after an absence...poetry

i am now embarked on an eighteenth century project: opium, philosophy, poetry-suicide maybe even landscape paintings and apocryphal tales of worthy peasant folk; who's nobility of spirit puts to shame the decadent excesses of our privileged class with our cloying hypocritical morality. milkmaids with their round hips pock marked visages and the sweet sour sent of rancid butter cascading from the sacred ceiling of that cotton curtained twin pillared temple at who's green spattered feet a sickly stenched whimpering lord may receive such a salty yellow baptism that may burn his eyes and for a fleeting moment wash away his lordly talc and charcoal blemish leaving him once more weeping and worthless among the ticks and manure.

Dostoyevsky's house

i read once that Dostoyevky ensured that wherever he lived; he could see from his window both a tavern and a church. so as to always be aware of the eternal choices facing 'man'-namely the spiritual and the earthly. from my window i can only see a graveyard... oh with a hospital behind it.

Boundless sacks and rotten turning tawny hands
Bound in tourniquets, salvage and straps of soil studded plastic
Sheathed in defence of a sandy bottom
And covered in defiance of an elemental desire
Mildred bubbles with social reference and reverence for steeple of un-timed absence
A lack of function; whimsical in the extreme but tiered and peppered with sweets (a clumsy allusion to domestic terror)
“Ultimately fortune falls through your fingers”
As you gain credence and support in a scandal that has bloated the corridors of…
How shall I say that she left you unfettered though unbalanced and on the whole a far better soul?
But it’s not your repeated atrocity leaving you free to pursue an inventive career in progress and prototype.
No?
Now the lack of a hand, tawny or not will give you problems with slapstick
Offence and an inclination to adventure.

im sorry drunks should never be spat on. often they are only fallen members of our shadowy protector elite. i apologize for my lack of sympathy. but it is frustrating for one who has spent so long attempting to join their ranks to see former brewmen reduced to sniveling white cider wrecks, while Teddy is in the park every day defending us(and occasionaly reprimanding us for our stupidity) some of these former warrior sages drink 'White Storm'!

Yet again denmark or more specifically Carlsberg 'Special Brew' has come to my rescue; this is not however a solution. in fact i would go so far as to call it a problem: 'the brew problem' the scourge of civilized nations. though in truth it is or only remaining bulwark against the hoards who would seek to destroy our beautiful and delicate way of life. like madalines and jasmine tea the brew serves as secret repository for our most vital collective memories. it is for this reason that our societal custodian have taken upon themselves the heavy burden of the brew. you may mistake them for drunks in the park but in fact they are members of an elite which traces its lineage back to ancient greece. tomorrow attempt to question one of these individuals and you find their answer so subtle and mysterious as to defy our present logic, indeed this nuanced code has been developed over millennia to ensure the secrets that protect us remain so, until we have reached a level of understanding whereby we can utilize this knowledge only for good. like the eastern masters these men(and occasionally women) shy away from the unnecessary luxuries we consider essential: home, car soap for them a nobler path but one without thanks from the very people they tirelessly defend. consider these valiant heroes and when possible attempt to assist them in their mission £1.60 is the average price for a draft of this elixir. a warning if they do not drink brew then they are merely drunks and should be spat on.

As he sat there a visible change came over him and he spurted out;” Everyone blames it on evolutionary imperatives. But they are wrong! If we were so highly evolved we’d drink 2 and a half litres of water in one go. We don’t!”
“Surely that’s insufficient evidence with which to counter the larger part of western scientific thought on the nature of mankind” I queried. “well, yes I suppose it is” he responded meekly.
“I’m sorry. My sister doesn’t like me.”
With that an uncomfortable silence descended on the proceedings. We looked down at our coffee cups. I got smoke in my eye, but suppressed the urge to blink. Afraid as I was of appearing glib. This only increased the discomfort and worse; caused tears to stream down my face. After enduring the pain for long enough to disassosiate it from said smoke . I affected a casual wipe with my sleeve. My hand however only sered to remind me of the sores that surrounded my mouth; from her crotch, from my crotch from hers. Inevitably enough the conversation turned to the merits or otherwise of one Alessandro Botticeli; apparently an artist of some renown, but not one I particularly loved. That said I did have some respect for something or other someone told me he did. Anyway, I argued that in my opinion his work was a bit like the illustrations from ‘Hotspur: for boys’. My ccompanion did not agree and was beginning to castigate me. At this point I became aware that his words had been reduced to a monotontous hum in my only working ear, on top of this my narration was hoplessly stilted and staggered. I desperately grasped for an onomatipia as a drowning man reaches for a log… or a metaphor, but to no avail I was lost!
There was once a broken drain in the street behind a house. At night it seemed a lake was living there: a rat lake with rat boats and coke cans. Cold and Black(two cats) patrolled its edges; each a mirror image of the other.
“Frescos are just massive flat man cocks!” I started, it was not nessasareiy that I disagreed with the statement, no in fact it made perfect sense to me. At this point as at all the other points it was the physical manifestation of an internal and unrelated issue that woke me from my reveries. Today was a day for espresso. It was too cold for a longer beverage. This conversation had gone on for too long: but the fact was we had said nothing of any worth. I became aware that nothing of any worth would be said that day. It is most unsettleing to realize that nothing will happen.
It wasin tandem with these pronouncement that I realized that competitive creativity is not very creative. This discovery coincided with a massive transcription of my entire creative output. Uncertain about how to proceed with this frankly Hurculean task… correction: unsure about how to proceed with this Sysiphusian task, I came to the inevitable conclusion that mythological reference is artistic shorthand for theoretical ineptitude. I considered Artemisia Gentileshi and…Biblical scenes represent a more profound problem…spiritual malaise is theoretical shorthand for religious ineptitude. I wondered how long it would take to reconcile my early life. As an artist I was many things. But I certainly wasn’t street, this isn’t street, I sound like a sixty year old civil servant(civil srevant is going too far) possibly a clerk at the Alliance and Lester. “You’ll see how street I am!” I declared in past tense. Indeed (indeed!?). Edgy production values and open effrontery were going to put me on the map ghetto style. This is Newcastle and I’m from the north! How could I wear a suit and spats? That’s how! From the street and my art kills people.
Eventually I was discharged and had time to consider all that had occurred in the interim, that is since my rash decision taken post-above statement; and informed by little more than a vitriolic reverie/ revisionist contemplation of my ill imagined identity or lack of. Luckily the clerk at the Alliance and Lester did not take my threats any more seriously than my claim to have access to illicit IRA explosives, any more than the doctors believed that I was part of an active service unit or my actions were those of a highly trained specialist. As I dribbled Haloperidol into my cup a kindly soul regaled me with tales of his abusive past and the satori like state he had achieved through his recent chemical castration; administered with his consent, insistence even at an adjacent unit that housed some of the regions more dangerous sex offenders. I had some reason to question the efficacy of this treatment later that cycle(a cycle being the duration between chemically induced sleep: approx 6hrs) when Simon proceeded to felate me with a vigour I have seldom seen; even in the most complete individuals on ‘the out’. At this point I wondered if the administration of chemicals in fact made an individual more complete than the non-medicated? I was still musing on this point as I came. I felt bad. I would feel worse when I eventually learned the true extent of my par amour’s social transgressions.
The reverie I had experienced was; thogh artificial in its initiation; authentic in its content. Crawling through sulphurous memory, obliging reflux, indulging in hysterical blindness and catgut, I groped my way through the impudent bile of my youth. In a hostel I practiced life…badly, weed and cap guns from third floor windows, biannual meetings with young black muslims and failed social climbers defeated by the distance required to leave the cravace they wher born into, having made it just far enough to isolate themselves they curled up in liberal misogyny and the awe of black skin held by only the most hopless whites. Pub prophets and bad ones at that. A girl arrived on a day we will say was Wednesday

Simon knew that he must, at all costs maintain absolute secrecy. The last time his mother; a formidable women who resonated at an alarmingly high frequency when perturbed, had deduced that simon was once again embarked on another programme of experimentation. She had assured him that to continue would result, in his not only the forefitting of his rooms but also and more importantly the loss of his monthly allowance: a meagre sum, but his only income. It should be explained that although the’experiment’ had beenin progress for some years the world had only become aware of its exsistence in the last sixteen months.

JULY. Despite his compromised position, upon waking Simon’s first feeling was rage, Rage that the man standing over him smelt of psychiatry, rage at the belt like appendages securing hie limbs to a disinfected white carriage. There could be little doubt that his situation was somewhat precarious. Though he was buoyed somewhat by the fact that the other staff appeared to lack the unsettling combination of boredom and despair indicative of asylum staff, a man passed the door armed with an aggressive bouquet of tulips, confirmed that simon was on a medical ward (people don’t give flowers to the mad and even if they did those lurid stems would never be permitted near even the most stable of psychotics).

EXPERIMENT. Just when the initial breakthrough was made is unclear, suffice to say it was some time in the summer of 95, when as the man himself tells it: “I was chased and I jumped off one thing onto another thing”. At this point the author feels obliged to apologise for the standard of our protagonist’s prose, gifted though he is in his chosen field he lis somewhat lacking in linguistic verve. This is in part obstinacy on his part born in part from anger at not feeling himself a fully formed character. It has even been alleged that Simon is simply a narrative device; ruthlessly exploited for the communication of what is essentially a one liner. Though completely erroneous this presumption has left him a very bitter man. We can only speculate at what he would have said were he not so ignorant and one-dimensional. During his 21st year(which incidentally was my 25th) Simon Jepson was having some success with his fledgling band: ‘Rancid Butter in the Hindu Temple’ (a name inspired by the groups only female member). As it was their modest achievements culminated that summer in a booking at ‘insert festival 95 or 99. This came about, if you believe the subsequent court deposition due to an unhappy coincidence in the naming of a popular artist in another, more sinister genre. So to cut a long and overley elaborate story short. Or at least shorter and less elaborate:


On Rape Beef
It was at lunch in a restaurant that shall remain nameless that I first tasted Rape Beef. The eatery in question was a French/Argentine/Spanish brassiere specializing in said bovine delicacy. It is said that RB combines all the elements of our most popular meat based treats while at once addressing the desire in present in most modern men to transgress vicariously; it allows the diner to participate in a positive orgy of blood lust and depravity during lunch and without his needing to change shoes.
On request a diner could obtain a biography, of some poor beast; complete with a written description of its final days, or for a significant surcharge a video of highlights from the killing floor. It is not difficult to deduce the target demographic for this cuisine. What did prove surprising was the popularity of RB among the legions of progressively minded ethical consumers.

Inevitably things could at times become slightly over heated: usually at the weekends and during the evening service, this was mostly down to an excess of alcohol, but on occasion the meat or more acuratly the meat menu was to blame; there were several instances of wealthy patrons being asked to leave after they were found to be excessively aroused by the whole experience. There was no malice in these expulsions and they were of re-addmited to conclude their meal once they had relieved themselves at a nearby facility, as such a degree of symbiosis existed between the two establishments it was decided that they should merge. This desison was taken exclusively by the management and initially met with serious resistance from both sets of workers. I am told that the ethical custom dropped off around this time. This was of little concearn in a burgeoning economic climate, besides cross pollination twixt the brothel and bistro (sorry) had led to the most controversial/progressive/illegal service: namely rape rape. As you can no doubt see the initial premise of my little story has collapsed under the weight of inevitability that is human inevitability. I don’t know when it went wrong was it when the men from the sex trade got involved? Was it when the ethical eaters left? Or was it all fucked the moment it started? Rape beef indeed!