The Ship of Fools

"Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity for each other. Thus, "Ship of Fools" crisscrossed the sea and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors." [From Jose Barchilon's Introduction to Foucault's Madness and Civilization].

My new zine The Ship of Fools has now finally been assembled, collated and published. You can obtain your very own copy here via this fancy Paypal button. The zine is a choice mix of gallows humour, pickled organs, 6 for 5 on south London stories into the distant darkness, a biscuit review, the noble gases, a song about Simon Cowell and an explanation of what happens when you throw your wallet into a river. Everything is centered around this carnivalesque ship of fools. There's a dark laughter bubbling throughout.

tarocchi

Ah friends, I've got myself in too deep on an impossible project to suggest new ways of living. My spirits are all over the place. What can communicate a gut feeling beyond words, in spite of words? I've been reading Artaud - I recommend 'No More Masterpieces' from The Theatre and Its Double. It's worth seeking out. Here's one new means of living. It's not as insincere as suggests.

It began as an aristocratic card game in 15^th century Europe, but by the 18^th century playing cards became a means of divining the future. Tarot cards will not change your life but they can give an outline or form for the path it may take, or the paths to avoid.

Although I don’t personally believe in the future, there could be a truth in them cards. The tarot I mean. They’ve got a lot of nerve, trying to reduce the limitlessness of life, its sheer randomness and chances, into the symbolic alphabet of a pack of playing cards. The cards are claiming that a life is game, where fortunes are made and lost. It all seems rather melodramatic, and I must make some sense of it before I swoon.

It is a way of imposing shoddy symbolic meanings on random and banal events, feelings and fears in our laughably uneventful lives. It can never be true as such, as nothing has a meaning except the one we foster on it, true to ourselves and no one else. Yet it ennobles these things, shoves Meaningfulness up the arsehole of existence, and is it not expedient for our own happiness and self-grounding to believe in strange spiritual forces behind our lives, under them? I’m in that phase of life where you can believe in any thing - nonsense, magic, whatever. Nothing serious, just curious. Nothing more or less than a choice. Nothing like that cruel moment where you need to believe in something, anything, where your survival depends on it. No. Just a game some people play when they have little else.

Truth in cards: take it if you need it, don’t give it here, don’t throw it away. I read them cards once and they told me I was a right pretentious bugger.

Late night mass

Transmission:

Tower of Babel, Bruegel the elder 1563.

Tower of Babel, Bedford and Yeats 1964.

...suicidal young women clutching their faces in parks, by sleepless canals and rivers...pious Africans clutching gospels...city addicted to pleasure, mindlessly pursued, drunk, sniffed, consumed...the bleak street architecture of night, inky blue, hurting...rushing commuters are transmuted grey flesh, dead spirits, spectres...premier league footballers become merciless idols, emperors, as mercenary as medieval barons...picture the strike of all cleaners, we'd be dead in months...ex-teachers and businessmen they are, exiled by war and fear...a lighthouse in the city: where? hither, hither...close friends who killed themselves at university, battling with their sexuality, now demoralised by prospects of profit-propagation by psychopathic capitalist vampires...but loneliness is not the colour white. Hear me.

Why are they pulsing to and pursuing the same looped rhythms? They make them unhappy and now they cannot sleep, so they drink and score. Heroin and alcohol, which is the greater demon? Either presides, the latter a little more manichean, the former just plain evil, like brown rock, like pcp, crystal meth, all that rotten fucked up shit. House of Detention in Clerkenwell is one of the last survying sights of something called evil in older days...wandering demons and ghosts dream through us, reeking through the architecture, a different plane of existence...all hail this empire of sewers, London shiver.

Face quakes and quivers, closes like the heart. Vessels burst, onset of apoplexy.

Defaced mini-cabbie portrayed as Ahauserus the Wandering Jew...the motor-car works as omniscient media device, the front window a lens, the rear mirrors a kaleidoschope of shifting, stinking, stale yet pulsating landscapes.

"Londoners are just like rats. They climb over one another. You see the way they try to get to a certain destination, their meanness, the way they fight with each other, try to get to the top of the pile. What is their goal? It is to buy a very expensive car or to buy a swimming pool in their garden. Maybe they want to go on the most expensive holiday they can afford. It is all so blind. There is no morality to them" - minicab driver interviewed on p.75, Night Haunts, Sukhdev Sandhu.

Later: "What do I like best about London? Nothing. Nothing at all." Cabbie is attacked, robbed, by the predatory rats and ghouls of underclass suburbs, neglected ghettos as familiar as media paedophilia scandals. The ghost architecture of a post-industrial river...high rise luxury prisons, brothels of stokebroker, banker, interior designer lifestyles...the poor are the soil, the shit, the exploited base of capitalism, a trade free only for the extremely rich and greedy, the psychologically primitive AKA privileged, the avant-garde homo erectus who ate neandarthals.

The hunter's favourite creature is always the one he kills, more so than his companion hound or the way he treats his loved ones. Consider the greatest animal and bird collecters, Americans like Charles Willson Peale and the second Baron Rothschild. Peale loved nothing better than to shoot the birds he loved. Rothschild contributed to the extermination of Hawaii's more naive creatures. Today they steal the last eggs of the last female of the species. There are always buyers, collectors who will kill for the last evidence of anything.

The computers are always on, the best workers never sleep you see...the flats become entertainment bazaars, playstations and xboxes, facebook, fridge full of cheap booze and microwave takeaway-imitation dinners...endlessly apologising, masochistically polite and self-effacing: you, and I mean you sah, madam, all those people you've ever known but never had the motivation or interest to get to know or understand: you deserve better than the anxiety you're chained up in. You have the freedom to be good and beautiful, like all humans. For that, you need to be good to yourself, and nothing more. We have potential. Hence faith in democracies, education - and then the transnational bourgeois intelligentsia have the gall to talk about Enlightenment metanarratives ah mother.

Ach says the friar, the city is a sewer: weakness, addiction, fake stimulation, social inequality - this is what said friar sees conspiring the converging parallel lives that shrink into a whirling gyre, vortex perhaps or burning fire, fire. Others see bus routes, the beauteous and quietening settings of the Sun, mysterious faces, bland text messages...all people are Christ he says...especially the poor, the weak, the zombified junkie teenage sex workers...the pain...friar sees his prophet's crucifixion...god of pain and ignoble suffering...spectre-deity sees all and does absolutely nothing in the city of the broken and the dying. This is the fate of the self-harming insomniacs, spent and thwarted lovers maybe, mostly molested, abused, messed, fucked up...pity the prayer of the damned. Ah city of dreadful night.

[Read Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night by Sukhdev Sandhu for more information...]

annual appraisal (please complete and return by post to _____)

23 tomorrow. At the moment I feel nothing for it. I am in the company of abysmal hospital-style coffee. I could offer a list of events of this 22nd year and suggest a hypothesis of how I might have matured as a result, but it's an unnecessary and vain exercise. We don't change through property of number, and in the course of things I don't feel like I have altered, either in my way or my manners, or my opinions concerning things.

I still love black coffee. I still drink too much. I still squeeze and roll my tummy in as I walk to prevent it possibly looking flabby. I've walked far more of London, brewed beer, see people close die and arrange all the functional necessities of disposal. I gained confidence, discovered happiness, became bewitched with a beautiful notion of secret proposal and unique engagement rings. And then like the course of all things, I lost that happiness entirely by the end of last year. I had devote winter to charting a new course, rediscovering confidence a little, brick by brick. I've read a good deal, but not the Schweitzer, Burton, Montaigne and Reverte that still looms from the shelf. I gave my blood to the nhs and my words to another zine, ignominious as all others. I failed to find a meaningful friend though I've met many friends - my old goal now adjusted with the realisation that the world I treat as my friend, but there are none now that I'd look to as a friend to me. This observation seems banal yet dispiriting, but it contains within it a fiery independence and pride.

These words will age quickly, sooner than I will. I'm actually quite young, too young for this old life-weary affection I end up adopting. I offer nothing unique to arts, sciences, popular culture, or conversation. This is 22-year old testimony. My goals are as they have been. For now it's fair weather, but I've been toughened by last season's storms.

pith

I want to tell the world

Something about itself

But I know nothing of it

So what can I say?

That I am true, or that I speak

Perhaps I can tinkle a

Single tune on a pianner

Or turn a pithy phrase?

Or that I've known love

And the bitter taste of cigarettes

On a balmy wet autumnal afternoon?

But there is her in the corner

And the clatter of my own never-played melodies.

It won't help in mapping my

Image of You, whatever You be

Or the world and its anger

Its listless lusts all indifferent

Perpetual propagation

As stubborn as nitrogen.

Lord this is no measure.

UK yarbles

Does that paper bag
Tell us anything we need to know
About why live?
Except that we do,
And the motives of our passion, and indifference?

That we are, because we is?
That we be, because we do?
If it was simple as that
Scientisis wouldn't have
Dressed us up as chimps
Or aquamarine amoebas

There's longer explanations
In the silences,
Be it in rhythm or number
It's all a more fantastical
Explanation for electricity
That we're worth defining
Something -
Beyond UK yarbles,
Or lesser gress tax payments,
Or sexual frisson
XXXXXXXX
Or barking on
Packed computer carriages
No final works these
In 30 seconds
There's wicked songs in
Final mornings
Pink pagan manipulator
Loss winner
The least melancholy, he
The bossman
Absent bloody winner
Hater
No truth in politics or Greek words.

cordyceps

Of course the skies move like blankets:

We require bland metaphors my love,

They're consoling and homely

of course,

Of courses like the movements of the seas,

Or dangerous journeys

Pretty metaphors for life's less salubrious chaos,

Filtered into tidy A-B narratives,

Do you understand?

Maybe framed correctly -

Beyond the optimist's

Innocuous joy delusion

Is the most petty egotistical tragedy

Perhaps this is the greatest abyss

We – yes – we strive to deny

As hopeless as the Mersey

Or New Deal yarbles

And of course we could couch

Far more convenient narratives

Like the joy of double-dropping

On a Bank holiday Sunday

At your elder – no -

Your younger brother's barbecue

(it becomes such, increasingly)

And all his fizzy friends

Meat and candy

Beats all the drugs or honey

They could filter in my last-

-no really my last drink

Of the afternoon

Gravity could beg several questions

So if the graveyards of the lesser cosmso

Are replete with the indispensable of a dozen aegis

- We bloody needed -

Then why are we flagellates

Always the last to say no?

Ah worthies -

Consider no.

In this guttural negative

We have weapon with which we can

Defy emotionally abusive lovers,

Local tyros,

Gender mephistos or

The movements of the heavens.

Just say no, and

Complicity cannot happen

Though we're small

These things cannot permit tyrannies

We have our hue

The nihilistis dagger against good

But yer – ah

Who first called us a tool,

Or a bitch, first?

Remember which sibling, teacher,

Parent?

Lackeys or flunkies,

Brigands of the age

Colluding in the deluding

Of the passive pallid ones

A yes restores power to the factory -

Jutting like a familiar lover's

Familiar southbound fumbles,

I know where that hand will move,

And it's not nice, but I know

In 60 seconds I'll become

Master

And her taunts of no

Will intoxicate the baser side

Of our conjugal pillows.

Sex is poisonous.

Consider Cordyceps funghi

That parasite that possesses

The souls of the most minute creatures

Growing and flowering through the skull of each

In a grotesque homily of bitter life,

Inspire the maps around my bones

To spore anywhere out of this world.

totem

The life is good they say

Grounded by expensive clothes

And debt obligations

Says R. Willis:

“I am no ordinary spectre -

Look around – each pore speaks,

Each atom, a prophet of cosmic agency“

Says the totem of complicity:

Barbarity through dusky

Displayed indeference.

The 20th century mantra,

The horde has sacked the town

Filled it somehow

With their gaudy poundshops

Pinched expressions

“It's just a lark -

Besides, I lack stimulus“

The following edition begs consumption

The old elite has run out of milk

Ex-marxist English lecturer

Beseeches indifferent schoolboys

To choose their own fate

Which simply means

In the world of indifferent schoolboys

Creating a new persona in

Sitdown addictive online

Schizoid role-playing games

Or denuding said ex-marxist teacher

If world requires indifference

As latest edition purports

Then I have a kind of fuel today

In the world of debt obligations

This is the second childhood.

As happy and grateful as all that

Does not suggest.

spectre

Too tired to talk. Or to conceive or perceive original music. Instead I propose interactive theatre composed of various scenes of interminable length, possibly life-long. The main site is an old public house in the region of south London. A ghostly production, it begins heading the audienceas if on a ghost tour into the abandoned or squatted pub. After self-congratulatory welcoming drinks, the audience are separately led upstairs into the private lodgings and rooms of the establishment. What begins as curious, suggestive though an ultimately banal tour ends up being disrupted by live drama: accusatory dialogues in small rooms; characters presumed to be fellow tour-members becoming dramatically abusive; uncanny shrill and piercing shriekings, with the charged erotic energy that is suggested.

Traditional saloon bar changes violently. A woman exhorts us (the birthday downstairs, the eulogy) to remember any detail at all of her loved one. Visibly older, she appears later to shock us with the guilt of death and age, and the weight of her unresolved accusations. Small fires burn, the audience coralled into senseless risky games of chance, the tarot and the dice, tricked into betting their lives and other audience participants' souls – dialogues replay in small scenes again, toilets, drink cellar, beneath and above, behind the walls – a murder made and a murder – resolved? - of sorts.

7 day travelcard

Cramped vehicles carry the passive and easy to please, workers wired on coffee or agreeable pop. See the songbirds too, labouring under their own hunger, a global hunger that burns through all struggling, perpetuating and decaying life. See the flock of gulls hanging from invisible strings above the jetsam-debauched canal, pathetically trying to clutch edible nuggets from the effluence. A ruddy-faced bloater, ego inflamed with brown rock and cider, wails insults at a gaggle of innocents on the other side of distant railings. One of the greatest crimes of life that we survivors of Gods' bloody deaths still have rights to waggle our fingers at is the blistered alabaster sky is this: why lovers, reduced by time to friendship, insult and interact with each other in the most sickeningly horrible and violent way. Or savage indifference. Drunken abuse is hurled from one to another, the miserable relationship dynamic coarsened in the active abuser-passive self-victimising sulker.

The titanic battle between stress and hangovers. This bloated and overheated body, rolling us its stone or having its guts mercilessly munched. I want intoxication to be unusual, occasional excess rather than nocturnal norm.

kingdom of evil book

Racked by migraine into mudless waste. I write to live. However, I claim all my words as lies, including this old one. Hence all this is fine, so please stop worrying about me. All pain.

New drugs + toys - surrender = lovely, kinder, warmer, chocolatey

“Our lives are as enhanced or as limited as our own desires” - Polly Meltzer, pub near Clapton

“New Day. So, ah love, let's feed our need for illusion.” - Unknown, NI number AX55970E

Art and writing is a dialogue of learning. Learning about the world. Lacking conversation, we need an other to challenge, bounce and unfold our impressions against, our conversation folding them into more elaborate forms. Without dialogue, these bright and quickly-burnt impressions on the retina fade as quickly as these days do, therefore the written artistic product gives some mad hope for stretching out our lives.

Love is the key. One effect of absurd love fantasies is the purpose and interest in life it ignites. Sex is life and in our human society of names, history and righteous reverence, legacy and posterity become equal drives for longer life. Through the fantasy you daydream endless dialgoues, gentle conversations which (in the sublimation of a base and illegal lust) become filled with talk of death, the meaning of happiness, what could fulfil us – you know, that shite. The love-fantasy object becomes the new other for dialogue, the new audience for the stories, the stoic soliloquies that emerge. It serves a brilliant artistic purpose then, a sneaky but effective tool for the creative mind. Otherwise these stupid dreams drown in their own narcissistic and masochistic ends, detailed by “Venus in Furs” and the Romantic poets.

Look back on this life: its followed similar paths to so many others. I think of Billy Childish but without much of the intensity, the defiance of authory. I've tramped along following the accepted paths and established modes, scriptures and lifestyle norms, any resistance wastefully spent with a poor cynicism that carries out the order first before mocking it quietly after. Pitiful perhaps, but all it is is me. This is the little Me of us all, the weakened I that is nothing until it perhaps joins some We of revolutionary Anarchist association. But I believe that we develop and change as individuals, we grow and grow, of course soemtimes slower, of course sometimes uglier, but even if we get very older we – I hope – become more calm, settled, natural in that way implied by Laozi.

And this development is not marked by dates but by emotions. By different circumstances which have forced us again and again into the anxious bright uncertain world of the new, from new jobs or new loves to new homes, new countries. That newness which I think marked so much of childhood, which gives it that intense weight and shape in the formation of our personalities and nature. Therefore new loves and new dialogues could make us grow, open us to the touch, ready to receive the divine new, restirring the emotions that make us grow and change, develop further. I know that even when I lose this text, lose these words, somewhere this sudden urge to speak will stay with me, may filter out in another form in some conversations where I hope it will spark some new thought for someone else.

Our thoughts require the sunlight of expression: our thoughts must be viral or they will not be at all. I wish my words could hum and burn with the intensity of Van Gogh's Arles landscapes. That'd be my ideal. Words with passion, but beyond this current nihilistic self-absorption that's marked most of what I've done to date. Words that ache and struggle but ultimately sing with the passion of the sower, the life-giver of colour in the post-man's wife, or of desire itself, wander in the wonder may-be's and a sad long heart-thwarted summer night sticky with sexuality in “Starry Sky”.

skraeling island.

Mind, I am in some kind of hell
All of my own making.
This frontal lobe will soon burst
Cramped in familiar vices,
Preoccupied with worries beyond my words.
And I wish I was away from these idiot people
And their idiot lives full of
Idiotic things exaggerated to the heights of gods.

Idiots of the world: get a room
And leave my idiot self alone, ta
Your demands make my mind cramp
And my guts submit and surrender
All this shit I've accumulated
In listening to your draining monologues.

And how I despise all my sisters and brothers
Who call me names and who have driven me
Back here to skraeling island,
Back here to my adopted family and illegitimate children.
In the colony's club-house there,
Stirred by the raw and syrupy fire-water,
I stood on a broken stool and cleared my throat
(The locals were shocked: I'd been
Morosely silent all my life)
And declared:

We are not beautiful
We are the last of a tribe of
Asexual atheistic robots.
We have no skills to share.
No talent for communication.
We sit about gawping at lights
Whilst digesting sugars.
Punished to terminally doubt
All fidelity of good deeds.

They clapped and cheered dementedly.

CRYSTAL WINDS!

Life is not an infinite series of opportunities for self-development. Its moments and its grand scenes and its hopeless gestures where the most emotional seismic shifts occur are not like the anodyne blue doors in some crystal corridor of mirrors.

Understand: what this is I can't describe, but nor does it fall within the mediocre and familiar realm of druggie poesie. They shred through all sensation like crystal winds. Poetasters like me only blurt through grinning masks, sleep-deprived, forever running, a question of an hour late? How we punish those who betray us with smiles. We, the multitude, we, small-minded arsewipes condemned to onerously thinking - about what? - oh love, absolutely nothing. Hence the anxiety of being. Constantly being this schmuck with the name me, I. The responsibility of waking up and leading this life - it's yours, it's yours, it's yours. Oh mother. What am I supposed to di with it? Get a job? And when I've got one, then? Be purposeful? But what if I discover all will to be deceit? And the anxiety returns.

And yet the beautiful winds noted in the title of this piece suggests a fleeting sensation (but have you seen CRYSTAL WINDS!? - you may. Look out for them. They crush you like the wisdom of children). You beautiful scallywags know from all your fascination with ignoble sweethearts and pioneering teen films that life's most moving sensations are not fleeting perceptions but obsessions, long-lasting, residing from the bliss of caress to self-denying combustion.

Anyhow. Stalking through the rinds and cat-skins of suburban pavements, oppressed by chewing gum, unwanted adverts and fliers, taking on various forms, hey - now I swagger like a scarab beetle: now I hide my body into my coat, each lock exchanged causes stress or followed by a sharp sad pain, a donkey no less, perhaps. He paces ahead, brutal nike trainers and jutting elbows, arranging plans with a man in town. Or I glance quietly into her steely blue-grey eyes, dear silver, impossible to read when unlit by any copper winter sun. Each of these encounters of intimacy between strangers or unlikely friendships, the harpoon jolts, you feel as you talk talk common-place philosophies, and you see deep within yourself, amongst the cod-philosophe claptrap, you see THAT THERE IS A MILLION DIFFERENT YOUS, a million ones you have been, devoted in monuments that dream like you, teaming at their toes with flowers dedicated to you or your sister, no less.

But these encounters are just electrified connections, exposed parts finding a quick union as sacred as mutual masturbation, conjugal coitus, as natural or frightening as anything you might spot through a brief scan through the trees of your local park.

All my problems spill out of me. I have too many holes in my head and sides, and when I drink I start to leak all this rubbish. The worst of myself, the unresolvable conflicts of repressed desire and feeling, come on stage! Express yourself! In an age entirely lacking in understanding of what might be sincere feeling or desire, what is the most abject self-denial and prostitution than clambering on stage and expressing yourself? When will people realise that life cannot be understood without spending a significant amount of time in your birthday suit?

the north-west passage, no less

In search of the north-west passage.

I travelled and unravelled weary and wary, in search of strangers to confess my loneliness to. I hoped for intimacy but expected harsh words and several elbow-jabs in the face and belly. The crux of everything begins and ends here, in the miserable mind. It's a good world if you don't weaken. I ask for nothing less than the prison of my own bed.

She was soppy and daft, wet behind the ears. She stared for too long, confessed the desire for coarse and strange hands to envelope her body, wrapping her in protective caresses, as cold as possessed north sea water. Her banal fantasies were unheard by the sterile mob of the night-drinkers, yuppie-sprogs with enough spondoolies to sup pretentious mixers with enviable undiscern. The sort that can even afford taxis. You know. We all had fantasies that we were forced to routinely report to the office psychiatrist to pass through the tests. You had a better chance of promotion than dissent. And promotion meant wage rise, rather than the freezes for all these years. My poor father was near-starvation since they'd frozen his wage after 2011. Thank fuck he'd bought his flat. He gave all his money to this hopelessly destitute individual who had stolen his interest. It was the only act of sadism I ever understood.

I felt so bruised I wanted to laugh and curse, sabotage all happiness with tepid cynicism. Curse the wine-weary women, discontent with crime novels and monsoon pig-skin lap-bags. Or the balding men, checked shirts and mass-manufactured tweed, manic laughing chops HA HA HA U DUN SAY

I felt like a collector of sad, self-minimising, lonely lives as I trawled through this mob of blanched faces, assuming this 2% of existence to confirm 98% of all their essence. Social beings, even these words are my dialogue - my message in a bottle - to some bored and ill other, turned wrong by inside-out hormones, choking up her lungs in some sorry but well-sanitised respite home of the not too distant future. But words become a bad habit, like biting one's nails in public, providing as much (no, less) evidence of my existence, with the same contempt for public audiences. They said of Pariah Masculine Writer's prose: (picture Sinclair, Salinger, Self, Home, all those ras-clarts) unreadable melancholy prose! Wine-needy! Worthless and verbose!

I've had enough. Beyond sitting in a maisonette in Clapton watching Trisha-Kyle tv and accusing my lone child of psychosomatic sorcery, I chart glorious misery. The sort of gutsy chap who uses the ferric crust of a scab to describe all human physique. Improvement via critique. So I called on my darling to provide illustration, the one with that job, you know, the one with the friend, that one yeah, blimey, and that sick-headed lover. We moderns are incapable of myth, only rumour. Hear me.

Darling: sat on me jack jones in anodyne public inn on ratty high street, anywhere-on-Thames. My words are blasphemous, so I exert myself through pox-laden looks. Definition by attraction. Clothes, wear. Without wallet, tv or PC - are you alive? So I mutter, between halves of cider (thanks Clive, yeah, can I ponce a fag, ta). They usually leave us in the end. I would tell them I was pregnant with their bleedin babies, but it was only desperate fantasy, impossible talk. There was something terrifying about all this lack of feeling. I wondered what other people were talking about, but then again, that was only in white middle class books. I made peace with dying. It was as easy as melting the frozen crusts of the north-west passage with the blood disease on the edge of my tongue.

You shouldn't scratch that

You see her but you don't beseech,
Lecterns are lectured; besides,
Each to each, and
Let fools learns and lovers recover unlovely ways
Hear me =
Muse Nothing: we're empty,
Innocent like that
So beseech her to be truthful
There's little else beside.
Claim, bold friend, there's little else outside,
Be yourself one day, a deceit that may
Satisfy the rest. Eh,
We never stay reliable. Ask mother. Whose?
Choose. Trickery to end, spent friend.

His face was once an enchanting sight.
Need I say? It isn't any more.
It threatened bewitchment to a dangerous side
The sort that squats and pisses flagrantly
Against the walls of railway stations
I offer this:
These hands are safe now these eyes aren't sore,
And I see sweetheart for what she is, her core
Truly nothing more than guilty bliss, hands tussle
Whilst pelvises flex, clumsy manoeuvres indict sexuality,
Or praise it, depends on your sensitivity - see?

"God bless other souls, still
The devil take me down"
A confessor in 2nd century souls,
My lover taught me grace.
She birthed me to the cotton age
I struggle and I learn nothing.
Fortunately I have a challenging role in Shoreditch Cod and Chips where I have learnt organisational and team-working skills as well as administistarve abilities and managaging a tight budget and aso at same time teamwortk skills with my cousin mo who tells me what to do and i like that - I NEED STRUCTURE ERGO I WAKE AT 7, LISTEN TO POP MUSIC, EAT WHEAT, PERSPIRE FOR 120 YEARS AND PERISH.

My crimes are scarcely worth report.

pickled kidneys

Friends, I'm in the city, the supposed heart of all things. But hearts only pump in circles, a despondent metaphor which only ecstatic mystics might take solace in. My bus shudders and jerks. I'm in trouble. I'm late for my love who expected me many hours ago. My fingers are threatening to bleed. I have drunk too much alcohol

Pallid yards of faces, eaten away with worry and work. In a moment of motivation, I choose to peel away the headline-spluttered pulp of some free newspaper. I pick through the bric-a-brac of classifieds, my empty belly salivating with the prospect of mean bargains and desperate possibilities. With mirthless absorption I come across the lonely ads, where I am not even surprised to see my soul has put in an advert for a new host. Typical bastard, she's stingy with the characters. LOOKN4NEWSTARTRUDA1? Pudenda ex origo, et cetera.

All these people I might've been, knew, even loved - friends, strangers, fellow prisoners in the human zoo some boffins have called capitalism, others bestiality. Now this chump chomps cashews, dashing their russet spent husks about the bus floor. Others yap on pieces of plastic glued to their mouths to the heroines of late 20th-century novels, or reincarnations of the pharoahs. I may perhaps be the only here truly aware of her/his own intrinsic dullness.

We escape with difficulty.

I'm fairly drunk with beer and the emotions of heart-scattered colleagues. I rambled a moment ago about friends and strangers, but really in this kinship of anonymity only strangers can be called friends. Pessoa bruv, back me up here. Our friends bind us to the misunderstandings of our younger former selves, they fix us into these selves. But the centre of all these experiences is no unified self. Like a dancing flame, ever shape-shifting. Yet I'm still here, aware of all these evasion of responsibility and maturity. In response to Thames pathos - I mean have you seen that bloody melancholic river - show me a painter who can do that justice - Whistler and Turner came close but no. That's why I use words, I use them to paint - However, I apologise, digression aside, in response to Thames pathos, I demand wine of every hue and tyhe reclamation of at least 6 hours of today. They should've been mine.

All aboard the ship of fools! The dead captain greynoose silently gestures with a three-fingered paw for us to come close. The galleon looks like something from a pirate film, all our memories really have probably been quoted from children's films of the 1980s and 90s. The pock-marked skipper gestures with his bird-gored paw for us to huddle into the helm through a small staircase in the centre of the ship. The rotten timbers stink so bad it suffocates, and as I gag the ever-widening and ever-expanding sky suddenly flashes from scrubbed steel to scorched black, and one of his wage-slave cronies grabs my boney arm and shoves me down the helm.

As I stumble and roll down the rotten staircase I realise that the ship was far bigger than I thought, that what I once thought was a small t0 medium size ship is actually gargantuan. A sudden crescendo of groans engorges me as I fall, and I realise I'm on some grotesque Amistad, the underbelly of the boat swollen with drunk and mad souls entirely complicit and enjoying their own slavery. There is nothing so reassuring as barefaced impossible lies, just as long as - for Gods' sake - they do not throw their weight around, all lairy and shirty, with a piece of rizla on their foreheads declaring what exactly they are.

My descent was stopped in a level below all the hubbub, and for a moment I could not breath as I struggled and wrestled violently to the top of the bloody cesspit, reeking of pickled kidneys. Once the usual vomiting and wailing quitened, I could hear outside myself some voice in the corner of the black pit murmuring. It was so dark I could hardly see a thing, and my eyes stung with tears, but I could tell somehow that it was a Spanish or Portuguese voice perhaps. I heard

...She was my sister. No-one called her baby or sweetheart. She loved too desperately. She fell for the most sickly. And they were too improper for her, too nasty, bad ones. Too impoverished to - ha ha ha - to have the means to love her back. Oh sweet lord. So she learned pain. She longed. She knew melancholy. She begged old Ironburns to stand proud by her. She begged but was too proud to borrow. To hell with pity he said, asshole! His prick was covered in sores anyway. I played the game. I despised her prudery. Through it all I did not desert my sweet saviour Christ. The one thing she turned to in the end was self-control. I hope God loved her, because fuck all else did. She now owns a string of gymnasiums across north-east France and BeneLux, and has a profitable series of self-help books.

I shut the pages of the free rag and sighed. I have always found the term 'prick' somehow disagreeable, and I'd come across enough maudlin mawkishness in my time to write a PhD on the Romantic tradition in certain places in the world. I had a text from my mobile phone network. It said "this night is as young as self-reproach, or resentment, depending on ability". I was like WTF?!!!!1LOLZ!