that he stepped outside as a man and returned, minutes later, as a fully-fledged werewolf. Not great news for Crispy, and not great news for the regulars who, as often happened when he made this change, had to flee for what was left of their wretched and worthless lives. Get at you! shouted the werewolf landlord as he tore open the yellowing throats of Sooty and Snow, Sid Sleigh and his gorgeous wife Giddyup, Sancho Hup and Dave and Ansel Collins. Boo!

By the time Crispy and his merry band of elves, reindeer and spazzers alighted upon the roof of the Hollyhocks and Boon, only the werewolf landlord, the Mistletoe Twins and Half Barry were there to greet them. Ha! thought Crispy, I’ll soon have those rascals up in the air screaming from fear! But when he reached down to grab them he was surprised to discover that they had nailed themselves to the floor in order to avoid any likely grabbing scenario. Curses. Which was why, instead, Crispy emptied his diesel-filled bladder into the chimney and watched with glee as the encroaching peasant villagers put their flaming torches to the windows of the Hollyhocks and Boon. Boom, as they say, and Crispy, his elves, the reindeer and the spazzers were thrown from the roof to rain down like snow (or snow down like rain) on to the surrounding white carpet of the pub’s fair grounds. Curses, vows and screams from within. Crispy laughing and catching without, his bright red sack a net of fine distinction. Hurrah! cried those villagers, he has saved our worthless and wretched lives!

And so Christmas was saved once more. And once more Crispy the Christmas Clown had to deal with the peasant adulation and praise that was now grist to his manky, ungrateful mill.

The Crunch Underfoot

2006-12-17T22:29:00.000Z

Tools of far light, coils of burning pomade. Last Christmas I gave you my heart. And if I had to live it over again, I would live it over again.

Life flowered but the tree outside died, again, for the winter. The sky grey, the light white. Somewhere through the frost, I could, almost, I could, your face.

Shoes are the tread they crimp into the packed level of snow. They are the walk from this end here to that end there. Do your children climb on to your shoes?

Christmas losers. You can have your Christmas, losers, you can have it all. I am, I mean, the king of mince pies, the lord of stuffed pudding and crows.

Those are not the things I meant, not the things I mean. If I shift in my chair on cold winter nights I shift to stay warm. Despite appearances, I fear the cold.

I am the best wrestle between you and the burn of hot figgy pudding. Shiny sixpences fill my pockets. And there’s the rub: the weight of old Christmas.

Old Christmas was a sketch on the back of a candle maker’s photograph. In the foreground the delicate cherubim. Just behind, the howl of red reindeer.

Here comes Saint Nick. Jolly and wise, he is both a gift to the ancient ritual of Festimas and the stone cold killer of it. Look how his sleigh tips from the weight.

Most crackers come with a toy of some kind, a novelty, a joke, a hat. These crackers here, they come with love. Love is all they have to give.

The kiss beneath the mistletoe: curiously non-sexual. No shaking off of the snow, no re-igniting the embers. Nothing at all that could be taken like brandy.

Throughout the pages and running through five staves, the build up to Christmas eve. You knew well how it ended. The secret was in the telling.

Socks on our hands, coats in the driers. The black of the corners, two: a chip shop and a haberdashery. The warmth of the coats: one minute’s pleasure for 50p.

Groans pushed past and the elves fell. A shopping trolley here, in the heart of the grotto. To his credit, he said he wouldn’t fill it up, never.

The same thing every year, pressed and hung at the back of the cupboard. She’s been dead eight years now. She would have liked him like this, at this time of year.

At this time of year it is always worth remembering those less fortunate. The old soldiers, the orphans, the meek. A shiny sixpence and you can be on your way.

Innocence is still the cry as he flies. As he sprinkles stardust and snowflakes, circled by the moon. But if the house is on fire where will he land?

Noted, the lean towards magic, the fall into faith. The doors are open wider and longer at this time of year, it is true. We have to let them in, we have to let them out.

He kicked his mother and she kicked her husband and the whole room fell into a spin. Let the games commence! they cried. They already have! somebody replied.

Tinsel and Gretel behind breadcrumbs and pebbles, somewhere in the forest. Will Christmas ever reach them out there? Will Christmas ever find them?

Stay with me this year while I get through the season. Stay with me while I undress, while I redress. Stay with me until this time next year.

The open floodgates were no longer a barrier to the run of the snow. Liquid snow, liquid ice. That consumed our front door steps, lifted our locks.

No more whiteness it blinds my grey eyes. In the dark, through the back, I press my face into the warmth of the oven. Eyebrows for the new year.

On the sea they see visions of God, of Jesus, of Santa Claus. The more able-bodied among them ice the deck and slide. All the way into the season.

Lost Christmas and she’s still there, I reckon, somewhere on the mantelpiece. We imagine her as a long-lost gift. Just waiting to return home.

I Will Kiss Your Cool Bark

2006-12-13T00:09:00.000Z

Dingle of Christmas, there was a spark by the fire and hot coals rolled in unison, in time, to the gentle throng of the carols whistling and rising from somewhere outside. By the fire’s glow this Christmas eve lay Gentle Rogue, the family dog and chief flea-catcher who, by morning, would, through no fault of Santa’s, not really, be stone cold dead with his eyes ripped out. Stone cold, that is, even though the fire will still be roaring and happy, unlike the kids who will be roaring over their dead dog, for sure, but not at all happy. But still, for a few hours at least, what we have here is a Christmas scene straight from a jolly Christmas postcard that gets you, so to speak, right here, and gets you, moreover, longing for the warmth, comfort and joy of the vagaries of what you seem to recall was some kind of halcyonic childhood. Snow can even be seen falling outside, great fat flakes of it puncturing the deep blue of a flawless Christmas sky. Look, there are angels swimming in it, stars dazzling through it. The perfect Christmas scene for you to cut out and keep.

But surrounding the house and so far yet invisible to your naked, watchful eye, the ghosts of Christmas past, those ruiners of everything. Held tight in their tiny fists, holly-cornered post-it notes from which they recount the highs, the lows, the fun-filled dramas of Christmases you hoped had long since been forgotten:

Christmas One.
How you have the nerve to look back on this Christmas without vomiting from shame is, actually, beyond us. You recall, I assume, your children beaten with huge striped candy walking sticks? Your wife bundled out into the snow, naked, while you gorged yourself on the hottest, tastiest mince pies in all Christendom?

Christmas Two.
The elves at the Co-Op grotto were treated for shock. As were the children. There was confusion, at first, as to whom you were referring when you ran through the grotto screaming Beware the little cunts! Beware the little cunts! In fact, now that we think of it, just who were you referring to? The elves or the children?

Christmas Three.
Pissing into the Christmas punch. Forgetting you’d pissed into it. Drinking most of it, later. Remembering you’d pissed into it. Throwing up into the Christmas punch. Watching your guests drink the Christmas punch.

Christmas Four.
It was Christmas Day at the Franklin Pangborne Hospice and the children there, like most children across the land, greeted the early day in excited anticipation of finding their stockings filled to the toes with all kinds of fantastic goodies and cracking stuff. Imagine their surprise then when they discovered that their stockings were, in fact, empty and that all of their fantastic goodies and fantastic stuff had been taken out and smashed into pieces in the car park. By you, of course.

Christmas Five.
Christmas cards filled with shit sent out to all the pensioners in your area.

Christmas Six.
You killed Santa and fucked his wife.

Christmas Seven.
Etc.

The Steamed Sixpence

2006-12-08T01:14:00.000Z

The red basket was open and inside were the apple blobs of Christmas time. The basket was warm slightly and also slightly damp so that when you pressed your hand into it, it felt wet slightly, a little warm. The apples were not, of course, crisp. The apples were soft and warm and you’d have to be a bedwetter or somesuch to eat and, moreover, enjoy them.

Red baskets and apples are all that remain. The children have fled. Crisp air, cobbled stones, a stretch of cobbles that hold, just, the stout legs of the sturdy market tables. There’s a church steeple, a counting house, a gallery, a courtyard, a small pub, an ostler’s wrestle, a bank, an Ann Bonney whop, an abandoned keep. And now, at last, a policeman. Who goes there?

Yes, Christmas time. You could tell by the lights and the general glad tidings that filled the air and played about even the sternest of faces. Christmas shopping fatigue? asked the sign that also directed the shoppers upstairs to some traditional Christmas grub. From the window looking down on to the expanse of shopping centre approach, the lights just visible through the quickly descending dusk. Maybe also a catch of snowflake - you could tell by the breath cutting into the air. No wonder they stamped their feet in a kind of rouse, in a kind of cheer.

Red baskets and apples, mere dots in the background. Pixels, as they say. Background pixels to the foreground Christmas drama of full plum pudding, turkey, all the trimmings. A steaming platter of traditional Christmas grub. No wonder that Father Christmas, visible and cold from the back pantry window, was licking his cherry red lips. No wonder that the little cherubims, five in total, were leaping up and down in their Sunday best all hoping for a stir of the gravy. No wonder mum was so serene and collected, pissed probably. And no wonder dad looked so maniacally twisted, the carving knife raised above his head with the baby Jesus in a picture on the wall just behind him - his baby head at the point of the knife. If this father could calm himself for a moment, could see what we see, he would be fair ashamed. At Christmas time and all.

It’s Christmas time so look, Victorians. With their top hats, big coats, merry furs, parnell gloves, woolly boots and what, cravats, scarves? Victorians are on the march and it’s just delightful that there’s snow on the ground, we need a bit of crisp and crunch. The brazier blazing away with roast chestnuts, jacket potatoes and red-faced kids is just the thing for this authentic Victorian Christmas. Mince pies and sherry, Mr Fezziwig and a whole afternoon of laughter and dancing. A tear, a song, the smallest bird and the biggest appreciation. Plum pudding and a sprig of holly pressed deep into your heart.

Deep into your heart.

And by the hearth, an old clock ticking, the mantelpiece groaning beneath the weight of plate, filled, as it is, with a merry feast of mince pies, brandy shavings, a glass of milk, twelve carrots, a corcupine rose, eight needles of grass, a small bottle of whiskey, two clams of chicken, a selection of the finest cheeses, a note. A handwritten note addressed to Santa himself and written in mother’s dear, slow hand:

Dear Santa

Oh what we wish for this year is somehow a relief from the misery that has dogged us throughout this year in the form of death rays and special bullets that can, in a moment, pierce our previously impenetrable skin and explode our already broken hearts. Who designed these fiendish splatters of death? We would love to know. And that, I suppose, is our first Christmas request. Our second Christmas request, while I’m on the subject, is a selection box each. Cadbury’s. Our third is, well, forgive me, slightly more risqué. That is, I would like some sexy new underwear or lingerie or whatever. Red in colour, perhaps. Maybe blue. I’ll leave it up to you. For the kids I direct your attention to the letters you must have received sometime during the earlier part of this month. Oh what lovely kids who want so little and give so much (in truth, they make me sick – but don’t tell them nor my husband). Talking of whom: for my husband I would like – or, rather, he would like – one of those new Ronco flapper things that selects, as if by magic, the record you want. Also, while I’m in that kind of area, I wouldn’t say no (hint, hint) to one of those button popping things that presses buttons on to your clothes without the need for needle and thread. I tell you Santa, even with my super speed I find the sewing on of buttons one of life’s more tedious tasks. Goodness knows how the rest of the women of Britain cope. I take my hat off to them all. And to you, Santa Baby, I remain, in pieces or as a whole, your abiding life-long servant and fan. PS: Please give the carrots to your beautiful and hardworking reindeer – the rest, of course, is for you. Eat up Santa, you fat buffoon!

In the corner the tree and from the tree, you know, the usual dangle of the usual baubles, lights and thingies. It is a forlorn tree, one might say, and a tree that has seen much better days. Its needles, rising up in a pile from the floor, are now high enough to swallow the tree whole. If only, the tree thinks, that slovenly bint would get the fucking Hoover out and give it a bash. Then, thinks the tree once more, my Christmas might be bearable. Unlikely, says a bauble who, somehow, has the power to read the minds of trees. The black hearted villain. And at Christmas time too.

Tear Open The Velvet Curtain

2006-12-02T13:08:00.000Z

She had, er, just returned home from the summer ball. Simply returned home from the summer ball. Her father, eyeing out from behind his newspaper, noticed, but didn’t mention, her skirt crazily tucked into her knickers, her blouse held tight in her hands, her lipstick all over her face and her shoes somewhere, God knows where, maybe somewhere on the steps of the Old Ballhouse or wherever it was that the summer ball had taken place.

The summer ball was, if you were that way inclined, the absolute event of the year. There was no way, man, no way at all, that you could even think about missing it. Why? Dancing, drinking, kissing, fighting, maybe a bit of fucking. You’d have to be a bedwetter to miss it. A jabbernow. A mooncalf.

She lay in dreams and wet her bed slightly as she drifted back to the earlier night’s proceedings. Oh, how could he, how could she? But she liked it really, didn’t she, liked him? Martha said that she had never seen her looking so, oh I don’t know, so daringly dramatic, so starkly beautiful, like a bewildered vampiress forced down the stairs by an unseen touch, perhaps the deadly hand of her master.

But it’s a mid-August night and the window, open, breathes in the enveloping closeness, the joy of a summer night to this summer night’s girl. She’s on the bed still, mere wisps over her, thinking that she’s finally asleep. The music of the night plays deep within her and her slow, imperceptible movements at last carry her into dreams. And he’s there. Of course he’s there.

Downstairs, her father is shuffling with an empty cup, towards the kitchen. A standard lamp throws, but misses, its empty light somewhere into the room which also, somehow, shuffles. He stops in the middle of the room, at the edge of the light, and aches, a little, for what is left of the summer.

A Flower To Try Its Currents

2006-11-29T00:15:00.000Z

A lonely town, adrift in a sea of waves: an island. On all sides there are barriers to prevent the meeting of land and water. A dry moat and the children who run within it.

In the centre, just past the railway station, a curve of shop doorways and the street lamp that lights them. From the glass, reflections and shadows bring warmth to the youthful proceedings. Steps, mainly, back and forth, the odd jab, the occasional cigarette, the smallest touch of laughter. It is cold tonight but no rain. The dryness has a snap that could maybe break their heads.

In the summer, the sun takes the town, turns it around. The oppression of the heat, everyone indoors, air conditioning, dry throats, faces etc. A kind of death of the town. Despite the heat, a cold, shimmering disc floating in a sea of warmth. No swimming, just bobbing.

The spring brings gambolling and all the virtues of new life and.

The spring brings a fade of wetness that reinvigorates the town, restores its people. Rehydrates, rather. It’s all about life. There are children, of course, clacking down the cobbled streets, chasing the coal man, the rag and bone man, the ice-cream man. There are children on low curbs, their knees past their ears, always looking down the street for the surprise that may turn in at the bottom. The surprise of the motor car, an errant bus, the run of a lost squirrel.

The spring fetches up the sea, filled also with new life and.

The sea is a surround that rises. It keeps an eye on the landlocked inhabitants within. The sea thinks it is the keeper of the land. Fish swim in it. Mermaids cut through it. Shopping trolleys sink in it. It is a stew of sorts.

Self-sufficiency is a curse to the sea. But who, after all, needs fish and saltwater? Health animals, heart attack types, nature bores, kitchen fanciers, letter writers, wine fanciers, wind chimers, hill walkers, real alers, documentary watchers, cottage dwellers, property owners, herb fanciers, tree climbers, river drivers, cyclists, recyclists, bedwetters and you.

The landlocked inhabitants, the lubbers, are held in a particular moment. There they are, standing against shop windows, rolling marbles, passing each other in the street, undressing through window frames, dying at the bottom of the stairs, peeking up through coal grates, flashing their knickers at passing strangers, kissing in the front seats of burnt out cars. They are activity driven, of one kind or another. The sea will not slow them.

The sea, how many times? How many times has it spied over the wall and dreamed of filling the moat, of drowning the children? Four? Three thousand? Countless times? The latter. Because the sea, every day, dreams of filling the moat and drowning the children. Every day. But the children, through generations, are aware of this and cock their appropriate snooks to the sea. And does the sea care? You can bet your salt it does.

Man-made barriers are a barrier to the sea’s success in the town. Let’s stick it to nature, the Mayor often says, when he’s addressing crowds against the backdrop of the angry sea. Tempestuous sea, naturally. He wipes spots of sea from the back of his neck. Drops of sea. Let us celebrate, he continues, the miracle of this town. Let’s stamp our feet on dry ground and make butterfly angels when it snows. Let’s hop from pavement to street, avoiding the curb, and tap in the gutter. Let’s crane our necks and twist our heads in admiration of the manmade steeples, skyscrapers and telephone masts that punctuate the unbearable aridity of the sky. Let’s whistle in appreciation to the vigour of our advertising boards. Let’s celebrate the triumph of the motor car. Let’s leap to it when the factory whistles blow. Let’s sink our pints, throw our darts and rub sawdust on the floors. Let’s say we like music when we mean we like music. Let’s dance to the music. Let’s stand, in rows three deep, watching the shop television screens in silence when our leaders are slaughtered. Let’s raise banners against those who raise banners. Let’s throw balls against old people’s walls. Let’s blow hard into sucker wrappers in order to get to our suckers. Let’s stand on park benches and make out like trees. Let’s hang our washing on the thinnest of lines. Let’s tell all the backwards that we want to go forwards. Let’s burn our electric lights and blaze them all night. Let’s go to smoky jazz clubs and make a noise for rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s tell our best children to sit on their desks. Let’s repair our railways when our railways have broken. Let’s drive our cars when our railways are broken, when our railways are working. Let’s hold hands before we step on to the grass. Let’s dress all in black when our people are dead. Let’s hate death and celebrate life. Let’s tear down old monuments to make way for new monuments. Let’s smile at radioactivity and get to know our nuclear. Let’s smoke ‘em if we’ve got ‘em. Let’s make one thing clear: we will not be slaves to the sea.

To which the people, oh, they cheer. The blank of the sky soon dotted with hats. Banners trailing behind planes. Cheap flights carrying the working-classes round the town, out of the town and faraway over and above the sea. Hooray for the working-classes! Hooray for cheap flights! Hooray for Israeli fruit and veg!

Remember It Hurts

2006-11-27T22:59:00.000Z

How much more joy can one life stand? How much more passion, excitement and meaning can I cram into my already brimful life? How many more times can I sit back and let the pleasure, the euphoria, the positive energy just wash over me? How much more happiness, truly, can I take?

The thing with exercises like these is that they have to be followed to the letter. To the absolute letter. Just a small veer from the path, just a tiny detour from the plan, will result in instant failure. Not delayed failure, instant failure. There and then failure. Think about that for a minute. Chew on that for a second while I whistle into my thumbs.

I despise lettuce juice and could just throw up at the mere sight of radish paste. But if life has taught me anything it’s that you have to learn not to trust your senses. That is, your traditional, conservative, capitalistic senses: the so-called big five. You have to learn to fall back somewhat, to give up the old reliances and focus on the new. The new you. The new you that hides somewhere within. But first you must locate, and learn how to use, your vectis. Without your vectis, your journey past those big five senses will be a tiresome journey indeed.

Action is the ingredient. Knowledge is the fuel. It’s time to put your foot down and go!

The love/hate balance is, of course, something that few, if any, of us, could ever hope to control. In fact, it has been said, as I’m sure most of you know, that this state of love/hate achievement has been attained by only the very few. And it has been written, throughout time and through the dustiest pages, that only a certain elite, a certain few, have ever conquered, or mastered, the ancient arts of the love/hate balance.

Who, in the Energiser versus Drainer showdown, will you be rooting for? Whose side, missy, will you be on? You can become a Drainer and drain the living shit from out of your friends, family and acquaintances until they’re nothing but dry, empty husks who neither know nor care. Or you can, conversely, be one of life’s Energisers and fill your friends, family and acquaintances with the very stuff of life and even re-energise, re-life, some of those dry, empty husks back to life. That’s right, back to life. So what will it be, missy? What will be your choice?

Curb entropy! Plug that open hole!

The road to empowerment is a crossroad meander that will lead you by various paths and nooks until you will at last find not just empowerment but also contentment, satisfaction, self-love, self-esteem and real, genuine empowerment all in one neat little package that can be bundled up, held in your heart and carried just about anywhere you go to light the way, to strengthen your resolve, to kick-start your life and to give you a real, genuine sense of empowerment and achievement that will enable you, in time, to become the person I truly believe, and you truly believe, you truly are.

Common side-effects that you, the Dynamic Mind, should be watchfully mindful of:
Self-loathing.
Pastoral angst.
Jealousy states.
Boredom.
Crater-faced crabbiness.

Faith-based meditation is a brand new enlightenment technique that allows the user (i.e. you) to participate in a new kind of religious experience that is designed purely to help you out of your old state of mind and into your new state of mind. It is as if God were, so to speak, your personal counsellor, offering best advice and real guidance that can equip you for the challenges you face in the modern world. It is your doorway to genuine spiritual enlightenment and, best of all, requires nothing more from you than the desire to hold fast to faith. Go on, you can do it. Anyone can do it.

Eating disorders are all too common among the middle-classes who take for granted the abundance that Western society has seen fit to pour upon their plates. This abuse of abundance tends to go either one way or the other: towards either a state of fatness or thin-ness, depending on which way the particular disordered mind is (at)tuned. Accompanying this appalling, self-imposed, self-aggrandising state is often the self-pitying whine of a mind that is also crying out for the attention it feels is its due – a mind that believes that being a bag of bones or, conversely, a bucket of lard is not enough to bestow upon the so-called ‘victim’ the all-important and highly prized victim status. Attempts to further encourage notice by way of self-harming rituals and endless fucking whittling on about absolutely nothing are all par for the course. It is enough, as this controversial yet totally empowering book makes clear, to make you puke.

Do you remember when you were small and your dreams were big? Not just your night dreams but your day dreams, your morning dreams, your afternoon dreams – all your dreams! And do you recall how you dared to dream? How your dreams were never too big, never too wild, never too impossible? Do you remember how, in those long gone days, your dreams seemed real, seemed touchable, seemed possible? You do? Then it’s time you dared to dream again!

May I Feel Said He

2006-11-24T15:29:00.000Z

Breasts that heave, rise and undulate beneath the tastefully decorated veneer of the frilliness of her almost see-through blouse that, surely, is a size too small. If they were any closer, he thought, he could reach out to them, touch them, maybe rest his head and sneak the smallest kiss, take the tiniest bite. Look at them, just look at them, heaving there, rising (the word tremulous comes to him, suddenly), look at the way they sit there. With his erection, his arousal, just a touch away beneath the table, he touches himself lightly. Somewhere, in the background, the ocean swells and pounds. In fact, it hammers. The sea rises and drowns the beach. The river rises and creaks its banks.

And creaks its banks. The silliness of this kind of situation is, of course, made sillier in the recounting. She had, as they say, great knockers. The things he’d like to do to them. Or rather, to her. To all of her.

The resulting wetness was all par for the course and what he’d come to expect from someone like her, the dirty little mare. All that leery winking, those fuck me eyes. How could he resist?

How could he resist? He almost had her saying: Give it to me big boy, as they fucked hard (of course, hard) on the floor of the restaurant toilet or out back somewhere, pressed against a rubbish bin so that all the attendant tastes and smells could intermingle with, you know, the act, and act as a kind of sensual posy for all the real, mechanical stuff that was hard, painful and deeply, beyond all expectation, deeply satisfying. Obviously. At one point, he had her on her knees, her face pressed into a puddle or a smudge of something appropriately filthy but also edible, somehow. When she looked up, afterwards, that grin on her face, the mess on her face, and the way she licked her lips, wiped her face with the barest touch of her fingertips. Well, it was enough to make him. Enough to just make him.

The silliness of this out the back of the restaurant business is, we hope, softened somehow by the knowledge that we have all, at one time or other, been there. Not, of course, literally behind the restaurant (or at least, not behind that restaurant), but on our knees like the desperate fornicators and women-haters we truly are. How did she end up on her knees on that cold, wet floor? How did she end up with her face in that pile of whatever it was?

He entered her and as soon as he entered her her body buckled beneath the weight – no, the sheer significance – of the multiple orgasms that raced through her and declared, in the most certain of terms, that, at last, her long years of frigidity were a long way behind her. Yes. Look what he did for her.

Oh, he thought, oh she’s going to suck me right down. Oh, he said, that’s it bitch, you suck me right down!

This character, this clown, is, of course, even more deserving of the contempt that, surely, has already come his way. He asked her, What do you want? Love. Love is what I want.

They were walking together, hand in hand occasionally, over the beach. The moonlight, the cooling breeze, something appropriately significant on the horizon or lighting their way from somewhere up ahead, the hotel maybe. They walked on the still warm sand, bare feet, and listened to the crashing, the pounding, of the sea as it crashed behind them, the dark making it seem that much more thrilling. For that brief moment, all of two minutes, she realised that, perhaps, she was in love. Perhaps. They reached the hotel and the manager greeted them, offhand, dismissive. Let’s go to the bar, he said, fuck him, we don’t have to go bed, let him wait on us all night, fuck him. So they went to the bar and joined, again, the crowd of youths they’d spent the previous night with, with their girlfriends and wives on another table in a kind of conspiracy of self-hatred. Yet with their arrogance. Taking their seats, drinks all round, the conversation as banal, as threatening and as overwhelmingly child-like as it had been the night before. And soon she was the centre of attention, held up as somehow different from those wives and girlfriends whose directed attention quickly turned to abuse and laughter. As she.

Later, in their room, he threw her to the bed, she remembered in the morning, slapping her, calling her the same names they’d called her, fucking her, fucking her up the arse, calling her those same, terrible names, telling her he fucking loved her and loved fucking her and all the fucking crap he came out with about spanking her so hard, you’d like that bitch, you’d like that bitch wouldn’t you, as his fingers, rigid, unlike his cock. You like that, don’t you bitch?

Don’t you bitch? Where had he, this young man of apparent outward respectability and maybe half decent breeding, acquired such language? From his father? From the movies? From his mother?

He knew he was on to a sure thing that first night when he saw how those sweet knockers, tight beneath her blouse, heaved almost in time to his declarations. Of how they seemed to cling tight not only to her blouse but tight, also, to his every word. It was like they were somehow attuned to him, somehow a part of him and he knew that he had to, as they say, get a good piece of her. And how willing she came to him and how trusting she was then, out in the night, both half cut, both heading home together for the rest of the night. Oh, the things he would do to her.

The silliness of the situation is undermined completely by just, even, a small insight into this tiny mind. The hatred, of course. Which could, naturally, be blamed on a million things that were absolutely no fault of his own. Naturally. And naturally, his hatred of women stood in direct comparison, direct proportion, to his love of men, to his love of all things to do with men. Even as he declared, as he often declared, his love for women. His love for the very essence of women.

And he would never have guessed that she mistook this hatred, at first, for a kind of naïve longing, a naïve desperation amid his naïve sensibility. She imagined that he was somehow engaged in a faintly heroic struggle against the clichés of that kind of thing but was, for whatever reason, and through no fault of his own, failing. It was then, she thought, her responsibility to help him get through it. She would help him to get through it.

And so, for a time, as she threw herself into the lovemaking, as she called it, and threw herself into this and that, she came to know herself more fully. Which is, of course, the main thing and the whole point of this kind of story. In fact, the really funny thing about the whole business of their relationship was that it all turned out to be much more than just a meditation on the misogyny of a certain young man and an exploration of the differences between the men and the women. Because, as we all eventually come to realise, the differences between the men and the women are so full of cosmic (and comic) possibilities that it would require something that goes far beyond tawdry hotel and restaurant scenes, far beyond the use of certain clichés and thingies. Far beyond anything at all that could be described as insightful, illuminating or - curses - entertaining. You get so far and then you have to get out.

Still, he did get to fuck her up the arse. Or ass, as the saying goes.

The Flowering Of The Lesions

2006-11-20T23:22:00.000Z

From, let’s say, the moment he moved here, he managed to contrive himself as the sworn enemy of that gang of kids, the Above The Law crew or whatever they were called. The ATL. Whose only point of existence was to

(Whose only point of existence was to what? Those kids who cried only for the open, unfamiliar arms of good, good loving? It is understood, surely, that there is no such thing as a rotten kid?)

Well, those rotten kids were at least responsible for a good deal of the pain he felt since the moment of moving here. Not even two feet out of the removal lorry when an egg hit him, right in the face. The laughter of the group and the abuse aimed at his daughter, nine-years-old: fucking whore, fucking bitch, fucking slag. Not yet even on the pavement.

They ran, those youths, and in time he caught up with one of them. Floored him, took his ankles away so that he fell on his face, teeth flying everywhere, blood etc. The howls, the obvious pain but also, surprisingly, the grim defiance. It would have been enough, that fall, but the continued threats and abuse, even as he tried to walk away, could only have led to: a kick in the face, a kick in the stomach, a punch in the face, two quick punches in the face, a kick at the back of the head. Then he walked away.

No, he didn’t die. The kicks and the punches were real, their ferocity muted. Bruised, battered, bloody and with a full crowd of witnesses, the kid took himself through the whole process, through the police, the court, the papers.

‘Rotten little cunt’ attacker freed

A father jailed for six months for attacking a youth he said was harassing him and his family has been freed by the Court of Appeal.

David Roley, 39, of Daffodil Crescent, Kelston, won his appeal against the length of the prison sentence given to him in April at Kelston Crown Court.

The term was reduced to three months, resulting in his immediate release.

Roley had pleaded guilty to three counts of grievous bodily harm, intent to injure and intent to cause fear through extreme violence.

Although his sentence was reduced, his counsel, Beaker Lestrade, failed to persuade the judges to follow the decision in the case of teacher Harry Smelts. His six-month jail term for waving around a blowtorch in a confrontation with yobs was quashed by the Court of Appeal in May and replaced with a conditional discharge.

The Recorder of Cardiff, sitting as a judge of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, said the facts of the Smelts case were "truly exceptional" and the court was not persuaded that Roley fell into that category.

Announcing the decision of the court on Wednesday, he said there was a "good reason" for Roley's offending.

Odious little bastards

The judge added: "The victim and his friends were clearly behaving like rotten little cunts and were doing all they could to intimidate Mr Roley and his family through threats, abuse and gratuitous name-calling."

Mr Coode told the court: "When these youths stood outside his house, they were clearly looking for some kind of fight and would have probably administered some level of violence. It was fortunate that Mr Roley, through his actions, ensured that this didn’t occur. He attacked the boy in an attempt to warn him off and to send out a clear message to others."

Summing up, Mr Coode added: “If only more of us were as civic-minded as Mr Roley. These odious little bastards, these dreadful, nasty cunts, running round our estates, ruining the lives of decent people. We should hang them. Fuck them and hang them. And people like Mr Roley should be paraded through the streets, awarded the highest honours and given the freedom of every city. Hurrah for Mr Roley, I say. And boo to all the little cunts."

In the court's judgment, the Recorder of Cardiff said, it was right that there should have been an immediate custodial sentence, but it should not have been longer than three months.

To Speak A Body Untethered

2006-11-16T01:08:00.000Z

I find that I find inspiration in the smallest of things. Such as, for instance, the songbird of flight that slammed into my lounge window this morning. His broken wing and the cat that tore him apart. Not my cat. Some cat, from somewhere next door, who showed no mercy. Absolutely none at all. The most perfect tweeting could not have saved that bird. But it was part of the raw aspect of nature that, to a greater or lesser extent, informs just about everything I do. I mean, that is, my work. I guess you could say that I am some kind of jackdaw. That songbird though. The poor thing.

The people I live with, that live around here, are, I imagine, mostly good people. Decent-ish, you know. There’s Carter across the road, the waver, with his bare torso whatever the weather and his studied career, or so it seems, of smoking cigarettes. Melinda, a few doors down, is like me in some ways: alone but out, most of the time, who knows where. There was an attempt here, some months ago, now I recall, to form some kind of association, a residents’ group to which I was asked to join but didn’t, couldn’t. The world closing in on us, they said, and we’re trying to keep it out. But I, on the other hand, wanted to invite it in, the world.

My art, as it is sometimes called, is, above all, the very thing of my self expression. It’s what I do it for, so I can relate to the world and to my own self, either through the me of the me here and now or the me of my yesteryears, my history and personal ancestry. My mother’s Native roots, my father’s Lithuanian bent. I do this, mainly, as I said, as a way to express myself, as a full mode of self expression. Without this, without this release, this big blast of art, I would be just another of the freaks with my methadone problem and potential alcoholic leanings. But as I am, now, I can see that Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson and The Pixies were me, were really me. They were all mine. In fact, they are, still, the very definition of the middle-browness that I craved and that which gave me so, so much. Without them, literally, I would now be dead. Literally. Oh, and The Clash, too, of course.

Right now I have invested myself into the business of helping to create a tribe which is a state of description I prefer over the word community because, you know, it signifies so differently. By which I mean that it tells us that we are especially different. I would have used the word gang but you can only take these things so far, can’t you? Tribe, I’ve been told, carries with it a certain sense of the ritual and gives off, I hope, the pungent whiff of a warrior’s raw call. And it touches, as I previously stated, both my mother’s Native heritage and my father’s Lithuanian saga from over the sea. Moreover, it justly identifies the intimate relationships that are birthed from a nomadic, ever-shifting, de-centered centralised energy that belongs more to the rough of the land, the urgent and to other bodies than it does to, you know, society as a whole. Or rather, society as a hole, a sinkhole. It is plural, this thing, cosmopolitan, egalitarian, eclectic and permanently fluid behind and beneath the whole power of order and pull.

And what, you may ask, of the songbird?

Smeared lightly on the glass of the window, the songbird’s general grease, plus the pulse of tiny blood droplets and no doubt a whistle of spittle. After impact, it not so much slid from the window as dragged, fell and bounced from the surface of the window, its glass, all the way to the floor. By the time I got close enough to see, the songbird was being ravaged, or savaged, by the neighbour’s cat. My frantic glass banging and howling did nothing to deter that cat from the business of, as I said, tearing that songbird apart. I tell you, by the time the cat had finished, I was spitting feathers. Just, in fact, like that cat was also spitting feathers.

But seriously. It is incidents like that that somehow rise to the occasion in order to provide my life with its richness of meaning. Without that songbird, my morning this morning would have been a search for inspiration that I may or may not have found. What was particularly gratifying was that, even without taking into account the whole symbolism of birds and flight thing, it was, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, quite literally a gift that fell from the skies. The only pity of it, really, was the fact of the cat.

Although, naturally, the real business of it all is primarily concerned with how moments like that are a gift for my self-expression. Not just as an artist but also as a woman. That is, and more importantly, as a woman artist. A wartist, in fact. A term that carries both the sense of my femininity vis a vis the w signifying woman and also the declaration push of serious intent as connoted by the prefix war. That the very act of my existence, including the acts of my making, are, to all intents and purposes, first and foremost declarations of war. I am, as they say, fighting a good fight and am in good fighting spirits. And besides, we all know how difficult it is to get rid of warts.

What lured me into the universe, at least the universe that I created, that created me and contains me, was the self-reflexiveness and mono-vocality that, quite literally, used to drive me insane. I long to collaborate and cannot see how I, or any other artist, can reasonably function within a world where the conservative nature of its writers and artists is something that has been forced down upon them by, you know, Reagan and then Bush. Outside of the moments of these regimes (because that is what history will prove them to be, momentary regimes) these artists were, of course, raging avant-gardeists and innovators. You literally could not stop them. So my mission, if I may state it so baldly, is to kind of kick open the universal gates into the universe I’m seeking to create. Which is to say, spaces within a larger space – the universe that contains them – where artists can go about the business of making art and doing all that they really long to do that is literally being denied to them by the funding boards, the book reviewers, the commentators, the media slags and the publishers and patrons who are, as we all know, directly controlled by the government or, if not, at least influenced and/or scared to such a degree that the conservative, mainstream agenda is something they promote as vigorously and as ruthlessly as if they were operating on party political lines. That is, what I mean is, that these conservative artists are conservative and middlebrow through no real fault of their own. How could it be their fault when it is they, unlike the politicians, who are the artists? So I mean that what I enjoy most is creating a dynamic space for writers and artists to, you know, just make. Especially the women. The women who I am determined to ensure get a real grasp of the modes of engagement so that they can truly engage within themselves their long denied need for diversification. Who cares? Well I care, for a start. I care from my heart. It is my heart that leads me. And sometimes, it really hurts, my wreckage of a heart.

Which is why, when I think harder about it, that songbird touched me so. Because he played out some kind of huger function that spoke to me perhaps on newer levels that I have yet to truly understand. He, like I said, represented not only all the symbolism and fancies of flight, but was also, literally, a smudge of smear on my window’s glass. I could, if I had been less driven by my heart, have wiped away the moment of him being brought into existence - the moment of him being brought into my frame of existence, into my universe. But my heart, I guess, stayed my hand. There was something intuitive about it, the reason for me staying indoors and staring at the songbird’s smudge. From the inside looking out.

Flicker Even Inside The Wet Wall

2006-11-15T10:48:00.000Z

Tender nights were the barrier to my blazing as I, ablaze, took my ready pizza and travelled the twenty yards or more to the neath of the Brooklyn Bridge where I, art as pure artefact, declared myself a bang (a lesser bang to be sure) and, for a brief moment, blazed neath that Brooklyn Bridge while passers-above wondered down at my blazing beauty. That is, I was a human torch. A man pyre.

But yes, my heat adventures had begun long before my lesser bang neath the Brooklyn Bridge. I was, all you grapple fans, the notorious dog sizzler, the legendary bum burner. That is, the tramp torcher. I could fly, I was lighter than air, I had complete control over the nature of fire, the elements were mine etc. I chose, however, instead, to squander my powers on a few cheap thrills.

In time, over time, after the initial burst, the bomburst, I learned to control my blaze, learned to tame my flame. I was, for a time, a man of mere embers. I boiled free-standing kettles, comforted cold hands, caused molecules to run, erased condensation from car windscreens, converted toilet seats.

And then the blaze. Flame on.

One Brief Glance at Waiting Jaws

2006-11-09T15:53:00.000Z

Looking for a way to feel? Then you need a return from the dead. All those past horrors coming back to haunt you. All those cherished memories no longer there in the past but here, in the here and now, ready for your glassy eyed scrutiny. Do they measure up? Were you right to cherish them? Now’s your chance to find out.

The mixed doom, for Carlton Albright, was exacerbated by the finger he held aloft in order to create the illusion of capture, on the tip, of the vulture that had been following him around for the past three hours. There, against the explosion of the bluest, brightest sky he’d ever seen, that cunt of a bird, circling. And circling, it seemed, to specifically avoid Carlton’s illusory fingertip capture. Why, thought Carlton, can it (i.e. the vulture) not allow me even this smallest satisfaction? To which the retort, from somewhere behind the ginger bush: The reason, my dear Carlton, is because that bird isn’t actually there. You know those floaters you sometimes get in your eyes? That’s your vulture. A mere floater. There’s no point trying to look at it dead on in an attempt to capture it with your fingertip and gaze. It will move from your grasp, always. Who’s there? asked Carlton, not unreasonably, to which he received no reply. Except, perhaps, for a clue-filled rustle from the bushes. If I don’t get something to drink soon, he thought.

Drinking was by the wayside as far as Dean Camper’s long-suffering wife, Denny, was concerned. She imagined, for some reason, that Dean was off the bottle and somewhere back on the old straight and narrer. But Dean, as a matter of interest, was, at the moment of her thinking this, face down in a pool of gruelly vomit, gurgling and wishing to sweet Jesus Christ that he were somewhere else. My Dean, thought Denny, as she closed her trusting, tired eyes.

It is now long ago, quite twenty-five years, since there was a poor man who had an ugly and deceitful wife, and they hated each other dearly. They had, however, plenty of children, though they wished they didn’t, very much, and the woman prayed for them to die day and night, but still they did not die. Now there was a basketball court in front of their house in which was an apple tree, and one day in summer the woman was standing beneath it, playing with her Beatle, and while she was playing with her Beatle she cut her finger, and the blood fell on the green, green grass. Ah, said the woman, and sighed right heavily, and looked at the blood before her, and was most unhappy, ah, if I had but a dead child like that, covered with red blood and as white as a sheet. And while she thus spoke, she became quite happy in her mind, and felt just as if that were going to happen. Then she went into the house and a month went by and the summer fucked off, and two months, and then everything was white, and three months, and then all the flowers died, and four months, and then all the trees in the wood bent to nothingness, and the grey branches were all brittle and entwined, and the birds fell out of their trees and the shit fell from the squirrels’ arses, then the fifth month passed away and she stood under the apple tree, which smelt so sickly that her throat gagged, and she fell on her knees and was beside herself with pain, and when the sixth month was over the tumour was large and bulbous, and then she was quite still, and the seventh month she snatched at the apple tree’s apples and ate them greedily, then she grew sick and sorrowful, then the eighth month passed, and she called her husband to her, and laughed and said, if I die then bury me beneath that fucking apple tree. Then she was quite uncomfortable and miserable until the next month was over, and then she had a child as black as you like and as green as snot, and when she beheld it she was so horrified that she died.

Who knew that the dinosaur park was full of real, actual dinosaurs? The children I took there, all in my care, certainly had no idea. In fact, they were still blissfully unaware right until the moment of being pierced and torn by those giant, killer teeth.

The grass, as they say, was somewhat greener on the other side. Which is why Crispy the Christmas Cricket wasted little time in hopping over. He’d had enough of the desolate patch of nothing that he shared with his dad. Of course, as soon as he made it to the other, greener, side he immediately regretted his decision. Why? Who knows. Crickets are funny like that. The real trouble, however, was that hopping back to his dad’s desolate side was simply not an option. Not unless he wanted to fry himself on the six foot high electric fence. Go on Crispy, you can do it!

The fairgrounders were all astray at the thought of yet another year without the Boxing Booth and the Wall of Death. But fuck it, they decided, let’s put them on and fuck them all.

Till I Hear The Very Ash

2006-11-08T00:41:00.000Z

I achieved a certain cancer of the bladder. As it raged within me, dripping its contaminated blood from stalactite nodules, I continued smoking even as I filled up porcelain piss bowls with endless streams of blood. Coincidentally, at the same time, my cancer of the bladder was an absolute coincide with a load of shit on my kidneys. What shit? Like barnacles, apparently. One day they will kill me.

Of my night or two in the hospital I was surrounded by the world’s oldest men who creaked and croaked throughout all days and ceaseless fucking nights, vowing, as they often vowed, that the end of their days would be the best days of the rest of their lives. They had cornflakes for their tea. They had, moreover, the nerve to gasp when I told them about the pissing of the blood. They set to work with their tired cemetery eyes.

When I got home from the hospital I was glad, for a time, not to be dead. I was pleased, also, that the young people across the street (having somehow found out about my newly shortened life) had the decency to keep the volume of their music right down to a minimum. What more could I fucking ask for?

As Modern As Moon Travel

2006-11-02T01:52:00.000Z

Popular culture advocates are made from meat. They are a saturation of meat, devoid, as far as we can tell, of additives. If you could skewer one you

If you could take one home and introduce it to your parents you would be making that first step toward, as Dale Carnegie foretold, a kind of controlled inner oblivion. Feel the peace, as they say.

And when the shine from your eyes prisms around the room. You know, if you could let all that out, while keeping some in, there’s no telling how far your popular culture advocate could go.

Popular culture advocates are a fizzle. This is their time and, boy, do they know it. They parade, yes, but their parading is always, kind of, if you’ve noticed, kind of low key. They’re always at the back somewhere, small banners, tin whistles, that kind of thing. Get to the front! the other paraders insist. But your popular culture advocates just don’t want to know.

Their manifesto is a similar whisper. Scrawled lightly on tracing paper or soft tissue – grey charcoal, easily erased – it covers the appropriate bases but somehow skirts. No wonder then that the popular culture advocates are often thought of – if they’re thought of at all – as mere pawns in the

As mere bit part actors, yes. You can’t, as they say, go around playing the (fool, martyr, injured party) and then expect people to take you seriously. As everyone knows, that’s where they go wrong, these popular culture types. If only they

If only they indeed:

Bell bottom ironies.
I was there in 1973. It was the year, for instance, that I watched Peter Shipstone beating his mother half to death with a rusty dustbin lid. His mother, a certain Nellie Shipstone, fending him off with a wide expanse of forearm that was, in its desperate flailing state, a small advert for the main feature of her twenty-five stone bulk. A big woman, yes. But with a bigger heart than yours.

Shirt-lifters.
Once a derogatory term for poofers. But no longer. It is out there. Look for it and use it.

Warm lies.
These warm lies we tell ourselves. All that bad faith. Who knows when to stop?

Insect society.
That’s right, insect society. You realise, don’t you, how many of us are down here – cockroaches that we are – crawling round with our heads torn off, refusing to die? Oh, that’s us alright, insect vermin just crawling around, infecting everything we touch. Except for me. Well of course except for me. Because I am a proud lion or, at the least, some kind of mountain monkey. Which means that I can climb parapets and generally raise the bar. And while I do so I, of course, look down on you, you disgusting insects. I tut myself stupid at the sight of you all.

Poems that rhyme.
When blackness of departing night
turned yellow with the dawn
I watched a robin soft alight
upon my dew soaked lawn.
(Copyright Gerald Bosacker, 1998. http://www.seniors-site.com/poetry/harbinge.html.)

Success.
What is it about successful people? Who do they surround themselves with? Idiots? Cretins? Morons? Are they happy? Are they three rungs up the ladder or four rungs up the ladder? Will they give you a piece of their pie? Or will they spit in your eye? Will they encourage you on your own road to success? Or will they push you off your path to perfection? Should you trust them? What makes them tick? Are they, deep down, lovely people? Or are they the unbearable cunts you suspect them to be?

Black nights.
This takes me back. Black nights. Candles on the mantelpiece, dad placing mirrors behind them to double the light. Or create a new room. In fact, now that I think about it, there was something rotten about that new room. Inside, on the other side, these simulacrums of us just sitting there, taking whatever shit it was that the government was throwing at them. Insect society is right. For the mirror people anyway.

Captain Fastnet.
He was a blur of light superhero and an afterthought at the back of Popular Hero Comics, circa 1978, where he advertised, among other things: Twinkies, Twinkles, Twiglets, Twix, Twits and Twax. He met his end through his nemesis The Spark Plug who, naturally enough, electrocuted him to death and hung him out to fry. I mean, dry.

Happiness.
Pollyanna imaginings that you so despise in happy people. But you too have constructed a phantasy world (note fancy spelling) and immersed yourself in it.

Partly Irish.
You never know what waits for you across that stretch of thin green sea. Washing days mainly. And rocks by the river.

Your wetness keeps me dry.
The house was on fire. The streets were flooded. We had upturned tables and dogs in dinghies. Old women pointed to the tide mark lines in the kitchen. Lamplighters complained about the wet matches as they stumbled around in the dark.

Fashion.
Fashion?

Lesbian fashion.
The fashion for lesbians has now reached some kind of peak. Or apex. That is, if we are to believe the reports coming out of Monaco or Paris or somewhere. Lesbians, they say, are no longer ashamed of the things they do. And quite right too. In fact, I saw two today, at the edge of the road, lips pressed tight to lips, embracing as if to say goodbye. Don’t leave her! I shouted from my passing car, stay and be hers, stay and love her as much as you love being a lesbian!

Back to the trees.
My new planet was something of a plan. I put rings around it. I speckled it with zones of gas.

Pop groups.
People who don’t understand pop music – who don’t actually like pop music – would most likely agree with the following statement about Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry album: “One of the best tracks on the record is King's rendition of her own "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," nearly unrecognisable as the Shirelles' thin early-'60s hit. King's version is sad and sincere, with haunting echoes of the chorus slowly building to a viscerally charged crescendo, as if, in asking her lover, King is also asking her audience: Is this a lasting treasure or just a moment's pleasure? Can I believe the magic of your sighs? Will you still love me tomorrow?” For those of us, however, who know and trust pop music, who surrender to its majesty and swim its simplicity – who, you know, understand the important differences - take one look at that word ‘thin’ and want to throw up. Maureen Tucker did a great version too.

Love.
The fat baker had fallen out of love with his wife. Not because his wife had done anything wrong but because he had fallen in love with his own reflection in the hot stainless steel oven door. Burnt lips.

Kingdom.
When I am king I will give myself the freedom to play with all the women.

The darkling thrush.
I awaited by the gate my own sadness my company and in that drift of my eye I spied, far away, past the cliffs, rising over the beach and far into the wipe of the horizon a bird I had never seen before. It was a speck I was pleased to have spotted. I turned to my wife, who I still loved, and told her of this bird, becoming her eyes for her as she listened into the wind, her own dead eyes not troubled by the wind as mine streamed their burning tears. That bird, I said, is my heart in flight conjoined with your heart in flight and after you are gone, my love, I will seek out that bird and take lift from the flap of its wings.

New York.
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.

You Can Hear Me In Your World

2006-10-30T00:58:00.000Z

Of terrifying loudness, the bluebirds of happiness are, in reality, the white doves of mischief. From their perches, these feathered brains are pure flights of aggravated motion. Only the clouds can keep them down.

The blackbird of pushiness flees the scene, a rainbow pebble trapped in its beak. The glass it leaves behind will brim over forever.

Yesterday, along the path - the perch - of doom, I crawled carefully to what, at first sight, appeared to be an enormous round mirror. Which later, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an enormous round mirror. My tiny face in it, looking back, all pockmarked and scaly. And next to the enormous round mirror, one of those cuttlefish bones.

The enormous round mirror, when viewed from the other side of the room (when viewed through the wires of cage, the mist of cigarette smoke, the blaze from the telly, the light through the window, past the shadows of the mourners), was a mere ten pence piece circle of shimmering silver.

And Florence Varsity was dead. So who then, asked Sylvia, will look after that little tweeter of hers, that poor little Joey, now that she’s gone? At which mention all eyes turned to see Joey, at the bottom of the cage, his throat open from here to there. The blood-soaked newspaper and its still discernible headline: Callaghan tells firemen to fuck themselves.

Such are the winds of ill-blown flight. Right?

The Motion Sickness Roar

2006-10-26T15:40:00.000+01:00

The artspace unit cum gallery floorshow happening event was in full swing. At the same time, coincidentally, the city fathers were aglow and warm at the prospect of tearing down the best buildings in town. Hey, said one of the fatter ones, let’s start with that artspace unit thing.

Upon hearing the news of this news, the artspace unit fillers – those peasant scratchers, parochial crackpots and naïve dabblers - rose up. Banners were carried, children were held aloft and flaming torches were put to the effigies of the various council members.

And to top it all, art with something to say became the order of the day.

Art with something to say!

Locked into a tiny room, the lights down low, Pandora K’s white, plastic-coated, steel wire frame cage is suspended from the ceiling and stuffed through the slats with a number of notes and messages that, in as crystal clear plain language as possible, get across the exact nature and degree of the pain and anguish she is suffering and has suffered, both through her childhood and adolescence, and also as a full grown independent person/artist who, naturally enough, feels even more keenly than mere mortals, citizens that is, the slings, arrows and crippling blows that come from the belittlers and haters who cannot seem to appreciate how her sheer sensitivity and spirituality makes her ready for, and open to, the full pain of life, life itself, not to mention the difficulties of life and the business of simply existing, as hard and as painful as that is on its own terms. She is, of course, the very challenge of life.

Cornered like the rats they are/were, the city fathers had no choice but to surrender and accede to the demands of all those local artists. We, they shouted in unison, are a mere fine line away from making that tread into the realms of arts and crafts. We demand our stalls for the Sunday markets!

On the walls, floors and ceilings of the artspace unit cum gallery floorshow happening event there was a conceptual scramble to see who could be first to not only pose the important questions but also, at the same time, to answer the important questions. Naturally, with all of this scrambling there emerged a good degree of blather and detritus that, siphoned off into the corners, was used as a kind of backing track for the art with something to say to riff over. Man, it was one happening cacophonous howl of beauty in the shriek of the night.

And so the art with something to say continued to confuse itself with art that has something to say.

Come Back to The Shores of What You Are

2006-10-24T00:43:00.000+01:00

The travel of Cadillac along empty highway. The sweet toot of the hillside train. Lonesome? Mournful. It chugs, this Cadillac, somewhat, and its occupants are oblivious to its stutter. Soaking up the fact of their journey, in all its epic significance, they are captured in the frames of an eight-second view. The train eases away from them, forward, the great privilege of the American railroad.

By cactus and bush, the Cadillac. Its occupants squat, four of them, all women. The horizon balances the last of the sun. Rain? A fall in temperature, a hang of moisture pulsing the air. They hurry inside, the clunks from their doors synchronised to the drop of the light. No horizon, simply the dark. This engine had better ride, someone says, from out of the black.

Crawling into a barn, into the haystacks, they would have done it for sure. Three of them dreaming now of barns, of haystacks and warm crusts of bread as the car shifts, lunges deeper into the road, moves warmer to the dark. The driver keeping watch, looking hard for the constant threat to these four women on the road. Tired? Beyond it. Morning is further away than she ever thought possible. What if she just turned off the road?

That You Shall Have No Envy

2006-10-19T23:47:00.000+01:00

The elements of blind chance are, for once and for all, disturbed to the point of whereby they can be consigned to the recesses of etc. We put things in this end here to see what comes out of that end there. Sometimes goodness. Occasionally evil.

Our purpose, to bluntly extrapolate, is to hammer home the point of being no longer bound by our shackles to the, you know, biological fascism that ensures we are short on this mortal coil by a distance not in keeping with what we, crazy fools that we are, believe is, at the least, something that could significantly be longer. Thus our banner campaign slogan strapline of: We are all Methuselah now.

Mice though. They shuffle through their metaphorical baffles, emerging as extensions of their former shortened selves.

Pelting Up From The Shallows

2006-10-17T12:24:00.000+01:00

We are, in the end, long feet. Like cornered blue canoes. Like cornered blue lagoons.

We have, as they say, the technology to drain these pools and, for a change, fill them with sand. With long feet at our disposal we could walk this solid water. Maybe, instead, tread the tiny coloured balls.

We went to the beach, you and I, and beneath cloudless climes we clambered over the rusted remnants of sea defences, the once proud monuments to fearlessness and obstinance. We clambered those hulks, you and I, and the rusty cuts did not prevent us from hurling pebbles into the sky. With our contempt for the crashing waves, we knew whose side we were on. And do you remember, as it darkened and the water retreated in short defeat, we removed our shoes and fed rust flakes through our toes?

The more we position our chairs on this beach, the more we surrender ourselves to the inevitability of death by water. At the bottom of the sea, supine at the bottom of the sea. Picked apart.

We took ourselves off, you and I, to the ice-cream stand as soon as the morning hit us. The sky in shock from the night, we walked beneath its clouds in cold fresh shoes. You said, to me, so I could barely hear you: this way, I think.

The sky has, since the beginning of true time, been a boon to sailors and the lovestruck everywhere. During the day, when the practicalities of life are enough to make us bend, the sky is our guiding light, both literally and, you know, metaphorically. Its consideration, however, stretches further with the realisation, especially to lovers, that the sky will think nothing of dimming its light to create corners and moods that, you know, us lovers can fall into and really make the most of. Thank God, as they say, for the sky in its night. The sea, on the other hand, is the bastard that swallows.

We walked quicker, absented ourselves from that beach, when we saw that the sea was coming. Do you remember how tired I was? All my moaning and groaning, my dead feet ploughing furrows into the increasingly wetter sand as the limpets and barnacles attached to my legs panicked, knowing that dry land under the guiding blazing light of the sky would be the death of them. I remember how frightened you were as I scraped them away and they turned to you, somehow, and somehow communicated through seemingly lifeless shell and indecipherable smallness how they were going to get you some night, some night while you slept. And they did get you, didn’t they? They did get you.

Some Motion Ever Unspent

2006-10-06T12:26:00.000+01:00

Opened up into the captain’s cabin, the first thing is the first class table with pig diners troughing it all down their taffeta ties, pearls dredging through the soup, pulling forth shreds of oxtail, dragging out the croutons. The ship pitches. The soup splashes.

I, my voyage, I’ve been lashed to this mast for the past three weeks and the substance of rope, my only friend, keeps me here tied, away from the rutting flash pigs and the foam-filled degenerates. Below deck the burning boys are holding their arseholes wide open, raw red against the twinks of the black starred night. Rum red. They are a rage, those boys, and in fine drinking spirits. Mutiny is among them.

The ship pitches so the soup splashes and the diners have had quite enough of these intolerable conditions. One of them, with foam literally sticking out from his ears, raises his hand, polite to the last, and asks, one might think quite reasonably, whether the cocksucker responsible for putting soup on the menu will be emerging some time soon to deliver his or her apology? The captain, in reply, says: Eat your soup and shut the fuck up. Which causes me, here, cocking an ear to the proceedings, to chuckle noiselessly.

Voyages like this are really something aren’t they? You get the fresh sea air, the pitching of the boat, the pallyness of the crew, all the limes you can eat, the bonhomie of the captain, the ship’s artistes (magicians, singers, comedians, dancers, puppeteers, curtain raisers, stilt walkers, clowns etc.), the roundness of the life belts, the calmness of the poop deck, the barrels of lucky rum. The lucky, lucky rum.

The sea at night is calm, without pitch. You could safely tread its water, framed heroically by the giant silver moon, on your way to a step over the horizon and into the speckled blackness of the sea sky at night. You could reach up, touch the North Star, and feel your way home.

Hidden in the lifeboats, suspended high, a young boy and a young girl. Bertie and Geena, twins, on board for a new life in the new world. They have escaped recent clutches after the death of saintly parents and, well, there they are, under canvas, occasionally peeping up at the stars. Below, pounding the deck, slightly nervous, the kindly frame of Dickie Bow, the portly porter. Under his tunic, some scraps for the kids. They’ll make it together, the three of them, and Dickie will set Broadway on fire, a queen among the johns.

Fast to this mast, tight pink ribboned, I spy, through my telescope, a bob of yonder land. Inching our way, cutting through the sark, we alight – or rather, they, the crew and passengers, alight – onto said land and discover, to their dismay, that the land in question is not land at all but the back of a blue whale.

This blue whale is the same blue whale who, leviathan, was host to Jonah, a cage for Pinocchio. They are in there still, camp fires and fishing, all kinds of wooden games. This blue whale pitches and shifts and the pig diners, now with cups of soup, splash soup down their tuxedos and ball gowns. They can’t win, can they? The captain tells them, again, to shut the fuck up and drink their soup while he sorts this mess out.

The anchor is pulled and we - me, Bertie, Geena and Dickie Bow - float majestically away, waving at the bob of blue whale land as it blips the quickly sinking horizon.

Black Nights Full of Shining Buses

2006-09-24T14:57:00.000+01:00

All other cities are not as my city. With its richness of tones, its hands across the ancient city walls, my city stands as a beacon for all the other cities that can only gaze (enviously, sadly, despairingly) to(wards) my city’s (majesty). They remain still, those other cities, stuck fast and dumb.

Other cities are not as I like them: they are not as per the perfect and mysterious grid of my city which is only understood as a grid by itself, by its own impenetrable, alien consciousness. To the city’s people this unseen grid is perceived as a random collection of (splashes) going one way and lots of ways, no studied paths, no straight lines nor concrete flats, no arrows pointing, no (certainties) of (reach).

Other cities are: analyse, discuss. From each city, maps, tour guides and paper shouts. Such as may be and, well, those other cities include:

1. The Black City of Raging Death.
You don’t want to go there.

2. The Flowing City of Pungent Gowns and Wisps of Life.
You don’t want to go there either. Full of fortune tellers and crystal pissers.

3. Waterville on The Water.
Good for ducks and swimmers.

4. Nottingham.
Ah, Nottingham. It sold me life back then. Where I grew up. Thus Nottingham of Old Radford, Harold Road. Gone now (demolished in the purge of slum demolition). I cannot go back, even if I wanted to. Street corners and small snatches of Matchbox cars in the fireplace. A prostitute’s house across the road, rubber johnnies in her bin, Holme Terrace. Mrs Atwal buying our coathangers, sixpence for two. The balance between low pavements and high walls. There’s flight down there, from this attic window, the older boys on the barrier in front of Player’s iron gates, doing impressions and telling lies about Superman’s powers of growth: Richard Bacon a snob and a bully with nothing to support his imagined superiority. His impressions of: I heard that, pardon.

5. Cuntford.
Full of cunts.

6. The City in the Sky Where Dreams Are Dreamed.
Cloud-based, ethereal, population of twelve thousand million. Two girls for every boy.

7. Tinkerville.
Folks, they say, just can't get enough of Tinkerville. This 1950s style city is jazzed up with the real scene and the hot fresh atmosphere goes along great with the warm friendly people. It's a comfortable place for living and for laughing – and, best of all, the pressure on your purse is minimal. The directions are as follows: as you are exited eastbound on T-009, taking the business loop into the city centre, make sure you don’t miss the appetite pleasing, belly-filling, put-a-smile-on-your-face attitude that makes Tinkerville such a hit with loons, crones and dumbos. Affordable for the entire family, Tinkerville boasts terrific amenities and the full works. If you are stupid, in a hurry, or just want to enjoy a great standard of all-American living, check out Tinkerville today!

8. Bosso Novo.
Its splendours are manifold, manifested through (surfing and dive-boarding) little cars and houses. Lilliputians live there.

9. Classroom.
In the city of Classroom there is a saying that, applied specifically (and always) to the current mayor (regardless of whoever he may be – and he is always a he) applies equally, also, to every other Classroom citizen (regardless of age, gender, race, colour, height, weight, shoe size, number of fingers, number of toes, language, eye colour, hair colour, hair thickness, hair straightness, hair length, hair style, hair smell and hair lip). The saying goes like this: Whomsoever behold the eye of the visitor also soever welcomes that visitor into his home as if they were a friend to themselves, their neighbours and their city-zens.

10. Rodstew.
Nothing to do on hot afternoons except to sit down and write lines.

11. The City That Never Sleeps.
You will need Pro-Plus. And piles of cash.

12. Wartness.
Built in homage to Terne Banks, the creator of the Wartness Method, whereby the wart is sanded down (until it bleeds) and then coated with a liberal amount of Superglue or somesuch. Amenities in this most modern of modern cities include waterboat rafting, lifterpulling and the sensual stroking of cocks - i.e. cock-stroking.

13. Romanfort.
In the daytime, the olden time city of Romanfort has baths, central heating and aquaducts. In the night time it is overrun by rats, cold fish and battalions of marching viaducts, marching, marching, ever onwards in despair.

14. Leicester.
Down the road from Nottingham.

15. Birmingham.
Down the road from Nottingham.

16. Derby.
Down the road from Nottingham.

17. Sheffield.
Up the road from Nottingham.

18. Cavity.
Full of steam and caustic surfaces, devoid of visible life. Cavity breathes on its own and, though inundated with potential, has explosive and destructive tendencies. It is teeming, as Dan Zuewski notes, with corrosive incipience. That is, it is beginning to rot.

19. Mini-London.
A smaller version of London.

20. Alt-New York.
An alternative version of New York.

21. Blindspot.
The men in Blindspot are slobbering pinheads. The women are the same. You could cut the harmony with a switchblade.

22. Tazundiz.
The rats that once plagued this city’s streets have all but disappeared, thanks to the rat-killing expertise of the two giant electronic cats that patrol the streets at night, killing the rats that once plagued this city’s streets. Hurrah for those cats!

23. Beautane By The Sea.
Ah, the city on the coast, all those cliffs, sticks of rock and seagulls. You can smell it in the air, the difference of Beautane which, not content with being merely beautiful, transcends all those arguments about art and love and the lovers who dwell at the bottom of the sea. Lifeboats are no good to them. Beautane is, of course – with its crashing waves, salt and dramatic skyline – a beacon to poets who, drawn as moths to the literal fact of Beautane’s stately lighthouse (like a huge fucking barber’s pole) flame, wander the city in many states of distress, orating loudly, crying out for the hand of the divine they know doesn’t exist. But creeping in the dark, fish and chips in hand, these bovines are, at the least, aware of the lack of the emergent metaphysic within the root structure of this city by the sea. Or, rather, are fatally not aware of it.

24. Grand Central Staish.
The illumination from the caroming caravans passing ‘neath – those shining buses – light up the already bright faces of, yes, the little children, hands clasped tight inside their grandparents’ hands. Within this city, the very old and the very young are privileged. At both ends they govern, in one particular way and another particular way, meeting, it is hoped, somewhere in the middle. And those people in the middle, neither young nor old, are kept in cattle trucks – those shining buses - fed through iron bars, transported from the very ends of the city to the other very ends. Until they reach the day when they too reach their very old states. There is, of course, no going back for them.

25. City-X.
Interplanetary communication reveals the lengths this city will go to.

Containing The Preservative

2006-09-19T01:46:00.000+01:00

Ointment on the bathroom sink. It burns, you know, when you put it on open sores. You should replace the cap because it sticks sometimes like glue.

Testament at the chemist’s, the long queue through the back. I have, here in my hand, my ticket to salvation. All I have to do is sing out, sing out!

The coiled like seagull was away above the rooftops. I said my chips may be enough to tempt him, not fish. The smell of the ointment kept him away.

The last time I rubbed my hands with copper, the soles of my feet with a pumice stone. I touched wood. I pressed dry ice – and it burnt – on my skin.

The eye was black in the middle, blue outside, white and then red. Puffy, she said. The lid loose, I pulled down my eye lid, and applied some ointment.

They tell me that the mirror is a looking-glass for me to step through. I wipe away the mist with a bunch of toilet roll. It mists again so I can’t see.

The pub on the corner with its olde worlde charm where I went there once. I was a singer in the back room with that Fred. Him and his aniseed sweets.

I put a coin in the top and watched while it circled into the hole in the middle. Raise the Children or something. Find the Kids anyway, at least.

My turn came at the counter and the girl there, I said to her speak up so she could fetch them. My ointments. I dropped them, all over the floor.

There was no need for that kind of language, like I said. It’s no wonder he’s not out at work, at a job. I said you should get yourself some kind of a job.

They press it sometimes so it goes all red, round the outside. Then they peel it off so I can breathe. You should see how much I like it then in my bath.

There was a church there, years ago, across from the clinic. They built bonfires on the grass and the council kept taking them down. They set fire to all the wood.

I could have gone a lot longer if they’d let me. I would have been all right doing that, but they said no. And I haven’t got it wet or even a bit damp.

Your Artistic Blasting Needs

2006-09-13T23:52:00.000+01:00

The paradox, of course, is that the very people who work so hard and so desperately to keep the, er, cogs of capitalism running - who grow fat and rich at the same time as providing opportunities of income for the thin and the poor - are also the very last people you’d actually want, if you could choose, to keep the cogs of capitalism running.

The further paradox is that Pab Stencil, our hero, is a walking, talking collection of disparities that have neither origin nor substance. That is and further: he is a walking – or crawling, or however I want him to get from point A to point B – cipher. His history nil, his story nothing, his face open, honest and blank. Enough of an empty space for you to want to fill it with your fist.

This Pab, short for Pablo, was not, as you might reasonably expect, of any kind of exotic origin. That is, exotic as (merely) a broad definition of anything that isn’t from round here. On its own terms, of course, the exotic alluded to (the name Pablo of, what, Mexican origin?) would, in its actual so-called exotic reality, be, in actual fact, crushingly mundane and, paradoxically, much less exotic than even what we could muster up from round here. That’s as may be. Pab’s name was short for Pablo which, in itself, was a derivation (or something) of Paul. But we’ll go with him on this and let him have his Pab.

Pab’s birth was a good time ago and has nothing at all to do with the fact of his evolution (to be grand about it) into an old-fashioned advertising man. Which is how he manages, as inadvertently (and thus, he imagines, somehow innocently) as he may feel this to be, to keep the rusting cogs of capitalism nicely oiled (to exhaust this most clichéd and barren of metaphors). His birth and his childhood have very little bearing on what we currently have in front of us. It’s not as if, for instance, there was ever a chance of capturing him at the age of five, pen in hand, copying ads from his mother’s magazines. (Who is still alive, by the way, his mother. And his father.)

Our Pab then, working in an advertising agency, a copywriter in the creative department (creative, I ask you!), was as much a part of the process as anyone else you might care to mention who wasn’t actually in control of, or directly responsible for, the process. Which is to say that he was no Rupert Murdoch, as most people aren’t. He was, however, like most people, enough of a part (I could have said cog) needed to keep the whole thing in motion. In short, he was doing his bit even as he underplayed his bit or pretended that his bit was somehow of absolutely no significance.

At least though, you may imagine, at home and king of his castle, he was, this Pab, happy. Or rather, happy? Contented? Leaving aside the definition of happy and blah, he was, to some degree, reasonably accomplished, settled and, as far as he could care, reasonably satisfied. He wasn’t, as the phrase has it, at a complete loss. His wife, she was a bit of this and a bit of that. He loved her, of course, and she was good in the way she was expected to be good, and bad in the way of all the usual stuff that keeps couples up at night talking it through. Their two kids, teenage girls, were also part of the painting. Which was kept over there, dominating a different wall.

The whole point of this Pab can be gleaned (as if there was any other way of doing it) by way of his position in the here and now. Let him stand alone. Let him sweat under his own spotlight. Let him reveal himself. Or, at least, let him submit himself to our trial of revealment. We’ll get him yet.

This Pab was, by any definition, a pudgy, four-eyed loser. Forget the wife and kids, forget the job, forget the whatever else it was. He was, first and foremost, a pudgy, four-eyed loser who loathed himself only slightly less than all of the other people he loathed. Jews, wests, blackies, birds, poofers - he hated them all. Or maybe that’s a different version, a different tale? His name doesn’t fit, for a start.

This Pab was, by any definition, something of a pudgy, four-eyed loser. As he so often and so self-deprecatingly described himself to his vast collection of friends and family who he loved beyond all reasonable comprehension. This pudgy, four-eyed loser, far from being a figure of fun or hate, was, in fact, a much-loved and highly prized attraction at parties, pub quizzes and gatherings of all kinds. That is, you could always rely on Pab to be, at the very least, a bit of a laugh. But let’s not get carried away. At the same time as being that laugh, he was held in the highest esteem for all sorts of other sound and sensible reasons: his diplomacy, his intelligence, his ability to get straight to the point, his clear and open mind, his friendliness, his winning smile, his noble paunch, his cherry red boots, his way with women, his unerring knack of always being right, his collection of soiled doo-dahs, his massive knob, his turning tides, his humility, his generosity, his caring nature, his liberal tendencies, his love of animals, his spoils of war, his captains courageous.

Established thus, we have an emerging picture of this Pab as – well, as the above. Sketched out maybe, perhaps not fleshed out, he is at least now able to step forward into whatever adventures and ludicrous scenarios we wish to cast him in. The ‘fun’ of this, of course, is playing the game of seeing whether he lives up to all the fantastic expectations we have of him. That is, educatedly guessing – from what we now know of him – how he might react (not act) to the things that get in his way. Or maybe instead – although highly unlikely - how he will glide along the easy path that lies ahead of him.

So there he is, this Pab, on his own for the time-being, a remembrance of family in the background, wondering how he will resolve the conflict he.

Wondering how, rather, he will be supernaturally guided through the obstacles before him. So one minute he’ll be happily walking along Path A – or even crawling along Path A – and the next minute he’ll be in a position where he has to choose Path B or Path C in order to, you know, get to Path D. The ‘fun’ of this, of course, will be had in what happens to him on either Path B or Path C.

But Christ, who on earth can be bothered with it all?

It's Cloudy in the West

2006-08-31T23:54:00.000+01:00

Like Nero sleep, the westerns point to the facts of bolting horses: the gates breached, the railings trampled. As they say, revolutionaries don’t get old, they just get chubby. It’s time to move on.

Western revolutionaries take part and take apart the last remnants of the tatters of civilisation. On the mound of plaster, beyond the gold leaf of the sun, the totem of respect and good luck stands tall for them. They, these westerns, are beyond the grasp of diktats, outside the reach of fear. On the ground, the cold grass, they are at the least preoccupied with leaf chewing and tea drinking: the best way to spend their days.

And here I am. All over you. My western tendencies, such as they are.

Pulling Up The Stakes

2006-08-29T22:33:00.000+01:00

What chances sleep from danger when all around, tumult? Blasting their way in, cutting through steel doors and sliding, vaporous, beneath faulty air tight seals. There is no escaping them, these monsters.

Except when you zip up your sleeping bag. All the way up.

Thick socks are ballast and a hat to warm your head. Protection from a torch, boxes of matches, one of those air gun things. Shadowed shapes, on the screens of the tent walls, may distract the kids from the terror outside.

Through grass the creeping of dust. Above dust the low-lying mist, the unbreathable air. Needless to say, the family bundle, out through the flaps, is enough to alert them to your previously guessed at -

- presence.

They are mostly blobs. Splats of gore and pus. Spikes of black, scaly. They hiss, wail, sigh. Terrifying screams that, of course, keep you up all night. From his farmhouse door the farmer motions to his wife the glow of your tent. His lit pipe, a sway against the moon, also like your tent. The farmer’s wife, her touching lament:

I am at last a part of this that surrounds me, the blank, the heather, the escape of space. Oh brrr, how I fought against it once and how I now laugh to think of it, especially how I embrace it now. Please help me. We have butter churns and cobs that rotate. We build wooden things and feathered things to sell by the roadside. Please take me away. My husband, him and his tractor, you would not separate them. We milk hearty and all day long. Sometimes the weather, sometimes the moon. That glow from the tent. I could crawl inside and they could take me. I once wished hard for children.

Outside the flap. There, beyond the aluminium pans, past the low hiss of the gas, above the frame of the windbreaker, certain figures – spiny, scaly, black – dancing on the line of the horizon. It is too dark and too far to see. Are they moving toward us or are they moving away from us? If the former, then what were those noises we witnessed before?

Those noises we heard before?

Dances are what they do in the countryside. Music to the movement of the trees. Beware you and all of your tents.