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!