i will make a mermaid of her:

i will whisper
of lips
of red eyelashes

of the freckles around her coral mouth

as if all the things in the ocean
conspired to make her face
a beautiful sad diagonal
swaying in the undertow,

a soft sea gaze
floating in a moving tangle of amber seaweed

she will fix her eyes to yours like barnicles
and her skin will dip and slide beneath yours
full of sea-fruits and salty promises

you will see her for as long as you can hold your breath

when you surface
still tasting red honey
you'll remember her tongue
swimming slowly
like a sleepy pink fish
as she tried to mouth something to you
under water

so, beloved ones,

its official, will be staying in spain til at least november - have enrolled for autumn academy here at The Independent Republique of Failure on Ibiza... (its a clown school... the documentary below sold it to me) looks juicy and challenging - 2 months from sept 28, and probably doing 2 weeks trapeze intensive 14-23rd sep in barcelona's Escola de Circ Rogelio Rivel... - spending the rest of the time studying spanish, swimming and eating fruit... VENGA!

http://www.bonts.com/

come visit ibiza or barcelona!
x
love

--
---
"Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern."
Henry Miller

blog: hernandez.blog.co.uk
number: +447946457908
skype username: tryhardtobekind

"You see," he says to me casually, "the moth is way up there by the white wall of the doorway, and it is visible only because it moves. From here it almost looks like a bird high up in the sky, if you think of the wall as the sky. That's probably how the moth sees the wall, and only we know it is wrong. But it doesn't know that we know. It doesn't know we exist. You try to communicate with it, if you can. Can you tell it anything in a way it understands; can you be sure it has understood you completely?"

"I don't know," I replied, "Can you?"

"Yes," the old man said quietly, and with a clap of his hands he killed the moth, then proffered its crushed body on the palm of his hand.

"Do you think it didn't understand what I told it?"...

..."Now, imagine" he went on, "that there is somebody who knows about us what we know about this moth. Somebody who knows how, with what, and why this space that we call the sky and assume to be boundless, is bounded - somebody who cannot approach us to let us know he exists except in one way - by killing us."

"Somebody on whose garments we are nourished, somebody who carries our death in his hand like a tongue, as a means of communicating with us. By killing us, this anonymous being informs us about himself. And we, through our deaths, which may be no more than a warning to some wayfarer sitting alongside the assassin, we, i say, can at the last moment perceive, as through an opened door, new fields and other boundaries. The sixth and highest degree of fear (where there is no memory) is what holds and links us anonymous participants in the game. The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes."

Milorad Pavic The Khazar Dictionary

The fact of the fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night.
Gregory David Roberts

*

1.

Arrive in the flatlands with a flat tyre. Roll slowly off the ferry, lopsided, but full of determination.

2.

Make the repair and get to Amsterdam in good time.

Meet her and walk, surrounded by the usual scenery: cafes, shops, markets, parks, bored looking people.

Feel out of it for the rendezvous, lopsided, lost for words.

3.

Evening. Blue Tea House, Vondelpark. You sit, she lies, her head in your lap, looking up into the trees, in the fading light. She reaches her arms up around you, pressing her head into your chest and embracing you.

After all the bullshit she finally says something that makes sense to you.

Let me go, it’s the only way for me to find out how I really feel.

4.

Drive. Drive on, through Holland, Belgium, France, stopping only for coffee, petrol. Drive for 15 hours or more, without blinking, for 500, 900, 1200 kilometres, with no spare tyre. Pause, blink, fill up, drink, but do not think, drive on.

5.

1300 kilometres. Southwest France. Heat… the sun rolling over everything, the roaring engine beneath you, your dry burning eyes, and a smell, like something is melting. The floor of the van is getting hotter under your bare feet, the gears are not shifting as they should.

You are approaching Spain, and something is coming loose. No garage is in sight, only the road, only the Pyrenees looming in the near distance, The Iberian Peninsula. Drive. Drive on.

Approaching the toll gate, trying to shift down a gear, something snaps. It is the gear stick. It has broken off completely and is loose in your hand. The engine is still in fifth gear, with no way to change.

Roll into the toll, pressing the clutch down, stationary in fifth gear, holding a metal stick in one hand and counting out money for the cashier with the other.

6.

You are walking, in a desolate industrial area of Hayenne, a weird little ghost town in the far south west corner of France, just off the motorway, 5 kilometres away from the Spanish border. You see huge grey corrugated buildings, clean wide streets completely devoid of humans, a prefabricated world deadly still under the fierce sun. You need to piss.

Walk into a post office, see seats in lines, a counter with a glass window, a stopped clock, no people, just a low hum. Find the toilet, and later, elsewhere, a mechanic.

7.

The knife bears down into the last piece of the bread you brought with you from England. You are sitting, consuming the last remnants of a life you are leaving behind, under a tree, on a sharp, thick, dense little scrap of grass, overlooking an empty playground, in front of a huge grey building whose ground floor shop-unit is occupied by a funeral parlour. Everything has stopped. The insects have stopped, the birds have stopped, time has stopped, the prefabricated buildings have stopped, the people have stopped, the future has stopped.

You did not want to stop yet. Terrible thoughts escape when you stop. You did not want it to end. Now, the fatigue - of a 20 hour journey, of this incessant silence now widening between us, of this broken feeling you are left with – grips your body.

The sweetness, the safe haven you shared, has gone. The passion lived through her, has now to find a new place to live, here, in this body, where it does not yet fit.

You have driven your vehicle too far without stopping, until parts of it have bent and snapped. It seems you must now break down, and you must find yourself to be here, at the border between countries, alone, in this empty place.

And the universe says

Stop here. Stop here and be alone. Do not be afraid. Feel this, it is yours. You are not ready to pass in to Spain yet.

You are trying to listen.

8.

In the workshop a miserable French man with hard black oily hands is ripping out broken pieces of your vehicle and welding them back together, and under this tree you are sobbing, pulling out broken bits from your own blocked up innards and laying them on the grass in front of you. Your fear, your arrogance, your weak, impulsive, destructive behaviours, your half-finished thoughts, your dependence, your reluctance and your denial, your mis-spent energies, which, so shamefully, you laid out before her.

Your soul, cut open, exposed, which does not want to be alone, which, above all, clings doggedly to the idea of two, asks you

what is freedom without love?

and you still don't know. You only know that now you are going to find out, and it shouldn't be so terrifying, but it is. So you sob. There is pain in your chest, in your throat, in your eyes, in you guts, as you weep for these broken parts of yourself.

Lay them out in front of you now, then say goodbye.

Leave it all here, on the grass, under this tree. Pull out the broken car parts and make some space for this passion to fit inside you again.

Call her back, and say goodbye, and mean it this time.

9.

Spain has opened its mouth and swallowed you. You enter a mountainous region, the van labouring up hills and coasting down them, passing through weaving roads and tunnels. You think of the tunnels as a part of your own body, a Spanish part of you.

At the border, you felt light and empty. Loneliness is a prayer, a deep longing to know and feel. There is great strength in wanting. There is dignity, not shame, in loneliness, sorrow isn’t the enemy.

Your body knows this, it needs you now.

By dawn you are in an arid, rocky landscape punctuated by small villages. The sun rises in a pink haze and you start to wonder who it is you want to be. Singularly, and whole heartedly, after what seems like your whole life, you ask yourself, at last, now that it’s all yours:

Who is it that I want to be?

</>

/ 1

A SINGLE LEATHER CASE
SITS STERN
ON THE FLOOR OF THE CARRIAGE.

HIS
SHORTENED LEFT LEG
WEARS A SPECIAL SHOE
WITH AN ENORMOUS PLATFORM.

TAKING OFF HIS SPECTACLES
HE SOON SNOOZES THERE LEANING
AGAINST THE PALM OF HIS HAND.

/ 2

CLUTCHING THE CASE
HE STANDS
IN A SCRUFFY PASTURE
BEHIND A DERELICT FARMHOUSE

A MASS OF WEEDS
GROWING AMONGST RUBBLE
CHICKEN WIRE
AND BROKEN TILES
TANGLES ITS VINES
THROUGH THE WINDOW

/ 3

HE DREAMS CHILDREN
FLOATING LIKE BALLOONS,

THEIR THOUSAND EYES
THEIR BURNING EARS
THEIR THREAD-LIKE VOICES,

RISE

I CAME FROM TRINIDAD AT 5 YEARS OF AGE

MY MOTHER - FULL OF PULSATIONS
AND AGONIES AND REPETITIONS
- INSISTED ON BRINGING ME HERE.

HER DREAM
WAS STRONG

SHE ENCOURAGED ME
TO MAKE PAINTINGS
AND SANG TO ME
INCOMPREHENSIBLE SONGS:

"AGWE ARRORO
PROTECT YOUR LITTLE ONES,
RECEIVE
THE SPIRIT
OF ERZULIE:
OF EVERYTHING WHICH IS
MORE
THAN THAT
WHICH IS NECESSARY -
OF VUDUON:
THE MYSTERY THAT
IS GOD IN THE WORLD"

SHE KNEW
THE MOVEMENTS
OF CELESTIAL BODIES,
AND RELATED STORIES
BY GRAVITY

O
THE BEAUTIFUL COMPLEXITY OF THIS WOMAN:

MUSIC FOR THE EYES

"There is something more. It is now clear that new developments in many areas - including mind-machine interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, and data storage, image and retrieval techniques - are coalescing into the potential for a truly demonic or an angelic self-imaging of our culture. Those who are on the demonic side of this process are fully aware of this potential and are hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture the technological high ground. It is a position from which they hope to turn nearly everyone into a believing consumer in a beige fascism from whose image none will escape.

The shamanic response, the Archaic response, the human response, to this situation should be to locate the art pedal and push it to the floor. This is one of the primary functions of shamanism, and is the function that is tremendously synergised by the psychedelics. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergise the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever-more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.

If we are serious about an Archaic Revival, then we need a new paradigmatic image that can take us rapidly forward and through the historical choke point that we can feel impending and resisting a more expansive, more humane, more caring dimension that is insisting on being born. Our sense of political obligation, of the need to reform or save the collective soul of humanity, our wish to connect the end of history with the beginning of history - all of this should impel us to look at shamanism as an exemplary model. In the current global crisis we cannot fail to take its techniques seriously, even those which may challenge the divinely ordained covenants of the constabulary"

*

"You don't examine obsessive behaviour; you just do it. You let nothing get in the way of your gratification. This is the kind of life that we are being sold at every level. To watch, to consume, and to watch and consume yet more. The psychedelic option is off in a tiny corner, never mentioned; yet it represents the only counterflow directed against a tendency to leave people in designer states of consciousness. Not of their own designs, but the designers of Madison Avenue, of The Pentagon, of the Fortune 500 corporations. This isn't just a metaphor; it is really happening to us.

Looking down on Los Angeles from an airliner, I never fail to notice that it is like looking at a printed circuit: all those curved driveways and cul de sacs with the same little modules installed along each one. As long as the Readers Digest stays subscribed and the TV stays on, these modules are all interchangeable parts within a very large machine. This is the nightmarish reality Marshall McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw: the creation of the public as herd. The public has no history and no future, the public lives in a golden moment created by a credit system which binds them ineluctably to a web of illusions that is never critiqued. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow style changes that are conveyed through the media. It is a world of pornographic wealth and slavish consumerism where in the participants become nothing more than the petrified object of their own unrequited desires. Lurking beneath the glistening surface of their perpetual lust for enterprise exists a strange brand of horror - the freedom from meaning. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off the symbiotic relationship with the Gaian matrix of the planet. This is the consequence of lack of partnership. This is the legacy of imbalance between the sexes; this is the terminal phase of a long descent into meaninglessness and toxic existential confusion.

The credit for giving us tools to resist this horror belongs to unsung heroes who are botanists and chemists, people such as Richard Schultes, the Wassons, and Albert Hoffman. Thanks to them we have, in this most chaotic of centuries, taken into our frail hands the means to do something about our predicament. Psychology, in contrast, has been complacent and silent. Psychologists have been content with behaviourist theory-making for fifty years, while knowing in their hearts that they were doing potentially fatal disservice to human dignity, by ignoring the potential of psychedelics."

Terrence Mckenna

when i call myself mad
i only acknowledge
the triumph of my own ego
over a perfectly beautiful
non compos mentis
reality

was i not
so hung up over myself
instead of being mad
i would merely be
a fascinated raconteur,
a tourist of untravelled countries

i would not ask stupid questions like
"am i mad?"

i would perhaps just shrug
and see madness
as just another tool
as another way to integrate

i will try
not to fear madness
or even the loss of my own limbs

if i die
or go mad
so be it

this is not bravery
it is only an attempt to be
less ego-centric
to acclimatise myself to
things

it is quite possible
for a man with no limbs
to light his own cigarette

so who are we to lament our own madness?

acting is believing oneself to be
someone or something else.

if you can believe with conviction
you will transform

life is a cabaret my friend
and the truth is
that god alone is wise

knowing that
you know
nothing

you might begin to try
to inhabit
or embody
another you

maybe a bit-part
maybe an extra
maybe a cowboy or an injun

whoever

just act it
with conviction
and belief

knowing that
truth
is only as true
as you can be

AND I SEE
a beetle:
the black scarab of the ancient pharaohs -
rolling a ball of dung across the cement floor.
Egyptians once believed the beetle
strong enough to roll the sun
across the heavens

and i see you there, sweating
on a creaking bed, sweating
beneath a musty mosquito net,
lying on a dirty mattress. there is
music outside. it is still light.
the market traders are still
selling their wares as you lie, still,
waiting for cooler, darker hours

meanwhile, thoughts meander and drip, sweating,
slipping off anything solid, dwelling
nowhere, evaporating.

it's hard to think straight in the heat.
it's hard to sleep.

you turn sideways and laugh.
probably you would be better off
outside, somewhere shaded.
at least the air would move, but

out there you will be cajoled
you stick out like a sore thumb.

no, stay here.
close your eyes for a bit and listen

you hear
high spirited talk
melancholy music
the rattle of decrepid rickshaws
rusty automobiles

everything has been rolled over
ravaged by the incessant sun.

*

at last
sleep is coming
and strange dreams.
sweating, slippery dreams
of laughing buddhas and
dancing shivas and
The Cave.

you hope to dream of rain
rumbling rolling rain,
but that dream must wait.

you
dream about the temple again.
you have lost your sandals and
must now walk barefoot. you look
down and see that you are naked.
you have lost your clothes.

you
run, in the heat, your feet dirty
and burning. you run - hiding your
penis in a cupped hand - from the
brown-skinned locals, who stare at
you angrily. they are deeply offended
by your nudity and intend to do violence.

they
surround you, holding sticks
and machetes. its hot, too hot to
run. where are your clothes? where
are you? what is this stink of
sweat and bad food?

you
do not wake up.

you
do not realise that
this is a dream.

a man orders you to lie down, and
you do. the people lower a heavy
stone slab over your whole body
so that you cannot move

you are still cupping your balls in
your hands and you hear the beetle,
scratching at the parched
earth near your toes.

and shadows fall
straight down
sharp as the midday sun.

she walks
toward a door
a slight breeze moves her hair.

in the house,
sitting straight down
closing her eyes
to look
receding
as the sweltering afternoon
sleeps.

a second person
the same as her
dreams
floating now
between each step
deliberate.

she
pulls a key
from between her lips
the room turning
sideways.

returning to that bed
where death left flowers on the pillow
where sleeping lips glisten and taste of metal
she opens the old wounds
of her former self.

taking slow giant steps
towards her double,
crushing whole worlds
beneath her sandles

she holds the knife
before her.

and blood seeps
seaweed slow

and around again
turns the room
a glass smashing there

her gestures
her movements
her steps
deliberate

love
is not a harpsichord concert
in a genteel drawing room
it isn't social security
the lottery
or roller disco

i think of the lunar card
in the tarot deck
some strange huge crustacean
its armour glistening and
its pincers wiggling
clatters out of a pool
while wild dogs howl at the moon

underneath the hearts and flowers
love is loony like that

attempts to housebreak it
to dress the crabs up like doves
and sing soprano
always result in thin blood
you end up with a parody

Out on the factory floor
workers in gray smocks
operate the presses
and down bares the large blade
through piles of newspapers
sad and determined.

Discarded cuttings
fall empty there.

One dark corner
is stacked with huge cogs

In another room
the typists finger
drops like a piston
and the sunlight
all wrinkled
scribbles sparkling white lines
in a water decanter.

Climb up the stairs
hold on to the banisters
cutting light into strips
that float on the carpet

Cling and sway
my lady
The soft varnished wood
under your smooth hand
hesitant

Pick up the scissors
and press them into your neck child,
for the world is too thin

Sort through
the myriad lamps
the leather shoes
the ashen smell of fresh print
the gigantic reels
of paper

Arrange neatly
your quill and ink bottle

Draw letters
with a finger
on the dusty table top

Pick up the scissors
and cut your long hair sister
and cut off the sleeves of your dress

Discarded cuttings
under the arched doorway
where you fought
disheveled
automated
oiled

Asleep
on the coach from Santa Elena de Uairen to Puerto La Cruz
my bag was stolen from right beneath my feet,
in the stupid cozy darkness
at the end
of a ten hour journey.

As we came into the station
I heard a noise
and looked down
at a dark skinned Venezuelan man with acne scars.
I woke, and gave chase.

No good, he was faster, and the bag contained my shoes.
My tattered Pumas,
my notebook,
my music, my t-shirt and
absolutely nothing of
material value to
anyone but
me.

I gave chase anyway
in a tangle of Brazilian rubber flipflops
tripping and hurting my toe.

The tall man ducked away
into dusty favelas
far ahead
but still I chased,
cursing him and my own
stupidity
and the soft sleepy seats
of that coach

My tattered Pumas, my notebook,
my music, my t-shirt and
most importantly
all the words recorded
on that trip.

You see I was on the way
to meet my father
for the first (and last) time and I
wanted to get the notebook back.
I had written it all down.

He's dead now,
that crazy Gordo
drowned himself.

28 years old carrying a broken bottle
looking for the acne man
who stole my bag
no use
no shoes

at a certain point with dirty feet
breathing hard
bleeding from the toenail
you have to say
fuck it

Hello, New York is an inspiring place. On Tuesday I went to see LTJ Bukem DJing @ Centro-Fly. It was wicked. I love the way people move to drum and bass - so much more instinctive and sensual than techno. Met Sarah - she dressed dorky to hide the fact that she was really fit. She was an excellent dancer. I tried to make her kidnap me but it didn't work out.

The other day I made a stencil and did my first bit of spray-art in New York - or anywhere for that matter - it was fun.

Last night I was at a rooftop rave in Brooklyn and ended up going completely crazy with Kevin and Luciana. We were throwing paint everywhere and using fire hydrants as musical instruments and shouting "DESTROY EVERYTHING!"

Jen and Rikky had a party last Thursday. It was mostly a good laugh though a bit awkward at times. There were some really nice people there like that artsy designer girl and the funny fat caner girl who kept getting us more and more stoned. I got a bit paranoid I think. We got a taxi back across Brooklyn Bridge.

Tara's dog's dead. She was fighting back the tears and I really felt for her.

I've been thinking a lot and feel a bit melancholy like something is missing not just in me but in the whole way people interact and the social constraints. I just wish it was easier to communicate and we didn't have to go through so much shit... I guess this feeling arises when you're meeting nice people who you know you probably will never see again, and you feel like you want to get to know them instantly, and you do in a way, because you have to rely on them in the absence of anyone else who you might know better. I feel this underlying regret that it's all so finite and transitory, and it almost compares to deep love. I feel like I really love these people because I know I'm going to lose them very soon. It's kind of beautiful though, and somehow we all feel it I think.

There's still time so lets make the best of it. The thought of going back home and back to how it was fills me with trepidation. I fear the old me will return and I will become weak and fragile. I fear falling back into old cycles of dysfunction. These three weeks in New York have been pure and free and innocent and playful and FUN... Like the time I got drunk in Chelsea and ended up back in a hotel room with two lesbians showing me all the electric goods they bought in the Hello Kitty store, or singing at BMW's and stroking that cute little dog with that Lithuanian girl, or hearing PALEFACE play at the Sidewalk Cafe, or shopping at the Salvation Army on 20th and 8th, or spraying stencils or skidding around in the rain or swinging off scaffolds or climbing big rocks in Central Park or taking photo's of skyscrapers or VIP passes to the Empire State or belly dancers or Energy drinks or Vodka Lime Tonics or scrawling 'hello' on the toilet wall of Esperanto cafe or playing frisbee or laughing or Banana Stacks with Maple Syrup, or saying 'gimme a slice' without saying please or thankyou, or Being Direct.

Yesterday it rained hard. I went to MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) and snuck in for free. Now I'm at Chelsea Piers. Gotta go find my sister..... BYE!

KHAO LAK, THAILAND - Agitated elephants felt the tsunami coming, and their sensitivity saved about a dozen foreign tourists from the fate of thousands killed by the giant waves.

"I was surprised because the elephants had never cried before," mahout Dang Salangam said on Sunday on Khao Lak beach at the eight-elephant business offering rides to tourists.

The elephants started trumpeting -- in a way Dang, 36, and his wife Kulada, 24, said could only be described as crying -- at first light, about the time an earthquake measured at a magnitude of 9.0 cracked open the sea bed off Indonesia's Sumatra island.

The elephants soon calmed down. But they started wailing again about an hour later and this time they could not be comforted despite their mahouts' attempts at reassurance.

"The elephants didn't believe the mahouts. They just kept running for the hill," said Wit Aniwat, 24, who takes the money from tourists and helps them on to the back of elephants from a sturdy wooden platform.

Those with tourists aboard headed for the jungle-clad hill behind the resort beach where at least 3,800 people, more than half of them foreigners, would soon be killed. The elephants that were not working broke their hefty chains."Then we saw the big wave coming and we started running," Wit said.

Around a dozen tourists were also running toward the hill from the Khao Lak Merlin Resort, one of a line of hotels strung along the 10 km (6-mile) beach especially popular with Scandinavians and Germans.

"The mahouts managed to turn the elephants to lift the tourists onto their backs," Kulada said. She used her hands to describe how the huge beasts used their trunks to pluck the foreigners from the ground and deposit them on their backs. The elephants charged up the hill through the jungle, then stopped.

The tsunami drove up to 1 km (1,000 yards) inshore from the gently sloping beach which had been so safe for children it made Khao Lak an ideal place for a family holiday. But it stopped short of where the elephants stood.

On Sunday, the elephants were back at work giving rides to the tourists on whom the area depends.

German Ewald Heeg, who said he came from a small town near Frankfurt, said his charter company had offered his family -- wife, two daughters and one of their boyfriends -- the chance to go straight home, but he had turned it down.

"Our family is OK so we stay here to make our holiday," he said.

"Today, we make a safari. We go by elephants at first, then we make a boat trip.

By Mark Bendeich
Reuters
January 3, 2005

Intimacy is the principle source of the sugars with which life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without it humour becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, eroticism becomes inpersonal and therefore mechanical, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, behaviour becomes predictable and therefore easy to control.

Tom Robbins

She was swollen, stretched out, swelling beneath that transparent layer of silk.

Resisting the screaming exigency of his own bloated cock he refrained from ripping aside the damp fabric and tearing into her. Instead, a pause. Taut. Fecund. Then, he began nudging at her with his nose. She extended further: a space opening, a slow-motion surge to the tip of clit: the curve of his erection tapping insistently at her ankles.
He placed his hand on her belly and felt an undulation there - deep in her abdomen. Pressing upwards he pulled silk tight against the eddy of her opening, swaying into her with a big, flat tongue.
Her hips went into flux.

1.
Frank crept slowly, aphid-like, through the trees. The birds were shrieking at each other up there, clinging onto those branches and pecking at the berries with their beaks, then prodding at them with their weird hard tongues. Frank was not pleased, not pleased at all. He had no predilection for creeping slowly, aphid-like, through the trees. The humidity prickled heavily on his forehead like a dead hedgehog, and he had lost one of his shoes back there in a bog, running away from those killer bees. No, it hadn't been a good day for Frank. He hadn't planned to embark on some hair-brain adventure when he'd boarded the W7 bus on Stroud Green Rd that morning. He'd had no inkling he would be being stalked by a gorilla on heat in the Amazon rainforest that afternoon, and not attending a seminar on 'Pet Insurance Policy Scheduling'.

"Jesus Christ!" he muttered, "Monkeys"
and then "FFFF, FFFFUCK" as he encountered an unexpected dip in the path and tripped, landing painfully on his wrist and a colony of seven million biting ants.

"EEEEEAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGH!" he said dispondently, extricating himself in as dignified a manner as he could muster, given the circumstances.

2.
Mona swung dolefully through the trees with the poise and grace one would expect from a primate in its natural habitat. In her small dark gorilla eyes was the tangible sadness of one who has been shunned, of one who has offered love but been refused. Hidden within those shimmering black baubles of sadness however was also a seed of determination and hope, and maybe even of joy and purpose. Mona was in love with a man from Stroud Green Road and she intended to have him even if it had to be by force...

if i could write

i would wonder
aimlessly
through forests

picking beautiful words
like magic beans.

i would show you

that paper was trees once

we could count the years together,
draw water,
through stem and node
rooting depths
for nutrients
.

i would invite you
into my tunnels
and show you
concentric rings

if i could write

Klip, Klop, the legless man walks, in his own way, on two stout, blunt, short, black, wooden stools, sitting on one as he moves the other. I too walk: straight past, not wanting to stop and stare. But how can I just walk by? I feel a lump in my throat, and pride in these people: the survivors. The legless man must have perceived me too, yet he ignored me - intent on the rhythm of his progress, shifting the weight of his torso from stool to stool on wiry brown arms.

stop.

stop here, at this cafe, sit down, smoke, order something.
"here's your coffee, the salad will be out shortly"
Klip, Klop.

2.

In the distance two huge cranes stood like insane mechanical giraffes under the clouds.

As she squeezed the over-ripe fruit it swelled and burst open, revealing stringy orange interiors. She offered it up to his mouth and he bit into the dripping flesh, taking a huge sickly mouthful. The juices and chunks of broken fruit dripped down his cheeks down his clothes and he chewed and they laughed.

They were to be married. These two.

His first wife.

The ferry hummed and whirred. They sat at a plastic table and looked out over the water and the gray sky and the cranes and the universe. She thought the cranes resembled lobsters.

" i like your crooked nose"
she said, eyes wet, scanning his face.

" i like you boots"

The heels of her boots were worn down unevenly. She tripped on them often.

She was an extrovert, his first wife, a talented exhibitionist, a good dancer, a mischievous arch-prankster with mercurial eyes. She smelled like sweets and her body was lithe and nimble. They had been friends for a long time. The love locked in the eyes like invisible smoke passing between them. It was white fire held in the mouth of a crocus flower.

3.

The window creaks and I look out at the North Sea. It is foamy and cold and salty. It is too big to comprehend, surrounding us. We'll never understand it, so I take another swig of scotch from the bottle and think about something else. It's still dark. It's slate-blue, 6.38 in the morning, I still haven't slept. The blue slate sky stretches out towards Edinburgh. Scotland hovers before my eyes, scratching itself and waking up.

"NO!"

He stands up, knocking his plate off the table, a brown streak of gravy shit-staining his slightly crumpled trousers.

"30 YEARS I'VE HAD THIS BULLSHIT, YOU WANT A TANTRUM? I'LL GIVE YOU A PROPER FUCKING TANTRUM"

Granny opens her mouth to speak.
"now Felix..."

"DON'T YOU FUCKING START EITHER, NONE OF YOU STAND UP TO HER!"

Gravy, dripping, he stands - trampling half chewed sprouts and bread sauce into the carpet - and walks towards the Christmas tree, leaning forth to grip its piney boughs. The tree shakes, needles dropping, baubles swaying, as he lifts it, ripping the fairylights from the socket, flimsy branches scratching loudly against textured yellow wallpaper.

"Felix! No!"

"ITS TOO LATE!"

He curls his lips back and lifts the tree over his head, a rain of needles bouncing off his blinking eyelids, takes a deep breath and hurls it towards the window with all of his force, hissing through his teeth. An explosion of green and glass, a horrible twist of tree-lights tentacle across the room.

He looks down at his palms, perforated by sickly smelling bright green pine needles. Nobody moves.

"You see? you see what you've done?"
"I've gone mad and it's all your fault."

in the indent of her pulse
were flashes of inspiration
a quiet thump
of soft matresses
flung on the floor

tap tapping
into darkness
we spoke
as if words were animals
baying in the red dusk

their eyelids droop and wane like suns

and small things
is what we were there
as each short sleep
dissolved another layer
like honey on ricepaper

we awoke relieved, younger
closer to childhood
hid under a table
whispering childish things

up to the present
my idea
in collaboration with myself
has been to get off the gold standard of literature
my idea briefly
has been to present a ressurection of the emotions
to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas
that is
in the grip of delirium
to paint a presocratic being
a creature part goat part titan
in short
to erect a world on the basis of the OMPHALOS
not an abstract idea nailed to a cross

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HQJyAacTnc

A Polish man with red hair combed into a side parting arrives with a steaming plate of egg, baked beans, sausage, mushroom, and chips.

"Your toast is coming"

You are sipping Earl Grey tea in a small cafeteria opposite the gates to Finsbury Park. The food is cheap, the decor is simple and the windows are large enough to see the big dirty city squinting outside. Pedestrians walk purposefully by with hands in pockets, moving from Point A to Point B, under a blanket of dust and grime, past black rubber and asphalt, in phase with the traffic lights, on the unsleeping floor, babbling, limping, but limping with purpose.

It is a London Sunday, the afternoon masquerading as morning after another long lay-in.
The cafe is half empty and mostly people sit alone at the small tables: a pensioner, a paraplegic, a small group of students, a Senegalese mother feeding chips to her young boy. The eyes in the faces sparkle with untold stories.

A man enters. He is very old. His clothes are worn and dirty. His face is strangely empty: a mass of thick white skin caving in beneath a tattered woolen hat. His eyes - pale, pale blue, almost white, like a wolfs eyes - fix upon the North African girl behind the counter. He smiles a little and orders a tea, lingering whilst she busies herself, wanting to talk. In a soft Scottish accent he asks her if she will give him a photograph of herself.

"Leave me alone Edward, you know I wont do that" she says, with a tone of playful reproach.

Edward takes his tea and goes to sit down. He moves stiffly across the room, hardly bending his legs with each step. His trousers are disheveled - both too short and too wide - and have gathered up into the crease of his arse. Perplexing, you think, the effects of age on the human arse. Finally he places his tea on the table and sits, pulling a ragged newspaper from the pocket of his stained brown jacket.

The gentle creases around his pale eyes spread like capillaries as he reads, lifting an elbow to bring the mug towards his lips, the hot liquid making them shine. He swallows slowly, revealing more wrinkles around his mouth, leafless trees creaking against a white winter sky.

The strange old man turns his pale eyes towards the North African waitress.

"When will you be in again Jessica?" he asks.

"Next weekend" she replies, unperturbed.

you may find yourself,
some day creeping,
spider-like
over
steep roof tiles,
trying to
evenly distribute
weight.

you may find yourself,
climbing across rooftops,
fortified by good sweet beer
and frustration.
breathing slow,
one step
at a time

you may imagine yourself,
adventuring,
swinging from chandeliers,
holding a rose between your teeth.

you may
some day
meet bogart,
in the street,
wearing no trenchcoat,
no hat,
smelling of whiskey
and cigarettes,
on his way
to the taxidermists,

you may, creep, climb, drunk

and save your private madness
as the form appears,
and fits

i do not want
to spar in vacant spaces
and rented minutes
climbing all the expected stairs
wary
weary
.
your disbelief
will not shrink me
i can still raise
the green gigantic skies
resume the legend of my disguises
.
you will see
my flesh has more stories
more surprises
will fly to you
.
come near
across sheer cavernous inches of air
.
i will hold you
through all your shifts of structure
while your bones
turn from caved rock
back to marrow
.
you can not approach love like a biologist
take off you rubber gloves
and labcoat
before i'm run away

Mine is a migrant mind, an irresponsible hobo mind, roaming from idea to idea, with no place to stop. Streams and rivulets flood the ears and cannot be collected, causing a constant ringing. The ideas build up at such a rate that the majority of them must go unrealised. I try to discard what I can but unrealised ideas deposit a residue that is thick, glutinous, viscid, a sort of cerebral plaque that can leave you feeling heavy, turgid.

Some days I felt so full up I wanted to scream. Writing was not enough. I wanted to accost pedestrians in the street and extract entire histories from them in one gulp, trace their genealogy, the etymology of their names, find out their ontogenies, phylogenies, chronologies, their heraldries, their future legacies, to make chronicles and annals of all the bafflement and shame they had known to date. I wanted to fill every empty building I saw with art and encyclopaedias, to execute meaningless poster campaigns, to rip up the pavements and smash the facades of every city on earth. I wanted to take photographs, grow vegetables, to journey by sea, preening the waves, valiant and venturesome as Beowulf himself. I wanted to make a sacrifice, an offering to the Walpurgisnacht, to make a Witches Sabbath, to rub a broomstick covered with solanaceous herbs between my thighs. Hemlock, Belladonna, Wolfsbane, Dock. I wanted to travel through time, to perform a miracle for mankind, to resurrect Jesus Christ in my own image. Not to do so seemed iniquitous, depraved.

I would sit in a caf tormented by grandiloquent thoughts until something distracted me, usually a vision, some incongruous glimpse of street life that to me seemed to be a miracle. I carried my notebook everywhere, writing down all the things I saw. On good days I would enter into what I called ‘The Dream’. This was a state in which everything I perceived was noteworthy, a state in which I felt like some sort of vessel or conduit for a torrent of words set off by visual stimuli that I had only to describe. It was as if finally I had reached an affirmative moment in which all I had to do was say ‘Yes’ and the prose would come automatically. I could write pages and pages this way, whole notebooks describing what I saw in the most florid terms. These notes were the raw material for the short pieces I was self-publishing on the internet at the time. In typing them up I would make them more or less sensical, reading and revising them over and over, obsessing over every passage, making minute adjustments and additions with each reread. However, I felt frustrated. They didn’t represent the writing I longed to author.

wearing cotton clothes
you comforted,
stroking my cheek.

i pressed my ear to your chest and listened:

distant bells ringing
the siren of a passing ambulance
the wind.

you only moved
when i moved.

i turned on you
cajoled you
head-butted you

still you remained
soft
serene. reliable

i heard, held within you

my heartbeat
an aeroplane passing
the rosy wadding of clouds

you drank my tears
heard my laughter

held my head in your arms as i slept

i never thanked you
lost as i was
in dreams

still you remained
soft
serene. reliable

dear shoreditch,

i look at the
beautiful people
shine glazed eyes
that don't return
and bouffant
haircuts

shoreditch,
you are wearing tight jeans

shoreditch
i look at your t-shirt

it is pink
and i want to smoke

you crowd around
disguises
and picnic tables
looking
like raw
bright
groins

look, look, but don't look

covered by one blanket
they leapt into each others eyes
and shut them firmly
trembling in the air
where the blind world beats
repeating the same incantation
of rapture

with the wisdom of grass
she hesitates

her right hand
beautiful as a command
rests in the air

the lines descend
into the valley of the palm
striving forward
under the skin
where memory and blood
flow in mineshafts wells
and chambers

she hesitates
remains in the position
which the sculptors taught her

the horizon of five fingers
a garland of possibilities
a nest of tenderness
where the weight of his sleeping head
should rest

the shadow of her cheek
a pearl under his tongue
hair at his shoulder
where the weight of her sleeping head
should rest

1.

smoking a kent
in raybans
on a round bar
in the airport
drinking watery coffee

the chinese barman
wouldn't give me tap water

welcome to the czech republic

the airport receipt
for the coffee
reads
-------------------------
KAVA ESPRESSO:
115,00 CZK
5,50 EUR
8,80 USD
9,60 CHF
4,42 GBP
-------------------------

skinned again,
for coffee and cigarettes.

2.
here
on the quiet cobbles
surrounded by old things
supping Goulash soup
sloping upwards.
travelling alone

is a good meditation
watching your thoughts,
you get to remember
who you are

3.
I may be wrong of course, but I think that Laurence felt that in watching our backgammon he was observing the progress of a mordent tradegy in which the money we won and lost served as a symbol for more vital forfeits. It is like Laurence to try to read significance and finality into every gesture that we make, and it is certain of Laurence that when he finds the inner logic of our conducts, it will be sordid...

...He watched raptly, as if the opaque checkers and the marked board served for an exchange of power. How dramatic the board, in its ring of light, and the quiet players, and the crash of the sea outside must have seemed to him! Here was spiritual cannibalism made visible, here, under his nose, were the symbols of the rapacious use human beings make of eachother...

...Oh what can you do with a man like that? what can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in the crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and sister were swimming - Diana and Helen - and i saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, full of grace, and i watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

4. you look out of the high window. the small square window of a 14th century boarding house. there is no view as such, only the promise of a view. you lean out further, try to turn, to see around the corner, to eat the big views, but you are teased, tantalised. all you can see is the opposite facade, and bits of wall.

withdrawing, you feel your hat gently dislodge from your head, and watch it tumble down the terracotta roof tiles on to a lower, unreachable tier. you look at the hat, far away, and miss it. you bought that hat in poland, a good quality italian hat made by RINALDO. the tiles are steep and brittle. you are very high up. you cannot climb down, too dangerous, and many windows look at this place. someone will shout at you in czech, call the police, a roof tile will break under your weight, you will slip...

your hat. your hat is out of reach.

5.
later, you attempt to fish. you find three mop handles and slot them together for a rod. but there is no hook. you lunge dumbly with the blunt tool, and the hat is only moved further away. it will not be caught, and the poles threaten to loosen from each other and tumble. tape is what is needed, to secure them better, and a hook, some sort of hook. you up and leave.

6.

the streets steep and loom, the buildings are deep, gnarly, antique. the doors are many, but they are not doors - they are grand portals - ornately decorated with sculptures and frescos, guarded by angels, cupids, gargoyles, gods.

bland civilians walk the streets, and you wonder where the secret world behind the portals is to be found. where is dvorak? where is franz kafka? where are the midgets with big cigars? the legs? the eyes? the dreams that wont go away? the machine guns, the frogs? where?

7.

sit now. sit under those trees, over there, on a clean bench, in the failing light. sit, and be still, or try to be. reason with yourself,

its really all around you all the time, its just a matter of framing it, getting thrilled by it. you have to find something to capture it in, make sure your umbrella is upside down.

8.
leaves will fall, raindrops will drip, and turnips will tumble, as will hats.

blessed gravity, that roots you to the cobble stones, the steeps, the loops. gravity. the bedrock. the deep foundations of these buildings, the bricks, the breezeblocks, all held in place.

Atlas, balancing the world on his finger. the tides. the moon, the raining cats and dogs, the storms of frogs, and my hat,

my
black
pork
pie
hat.

sitting dumbly in the guttering, perching, like a stuffed crow, the taxidermist's nightmare, a black fedora hat with silk vermillion lining.

admit it, nothing shall escape, all shall be held in balance, by gravity. gravity.

9.

you may find yourself,
some day creeping,
spider-like
over
steep roof tiles,
trying to
evenly distribute
wieght.

you may find yourself,
climbing across rooftops,
fortified by good sweet beer
and frustration.
breathing slow,
one step
at a time

you may imagine yourself,
adventuring,
swinging from chandeliers,
holding a rose between your teeth.

you may
some day
meet bogart,
in the street,
wearing no trenchcoat,
no hat,
smelling of whiskey
and cigarettes,
on his way
to the taxidermists,

you may, creep, climb, drunk

and save your private madness
as the form appears,
and fits

o serene Motherhood
of the baby blink
as you coo coo coo
and cluck and fluff
the warm thing
and o
so tenderly
wipe
the tender turds and
sing a little song
to kolya
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CHAPTER 6

"What am I doing here?", he wandered.
"Here, quite alone, in this square, amongst the white austrians with
their blond looks and clean streets."

He saw twenty paces away an independent looking woman in a pink
tee-shirt with blond hair and a devilish smile, laughing in german with
her friends. Her eyes had met his for a moment - blue, or perhaps green
- with a force she could never be aware of. They expressed a sort of
female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him.

A lot hadn´t happened here. Despite arriving laden with wine and full of
stories he hadn´t managed to spend much time with Julia or Salma. He
hadn´t seen much of them at all, both of them being pre-occupied with
new lovers. He hadn´t gone out dancing yet. He hadn´t had much money to
spend. He hadn´t met a great deal of people. Hadn´t wanted to.

The last 2 days had been entirely consumed by writing and playing the
guitar, snoozing, smoking a bit of weed, walking around a bit, a couple
of exhibitions, and two dinner dates. Hardly arduous, bliss in fact, but
enough of that for now.

It wasn´t frustration he felt, more of a mild bewilderment, a fuzzled
wonder, a gentle boredom fused with a sense of patient trepidation.
Before now he had wanted to linger here a while longer, to enjoy this
void in his usually intense existence, use the empty space to hone down
ideas, to refine his new armoury of experiences and concepts. But now he
felt like a stopped clock. Life was no longer ticking. Everything had
softened, mellowed.

" In Vienna it is possible to live a very comfortable, cushioned
existence. ", he thought.

This was evidenced by the sheer number of shops selling cushions.

Certainly he looked forward to moving on, towards Amsterdam, via Koln.
Towards friends met in far off places. Towards Twiggy, via Winke.
Finally towards home, England, towards his family, his oldest friends
and loves, his muses, his work, his life. The prospect of Home was both
Terrifying and Fabulous. This excitement jutted out into the future,
casting a pointed shadow over the present. In this dim light even on a
sunny day Vienna seemed a lack-lustre mono-culture, lacking drama,
lacking heroism, riven with middle-class self-conciousness, populated by
bland couples holding hands, looking into the windows of interior design
shops, longing for expensive lifestyles bejeweled with the extraneous
trappings of a 9-5 existence.

He had walked about utterly unimpressed by the imposing neo-classical
facades, untempted by the dazzling array of pastries on offer at
numerous bakeries, untouched by the wares on offer, excited only by the
thought of finding a companion, a friend, perhaps a lover. He needed to
speak, to expound with passion upon the most important subjects. He
longed for the warm intensity held in the arms of another hot human
being, for a mouth to kiss. But today he felt demeaned by the prospect
of having to approach someone, here, in broad daylight, in this square,
amongst these huge, inert buildings; of having to convince someone of
his worthiness, with no other pretext than - "I am alone. I need a
friend. I want to speak".

From a distance he observed a baby, still too young to walk, crawling
towards him, intent on its own pudgy little hands making progress over
the gray paving slabs. The child arrived at his feet, and, with tiny
hands grasping his trousers, climbed up to a wobbly standing position,
stared directly into his eyes and with a grave expression proclaimed:

" Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba !"

before crawling off.

"Well, if he can approach me and say that, how hard can it be....."

Suddenly his heart was beating, he felt a burst of confidence. He looked
across the square, but the girl in pink with the wicked grin was already
walking away.....

1.

THE DRIVER GESTICULATES TO THE TICKET COLLECTOR, HIS HANDS LEAVING THE STEERING WHEEL, HIS EYES LEAVING THE ROAD. HE SEEMS ANIMATED, BUT IN A DECIDEDLY EUROPEAN, QUIETLY SPOKEN WAY. THESE TWO MEN ARE HAIRY, LIKE ME, BUT THE BODIES ARE BIGGER AND STOCKIER.

OUTSIDE IT'S WARM - 25 DEGREES C, BUT NOT VERY HUMID. I'M VERY VERY TIRED BUT VERY VERY HAPPY, LAUGHING TO MYSELF, INTO MY ARM - WHICH I'M LEANING ON - FEELING LIKE I'M IN DISGUISE, LIKE, FINALLY - AFTER MONTHS OF STICKING OUT LIKE SORE THUMB IN ASIA- I BLEND IN TO THE CROWD! A SECRET JOY ENJOYED AMONGST PASSENGERS OBLIVIOUS TO ME, LEADING THEIR EVERY DAY MOSCOW LIVES.........

2.

THE METRO IS BIG! AND OLD! WITH THIS COOL LEATHER UPHOLSTERY AND BIG WINDOWS AND A GLORIOUS ROAR LIKE A DRAGON OR HUMUNGOUS BURROWING WORM. AND ITS DEEP. YOU GO DOWN ABOUT A MILE OF ESCALATORS TO GET ONTO THE PLATFORM, WHICH IS WIDE AND LINED WITH COLUMNS AND SMOOTH MARBLE. I GOT ON AT THE END OF THE LINE AND THE TRAIN GETS BUSIER WITH EVERY STOP WE MAKE. THE PEOPLE ARE PRETTY SEXY IN A CASUAL CITY WAY. LOTS OF CUTE GIRLS AND BOYS. THE LIGHTS FLASH ON AND OFF, AND I AM IN RUSSIA, HEAD FULL OF THOUGHTS, EYES WIDE, BEARD THICK, RIGHT ON TOP OF IT.

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON I WAS STANDING ON THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA, LAST NIGHT I WAS DRINKING VODKA REDBULLS IN A BAR IN BEIJING, I GOT TO THE AIRPORT AT 5 AM, THE MORNING AFTER THE SECOND SLEEPLESS NIGHT, AND ALL THE MEMORIES SEEM TO HAVE RECEEDED INTO A TUNNEL. AS IF VIEWED FROM A TRAIN, THEY GET SMALLER AS IT PULLS AWAY, A TRAIN OF THOUGHT, A CONSTANT UNINTERUPTED DREAMLESS 60 HOUR TRAIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS.......

3

I'M IN THIS LITTLE CHURCH, ALL COVERED IN INCREDIBLE PAINTINGS, ITS SMALL, ABOUT 10 WORSHIPPERS STAND, ALONG WITH ME, FACING A WALL OF ICONS, BEFORE WHICH STAND 2 PRIESTS, ALSO FACING THE WALL, AND A CHOIR OF ABOUT 6 PEOPLE, HIDDEN IN A LITTLE CUBICLE, SINGING UP A BEAUTIFUL CHORUS. AN INCREDIBLE SOUND, AN INCREDIBLE LIGHT, AND A GOODLY RELIGIOUS EXSTACY COMING ON AND CAUSING LITTLE TEARS TO WELL UP BEHIND MY EYES AND RUN DOWN THE INSIDES OF MY CHEEKS.

ALL THE IMPOSSIBLY BEAUTIFUL RUSSIANS ARE CROSSING THEMSELVES AND BOWING AND KISSING A LITTLE PORTRAIT OF JESUS AT THE FRONT.

AFTER CHANTING A CANTICLE ONE OF THE GREEN-ROBED PRIESTS DUCKS INTO A LITTLE DOOR HIDDEN IN THE WALL WE'RE ALL FACING. THE HIDDEN SINGERS SING THEIR SECRET SONGS, AND OUT COMES THE PRIEST AGAIN, THROUGH ANOTHER DOOR, SWINGING A GOLDEN CHALICE OF INCENSE THIS WAY AND THAT, GIVING OFF HEAVENLY SCENTS THAT RISE UP INTO THE HOLY DOME THAT MUST HAVE BEEN PAINTED BY ANGELS. ALL THE LITTLE DOORS AND MINITURE PAINTINGS BEGIN TO SHRINK AND THE INS AND OUTS OF THE PRIEST BECOMES THE INS AND OUTS OF LITTLE FIGURES IN AN INGENIOUSLY CRAFTED MECHANICAL CUCKOO CLOCK. THE INCENSE IS SWINGING, AND I SEE THAT IT IS THE PENDULUM. THE CLOCK TICKS AND EVERYONE CROSSES THEMSELVES AND BOWS STIFFLY FORWARDS INTO SMOKE AND DIMNESS. IN A SWOON, I AM MOVED. I BOW, AND THE TEARS WELLING IN MY EYES ARE LIQUID GOLD THAT RUNS INTO CLAY MOULDS THAT ARE CRUCIFIXES IN NEGATIVE. THE GOLDEN CRUCIFIXES ARE EVERYWHERE, GLEAMING LIKE TEARS.

THE SINGING IS SO BEAUTIFUL AND EVERYONE IS FACING THE WALL, LIKE WHEN YOU WERE BAD AT SCHOOL AND YOU HAD TO STAND IN THE CORNER. THE PENDULUM REVERSES AND TIME IS GOING BACKWARDS. THE HOLY SPIRIT IS PASSING THROUGH ME AND AND LETTING THE TEACHER FORGIVE ME FOR BEING BAD. I'M ALL THE WAY BACK IN PRIMARY SCHOOL NOW, WITH A LITTLE BODY AND WAYWARD HAIR AND GOOFY GLASSES, IN THE SCHOOL HALL, SINGING HYMNS. THE SAME ROOM WHERE WE HAD TO EAT SCHOOL DINNERS, THE SAME ROOM IN WHICH WE FLICKED PEAS AT EACHOTHER AND TOLD CRUEL JOKES ABOUT SPASTICS. I'M BACK IN THAT ROOM BUT ITS BEEN PAINTED WITH INCREDIBLY DELICATE PICTURES OF CHRIST INLAID WITH GOLD LEAF THAT MELTS INTO TEARS THAT DON'T COME OUT OF YOUR EYES BUT YOU FEEL THEM JUST THE SAME. YOU FEEL THEM RUN DOWN INTO YOUR THROAT.

"LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL"

I THINK I HAVE A HALO NOW, I'M THE BABY JESUS, IN THE CRIB, THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, A STAR LED THESE PEOPLE HERE - THEY ARE WISE MEN FROM THE EAST.

THE MONOTONE CHANTS CONTINUE. THEN THE CHOIR KICKS IN IN INCREDIBLE HARMONY, THE PRIEST GOES INTO HIS DOORS, THE PEOPLE CROSS THEMSELVES AND HE COMES OUT WITH MORE INCENSE. I REALISE I SHOULD LEAVE BEFORE I DISSAPPEAR COMPLETELY OR BECOME AN EMBRYO. SO I WALK OUT, BACKWARDS, AND SIT ON A BENCH OUTSIDE THE CHAPEL, TO WRITE THIS......

moscow underground

It was a long time ago
way back in 2008
in the country they used to call UK,
in a town they used to call London,
in a place they used to call
Hackney.

We used to go down to Passing Clouds
in fancy dress
and just get stupid.

It was a big group.
We all had cool names:
Hernandez,
Morski,
Shahan,
Djanan,
Dila,
Ilaria,
Bass,
Baird,
Assman,
Poon,
Cassidy,
Musker,
Miggi,
Jules,
Noda,
Kwodja,
Planetman,
Chan,
Castro,
Cruz,
Amos,
Ram,
lydie, magda,
others,
more,

always someone new
and usually some
mad gypsy shit
playing

trying to dance to
janky 9/8 beats
that didn't really make
sense. until.

Noda would have a bottle
hid down the front of his trousers

Jamaican overproof rum
you'd keep nipping
until your stomach burned,
until
you started sweating
alcohol.

people from all over the London world
got down in the London way.

like when this
venezuelan
indian
chica
indian eyes,
red skin, venezuelan hips.

played with 2 Ghanan Tribesman.
she could bang on
a ukelele like nobodies business.

See her
Indian Feather Tribal Headress
rest in her thick hair-O

and in the first song
she gets the Audience to
BREATHE.

She just says

BREATHE IN

and we breathe in.

BREATHE OUT

and we breath out.

Then those black boys start
beating the
drums
and she strums.
sings.

everyone around has
got on
a stupid hat
and weird shit
SELLOTAPED TO THEIR FACE.

Really?
yes.

everyone in the
room had something sellotaped
on. Eleanor would
keep costumes and
fake moustaches and
sellotape and
wotnot in the bar.

They'd come
up

with some mad decorations too
- like nailing a load of
teddy bears to the
ceiling or something.

random stuff
strewn everywhere
to pick up and wear and play with and move.

it was a pretty good set up -
no neighbours around to complain about the noise.

just a
back st
door
down
a dodgy alley
thats
impossible
to find.

remember?

the big room
upstairs and
Kwodj shouting something
like

'EVERYBODY FUCK OFF!'

and nobody
taking a blind
bit of notice.

keep nipping and falling
forwards backwards into
sofas or girls or both.

or maybe
on occasion

especially if you
smoked to much weed

you'd get a sad drunk on

and sit
and feel slightly
disgusted
by all these people having
a really good time
around you
and you had
a dry mouth
and needed a
drink of water or

something else.
something missing.

ADMIT IT

that could
happen too.

occasionally
you'd see through
the fun
into the
cold desperate eyes of
monkeys
grabbing at things to drag back to the cave.

fuck knows why.
who cares?
they're just
dark moments
of reflection
sandwiched betwixt swollen
glorious moments of
closed eyed dancing
to mad beats beaten out
by real life hands

a beat
beat on real animal skins
beat on by calloused hands.

Did you ever
shake
Noda's hand?

his fingers
are inch-thick
and hard.

like shaking a
very
thick slice of
over sliced

stale bread.

He had that special
cuban
way of drumming
and smiling

at the same time.

One time
down at Kwodjas
when Noda played
I got covered
in sponge cake
by a girl
in a pink nightie.

dreamy.

Only thing is
the cake was
that cheapshit
chemical sponge and
it left me
smelling
a bit milky.

smelling a bit
like when a dog eats a
whole knob of butter then
pukes it back up.

and it was greasy shit too -
you couldn't
just rinse it off.

the whole rest of the night i could smell myself.
eee.
those were the days.

i heard the ice cream man today. from somewhere in the blue distance his music drifted through my window like a portent of spring. yes, sound the klaxons! the ice cream man took a trip in his ice cream van today. i heard him. perhaps it was only a speculative trip, perhaps only to warm the sprockets of his ice cream van, which must have been gathering rust for some months now, perhaps just to see if it would start after so long in the garage. i doubt if every child in the neighbourhood ran to mother to beg for enough spare change for a mr. whippy, but still, the ding dong sing song ice cream music did drift and i'm sure the sun heard it and thought of lollies and cones and those see through containers of white ice cream with a gob stopper in the bottom. i certainly did. i thought of the sharp pain in the side of the head when you eat too much at once. the smooth texture of a small plastic spoon. i thought of the sticky drip that climbs down your fingers. i thought of chewing on the wooden stick long after its finished. i remembered with glee the disappointing foamy texture of stale wafer. i considered the perfection of the little cardboard circle they put in the top of a walls cornetto. i saw in my minds eye a young flaxon haired girl pucker her lips and bite slowly into a magnum, whilst the smell of engine smoke curls up into the cue. we stand and wait, not quite being able to see through the happy window until we reach the front. look! a strange looking man wearing a white jacket and asking if you'd like a flake in it.

anyone remember zoe taylor?

she was the first girl i properly snogged. it was around christmas under the mistletoe in the entrance to the prefab classroom where mr. kirk used to teach us '8 a day'.

all these kids were standing around COUNTING cos there was some sort of contest to see who could kiss the longest. we went for it and i remember Z saying it had to be 'FK's' (French Kisses). i had no idea what FK's was but went for it anyway. we made it up to a count of 100 with the tongues going in and out. it felt strange but i liked it. then i saw her 2 more times. we went to the cinema round by waitrose and saw something with michael j fox in it.

as usual she had her friend chloe with her which made me really nervous. chloe used to sharpen her nails and fucking SCRATCH me! we sat in the back row of the cinema and i was shitting it about putting my arm round zoe and it took me forever to pluck up the courage. finally i managed it and can't remember much of the film cos we were eating each others face off!

then another time i went around to see her at chloes house and we got down on the top bunk of the bunk beds whilst chloe fucking dug her nails into my leg! kind of kinky when you think about it. all i really remember is a mess of hairspray and saliva and 'walk like an egyptian' blasting on the hi-fi

They snap their teeth on your cigarette
Foreign types with the hookah pipes say
Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh
Walk like an Egyptian.....

then summer holidays came and i was too shy to call her.

x

11.02.08

1.

At Marble Arch my fake printed ticket saved me 17 English Pounds on the journey to Luton airport. The driver had tattoed arms and a friendly face. With genuine gratitude and relief I thanked him and took a seat. We turned past the Odeon cinema and I was headed for Marrakech with a swollen blue bag. During the long draw waiting for the 341 at Manor House I had decided to write it all down. Everything, now, as it happens. The sore throat. The cold that I thought might bite my nose clean off. The time: 02.41am. The twitching sleepiness creeping into my eyelids. And this bus, now speeding through Marble Arch past the Danibus Hotel, now passing Regents Park, now stopping and opening its doors. A dark skinned aboriginal girl gets on, with pockmarked skin hanging loosely about her cheeks. I look out at London and wonder why the fuck I live here. Why not somewhere warmer, where I wouldn't be able to read all the signage.

"Chicken Cottage" - who needs it?

The bus drives past the Finchley Squat and I remember why I am here. Certainly all the synchronicities point to the fact that i should be here, now, in this 2008, with all these creative forces gathering at my feet, with this network, these webbed toes.

And the steam rises and there is garlic in my breath and the driver with the tattoed arms is eating minstrels and riding one handed through the freezing cold in a flimsy white shirt with the windows wide and I think the cold might just bite my nose off yet.

2.

Luton Airport.

Shopping Lift:

1 x FlowerBomb perfume for M
1 x Rasberry Muffin from Starbucks
1 x Lonely Planet Morocco guidebook from WH Smiths
1 x Peach and Passionfruit Smoothie

3.

11.14am, Djemma el-Fna, Marrakech

I am drinking muddy coffee on a blue plastic table under the hottest sun I've seen in some time. A sun that puts creases in cross-eyed faces, that itches the trigger finger that creeps towards the shutter release of camera aparatus and wishes to take a picture. My eyes are rotating in my head attentive as a cats ears.

And the cats slink through the market place, as bedraggled as a cat should be. There's a smell of woodsmoke and dust and I see humour in these people's eyes. A humour that lets cats be cats. A blue plastic humour that's nicely worn and soft and dusty. The slightly cross-eyed populace sports a variety of limps and hunches.

Marrakech. The charm is immediate. Here Kerouac came, and others. Here cats roam. Mangy, happy cats with black berber hair. And the tiles all gaudy with kaleidoscopic blue designs attach to the crumbling plaster medina and I'm glad to be here.

The cow-bells which I carried under my ribs began clanking wildly; in the belfry above it was as if all the stars in the heavens had come together to make a celestial bonfire. There was no weight to my body, none whatever.

1.

It was night. Jarvan Tarant was still in the office. He’d been at the office all day but hadn’t got much done. The Blue Nightingale case had hit a dead end and his uncompleted tax return loomed like a painful unpopped pimple on his desk, accumulating circular coffee cup stains and fallen ash. He sat back in his ergonomically designed chair, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Silk Cut. The cheap smoke rasped at the back of his throat pointlessly. He blew a smoke ring at his laptop and thought about his life. He was 42, virtually penniless, and horny as hell. Being a private detective hadn’t proved as profitable or glamorous as he’d anticipated. Assignments were few and far between, a lot of his clients defaulted on payments, and oftentimes they were ungrateful about the can of worms he’d opened for them. He was sick of the life. Sick of chasing dud leads and searching for clues where there were none to be found. Sick of all the betrayal and the double-crossing and the lies. Sick of his pulpy, ugly face in the mirror. He felt disappointed. 10 years in the life and only one or two high speed car chases. He hadn’t had to shoot his gun in over 2 years. It was dirty, repetitive work and he felt like giving it up and going back to the Post Office. He leant forward and stubbed the cigarette out on the table top, exhaling smoke with a long disgusted sigh. He rubbed his eyes with his fists and decided to call it a night. He stood up and walked towards the door, grabbed his jacket - hung from a nail rudely hammered into the flimsy partition walls of his office - opened the door, stepped outside and had walked halfway down the hall before he heard the phone ringing in the office. He looked at his watch. 2.33 in the morning. Who the fuck called him at this hour?

‘Tarant?’
‘This is he.’
‘It’s The Chameleon, you know who I am?’
‘No, who are you?’
‘I’m the shape-shifting motherfucker who’s gonna pay you.’
‘What for?’
‘I need to find a girl.’
‘I don’t deal tricks mister, this is a reputable company.’
‘Not that sort of girl, her name’s Pinky, she’s a dominatrix, and I need to locate her.’
‘You got any more than that?’
‘Some pictures and a telephone number.’
‘Come by my office tomorrow at noon and we’ll discuss it. Bring the pictures and my fee.’
‘How much?’
‘300 per day, I’ll need a week in advance.’
‘Okay.’

Half an hour later Jarvan Tarant was sucking on a bottle of beer in a snooker club close to his apartment. It was the only local place that was open past 3. He was still horny as hell. He thought about Pinky, wondering what she looked like, if she ever got horny. Did she wear pink? It was a mystery to him. He looked around the bar at the Turkish men playing pool. They all wore cheap polyester slacks and moustaches. Some music played. Jarvan Tarant decided to dance. He closed his eyes and moved instinctively to the beat of the music. His head tilted sideways. He swayed and rotated with his feet firmly rooted to the spot. He felt better, almost ready to sleep. Maybe this would be the case he had been waiting for. The song ended, he finished his beer, and went home.

2.

In the morning Jarvan Tarant liked to read. He was slowly working his way through Miller, Buk, Fante, Kerouac, Buddhadasa, Nabokov, Dost, Genet, Castaneda, and Hunter S. He liked any combination of hard hitting, fiercely individual, slightly pornographic, surreal, or esoteric. He had a fondness for some of the more flowery stuff too. J. Winterson, DHL, A. Nin and the poetry of Ted Hughes. His small apartment was littered with tattered volumes and overdue library books. He sat in bed reading Our Lady of the Flowers and eating from a bag of mixed nuts and raisons.

At times it would rain. I would hear the patter of the drops on the zinc roofing. Then my sad well-being, my morose delectation, would be aggravated by a further sorrow. I would open the door a crack, and the sight of the wet garden and the pelted vegetables would grieve me. I would remain for hours squatting in my cell, roosting on my wooden seat, my body and soul prey to the odor and darkness; I would feel mysteriously moved, because it was there that the most secret part of human beings came to reveal itself, as in a confessional. Empty confessionals had the same sweetness for me. Back issues of fashion magazines lay about there, illustrated with engravings in which the women of 1910 always had a muff, a parasol, and a dress with a bustle. It took me a long time to learn to exploit the spell of these nether powers, who drew me to them by the feet, who flapped their black wings about me, fluttering them like the eyelashes of a vamp, and dug their branchlike fingers into my eyes.

He looked at his cheap wristwatch, picking with the fingernail of his left index finger at a small piece of almond that had lodged itself between his primary molar and cuspid tooth. It was 11.30. Time to get up.

3.

‘You’re late,’ said The Chameleon.
‘I’ll work through my lunch break.’

Jarvan Tarant fumbled for his keys in his jacket. The pockets had worn through and consequently all his personal effects jostled for room in the depths of the lining. Jarvan’s fingers felt for his keys while he looked at The Chameleon’s face.

He was a short, fat-lipped, rotund man in his 70’s with a down-turned mouth and protruberant eyes that were slightly too far apart and pointed in different directions. His skin seemed thin, almost transparant, and beneath its wrinkled surface could be seen a fluctuating network of chromatophores – specialised cells that can rapidly relocate many different coloured pigments. From each cheek two tiny horn-like projections emerged. The Chameleon seemed distracted, impatient. His protruberant eyes twitched in their sockets as he licked his lips nervously.

‘Come in, sit down,’ said Jarvan Tarant, ‘what can I do for you?’
‘I need you to find Pinky. She’s got something of mine.’
‘Where’s the last place you saw her?’
‘She used to work here,’ said The Chameleon, flipping a business card across the table as his face turned from red to blue to green.

Jarvan picked it up and looked at it.

PREYING MANTIS
mind control, electrics, cock and ball torture,
leg worship, and humiliation
07815 649943

‘So she’s a dominatrix?’
‘She’s a contemporary dancer, the dominatrix thing is just to pay the rent. I was going to help her open up a new theatre down town.’
‘And she’s disappeared?’
‘Without a trace, I’ve had my people search all over town for her and they came up blank, I heard you were making good ground on The Blue Nightingale case and…’

The Chameleon abruptly stopped talking and eyed a large fly that was buzzing around the office and had landed on a sticky patch of spilt coffee on the desk. In the blink of an eye his tongue jerked rapidly out of his mouth and its strangely muscular tip suctioned onto the fly, pulling it into his gaping jaws, which snapped shut, crushing the insect with a little squelching sound.

He pulled a brown envelope out of his pocket and passed it to Jarvan Tarant.

‘Here’s the money and the photographs. I’ll call you tomorrow to see how you’re doing.’

4.

Jarvan Tarant sat in his ergonomically designed chair smoking a cigarette and looking at the business card. 1500 pounds in cash and a handful of large glossy photographs lay on the table - studio shots of a young woman wearing a pink spandex leotard and sky-blue legwarmers. There were various poses that seemed designed to demonstrate how supple and energetic the young woman in them was. She had shiny long auburn hair and beautifully arched feet. In every picture Pinky bent her lips into the same smile. It was a smile in which girlish innocence was fighting a losing battle with wanton sexuality. She looked about 19. Her youthful perfection was offset by a slightly crooked nose that gave her an approachable, friendly look. In one of the pictures she was holding a Chihuahua.

‘Pinky…’ Jarvan frowned, dialling the number for Preying Mantis.

A gruff woman answered the phone.
‘Allo?’
She sounded eastern European.
‘I’m looking for Pinky,’ said Jarvan.
‘Pinky don’t work for us no more. You wanna see Mistress Alexia?’
‘You know where I can find Pinky?’
‘I told you, I haven’t seen her, she quit, Alexia is working here now, you wanna come today around 3 for ball torture?’
‘Er, okay, I’ll come at 3. Where to?’
‘Come to the industrial estate off Hermitage Road and call this number at 2.45. Bring 300 pounds. She will torture you but no fucking okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Good. What’s your name?’
‘Tarant.’
‘Good.’

The gruff woman hung up the phone and Jarvan sat back in his ergonomically designed chair. It was around 1 and he still hadn’t eaten. He thought about The Chameleon’s tongue-act earlier. He didn’t feel hungry so he decided to go for a beer instead.

Half way out the door the phone rang.

‘Hello?’
‘Jarvan its Abnar, how’s it going with the Nightingale Case? You got any leads?’
‘A couple, I’m waiting for Ernesto to get back to me with that spray. You got something for me?’
‘Maybe, but it’ll cost you’
‘How much?’
‘A grand’
‘How do I know its good?’
‘Its good Jarvan, you can trust me, come and meet me at 3’
‘I can’t do 3, how about I meet you tonight at 6, at the Turkish place?’
‘Okay, sure, I’ll see you there, bring the money, you’re going to like what I’ve got’
‘Fine.’

5.

It was about 3.20 by the time Jarvan got to Hermitage Road. He went into the phone box on the corner and dialled the number.

‘Tarant?’
‘I am he.’
‘Wait there.’

A big man in a black suit came around the corner and knocked on the door of the telephone box, speaking to Jarvan through the glass.

‘You Tarant?’
‘I am he.’
‘You got the money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Give it to me.’
Jarvan counted out 300 pounds and passed it to the man through the door of the telephone box.
‘Come.’

Jarvan followed the man a little way down the street and through the entrance to a gated industrial complex. They came to the door of one of the units and the big man pressed a buzzer.

‘You seen any Chihuahua’s lately?’ asked Jarvan.
‘Wha?’
‘Chihuahua’s.’
From the dumb look on the big man’s face Jarvan could tell he hadn’t seen a Chihuahua in a while.
‘Pinky, you remember Pinky?’
Jarvan pulled one of the pictures of Pinky out of his jacket lining and showed it to the big man. The big man frowned and nodded his head.
‘Pinky? I don’t know.’

The door made a clicking sound and the big man pushed it open.

‘Go upstairs, number 5.’

Jarvan passed through the door and up the stairs into a long white hallway. He could hear classical music playing – Balakirev’s Octet, Opus 3. Suddenly it got louder as a door opened. A tall black woman appeared in the hallway, about 6 foot, wearing a dressing gown. Her hair was all natural – an afro. Jarvan looked at her.

‘Step inside,’ said Alexia.

6.

It was a large, high-windowed studio, part of a converted factory, overlooking a railway track, furnished in one corner with a nook of leather Chesterfield’s encircled by an array of well kept house plants. Several large abstract artworks adorned the walls, including one by de Kooning and what looked like a Hans Hoffman. In the centre of the room a crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, casting a low light over the surroundings. All the way along the far wall the brickwork had been exposed and an array of chains and straps hung down from heavy bolts embedded in the mortar. A gynaecologist’s chair - upholstered with red PVC and customised with unidentifiable electrical apparatus – skulked next to a pair of rough looking wooden stocks and some sort of gym horse with a saddle on it. On the floor was a basket containing what must have been 30 or so different types of whips, ticklers, ropes, cords, clamps and slings, and next to that stood a large ornate Chinese vase full of freshly cut stinging nettles.

Jarvan swallowed nervously.

‘Alexia…’
‘THAT’S MISTRESS ALEXIA TO YOU, SHIT-BAG’
‘Excuse me, Mistress Alexia… I… ’

Alexia’s face was like an African mask: cold, expressionless, wooden. Her dressing gown hung open and her tits were falling out of her brassiere like liquid chocolate. He could see the outline of her bush pressing against a pair of shiny rubber panties. Her skin was oily, smooth. Just above the bush a strap-on dildo of some girth prodded at the opening in her bath robe.

‘I… I’m looking for…’
‘SHUT THE FUCK UP, SHIT-BAG. SHOW ME YOUR BALLS.’
‘What?’
‘YOU HEARD ME, SHIT-BAG, YOUR BALL BAG, SHOW IT TO ME.’

Jarvan Tarant thought about it for a moment. He was still horny as hell. Maybe a bit of ball torture would take the edge off. Then again maybe it would only make matters worse.

‘Listen, I’m an old friend of Pinky’s, we go way back, do you know where she is?’
Alexia frowned, ‘Pinky?’

It was obvious she knew the name but she wasn’t sure if she should talk. She looked at him for a moment, trying to decide whether to trust him. Jarvan tore his eyes away from her latex cock and tried to look into her eyes with an expression of authenticity and warmth.

‘Yeah, Pinky. Do you know where she is?’

Tarant passed her the photograph – the one with the Chihuahua.
Alexia took the photograph and stared at it blankly. She looked back at Jarvan. He held her gaze, willing her to talk.

‘Oh… her, yeah, she used to come here and do a lot of weird stuff for the customers, you know, specialist shit. A couple of guys got sick seeing her. They’d come around here asking for her 2 or 3 times a week. She had quite a reputation. Then she just disappeared. She quit I guess, maybe the life was getting her down. It can do that to a girl.’
‘The life is getting us all down Alexia, its getting weirder and weirder earning a living. You know anything about The Chameleon?’
‘That squamate? Everyone knows about him, especially Pinky. When she split he was pissed. He was one of the sick ones, he thought she was a victim, that he was going to save her. A lot of guys come through here thinking like that but not many of them have a hemipenis and a six foot tongue.’
‘A hemipenis?’
‘Look it up cleverdick. The fucked up thing is that she seemed to actually like that freaky lizard man’

When I lie beside you, and you look at me - I mean really look at me – when all boundaries and barriers have dissolved and I can really see you, in your eyes, I honestly love you completely.

Your gaze can touch me like hands and I can feel you holding me there, as if our eyes had a secret language of their own.

In my dream I would lie with you in the long morning. We would gaze into each others eyes and speak the language of silence, of nature, grow roots into the bed sheets, learn telepathy, reach out and whisper touches that speak of only one thought.

At noon we would get up and go to fly a kite, and end up playing hide and seek, running and rushing in the hush of parkland, bodiless, headless, in the woods, where I would find you and steal a hundred whirling kisses in the bracken, softer and more fecund than lush black peat, and we would laugh, and I would see you there: giggling in the cradle of your eyes, deep with reflections of that beauteous sky and all the trees and creeping tendrils of the forest.

'Its true,' I said, trying to be conciliatory. 'All in all, you're right. But the fact is we're all sitting in a big galley, pulling at the oars with all our might. You can't tell me different!...Sitting on nails and pulling like mad. And what do we get for it? Nothing! Thrashings and misery, hard words and hard knocks. We're workers, they say. Work they call it. Thats the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the fold, heaving and panting, smelling and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel as follows: "You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out. Lets go! Lets go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Lets hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man who shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Lets go! And if there's anybody that doesn't want to be killed at sea, he can go and get killed on land, its even quicker!"'

'That's the way it is exactly,' said Arthur, suddenly willing to listen to reason.

But just then, who should come marching past the cafe where we're sitting, but a regiment with the colonel up front on his horse, looking nice and friendly, a fine figure of a man! Enthusiasm lifted me to my feet.

'I'll just go see if that's the way it is' I sing out to Arthur, and off I go to enlist, at the double.

'Ferdinand!' he yells back. 'Don't be a cunt!' I suppose he was nettled by the effect my heroism was having on people around us.

Celine