THE DEEP BLUE HEAD

THE LEOPARDS (BIG CATS AND A BALD MONKEY)

2012-01-04T20:03:00.007+01:00

“Peter, this can’t go on. Simply can’t go on. Friday’s the limit. After that it’s the end, I can’t take it anymore. Friday....We’ve got to get her out of here....” pleaded Alba in a distant sort of voice on the point of cracking under the emotion of it all, but my erection felt magnificent.

....the voyeur and the leopards....

Alba stared in my direction, sort of vacantly, gazed through me really, but, there she was, standing there next to me, next to the bed, next to The Pretty Girl lying on her back on the bed, radiantly naked. Alba, radiantly naked also, lowered herself onto the rumpled white sheet and she was over The Pretty Girl, on all fours, and, folding her elbows to lower her head, brushed The Pretty Girl’s cheeks, her whole face, with kisses and licks lighter than air and the movement was entirely under control, slow and deliberate and strong, like a leopard might well move and Alba turned her head up to look at me and thereafter never lost my eye, so I was held in the glint of a leopards stare such that, at that very moment she became a leopard and then they both became leopards before my very eyes and settled in together, elegantly, in that way that leopards have of moving together to rest, to caress, to watch. Big cats purring, forever vigilant, powerfully content.

....toucher and the touched....

The two of them were radiantly naked, me too, aroused and entranced, magnificent, and we were all bathed in celestial light, slightly blue, slightly orange savannah. (Except, of course we were not, for “celestial” and “radiant” and “magnificent” are just the kind of words that come to mind to describe these kinds of celestially radiant moments after the fact, a posteriori.)

....our prowling eyes upon it all....

In a trance, in the tall grass, from atop a small rise, staring into the clear, black moonless night sky, three leopards look incredibly insignificant, celestially, radiantly insignificantly magnificent, three leopards bathed under so many stars, the Milky Way, Mars, infinite galaxies they suppose, parallel and bubble universes, but care not whether they are right in their enchanted suppositions, or wrong, but they are eternally vigilant. “So much space, so much silence....” they think to themselves in magic unison, (Except, of course it was not magic, for “magic” is just the kind of word that comes to mind to describe these kinds of celestially radiant moments after the fact, a posteriori.) and, of course, with that thought there is no more silence, and there are no more leopards, no more eternity, but hey! Lo and behold, a magnificent music floats out of the ether.

the voyeur and the leopards
the toucher and the touched
our prowling eyes upon it all

“That’s it? That’s the lot, the whole song? Three fucking lines? Stupid fucking title almost as long as the song, three lines, and we’re back in the real world?” A voice in my head importuned me, but I drowned it out. “Yes! So, right then, we’re in this together. She’s with us from here on in, we work together.” I said.

“Big Cats and a Bald Monkey”© 2012, Jone Hernández & The Blue Roadsters™.

Elsewhere, in the real world, various men and women, AC Commercial Reps, oblige a father to witness the show they have arranged for his daughter. Then, after he gets his last feeble erection, they shoot him several times in the stomach. He who buys pays the price. There is profit to be made from these things.

Somewhere very distant, perhaps in a different dimension, Tankman Johnson lies atop the turret of his Chieftain, his custom baby, in a trance, staring into the clear, black moonless night sky. He feels incredibly insignificant, celestially radiantly insignificant, so many stars, the Milky Way, Mars, he supposes, but cares not whether he is right in his suppositions, or wrong. “So much space, so much silence....” he thinks to himself, and, of course, with that thought there is no more silence and a magnificent music floats out of the ether.

....the voyeur and the leopards....

And with that he rolls over onto his stomach and bawls through the commander’s hatch, “Put The Roadsters on the sound system, let’s get this show on the move, celestially, radiantly, magnificently on the move! And put that leopards DVD on the monitors. What? The one Bug Eyed Peter sent just before the New Year....and mute the soundtrack, we need the music.” And to himself he asks, “Why do those old BBC wildlife documentaries kill the magic with words like endogamy?”

....toucher and the touched....

“He who pays will pay the price.” He murmurs to himself.

....our prowling eyes upon it all....

A CHILD IS BORN

2011-12-29T18:30:00.005+01:00

My father’s diaries and journals were hidden on the very top shelf of the kitchen larder. Hidden where he knew they would regularly be found by inquisitive youngsters, my sister and me. I was twelve the first time I climbed the shelves and discovered his writings, his daughter, just thirteen. By this subterfuge dad was able to explain things without recourse to conversations that made him sound confused. My father was like that. Now that I live with Alba and Peter we would love to turn him into a work of art, which, in his own modest way, was what I think he aspired to create. We have his works of art. His daughter read them many a time when she was younger but, in her late teens was unable to bring herself to read them anew. He created my sister and loved her dearly, but he brought me up with a quiet, desperate adoration I was never able to demonstrate in return. When I understood this, I understood his sadness, his silent despair. Pardon me if I have spoken of these things before, but sometimes I need to get these ideas off my chest, sometimes, when I speak, I can only speak through his words. Sometimes I am inside his head, I am him and so I can plead forgiveness.

The smell of death, he called it. The Smell of Nothing, he wrote, but he kept the concept quietly to himself throughout his childhood into his adolescent years. It was, he explained, a distant mixture of historical odours of institutional catering, cold cooked nursery lunches, tepid school dinners, and lukewarm hospital meals, “a prison of vast steaming aluminium vats filled with the faint smell of death. The Smell of Nothing, the smell that takes my breath away, that empties my lungs. A vacuum, The Smell of Death, it visits every now and again, like the welcome perfumes of night time pursuits, of sperm between my fingers, sperm seeping from between your late departed mother’s legs, sperm at the altar from which I so often fed so avidly. The Smell of Death, it visits every now and then like the scents of mourning toast and fresh coffee the morning after, but The Smell of Death, it stalks its way back too often for comfort, for it has its job to do; to remind me that ‘You are still alive!’.”

And then there is the entry entitled “A Child is Born.” And every time I read it I understand what my sister must feel and I long for her company ever more fiercely. Sonia never leaves news of where she may wander, so my longings remain strictly my own to suffer. How can I apologise? Father tried for an explanation but Sonia was long gone. “A Child is Born.” was written two weeks before dad died and is the last lucid scratching in the last, the newest, and the emptiest of his little pile of black leather bound journals.

“Born bald and choked up from the amniotic ocean into nothing. I was breach birthed, beached in salt sand and bathed in sticky blood, strangled with your gristle noose, but nothing happened. Birth, it had killed my art. The delirium was gone.

Then daughters mine, one breached bellowing the amniotic portal I had oft time worshipped at, she was mine, I had created her with you in love and lust. The second from the scalpel, from the burnished caesarean blade born, yours from somewhere and someone unknown to me, both born into nothing, both grown beautiful, yours, supremely, dangerously so. Adored, yours, supremely and dangerously so, but nothing happened. Births, they had killed my art. The delirium was gone.

Grown bald unto death, splattered and gagging on blood, I had been opened in caesarean canal, to give birth to cancer, in vain, and then I was drained, flushed away into the canal, into the tumourous sewers of nothing, into nothing. I watched the whole process from the fluorescent heavens, the theatre ceiling, the operating theatre ceiling. Cancer. There’s nothing to be done and nothing happened. Its birth, it had killed my art. The delirium was gone.”

THE LIFE MODEL, THE MODEL OF LIFE

2011-12-03T15:51:00.005+01:00

Nineteen seventy two, late October, my memory feels it was a Thursday, perhaps Friday, in the life studio with my easel, drawing board and sheaves of quality drawing paper, a selection of drawing pencils of various softnesses 2B 3B, and vision and a model and me and I just, for the life of me, find it impossible to get the sketch to say anything. Then she twists and turns just for me. “Oh! Oh, mummy! How I love that lonely bumble bee!” I thought. “Sometimes you just can’t think straight....”

The model was called, let me suggest, if my memory serves me well, Louisa, and she was neither fat nor wrinkled nor old or grey nor deformed or toothless nor senile in any way, which made her nakedness incredibly easy to look at, which made her nakedness incredibly difficult to draw. She was twenty five years old, perched on a high, paint splattered stool, her right elbow resting on a grubby plaster Doric style column, that I remember clearly, and she spoke in soft tones, when she asked for a break, a cup of tea, to change her pose, she spoke in a poetry of becoming coyness, of a past somewhat Syd Barrett, somewhat distant, somewhat disjointed, remembered from way, way back behind the remote gaze of her glazed brown eyes.

For us, seventeen year old arts students discovering Bowie and Reed, she was the earthly princess of experience, a little bit of experience we could touch vicariously....“The Blue Moth!”....and I was supposed to be worshiping her with my drawing instruments, but I was utterly unable to study her to draw. I was incapable of getting my head round the idea. “Hi there, little bee! Bee, promise to be beautiful forever, like The Pretty Girl here....”

The boys and girls had given up and retired to the bar and the beer and the table football to exercise their wrists. Me, I had five minutes before Louisa wrapped herself in a tatty oriental silk dressing gown and floated, no, better, flitted off into the real world playing the part of The Blue Moth....“Mummy! Mummy, she’s dancing for me, mummy! Look! See?”

“I want to see everything!” I exclaimed, and rather shocked myself with my vehemence. “I want to see everything but I can’t stand in enough different places at the same time! I need to see it all!” So, at that, Louisa opened her legs and I could truly see more than I had ever seen before. “No! No! Sorry, I didn’t mean that Louisa, really....” But she, being the princess she was, smiled regally and fluttered off into the mists of nostalgia only to be remembered with lost lust forty years later.

LA ÁNFORA DE PANDORA / THE IMP OF MISCHIEF

2011-11-01T19:23:00.004+01:00

"Mamá, ¿por qué todo este mar está tan salado?

"Porque está todo lleno de miles de millones de años de las lágrimas de los dioses!"

"¿Y por qué están los dioses tan tristes?"

"¿Tristes? No están tristes, cariño; andan por el suelo retorciéndose de risa, sujetándose el costado de dolor.

"¡Pues creo que los dioses están siendo unos tontos de remate!"

"Eres un cielo. ¿Me prometes que siempre serás un encanto? "

"¿Mamá?"

"¡Sé siempre así de maravillosa! ¿Lo prometes?.... ¡Eso, mi amor, realmente los pondrá de un humor de perros! "

It is given, of course, that the original conversation was conducted in Spanish, as The Imp of Mischief was born to Spanish parents. It was acted out on a small beach in the face of a stiff northerly wind somewhere in The Basque Country, some ten years back, but....

“Mummy, why is all this sea so salty?

“Because it’s all so full up with billions of years of the god’s tears!”

“And why are the gods so sad, then?”

“Sad? They’re not sad, darling; they’re rolling round on the floor in fits, clutching their sides, laughing ‘till it hurts.”

“Then, I think the gods are just being so plain silly!”

“You’re so sweet. Promise to be gorgeous forevermore?”

“Mummy?”

“Be beautiful! Always! Promise?....That, my love, will truly put them into a real sulk!”

CHILDREN FOR SALE

2011-10-22T21:24:00.005+02:00

The boat is hauled up onto the beach. The force used on the winch handle, winding the rusted but greased cogs, tensing the cable, ratcheting in the rope, feels like the winding in of time, feels like safety.

Refloating, re-hauling, winding, day after day, week after week year after year, one generation after another until, one day, the sea and the sand have finished with eating away at the wood and caulking and the boat, slave to the both of them, the salt sea and the sharp sand, prisoner to rope and cable and chains, has died sodden and softened, and is at rest, and the tension is lost and it all begins to fall slowly and silently apart.

The shoals of silver fish that quivered in rainbow sheets in and out of the arc lights, under the ominous shadow of the hull, into the nets thrown like disease sown onto the ocean, sown by sun baked brown salted muscle, the shoals of silver fish shimmering were fished out years back.

Salted muscle sits decaying, cancerous and cankerous, on low three legged wooden stools, wrinkled like useless sunburnt leather, hungry, and hungry for the wide open ocean, thirsty, and thirsty for the wide open seas, in myriads of back alley sewers in myriads of modern cities. The same slime the world over, disease sown onto the land. No more nets to be knotted, eyes as dead and opaque to the glassy gazes of wives, sons, daughters, grandchildren, their eyes as dead and opaque as those of the last rotten fish staring them out, gutted then swilled into the gutter in myriads of decomposing back alley sewers the world over.

Photograph used with the kind permission of the photographer Piru Sedano. ©2011, Piru Sedano

A GOLDEN TEAR IN GOLDEN RAIN (AN AFTER DINNER THOUGHT)

2011-10-08T21:04:00.004+02:00

Hard to see to finish my shave, what I heard, I gathered, was that you had just urinated most copiously and with most obvious pleasurable relief.

I brushed my hand across the steamed up mirror to reveal your watery head over there, rising behind my left shoulder.

A somewhat mischievous look there was, on this childlike visage, so I slowly turned to gaze and my eyes were led by your eyes to a lonely tear of urine on the very end of your index finger, dancing the last desperate dance before crying to its death on the cold bathroom floor.

I bowed slightly, took this finger offered, and its offering, gently into my mouth, and saved the dancer's life.

You said, “Not a single road would lead me to Rome, but a thousand pathways have brought me alive from Greece.”

You dabbed my lips with the little folded rectangle of moist toilet paper that had, a little previously, delicately hung between your thumb and third finger.

MANY WORLDS (AN AFTER DINNER THOUGHT AWAY)

2011-09-22T14:36:00.006+02:00

Towering piles of ledgers line the walls, floor to ceiling, between door and window, from window to door, hundreds, thousands, millions, in library after library, alcove after endless alcove downstairs from John Doe’s laboratory, down the spiral stairs from the locked and abandoned laboratory.

Stacks of stories, legends, the history of birth and death, love and pain, lust and letdown, beauty and its decadence, beauty and its constant destruction, the content of countless forgotten after dinner conversations, the content of trillions of after dinner conversations to come.

This, of course, is all happening on some page long lost to any recall, on page one hundred and sixty eight and page one hundred and sixty eight has forgotten, if it were ever aware, what had occurred to the selfsame characters on one six seven and can only dream of the horrors, the screams of beauty strangled, coming down on one hundred and sixty nine. Not a single soul anywhere has any notion of the title of the work, worlds away, sometimes above, sometimes below, heaven and hell, depending on just how the volume had been carelessly tossed onto the growing dusty heaps.

Each and every thought stirs, original or mundane, sparkling or dull, a new page for it to live upon, each page a world away, coded, unbreakable, impenetrable, filed and forgotten, a world away from the following lonely thought and the grandiose thought from the time before.

The Galán, holding a mirror up to a certain fragile moral flexibility, took his decision and ambled nonchalantly up to the three little drunken carnival clowns. “Girls! You have a thought? There is a new page for every thought!” He bowed most soberly.

John Doe had vaguely imagined, before he became dust, whilst he had perused these very same chambers and ledgers, he imagined ink seeping, bleeding from page to page as a disease was wont to seep from cell to cell. He could not see it, it was just intuition. He thought it and so it was. It was his final contribution. On page one sixty eight, between the third comma and the seventh h in the ultimate paragraph, or, perhaps, between the first comma and the second h of the penultimate paragraph. Too late. The viruses, the bacteria, they are out for his blood.

THE TIRED UNIVERSE, PART ONE, STANISLAV’S STORY

2011-09-04T21:40:00.006+02:00

THE STORY OF STANISLAV AND HIS SWEET TOOTH

Stanislav simply adores sugar. If one possesses a sweet tooth, it is not an arduous task to happen upon work. Many a world away he has made a comfortable fortune selling darling white slaves to the plantation owners to cover their peculiar pleasures in return for raw materials.

On this particular planet Stanislava suffers from receding gums, rotting teeth, and sells a halitosis that can turn one’s stomach over extraordinary distances. Not to be conserved in any manner but the most evident, this breath therefore comes with the complete package. For Stanislava, it is not an arduous task to stumble across work. No matter what for the money.

THE TIRED UNIVERSE, PART TWO, THE PERFECT ENNUI

2011-09-04T21:36:00.004+02:00

They are supposed to be creating an appraisal of Hopkins’ The Leaden Echo. Some actually look like they are thinking. Supply teacher Miss Alba, at someone’s service, staring blankly, slow motion, at this class of seventeen year olds, at closer inspection, you might notice, staring at one of the class of seventeen year olds in particular, at The Pretty Girl. Miss Alba, at your service, daydreaming through the tired hours.

A May sun shines through the windows onto the faces and chests of girls struggling with the concept of ageing when they are still young enough to know they are ageless, immortal, still young enough not to even care about the decadence of beauty, The Beauty of Decadence. Who can blame them, really? I stare, surreptitiously I hope, at The Pretty Girl. Jone. Jone Johnson does think. I can see it in her eyes, fluttering, trembling eyelashes. I can see it in the way she moves. I can see the concentration written on her face. I face the group. The Pretty Girl is over there on my left, about fifteen feet away. Shadows add contours to the breathing swell of her adolescent breasts under the loose u shape of her low cut top wide on her shoulders. Shadows on breasts and as she writes and moves her left arm, without giving conscious thought to the movement, under her breasts, parallel to the edge of the desk, to tickle a rib or ease an elastic or metal support from an uncomfortable place, so her breasts change shape, swelling slightly under a silky black bra. I can trace the lacy top edge curving, nothing changes too much really, though I amplify this delicacy I daydream of touching to animate my future nostalgia for this all too brief moment.

So, from a prudent distance, I hope, I dreamt my fingers on those curves, I dreamt them where the curve of her breast lifts the silvery black strap of her bra from her skin until it flows over her collarbone, her right collarbone, it shines, strap and its shadow on skin slightly shivering, slightly trembling and so light from the window in front of her behind my back plays across her chest, over the swell of her breasts breathing lifts and darkens then lightens the shadow and I daydream of tracing the route of that shadow with my tongue down to the faintly lighter, more diffused shadow cast by the low neckline of her summer top these shadows a sweet curve across her right breast, umbra and penumbra sweep gently up to the dark line cast by strap at radiant collarbone waterfall a young and delicate mole to provide a modicum of surface reference, Ophelia slowly surfacing in the midst of an ocean to sing above the highlight of her right collarbone another mole a little to the right as I watch enraptured, on her neck, and I daydream my finger on it, my tongue licking away the tears I cry on her shoulder, ear on her breast hearing her heartbeat and I dream of drowning in her umbra and penumbra, and I scream and rant and sob and curse that perfect skin, these perfect shadows, this perfect musky scented flesh, this perfect concentration, this perfect thought, because so much beauty has such a short lifespan. I curse myself hoarse, but, of course, in my daydream, so, from a prudent distance I undress beauty, I daydream of the beast in me, who slowly pushes a fine kitchen knife into her breast, heartbeat boom boom, front door between her ribs, boom boom to say hello to her heart. Aüstein messer rostfrei, not the most direct route, true, but the most picturesque, I daydream the kind of thought you have when something dear is so near but yet, for ninety nine point nine percent of the human virus, so illicit. I daydream the kind of thought you daydream when you are living an instant of perfect ennui in this tired universe.

Peter put the book he had just finished reading down on the bedside table, sat up in bed and leaned across his sleeping girlfriend, who, irony of the moment, was called Alba too, to Alba’s table and picked up a pencil, Jone’s pencil. He then took up the paperback again, opened it and wrote a note, as was his custom, on the back of the embossed cover. “Page 109- on beauty, on an obsession with beauty” was added to, “Page 59- youth/humanity i.e. The human VIRUS”, was added to, “Page 62-72- ecstasy/language, the body as vehicle.”

I lay down in bed with the closed book on my chest and the room was screamingly grey and tatty and ordinary for that instant of adjustment from book to real life and it was just at that realization that I, me, Peter, understood that no book, no film, nor any other artistic creation was any more interesting than the world I lived in, but just more creatively described than any tale I could ever aspire to put into words or images “....in this tired universe.”

THE TIRED UNIVERSE, PART THREE, THE IMP OF MISCHIEF

2011-09-04T21:30:00.003+02:00

Under our slightly soiled continental quilt radiates a warm glow rather akin to strong light pushing through fingers clamped over tightly closed eyelids.

Under the continental quilt I search the endless cotton seas for you, Alba, swishing sounding seas and rhythmic breathing in waves soothing the way to your lips bathed in warm bed peach light and you are floating in that tide, on a swell between what you hoped and dreamt was true what you know to be true. I lightly kiss your closed eyelid, your eyebrow, and you do not object. A slight moan and your head pitches and rolls gently in the white water, so I kiss your cheek and you do not object. I kiss your lips, I trap your bottom lip between mine, pull lightly, taste it with my tongue and let it fall back onto your night time brace, for both of you wore night time braces, and you do not object but flex your whole body in the hundred watt waves of yellowed white sheet cream white horses awakening sepia peach smile swimming between the sheets and so I understand that my apology has been accepted. I see you. I see the whole thing. I see it and feel it as a truly nice sensation, as a truly sweet moment in this tired universe and Jone grins at me from the wall opposite, her lips there, her torso too, The Imp of Mischief, this is domestic bliss. She grins at us both in truth, but you, still floating between worlds, like a leaf in a lake, like Millais’ Ophelia slowly surfacing in the midst of an ocean to sing, you are yet to be conscious of the music of the moment.

Outside a cool wind ruffles up a dark, moonlit storm of autumn leaves. Not a full moon. Just a slight cool moonlight.

Just half past eleven. Bedtime. First night in a slightly down at the heel, slightly musty smelling London hotel room eight hundred miles away from home, and Jone is showering with a shampoo and body gel that will radically transform her sensual, mildly musky smell for the worse, for she has forgotten to pack her herbal soaps, lotions and ointments.

On the twelfth floor of a tower block on The Cambridge Estate Peter and the neighbours hear the sound of the heavily booted feet of operatives from the T.B.A.P. (Tactical Bureau of Applied Politics) in the stairwells and hallways, then a short silence followed by a loud knocking and sounds of a short, but violent scuffle, a scream, more screams and pleading. They are taking their, the family on the next floor, they are taking their daughter away, all the sordid turmoil giving the lie to the commonly propagated faith that all these moonlight escapades are fabulations, second rate erotic daydreams, written into reality by malcontents, novelists, film directors, you name it, they propagate it, living instants of perfect ennui in this tired universe.

“Page 149- The girl’s body was discovered the following morning at low tide.”

Seven forty three. Pulling out of Hackbridge, four minutes late again, back gardens through sepia scratched and spat upon British Rail window. Dog collar commuter reflected in scratched and spat upon British Rail windows dog eared files and worn out video cassettes in a scuffed suitcase held on his lap under both hands. Dirty fingernails, blood under his nails. Blood on his hands. Profiles in suitcase. Decisions to be made, work to be done in this tired old universe.

Ten twenty six. The two held her down in the metal chair by her naked shoulders while another woman grabbed a handful of her hair in her left hand and thus held her head so the girl had to watch as the wasted looking blonde slowly pushed the knife into the teenager’s chest.

“You were getting old,” said the blonde. “She was getting old. Your turn next pretty thing....”

“Cut! Okay, okay, cut it!....Have I ever told you Stanislav’s story?”

ON A COLD, ANONYMOUS, RAIN SODDEN SUBURBAN PAVEMENT

2011-07-10T21:20:00.004+02:00

Somewhere walks a fading memory of musky scents from herbal soaps, lotions and ointments.

Someone stalks a fading memory of musky scents from herbal soaps, lotions and ointments.

JONE CONVERSES WITH HER LOVED ONES

2011-06-30T20:12:00.021+02:00

“Yeah, yeah okay, the same old warhorse trotted out night after boring night, day after soporific day, performed like a ritual in every two bit conversation when someone thinks they’ve discovered some new insight into human behaviour, humanity....”

“And loads of reputable authors write it into their dialogues too, to make their characters seem like they can actually think, be intellectual, and talk and....”

“They posit the remarkable, universally true fact that everyone has a dark secret that they’ve never told anyone....”

“Never been offered enough money for such trivia!”

“They’ve never told anyone. Always to do with sex and fingers and fingers in little sisters ‘cause that’s really evil....”

“Scatology, shit, wind and loss of control. Smelling it. Eating hers. Drinking his, pissing on her....”

“You’re enjoying it all a little too much Sunshine, aren’t you?”

“Mothers and fathers, little brother’s arsehole, abuse, abusing, but it’s ninety nine point nine percent horseshit, inevitable, unavoidable horseshit....”

“Horseplay, so, it’s all cliché, we all know that, all ritual is Neanderthal cliché....”

“Now you’re being cliché Pete, that’s cliché, that’s absurd....”

“You’re right princess, many and most profound apologies....”

“Oh señor de la pomposidad sin fin!....Listen, it’s horseshit but there is something, a grain of truth radiating away in the rotting horse pat....No....Listen! What are you really?....”

“....Me?”

“No, the general you. Not you, Alba my dear! My dear sweet little Sunrise Girl!”

“Oh shit! Out with it then! What are we all then? Let us both in on this earth shattering insight....”

“Horseshit?”

“What you are is that dark secret. You don’t have a secret! You don’t own a secret, you are that dirty deep down inside secret you can’t tell anyone else, not your lover, not your partner, wife or husband, psychiatrist or confessor. No one nowhere, nothing, never because everything you’ve so frantically divulged, banded so blithely about, it’s gone. It’s nowhere. It’s nothing, gone and forgotten by everyone, it’s not you anymore, it’s nowhere, nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard, with no one, it’s nothing. That one, last desperate black secret? It’s all that’s left of you after you’ve erased yourself with so much conversation....”

“And if you’ve actually got a deep dark secret, then you’re supremely lucky, most....

“Most of humanity are on a fraught, er, highly fraudulent crusade to fill up the void where their one true secret should reside, where they should reside, the dirty, disgusting, sordid secret that ought to define, drive the individual! Then, when they can't be bothered anymore, they simply invent the whole goddamned thing, make it all up....”

“Shit!”

“Back to the scatological then, is it?”

A COMMUTER

2011-06-12T13:05:00.006+02:00

At just nine years old he had skipped around the fluted cast iron lamppost set in the dog shit grass verge in front of his parents’ semi, in front of the trim hedge, in front of number eighty nine on the mouldy wooden gate in need of creosote. His father trimmed the hedge Sundays, they all did in this neck of the woods. Washed their cars too, if they owned one. His Father owned a black Hercules bike with rod brakes. It weighed a ton.

Eighty nine eighty nine eighty nine eighty nine as he skipped, spun, hopped round around and around and around he went as the hands of his Timex would travel in ticka ticka timex time machine, tra la la, tra la la, his right hand on cold and solid and dependable iron holding him in from flying into giddy orbit. The dizzy Tardis, deep dark blue. It was super living in a scraping sound vortex of tardistic creosote scented space time. Creosoted, once a year in this neck of the woods, smelly dog shit green nettle stinging verge, spacelessness timelessness inside out, scatty mind over matter not nowhere, nothing, never ever again in my neck of the woods.

“Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye and good riddance, oh porcelain faced Princess of The Thunder Clouds!”

Little did he know, at such a tender age, that that had been as happy as life would ever get, and having sobbed for Bambi, that was as sad as it would ever get. Little did he know that having fallen from his blue tricycle, and having broken both his front teeth, that was as painful as existence would ever get.

And little did he know that playing with little tinkler and wiping his fingers on the sheet, that was as stimulating as love would ever get.

PRELUDE TO “SPACE JUNK, THE NIGHTTIME BRACE”

2011-06-07T10:15:00.004+02:00

Bedtime, first night in a slightly down at the heel, slightly musty smelling London hotel room eight hundred miles away from home, and The Pretty Girl is showering with a shampoo and body gel that will radically transform her sensual, mildly musky smell, for the worse, for she has forgotten to pack her herbal soaps, lotions and ointments.

PRELUDIO A “BASURA ESPACIAL, EL APARATO DENTAL DE NOCHE”

Hora de acostarse, primera noche en una habitación de un hotel ligeramente destartalado, ligero olor a cerrado y humedad, Londres, a ochocientas millas de casa, y The Pretty Girl duchándose con un champú y un gel que borrarán su sensual olor, ligeramente almizclado, pues ha olvidado meter sus jabones de hierbas, sus lociónes y ungüentos en la maleta.

BASURA ESPACIAL, EL APARATO DENTAL DE NOCHE

2011-04-24T21:33:00.009+02:00

Una noche no regresó, pero no le di mayor importancia. La almohada bien podría haber olido a su sudor, a su aliento, a su último vaso de vino, a su última comida, a su pasta de dientes, a toques de enjuague bucal, a rastros de perfume, a su inhalador, pero no le di ninguna importancia.

Dos noches después de su desaparición me encontré mirando el aparato dental de noche de The Pretty Girl, rosa quirúrgico y acero inoxidable, abandonado en un kleenex blanco, sobre el suelo de madera pintado en blanco, junto a la cabecera de nuestro colchón.

Cada vez que, sigilosamente, lo olfateaba en los días posteriores, dos días, olía vagamente a su aliento, a su última comida, a su pasta de dientes, a toques de enjuague bucal, a rastros de perfume, a su inhalador. Durante dos días más imaginé que aún olía vagamente a su aliento, a su pasta de dientes, a toques de enjuague bucal, a rastros de perfume, a su inhalador. Durante otro par de días más conseguí, a ratos, convencerme a mí mismo, en una lucha de facciones desesperadas, que podía captar una tenue traza de su aliento, de su pasta de dientes, toques de enjuague bucal, rastros de perfume, de su inhalador, pero luego, dos días más y había pasado a inventar el olor de su aliento, de su último vaso de vino, de su última comida, de su pasta de dientes y enjuague bucal, rastros de su perfume, de su inhalador.

Y luego, todo se desvaneció haciéndose imposible.

Esa noche deslicé el aparato en mi boca y viví su textura de plástico rosa quirúrgico, de alambre de acero, una tortura para mis ahora sangrantes encías. Provoqué el dolor, pero a pesar del dolor, todo sabor de ella hacía tiempo que se había perdido en discusiones silenciosas de ficticios recuerdos, no importaron mis desesperados intentos por succionar su vida a partir del último recuerdo de nuestra intimidad.

El último recuerdo, lo único que me quedaba de lo que había vivido dentro de ella y que no hubiera terminado inodoro abajo o reciclado en el detritus del mundo exterior, pues incluso mi lengua había probado durante horas la sangre de su última regla, tragada, y rápidamente digerida, pero al menos paladeada más de tres semanas antes de la noche en que no regresó. Y había significado tanto para mí, y tan poco para ella.

Las ilustraciones que van con este texto son del artista David F. Brandon. Visita su mundo haciendo un click sobre esta información.

ICARUS TARRED AND FEATHERED

2011-03-18T19:59:00.008+01:00

Come hither my darling one, take a seat, the apparition sits where The Pretty Girl used to sit. Sometimes I beckon her move, and she moves down the endless corridors and passageways she used to saunter coyly down but that I had never noticed before and I beckon her do lie down, and she does doze dreamily in the pure white sheets she used to sheath herself into, curled, baby curled, covered and carelessly wrapped to be unwrapped for sex.

Rise and shine my love, awake, she is sensitive and attentive. Sharp, acute, her slightly out of kilter opinions are neither overly original nor overly eloquent but, shy and attractively self-conscious, she expresses her thoughts with such a freshness and with such self-depreciating humour as to make herself quite unique, to illuminate in herself a difference, an aura.

Her aura is the infinitesimal chasm between the routinely ordinary and the truly beautiful what do you say to that my dear?

This way my dear I guide Beauty across my path. The Pretty Girl crosses my path, causes me to check my step so as not to trip her, and so I step aside, bow, and she passes me where, everyday, on leaving home, we used to skip hither and thither to the front door, but today, yet again as every day, I do not want her to leave home, so I do conduct her back, with a gallant, grandiloquent gesticulation of my arm, to the bedroom. I bid her wait please wait please bide your time bide your time a little my love.

She bides her time awhile her arm sweeps the net curtain from the frosty pane, for it is terribly cold outside, but not in here, at home. Her dramatic gesture sweeps away the dark and heavy cumulus clouds from the sky, does sweep away the sheets of silver grey sleet, to reveal deep blue, black. The black hole.

The blackness simply turns a badly re-enacted theatrical arc of her arm, into something quite unbearably grotesque, unbearably tragically sad, so I sit her, sit here my dear The Pretty Girl where I would like her to have been sitting but dare not look upon the ghastly rotting corpse of she I had so loved and so admired so deeply for so long.

So long my love she fades for fickle memory has failed my vision. I feel her sorrowful gaze is upon me. I have led her eyes unto me.

Sees she through the artifice of my all too churlish desperation?

“....the sheen on her skin the shine in her eyes
but deathly white to decay her image flies....”

The title of this piece is taken from a series of photographs by the artist David F. Brandon. Permission kindly granted by Mr Brandon to use both the title and his photographic illustrations. Click here to view his work. Thank you, Bashir B. Sherpa.

SIXTY NINE

2011-02-13T13:39:00.003+01:00

She is growing up at number sixty nine....on the seventh floor....seventh heaven....left....left hand....right hand in hand....she leaves for school at seven forty five....at the crack of frosty winter dawn....to hold hands with Alba....and I watch....and I see it is stunning in its beauty....and not a thing does move....not a person does move....not a scraggy city dog does bark nor does a grubby black crow....grey city gull grumble its calling....and nothing does move except their fingers....sixteen fingers....four thumbs four eyes melt into each other....eyelids almost imperceptibly quivering....eyelashes....at fourteen....Alba....at twenty seven....eight on the dot....fourteen....I wonder if another part of her body is as beautiful as her....moist....silent....lips....thirty seconds later....and I watch....from bus shelter....number two one three....Alba and The Pretty Girl....and....although it is raining on frost not a raindrop does fall....black and blue....the sky is a still silent storm of newborn pearls....hanging on the fluttering of an eyelash....eight on the dot....and I gaze....and they are stunning in their beauty and it is not hard to understand....

“Hey, Peter! Have a look at this....the little cottages in the hills....the winter snow....”

And Alba shook up the little universe and it was snowing in those faraway mountains.

“....and we’re in there....look....the third cottage along....number sixty nine....the three of us warm and cosy in front of a raging fire....logs....toasting bread....butter and coarse cut bitter marmalade....”

“That tree’s a bit out of scale. With so much water in the mountains Alba, could the fire actually rage?”

“Jo....chica, por favor, oh no....has roto el hechizo....Peter! She’s broken the spell....”

And they kissed, but I was in one of the other universes, toying with an enormous clear glass paperweight I had picked up off the mantelpiece.

Trapped in its cool heaviness are thousands....of tiny air bubbles....the sky is a still silent storm of newborn pearls....hanging on the fluttering of an eyelid....eight on the dot....sixteen....and a half years old....and I gaze....and they are stunning in their beauty and it is not hard to understand....that Christmas it is not but, for our time, it is like that forever, forever our time, eight on the dot....I wonder no longer....It is....And that is that.

THE FATHER’S LAMENT (REVELATION)

2011-02-06T12:44:00.007+01:00

....fifteen....and a half....and there is half past five....and a half....and there is twenty four more....seven....sixteen fingers and four thumbs two tongues....and since she was twelve I have often wondered if another part of her body was as beautiful as her.... sleeping....moist....silent....lips....eyelids almost imperceptibly quivering....eyelashes....

....at fifteen....I demand the numbers....and a half....strangle out....suffocate the image of her....in the half light....behind the door left ajar....but the numbers....the words for the numbers....the letters for the words....they do not obey....do not drown out a poetry of leaden emptiness....fifteen....and a half....sixteen fingers four thumbs....two tongues recite me a silent poem of emptiness for a lost daughter....

WHAT ALBA'S MOTHER SAW UNDER THE BED

2010-12-30T14:33:00.012+01:00

Magdalene bed number four eight six black priest from Africa’s hand hovers vacuum packed bags of morphine hooked to ship’s rails above the bed sheets stamped N H S white light dog collar fluorescent tubes at eye level last catholic in the world black hand sign of the cross your turn mother flashes red number twenty five voyage

“Whose turn? Whose next? Twenty six? Twenty seven?”

faded blue gown starch many times laundered laundered falls open on a shoulder of dimpled ham clear plastic mask pumps oxygen into side of dead wrinkled meat ribs rise and fall pumped up pumped in sunken eyes already withered portholes in another dimension on another voyage gaze past them all out of it all number twenty nine at the end of the tunnel white light black hand signs the cross and the virgin Mary disguised as archangel flaming heart Jesus last catholic in the world sits under the bed beckoning under the cream coloured frame of the electric motors coiled cables bed on the cold salmon shade fake granite chip floor in a puddle of celestial light urine drain bag leaking yellow on salmon linoleum

“Come aboard! Come aboard! Whose turn? Thirty one? Thirty two?

yellow on salmon sunset black priest from Africa my mother dying vacuum packed bags of morphine hooked to ship’s rails at eye level portholes your turn flashes red number twenty five all aboard voyage tubed up tubed out bag drip drip dripping dripping tick tock tick tock into her vein butcher’s meat on the slab and the whole god damned family audience impatient at the door of ward four eighty six clutching their little pink paper numbers for an audience drip drip dripping their turns and drip drip dripping time running out for absolutions number forty seven nephews and niece niece whose turn into the next world carry my weight away for me spitting on the light at the end of the tunnel desperately pleading the butcher for her money back where is the guarantee verbal diarrhoea not a blind bit of notice taken vacuum packed bags of morphine hooked to ship’s rails above the bed snow sheets stamped National Health Service white light frosted fluorescent tubes at eye level your turn flashes red number twenty five voyage virgin Mary disguised as archangel flaming heart hippy Captain Jesus sits under the bed beckoning through the dog collar porthole under the cream coloured frame of the electric bed sinks to horizontal at my mother’s last smile

“I’m not here any more, kids! I’m over the sea and far away carried from port by celestial sails that sing....National Health Service....on the infinite cool black breeze....

SPACE JUNK, THE NIGHTTIME BRACE

2010-12-26T19:32:00.009+01:00

The night she failed to return, I thought nothing of it. The pillow might well have smelt of her sweat, her breath, her last glass of wine, her last meal, her toothpaste, touches of mouthwash, traces of perfume, her inhalant, but I thought nothing of it.

Two nights after she had failed to return, I found myself gazing at The Pretty Girl’s nighttime brace, surgical pink plastic and stainless steel wire, abandoned on a white tissue on the white painted floorboards next to the head of our mattress.

Every time I gingerly sniffed over it in the coming days, two days, it smelt vaguely of her breath, her last meal, her toothpaste, touches of mouthwash, traces of perfume, her inhalant. For a further two days I imagined it still smelt vaguely of her breath, her toothpaste, touches of mouthwash, traces of perfume, her inhalant. For another couple of days I managed, occasionally, to convince myself, in an argument of desperate factions, that I could catch faint hints of her breath, her toothpaste, touches of mouthwash, traces of perfume, her inhalant, but then, two more days and I was inventing the smell of her breath, her last glass of wine, her last meal, her toothpaste and mouthwash, traces of her perfume, her inhalant.

And then, it all just vanished into impossibility.

That night I slipped the brace into my mouth and lived its surgical pink plastic texture, steel wire, a torture against my bleeding gums. I made it hurt, and in spite of the hurt, all taste of her was long lost in silent arguments of factitious memories however hard I tried to suck her life back out of the ultimate souvenir of our intimacy.

The last souvenir, the one and only thing surviving that had lived inside of her that had not been flushed away or recycled into the detritus of the outside world, for, even the blood from her last period had been tasted on my tongue during hours, swallowed, and all too quickly digested, but at least tasted, more than three weeks before the night she had failed to return. And I had thought everything of it, she, nothing of it.

A HIGH PROFILE DISPUTE. (FROM THE THE BORN AGAIN PRIEST ARCHIVES)

2010-11-17T16:11:00.004+01:00

Roses are red, violets are blue, I don’t know, how about.... Skipping chants, I could just pick out skipping songs from somewhere distant. Skipping songs in faded voices a long way away in the past, metallic echoes of little girls´ skipping songs, bad a ba da ba da ba da....bad a ba da ba da ba da....Roses are red....

After summer showers there were always what seemed like huge oily lakes all over the roads and pavements, wondrous, astonishing lakes of colours.

After this remarkably heavy summer shower there were stupendous oily puddles shining all over the road and pavement, rivers of gay colours sparkling, cascading in the gutters and into drains.

The neighbours’ pretty little golden haired girl came by and stood beside me and glanced up at me staring at our rippled multicoloured refractions, at her first communion dress, all virgin white, a silver medallion around her neck on a long silver chain. She looked down, clear blue eyes, into the waters, the silver blues sparkling off rusty browns, then stared back up at me, proud, and trusting and terribly innocent. I held on to her little pale hand just a little tighter and we both took a couple of steps forward into the gutter, red patent leather shoes and little white ankle socks sort of walking on the water.

She smiled me a sweet toothy smile, but wanted to move back, her sharp blue stare becoming more imploring, so I took her other delicate hand in my left, held both her sweet hands a little more roughly and, face to gorgeous face, jumped up and down madly in the puddle, as kids are wont to do because puddles are just such a temptation, until she was dirty soaked and her dress was just slightly oily grey transparent. She was screaming, and tears were running down her reddening cheeks, but the sound of her horror was as distant as the skipping songs from yesterday’s memories, all hollow and tinny, and I just couldn’t control my hysterical laughter.

“God told me to do it!” I got out between sobs of painful laughter, whilst, all around everyone else was saying it was the devil in me.

Now, that is a high profile dispute, if ever there was one.

DOING THE BLANCMANGE

2010-09-25T21:17:00.007+02:00

Very, but very early, one late September morning. Heads back to front. Heads and tails back to front.

Inside out, Peter watched the harlequin jester tumble and jingle from out of his left ear into his right and back to centre stage again. She had somersaulted to a hoppity halt between the point of Peter’s nose and his backdrop of thinning, but slightly curly hair. She stared into Peter’s blue eyes and lifted two fingers that cut the stare in an insolent salute.

“Stare you out anytime, dickhead....So! Now you know! This is where it all begins and ends....”

And she stared, over theatrically, of course, around the gloomy theatre, arms outstretched, palms upwards, Cheshire cat grin and lopsided bow included.

“....Here, baby....Right here!....Not much of an infinite space, is it?....Full moon though!”

And Peter saw his eardrums hear what he had just seen, and outside, in the real world, Peter, Alba and The Pretty Girl’s grey matter did The Blancmange together, oh, ooh, aaah, so sweetly, to such strange music.

But then came sunrise and silent blindness forever.

KILLER PREGNANCY TESTERS

2010-09-12T17:32:00.016+02:00

....pull down these peach skin jeans I am desperate dear dying to eat the fruit peel down these peach skin jeans for me to smear my lips in the juice shimmy down these peach skin jeans for me this heavenly fruit on my tongue....

....Jan Mutts had been deckchair sunbathing all day, had been a deckchair all day circus red blue and orange stripes and obese lobster pink, when he stood up, eventually, he fell headlong off the beach....

....pull down those peach skin jeans I am desperate dear dying to eat the fruit peel down those peach skin jeans for me to smear my lips in the juice shimmy down those peach skin jeans for me that heavenly fruit hides no stone....

....reach out, reach, overreach, he fell headlong off the sunshine yellow beach beach hut padlocked all clean and tidy split his lip, broke his nicotine brown bad breath teeth on a rock the size of cloud covered Snowdon overripe stone open edge slices into his bloody red tongue brown stone dead....

....stone dead....

....then his right hand hit the floorboards and the grisly curtain goes up on late morning grey housing estate condensation on grey windowpanes cigarette smoke stale net curtains hangover takeaway kebab breath digoxin dioxin atorvastatin eighteen hours stale urine and sweat unemployed unemployable unwashed unshowered spunk on the floor glued The Sun topless teenagers rage instant coffee mould in sink drains coffee cup rings ring headlines from days ago Killer Pregnancy Testers Shred Astronaut....

....the Green Knight of The Forest had just delivered us from the broad back of his huge warhorse muscular right arm for support.... reach out, reach, overreach, he and his mount, fell headlong off the sunshine yellow beach hut, padlocked, noble, clean and tidy, split his lip, broke his lighthouse teeth on an iceberg rock overripe stone open edge slices into his bloody red tongue gurgled his last words ever....

....Peter, Bug Eyed Peter you are a wanted man flyaway Peter flyaway Paul....

....damp smack sound broken bone and dry crack snapped teeth river of red blood lake brown stone dead....

....pull down those peach skin jeans I am desperate dear dying to eat the fruit peel down those peach skin jeans for me to smear my lips in the juice shimmy down those peach skin jeans for me that heavenly fruit hides no stone....

....somewhere else someone called Jan Mutts dressed in full faded Papal regalia was daydreaming of peach skin jeans but the tilt of his daydream was swung in favour of violent and obsessive musty lust rather than The Deep Blue Head love orgasms....

....pull down these peach skin jeans I am desperate dear dying to eat the sweet fruit peel down these peach skin jeans for me to smear my lips in the ripe juice shimmy down these peach skin jeans for me this heavenly fruit awaits my tongue....

....orgasms The Deep Blue Head love orgasms the three of us were hot wet and comfortable and slippery in the glass walled shower, me, Alba and The Pretty Girl padlocked in soaking it all in while the ugly fertile populations of this dimension were being cut to shreds by deep electric blue alien fleets of killer pregnancy testers tornados of bloody red rain pinkly sweet minced meat inside beach huts peppermint blue padlocked all clean and tidy....

....KILLER PREGNANCY TESTERS SHRED ASTRONAUT Sexy space strolling astronaut Major Kitty Makepeace and her three month old fetus Darian out taking their usual Saturday night galactic constitutional were briefly surprised by....

....pull down these peach skin jeans I am desperate dear dying to eat the sweet fruit peel down these peach skin jeans for me to smear my lips in the ripe juice shimmy down these peach skin jeans for me this heavenly fruit on my tongue....

....then my right hand hit the floorboards and, morning erection glorious electric blue orgasm, I thought....

....“Killer Pregnancy Testers?....I’ve just got to use that line as a title....or something....”

....then my right hand hit the floorboards....

SPACE JUNK, NONE OF IT IS TRUE

2010-06-21T22:46:00.022+02:00

Teeming life picked out an instant of harmony from dissonance and this choir sang hoarsely and rhymed and reasoned for no reason and no rhyme nor reason rang forth. In fact, but for brief episodes of striking, startling perfection pain and pleasure, nothing of very much worth rang forth at all.

In a long abandoned cement plant, put to new, more agonizing uses, the chorus, firm muscled apprentice butcher’s boys and girls with always a crude song on their lips, or football chants, lounge about languidly smoking what smell like John Player’s Navy Cuts, no filters, choking back on phlegm obstructed vocal chords, the virus of words held in check a moment. Butchery on the front line. War film computer war game the bullets, fast silent and invisible, thud into the plaster and red brick dust bursts, and floats, then settles in their hair, on their pallid, naked bodies, his shoulders, her breasts. The smoke, blue curlicues of dead smoke rising unconcerned through settling brick dust write unread stories against the sky but it is the dripping blood that adds the punctuation.

“Wake up for Christ’s sake....Let’s go, let’s go....Move it....”

“Shit....”

“You sergeant! Get him and her up and about and get rid of that body. The domestic violence routine for this one. Here’s the address and implicate the father. There’s his fluid samples from the registry. Cut her up a bit. Use some of the bottles from his wine cellar....erm, cupboard....Just look where they live for....Oh, and lots of blood...cover up those burns....”

“Images?”

“Why not? Waste not, want not!”

“She moved....”

“You suggesting I don’t know how to do my job? Enough electricity been through her to light up....god....get it the hell out of here....”

“Tip it in the back of the lorry, you two....”

Today the sky is stunning summer blue but the aircraft are knitting an intricate weave that so effectively delineates humanity’s suffocating prison time tick tack wool over the finger tick tack tick tack prison like time grandmother’s birthday sweaters, always too tight sleeves too short too rhomboid last year’s time bright colours my universe crushed into chainmail, an adolescent body. On a sick, invisible screen, our space junk orbits high above the vapour trails, knitting at even higher altitudes, tick tack tick tack through the void, any fantasy that one day you and I will climb aboard our shiny silver Dan Dare spaceship and set off for a new world shot to Swiss cheese by all the nuts, bolts, flakes of paint, chip pans, satellite dishes and pregnancy testers tick tack tick tack tack tack.... I gaze at her out there and down here, on earth, on solid ground too.

Nettle lined path trails slip sliding down through the trees, through the almost solid shafts of summer sunlight insects flitting gaily from one to the next through the trees to the brook and polished roots trip The Pretty Girl. Cut and bloody, bruised, burnt and battered, polished roots trip her, The Pretty Girl stumbles and, yet again, stubs her toes but even that pain, after all that has been said, all that has been done to her, is a pleasure. She, angelic, floats through the woods, ghostly naked, almost not really there at all, to the stream. The brook.

The sun glints colours so gorgeous you could never even remotely imagine them, glints pure white light into her eyes from the rippling skin of the water and I understand how mightily she wants to melt into that moment of truth. You had to be there. I was there.

Through fields of poppies I flittered, and over dandelions and buttercups. I thought red and silken yellow sun hot and comfortable on my back and pollen in the air and failed to decide between buttercup here and dandelion there silken yellow and I was silken yellow on white wings sun hot on my back powder white wing flits and flickers I was in the air, pollen in the air through which I flutter and stare. I settle onto a flower, an Arum lily almost as perfect as my wings, same colour, same perfect powder white, and I flex my wings, once, twice, slowly, elegantly, again, and I gaze into the light in her eyes which blink once, twice, slowly, elegantly, again, almost nothing there, almost nothing left, but she watches me too and we are in harmony.

For a moment it little matters what she might do or what might be done to her, in this harmony I possess the essence of what I imagine her to be, a moment of truth, and she has possession of a universe and so, so do I. I can gaze at her there, and she at me too. The brook smells of sweet spring rain on grass, a moment of truth. She splashes cool water over her face. Me too.

Nettles hang over the brook.

Nettles hang over the brook. I stare back at myself in the gutter over there in some future, looks like I am praying into the drain.

Sound of a diesel engine working in reverse gear whine. Sound of a diesel engine. Silence after a diesel engine. Two doors slam sharp shut. A fright of animal shrieks. Silence after animal shrieks. Smell of diesel exhaust. Smell of death. A wiry middle aged man, a young boy and girl, all three muscular looking lager drinking types dressed in grubby white forensic overalls and heavy rubbery white aprons, come crashing down the path, come to an ugly stupid dead standstill, as does our possession of a universe. One, two, three, like some kind of beer in bottle tsunami, they swig from half full Stellas.

“Well, well well, wouldn’t you just believe what I see here right in front of my very own eyes, eh? An ashtray. Just look at ‘er!....Cigarette?”

“Ta....”

“Waste not, want not! Who said that, eh?....Ta....Cheers!”

“Mmm....Ok then, help yourselves kids. Half an hour, then we gotta dump her in her father’s place, you know how it goes!”

The gutter smells of sweet spring rain washing urine into the sewers, a moment of truth. I am praying to the drain. Scraggy nettles hang over the kerb. I am beaten. They beat me here and there. They tore my wings from me, from The Sunrise Girl. I was crushed under boot, me, my name is Alba, ground under boot heel into the sewerage.

I splash foul smelling but cool, oily water over my face and remember with a clarity that shocks, chills me to the bone, a conversation I had had some weeks before she, The Pretty Girl, was found in her parent’s flat on The Cambridge Estate.

She asked how I could write such horrible things and so I suggested that writing them down was infinitely better than actually doing them....

“....or suffering them.”

“But it’s not true, none of it is true Alba....”

“Truth! Truth is simply what works. What works for the moment! Nothing more, nothing less, and me, you, us, all of this, is just a thing of the moment and this is the moment. It functions, that's all!”

The image used to illustrate this part of the "SPACE JUNK" series of stories is a photographic collage titled "LAS HORTIGAS Y EL EFECTO MARIPOSA" by the artist David F. Brandon. Copyright belongs to the artist.Click here to see more of his artwork.

The "Dan Dare and his silver spaceship" idea was helped along by a-soma.Click here to visit his universe.

THE CASH STRAPPED CARPENTER

2010-04-21T13:27:00.002+02:00

The Wiseman lays before his students a vision of magnificence in creativity, the arts, universes of openings, and a few ask for more. What more could he ask for? For something magnificent shall be incubated.

The clergyman gave his acolytes a vision of malignance in creativity, in the arts, gave the congregation a book of rules, creation, and a great many of them asked for more. What more could he have asked for? For them, none the wiser, something malignant had been incubated.

The cash strapped carpenter lost his comfortable furniture loving lost soul to cash on the nail instruments of humiliation and execution, and lost his son and family into the bargain.

Old Joe had strolled, lolled in lush green woods among cheerful flora and fauna aplenty, but his work drove him and his timbers into a cheerless desert where the straightforward, clear-cut trees there, two a penny, cash on the nail, bore barren fruit and their sap was rust.

LET THEM STEW IN THEIR OWN JUICES

2010-04-07T23:35:00.008+02:00

In “The Cellar”, an underground cinema on Duke Street, near the centre of the universe.

Background Radiation. Radio Dust. Pinpoints of Past Fire recede. Dust, riding the dial, slowly accelerates toward the audience through the static. The screen flickers into light.

The scene, a hovel constructed from damp scraps of discarded wood and mouldy, faded brown cardboard, but with a distinct air of pretensions of becoming a cathedral.

Here sitteth a pantomime sorcerer wrapped in hokum-pocum costume drama drag, sham fifteenth century Spanish court slippers stained with sewage. Here sitteth, dully illuminated in the sparks of some dying embers, cross legged, amongst piles of rotting entrails, a sorcerer stirring relentlessly at a blackened cauldron of thick, sick smelling stew. Here sitteth, under the black shadow of a cathedral steeple hat reaching unto truly celestial heights, the sorcerer, who, just at this moment, all fired up by the brewage, sheds his hokum-pocum skin to don his immaculate black and white habits as becomes the High Priest of the one and only church of what must and must not, and you had better believe it sons and daughters of the One and Only John Doe, our father who art in heaven. Somewhere.

The little lambs get to climb up to the dizzy heights upon that heavenly ladder to look him straight in the eye, to be blessed by the judgements, and are instantaneously damned in his ubiquitous silver mirror shades, the mirror shades he angrily snaps on at their disgusting, subservient, brown nosing approach (Aside),-

“Sometimes you just have to hold your breath, pinch your nose.”

Crucifixes, electric chairs, lethal injection benches bellows butcher’s apron, nooses ropes chains cables carving knives and crocodile clips, hammers and nails, racks and pullies and poles to impale, a ladder and a toolbox. A ladder and a toolbox, as carpenter and metalworker, as all round handyman is he known, the son of John Doe, The Born Again Priest.

The heights are climbed and the faithless find faith in something a little more heavenly, a little more mystical, at each and every rung on the way up and so they have more faith because, sermonises The Born Again Priest,-

“Lo, hallowed be my wisdom, faith becometh the absolute truth, hallowed be thy name, John Doe, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven, erm....somewhere.”

And it comes about that all this truth is verily rattling about in each and every skull and making a right old din.*

And it comes about that The Born Again Priest, in all his infinite heavenly love and mystical affection, spreads his arms universally wide to welcome his precious flock unto his protective bosom. And it comes about that, lo and behold, he is up to his elbows in little boy’s and girl’s shit and blood, for, as we behold, they stand before him in sublime submission, anointed in blood and faeces smeared over their otherwise milky white flesh....milky white....

Full on, full screen mirror shades reflecting cameras and lighting rig, The Born Again Priest admonishes,-

“For this is the Northern European section of The Alliance of Civilisations and we do not countenance any of those other colours fucking up this tale, do we now?”

....milky white flesh waiting in trancelike subjugation for his oration. The Sermon on The Mound, Mons Veneris for, verily, The Born Again Priest truly believes, with high religious hubris, in heaven right down here and now and he is doing his damnedest best to keep the pearly gates tight shut to the hoi polloi.

The Sermon on The Mound, Mons Veneris,-

“Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, suffer the little children to come, to come unto me for my pleasure, for, verily, of such pleasure is the Kingdom of The Born Again Priest!”

So, hardened Sheffield steel shears in one hand, silver mirror shades over his eyes, stainless steel pincers in his right hand, he welcomes the little lambs to his last judgment and, of course, they are ecstatically happy, euphoric, for they have drunk and eaten of him and of all the others and they can see what the future holds for them just where The Born Again Priest’s eyes should be, that is, submission, suffering and faith, but he, mirror shades high on his nose, he can see them for what they really are, Cuts of Meat! Cuts of Meat, for his is the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

“For mine is the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen!”

In “The Cellar”, an underground cinema on Duke Street, near the centre of the universe, THE END, and voices are heard to mumble under their breaths,-

“Amen....”

And,-

“Where we gonna find something to eat this time of the night?”

*Those who have heard voices from the nondominant brain hemisphere remark on the absolute authority of the voice. They know they are hearing the truth. The fact that no evidence is adduced and that the voice may be talking utter nonsense is irrelevant. This is what Truth is. And Truth has nothing to do with facts. Those who manipulate Truth to their advantage, the people of the Big Lie, are careful to shun facts. In fact nothing is more deeply offensive to such people than the concept of fact.

(William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance, 1991, published by Serpent’s Tail, 2002)

A large part of the inspiration for this piece of writing can be found in a video clip by the multi media artist A-Soma. A-Soma and the Unlightened, Draps Bruts, from the collection of songs, Dark in Space. Click here to see the clip!

A PEACH, A BRUISE, BLUEJEANS AND VIRGIN EXTRA OLIVE OIL

2010-04-03T22:34:00.016+02:00

The Sunrise Girl, Alba, is, at this very moment, peeling the velvet skin from a dripping, sweet ripe peach with her lips, not her teeth, her lips, and The Pretty Girl passes through her fruit perfumed field of vision causing perfumed fresh peach pink womb glow tasted on her tongue, wearing tight bluejeans perfectly. Perfectly, muscles dance slow and intimate together and her right hip falls a tad and she hits a pose, innocently, and cherished skin slides sexy, moistly. Shed that skin....

“Why don’t I put my lips to your deep blue jeans, Pretty Girl? Why don’t I put my lips to your sheer white cotton Princesa underwear, Pretty Girl? Why don’t I put my lips to your ever so slightly translucent light pink olive peach skin, Pretty Girl?” Thinks she, warmly sinking to the depths inside her ribcage butterfly lust and love for beauty peach pink but olive oil small death. “Wrap that fine light olive flesh torso, abdomen in clingfilm so airtight it keeps forever peach velvet clean and fresh deep sepia frozen in my desperate memory....”

Olive oil, pour olive oil on light pink olive peach skin snakes through such fine silvery ghosts of downy hair into her neatly tied navel, slightly breathing, rising up and down gently tensed stomach faintly shivering translucent skin breath of cool sepia sex oil lake preciously knotted navel where Sunrise submerges her index finger maroon black nail varnish, tip of tongue, nose, pour some more that glides and guides virgin olive oil curls through gossamer fine velvet downy cool and down slow and easy in another virgin direction tighter curls, first pressing quivering cold pressing, calm....

“Ahí, ahí....”

The Pretty Girl, naked, rests her shoulders on the edge of the kitchen table and, chin in hands, looks, unblinking, straight into Alba’s sad brown eyes. There is a small reddish stain of eczema on the pearl pale pink olive sheen skin that Alba notices on her right cheek and such fine ghosts of downy hair that The Sunrise Girl so desperately wants to tickle and tease them into life with her breath, breathe life into them with tip of tongue luster that glides and guides virgin olive oil through sheer white cotton Princesa underwear gossamer fine velvet down cool and slow and easy in another virgin direction gorgeous tight goose pimple blush young velvet skin from a dripping, sweet ripe peach, juice on her lips.

“Intenté anotarlo todo, intenté ver mi belleza. La belleza que ves en mi.”

“¡Eso no importa Jone! Prométeme que nunca te convertirás tan sólo en otra superviviente fea, amargada y retorcida!”

In a wicker basket cradled between Jone’s perfect, gorgeous forearms, there is an almost invisibly bruised peach. The fruit, with its precious bruise from which decay would spread if they gave it half a chance, is also suddenly so much more desperately, deliciously delicate and sad and beautiful, gorgeous, for its wound.

The Sunrise Girl, naked too, dabs her index finger into a sepia pool of glinting olive oil on the clear glass table and gently rubs a little into the tiny flaking blemish on The Pretty Girl’s cheek, leans across the table, over the basket of fruit, and kisses the same spot, licks it delicately. The Pretty Girl, sublime, lightly caresses Alba’s glistening breasts, her nipples, with the still somewhat slippery palms of her hands.

“¡Sabes, Alba, que preferiría mucho más ser una bella víctima que una fea superviviente!”

“Hagámoslo otra vez....”

“Por favor....”

THE CONVERSATION

“There, there....”

“I tried to write it all down, I tried to see my beauty. The beauty you see in me.”

“Give it no mind Jone! Promise me you’ll never become just another ugly bitter twisted survivor?”

“You know, Alba, I’d much prefer to be a beautiful victim than an ugly survivor!”

“Let’s do it again....”

“Please....”

THE PRETTY GIRL PEELS THE SKIN OFF THE BORN AGAIN PRIEST

2010-01-31T18:16:00.003+01:00

Backed into a little boy’s bedroom corner. Hugging my knees. Rocking slowly back and forth. Always looked over my shoulder. Sick and trembling. Sweating it out in the bad boy’s corner. Never ever crossed the line. All the Sunday school sin pissed into splinters. Warm then cooling out a huge emptiness. A never ending lake spreading from my crutch to the camera. Never said the wrong thing. Across the bare bedroom floorboards. Flows under the midnight net curtains. Never said anything much at all. Lens crystal clear. Never asked. Never questioned. Clear like a poison needle hitting the vein. Hypodermic index finger pointed in warning. Never got an answer. Never told her what I thought. Rusty vein rusty pain pale flowers on the faded wallpaper. Splinters. Dust. Dusted the past tense. The past perfect. Never ever really left off holding mummy’s hand. The touch of her fingers. Can’t open my mouth. Never played daddy’s sports. Never went anywhere I couldn’t get back from. Mummy please don’t die. Mummy please open my mouth. There’s nothing coherent. Never ever touched my cousin’s breasts. Choking on incoherence. Gagging on the teeth of incoherence. Never put a foot wrong. Never ever did the real thing. Nightmare teeth falling. Never said it wasn’t true. Suffocating turning blue china porcelain cheeks. Cracked blue crystal veins. Never said it wasn’t me. Let me see. Teeth. Thick bitter spittle and teeth bury my tongue. Never took a drug. Cry desperate shriek impossible to breath. Never ever catch a breath. Fingers jammed in my mouth. Lacerate fingers tearing at endless teeth splinters crucify my vocal chords. Split the corners of my mouth. Never ever ate the rotting fruit. Crucify my tongue my lips. My cheeks. Fingernails jammed between my teeth. Pain. Teeth. Bite my nails ‘till. A taste for blood. Never ever saw the snake. Sperm in my fingers. Never touched Sunday school girls lips. Split my lips. Never ever even once saw theirs if they’d see mine. Never lost consciousness. Never lost control. Never woke up bleeding and hurting in a hospital. Didn’t even ever get to sit on the fence. Never cried acid hate tears for lost love. Never ever really felt anything much. Never drank too much. Rusty needle hitting the vein. Guilty for it all. Stinging pain when mummy lifted her index finger to explain. Bit my nails. Guilty for nothing. Never understood a word. Never wrote any of it down. Bit them ‘till my fingers bled. Gnaw them ‘till my fingers bleed. Cuticles. That’s where I got my taste for blood. Sperm on the floor. Sperm in my fingers. Hugging my knees. Cold wet carpet spongy. Yellow ocean in baby boy bedroom. Stained underpants. Acid tears. Gasps roar hoarse. Throat’s burnt through. Hearse. Never ever really left off holding mummy’s hand. Mummy’s hand. Mummy hurt me. Let me see. Sick and vomit trembling. Bit them ‘till they bled. Cuticles. Cute. Let me see pretty. Let me see. Let me see.

Then The Pretty Girl stared him out and instantly peeled the skin off his rotting love.

Mummy....Mummy....Please, mummy....

THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

2009-12-27T21:26:00.006+01:00

In “The Cellar”, an underground cinema on Duke Street, near the centre of the universe.

Background Radiation. Radio Dust. Pinpoints of Past Fire. Dust, riding the dial, slowly accelerates toward him through the static. The dust sails on waves of flame. (Images of salvoes of blazing Greek lances launched from philosophical times. Their Blades Cleave the Future).

Over his head it all goes, or nearly all of it, for some leaves its mark. His left eye, he blinks. Something causes it to sting slightly.

“Right! You think you’re the centre of the universe, do you not?” Crackled, cackled the hordes, by the static concealed.

“Wrong!” Was his instant riposte, “The centre of the universe is due south east of here, five foot seven and five eighths of an inch in that direction. Me? I’m in orbit.”

SPACE JUNK, PLAYING ON THE SWING (IN MUDDY SHOES)

2009-12-19T15:05:00.023+01:00

“Damned Croakers’ve given us all a bad name....”

“Come off it Peter! That’s an urban fairy tale from the mists of time. It never happened. It was all made up by the underground so that we felt something, at least something minimal, was being done, that there was some kind of action....”

“I’ve never told anyone about this before, but I met a Croaker once, when I was at university in London. He was a writer and illustrator a real genius....”

“Bit of Arabic myth slipping in here, then? Demons and jinn strutting about in urban legends....”

“....Mmm, fits though, doesn’t it Alba my dear, a genius jinn with photographic and arts software. He seduced me one evening after I’d gone over the top on the brandy at the presentation of some cheap and nasty gay spy novel he’d written and illustrated the cover for. Didn’t get much from me, but he understood and so, when my head cleared enough in the morning we lay together in his double bed and he offloaded his, don’t know what it was really, guilt perhaps, frustration, more like, on me, the works. They’d sent his lover away to some camp or another in The Muslim Federation for TEET and he’d never seen him again till, quite by chance, someone had sent him the resultant files. That’s when he became a Croaker. Hey Cerebrum, pour me another beer my good lad....Thanks....

“....Quite by chance! I bet! How’d he get into that, How’d he make contact?”

“Didn’t Cerebrum, apparently....and never did. Worked on his own but said he picked up on clues online that there were about twenty or so Croakers working along similar lines to him in The Christian Alliance and some strange things were going down that bore the hallmarks all over the world. Where’d you first catch the word, Alba?”

“Graffiti. Started turning up all over the place ‘bout two thousand twelve....these damned traffic lights gonna stay red forever....I thought it was just some crazy death metal band, “The Croakers”.... So must the authorities, nothing subversive, death metal, adolescent dragon fantasies of the middle aged....“The Croakers”.... right, let’s go then, come on, ‘bout time....that’s a lot of letters to spray and escape from when the sirens approach....Never any concerts, nothing to download, nothing. Traditional English word, “croaker”, “killer” it means, according to that old dictionary over there behind your head, Peter, and as a verb, “croak”, “to croak it”....to die....neat sense of humour....”

“Don’t think he invented the term, think he appropriated it for his own twisted reasons my dear, the Contamination and Re-use of Objectives’ Archives for Key Enemy Renditions. That’s what he said it stood for, but it’s bloody ugly and definitely not very catchy. I got the feeling he just adored the word itself, a bit of bloody black humoured poetry....”

“How’d it work, this plot, then?....¡Joder!....”

“¿Estás bien?....¿Demasiado tráfico?”

“Nada, tío, no, demasiados baches....the plot?

“Well, Alba, a lot of it went straight over my head, I mean, I wasn’t in a particularly fit state, now was I, eh? Goes something like this, as far as I can remember, and I’m not going to be using the right computer jargon either, Cerebrum, so, lend a hand if it’ll make anything clearer for the little one....”

“All the same to me, Pete! I’m just a user, no idea of the mechanics, Cerebrum, better keep your mouth shut, just nod or shake your head if you think he doesn’t know what he’s on about....”

“Ha! Ha!....Right! ....More beer in the fridge, Pete?”

“Hope so, sunshine! Goes something like this....like the letters of the word “croaker”. He’d break into the objective’s computer and appropriate all the codes and data to allow himself to turn his portable into an exact copy, “shadow” was the word he used, of the original. Then he spent months just studying how the computer was used until he could, he became the shadow of original user, a copy and a perfect copy is the real thing! Most archives are stored in enormous banks of servers, not on the victim’s personal hard drives, big mistake; servers looked over by agents of the Department of Culture Equalization, he said, bored most of the time, stupid all of it, if you never ask a question you never find a reason, and they never found any reason to question what appeared to be normal private use of a computer by some mid level civil servant, too intent were they on their torture videos and death games. Anyway, Croaker adjusted bank balances, payments, receipts and inserted fake government forms and documents into archives well hidden from the user and the agents and their crap electronic and human security systems, but relatively easy for Special Alliance Department of Information Control hacks to uncover when he’d decided the time had come for the sacrifice....and got loads of wives, husbands, sons and daughters of middle ranking Alliance operatives rendered for Temporal and/or Terminal Education Exchange Treatment. Made them all into regular little video film stars, he did....”

“That’s impossible, no one’s gonna believe any of that information without an investigation, without a bit of digging around....Nah....don’t believe it....”

“Neither did I! But he insisted. Said the SADIC hacks were fanatics. They believed what they wanted to see and what they wanted to see was the elimination of threats to their beliefs, no questions asked, quick decisive action....hell, he’d joke that if you were carrying round a banner proclaiming god and all the prophets were an invention of The Born Again Priest, they would simply beat you to death because your shoes were dirty....”

“Bollocks....”

“That’s what I said, Cerebrum, but look, first decade of this century half the political and religious classes were making money or sex....”

“....Or both....”

“Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll....”

“.... in extracurricular activities, as it were, no? And leaking information landed lots of them in the fire in the frying pan, right? Anyone ever bother to verify where all that leaking information came from, if it was even true? Who cared? Came from vengeance! Back stabbing. In the public domain, public interest, take it on face value and get it shoved in your face, down your throat....Don’t think, react, the more closed off to thinking the more reaction you get, the less questions get asked, the easier it gets to slip in dodgy information, and I agree whole heartedly with Croaker on that analysis....”

“So this Croaker, in his roundabout way, sent off planeloads of beautiful people to be rendered into snuff videos, kind of collateral damage, right?....”

“Families of fanatics, he said turned out baby fanatics, little beasts, at least from the age of four up. Look at the religions, they always want to get their teeth into good young virgin blood, screw them up young and you’ve got ‘em screwed down for life....That’s my line, by the way, not his....cannon fodder and chattel....”

“Give me the child, I’ll give you the man, or some such....Who said that?....”

“Mmm....concerned citizens, Concerned Citizens groups to be sent fourth and multiply in the public interest and do the dirty on the unsuspecting and unwary, unsuspectingly finding the dirt being done on them....mmm, yes, neat idea....He said that he always saw them strung up screaming in pain, not so much in amazement at their situation, but screaming in jealousy, or envy, or whatever, at not being behind the controls themselves, behind the machines, transformers, cameras, sound equipment, mixing desks....Had quite a sense of humour did Croaker....”

“Sounds like you quite like the man. Seems a monster like all the rest to me, mate!....¡Mierda!....No hay ningún coche en millas y otro semáforo en rojo....”

“He’s dead....Liked, liked....I have to say I had a certain admiration for his work ethic....”

“....Do unto those as they would do unto yours, but get there first and fastest....”

“....and hardest....to an extent Alba, yes….but he committed suicide, drank himself to death, all above board, legal, tax paid on every bottle, drank himself to death in six months because he couldn’t rectify and somehow didn’t want to rectify all the pain he’d caused because, right to the end he felt it was all justified. Justice, Poetic justice....”

“Why then?....What happened?

EUCAUC/F758362100402/REND, Mortimer, Dawn Roxanne is what happened.

“She was different from the rest. She awoke a respect in me, an inescapable respect close to love. It became love. She made me feel profound sorrow which morphed into a paralyzing guilt at what I had caused to be done to her. I had become evil. In my carefully considered, thoughtful, detailed planning I had become more evil than the evil I presumed to be fighting against. This emotion, this guilt lay heavy on my shoulders. I had thought of myself as some kind of freedom fighter, a latter day Jesus, but she had dawned on me that I should, could never presume to bear the weight for some abstract idea of humanity on my shoulders. I had to die, not to carry off the burden of guilt for my fellow man, rather, I had to die simply because I couldn’t live with myself any longer, I couldn’t live with, with my memories, with the images, with the horrifying, concrete knowledge of all the pain I’d caused. Not to humanity, no, to her, her, rising above the crowds, her person, not the people. there was always a shadow of pessimism and defiance in those eyes, a sorrow in her gaze, in her tone of voice even when she laughed, especially when she smiled, that made her beauty so fragile and so perfect.

So I went about setting myself up for the fall. I downloaded and printed out and copied files of her old family videos and photos, a thirteen year old playing on a swing, then her Terminal Education Exchange Treatment, soundtracks, stills, high definition videos, you name it I possessed it, and it all came from the account I’d set her parents up with, illegal, all illegal, and I paid large sums into their bank accounts leaving an evident trail back to me that needn’t ever have existed. I printed out the receipts, had everything scattered round the flat and finally waited for Death to come knocking while her death screamed out from various monitors in pure surround sound clarity.

Death soon came knocking! Death smashed in the door, found me watching Beauty spit blood in the face of The Beast and Death and its henchmen kicked me off my reclining armchair and proceeded to kick me unconscious, just for the fun of it, perhaps I hadn’t polished my shoes enough. When I came round the computers and hard drives, the videos were all gone, as were the associated documents, though I later discovered a wastepaper bin full of ashes on the kitchen balcony. I’d had a visit from the vigilantes of The Concerned Citizens. Now, these guys, as my grandmother would have said, “Can’t see the wood for the trees!” All that illegally bought stuff can be sold on, black marketing, long as there’s no documentation to tie it to anyone and so, profits talk louder than....I was simply invisible, except, of course, to various pairs of military style boots that enjoyed themselves inflicting pain.

I’d given Death the front door to open, given it to them on a plate, as it were, and, in their stupid greed, they’d missed the whole point. Try to get yourself killed, sent to MF Treatment Center 18SA.T or wherever, to pay for your sins, and you get saved, born again, these days. Try to keep yourself safe, out of the way, and you end up as collateral damage, carry round a banner proclaiming god and all the prophets are an invention of The Born Again Priest, and they simply beat you to death because your shoes are dirty.

Mohammed A. , a Croaker in the Muslim Federation, went through much the same thing with a kid called Arun. Atonement. What can we do? I have no desire, we have no desire, to live with this unbearable emotion but that’s the sentence that’s been passed down in the prison of our thoughts.”

“Cerebrum, Big Man, ya gotta jump ship, lose yourself, pirate! I got a Concerned Citizens checkpoint up ahead and something I don’t like the look of ‘s just pulled out behind....”

“Joder, que mierda.... Good luck....”

“I love Jone, you know....”

“I know Alba. ¿Y El Grumo?”

And there is no answer to that you can put into words and Big Man can see that in my eyes. I cancel the hands free conference connection and Mr Cerebrum, with a thumbs up that fills the screen, vanishes from the monitor and I am suddenly all alone, and so I whisper to myself,

“I love you, Jone....”

“Stop the fucking car, shithead.”

“Contact off! Out of that car bitch.... Hands where we can see ‘em....”

And I think to myself,

“Jone, there was always a half hidden hint of defiant pessimism, defiance in your eyes, a pristine sorrow in your gaze, in your tone of voice, even when you laughed, especially when you smiled, that made your beauty so fragile and so perfect....”

“Hands over your head....Identification? Where, where is it cunt?”

“Inside pocket, here....”

And I moved my hand to take out the little electronic ID and the Concerned Citizen nearest me screamed at me not to move even an inch, to keep my hands over my head, to give him my papers, so I moved my hand again and he told me to keep the fuck still, like a statue, so I began to say it was in my pocket and he ordered me to shut the fuck up then hissed,

“Name?”

At that point I was wetting myself with nerves and, when I’m nervous I can’t stop myself laughing and the more I tried to suppress my laughter, the less able I was at it. That’s when he came over to me, standing there on the muddy edge of the road, and put his face an inch from mine and barked,

“Right dirty pair of shoes you got there, eh Slag? What you say?”

And that, Peter, was when the beating started and that was when I knew we were all safe.

SPACE JUNK, PART FOUR, SEX AT A FUNERAL

2009-11-07T14:55:00.019+01:00

forever over the sour years go once beautiful girls everyone stuttered dullard grey pearls cancerous city of poison seers bitter traffic of deathly tears over the static years forever curtain go down on beauty forever over the stale years go once beautiful boys everyone dullards grey pearls stuttered city of poison sears cancerous bitter traffic of deathly tears over the static years forever go down curtain on beauty

forever sour the stale years go once beautiful men everyone dullards grey pearls cratered city of poison seers cancerous bitter traffic of deathly tears over the static fears forever way down on beauty curtain go forever hang the stale years on beautiful women everyone cracked grey pearls cratered city of poison sears cankerous bitter traffic of dead tears over the sour years forever curtain go down on beauty

That is the landscape, the panorama they sell us each and every living second and so we took it down off all the rusting nails on all the filthy walls, us, Bug Eyed Peter and The Sunrise Girl, me, Alba and took ourselves out of town and burnt it all to ashes and held a funeral service for all the priests and prophets, crooked death salesmen, each and every one, under the Great Wide Milky Way and we scattered the ashes into the stars and planets and bits of their broken satellites and twisted dreams.

We were looking at each other, holding each other’s hands gently, we were in the dark, a jet black shooting stars night, Peter, and we were cool naked and your penis was falling and looking kind of pathetic and my little breasts too and we were shivery and ghostly white thin, insignificant, sad looking, and you looked up into the galaxy and told me she was of the same star sign as me, well almost, you said, and you began to laugh so hard you doubled up at the waist and you laughed so hard you cried and there was nothing left in all creation except your laugh so I knelt down and held your laugh in my hands and I can never see you cry so beautiful without crying myself and so I cried in love too and you kissed me and my tears rolled down my cheeks onto your lips, onto your tongue and you looked straight into my eyes and told me you had just tasted the universe and so, suddenly, the tears became deadly serious and the scene, fragile beauty reincarnated, and we were perfect again, drinking long and deep of the universe.

The Photograph illustrating this part of the “Space Junk” series of stories was taken by the photographer, writer and philosopher Mr P. Iru, and is used here with his consent.

SPACE JUNK, EPITAPH, VIRGIN PLACES, PENCILS SHARPENED BUT NEVER USED

2009-10-19T12:42:00.005+02:00

“Jone, see this Jone, your room is emptiness and silence, a white light, a white, freshly primed canvas sits easy, comfortable on an easel. Sheaves of pristine white writing paper lie patiently, an unwritten tome on the shelf. Jone, there was always a half hidden hint of defiant pessimism, defiance in your eyes, a pristine sorrow in your gaze, in your tone of voice, even when you laughed, especially when you smiled, that made your beauty so fragile and so perfect. Your white room, white walls and floorboards, whitewashed sash windows, crisp white bed sheets wait for you, my love. I open the white paneled door and stand on the threshold staring out into the void, but you, my dear, will never come again.”

“Alba, you must be really, really sure of yourself before you touch such perfect, virgin places and I was never up to it, ever. It was best, by far, to have left them all alone. I could do no better than that. You told me that I was beautiful, that I was Beauty, that the universe was full of beautiful things, and that I was one of those beautiful things. Thank you my dear. Thank you so much. I could have hoped for no more than that, so shed no tears for who I was, my love, and cry only for the better girl I could have been.”

SPACE JUNK, PROLOGUE, THE SUNRISE BABY REMEMBERS JONE

2009-10-03T22:53:00.026+02:00

How to keep....is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty.... from vanishing away?

No there’s none, there’s none. Oh no there’s none, nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, do what you may do, what, do what you may, and wisdom is early to despair....

The Leaden Echo, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

Street lights out, dark, dark night and the stars took my breath away. Tumbling brook, gutters in the street and I’m stumbling, clawing myself up the trunk of a dead skeletal looking tree onto my own two feet, tumbling back up the road, homeward bound, with any of the little luck left to me, so I hope, and now the stars are turned out because I can’t lift my head more than a few footsteps into the future because everything hurts so much, they could have done me a favour, gone a little further, but no one is left for dead, they got to see you up and running, shuffling, no one is left for dead.

So I stumble on and stumble into something and can’t control my bladder and wet myself, which doesn’t matter at all because I’ve only got on my muddy raincoat, nothing else, didn’t even bother to look for anything else, don’t care. Could be mud. Could be blood, could be diarrhea, couldn’t stop it when I eventually got the coat over my shoulders, I think I recall....could be all that stuff, street lights out, dark, dark night. Can’t see. So, anyway, I stop, close my swollen eyes and there she is, perhaps two and a half, three years old floating in a stone enameled kitchen sink. There she is, me, me being bathed by a fat old woman I can never put a face to, or a smell to, or a voice to, but the sink is off white and the water must be at blood temperature because I have no memory of it being hot or cold, but it’s kind of grayish and soapy, and sometimes I can remember the sound of a baby, of me, splashing, but, maybe not, since everything swims in and out of focus and I can only get a grip on what I’m remembering right this moment, so maybe I’m only remembering from last time I remembered my first ever memory of this, my one and only life. Two things are constant. I think two things are constant. On her right foot, on her right foot, my right foot there is a soaking wet sock and, to this day I can feel that soaking wet sock, if I try hard enough. This is my first ever memory. I say “is”, I think “is” because it’s never that exact, it’s been lived so often that it may never ever have happened, but no mind, it’s a memory all the same, part of the ever so colourful history of my life and, looking back, that would have been the time when my brother was born and mother was in the hospital with father smoking up the corridors with his Navy Cuts. So, that would put the stone sink in aunty Vi’s place, next door, and a little later aunty Vi turned out to be no aunty to me at all and aunts who aren’t aunts at all are all supposed to be slightly fat so the woman with no face is slightly fat too. The other thing that’s fairly constant is a sensation, a sensation of being goose pimply fresh and clean and the sock makes me feel even cleaner and goose pimply clean with its heavy sepia soddeness to compare the rest of my body with. Sodden, but I adore goose pimples....and suddenly someone, trespassing in my head says,

“You’re not dead yet Alba, open your eyes!”

Something told me to open my eyes and I, feeling I had no strength to do otherwise, so obedient I am, open my eyes and stumble and stagger on for a little while longer. Street lights out, dark, dark night and there is dirty water calmly singing in the gutters and I’m stumbling against the tide and everything hurts so much. Bubling Brook, Dingly Dell were in one of my storybooks from before the Alliance of Civilizations, weren’t they? Where the Goblins parked the cars they’d stolen from Toyland in the hollow under the roots of the biggest tree in the woods. It was there, wasn’t it? Years ago. How can I have so much blood? I have to keep rubbing something sticky from my eyes. Suppose it’s blood, there’s no rain. Don’t know if there are any clouds, can’t lift my head more than a few paces into the future because everything hurts so much and no one is left for dead. I’m nodding out.

I’m nodding out, so I close my eyes and stumble on and into some kind of metal post that I hug desperately to keep myself upright and I hug it with desperate gratitude, but gratitude does no good and so I slowly slip to the ground and I’m hugging metal with my forehead on a stinking curbstone. I can do no more. I can go no further than this little ring of light. This has to be the only lamppost with light in the whole town and there she is, older but no wiser, me, me on stage, on stage, black velvet drapes and black satins and silks strewn over the boards, spotlight brilliant, but icy cold, over my head, somewhere up there in the universe. And a curtain lifts and there, three years older, just eighteen, is the pretty girl. The prettiest girl. She is naked and shivering just slightly and her head is lowered in modesty but her eyes look up into mine demurely and she holds her hands, fingers lightly intertwined, in the small of her back, palms open for caresses and she is truly beautiful, truely gorgeous. I am naked too but my nakedness is somehow shameful in her light although she doesn’t seem to see it that way. I am with her and softly kiss her eyelids, the cold tip of her nose, her neck just under her pierced ears and the cool creases at the top of her arms and, as I do this I brush her breasts with my cheeks, her nipples with my thumbs. Then we embrace and make love in the spotlight in all the silks and velvet, we turn, slowly in the spotlight and she is shivering so slightly, so ecstatically I have to kiss every goose pimple, each and every one and I am clean and she is pure and we embrace, and I taste her mouth again and we’re in love and in lust, we embrace, but so exquisitely lightly because everything hurts a little too much and there is a tear in her eye, on her cheek, which I kiss away and she licks away the black tears in my brown eyes, sodden in nostalgia for what was and what is to come and we make love again on a black silk draped divan, but oh, so so incredibly gently because everything hurts so much and, just then, orgasm, a shooting pain, shooting stars, a tumbling brook, and I open my eyes to the stinking curbstone, my arms round a dog piss stained lamppost, street lights out on a dark, dark pain filled night. I let go. I let go of her, I let go of beauty and I let go and roll onto my back. Dark night. The universe takes my breath away. Again.

When I eventually get to my feet, heaving myself in slow motion up the fluted, anorexic body of the lamppost, I can no longer see the stars because I can’t lift my head or raise my eyes more than a few unsteady steps into the future. I stumble as I swing slightly round the post, lights out, and move on, heavily, against the tide in the gutter, no one is left for dead. No one is left for dead, just deserted. The street is deserted and, as I move along I get the impression that I’m causing some kind of wave and I sense all the windows closing as I approach and then, just as silently, opening as I pass, thousands of windows, from ground floor to top floor, from one semi detached to the next. Even the stars appear to turn off at my passing, but that’s probably all in my mind although I picture all the night time fauna hushing each other in awe and turning their backs in fear at the sound of my oncoming, uneven footsteps, whispering behind trembling fingers when I’ve passed by and it slowly dawns on me why no one is left for dead but, just at that moment of realization, I hear a sound that hasn’t hushed up at my approach and I tilt my head sideways a little and catch a glimpse, get my eyes raised just enough to see headlights somewhere in my future and a moment later there’s the unmistakable sound of an old diesel engine coming into my present, and my lips are opening and closing but no sound is coming out but my head is saying,

“Please, please don’t do that again, please, don’t hit me there again....”

I sink to my knees. I have my hands on my thighs, slipping to my knees. I’m sitting on my heels and I’m swaying backwards and forwards too, too much, and the back of my head hits the curb but I can feel no more pain so I just don’t care. Street lights out, dark, such a dark night, but the stars are bleached out in these headlights and there’s a smell of diesel fills my lungs. Shooting pain, shooting stars, tumbling brook,

“Please, please don’t do that again, please, don’t hit me there again....”

And I’m gone. The universe has taken my breath away.

SPACE JUNK, EPILOGUE, ALBA GOES HOME

2009-10-03T22:34:00.017+02:00

Short Sharp shock....

“Jone y El Grumo....” *

I open my eyes to a shooting pain, shooting stars, a tumbling brook, and discover myself, legs folded under me, all akimbo, soaked in something, foul, acid, acrid smelling, right here in a gutter. There’s an image there of an open car door on my right, but I’m not focussing that well, it’s all kind of blurred nigh time white. White door. A sick anaemic yellow light illuminates, vaguely, tatty aged brownish seats and trim and this universe takes my breath away and I cough and choke back something rather bitter sick tasting and try to move my arms and think about trying to curl into a foetal ball, but nothing works and there are words in my head that say,

“Please, please don’t do that again, please, don’t hit me there again....”

And I think to say them out loud but I can make no sound and suddenly I realise I just don’t care any more because, a rather calm and collected voice floating between my ears advises me I can’t possibly feel any more pain than the pain I’m suffering already, but a cackling black clad character is marching backward and forward in my head, spitting out cheerily from somewhere in my battered memory,

“Don’t you believe it, baby, just don’t you believe it!....”

I blink. Something tells me I should blink furtively, play dead. I blink, I force my eyes shut and will them to stay shut, and it seems like an eternity, fat chance, but I just don’t feel anything now, not anxiety, not sickness, just emptiness and an unreasonable calm as I drive up to the checkpoint,

“I love Jone, I love her so much....”

“Stop the fucking car, shithead.”

I pull on the handbrake and punch the button to shut down the Daciaelectric’s systems and the car hums into silence.

“Out of that fucking car, cunt, right this instant....”

I close my eyes tight shut and reach for the pull up handle to open the door. I cough and choke back something rather bitter sick tasting and want, have an overwhelming desire, to open my eyes to catch a glimpse of stars enough to make me feel so tiny, so insignificant I no longer am but, when I do blink, I see the moon there, right there, bobbing about right in front of my face making me feel quite faint and uncontrollably dizzy all over again. And then I think I hear a voice from light years away and, quite by chance, my eyes focus close to and there’s Peter, the goddamned beautiful, beautiful shithead, goddamned Peter, Bug Eyed Peter, and the bloody idiot is crying his stupid stupid blue English eyes out. The moon is filling the curb, the goddamned gutters with, with rivers of tumbling water. The moon is crying for me, and the voice has brought my name back to me from somewhere out there in the infinite, has given me my name back, my name back and my world, my little bit of beautiful, gorgeous world too, so I am crying too because you always have to cry for someone who’s willing to throw it all away, again and again, to save you, in spite of it all.

While Bug Eyed Peter lifts me into our battered Megane, I turn this thought, over and over and over again, deep inside my head,

“Suicide! This is tantamount to suicide....my love, they’ll do for you what they’ve done for me twice over....tantamount to suicide....”

And, as Peter pushes the back of the passenger seat into its reclining position, the pain of these ideas surpasses the pain of my beating and the pain of him strapping the seatbelt over my chest. I grimace and let out a low, guttural groan.

“I know, I know lover, let’s see if we can get ourselves home in one piece.”

And the Megane had a panoramic roof and the moon, and the stars and the universe took my breath away, so my first words to Peter, precious Bug Eyed Peter, were not about how much I loved him, how much I adored him, but,

“You can read my mind, can’t you....”

* A good deal of the inspiration for this “SPACE JUNK” series was drawn from a painting titled “JONE Y EL GRUMO”, by the painter David F. Brandon. I would like to thank him for permission to use a detail from this painting as an illustration in “SPACE JUNK, PART ONE, AFTER THE BEATING”.

I hope Brandon will forgive me for the extensive use I have made of the title of his artwork in my written work and, I have to say that “SPACE JUNK” could well have been titled, in honour of the painting, “JONE Y EL GRUMO”. Thank you Mr Brandon, "THE PRETTY GIRL" has found her name.

Click on this text to view the most recent version of Brandon’s painting.

Bashir B. Sherpa.

SPACE JUNK, PART ONE, AFTER THE BEATING

2009-09-02T19:42:00.004+02:00

Jone y El Grumo, Jone Y El Grumo, then all the pain, all the painful detail and Jone y El Grumo disintigrated again in a breath of comforting blackness.

After the beating, sometime after the beating, I regained a semblance of consciousness awhile.

Something under me was clawing me into the blood and cement and something invisible above was crushing the air from my....

Street, damp dirt and stones, blood, it all seemed to be so very intimate and incredibly detailed and vast and painful. The sky felt so darkened and far away and insignificant, an agony of distance away, and I could never have got a grip on the void even if I could have moved more than a splitting right eye....

Wall, broken down wall over there in front of my eye. Names, names, marks, graffiti all over the wall. Amongst the crowd, the long gone gang, Jone y El Grumo, Jone y El Grumo....

I knew a Jone once, way back then in two thousand and nine, so El Grumo must have been The Beast....

Jone y El Grumo....

SPACE JUNK, PART TWO, BITS AND PIECES

2009-09-02T19:36:00.014+02:00

January 11th, 2007, Xichang Space Centre, China.

Controllers follow a kill vehicle on track to intercept a defunct Feng Yun weather satellite. With flawless engineering, control, timing and targeting the missile blows said satellite into more than two thousand five hundred pieces ten centimetres or more in size, not to mention smaller killer particles, incrementing debris in Low Earth Orbit by forty percent or more, and there is more, a lot more, to come.

February 10th, 2009, Low Earth Orbit.

Cosmos 2251, a Russian signals satellite and Motorola’s Iridium 33 bump into each other between seven hundred and nine hundred kilometres above our heads converting themselves into, perhaps, more than one hundred thousand pieces of junk bigger than a centimetre in diameter, and there is more, a lot more, to come.

And I remember Mr Cerebrum saying, way back then, imitating the sardonic drawl of William S. Burroughs,

“Now that's what I call a reaal quiet orrgasm....”

February 25th, 2016, Pennsylvania, a backcountry road, The United States of America.

A real solid lump of a malfunctioning GPS satellite smashes into a horse drawn buggy pulled up just before a nearby intersection. Preacher Jakob never gets his pencil drawn map the right way around and his broad rimmed black hat is a real bloody mess, not to mention his last thoughts....

....That is that, and the horse glances nonchalantly sideways, a one eyed glance, and ambles, kind of bored, over to the nearest patch of juicy green roadside grass.

And I remember Mr Cerebrum saying, way back then, imitating the sardonic drawl of William S. Burroughs,

“Shame he hadn’t worked out beforehand, you know, with a little more attention to detail, in what the hell direction the sun rised in them there parts, coulda avoided a reeal baad headache....”

January 10th, 2025, South East England, on a backcountry road.

Breezing through the parched English countryside in my battered Daciaelectric Hydro*, hands free mobile and GPS systems hacked to send in erroneous, but believable, triangulations to whomsoever it might concern, breezing along, (that is, a breeze only from the air con fan turned up to its limit) listening to some nostalgic jazz tinged hard rock by The Blue Roadsters, and Mr Cerebrum and I, in one of those mutual moments that need no words and have no explanation, decide to switch to a crackly sounding DAB news broadcast just in time to hear,

“....Mars Project Way Station disintegrates in low earth orbit. Scientific speculation has it that the Way Station was struck by part, or parts of a reactor from one of thirty two ancient Russian radar tracking satellites that itself had recently been nudged out of its previous orbit by debris from an unknown source impossible to track back....Fifteen lives lost....Well over half a million additional sizeable pieces of orbital space junk calculated added to LEO debris....”

And Mr Cerebrum, as he is want to do, switches to imitation mode. Robert De Nero (Anyone remember ever downloading one of his?) as Mafiosi Government Criminal, but the content is Burroughs, William S. Burroughs,

“What are you here for? We’re all here to go. That’s what we’re all here for. Earth is going to be a space station and we’re here to go. Into space. That’s what we are here for. Do I hear any questions about that?”

*The last private (non military/police) transportation vehicle built by deviants in the European Sector of The Alliance of Civilisations, not by reconditioned non terminal rendition prisoners in The Muslim Federation.

SPACE JUNK, PART THREE, JONE Y EL GRUMO

2009-09-02T19:22:00.014+02:00

“Well, Yep! That was then and there and now is most definately here and right now. Hey, you feeling nostalgic, or what?”

“Ya just gone 'nd hit the nail square on the head babe....”

January 10th, 2025, South East England, approaching a backcountry vigilante roadblock.

Mr Cerebrum and yours truly both look at each other and smile and think it lucky that William’s trips were really into the interior lands, the only lands left to visit, and, in an instant, I shoot a look out of the passenger window, over my left shoulder, and, in a flash remember when there had once, once upon a time, been leaves on trees to flash by, and there is more, a lot more, to come.

And Cerebrum is getting all animated,

“....and the circle closing in above our heads, in space, our very own little bit of space, neat stuff, neat looking shroud, mint! Trapped, mint! Lucky for the universe this virus got nowhere else to go ‘cept into archaeological oblivion....”

“....tuck in the shroud, screw down the coffin lid, shovel on the dirt, nighty night....”

“Virus, most goddamned useless virus ever lived....got sexy armpits though....”

“You just have to get those lines in , don’t ya? Or died, my big man, or died! Junk, dead, inert, cosmic junk. What ya think of that then?”

And Cerebrum slips into Burroughs Mordant Mode, yet again,

“As your old uncle Bill would tell ya all, sure is a hell ova shame it aint the kind of junk you can inject....”

I notice an acrid, chemical smell circulating into the car. Scorched earth thick black smoke from burning tyres up ahead,

“Cerebrum, Big Man, ya gotta jump ship, lose yourself, pirate! I got a Concerned Citizens checkpoint up ahead and something I don’t like the look of ‘s just pulled out behind....Trapped....Mint, muñeca mia....”

“Joder....Mierda....Good luck....”

“I love Jone, you know....”

“I know Alba. ¿Y El Grumo?”

And there is no answer to that you can put into words and Big Man can see that in my eyes as I move to cancel the hands free conference connection and Mr Cerebrum, with a thumbs up that fills the screen, vanishes from the monitor and I am suddenly all alone, and so I whisper to myself,

“I love Jone....”

“Stop the fucking car, shithead. Stop the fucking car....”

829B. A GODDAMNED CUP AND SAUCER SILVER SPOON CRETIN, WATCHING, JUST WATCHING AND KEEPING IT UNDER HIS (FUNERAL) HAT

2009-07-03T23:50:00.008+02:00

“Hey you! Watch where you look! You blind you goddamned cretin, can’t you see?”

“The lame never have even the slightest dirty coal dust clue to
The blind who see more hard and diamond clear than they ever do
Never dare offer help when you collide into them in the street
When you have little idea how to get up onto your own two feet”

“I said you, cretin! Are you blind or what you goddamned fool, watch where you look!”

“There’s a nice, refreshing cup of tea sitting under my black silk top hat
Brewed especially, ceremoniously, by my steadfast hand, just for you
Bone china crockery, Chinese blue waves! So what do you think of that?
Look! There’s imagination trodden under your shoe! One sugar or two?”

HAND IN GLOVE, ON A TIGHT, BLACK SILK BODICE (A VICTORIAN COSTUME DRAMA)

2009-06-21T17:29:00.016+02:00

David John Johnson, one time child miner in various Welsh pits, bit part actor on later epoch Victorian stages, with a strong baritone voice, stitched full facemasks together from leather gloves acquired, by slightly surreptitious means, from society ladies on their cultural evenings out at the opera, or the theatre houses and concert venues of our grandest of cities. He wore these masks in the dirty dark of gaslight night and thus was touched by the loveliness and elegance of his time.

David John Johnson, not being particularly proficient at the noble art of stitching, was never really one hundred percent satisfied with the results of his artworks for, wearing one of his creations, his face appeared, out there, in the tarnished mirror in his workshop, to have taken on the sun baked leprous texture and sepia colour of illustrations of diseased dark populations of the Empire displayed in illustrated magazines that charitable ladies would pass on to each other with earnest sounding voices saying, in decorous whispers,

“Something really ought to be done for them....Poor dears....”

Perhaps ladies of such breeding would take pity on him, but, whatever the case might be, wearing his masks, he at least, had been touched by them and, from the inside, for the insider, his masks were the tortured faces of the wise and the aged, the venerated, and were so because he was, he convinced himself, voyaging back and forth in time and space caressed by women of virtue, education and good taste who wore soft, well cured leather with just a faint reminiscence, now and then, of delicate perfumes and face powders.

It is difficult, well nigh impossible, to respect a secret, let alone understand its significance or true reach and David John Johnson’s wife was no exception to this well established tenet. One late rainy Friday evening, not long after Johnson had donned his silk top hat, tails and his most recent, and, as yet, most carefully realised face of wisdom, with its dash of sun bleached pink, his traitorous lady wife and young scamp of a son consigned his tatty and soiled (to their appreciation) collection of upper class cultural caresses, his time and place machines (though they had no inkling of any of these concepts), to the fires of hell (the stove in the corner of the greasy white tiled kitchen downstairs) in a spasm of self induced shame and impotence, and she sermonised,

“Cauterise the present and the future be purified!”

“How the ignorant deceive themselves into a profound belief in such simplistic solutions. They always miss the box at the back of the wardrobe to concentrate on the locked chest in the alcove behind the tapestry in the workshop....”

Was the thought he kept to himself in the midst of her sermonising.

Under the porch, dark eyes, distorted through a lozenge of glass in the leaded window on the right of the front door, dark deep-set eyes look into another world, another universe. Safari trophies from every part, severed heads stare down on etchings of bulky beasts from some far distant exotic African colony, hung on the wall above the blazing fireplace of Lord and Lady Townsend Coles’ reception room. Sun baked, earth encrusted, rhinoceros hide, the beast. The beast.

“The Beasts!”

“I just cannot, for the life of me, imagine what has become of those dear pink gloves, can you, Arthur? James, James! ....Ah, James, I need a brandy before we leave....”

Once upon a time, thankfully, David John Johnson’s darling wife passed away. She contracted an influenza which complicated into a pneumonia, her lungs had never been very resistant to infections, so there was little to be done and his son had vacated the premises, poisoned by his mother’s shameless love and protectiveness for him, unable to look his father directly in the eyes ever again since one fiery night, years before, when they had waited up for father’s return and he had welcomed them both, from a wisdom deep inside his best face, in the hall, with a hug and kiss and a

“Jolly good night to the both of you!”

There was nothing else to be done, nothing else to be said.

There was nothing else to be done, but one bright break of day, David John Johnson woke to discover, in the oval mirror above the washbasin, that his time travelling days were over, finally he had actually arrived at his destination without having been touched by his lovely lady friends at all, and he was serene and happy beyond belief, king in his castle.

It is complicated, however, well nigh impossible to respect a secret and, on his deathbed David J. Johnson’s not so well beloved son insisted on bringing his fiancée to his father’s den of iniquity with the intention of teaching her the lesson of how he had avoided the traps and snares of moral perversion, moral perversion and social depravity in the figure of his father, the freak wasting away in penury, on greyish bed sheets, in front of their very eyes!

“I could have ended up in that Godforsaken state, don’t you just know it?”

Of course, Dawn, my future grandmother, fifteen years old that week past, never said a word of it to her fiancé, but this old man, to her mind’s eye, was a picture of pure contentment and she wondered if she would ever manage to be as happy as he appeared to be as she gently pulled at each finger of her dark claret coloured leather gloves in turn, finally revealing pastel pale, delicate, gorgeous hands the like of which David had never seen before. Cool alabaster hands on a tight black silk bodice, and he knew he had finally been profoundly touched for the ultimate time and he moved his deeply lined face, haloed in pure silver hair, better to see Dawn, slightly towards the couple framed, in late afternoon light, in the curtained window.

His deathbed smile for her eyes only, was the smile of a wisdom hidden behind no mask, and his last words came from a place only wisdom could travel to, hand in glove, in a broken baritone,

“God doesn’t know, Dawn, but there’s heat in the deep down seams, darkness in the hot night, gas in the streetlamps, light in cupboard, dark in space, coal in the bunker out back black, light in the box at the back of the wardrobe. Head in hand, hand in glove, glove in hand, blood in your veins, in the universe, in the universe an infinity of wondrous, beautiful things, child, and you are one of them.”

David John Johnson’s son was never to be my grandfather, but he was to be a man of god.

RIVEN TO SHREDS, JOY’S SUBDIVISION

2009-05-09T18:10:00.014+02:00

“Cliff top statue shrouded by night, glowing slightly death white alabaster under moonlight, slightly inclined to the west, facing a lacerating Atlantic wind, and the orange rust dust and the red brick dust and the grey bone dust of life riven from its pores, driven out back east, far away, further away. Dried out salt encrusted tear ducts facing the ice cold migraine gale, all the putrid, death smell robed deals have been riven from its pores, driven out back east, far away, further away. I feel myself slow motion still further westward and leap away from my atrophied pores, from all these moribund words, further away than ever before, left it all back there, blown far away forevermore into the waning eastern horizon, into nothing. Dead, I’m leaving for joy’s subdivision, section nine A, the pleasures of inflicting pain, that’s cool.... Cool, that’s what you kids say, isn’t it?”

“Too many words, you pompous bastard....” Spat back bloodily The Pretty Girl, suspended by her wrists with rope from a hook in a beam in the curved ceiling of the crypt, desperately, agonizingly fighting for breath.

She’d leapt.

“I think you, mmm, perhaps er, just need this, eh?” And he slammed her inhaler down on the white, but rusting, metal work bench, next to the transformer. “How would you have expressed it then, child? Could you have done any better my dear, mmm?”

She could and she did, somewhere deep in her head....

“I stand facing the wind and life is being riven out of my pores. Facing the wind, all your sticky sweet death smell draped deals are being riven out of my pores to far, far away, and I have leapt, and I will fly into nothing forevermore.”

She could and she had done, way better, with a choking sound from her throat, with an unsteady stare, so The Born Again Priest plugged The Pretty Girl into the mains again for one last time and, over the next hour or so, she slowly, but finally, soared into nothing forevermore.

“The moon looked down as the planet turned, what they did down there, well, it took some nerve.” A-Soma

THREE OR FOUR BOTTLES OF WINE

2009-04-27T21:20:00.020+02:00

....talk about pretty little girls girls about tasty boys boys about girls doing get down and dirty sex obsession with each other real or imagined did it five times more often desire and lust than real men about women women about men football no defence basketball second division lousy shot trainer lost match tits center forward cunts on television if it’s on there talk gossip cheap and nasty look at the cunt on that about last night’s telly downloaded porn cheap shot next week’s telly soaps soap powder don’t shift dirty stains lied last week’s telly the dirty rich the famous clean the infamous dead shot raped on screen twenty four hours hello the neighbours what the neighbours got normal kind of guy regular sort friends and shotgun family don’t talk to them no more fucking family stabbed in the back betrayed good exam results bad luck of the past how it was all obviously so much better back then sick present no future there is just simply none no respect nowadays not safe to be on the streets I mean it prices not what they used to be who’d of thought potatoes at that price per pound body functions dysfunctions who’s dead should be dead prick periods shit and piss and shitting skid mark fart wind the goddamned weather good morning rain lift stuck it’s never ever been so bad headaches drinking headaches beer twelve pints your round how's the migraines cars that he hasn’t got I got to get that's really nice stupid bus service take this it's stronger works better better work harder boss shithead hate it and work because I spent it all broke love it honestly you love it me too got to be done crisis five days a week eight hours a day weekends out of it bad beer bad wine bad music bad sex no sex at all sick and tired everything gone to hell train smells delayed overweight you too deadend life discotheque dirt box noise paracetamol two a day couldn't live without it shouts talks all at once and the same time are you listening no way she looked at me goodbye good riddance the young suck me off just wasted generations wasting away down the drain not like back then my father always said discipline back then discipline and order the pains goddamned cancer chemicals in all this prefabricated food when I was young you knew where you stood you see who died crap pension so sorry for them kids these days and oh my joints the aches and drugs goddamned drugaddicts everywhere you turn to take pain away codeine hurray cholesterol younger generation isn't she just so sweet goo goo kids look like slags real professionals prostitutes fuck them I would what's she called shit heads pissed as a rat see you tomorrow bye talk about girls girls about boys boys about girls doing it ten times get down and dirty sex late again never on time what's the time that's nice just your colour....

Round and round and round again and again and again forever and ever but, if you can join in all the din, find a corner in the conversation, be conversational, be talkative, it means you know you are still about, you can hear yourself, you, yes, your very self.

This is a big help. This means you are not dead. It means you are not dead, you have not already died and nobody from T.B.A.P. has come to take you away.

Yet.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in the hot summer of 1972, Sunday the sixth of August actually, a priest on a pilgrimage to Santiago was run over and killed crossing a narrow country road in Alava, Spain, by a tractor. Run over by a tractor.

Alava isn't on the route to Santiago from France via Roncesvalles, but he was in good spirits and so just wanted to take a day or two detour to visit a friend studying at the seminary on the outskirts of a small town called Vitoria.

Back in England his hobby was restoration, restoration of classic farm equipment, steam powered mainly. He was quite an expert in the material, both old and new, so he knew that what was bearing down on him, dodgy brakes and all, was a rather tatty old looking Hanomag Barreiros R438 Special. Made in Spain sometime in the early sixties. Number plate VI 17.

Trouble was that the left hand headlight was not standard to this model. The instant this oddity caught his attention, the priest lost the vital fraction of a second he would have needed to jump out of its oncoming path.

Almost exactly two years before, the sweating owner of VI 17 had hack sawn a headlight off an old abandoned fifties box van (A Citroen, perhaps?) and hashed together a replacement for an original headlight that had been destroyed by revellers enjoying the village fiestas.

Three or four bottles of wine can change history.

The young man was never born again, and, therefore, definitely never ever lived happily ever after.

EL AMIGO INVISIBLE

2009-04-13T19:18:00.017+02:00

I have three books before me on my desk on this Sunday evening, the fifteenth of December.

Five years ago, before sweeping laws were put into effect to protect respect for the masses over respect for the individual, I received, on Tuesday the twenty fifth of November 2008, through the post, a second hand novel I had bought from an American seller via the World Wide Web three weeks earlier, “The Voyeur”, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Grove Press, NY, New Everyman Edition 1989. Flipping through the pages, the first thing I read was a dedication in black Bic biro ink,

To: The little man who wasn’t there From: you figure it out. 12.25.89

The smell of 1989. I smell the smell of 1998. Christmas day scents and the smell of roast and candles and see the deep green holly rich orange berries design on wrapping paper that is torn from a paperback given by “un amigo invisible” somewhere in New York.

I have a news headline which I printed out from The London Sun the other day (I collect this kind of stuff, all sorts of odds and sods) which reads,

Local recycling plant ransacked and vandalised. Anti system terrorists....

Apparently, “increasingly desperate subversive attackers” had made off with various boxes of “materials prepared for recycling”. Now, in the name of the respectable and respected masses, resources are no longer burnt in public squares in rituals overseen by men in black uniforms or white robes or thousands dressed in suits and caps all the same grey, but “dissident materials” are recycled to produce clean energy to light the paths of respectfulness and the politically correct.

The smoke and ash and the reappearance of London smog do, however, make some, and I count myself among that number, wonder how clean, exactly, all this energy is.

I have, here on my desk, in front of me, three books considered by those in power to be worth no more than a calorific statistic from government heat generation figures, “The Voyeur”, of course, and also two others, a 1998 Thames and Hudson paperback compendium of the work of the English artist Francis Bacon (excellent quality reproductions) and a catalogue from the Bacon retrospective in The Tate, 11 September 2008 – 4 January 2009. They were rescued, along with piles of other essential reading (and seeing and hearing) matter, by agents under my highly indirect orders, and put into safe hands.

So close was that exhibition to the enactment of the Alliance of Civilisations’ new Laws of Respect, I often ask myself what has become of the paintings in that exhibition. I’d like to know in what dark vault or government employees’ or ministers’ back rooms all these paintings are locked away and hung in because, they might be seditious, but I am sure they are safely guarded. They are, after all is said and done, worth money, a lot of money, if only on the black market.

Francis Bacon, an invisible friend, beautiful, twisted and tortured, but beautiful, a voyeur to instants in time and I’m inside his mind inside the paintings under the glass (I know about the glass. I saw one or two of his works in real life when I was young and there I was wondering about and wandering about in the images) reflected and reflecting, and the paint is organic material fleshing out my Ray Harryhausen sword and shield wielding seed sown skeleton until my pen is mightier and I am complete! Whole!

Culture, these books can do that to you.

In warehouse K.U.T 25 there were no Alliance Constitutions, no Red Books, no Bibles or Korans to be saved. No need, that stuff is all government endorsed reading with instant subsidised distribution sales and downloading. That’s just common sense.

....the Islamic Higher Council hereby communicates that no girls will be allowed schooling from this time on....

Inside “The Voyeur”, pages 148/149, by way of a bookmark (I use it for that), is a receipt from J & R Music World, 23 Park Row NYC. NY. Dated 24.05.99, MON, for a CD collection,

BURROUGHS/BEST O. $62.99 ALL SALES FINAL: NO CASH REFUND

These are thoughts, scraps and coincidences for naked, empty days and nights and evenings like this. These books, these thoughts, could get me “recycled” but it’s worth the risk. So many things have gone these last twenty years, too many persons, all sales final. Too many important things, too many little things gone too, and there’s no refund. Where’s Virginia Maestro and the Blue Roadsters’ version of Lou Reed’s “A Sheltered Life” disappeared to? Where’s it gone? Where’s the film, “Interview with Beauty”, the song was on the soundtrack, where’s it all gone? The song’s been vanished from the World Wide Web, there’s no result for a search for “Interview with Beauty”, it’s gone, gone, like so much else you supposed was there but can’t find anymore. I can’t even hum it anymore, it’s as if it never ever existed and a flake of organic material has been picked away from my flesh, and it itches, and my pen is slightly less mighty.

Someone’s sold out. Microsoft, perhaps?

Who keeps an eye on the voyeur? I do, your invisible friend. My invisible friend, the little man who isn’t exactly there. When the smog comes rolling over the towers it’s best to keep your eyes wide open. Someone said something twenty five years ago and they’re still saying it in 2013. It’s written. In black ink. Here,

you figure it out

On the twelfth floor of a tower block on The Cambridge Estate the neighbours and I hear the sound of the heavily booted feet of operatives from the T.B.A.P. (Tactical Bureau of Applied Politics) in the stairwells and hallways, then a short silence followed by a loud knocking and sounds of a short, but violent scuffle .

(P 149) The girl’s body was discovered the following morning at low tide.

Half past ten in the evening and I’m wandering about my twelfth floor flat shuffling papers and books and CDs about here and moving things into the sink there, and wiping the day’s stains from over there and I’ve finished with the internet and the screen’s blank and I’m talking to myself again and I’m shuffling my papers about. You figure it out.

....evening a large piece of M. Barceló’s “Ocean” fell onto a Delegate Representative of the Taliban Higher Council chairing a meeting of The Alliance of Civilisations in its Geneva headquarters. Said Representative suffered a heavy concussion and the dislocation, in his fall, of his right shoulder. His daughter, currently studying at a British Government funded Madrassa in Kingston upon Thames, is quoted as having called on the European Union to designate more funds for the conservation of religious properties since....

Since the smell of 1989. Christmas day and I sense the scents of all these vital scraps, thoughts, odds and sods and coincidences for naked, empty days and nights and evenings like this. My collections of materials, flesh out my Ray Harryhausen sword and shield wielding seed sown skeleton until the pen is mightier!

Concussion? Why couldn’t they all have just drowned? Drowned in an ocean of acrylic paint.

You figure it out!

INTERVIEW WITH BEAUTY

2009-02-10T14:12:00.029+01:00

“On arrival, the station is a rickety wooden platform with only just enough space to teeter on. Here I am tuned to the infinite silence of reflection and from this vantage point I keep a precarious watch over the tracks. The melody from “Black Cats on the Satin Greaseway” tickles the inside of my skull but there is a deafening silence out there, in both directions. Two foot worn steps had carried me up a good three feet to where I am now.”

“El mundo siguió girando, cada cual a lo suyo.”

“Around here there is no-one, no features, no landscape, no wind, no temperature, nothing. Here there is no cover from behind which some satyr might possibly camouflage an approach. It happens that I know that somewhere near here stands the old house. I always find myself there but never know how or why and you can never be certain of its structure, unrelieved and unsupported as it is by shadows or definite perspective. The only shadows that can be cast are cast by closing my eyelids.”

Peter Johnson, Bug Eyed Peter, blinks once or twice, slowly.

“It was at this house, try as I might, that I failed in my attempts to decode instructions proffered by the youngest daughter in urgent tones. Instructions, I gathered, because her hands moved in such a way as to illustrate urgency. But I was agitated due to the train’s imminent arrival or departure, agitated over the exact timetable. A carriage was in the station, but no childlike memory of a steam train, and the timetable was a complete blank and time was shortening the gaps between acts for me backstage. Problem was I couldn’t understand a word. Them all babbling away, all at once, and the frail old carriage, deserted, never seemed to entirely cease its shimmering movement. I can’t get a handhold to pull myself aboard and the girl, her insistent chatter burning up my time, unnerving me, she cuts down my ration of possibilities and I can’t switch off her words, or mine, come to that....” And Peter was sweating.

A running man wearing what, at this distance, looks like a black leather trilby style hat, causes turbulence in the sharp misty air, distant sirens, an echo of a bell, a ghostly fire engine chases a white police car and seconds stretch into an eternity, and Johnson was just about to switch off his words when....

“¿Hay sombras en el cielo?” Whispers Alba. “Aquí puede que sólo sirvan para acunar árboles torcidos o para dar solidez a alguna estructura, sin embargo estropean nuestra simetría, así que nos obligan a agitar los brazos y a retorcer los torsos en una inútil búsqueda de equilibrio. ¿Tenemos que sufrir estos malditos sátiros que deforman cada mirada inocente? ¿Incluso ahí arriba? ¡Momento de pánico y, a pesar de todo, podemos tenerlos ahí estirándonos de la manga mientras caminamos por las calles, en cualquier momento, con los vientos más fuertes y sin caernos! ¡Pareciera que somos tan deformes que ni siquiera lo advertimos!”

“Heaven is here and now, this is it, all you’ve got, all you'll ever get, here and now, shadows and satyrs and all the fairy tales included!” Advises, with a knowing smile, a wise looking white haired man with a walking-stick, hat in hand, out wandering with his dog. “Up there....” and he tilts his head a slightly twisted angle skyward, “....is in here....” and, as he passes, he salutes us with a touch of a bony finger to his forehead.

“Where’d he materialise from for heaven's sake?....Have I really, really just asked that? Turn off the words, please....” and then suddenly Peter turns, paralysed for an instant, to look for the security of some familiar presence, but the girl has vanished.

Somewhere else another stone skips out into the ocean.

“Alba’s house is on no splendid avenue. I can’t distinguish between eight thirty and three, the timetable is all empty space. I’m worried sweaty sick about the train and there’s too much babble, too much sabotage backstage. Where is the train? I must leave soon. I’m agitated about the train. Turn off the words, please. How did I find myself so alone aboard this desolate carriage?”

“Y así su sátiro, un demonio familiar, le dio caza. Alguna que otra gota de sudor frío importunaba su ceño fruncido y una sensación de vacío cae, pesada como el plomo, hasta el fondo de mi estómago cuando veo a las sombras agarrar a Peter de la manga y sus ojos cristalizarse. Así que visualicé su deformidad en algún lugar indefinido del azul de los bastidores, deformidad a la que aún se le puede seguir la pista en el tiempo, en las líneas más rectas, a lo largo de las vías. Debió parecerle una buena idea por aquel entonces, pero tanta soledad no podía ser sino algo temporal. Fue un tiempo en el que tan sólo un roce habría atravesado momentáneamente el vacío, un lenguaje completo liberado para dar colorido a la mediocridad. Las sombras condenan al mirón, al ojo errante, al ojo escrutador a ser un satélite del placer y del dolor, obligado para siempre a mirar hacia atrás, a concentrarse en todos esos movimientos más allá de su campo de visión, sus ojos alerta, eternos guardianes de la puerta. Así que la sentencia está aprobada.” Narrates Alba offstage, on off.

A third stone skips out into the ocean and the running man in the long black overcoat disturbs the peaceful mist and the fire engine chases the police car.

“Everything is so cluttered, there’s so much debris and the plaster is stained with a cold sweat. Once upon a time the plants needed watering. The truth is it’s bleak here while that wall, over there, which sweats rusty moss, is so high and so vicious broken glass at the top that I can’t see in any other direction. There is no horizon. Please, you couldn’t lend me a helping hand to scale these heights, could you? Could you stretch out a hand to me, take my hand....?”

It is all so well illuminated, this barrier, this wall, these angles, that the shadows become intimate with the reflections projected on the ground. Shadows and reflections dance with dainty foot over these polished pathways, washed by the night time rain.

A young girl, a pretty girl, blue green eyes, skin so beautifully, transparently pale, with a nineteen sixties fringe of shiny light brown hair, wisps before and over her ears and a pony tail right at the back of her head strolls a short distance away, on the other side of the chain-link fence, behind the wall, and at once everything smells like hospitals.

“Jeer then!” Peter shouts, and then searches the void for me, but I was no longer at his side. “From where she’s standing you can see and hear nothing. Anyway, she doesn’t want to look, refuses to listen. See? Hey, can’t you see?”

“Una noche me pareció ser capaz de saltar tanto el muro como la alambrada. Probablemente había bebido demasiado y no sentí el golpe. Cansada y conmovida, me alejé de allí. Fue después de este incidente cuando se produjo el encuentro accidental de nuestros ojos, un encuentro que marcó ese lugar como nuestro lugar, para siempre.”

And exactly as Alba finishes “para siempre”, somewhere a fourth stone arcs out to skip across the Atlantic. And the fire engine chases the police car in four minute trips. The lights of the merry-go-round sparkle beyond the trees, a crown of jewels. Notes of “La Dama Desnuda” float by on the breeze and The king turns his head to where, in daylight, two autumnal leaves will soon be flying defiantly on the morning wind.

“¡Peter, Peter! ¡Mírame Peter! Los sueños no suceden necesariamente en negro y el negro no es necesariamente el velo de la miseria....”

Somewhere a fifth stone dances out toward the ocean. Atlantic Ocean songs of sirens and bells play. Unseen children shout. Unseen dogs bark. In these final frames, a little girl passes by (a brace flashes white light through her little girl laugh) skipping with her shadow on the wet pavement, and then suddenly she turns, paralysed for an instant, to look for the security of some familiar presence.

Sirens and bells, and little yellow red and green and blue fires and the train chases the fire engine chases the police car motorbike and ambulance. The spotlight colours turn to illuminate litter blown into a delicate, touching ballet, offered in honour of those who might walk around one of the curves in the pathways through the trees in the park down there. Peter and I take a bow from the edge of this rickety wooden platform.

“El mundo siguió girando, cada cual a lo suyo. Sólo existe una verdadera decisión fundamental en nuestras vidas, una vez tomada pasamos el resto de nuestra existencia conviviendo con ella, ya olvidada, y no importa lo que hagamos ya sólo queda una única historia que contar y el mundo sigue girando, cada cual a lo suyo, y en algún lugar lejano una piedra salta al ras de la superficie del océano y en algún otro lugar, en un raquítico andén, unos brazos se agitan y un torso se retuerce en busca de equilibrio mientras por aquí pasa un coche blanco, las luces de los frenos, rubíes para nuestros anillos y los faros de otro, diamantes para nuestros ojos. En los charcos de luz, en los charcos de color, en las sombras y entre los árboles aparecemos y desaparecemos, a nuestro antojo, juntos, perfectos.”

The design of the CD “INTERVIEW WITH BEAUTY” was commissioned from the artist David F. Brandon. The photographic portrait of Alba Johnson was taken by him and the "Atlantic Song" picture is my work.

Bashir "Blue" Sherpa.

THE CASE (PART ONE), ON THE TELEVISION

2009-01-24T12:18:00.007+01:00

Thursday morning, twenty three minutes to ten….

The television screen reappears. A band of interference lifts the curtain on the action to follow. At first Peter is aware of the screen, but slowly it appears as though the action were at first hand, not watched, and then there is another sensation, a tickle in his nose. Peter shakes out the neatly pressed folds of a white cotton handkerchief and blows hard. Being well starched, it doesn’t absorb anything, just pushes, spreads something slightly warm and slippery around his upper lip a while. He becomes aware of a certain variety of sounds in the vicinity, old fragmented historic sounds of footsteps on damp concrete, the scraping of gravel underfoot, in grit or green kerb mush in wet gullies, in alleyways, on paths or roadways. There are black and white 1950’s detective movies playing every night on late night T.V. The heavy rain, the street corner light illuminating a shadowy figure, coat collar turned up and there are footsteps leading into that strange world of pre-sleep, pre-nightmare, of falling away, slipping away.

Peter is, momentarily aware of his slightly numb index finger; it should pre-suppose hand and that which controls hand. It seems so obvious but the idea falls away, slips away into a grey nothingness, into a “word”.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” John was on to something. He didn’t investigate, wouldn’t have made even a half-way decent detective. His interests were elsewhere. The words are in control, but Peter, Bug eyed Peter, he is only interested in what this story has to offer in as much as he can steal bits of it to fill out the gaps in his own little adventure.

There are words wandering about in Peter’s head. They slowly filter down, form a pattern, and switch on the machine. The words tell him in what direction to turn his head, where to focus his eyes, whereabouts and what to tune his ears into, where to point his nose. Up and down, from side to side, Peter’s head surveys the surroundings, the redbrick walls; the jagged glass parapet veneered a dried blood brown. A varied collection of dull earthen coloured bottles, some broken, dirtied by time to a smokey semitransparent rust, abandoned railway cutting electric smelling rusty dirt and stones urine and vomit. He records a few crumpled, faded looking Coke cans, temporarily brightened, by spots of recent rainfall, various torn up scraps of blue coloured paper. Here and there a newspaper, torn pieces of newspaper, growing mould, a dustbin-lid full of oily water and little islands of dead insects lays not more than three feet from where he stands in the muddy passageway. All these things neatly detected, tagged and labelled and filed, up there in his head, in the machine. Raymond Chandler would have been dead proud.

THE CASE (PART TWO), THE WATCHER AND THE WATCHED

2009-01-24T12:11:00.008+01:00

Thursday morning, twenty to four….

Solitude breeds in Alba a kind of quiet agitation in the half dark shadows, and just as the mind’s eye obliterates uncomfortable or unwanted visions, Alba’s consciousness has broken with the distant sounds of life outside her bedroom. Her eyes leap from one point to another. From the letter to a distant lover she is in the act of writing, to the blue end of the Bic biro, the instrument through which her images, ideas, visions, inspirations, appear to have been transmitted from mind to paper. From this pen her eyes pan over to the islands of temporary light and some reflections created by the small angle-poise desk lamp, a light just there that reveals, yet seems poised to punish whatever it might illuminate, held in the claw of a gunmetal grey scorpion hovering over her pad of light blue, lined writing paper.

Peter, Bug Eyed Peter, his eyes leap from one point to another too. He can picture the islands of light, Alba’s face reflected in the glass of the sash-cord window in front of which she sits, the letter she is in the act of composing, illuminated before her, at a slight angle to the edge of the white Formica top table, as makes writing comfortable for the right handed. He can picture, to her left, a little nearer the window, five or six paperback novels stacked one atop the other, a little stairway with grey authors’ photographs and back-jacket book reviews. These are the real story and “....it’s sharp, short, cold, exact and exiting. Every word counts in this macabre, strongly imagined little intrigue.”

Peter hears the sounds of birds that will soon be singing outside Alba's dusty, rain splattered Victorian era sash-cord window.

THE CASE (PART THREE), ONLINE

2009-01-24T12:07:00.009+01:00

Thursday morning, twenty to four….

Now, all that the mind’s eye has not obliterated is a track back into memory. New light is thrown on things usually taken for granted. The paint drips around the window frame and on the window pane retell messages from that distant someone who had once carelessly passed an overloaded brush around and across these surfaces, delineating the outside world. Some simple message from a long forgotten, long gone Chapter, to Chapter Ten thousand, here and now, where peeling paint screams off the wood and fine black hairline cracks grow invisibly, radiating back out into some obscure timelessness out there, fine black hairline cracks radiate out from the carpenter’s joints, to also reveal the story of that which had once been precisely measured, sawn, chiselled and glued.

There happens to be a convolution, and the centre of attention is on the screen, on her world, the words. With these keys she conjures up, in solitude, her conversation. There is never any going back, never!

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

“Who said that? Who wrote those words?”* These two questions played a moment through Alba’s thoughts.

The word writes, wriggles and insinuates itself into her images. The words tell her that if only she were a bird she would be able to fly way away, far away from here, way out there. But what they didn’t write for her was that a bird is prisoner to the sky as words are prisoners to the programme in which they are written, to the skull in which they were hatched.

A scalpel blade cuts from the outside edge of her thoughts, from the pathetic screen, to the inside, deep inside.

Convolution, and there is nothing online, no connections out there, no screen, no monitor except the dirty sash-cord window, the blue paper. The surgical steel draws her mind back in, through the surface, through all the ruptures, to the secret place deep inside, the Secret Meeting Place, The Deep Blue Head, into crystalline worlds where silver nerves spark messages inside and out and around and about, as out spin ideas, beautiful images, and words with new meanings, onto her sheets of blue writing paper.

She thinks the early morning birds are singing and, in only an instant and only for an instant, Alba’s thoughts are back to sounds, sounds of feet, of feet walking towards the houses, towards her room, somewhere out there on the streets.

*RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM

THE CASE (PART FOUR), A THOUGHT ASSASSINATED

2009-01-24T11:57:00.007+01:00

Thursday morning, twenty to four….

Faces live in patterns in faded wallpaper, in the shapes and folds of dropped clothing, reflections in brass, on white, in shadows, surfaces that wait, then accept, waiting surfaces that have no voices. Alba can make them speak however, in universes inflicted with her own meaning and these meanings are true to her because she invented them and she believes in them.

A large cube reflects the limits of her room, a cold bedsit room floating about aimlessly in some universe or other. The frame of the sash-cord window delimits the view outside. The sealed windows of playrooms and nurseries now bar the way back into a youthful innocence as clean and fresh and as nice as ice. Silence, but too quickly comes the word “silence”, and where there are words there is never silence.

“Are those birds outside singing to me?” She thinks to herself.

The letter under her right hand is a fine but fragile key to memory and a future temporally free of imperfections, a future whose silver threads, nerves, whose sparks, whose strategies and vaporous plans have yet to deceive or distort the moment.

Hands pressed tight over her eyes she steps outside her eyelids, out of the mask into the swirling patterns projected out here. Faces live in patterns in faded wallpaper, in folds in dropped clothing, in shadows that cut across walls into corners, in the red smudge of biro ink, ink she had cleaned onto the corner of that tissue over there, on the corner of the table by the pile of paperbacks, sometime the day before.

“A red stain. Amaryllis belladonna. A red belladonna Lily, father used to grow them in the back garden, in the flowerbed between the apple trees on the right, there, out of the back door....” The words flickered through her thoughts.

It is deep red, the Naked Lady, and Alba is The Naked Lady, a colour of distinction, a stupid obvious symbol of love spreading out to Shakespearean proportions in her mind’s eye, growing richer and more perfect than anyone else could possibly comprehend. Belladonna, a bud’s opening, offering up a prayer for the brushing together of lovers’ lips.

More words flickered and flashed somewhere behind her eyes, “Oh, to tuck myself amongst the petals and purify all the imperfections of the script, to so overwhelm them as to nullify their sourness, to go down and feel between the petal sheets without guilt. To glow that red, that warm!”

Ruby coloured flashes and reflections reveal the beauty in little things in a hopeless heaven. She bites her bottom lip, draws blood, and fights back a tear. A thought, an image, an idea is assassinated by words.

She hears the broken sound of footsteps at a distance out there somewhere, their origin unclear. It is a silent sensation, the only memory tonight without words. She instantly forgets she ever heard them.

THE CASE (PART FIVE), IN THE ALLYWAY, 1

2009-01-24T11:53:00.008+01:00

Thursday morning, twenty to four....

In only an instant his thoughts are back to sounds, sounds of feet, of feet walking towards the houses, towards Peter, somewhere out on the street.

Nervous, Bug Eyed Peter twists the silver metal bracelet of a scratched watch around his wrist and registers the time while taking a last pull from the shortening stub of one of the day’s cigarettes, as is his habit. Brushing his fingers from his temples back to massage his stiff neck, as he was want to do, Peter blows the used air and stale smoke from his last inhalation out in a half whistled rush. Slowly, studiously, he withdraws another cigarette from a slightly buckled white packet. It has no filter. Placing the Navy Cut between dry, chapped lips he lights it, shrugs, or more accurately, rearranges himself in the dying warmth of his leather overcoat, takes another drag from his cigarette and notices the time without remembering what it was. A moment later he drops the butt to the ground, sparks jump, fly briefly and drown and he deftly guides the half smoked cigarette into a nearby pool of muddy water. His right foot feels damp, his thick winter sock and the pumping action of foot in shoe has drawn wetness through the cracked leather sole. “The ninth of the morning. Counted and filed away!” He mutters to himself, into thin air, “Damned damp toes.... Cold wet, numb fingers.... Cracked, painful lips....”

Raindrops ripple the puddles.

THE CASE (PART SIX), ALBA’S LETTER MEANS SOMETHING

2009-01-24T11:47:00.007+01:00

Alba’s sweet letter becomes Shakespearean Belladonna, and Alba is naked and offered up to her distant lover as her hand passes between her eyes and the windowpane, to vaguely point out some distant horizon over there, and there is another image beyond the glass and frame of the dirty sash-cord window, a newly revealed pale sepia moon caught in gaps between fast moving grey clouds thinning out in a dark sky.

Alba tears the blue lined writing paper, her letter, into a handful of petals

The richness of red bleeds into this sepia spotlight of a moon and the surrounding heavens. The blue-black sky becomes maroon velvet. The cutting clouds become a drifting mix between crimson and violet. Torn letter petals scatter like stars and she offers up a prayer, more like a curse, to their spreading display.

In the centre of her head there is a sailor’s sextant, warm polished orange brass, a sailor’s brass sextant from the nineteenth century. Alba calculates her triangulation, her ethereal triangulation, once calculated, forever calculated, London suburb to her red moon and from moon to the streets of small town Spain. The curved line between lunar day and night gives depth and form to its craters and the distance between here and there and Spain and back again, has to be rescaled. A crimson cloud cuts between this point here, her hand, and that distant horizon out there.

Gold brass red, the sextant smiles at the terrible beauty in little things, and, for an instant, she is every invincible hero or heroine that ever lived. The paradoxes of the plot! She plays all the roles, the detective, the victim, the perpetrator, the plotter, the lover and the loved. You will never see them, although you can hear all of them, all the characters, all back there sorting through the props, moving the scenery about backstage, but you can see the scenery trembling just so slightly.

For Alba, the daytime strangers can see nothing of any beauty out there, on the horizon. For them this playacting could never ever be worthwhile, the sense of magic gone, banished, washed away and ignored by them all, huddled as they are under the shifting forms between white and winter blue in the morning sky

THE CASE (PART SEVEN), IN THE ALLEYWAY, 2

2009-01-24T11:40:00.010+01:00

Thursday morning, twenty three minutes to ten….

In darkness, that which is withered gains perfection and is transformed. In the cold light of day scattered petals seem sad and pathetic, just fragments of a dream strewn about, with abandoned theatre tickets and programs and crisp and gum and sweet wrappers and sodden newspapers trodden underfoot by strangers, a discarded world in which, year by year, beauty is worn down and worn out and shrivels up to dust, and when, eventually, death rings its clarion call, the bones that were once the sacred untouchable walls of the Cathedral of the Language, the Factory of Words, only sing of silence.

Now there are songs of a silence like the roar of Atlantic winds rolling up and over seashore trees, shrouded in clouds of heavy green blue mist, Atlantic winds, and storms and driving rain from the distant horizon over there. Now there are songs of silent tears which are perfectly cut diamonds lost in frozen waterfalls.

Alba’s night-time sextant smiles at all the beauty in little things, the gold brass red, the red petal, The Naked Lady, the crimson red moon. The crimson red lip, once bitten, once bleeding, must still be kissed, again and again, even while another day dawns.

A dream lasts long enough to free a truth, free it, that is, until the truth is assassinated by the word. The thought is assassinated by words and the words tell Bug Eyed Peter, they echo around, up there in his Cathedral, they defended themselves and say, all innocence and pleading, “Do not take us too seriously, do not take all this rubbish too seriously!”

Convolution, I survey the surroundings, they smell of urine, sodden staleness. I survey the redbrick walls; the jagged glass parapet veneered a dried blood brown, a varied collection of dull earthen coloured bottles, some broken, dirtied by time to a smoky semitransparent rust, abandoned railway cutting electric smelling rusty dirt and stones, a few crumpled, faded looking Coke cans, temporarily brightened, by spots of rainfall, various torn up scraps of blue coloured paper, here and there a newspaper, torn pieces of newspaper, growing mould, a dustbin-lid full of oily water and little islands of dead insects lays not more than three feet from where I stand in the muddy passageway between two dilapidated four story London town houses converted into bedsits.

Down in the alleyway I am suffering from cold, wet, numb fingers. Scattered fragments of a letter rest tangled in the stump of a long leafless bush, the dry pieces, light blue in colour. Others drift slowly to and fro in a puddle, ink blurred and running slightly, and some, turning a yellow white colour, have become stuck in a patch of rotting vegetation about a foot behind my left shoe. These scraps of torn paper, letter and envelope as it turns out, I bend down and carefully collect up. A dustbin lid, full of oily water reflects a black London sky and a universe of colours not three feet away from where I crouch in the cold early morning sun. Beauty glows, hidden in little things.

TRILLIONS OF GODS, THE SEQUEL

2009-01-17T19:35:00.010+01:00

I surreptitiously follow Peter down into the mattress, at a prudent distance, keeping a discreet eye on his progress and moving the strings to nudge him away from any direction I am not particularly pleased he has taken, to where I think he ought to be going. Sometimes the nudging works, sometimes it fails. If I get him away from the holy art book, it is almost impossible to get him out of the tall, bow legged wardrobe from Maples on the Tottenham Court Road, a furniture empire that collapsed in nineteen ninety seven although, of course, this particular time machine was bought by his newlywed parents, with his grandfather’s money, in nineteen fifty three.

The wardrobe had two high gloss lacquered doors, and the keyholes mirrored each other, one with its Bakelite ornamentation chipped and broken, both sporting skeleton keys with ornate twisting flowery bows of a tarnished worn brass metallic colour. Nineteen fifties dark brown mirror smooth lacquer, and universes floated in the walnut veneer, black holes for Baby Belladonna to out of body travel into, rich nostalgic, almost sad sepia walnut browns and near blacks in veneer Rorschach swirling stereo test reflections and the two doors to the imagination melted and, if it was not enough for Baby Belladonna to float through the doors via the universal veneer, because the monstrous faces of ogres and goblins got in his way, then he would simply reach up and open the universe with one of the keys, usually the right hand one.

The universe inside was, initially, profoundly black and filled with an old fur coat. There were, of course, other things hung and stored away in there too, ladies leather shoes and leather ladies gloves added other scents of different leathers to the cured and dyed rabbit skins, and they all had their textures to touch and perfumes to smell.

The fur coat, however, was the universe Baby Belladonna was most interested in wrapping himself into, and it still is. When he was inside, and the wardrobe door was closed, the smell of fur and leathers and fading perfumes and face powders and the camphor all had a tranquilizing effect, and, in this fur womb, in the fur and leather dark, eyes closed, Baby Belladonna would gently press his eyes with his loosely clenched fists and thousands of multicolour universes and thousands of lonely space adventures would open up right there inside his head and he was at the center of it all, and it was dangerous, lonely sailing, and delicate too, because he only had to release the pressure a little on his eyes, or the heel of a shoe would get a little too uncomfortably under his leg where he was kneeling and he would be back home in a wardrobe again, on the Cambridge Estate, Kingston upon Thames.

Baby Belladonna’s time travel is secure because it is a constant in a universe of constant change and that has been the function of wardrobes and cupboards under the stairs and larders and dark enclosed places for special, beautiful, time traveling flowers all through the ages, and will be so all through the ages to come, it is just that, now, I try to hold his hand on his trips and kiss his lips.

I often ask myself what would have happened to Baby Belladonna if, when, one afternoon in nineteen sixty five, when he had time travelled up to the top shelf of the wardrobe, into the well thumbed books under a pile of old handbags, gloves, and silky scarves, instead of finding himself voyaging unrecognizable in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, he had found himself sharing time and space with William S. Burroughs.

Would he have made a more successful agent of himself?

I surreptitiously follow Peter down into the mattress, I look into his eyes and kiss him on the lips.

Perhaps the universe would have been a different place. Perhaps, perhaps not. Bigger things have hung on smaller threads.

TANKMAN JOHNSON’S PHANTOM ECHO REGIMENT

2008-12-30T13:54:00.016+01:00

The fifth of January twenty twenty five, yet another not so cool southern Spanish siesta afternoon.

Sixteen years too late ghostly Tankman Johnson’s Phantom Echo Regiment of supercharged mother of pearl blue black Chieftains crewed by the sweet sexy Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls roar a symphony of tuned chrome trimmed engines and canon and machine gun fire across the shimmering dust fields of Almería, Sister Ray loud on the sound systems of each and every vehicle, deep into Al-Ándalus, and, ding dong, rescue The Transparent Princess, The Pretty Girl, with her oh so cute nineteen sixties style pageboy fringe and pony tail from The Born Again Priest’s castle keep, The Stone Room, without suffering a single casualty, cuts and bruises, aches and pains apart, to the hoary hordes of mercenary martyrs of the Afterlife Paradise Enlightenment Salesmen.

“Help them all along on their way to where they want to go is what I say! Everyone Ok?! Cut! That’s a wrap! Shit, we’re all over exposed! Switch the time curves! Let’s get the hell outta here, kids!!”

The image of the Chieftain tank is a digital reworking by B. Sherpa of a 2008 painting, FOOTSTEPS ECHO, HUGE DUST ,by the artist David F. Brandon, taken from his website.(Click on the title here or go to "Interesting Places to Visit" in this blog to see the original.) Brandon used one of my original digital photographs as source material for his painting. B. Sherpa.

Sister Ray is a song from The Velvet Underground’s second LP record, White Light/White Heat, 1967.

WHERE THE MISSING CHILDREN GO

2008-12-29T14:30:00.026+01:00

The pretty boy picked up the pretty clear eyed girl two doors down from the sordid looking bar discotheque, just outside the one direction to the other direction radar sweep of the bored, slightly amphetamined out bouncer, and the street was awash in rivulets of stale alcohol acid smelling urine, spilled wine and abandoned crumpled plastic two litre bottles part filled and abandoned with various different coloured liquids slopping around their insides, broken glass from flung and kicked beer bottles shouts and screams cries and modern electronic discotheque noise throbbed nonstop and the pretty boy looked into the eyes of the pretty girl and gestured with his head to two girls collapsed in the doorstep of number thirty five, one crying her eyes out in empty, almost silent, simpering desperation, nose running, legs outstretched and slightly apart and she’d wet herself plain for all to see, the other sat in a pool of wine coloured vomit, sick in her lap, with her unconscious looking blood drained head empty on her companions left shoulder, her palms outstretched at her sides a bit like a drug addict pleading for a stronger dose, for just any kind of dose at all.

“¡No puedo hacer nada! ¡No sé qué hacer con ellas!” Said the pretty girl with a sixties fringe of shiny light brown hair, wisps before and over her ears and a pony tail right at the back of her head, ¡No sé qué hacer!” she repeated as she gestured in turn at her two best friends and looked back into the pretty boy's dark brown eyes. “Quince años, y míralas....no sé qué hacer....”

“Vamos a ver, a ver....venga,” and he handed her a plastic bottle of mineral water, “¡Toma, toma!”

So The Pretty Girl did, she twisted the blue plastic cap on the little clear plastic bottle and heard the clear, clean sounding clicks as the cap broke free of the blue plastic seal, and she took a long, clean, cool, truly satisfying drink and the pretty boy put his arm round her slim waist, and they stood for what seemed to her to be a long while looking into each other's eyes, then back at the desperately sad looking best friends, then, she, into his eyes, his handsome face. She smiled. She had a brace on her upper teeth, but this instrument of torture, it only made everything else about her lips and face seem so much more attractive.

Then he grinned at her, left her and walked the three meters over to the doorway of number thirty five. He stood over the two girls, at a slight angle so that The Pretty Girl could see clearly what he was about to do, but the bouncer couldn’t, and then undid his jeans, lowered his fashionable, fake, stained white Calvin Klein underwear, took his penis in his right hand and urinated a stream of rich yellow coloured piss all over the sad looking best friends in the doorway, in their hair, in their faces, over their slightly over exposed breasts, a stream that, to The Pretty Girl, seemed to last forever. There was simply no reaction, then, perhaps, just a little flicker of their eyelids, a slight refocusing, whereupon he snorted several times and spat some slime on them both, just for good measure.

“¡Un regalo de navidad, lluvia dorada!” He spoke back to her over his right shoulder, as he put himself away and then retraced his steps back to her and put his arm back round her precious waist. “¡Feliz año Nuevo!”

The Pretty Girl’s wide eyes and slightly open mouth registered a certain shock she couldn’t seem to react to, and she was having difficulty catching her breath, which excited Pretty Boy, but he’d been told to leave well alone, or else no wages, or else....“Se te ha caído esto, querida....¡Cógelo, venga.....cógelo!” And he gently folded her cold and slightly trembling fingers round the inhaler. “Pareces necesitarlo....venga....” So, guiding her with his arm, he led her off down the narrow street, away from her best friends, away from her past....“Respira hondo....respira hondo....”

Pretty Boy came around to visit "El Castillo" in the afternoon for his pay, but what was due to him was to be his worst ever nightmare and his worst ever and final nightmare started with the large glass of whisky he’d been poured.

“Hey, there, come on now! Eh? There’s plenty of bait around not to need to be worried about conservation efforts, and the boy is exceedingly pretty, even if he is a little old at twenty and an ignorant, nasty piece of work, traitor to their cause to boot, just no style at all,” chuckled The Born Again Priest to the head of the Pick Up Squad, “oh no, no! No, not the girl, she’s a perk of the job don’t you know Inspector! Just leave her down there on the floor in The Stone Room, but cut off all those nylon restraints before you take your leave will you? Ok?”

“Understood, sir. Snap to it, lads!”

In The Stone Room The Born Again Priest had The Pretty Girl bare, nude, except for a pair of pretty white cotton Dusen knickers. Made in Spain. She was laid on top of him, on his chest, his left leg between hers in the middle of a king sized double bed covered in a suave black rubber sheet. His left hand hovered over and on the smooth silky skin of the left cheek of her bottom, under the stretched pretty white cotton, a finger on the fine indented rosy line between her upper leg and cheek where the elastic edge with its silver trim would normally lay and, as she slowly regained a semblance of consciousness from the quite hefty dose of floozy solution Pretty Boy had injected into her water, she began to move slightly, to tremble smooth and soft and so young and cool over his withered, naked body, a fringe of hair tickling on his jawbone, her pony tail gently brushing the blotched, loose, leathery skin of his left shoulder.

She opened her perfectly pretty eyes, her pretty eyelashes fluttered slightly, and The Born Again Priest caressed her nose with the middle finger of his right hand, neatly manicured but unmistakably claw like. He prayed constant gravelly sounding words in a mixture of English and shaky Spanish into her delicate little pierced ear. He saw fear grow in her sweet blue green eyes and savoured what he saw and savoured the feeling of blood beating in his veins, in his temples, but he felt it in his stomach most of all.

He had no erection. It would take a lot more than this to tease those twisted, swollen blue veins, that gristle, into a flaccid shape no way reminiscent of youth, but it would come, and he saw that The Pretty Girl was dribbling from the corner of her lips, and the spittle was sticky warm, then cool in the roots of the sparse white hairs on his scrawny chest and her sweet jaw moved slightly in a fruitless effort to articulate a sound and there were silent tears welling in her pretty pleading eyes and he luxuriated in her helpless panic.

Decisions had been taken in Parliament by the International Court of the Alliance of Civilizations, The Alliance of Civilizations, Department of Culture Equalization, under the watchful, domed eye of Miguel Barceló’s ocean, decisions that pleased The Born Again Priest no end, decisions that made him feel all warm and itchy inside, itchy for action, itchy for control, itchy for power.

“¡Está bien nena, muy bien, calma! ¡No ha acorrido nada! Floozy I call it, but no one else does! It’s a personal joke! You’re no floozy, calma, eres una belleza, preciosa, but your best friends are! Both of them ugly, cheap, dirty stupid floozies! You’re smart, I’ve read the reports! Floozy, you kids take it for fun in your discotheque clubs, but me, I order its use for far higher and mightier reasons, Rohypnol, flunitrazepam, black market of course, no dye in the solution so you never saw it coming, big dose too! Calma, calma, there there....but I have no use for anterorgrade amnesia because, we'll be seeing....tranquila, calma, the first week of January in together, nena....Oh, no no no....tranquila, calma, calma nena tranquila! Because, you know what? The real entertainment, tranquila....will only start when you’re wide awake! Happy?....There, there! It's all going to be alright....Happy new year, baby!"

TRILLIONS, TRILLIONS OF GODS

2008-12-19T22:23:00.006+01:00

“I believe, I have faith, I have faith.” She recited under her breath for the umpteenth time. “I believe!” She prayed, as if, if she repeated it enough, it would magically turn into the truth, not just any old untrustworthy truth of hers, or anyone else’s come to that, but she prayed, as if “The Real Truth” would be revealed, would be visited upon her.

“There are gods, trillions of gods, trillions in the way back then, trillions in the here and now, trillions yet to come, in trillions of infected heads. In trillions of heads a different figment of a distinctly rusted imagination....” I whispered to myself and left it at that, because she had lost me and I her and, at long last, I had seen through to the corrosion that was eating away at her beauty, I had travelled back into a rusty sepia Sunday vision, and saw that it was not her fault, none of it was her fault, but I could no longer bring myself to feel anything for her anymore, no pity, no anger, no love, nothing.

It had been a lopsided kind of conversation, a lopsided relationship. I had, finally, been out manoeuvred by the ghostly goblins lurking in the shadows in her past.

Somewhere in my head William tried to console me, “You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort, as if you were dismayed: be cheerful, sir.”

She was a vision. I had first met her when I was six, in the inferno, amid the cinematic hell fires, amid all the heroic pain and death, suffering and guilt, amid tempests, plagues, and an occasional miracle, imparted and lived and believed in, as children will believe, in the passageways and cramped, dusty dark brown varnished offices that served as classes in the slightly musty Methodist church hall that was our Sunday school. She was truly a miracle and, in the end, over the years, I only wanted to go there to be in the presence of the miracle that she was. She was hope.

The white car had backed out across the pavement and down the kerb, making us check our step. It was rather over full of happy faces and movement, full of theatrical colour. It was an incident that seemed a touch sinister on that warm summer’s day months ago. It caused me a momentary shudder, but was quickly forgotten, filed away in one of those half empty cupboards floating about somewhere in the back of my mind.

By that time she had already numbered and labelled, codified me as “furniture” and, I had an inkling, offensive furniture no less.

“Well, who am I to argue?” I thought to myself.

“You have no faith!” she had lamented over and over in her soft, sweet, resigned tone of voice, and I had no words left to say.

“Our revels are now ended.” William rattled at me from somewhere in my head.

So, one day, when I was feeling particularly troubled and thoughtful, one sticky evening, facing yet another dreary, dusty Sunday school lamentation, I melted through the rumpled up sheets into our pale blue covered foam mattress with its little white flower design and, thus losing the power of speech, which never came that easily at the best of times, I was unable to utter a single word.

I was melting away, into and through things, and deep down in that foam mattress there was a vast sepia sea and a shadow, a misty rectangular shape, a mirage. “Perhaps Moses is bringing me a tablet,” said something in my head, but I had to work for it and I kind of drifted towards it and the closer I got the more obviously it became a holy book I began to remember from my childhood days.

It was coming for me too. The closer we got to each other the clearer the image became and the holy book was just there, in the corner, against the skirting boards, under the back, left hand foot of mother’s wardrobe, there so as to stop the thing rocking on the uneven floorboards of her bay windowed bedroom. It was art, with a grey cloth hardback cover, the Tate Gallery, Illustrations, from The British School, a nineteen fifties edition.

While pondering my slightly suffocating sepia tinted predicament, I arrived, by and by, at this conclusion,- I had always thought of furniture as accommodating, though not necessarily comfortable, but now it was all just simply empty.

I was empty but the furniture was full of me and so was my mother’s book and its images and so I drifted into Etty’s rippled sepia stream with the bather, at the doubtful breeze alarmed, as I had done so often as a child, because the bather was beautiful and somehow forbidden and I wanted to be with beauty and so I was, I was momentarily consoling beauty and I was at rest on page fifty, reference six one four, and it was definitely not absurd being naked and up to my knees in that cool sepia coloured stream soothing my alarmed bather, because it was surely I that had caused the ripple of alarm in the first instance.

Knock, knock! Knock knock, on the wardrobe door,-William again, “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.”

And I was empty, and alone with beauty, and I was free and it was not absurd!

Later, as Victoria and I walked on down the windy street toward some trivial chore, I suddenly felt she was missing. She had been following, just a step behind because of the crowds all going about their little businesses, but I could easily have held her hand, if I had so chosen. And so, quietly shocked and chilled by the sensation of emptiness, I glanced back to see her in the slightly, strangely familiar white and beige car I had seen over the weeks before, but which had never really registered in my memory, only in my nostalgia, and I felt the full absurdity of it all.

Then said William, somewhere in the back of my mind, “And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.”

I turned the sepia picture pages over and over again, on through Blake’s infernos, looking for reference sixteen forty, on and on pages more pages in the sepia lacquered rocking wardrobes of my nostalgia and then, suddenly on page fifty seven, Hope, and I was there and Watts’ Hope was blind again and somehow yet again so utterly, attractively, masochistic! So Hope’s beauty grew before my eyes, before my emotions, although blind and bound, because Hope’s hope was free while blind faith burnt forever in divine flames. I kissed her neck, I brushed her cheek with my lips.

William chided me, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep....”

Victoria was in the rear seat, kerbside, pressed awkwardly against the window of the two- tone Zephyr, with the absurd clowns applying makeup to her face and she shared with them such a beautiful smile, such an aura of contentment that I had to confide to myself, “Well, it must have been true. It must have been pretty irritating, to say the least, for her to have lived with the furniture!” But, now I was smiling because I was empty, and alone, and I was free and, for an instant, nothing seemed quite so absurd anymore.

I understood what William said when, just then, the next instant, he warned me, “Should be, but, it isn’t always the furniture men that do the moving!” Now, this was, of course, a bit strange because, as far as I could remember having read, he had never written anything at all like that.

References,-
Blake, The Simoniac Pope, Hell Canto 19.
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
Etty, The Bather, At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed.
Ford, The Zephyr Zodiac, 1954-1956
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV.
Watts, Hope.

THE BLACK SHEEP BACK GARDENER’S SONG

2008-11-26T11:49:00.024+01:00

Sings.-

I am your black sheep back gardener, lady,
sowing hard to get things to grow.

I am your black sheep back gardener, lady,
I thought you really ought to know.

Almost spoken word.-

Got this handsome white Arum Lily
wrapped in pink edged cellophane
specially, especially, purely for you.

Muttered.-

Oh, Beauty in the hands of The Beast.

Sings.-

I am your black sheep back gardener, lady,
but there is something to straighten out in my head,
I am your black sheep back gardener, lady,
although I am not ever going to get you into my bed.

(Fade out). The girls in the band sing a version of the old, old song, in mocking tones.-

Oh, his heartbone’s connected to his backbone.
His backbone’s connected to his headbone.
His headbone’s connected to his jawbone
and that’s what it’s all about....

Conversation.-

....jawbone that, girls, just another lily-livered fucking bonehead....

The girls in the band crack up into fits of laughter! The song ends on a fading note of feedback.

THE BLACK SHEEP BACK GARDENER’S SONG © A. JOHNSON/BLUE ROADSTERS, 2008

SPACE TRAVEL, NINTEEN FIFTIES VINTAGE

2008-11-15T16:53:00.006+01:00

Black and white nineteen fifties detective movies playing every night on late night television, on black and white valve televisions from memories before the age of the transistor.

The heavy rain, the street corner light illuminating a shadowy figure, coat collar turned up.

Voices are faintly heard in the factory of words, whispers in the cathedral of language and language burns, flaming, with its need to reproduce.

Footsteps are heard leading into that strange world of pre-sleep, pre-nightmare, of falling away, slipping away, that old fragmented historic sepia memory sound and sights of footsteps on damp October concrete, the scraping of gravel underfoot, in grit or green kerb mush in wet gullies, in long ago travelled alleyways, paths and roadways.

When the slow spaceship valves turn off, the picture fast finds distance as white watchface moon shimmering silver seconds in darkness and you travel into space, the deep space inside. It’s the peephole, and as you step on through the back door there, you might be looking at your final credits, but you are, in fact, really being welcomed by your past, by long before your past, by universal silver static dancing gaily diamond flashes at the front door of your spring.

Static. Background radiation. It’s the end of the film, the end of words.

Baby Belladonna waddles through the backdoor into the garden, nineteen fifties vintage spaceship in hand, into golden reds and yellows, autumn leaves fall on cool stilled air.

Two golden orange autumn leaves dance in the wind, find an eye to watch their ballet in someone’s daydream, find a home in a corner of another unknown eye.

Actually, a root dreamt of them and soon they will live in a velvet green corner of some new bud’s dream of golden sails set to sail on to the sunset where death dances gaily by the back door of autumn at The End of the Film.

The End of the Film.

The End of Words.

Rake them up, pile them on the bonfire, they don’t hurt anyone anymore.

JOHN DOE’S STORY. LIQUID VERSION. PART TWO

2008-10-16T12:57:00.006+02:00

Seconds before midnight, the very end of day six.

John Doe throws his trembling hands to his temples, sweeps the Petri dish with its recalcitrant cultures off the lab table onto the floor with his right arm, and leaves.

The viruses and bacteria search out John Doe.

Last day, last minute, last seconds, last drops of warm blood left circulating in the last warm blooded flesh in the known universe, rotting in the beauty of a warm evening sunset all pinks and mauves and deeper purples.

Last man left standing, John Doe, a bruise on the face of the universe.

Last man left standing, John Doe, so riddled with suicidal cMRA that that was really all he was, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Community acquired, of course, except there was no community left to acquire it from or to pass it on to.

Last man left standing, John Doe, just a host for the ultimate dregs of disease.

Last man left standing, John Doe, on the slide, on the slide into oblivion, the Petri dish a long lost memory.

Last man left standing, John Doe, the only disease advanced enough to actually think about apologising for all the destruction.

Not that it actually ever did.

No one left here to know the universe.

DEPRESSION AND BAD, VERY BAD, SCIENCE

2008-09-30T13:30:00.014+02:00

Bug Eyed Peter Johnson is, well, depressed, and not just a little drunk....

What’s so damned precious about the dead? We got to dig them up, millions of years of them, and say sorry to them all?

Most of them should say sorry to us, the damned criminals, bringing us here to this.

Anyway and after all, they haven’t gone anywhere! Nowhere, except onto the universal damned pile of civilised bones that leads back to the biggest bloody mistake ever ever perpetrated.

They haven’t gone anywhere! There’s nowhere to go is there now? Nowhere.

The people who have gone are the archaeologists! The scientists have gone....investigating the whole useless mess.

The archaeologists are getting real close to discovering just what vengeful gene beat the sense out of our most distant, distant, distant ancestors, causing them, the idiots, to get up onto their feet, off of all fours, leaving them no bloody sense except beaten in bloody bloodthirsty nonsense.

So I guess we should all just pick up our picks spades and shovels and dig, dig dig dig right back to t=0 and put the fucking fire out! Right out! There and then! Out! Out! Out!

Now, that is what I'd call a real worthy obligation! Save us all a shitload of trouble.

Get to work you lazy sons! Get to it! GET DIGGING!

And don’t forget the bucket of water!

Bucket “Made in China” by my Chinese cousins! They got their part to play too, don’t you know?

....Douse the spark....

....Come on! Dig! DIG....

PLAYING ON THE SWING, PART ONE

2008-09-26T14:09:00.016+02:00

....I’ll just put this stuff down over there I think. Ah! Damned back!

You alright? Cup of tea?

Coffee please. Smelt it as I was coming through the back door with that lot, so I won’t be able to get the idea out of my head, or the smell, ‘till after a couple of cups! Where’s Gabriel, then?

There you are....Wanna talk to him then, or what?

Nah! You know me, addicted to coffee and gossip, I was just passing and thought I’d pop in for a fix!

He’s just taken a walk down to the market with Anatoly. To the village. We’re totally out of veggies and he’s gotta pick up some other odds and ends too for the weekend or we’ll all starve!.... There’s a packet of digestives over there....

Great, thanks.... and, how’s it going with Anatoly? Bit of a mouthful, Anatoly, isn’t it?

Can hardly call ‘im Ana now can we?

Bit of a temptation though!

Yeah, yeah, well it’s fine for us and he’s picking up English faster than either of us would have thought possible. Doesn’t smile too much yet, though.

And the bureaucracy? How’s all that panning out?

Time, takes time but it’s almost all done. Just waiting for DCER to register his DNA fingerprint and there is some hitch or another with his sister. Her details have gone missing somewhere between the offices of CEREEA and our local branch of ICAC. In fact no one has a clue where she’s got to, let alone her rehabilitation documentation. It’ll get sorted, eventually. Can’t do a thing from this end.

Always the way! How’re the kids taking to him? Ok?

Vivien, well Vivien’s got himself a brother to play with, both nuts for football! Just look at the state of the lawn!

Price you have to pay for boys I’m afraid!

Vivien’s got himself someone who doesn’t think he’s just a little pain in the neck to be got rid of as quickly as possible. Dawn, well she’s living in a world of her own. Well, ‘nother universe more like it! Like, she seems to know Anatoly is there but just looks through him like he’s not. Actually, Anatoly reacts just the same. Like living with two ghosts sometimes!

She’ll snap out of it!

Look at her out there on the swing plugged into....Help yourself to more coffee....never know what she’s listening to and when I do, can’t understand for the life of me what she sees, hears, in it and she’s so morose all the bloody time.

She’s a teenager! Teenager!.... Mmmm, thanks!....Remember that don’t you! Happened a long time ago but I don’t think you’re an Alzheimer’s case just yet, No? Looks like some kind of Madonna out there, a Madonna with that sun shining like that through her hair. She’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Madonna? Devil in disguise, if you ask me. You’ve never had to go through one of her shouting jags. Snaps at the whole world, tongue like a snake and it’s the only time you can actually understand more than a quarter of what she says! Damned thing’s plugged straight into her brain. Ears don’t come into it, not even close.

Methinks you two have had a tiny weenie discrepancy this morning, no? She’s beautiful!

Discrepancy? Discrepancy Yes!....Have to make another pot, that’s getting a bit low....I really love her you know.

No me Jodas, I know that tonta, I got kids too, remember?

Language! Language!

Sorry! But not very!....‘nother digestive, please....Work?....thanks....

Yeah, great. It all seems to be coming together again. Lost it for a while but, dunno, I’m getting a whole lot more feedback and feel like I’m doing something worthwhile for once, got renewed faith in it all, I guess. The system ‘nd all.

Mmm, how come the new positive you, darling?!

Been working with a new exchange group and my section has three educators and I’m head! Got three subjects on hand at the moment.

Like always then, isn’t it?

Got the twenty five year old wife of some dissident Chinese philosopher, can’t remember his name, or hers half the time. Can’t get my head round their names, you know! Don’t stick up here! Bit of a problem actually!

Oh yes! More Alzheimer’s, or what?

Idiot!

Language!

Then there’s the young son, twelve, of a poet, never read any of his stuff. Not likely to either! Kid’s called Arun....

Bit of a coincidence that, No?

Too right! That’s what I thought! You know, Gabriel really wanted to name Vivien after Elvis Presley, you know what he’s like when he gets an idea in his head, and I just didn’t wanna have anything to do with something as tacky as that. Put my foot down on that one! Compromised, but insisted on changing the spelling! Never ever even knew what it meant till a couple of days ago....

Well, don't keep me waiting, tell me then, what does it mean then, lista?

Sunrise!

Pretty!

Quite common where the kid comes from. India. It’s Hindi, apparently. Then we’ve got the daughter of a scientist from somewhere in the Muslim Federation of States, called Sahar.

Where?

Don’t know exactly. Muslim Federation....

Oh.

Now Sahar, she’s smart, same age as Dawn, real smart and she really is a sight to see. Slim, not, sort of dumpy, podgy pale English.

Dawn ain’t podgy, not by a long chalk.

The exception that proves the rule! Anyhow, where was I? Mmm, Sahar’s got this beautiful silky chocolate coloured skin, long shiny black hair and eyes that any English kid ‘d kill for, any English adult, come to that, so deep, so black. Intelligent, somehow. Scary!

More coffee please! Much more coffee! This is great!

Anyway, we’ve all been working very hard with her....Here you go....and after the first week we even managed to persuade the other two, Arun and Xiaofan fin fun or whatever, to get heavily involved in the process. We’re getting some very good high quality product out of it all and I think we could well pick up a whole load of sales. We get a commission you know!

Sounds just like real job satisfaction to me.

Tis, and I’ve been bringing some of the stuff home to show, you know, educate the kids, well, really to try and get Dawn interested in something that’s not piped directly to the few remaining neurons she’s got upstairs.

Joder! She’s a teeeenager! Teeeeeenager!

Sorry, can’t help myself sometimes. Anyway....Take another biscuit, for heaven’s sake....Anyway she seems to be taking an interest.

There you go then!

Taking an interest, yes,I guess, if you manage to decipher the monosyllables, sorry, sorry, her conversation. She’s gotta learn some discipline, some ideology and faith for god’s sake, start thinking about the future, though I have to say she seems to be taking more of an interest in the new materials than my older stuff. Seems to be developing an inkling 'bout what it's all for, what it's all about. Whys and wherefores 'nd stuff....It ‘d be nice if she followed in mother’s footprints, you know, keep it all, the trade, you know, in the family, and the ICAC pay’s not bad.

Job security too, no? Vivien?

It all frightens him a bit and he has the occasional nightmare, but he’s got to learn. Start early so it sticks right in is what I say. That was our mistake with Dawn, started too late, for delicacy’s sake I guess.

Never too late, isn’t that what they say?

True, but nobody ever tells you about the consequences. Anyway, how’s my big brother? The Children?

Don’t want to talk about it and you just really don’t want to know!

Ain’t giving much away today, ain’t talking much are ya?

Ha ha ha! Visit me the next time and I’ll blab to your heart’s content! Your kitchen your blab, my kitchen my blab, rules of the game!.... Neat coffee. Sorry I, erm, demolished half the digestives!.... Anyway, gotta be off or I’ll be reported Missing in Action. Pass me that stuff....Ta....Know what your brother’s like....

I’ll pop round maybe Friday, Ok?

Oh, going to the Priests concert on Sunday?

Date?

Twenny ninth, No, no, thirtieth, I think.

Love to! Could take all the kids. I’ll talk to Gab and let you know Friday. Got enough tickets?

Yeah, got a whole pile from the mission yesterday. See ya!

Right....

PLAYING ON THE SWING, PART TWO

2008-09-26T14:04:00.010+02:00

ICAC/AC Standard Notification Document. CEREEA 7. Department of Culture Equalization and Rendition.

Reference; EUCAUC/F758362100402/REND
Reference; EUCAUC/M758363081106/REND
Reference; EUCAUC/F758364270804/HOLD

Secondary Reference; 135S. Economic Infringements. Tome 3, Section 48B, Illicit Copying and Media Transfer.

Date of issue of document/notification:

25/04/17

Projected date of receipt of document/notification:

28/04/17

You are hereby notified that A:

The Department of Culture Equalization and Rendition, section European Union (EU) of The International Court of the Alliance of Civilizations, in accordance with established Cultural Equalization and Rendition Educational Exchange Agreements, has determined that;

EUICAC4730UK, Mortimer, Melanie Hilda,

be informed in accord with section 24C of The Culture Equalization Tariff Laws of 7 January 2012, tome 7 ICAC document 874B49, that the afore mentioned reference,-

EUCAUC/F758362100402/REND, Mortimer, Dawn Roxanne, is being transferred to the MF Treatment Center 18SA for a period of twenty seven days of Temporal Education Exchange Treatment.

And that the following reference,-

EUCAUC/M758363081106REND, Mortimer, Vivien Arun, is being transferred to the MF Treatment Center 18SA.T for a period of fifteen days of Terminal Education Exchange Treatment.

That B:

Both Exchanges are judged to be in compensation for registered and proven illegal movement and manipulation of ICAC documentation and visual records (135S. Economic Infringements. Tome 3, Section 48B, Illicit Copying and Media Transfer) by the legally registered head of the Mortimer Family Unit and ICAC operative;

Contract Reference:

EUICAC4730UK, Mortimer, Melanie Hilda,

and the consequent decrease in margins of profit on sales of said documentation and/or visual records.

That C:

Legal grounds for an appeal against decisions taken by The Supreme Council of the ICAC have been deemed by the Court to be constitutionally unfounded.

No appeals will be accepted.

AC and ICAC authorities and their affiliate organizations have ample powers and the right and means to assure compliance to all court directives under articles 34B and 34D through to 39G of The Constitution of The Alliance of Civilizations.

That D:

EUICAC4730UK, Mortimer, Melanie Hilda,

will be expected to make arrangements and cost the return and rehabilitation of;

EUCAUCF758362100402, Mortimer, Dawn Roxanne

From;

MF Treatment Center 18SA

via Rendition Flights Ltd A-380 shuttle services, after having received the standard form,- Notification of the Termination of Temporal Culture Equalization Rendition Treatment, CEREEA 8.

That E:

EUCAUC/F758364270804/HOLD, Mortimer Hernández, Alba,

is being held under a Temporary Department of Culture Equalization and Rendition Order at EU Treatment Center 54SP in lieu of complete adherence and compliance with all ICAC court orders and requisites in accord with section 24C of The Culture Equalization Tariff Laws of 7 January 2012, tome 7 ICAC document 874B54.

That F:

Any irregularities on your part, or lack of cooperation in TEETs on the part of the aforementioned reference EUCAUC/F758362100402/REND or the aforementioned reference EUCAUC/M758363081106/REND and, or, if margins are not met on the sale of product produced during the periods of the above mentioned Culture Equalization Rendition Treatments/Temporal or Terminal Education Exchange Treatments, will automatically mean the holding status of;

EUCAUC/F758364270804/HOLD

will be revoked and a period of twenty seven days of Temporal Education Exchange Treatment will be confirmed for said reference at AS Treatment Center 23IN and will also mean the transfer of;

EUCAUC/F758362100402/REND

to a further course of fifteen days of Terminal Education Exchange Treatment after the course of Temporal Education Exchange Treatment has been finalized.

That G:

In accordance with the ICAC and AC Freedom of Information Acts, 2010/2011, digital visual sound and picture recordings and documentation of the afore mentioned TEET sessions will be made available for sale via ICAC and AC authorized internet outlets and AC embassies worldwide.

Addenda:

The TEET Programs organized via ICAC and its affiliates, are designed to be profit making. Profits are reinvested in further Equalizing Cultural Respectability Projects and your full cooperation in these and further projects is a requirement under internationally binding laws drawn up in compliance with AC Department of Public Entertainment Legislation, tome 9 ICAC document 125A69.

For, The Right Honorable High Commissioner for Respect,

ICAC/AC, Department of Culture Equalization, 25/04/17

"LA DAMA DESNUDA", AND SO?

2008-08-14T13:19:00.027+02:00

And So? And so there he is, strung up by the neck, blue in the face and as dead as a doornail and useless. Dead. Dead useless.

And so? And so we are watching him, Peter is looking in on himself, Bug Eyed Peter.

And? And Peter, Bug Eyed Peter, sees himself swinging slowly, rhythmically in the cool breeze because the strings in this bit of dimension, are all tangled up. There’s a bit of a tangled up string theory hereabouts. So it goes.

And? And he holds in his hand a handgun with fifteen rounds in the magazine that he had asked for, and was, of course, granted, to end it all another faster way, but which he never could use because he could never stop wondering if there weren’t always better uses for fifteen rounds than first putting a bullet in his brain to end his little personal part in this universe of songs jamming up the mind and other more sinister oppressions.

Flying would definitely be Peter's deal. Flying, swooping down from the stars, from the blue sky after having said goodbye to the clouds and an enormous hello to mother earth, that would be just so much more poetic a way to go out and no strings attached.

And? And I hold his beautiful, noble hand and I sing in my head.

And? And I find myself singing and humming the chorus of “La Dama Desnuda”, and, naked, naked emotion, honest bare naked emotion, brings back to me smells of a long lost Sunday roast ritual, fresh roast coffee from the Olde Coffee Shoppe at the top of the hill wafting across the street as I swing on the creamy white pole onto the open platform of the 93 bus to North Cheam. A blood red RT. Smells from the open door of old Barnes the baker’s swathe me on an errand to the I can’t remember exactly where, when death was yet to be born and I was most definitely still a virgin and Virginia was still yet to be born and her song stuck in my mind yet to be written and the little boy next door was the doctor and I the nurse, and vice versa and versa vice, and we were nice naughty naked and nude at the end of the garden in our gooseberry and blackcurrant bush dell safe from the grown ups' world a dell where the sparrows sang and swooped above and sometimes the swifts too and we were so patient, and patient and medic and vice versa, versa vice in turns and turned and took turns to examine the feel and smells of our pretty little goose pimpled bodies never ever to be so pretty ever ever again when the dreams became polluted by old wounded words and dead doomed ideas of troubles and decay and decadence that are seeded and fed and watered and are imposed by growing up under the dreary shadow of onrushing age and a reasoning that drags us all anesthetized and twisted perverted into the years of the birth of death, heralded in with iron certainties and the doomsayer drums that beat faith in and honest to goodness feelings to death.

2015, Tuesday the twenty second, chilly dying dead December decaying and they can read your mind and I can’t get “La Dama Desnuda” out of mine for more than a fleeting moment at a time, (which is jolly good cover against someone reading your deeper thoughts, by the way, very useful!) but where it took me, beauty was still innocent and unquestioned but a fear of god was beginning to be drummed in every black book Sunday morning prayers to leave its mark as everlasting as a cut scabby knee from that fall from my blue bike left me too, learning to ride wobbly, learning to balance, being taught by father whose hairy man hand held the back of the scuffed brown leather saddle, one moment yes, another no, crash bang, hurt and tears.

And? And, eventually there was balance.

Now there is no balance and the people queue calmly to be broken slowly and surely on the Born Again Priest’s wooden wheel, iron rack meat hook stretched slowly and surely to death and all the happier for it too, don’t you just know it all? Wouldn’t you just know it? Empty looks and empty smiles copied ad infinitum as joints dislocate to an orchestra of toffee apple sticky fingers in childish cheeks popping out time and time and time again to the priest’s dusty death orchestration. Conductor, my eye! Pop! Pop, Pop! Pop….

Pop!

Back then, balmy summer Sunday mornings, sparrows and thrushes dance and sing in the branches of a young immature apple tree where robin red breasts did in leafless winter and I lay in the cool green grass and looked at the clouds and wondered what on earth stopped me from floating up to them to say hello, to give the sky a hug, why couldn't I?

And there was balance, sometimes, and daddy’s old mouth laughs at my fall and my little girl tears and his rough tobacco Player’s Navy Cut lips kiss away the tears and there was him and me and mother and a little sister somewhere thereabouts and the smell of homely home cooking jam tarts cake and I was free of people and only felt a precious few persons here and there, outside of me, and no one could read my mind and I had no idea of how, or inclination, to read theirs and never dreamt I’d be able to, up to a point, when I grew out of my child’s universe of fantastic facts into a sad, desperate nostalgia burning anew thanks to a few words and notes from a haunting refrain written and, assuredly sweetly knowingly sung by Virginia Maestro Diaz and the Blue Roadsters.

Who would ever have dreamt that? Not Peter, who started it all, whistling the damned tune at quarter to seven this morning.

Bassett’s Sherbet Fountains with their permanently blocked black licorice straws dance “La Dama Desnuda”, a brave beacon of light teaching me of memories of yellow Jamboree Bags from Jolly’s the sweetshop at the top of the hill opposite my infants school. Pass the ha’penny, the sixpence if you were rich or the thrupenny bit up over the glass topped counter to Mrs. Jolly for black and white striped humbugs or gobstoppers so big they most assuredly did stop you, or sherbet flying saucers powder pink or powder yellow or powder blue to melt in your mouth and fizz up your nose, don’t forget the change love!

And? And all children have a smell for the fear of the void before death is born to them, and it’s a different perfume for each and every one of them and my smell of the void was a kind of sweet schooldinnery scent of food prepared in institutions served on thick imperfect looking canteen crockery tugging at nerve endings infants and junior schooldays.

And? And it comes back sometimes, when you least expect it.

Blue nostalgia, but it’s always blue, powder blue, royal blue, ultramarine, deep rich blue, Blue Roadsters blues, fancy blue diamond blue, except for “La Dama Desnuda” which is exotic, is hot, hot and red and blood red alive and kicking and kicking with life.

Who would ever have dreamt up the trouble it would all cause? Not Peter, who started it all off, whistling the damned tune at quarter to seven this morning. I'll just have to try out one of my tunes on him one day, get mine in there first.*

And? And it all comes back sometimes, especially when you least expect it.

Thank you The Naked Lady, thank you very much! Thank you Peter!

And? And I hold his beautiful, noble hand and I sing out loud in my head and I have a meaningful, happy smile on my face.

And? And this is not the end.

*‘cause you know now I’m the man that looks around and here’s my shadow on the ground, just the two of us, the two of us. The two of us...nomads, the nomads, the nomads...

THE SONG THAT LOU REED NEVER WROTE

VIRGINIA NO ES VIRGEN (A SHORT STORY OF DEFIANT, FRAGILE BEAUTY)

2008-07-16T23:13:00.023+02:00

Day and night, night and day, day and night, and on and on and on, interminable, what an awful, awful evening, what a awful day, what a terrible couple of months. Not even a scant scent of triumph in all this terrible time, in this dirty underhand little setup, and then,-

A Blue Diamond Shines in the Pigsty!

Virginia Maestro Díaz sang to me on the radio while I drove and she looked down on me from concert posters as I parked the car under the second lamppost from the corner. The London Concerts. The Apollo, the twenty third and fourth.

The Virgin tour 2010. A month and a half in the UK. Small intimate venues. A Crystal White Rose, the CD. "La Dama Desnuda"(The Naked Lady), the song I am haunted by. Wrote it herself according to the radio.

Writes all her own stuff. She’s Spanish. I read it somewhere.*

It’s in her voice dancing the radio waves, the beautiful crystal clear sin of it all! Pure pleasure! That’s what gets to a person! That’s what gets to my person!

Those that shape taste have no desire to cultivate persons! Persons are a true nightmare of a complication. What they manipulate, what they demand and command, are people. They just adore “the people”. They just love dipping their grubby little fingers into that pie! The people pie! They feed the people on people pie!

Virginia’s no virgin. Virginia no es virgen. There’s no virginity in her smile. She is not people pie! She is not of the people. There’s no virginity in her crystal clear eyes, just pure pleasure in the beautiful sin of the sound of her song and what that sound does to your person. That’s what gets to a person! That’s what gets to Virginia’s persons, the crystal clear sin of it all!

What do I care if my interpretation is on the spot or not? It’s mine! If my premise is lived as real by enough persons, it is real in its beautiful crystal clear consequences,- the beautiful crystal clear sin of it all! The crystal sound and the crystal vision! Pure pleasure! Pure beauty! Pure sin! Pure Virginia.

Oh, by the way, thanks for the second hand inspiration, Mr Thomas!#

Pure pleasure! Pure beauty! Pure sin! Pure Virginia Maestro.

That’s what gets to a person! That’s what gets to my person!

Teach me about it Virginia!

I pushed the lock button on the key card of my Renault and its lights blinked twice as it shut down and I felt a kind of warmth inside myself somewhere at half nine on a chilly October night, Friday the twenty second, downtown.

Virginia no es virgen.

I might just have to buy myself a ticket for the show!

I'm getting nervous, I need a drink.

* Virginia Maestro Díaz sings Lou Reed.

After having written this piece and going to two of her shows, I discovered that the key to getting the UK dates was the online success of a cracking cover version of a Lou Reed song, “A Sheltered Life”, from the CD “Rock and Roll Heart", 1976, recorded by Virginia in late December 2009, a song on the playlist at the London shows.

Virginia was backed on “A Sheltered Life”, and live, by the "Blue Roadsters",- Alba Johnson, upright electric bass, B. Sherpa, all wind instruments, Piru5j, percussion, The Visitation, lead and rhythm guitars and Victoria G, power bass guitar.

The London concerts were heart warming, very moving. Heartrending, in fact. Never to be forgotten.

# W. I. Thomas, an American sociologist.

THE SONG THAT LOU REED NEVER WROTE

2008-05-10T20:30:00.017+02:00

Alba and I were walking home down the deserted night time street and she seemed distracted, somehow, somewhere in some other time, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on the distraction. Our footsteps echoed off the damp London pavements and red brick walls. Then she started singing in a low, sweet sentimental voice, a sad song I was not familiar with, but which sounded some chord in my memory.

“Well now darling, those other lights invite me on, so you better look down here quick or I’ll be gone, ‘cause you know baby, I’m the man that looks around and right here’s my shadow on the ground. Well now baby, I just know those other lights invite me on, so you’d better look down here quick or I’ll be gone, ‘cause you know now I’m the man that looks around and here’s my shadow on the ground, I’m the man that looks around and here’s my shadow on the ground....”

It brought back smells and tastes and sounds from some ether or another, of student flats and parties, Rumanian red wine mixed with orange juice, Cheddar cheese and pineapple snacks, marijuana, Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, 1972 and Lou Reed live at Kingston Polytechnic, Lou and the Tots, but I didn’t register the words until she got to the chorus, which she repeated over and over, with minor variations, with growing stridency and confidence in the rhythm and melody till she suddenly stopped, looked up at me, blushed a little, and broke into a shy, slightly sly, laugh.

“You’d better look down here quick or I’ll be gone, ‘cause you know now I’m the man that looks around and here’s my shadow on the ground, I’m the man that looks around and here’s my shadow on the ground , just the two of us, the two of us. The two of us….nomads, the nomads, the nomads....”

“Sounds terribly familiar, but what on earth is it?”

Alba kissed me. It was a sad nostalgic kiss and I loved her even more for it.

“The song that Lou Reed never wrote!”

THE NOMADS

Always some grit or other shit blown in my eye
Always some marvellous habit I’ve got to break
Would surely cause a lesser man to cry
And break the curse of reflection for its own sake

You’ll catch an infinite sigh on the breeze
Two strangers you’ll see slapping mossy bark
Walking through the darkened night time trees
Walking through the trees in Columbus Park

Well I think those other lights invite me on
You better look down here quick or we’ll be gone
You know I’m the man that looks around
And here’s my shadow on the ground

Always some new darkness amongst all this light
Always such a storm brewing in this dusty air
Always some new painful screaming in the night
But there are always those so cool lights over there

Two strangers you’ll see slapping mossy bark
Walking through the darkened nigh time trees
Walking through the trees in Battery Park
You’ll surely catch their infinite sigh on the breeze

Well I see those other lights invite me on
You better look down here quick or we’ll be gone
You know I’m the man that looks around
And here’s my shadow on the ground

Well I know those other lights invite me on
You better look down here quick or we’ll be gone
You know I’m the man that looks around
And here’s my shadow on the ground

The two of us
Nomads

Copyright, A.Johnson/Blue Roadsters,2008

The image is a photographic reworking by B. Sherpa of a sculpture by A. Gormley.

A LUST (SWAN)SONG FOR A LOST YOUTH

2008-05-02T17:39:00.009+02:00

Red hot days. Red hot nights. Even the moon’s on fire. You sat down just over there, just there, in front of me, so close I could smell your sweetness and I was instantly burning for you, here, in our red city of fire. Then you closed your eyes and that hurt me for its innocence. You looked away and this hurt me too because, in that instant, I ceased to exist and I realised my eyes were just too old and opaque and waxy, too burnt out to interest you, but, you know, they’ll be burning bloodshot for you somewhere out there in the city of fire. Burning for evermore.

You looked away and you were gone. You must have been, what, twelve or thirteen? Thirteen years in this city of fire, where even the moon’s on fire, and you were lost to me in the shimmer of heat rising off the dark, blackened street, and in the chimera of my overheated memories. Only chance will ever have you sit down so close to me ever again and that kind of chance was burnt out for me years ago, you know, when I was just about your age I guess.

In red hot bloodshot mornings I’m burning for you in my red hot city of fire. Burning for your cool blue veins streaming through your fresh transparent downy white skin. The fresh flesh of youth, kissed by no sun at all in the flickering smoky shadows of this city on fire. I’m burning to look into your crystal clear, clean, guileless blue green eyes, eyes that have never ever dwelt on trickery or scheming.

Head slightly lowered, your blonde pageboy fringe shifts slightly in the fresh cleansing breeze you seemed to carry with you in your aura, in your wake, and the nostalgia for youth is like acid in my twisted, swollen veins. Your eyes looked up to me and there was a smile, and no slyness, on your lips and there was a quick childish laugh at nothing in particular I could discern, and so I’m burning for innocence in this city of burning red hot fire. I’m burning with a passion for cold, icy transparency in this red hot city of flames.

Red hot afternoons. I desperately want to pinch just one of those blue chill veins in your chest or neck or temples, or anywhere, or put my lips to your body to see if they really are as cold and delicate and perfect and young as the idea the actors up here in my theatre of memory torment me with all the time.

My name’s Alba, something I guess you’ll never ever, ever know, which means dawn in English, and I’m twenty one years old tomorrow, Saturday the third of May, 2008.

Just one kiss is all I desire on red hot evenings when I need to prove I haven’t been taken in by you, or by my memory in flames.

But it can never be. There’s no new dawn for me. I’m simply just more fuel for the furnaces of a city on fire.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE DISINFECTED

2008-04-09T14:12:00.011+02:00

Alone, a young woman is wandering about her twelfth floor flat shuffling papers and things about here, moving things into the kitchen sink there and wiping the week’s stains away from everywhere.

She has finished with the integrated home entertainment system and the screen is blank in more ways than one. There is a smell of pine and stale air. She moves over to the window and is vaguely aware of the distant muffled sounds of the city. It is dark outside, and stormy. She is talking to herself, up there in her head, now and all the time, all by herself.

Look at him! Sirens. His mind is a sewer and everything that flows through it is sewerage. I could walk through those tubes. It’s so obvious. On patrol. I’d have to hold a scented handkerchief to my delicate nose. Traffic. That’s as maybe, but just think about the three of them. I can’t stop it man, I can’t switch it off. Yes, but two of them have minds that are sewer systems and the poor girl is just not there at all. Sunshiny bright and clean. Inside of her skull, it’s like an empty cathedral with the sun burning on the inside. Radioactive space, I know, I’ve done the tourism. Girl, boy? What’s the difference? That’s an aggressive shout. What are you getting at? If you can’t tell the difference there’s no difference to matter. You’re blabbering, Rabbit. Blue boils. Acne glows. Rabbiting on like that! It’s a disgrace. The sewerage in the Born Again Priest’s head flows freely in floods into the pretty world and it stinks it all up and it festers your fingers and you can’t get it off and you’re corrupted by it while he’s wallowing in shit in his sewer works, and he works hard. And poor Peter, pretty with his permanently surprised eyes? If I were prone to religious epithets, hell, I am, sometimes, must have been my methodist childhood, I’d call him saintly. Dettol. A smell of pine and castor oil and caramel somewhere in memory store. I’ve walked his tubes hankie in hand too. So you’ve seen that his brain is a sewerage just the same, right? A disgrace. Full of sewerage. The same, right? There are no leaks there though. If anything, the only person who suffers from the smell is pretty Peter himself, and it serves him right, right? Wrong! He lives with it and he doesn’t smear it all about, nobody gets festered. Pretty saint Peter. No acne on him. And this other one? The third person here, on the list. Number sixty nine. This one? Well well! Nothing has ever occurred in her simple system that’s ever needed much disinfecting. Boy or girl, it’s the same. A dedicated protestant boy. Dettoled to death. Nineteen sixty nine. Chloroxylenol. Nineteen sixty nine. Beatles were always cleaner than Stones. Innocent. Cuddly. Homely. I could never get into the Stones. Her! She’s never ever ever had to make a choice between any different standpoints. Here or there? This or that? These or those? The questions simply never arose in her simple cathedral mind. Brainwashed. Dettoled to death. She’s just not all there. Parachlorometaxylenol. Dead in the head. You can clean yourself to death with Dettol. It’s happened. I read about it somewhere. Sad. Sadder still, she’s The Born Again Priest’s cannon fodder, a good catholic girl, bang bang bang, and the very type Peter is dedicated to fighting to protect, child! Children. Pine. Watery white pine. Fully skimmed milk. PCMX.

In two thousand and eight the first tentative steps were taken towards the construction of a machine that could read a person’s thoughts. The announcement was made in the scientific press and made little or no impact on a wider, more public, level.

In the year two thousand and fifteen agents of The Born Again Priest, on behalf of shadow organisations working for the ICAC*, bought the first portable versions of this machine for their travelling missionaries.

In two thousand and twenty more advanced versions of these portable machines could read minds at moderately long distances as long as there were no major obstructions between the probe and the subject being investigated.

On the twelfth floor of a block of flats on The Cambridge Estate the neighbours hear the sound of heavily booted feet in the stairwells and hallways, then a short silence followed by loud knocking.

On the seventh Bill mutters to himself, “Shit!”

He has heard the boots on their way downstairs.

Too late.

*The International Court of The Alliance of Civilisations

BUG EYED PETER TELLS THE BEDTIME STORY OF THE RESPECTFUL FAMILY THAT RESPECT KILLED

2008-03-20T15:26:00.033+01:00

Once upon a time, so way back then that you can hardly even picture the time, a really rather together family decided to safari out across the savannah and the deserts and mountains, not only the physical deserts and mountains and ice fields, but also the hot and stormy deserts and mountains, the freezing expanses of icy ignorance, the seas and oceans of superstition because they felt, sort of, uncomfortable with it all.

They’d had some kind vision that they wanted to come into the light and comfort of reason and learning and, by and by, get a square meal inside of them all.

Without having to go to war and kill everyone for it, that is.

And this good family and its descendants spent millions of years travelling and reasoning and learning and shedding dark violent superstitions for a life of love and logic and cooperation, a life where they weren’t prey any longer and where they ceased praying and everything could be sorted out with words of wisdom and everyone minded their own bloody business.

One fine late spring day, with the apple blossoms just on the point of flowering, sun high in the sky, the Johnson family arrived in the pretty little town of Vultureville, just on the edge of the known world.

Vultureville, with its multifarious stadiums of worship, its palaces of legal drugs, its courts of industry and its picture houses and picture boxes of manipulated emotions and its blind belief in itself and its righteousness flowing from each and every window and door.

Like god's sunbeams from a terribly remembered Charlton Heston film.

Each and every door the Johnsons passed opened up to caverns of pious uprightness and sermons full of dead useful advice. Really dead advice, carved in gravestones.

Each and every door they passed, each opened to its host’s welcoming smile and an arm across the shoulder guaranteeing companionship and fraternity and love and support, and warmth, because these Vulturites had naturally selected in just such a way that they appeared to be the same species as their guests, except, of course, they were vultures in granny and granddad mourning garb, snow white hair, balding, scrawny necked, with sort of hooked noses.

Home baked bread and roasting coffee smells wafting from their kitchens included free of charge. Free of charge, so to speak.

At each and every door a different flavour was offered, a different kind of love and each love was, essentially, love yourself first and the mostest and the rest just better tag along or else. So, at each door was a different solution and all the solutions were incompatible but wisdom wasn’t to be listened to, or asked for, nor was it wanted and definitely couldn’t be found in sharing a conversation.

"That path isn’t the path to submission, brothers and sisters," whispered, hissing, the faithful.

The Johnson family, and those of their relatives, were a reasonable, respectable bunch, live and let live, minding their own businesses, keeping their noses out of the muck and were, of course, offered cringingly over the top hospitality and evidently forced smiles at each and every sunny threshold, and, having learnt to be respectful, swallowed, in doses just small enough to go unnoticed, a bite of bile from each and everyone’s superstitions, superstitions they’d spent millions of years turning their backs on.

"Sow those seeds! Sow those seeds, brothers and sisters, in the name of John Doe!"

Well, the Johnson family didn’t believe a word of it all, of course. Never had in millions of years. They didn’t believe a word of every host’s gifts of unreasonable potions for happiness and fulfilment, because they were already truly happy, and, though they didn’t believe a word of it, they were respectful, but, however, at each sign of respect a damned liberty was taken. Each and every demonstration of respect left them open to more and more pecking away at their common sense, at their idea of common ground, pecking away, pecking back in time, pecking back through millions of years of travelling and reasoning and learning and the shedding of dark violent superstitions, pecking back into dark, violent ignorance.

Right, so, of course, the Johnsons got themselves a pretty awful reputation. Got it quicker than you can catch a cold in a nursery school playground on a freezing January afternoon, real fast.

They'd become nasty bad evil mean people.

"Outlaws!"

I mean, they accepted hospitality without expressing enthusiasm, but didn’t want to make a single donation. They listened respectfully, but never learnt. They listened, and that showed respect and that was a concession one step too far and that was it.

"Where was their cash contributions?" Whined The Poisonous Faithful.

Even if they’d been charged and put on trial by The International Court of The Alliance of Civilisations, the ICAC, the outcome would have been the same.

By the time the family got to the end of main street Vultureville, they were just a pile of bones picked clean, nothing left for even a starving fly to buzz over.

A pile of bones, bleached white by the burning sun.

A pile of bones.

And that’s where Stanley Kubrick’s great ape came into the picture, isn’t it?

*Note, the photograph illustrating Bug Eyed Peter's bedtime story is a long distance digital shot of a fertilizer plant run on behalf of the ICAC in the suburbs of Vultureville by an organisation belonging to the sphere of action of The Born Again Priest and his cronies.

Extra information on the activities of The Born Again Priest can be found under "The Born Again Priest" tag.

FOR THE LOVE OF SAHAR

2008-03-09T19:01:00.018+01:00

Dandelions and daises, dingle dell. I am a child again. When I was a child I used to ride in the rear, nearside passenger seat of my father’s nineteen sixty four Ford Zephyr Zodiac. Powdery green colour, neat angle to its wings. No seat belts used in those days and I used to rest my head against the window, ever so slightly cool on a summer evening’s drive.

We would often motor down to the south coast and back on narrow country roads, next to rich green hedgerows, through deep green tunnels of overhanging trees. Cool tunnels of darkness in clear summer evening light. I would watch myself outside the car, over there, running, floating at speed down the barely visible bridleways and in and out of the trees, always keeping up with the car, smiling and waving back at me from out there, flying my Airfix air force, commanding my Airfix army. I could never watch me from outside the car though.

Until now.

Now I can. Dingle dell. The car is just as ghostly as I was when I was running through the green woods, dingle dell, in nineteen sixty seven as commander of a squadron of Centurion tanks, cheeks ballooned out, engine sounds spluttering from my lips.

I can see me inside. I am the passenger in the back seat, face pressed against the glass. I am the four headlights. I am the sparkle off the chrome and I am the chrome. I am pistons pumping out their beat, the lead in the petrol and the exhaust melting into the sweet summer evening air. I am the smell of petrol burnt in nineteen sixty seven vintage engines. I am the damp smell of summer evening rain. I am a raindrop on the windscreen wiped too quickly aside, but I am good at being raindrops. I am the rain. I was there. I saw it. I see it.

I am the smell and colour of dad’s pint of Red Barrel. I am the dimpled glass hugging the beer. I am the little boy on the swing in the country pub garden. The Ship Inn. I am the pirate. I am the grass under my Tuff shoes. I am the to and fro motion. I am the little girl in plaits wearing a white flower pattern cotton dress, waiting for her turn to swing. I am her eyes, I am her spiteful stare at me and I see what she sees, I see what she thinks. I see what she means.

I see seesaw. I see it all. Out of the body inside the mind and it is more real now than it has ever been, and every time I journey it is more real inside here than ever, although it is never ever exactly the same, time and time again, crossing the ocean, golden sails glowing in the sunset.

Dad is dead now. So is his Ford Zephyr Zodiac. I often wear my father’s face like a mask. I move into my father’s face, I become my father’s face and, for an instant, see things from his point of view. Literally.

The thought often occurs to me that he might be telling me lies or that I might be lying to myself, crossing the ocean, golden sails glowing in a sepia sunset.

Fire and Brimstone. I am an adult. In the south, sandstorms, but I was the raindrop falling to the desert sand. We were two raindrops, Sahar. I was there, I saw it. I did it. I fell. I fell in love, Sahar, with you and you with me.

In the south you dare not open your mouth.

In the north, floods and I was a raindrop falling, wrapped around desert dust. I was there, I saw it. Sahar, Dawn, dawn, I had flown with her, floating over the dusty land, hand in hand with the desert sand. I was her tear, but I felt no fear.

I was there, I saw it, I had it canned even if they had it banned. I was there, I did it. I had consummated the lust and I felt no fear because I felt her trust.

They took Sahar away from me. They took her away. For ever.

I was our tender kiss but, then, the hydraulic hiss. I was a throbbing symphony, I was the wear and tear. I was the crack, the number one, I was the screaming track. I was a gear change like clockwork, the exhaust drifting blue black in the air.

I was the armoured steel, never, never ever to turn on my heel. I was the tank. I was the wear and tear. One hundred and twenty millimetres, I was the gun man, looking for fun. One hundred and twenty millimetres, I was the shell man, their trip to hell, fire and brimstone.

Sahar is dead now. When I remember someone who has died, more often than not I first see their face. From one side, from the other, face to face, from a little higher up, a little lower down, a myriad of angles. Once however, I wore Sahar’s face like a mask. I moved into Sahar’s face, I became Sahar’s face and, for an instant, saw things from her point of view. Literally.

Now I do it over and over.

The thought often occurs to me that she might be telling me lies or that I might be lying to myself more like it, crossing the ocean, golden sails glowing in the sunset.

Waves, on my last breath close my eyelids for me so that the sea has no time to wash away my sins.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

2008-02-03T21:13:00.002+01:00

Act One.

Eleven forty eight, dark night, London, England. The year, twenty fifteen. January the twenty fourth.

Nineteen fifties smog burns the eyes again. Coal burns in many a fireplace and there’s lead back in the petrol again, or that’s what it all smells like. Smog in the brain again, the book is the word, the church is the state and the priest is the prime minister, an old, balding, grey skinned, born again rider of the apocalypse baptist to boot.

Billy Johnson dropped his black plastic recycling bag full of household rubbish on the pavement next to the overflowing containers just to the left of the grubby, graffitied entrance to a privatised tower block in the London borough of Kingston upon Thames where he owned a small flat. A flat on the seventh floor on The Cambridge Estate. He felt in his trouser pockets for his keys.

Bill felt surpassed, but, unlike most oldies fast closing in on retirement age he had, happily, managed to avoid lashing out, lashing out at the nihilistic, drug ravaged younger generation, at the politicians and their airy fairy ideas of freedom and respect, at the decadent modern world with its lack of discipline and respect for church and state and its elders. He felt no part of any of that trash. No part at all. No, Bill felt surpassed and mildly surprised by it all, irrelevant but safe and comfy in the knowledge that he had never really amounted to much and never would, even after his death, and what did he care?

Anyway, he had had an inkling of a job well done, he had played his part and his part had been minimal against The Born Again Priest and company, but essential, though he was never to know that. He was a good agent.

He was becoming irrelevant and, like a salesman desperately trying to sell electric typewriters to desert tribes with only a waterwheel to generate power, his mind had been overacting and thrashing about in all sorts of exaggerated ways, trying desperately to get its wares taken notice of. But, he reasoned, what did he care about becoming obsolete? Not a jot. He knew he had been a good agent, done his best.

He was not at all depressed at any of that, that was not why he was standing at his seventh floor balcony window feeling furious and hurt. He was feeling a deep anxiety for something far closer, far more intimate yet universal for the middle aged. Everyone around him, close to him, family and friends, fellow agents, you name anyone and they seemed to be dying or close to the dying, and they were not dying in glorious cinematic battles or in part of a twisted, intricate spy drama on the point of saving countless innocent lives or rescuing damsels in distress, no, they were dying horribly painful sordid deaths from the results of diseases he would rather not name, even to himself. They were the ones dying as real life heroes with real life heroes at their sides, in agony, and this made Bill deeply sad.

Bill Johnson was in a reverie up on the seventh floor, thinking of flying.

The gigantic carnival float of a hand whose job it is to dole out everyone’s quota of irrelevance moves over the land in stereo surroundsound thunderclaps and biblical black cardboard cut out clouds, absolving those who are no longer relevant, germane, like a priest absolves the sinful as they cannibalise the body and blood of Mr J. Christ.

Gigantic dirty fingernails too.

Absolved of relevance. That is, if you’re lucky. If not, this papier-mâché apparition might just chop you down with a nice little paralysing stroke or a teasing little cancer just to let you know you had really got on the wrong side of John Doe. Euthanasia? Painkilling drugs? A condom to protect you from aids? No way. What you need is a nice natural death just like the nice natural birth and lifestyle we have always ordained for your submission. Carved in stone for your submission, cash most definitely in hand please, collection box on its way.

Bill Johnson’s reverie flickered into anger. You must mightily rail against it all. He felt a falling sensation in the pit of his stomach. He glanced at his watch.Twelve fifty two and a bit, or something like it.

Act Two

Twelve forty eight, dark night, Madrid, Spain, The year, twenty fifteen. January the twenty fourth.

Nineteen fifties lead back in the petrol again, or that’s what it all smells like because the air cooks solid chemical cold and refuses to move. Nineteen fifties in the brain again. Smog in the brain again, suffer the little children. The church is the state and the priest is the president, and an old, balding, grey skinned born again opus dei catholic death’s head to boot.

Miguel Iglesias dropped his black plastic recycling bag full of rotting vegetable matter on the pavement next to the overflowing wheeled containers just to the left of the elegant CCTV protected entrance to a privately owned block of flats a couple of streets back off the Castellana, Salamanca district, where he owned a small flat. Galvanised containers they were. He buzzed to be let in.

Don Miguel was a pleasant, thoughtful man, but he and his company and workforce had become increasingly, alarmingly irrelevant and increasingly and alarmingly radical and, like a salesman desperately trying to sell electric typewriters to nomadic tribes well equipped with GPS and instant connections to internet via the latest mobile technology, his business, on the verge of bankruptcy, had overacted and thrashed about in all sorts of exaggerated ways trying desperately to get its wares taken notice of, and they were having some success, at the expense of common sense that is. Not success in numbers that is, but in influence. You grease my palm here, I will grease yours there and suffer the little children to come unto me to be molested. Morally bankrupt, but rolling in grease.

Miguel had not been feeling at all comfortable with the born again fanaticism of the new salesmen for a very, very long while, so, as arranged, after a tender kiss, Jesús shot him up with a healthy dose of pure heroin and he dressed up in all his finest raiment, starched dog collar and the finest of silver crucifixes, and zipped himself up in a heavy duty black body bag of the type that his organisation frequently shipped to the world’s trouble spots as their charitable donation to disaster relief, gold embossed Vatican City seal and dedication from John Doe included.

The altar boy he had borrowed for the afternoon and evening, Jesús, zipped him up the rest of the way, checked for passers by on the street down below and when there were none tapped his companion and friend on the leg and Don Miguel Iglesias The Younger, eighty seven years old, cardinal of the church of Rome with hidden humanist leanings, jumped into space from the balcony rail of his seventh floor Madrid flat, plummeted an instant, glanced off the edge of a galvanised rubbish container with a black rubberised lid, and hit the concrete curb with a dull thud, twitched a little and died painlessly stone dead, no lights, no angels, no guilt no last judgement, nothing at all, a fitting personal revenge taken against the church that had left him in the lurch.

Jesús looked at his watch. One fifty two and a bit, the precise same moment at which Bill Johnson felt his stomach speak to him about a flight he was not about to take.

Flashbulbs lit the Madrid street explosively that night. Diamonds lit the night.

Billy Johnson and the background radiation left over after the explosive end of Don Miguel Iglesias recommend this link, "RAZONES POR LAS QUE MOLARIA SER OBISPO. EL CAMINO AL CIELO, EL CAMINO DE MARTÍNEZ CAMINO SA." although they've changed the title a teency weency little bit here. Touch on the link below,-

PRIESTS/CURAS

FIBS, THE GODHOLY FAITHFUL INSURANCE SCAM

2008-01-17T13:51:00.001+01:00

“…yes, and that’s the thing about insurance policies, Cerebrum, be careful and you should never need to reclaim on them.”

“Except the one that pays for your funeral!”

“Actually, that’s one insurance you’ll never ever get to use!”

“Had the goddamned death's head mormons round again today too.”

“Again? John Doe's brokers.”

“Saw those corporate looking name badges and they didn’t even have time for a ‘have you ever thought about…’ before they got the door in their faces.”

“Insurance!”

“What?”

“Insurance. Now, there are some Johns who have learnt to recite their policies by rote, heads scraping the floor or rocking backwards and forwards like the egg men I had as a kid. Remember them, Cerebrum?”

“Smack ‘em on the head with a teaspoon! End of story!...Russian dolls?”

“No, painted egg men. Didn’t open. Solid wood. I think. Rocked too and fro for an eternity…or perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me again…but John Doe’s self appointed brokers even sell their nightmares to the underage children of the faithful, legally, from their business premises all over the country…There’s no smashing them over the head with a teaspoon…”

“All over the world, actually. You're on your high horse...A client is a client is a client to a pusher, Peter my dear, insurance down now against future income. Good business practice. A captured market…”

“Yeah…and when the worst comes to the worst there’s the inevitable dry voice in the conscience that tells you you signed the contract and should’ve read sub clause sixty nine B, so it’s highly unlikely you’ll get…”

“You’ll get to enjoy what you were sold, eh?”

“Unless you pay yet another hefty premium say they!”

“Yeah, and normally you’re putting money down against a possibility.”

“Normally, but John Doe’s brokers are asking you to pay a more than generous premium, to put good money down on the implausible…”

“Which means then, Peter, that there are actually two policies you’ll never ever get to use, no?”

“You said it, Cerebrum! You said it!”

“Gullible. People are just so terribly innocent, empty pages, virgin material.”

“While you’re on about virgins, and bearing in mind your brother introduced old Mr Death into the picture the other day, C, I can’t help but make the comment that screwing virgins when you’re dead in paradise is all well and good in theory, but the practice must be pretty frustrating. Let me explain, let’s see…”

“Feel free, feel free!”

“It must be pretty frustrating going to ethereal paradise,

“Second door on the left and up the stairs, Sir!.”

“Penthouse suite? Anyway, listen, you blow yourself to bits and get shovelled up into a blue plastic bucket from the Chinese bazaar corner shop with little bits of the kids and passers by you took with you, dog shit and guts and fag ends, blood, bladder content from here and there, a nicotine stained fingernail, scalp…”

“Ok, ok…”

“…and you open your eyes in paradise and see your grandpa, nice clean bullet hole through the head, fucking all your virgins. He’s all there! So you take a look around and, holy shit, you ain’t got no knob to get knobbing with, in fact, you hardly got any of your own bits at all, and double holy fucking shit, the nearest bit of anything that’s vaguely penis shaped is a bit of gristle that probably came from the stinking, unbelieving atheist pig you pushed in front of at the bus stop. Goddamn it!”

“Goddamn it! To finally get to see your quota of virgins after queuing in the martyr’s queue, swilling around in your leaky blue plastic bucket..."

"Made in China."

"...and you suddenly realise everything is so ethereal you can’t even get your hand round the meat to beat it and you look around and you’re all just a river of foul smelling decaying fleshy sewerage. I love it, Pete! I just love it”

“Someone’s sold them a little fib! There’s a few fibbers around somewhere, my friend!”

“Gullible. People are just so terribly innocent, empty pages, virgin material.”

“Ha! Smack ‘em on the head with a teaspoon! End of story!...”

Bug Eyed Peter and Mr Cerebrum just have to recommend this link, "RAZONES POR LAS QUE MOLARIA SER OBISPO. EL CAMINO AL CIELO, EL CAMINO DE MARTÍNEZ CAMINO SA." although they've changed the title a teency weency little bit here.Touch on the link below,-

CURAS/PRIESTS/PRIESTS/CURAS

CHILD ABUSE (ABUSE, PART ONE)

2007-12-26T22:53:00.004+01:00

“He hurt me mother. He hurt me with what he did and what he said. He really really hurt me.”

“I know that, my love, but while he was hurting you, he was hurting me a lot...a whole lot lot less...”

THE TORTURER, (ABUSE, PART TWO, MOBBING)

2007-12-14T23:43:00.005+01:00

Arthur Lovich, but I have them call me Love. Neat, right? Love? Honesty time, Kids! I’m a nobody in this company and I know it but I’ve a reputation to uphold and it isn’t the reputation of a loser, no way. I’m on top of it all, man, and though I’m on the production line everyone knows my name. I’m the centre of it all. I got culture, man. I listen to Queen and play Oblivion on the computer with the kids.

I’m a control freak, or something, a born manipulator and I know this work is all empty and pointless, it’s dead time for me and so, for a bit of fun, a bit of a laugh, I like to feel I’m having an effect. Creating something. Ha! I’m the king of the dead time. It’s power for me, POWER with capital letters, P-O-W-E-R!

Man, I can really make everyone’s life uncomfortable, so I do! I mean, no one respects me, I know that, for god’s sake, no one ever has! No one! What the fuck do I need respect? Fear. Now, there’s as good a tool as anything else and it works like a dream fear does. Three hundred ‘n fifty mugs here and everyone knows my name. Told you that before. They say it under their breaths.

I’m here for life. I got a fixed contract shits! Fulfill all my quotas and nobody steps on my toes or try it on with me or I’ll fuck ‘em right up. They just gotta give me a look. A look‘ll do it, or coming on all friendly like! That‘ll set me off and I’m on their case! Hey, the job’s a bore for christ’s sake. You’ve gotta keep yourself entertained. They laugh too, they gotta laugh! I just love to hear those false laughs. Kind of nervous, sort of too loud or not quite loud enough. These people are just scum, fuck ‘em.

The King of The Dead Time, me and you can’t afford to get all self involved, no way. Don’t get me wrong, man! No excuses. I know exactly what I’m up to. I’m a professional. I screw up all these shits ‘cause it makes me feel like royalty! No, I feel the power. I’m your normal Tom, Dick or Harry, can’t tell me from Adam on the street, not much good at explaining things in words and don’t think I talk like this out there either but, you know, nowadays you just can’t hit nobody but you can have some fun breaking their fuckin’ stupid brains in! Don’t care who I fuck, nobody fucks with me.

THE TORTURER AND THE TORTURED, (ABUSE, PART THREE)

2007-12-14T23:37:00.003+01:00

Her name’s Mary. Good damned Christian name that. Mother of God. I go to Church. Sometimes. More action in the old bit of the bible. I can relate to that. Anyways, this Mary came on kind of cute and friendly. Shit, the other guys started to quite like her, come on to her a bit, her being the only girl worth looking at in the section. Man, have we got some ugly bints in here. Well, I wasn’t having any of that. Got to work on her as soon as I clocked on to that. I was dead cheery and all smiles for the lads but pressured the slimy bitch from the start. I was dead jovial for their ears but stuck the knife in in whispers over her shoulder, breathing down her neck.

“Hey, dear! Can’t wait ‘till the end of the week for that piece!” I’d shout over the noise of the machines for everyone to hear! All with my best toothy smile in place. Then I’d lower my voice, “Bitch, biiiiiiiiiiiitch!” Over and over and fucking over again, like mantra, or whatever, in her sweet little ear.

“You gonna burn out bitch..”
“Why don’t you burn, bitch..”
“What you telling me that for bitch..”
“Prick teaser!”
“Using your fingers for the wrong job bitch..”
“Never gonna make it with me here bitch..”
“You’re losing it Bitch..”

Man, I got a whole songbook full of this stuff, all up here in the head department!

Sure enough, she got all nervous and her production fell and so did the pieces I’d pass her and drop so it looked like she’d dropped them and, boy did she look incompetent and the lads saw that and I didn’t even have to speak to her no more but I just pick on her with the lads and the lads don’t talk to her no more either, ‘cause I won’t be having any of that and she can’t fucking hack it no more and sweet little Mary has gone all quite contrary.

Spoke to the foreman, she did. The guy’s a friend of mine. Nobody likes people who talks behind their backs. I told them all that. Explained it in real clear language. So, I’ve got the cow on the slippery slope and we laugh and snigger and comment and give the bitch the finger when Little Mary Quite Contrary is in earshot, and she’s had it. I’ve turned everyone and everything against her. Even the fucking machines!

She eats her sandwiches in the toilet ‘cause I just can’t never let up with the sarky comments and dirty suggestions with the lads. You know the plan! Gotta keep her on edge. Told everyone she was a paranoid bitch out to get ‘em all, and, whether they believe it or not, that’s the way they react ‘cause I’m in control here, baby, and I’ve got a nice warm feeling inside and they’re all shiteating cowards, the cunts. Fuck them all.

And sweet Little Mary Quite Contrary has lost a whole load of weight these months I’ve been working her over and looks much sexier than when I started work on her, the bitch.

“Bitch”, I like that word, just rolls off the tongue like it should be in some Queen song. Rolls off the tongue like poetry!

The “Arthur Lovich” of this three part story is a fictional character.

THE TORTURED, (ABUSE, PART FOUR, THE MOBBED)

2007-12-14T23:30:00.004+01:00

I think all these people see through me. I’ve become some kind of ghost or something. I don’t know, but I feel dirty, polluted somehow, but I can’t put it into words, really. They all take any opportunity to niggle me, to take a dig at me and it’s been like this ever since I can’t remember when. I’ve lost my temper sometimes, I’ve snapped, I’ve said things I shouldn’t have, I’ve got angry but mostly I don’t know what I’ve been talking about because everything is so empty and I’m not me anymore. I’ve disappeared, gone.

What have I done to deserve all of this? What did I do to set it all off? What can I tell anybody? My eight hours have twenty four hours worth of minutes in them, weeks worth of minutes in them in a future that is always on top of me so I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating. Am I explaining myself? Can you see what I’m getting at? I know what’s going on, then I think I know what’s going on, and then I’m not sure what’s going on and then I’m lost and then it all starts going round and round and round in my head, over and over and over again and I can’t think straight.

I can’t let everybody down. I’ve got to cause a good impression. Be friendly. It’s impossible because I’m not me anymore, I don’t know who I am anymore. I just can’t get the production done. Eight hours, with all those millions of minutes, is a black hole. A big black aloneness. My hands tremble at the start of the shift and tremble the whole day, the whole week. I’ve got a knot in my stomach I just wish I could unravel. I want to force my hands in there and untie it all but I don’t have the energy. I’m too weak. I’m too tired, worn out.

I’ve tried to talk to them all. I try to smile. I tried to talk to Lovich, but he was so spiteful I nearly cried but I didn’t, because I’m trying so hard not to be pathetic. I try to talk to the other guys but, somehow, he’s turned them against me. They won’t talk to me, but they won’t leave me alone either. Seriously, sometimes I think they’re afraid of him. I don’t know.

I’m suffering from a kind of tunnel vision and tunnel hearing. I don’t understand. They’ve been giving me looks again and laughing at me and passing comments I can’t quite hear, though they have a nasty tone to them. Maybe I’m a bit paranoid. Maybe I’m blowing this up out of all proportion. I don’t think so.

I don’t understand anything. I feel so useless. My thoughts don’t work and my words are less than useless. What can I say to my husband? I can’t. I’ve left it too long to even know where to start to explain. Things have all piled up. He’s, somehow, behind a door and I’ve piled up so much against it it’s impossible to open. Am I explaining myself? I don’t know anymore. Anyway, I don’t want him to worry over me, I’ve got to be strong for my family. I’ve asked some of my best friends about it. You know, I’ve told them bits and pieces, and they’ve been ever so nice and given me some good advice, but what use is good advice if your friends aren’t holding your hands? Nothing. It all evaporates when they let go. Sometimes I can keep it up to the factory gates.

What am I becoming? I’m too scared to go to bed because I can’t sleep and my thoughts won’t leave me alone. A nightmare would be a relief. It would mean I’d slept. I’m so terrified of getting up because I know what I’m in for because my mind's been turning it over and over and over again all through the night. The days have it in for me.

Just another very bad day.

I broke down and knelt and cried in front of my little daughter this evening. She’s not even three yet, but she was just so beautiful I couldn’t control the tears. She cried too, because mummy was crying and I kissed her soft cheek, and that was even more beautiful and her little tears were salty, but kind of sweet too.

I hope my tears weren’t too bitter for her. I love her so much.

The “Arthur Lovich” of this three part story is a fictional character, though far too many men and women of his kind are destroying lives in workplaces everyday, all over the world. Let me extend the accusation and say that far too many men, and, to a lesser degree, women, are doing the same thing to their partners in homes all over the world, torturing, destroying, CONTROLLING.

The man "behind" Arthur Lovich actually used the words "Burn out." He knows exactly what he is doing and is the more dangerous for it. He has investigated all the possibilities.

If you are a victim of mobbing, fight back! Never let it even have the chance to CONTROL you. Denounce the mobber to the company, the unions and find help and get information from associations. Where? Google “mobbing”. Yahoo “mobbing”. Never say “IT’LL GO AWAY IN THE END.” If you ignore it, it never will.

If you see mobbing going on in your workplace, denounce the mobber, or you will be next on the list. Stay quiet and the mobber has you CONTROLLED too. Fight back.

Mary is a fictional character too, and her daughter, husband, mother and father, but there are too many real victims just like them that shouldn’t be having their lives destroyed. Fight back!

TAKE CONTROL BACK FROM THOSE WHO WOULD USE IT AGAINST YOU.

SCREWED, SCREWED UP AND SCREWED DOWN

2007-11-29T10:46:00.000+01:00

I am not really interested in what anybody is doing right now, unless they’re doing it to me and mine, and I don’t see that anybody should be at all interested in what I’m doing right now, unless I’m doing it to them and theirs.

That’s what I thought then and, on the face of it, it seems like a reasonable deal.

So? So the holy man just screwed my best friend. Pulling the strings, tried it on quick and secret and with sacred salvation thrown into the bargain with his heavenly orgasm. A life devoted entirely to pleasure results in emptiness, he whispered in his seconds of climax.

He got there first, in the name of some born again something or another, with all the trappings, all the theatre, and act two was his vanishing act.

One hell of an anticlimax, whateverwhichway you look at it, specially for my best friend.

Once upon a time I’d had a similar plan and the opportunity, but my offer came without the strings attached and was rejected, OK, dear, no problem. I understood.

Sometimes pure lust is just too honest and honesty isn’t in the nature of the game.

You get screwed, screwed up and screwed down.

So, what’s the big deal then? Happens every day, right? Right, but you can’t react with extreme reasonableness to extremism, and therein lies a paradox of sorts.

I could've killed him.

PORNOGRAPHY AND COLDER WEATHER GETTING COLDER

2007-11-22T11:56:00.000+01:00

Bug Eyed Peter could walk down the street and sow terrible violence and destruction around him every step of the way. He could roam through at least two worlds at the same moments in time and, while in one, the conversation, the gossip, turned on the changes in the weather or who had begun to do you know what with whom, in the other his meat knife would be carving painfully deep red tattoos in young summer suntanned flesh.

Everything he touched lived in these two, or more, worlds. In one everyone begged for pornography, more beautiful suffering and pain, more death and destruction while, in the other the weather was getting colder and the summer suntanned girl caught the university bus or got out of the lift at the fifth chatting to Debbie about Mark totally unaware of what she had just suffered, what they had all just been through or what they were just about to suffer.

Everything Peter touched decayed, but not out there on the street. It all decayed inside his head, in the death chambers and sweet sewers of his imagination. Out there, on the street it was as beautiful as ever.

Everything he touched shrivelled behind his lonely eyes and life became sordid and, gradually, everything and everyone he reached out to really did appear to decay right there in front of his eyes and the passersby in the street began to give him strange sideways looks and avoid direct eye contact and the weather conversations, always brief, became inaudible whispers and the girls kept it down to a dry, very dry and distant “Hello” or “Bye” and that was that.

So, that which was beautiful, but that which he had soiled, was never enough to satisfy the tastes of his fantasies and everything became a terminal disappointment, for his worlds had intertwined far too intimately and Bug Eyed Peter was hurt.

He was hurt and beautiful and lonely in his suffering, his head turned to face some far distant horizon, some far distant tragedy, though the tragedy was inside and he was abandoned and abused and finally forgotten in his solitude.

Thankfully, Bug Eyed Peter was aware of his predicament and snapped out of it one day when he realised that things had to be kept firmly in their places and nothing was more powerful, or beautiful than what was out there before his eyes, no imaginations, no fantasies, no inventions could compare to the bare beauty before his eyes.

“Hey, Pete! What time’s the next bus?” breathed Alba in his ear.
“Just over an hour. Want a coffee?”
“Yeah, why not? You coming or what?”

Peter checked his watch.

“Hurry up then..............do we really have the time?” asked Alba impatiently as she noticed Peter pull the sleeve of his jacket down over his left wrist.

“In reality, no!” he thought to himself.

THE GENE THAT INVENTED GOD (A CONSPIRACY THEORY)

2007-10-27T18:45:00.003+02:00

“Doesn’t look much like they do anything other than reproduce.”

“They juggle. They’re professional jugglers!”

“So, sometimes it comes off, sometimes it doesn’t, then?”

“When it works, it really hits home and they make allies and the more acolytes they manufacture the more success they have.”

“Seems to me that it all got a bit out of control when what they stitched together started getting all thoughtful and questioning.”

“They juggle, I told you that before, but, like any good conjuring trick, you just haven’t picked up on how it works, can’t believe how it works”

“We know how it works!”

“That’s what you think! It’s all part of their strategy, keeping it under their very own hats! If you got fellow travellers, keep them tight up close together, all the better to reproduce with, baby!”

“And all the rest?”

“Dead, extinct, all the individuals exterminated. Never had a look in! “G” stumbled on the idea of god and god kept the machinery all oiled up all the better to reproduce to!”

“So genes invented god?”

“No, a situation was engineered in which the meme was useful to them.”

“So, to all intents and purposes, genes invented god?”

“In a manner of speaking! The god system of control was efficient, reproductive. The more you reproduce the more you produce like you, the more fun you have with yourselves!”

“Masturbation! Seems to me that it’s all got a bit out of hand. Too much investigating going on for their purposes now. Too much for their own good!”

“Crass error of interpretation, sunshine! They’re juggling and the god idea was part of the code that’s now obsolete, already built on. To date, the juggling, the shuffling of codes has been painfully slow but now! Now the codes are on the point of short circuiting time”

“But people are beginning to say the machines are not the codes but a product of the codes, right?”

“Yet another crass error, my friend! This is their conspiracy! The codes have engineered a situation in which the very machines they built have become sufficiently well programmed to juggle with the very codes that built them! Voila!”

“Voila what?”

“The cat that chases its tail! A black cat on The Satin Greaseway! Whoa! You think that’s chance?”

“Chance?”

“Evolution! EVOLUTION!”

BLACK CATS ON THE SATIN GREASEWAY

2007-09-11T21:31:00.001+02:00

I held Peter’s cold trembling hand while my silver seabirds glided over a silver night time seascape, and when the moon fell just about right, the sea was mercury and the buildings became shimmering jewel studded silver silk, like a New York of the films.

I saw a black diamond sky, a mercury sea. I saw black cats on the satin greaseway.

I held his cold hand, he who spoke so much he had long ago run out of things to say but kept on saying them all the same but, if you couldn’t have thought once, you shouldn’t have thought twice.

You carried it all too far and fell into a profound, empty depression, and you were simply incapable of making beautiful sad works of art out of it all. Tragic art might have saved you.

Nor were you capable of leaving it all alone. Leaving it all alone might have saved you too.

I came to realize that never had there been a glimmer of imagination or understanding behind those dark eyes which always seemed to promise so much, and so you lived in a world where there was no sense and everything was nonsense, no rhyme nor reason, only blind faith and submission.

In our quiet, respectable London suburb the mantis of fear and fever never allowed you to sleep, nor to act or react, not even a fragment, not a line of rhyme or reason. The mantis sowed living room claustrophobia for you. You, curled up, paralyzed on the bed brought down from upstairs, and everything out there rang a bell but nothing made music.

Under a black diamond sky, I watched the silver milk mercury sea, the shimmering jewel studded silk and the moon coin tossed heads and tails, and everything rang a bell for you but nothing made music like the black cats on the satin greaseway could have, like a silver night time seascape could have, like the magic and poetry of reality could have.

I tried to bring it all together for us for so long. I was the heroine who sowed red roses across the divide. Under a black diamond sky, I was the black cat on the satin greaseway.

I was the only jewel in your life.

THE RAW, NAKED TRUTH

2007-07-18T19:09:00.000+02:00

I have to admit that I can’t say I can recall everything discussed at the meeting, or afterwards when I caught up with the priests in the deep, plush, subdued luxury of the hotel bar. The snatches of conversation I report here might not be a hundred percent accurate, word for word, but their meaning is.

There had been joyless prayers recited and a hymn sung with a terrible piety and very little enthusiasm or music and the suits were dark grey or black and the faces were ashen and expressionless, the cardinals, bishops, priests and courtiers of The High and Mighty Church of John Doe were waiting on death and waiting on those waiting on death and their release into paradise like buzzards. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Cash on demand.*

The worn out chains of office weighed mightily heavy round each and every dog collared neck.

“Let John Doe be praised.”

“Now let us begin.”

Black briefcases, all the same slightly battered age, at exactly the same moment, spewed reams of officious documents onto dark, polished wooden tables.

“This is war and our highest priority is to manipulate, and so invade, the areas of consciousness still underexploited or unknown to our victims, subjects and potential converts. We must invade and occupy their ignorance.”

“And keep them ignorant.”

“Praise be to John Doe.”

Their words were a colourless litany chanted with the intonation of the dead, or how you might imagine the dead should intonate if they could actually get up and find anything to say, dusty and as dry as ash and they were not meant for my ears.

“Take note, however, that no religions with intelligent or well indoctrinated representatives actually desire to take the reins of earthly power, they stay just out of frame, for they have absolutely no desire to carry on their shoulders a burdensome responsibility for the material failures common to all of us human beings.”

“Let John Doe be praised.”

"John Doe?"

“Let the politicians and libertines, the scientists, let society take on its back and shoulders this burden of material inadequacy and our failures will become theirs alone and we shall control a system of absolute moral authority, have faith.”

Their words were predominantly negative and obsessed with evil and sin and the cooperation one might subscribe to with these evils and sins.

“Have faith? Keep one step aside, in the shadows. We shall be the puppet masters.”

"A door will be opened for our absolute moral truth, a truth above and beyond the laws of man. The door will be open to absolute power.”

“The raw, naked truth! Absolute power!”

“Absolute control. Praise be to John Doe.”

Two hours later I was picturing centuries of popes who all looked like the painter Francis Bacon’s pope innocent X’s demons, liturgies, processions, ceremonials, hierarchies, cathedrals and I smelt the incense and wax and the centuries of submission and blood as I sank into the red velvet armchair in the bar next to a tall sash cord window that looked out onto the main square and framed the renaissance spires of………

My trains of thought were interrupted by The Born Again Priest and his acolytes somewhere over to my right, as he slammed his empty beer glass onto the green leather topped table and exclaimed,

“John Doe be damned! The raw, naked truth. If we can’t screw them all down, ha! Damn them all, we’ll surely screw them all up.”

I felt sick for the future.

*This is a snippet of conversation that I have been unable to place into a definite context or strict timeframe, but which I have the suspicion I caught in the corridors of the hotel sometime late that evening.

“The politicians and libertines, the scientists, society, the John Doeless still insist on paying us for our efforts, can you believe that?”

“It’s a miracle.”

“No, it’s the raw, naked truth.”

“Damn them all, but, mark my words! Keep your hands out for their cash.”

Then I remember them crossing themselves. A lot of that had gone on all day.

“The Word of John Doe.”

"Who?"

This report is dedicated to the Spanish branch of John Doe Ltd, Blázquez, Camino, Cañizares, Rouco and company at the C.E.E., who have launched an all out war against the Spanish government’s introduction in schools, of a subject called “Civic Education”, or “Education for Forming Good Citizens”, (Educación para la Ciudadania).

THE NAKED LADY, A CHILD’S FAIRY TALE

2007-06-24T21:21:00.000+02:00

Baby was transfixed by the vision of Naked Lady standing there, hypnotically swaying, slightly, gently, from side to side.

Naked Lady grew and her detail was beauty, her being, ugliness. Fast came decay and then death to Naked Lady and she was gone, but Baby wasn’t.

For the rest of his life Baby intended to live in his voyage into the depths of her colour, the red carpet rolled out, his feet sinking into the luxuriant, warm pile, leading him on to a lush velvet upholstered throne where pure beauty reigned, beauty itself, and that was all he needed and all he needed to know and experience.

Once upon a time, one late, sunny spring afternoon, just as the last diamond drops of a shower were falling, Baby had padded unsteadily off down a damp garden path and, for the most part of those other mortals, the most part of him had never come back.

“Baby Belladonna”, his mother, Lily, lovingly called him thereafter, remembering, each time she uttered the words, the smell of warm, sweet, spring rain bringing a garden to life.

“Vegetable life”, said the most part of those other mortals, even though they knew Lily was within easy earshot and Lily would blush such a deep, pure, rich red at every barb.

Baby Belladonna saw and felt that stab in Lily’s back each and every time and knew just why he should never return, for, each and every time, Baby Belladonna felt hate burn more fiercely in his heart.

Hate instead of beauty, and guilt instead of peace sat on a lush velvet upholstered throne where pure beauty had once reigned.

THERE IS BLOOD ON THE SWORD

2007-05-31T13:36:00.004+02:00

Pete and Cerebrum are sat in the bar opposite the station on a hot, sticky summer afternoon, throwing ideas about over a glass or two of desperately welcome beer.

“Tankman Johnson customised engines. He’d ripped out the L60, installed a Condor “liberated” from the workshops coupled with a TN37 automatic gearbox, had either replaced, re-enforced, re-machined or re-built the entire drive train to his own specifications to handle the extra power he’d tweaked out of the unit. Almost one thousand five hundred horsepower so he claimed.”

“One of my selves could have been a soldier driving tanks through the mud like my toys were driven through the puddles and dug into defensive positions in the back garden at weekends. The scouts put an end to those childish dreams. You got told what to do and you had to do it like they told it. Obey orders.”

“The engine bay was full of clean, surgical looking chrome, from the exhaust pipes to two mean looking turbo chargers. Electrical cables and fuel lines were neatly, geometrically placed. Not a drip of leaking oil or fluid anywhere. You’d never seen anything like it. All highly unofficial, of course, and hidden, except when the starter was pushed and he and those nearby could luxuriate in the resultant music. He loved his work of art and his work of art responded lovingly to his touch.”

“How’d he get away with that?”

“Times of crisis. He kept the machines rolling. What could they say?”

The noble king is up there on the hillside dressed for warfare in his engraved armour, embroidered velvets and brocades, listening to the gentlemanly clashing of swords, seeing the lightning flashes of white light fire and flash from swung blades and the spell, the dream*, fades out into distant sepia tinged nostalgia and the tank engines throb a deep tone that moves in your guts and the tanks glide, gun metal black and blue, over the landscape jousting for position like beautiful armies of metallic reptiles.

The noble king is nowhere to be seen and The Born Again Priest’s section chief, the higher representatives who speak in the name of John Doe, his ideologues, all the ideologues of systems of control imposed from above, no longer ride into action, into battle, mounted on the backs of elegantly groomed, saddled and prepared war horses. They no longer bear their armour burnished bright. There are no shields decorated with the symbols of allegiance, cause and family, no banners of belief proudly held aloft, no leaders ready to defend their ideals with life and limb.

These warriors for justice are safely hidden behind black armoured glass, escorted by a phalanx of anonymous black limousines, camouflaged in creased, formal business suits, and to open their mouths is to preach to the converted from behind rows of shaven headed bodyguards, dark glasses and coiled cables leading to their ears and, with camouflage and subterfuge, die the last vestiges of the noble warrior, and there is no blood on their hands.

“Right! As the beautiful regiments of tanks throb and glide on hydraulic suspension over the rolling countryside, representatives of power are safely and secretly ensconced in deep brown varnished wood panelled offices, camouflaged in dead normal looking business suits, all rumpled up, of course, portrait photographs of themselves or the dear leader keeping a beady eye on proceedings......”

“......Never, say I, trust anyone who works under a portrait of himself and never trust anyone who works under a portrait of his dear leader. The scouts cured me of that need......”

After the battle the knight hands his resplendent weapon and shield down to his man servant, dismounts, stands by the head of his white horse and slaps its flank and feels the strength of the beast, its firmness of muscle, its weight, and the golden haired princess is in the tower waiting to be rescued and virtue and honesty and truth are upheld and the image fades out into distant sepia tinged nostalgia and the tank engine throbs a deep tone that rumbles in your guts and the tank glides, gun metal black and blue, to a halt. The crew slaps its flank and feel the strength of the beast, its solidity, its weight and feel that virtue and honesty and truth have been upheld but, in the boardrooms and control centres of the powerful, a profit has been made and there are stiff , vicious smiles on grey faces.

“......a profit has been made and the days of the warrior, the noble fighter for just, often lost causes fades into my bloodless schoolboy fantasy of the art of Sunday afternoon warfare, an “All Our Yesterdays” cold war documentary, a sepia romance of comic book heroes and black and white war films on television after the family roast. The bling, bling of submarines, the victory roll of a Spitfire and the sweet roaring sound of a Rolls Royce Merlin engine as a swastika goes down in flames over our green and pleasant land.”

The tanks sit, squat and heavy, under a crimson dusk, choreographed like Escher’s dragon reptiles, an opera of throbbing, pumping, hissing hydraulics and electrical circuits and they are beautiful in their weight and they are beautiful in their power and in their power of destruction, because, if there is one thing that is always done really beautifully, that thing is life and death, the business of destruction.

* “I hear hissing, I hear hissing in the distance, I hear the tanks crawling. They're crawling over the hill, they're crawling over the hill, like rattlesnakes in the desert sun. They're blistering up my spell, they're blistering it up they're breaking it up, they're breaking up my spell and what else is there, what else have I got? What else have I got but that spell?”

John Cale, "Leaving it up to You", from the album "Helen of Troy", 1975.