Pulped Fraction - JLG Clift

All wasn’t fine on the Piccadilly line where I trudged through the slew and the sludge of London decay under the scorching scorn of the vindictively bright sun against worn track suits and train tracks and the burning roots of sun sapped plants; I got the train at sunset and rode down down to the dark where the stark reality of recessive culture was lurking I saw a dealer working a whole carriage at Bounds Green I saw a mum bags from her eyes to her chin to her straining hands scavenging in a bin for her crying kids knackered action man that he’d thrown in a rage an action man very similar to the one I played with when I was his age he’d thrown it in amidst the screeching thuds as his trainers drew traction against the floor his mother dragging him flailing one handed up the stairs and everyone stared but nobody helped; the throwing of the toy was something the boy clearly and dearly regretted after he released what he’d thrown away the train took off too fast to tell whether or not she found it but I hope she did I doubt she could cope with her child crying on top of everything else on top of her bag tearing and the contents spreading across the greasy tiles of the grey platform vagisil vaulting the tattered yellow line and the worn bronze rim where the train meets the stains of the station for the first time and rupturing under hot black wheels that peel away with a slightly raspy squelch.

the train ploughed on and I turned away into a bikers belch a behemoth of a man a man so wide and so terrifying I dared not even cough at his gas for fear that he would think of my reaction to his crude action as rude and therefore his leather clad fists would meet my face and I’d paint the glass with the lining of my cheek and tooth and tongue this man looked so unstable I probably wouldn’t even need to speak to piss him off I mean he probably hates toffs he’s probably looking for an excuse to kill us all off; the smell of the man’s breath did make me meek but not as weak as I felt at the thought of fighting the fucker who I’d already dubbed in my head as the Kilimanjaro Killer who could crack mountains who could turn human necks into spewing fountains with a flick of his forefinger a man so savage that he could ravage both contenders at the Thriller in Manila with ease tearing the whole arena into screaming shreds like still warm bread for fun and a man who had laid waste to everyone who had ever crossed his path grinding them up like an ogre into a lumpy porridge paste only darker and redder and deader, as dead as the Quaker Oats guy.

‘oh they’d really be Quaker Oats if this bloated barbarian was shaping the recipe; you know he probably eats people’

‘no he doesn’t’

‘yes he does he captures them and juices their heads with his hands he likes girls the best he likes the way their bloodied hair threads through his tensing tree trunk fingers’

‘well where would he put the bodies?’

‘he’s like Dexter he drops them off the side of his boat and the bodies are so scared of him they don’t even float they just sink’

 I had an internal Withnail moment the cruellest part of my brain would not stop taking to me he would not let me be he was making me strain and driving my skin pale with thoughts of how this grimacing thug was to crush me under his candy coloured jack boot like a Hummer crushes snails or slugs and I had to try to feign calmness all the while pretending that the man to my immediate left who I’d need a crane to make eye contact with couldn’t turn me to paste on the tiles; a little bit of my head kept reminding me of this story on Rotten dot com that I had gotten sent to me when I was twelve a story that had been stewing on the darkest on my mind’s internal shelves hanging on by shrewd screws that refuse to fall out; my darkest thoughts are there shouting into constantly shattering mirrors annoyed that they can only scare themselves waiting to haunt me again and now this Withnail had taken it from its wailing jail and was taunting me with it; the story about how a body builder had picked up his child and given her a bear hug and how this child’s head hit the ground 10 feet away with a thud blood coating the body builders face and muscles yesterday’s Brussels sprouts gushing from the beneath the little girl’s flower dress with her bowels and all the rest of her no-longer-interior she was like a tube of chunky toothpaste sagging in her father’s swollen arms; it came with pictures and Withnail decided to bring them along too just to add a slightly more menacing hue to the tale heavy breathing I flew off the train fast at Finsbury Park and watched as the train departed the biker had not started to follow me and I watched with a smile as the vile beast was swallowed into the dark dragged along by the motion of a train still leaving tracks of that woman’s wasted lotion on the black steel wheels squealing on the ground.

I lost my way outside I was still fried from the Harley Davidson disciple and the stifling array of ways in which he could make me suffer I was hiding from the melees of midday in the shade and trying to shake the image of the biker filleting me and then devouring me with oil and maybe some bree (I know he was trying to play it low key but I did see a loaf in the oaf's canvas bag for life or until you put it through too much strife tear it making that whole for life statement no more than a marketing gimmick crooked and phoney as a Hallmark pre-watershed limerick the ones that are so dull they actually make you sick) and there was this guy touting his wares his cockney lisps like snares against the air he was shouting about fresh fruit that I suspect had been there since sunrise with no shade to speak of I stayed around a while and then I met Alice the Red and then (below the Shard where numerous postcards were being snapped as our shoes tapped against the heat of central concrete) another Alice this one with blonde and brown dreads threading across her head down to her shoulders complete with quirky attitude and banjo and lime green skateboard she was so immediately cool it was almost cruel and after the movie she played a jaunty little tune in the little park we found after dark telling me about how she'd sieved through several instruments from violins through to bassoons but that she had finally now found an instrument she wanted to stick with.

We got moving to the movie and found it downstairs in a really cool bar just a bit past London Bridge on one of those ridge like roads where freighter trucks unload and where unchecked cars are towed away and scrapped; I swear I’ve never seen more needlessly worn glasses in all my life there was this girl off on the right a chequered scythe across her tissue tampered chest that just got bored of wearing her frames half way through the film because as she remarked to who I guessed was her boyfriend ‘the glare was lame’ it’s a semi miracle I could actually tame my temper I’ve torn people down for a lot less than wearing coke bottle frames as fancy fucking dress but I moved on a round later and got into the zone fairly quickly afterwards Bruce Willis was starting to feel sickly about the loss of his father’s watch that was on the glazed kangaroo I was trying to get my straw to stop being so askew in my glass trying to figure out what people had against dignitas (as you do) but I didn’t really follow any of these thoughts through and I didn’t chew on them for too long either they just occurred and then were gone along with the other hundred thoughts I had during that screening about so many things from the biker to the housewife I saw preening the hedges not 200 metres away from the ledges at Arnos where those ghosts of people were lurking when I boarded the people that are only lauded over en masse when people of new means mumble about the death of the working class who can’t pay the gas man to keep their water warm but people that don’t care to help and people that would in fact yelp with disgust and shy away with distrust if they ever came into contact with these people like they’d caught a gust of sewage or like they’d been caught in the scrimmage of blunderbuss propelled ballistics.   

Fast forward through the film cut through the fumes in a small park in the barely dark of the city centre and see us getting licked but the zoot had to be toked quick because the two Alice’s had school the next day and didn’t want their parents shooting them down with negatives and imperatives about how they had to improve their timekeeping and about how they have to stop sleeping their mornings away the minute they rounded on their front doors kicking of freshly scored draw; it was a small and a green alcove, well more of a hollow grove, that we’d found and I looked up and around the Shard was in the stars like it always is the cars were hueless soundless cityscape's caress had darkened the trees on the far left all the way to black and the mento moon had boiled into recoiling clouds that looked like wet candy floss all the colour diluted and lost rooting around the high rises finding no pleasant surprises and no places to rest on the ride home there was a tramp on the carriage dressed in soon to be rags his club foot dragging behind him he told us that he lost his home when the bank took it up from underneath his hardworking constantly moving feet and that they’d thrown him out onto the street without batting an eye and that they even had the cheek to pat him on the back and wish him luck even though they knew they’d fucked him over he told us all that he’d heard successes call and had strode gallantly towards it only to fall into the pits laid out by greedy consumerists that made us the ninja generation the only generation in the history of population to be completely fucked and absolutely rinsed of luck and faith subject to the wrath of terrible men that don’t care and don’t see us as children but as acceptable casualties needed to mop up their mess there’s no mind paid to our distress and we’re all so cynical that we feel our rebellion would be utterly useless and would amount to nothing so we don’t even try and we go along with what we know in our hearts is wrong and we get our meaningless degrees and we get on our knees and we suck away and we hope that one day it all pays off; well not me, I’m not going to one of these guys that confines himself to a lot and a life that he did not choose I’m not going to let myself lose I’m not going to be one of these guys cruising with a conservative agenda going round the bends with the stupid men in Savile's suits chasing political trends like kids with nets chase non-existent butterflies of apparently amazing colours but how amazing can they be when they cause good people to bleed and blubber stinging them with the sharp of their stained glass wings that only beat to fill the pockets of kings; the guy was about to start crying so I dropped a couple of coins into his callused hands he said thanks and I smiled looking down at the flaky cup in his shaking grasp it was empty apart from my contribution practically there were men and women well-dressed successful tactically glancing into papers and smart phones until we, the lucky ones bound for home, were alone again; the crying man exited at Euston and headed into the Piccadilly line to be among his own kind who are all too far from fine to describe the impoverished tribe that are living in flivvers if they’re lucky while the people that should be the givers dither in their detached districts of a truly disturbing suburbia where no one is poor and no one’s stomach is sore with hunger where lungs are not raw with the pollution of man’s retribution on what he see as a neglectful mother or a lazy lover or just another alien failing to pull their weight the fires on both sides of the tracks are now smouldering to through the spectrum all the way to black with hate for those across the way but at least we have a place to stay at least when we have bills to pay we can pay them we are the lucky ones and the people on the other line are the pulped fraction juiced by the actions of noble men that will never meet their noose, you know, the ones we all let loose to run the world, you know, the ones making society unfurl; you know; the ones that we’ll probably become some day.

  

Aurora Australis (the Southern Lights) - JLG Clift

Aurora Australis falls from a divine and unearthly chalice made of materials so precious that there is no word in our language to gauge its splendour there never will be either because how can our slumbering fumbling syllables of sound encapsulate how profound what we're seeing is? She now soars across our unworthy skies past my unworthy eyes stringing bright streamers of red and green and blue to be seen and admired by the thinkers and the dreamers amid the screaming malice of the modest the mundane and the insane that rule the roost of life from booster chairs wearing bibs below bespoken blazers and throwing bottles motherless children one and all turning out identically cruel; her strands have made me a star gazer today I looked up mythology and space weather and found out so many things I never knew before I memorised facts that would usually bore me to my core but that was me before I saw her lying in the dullness of the night it was like seeing a miracle taking flight I didn’t feel like I deserved to have her in my sight after all I had not been looking for her I had not been waiting for her call I’d been staring at the ground listening to the sounds of the world my mind boxed in behind red brick walls miles thick where I had so often dwelled but above the chaos of the ice turning to sludge while on a cruise to nowhere which I excepted begrudgingly because a friend at Thomas Cooke had offered it to me I bitched and I moaned and I groaned as I boarded the plane that took me to the train that took me to the boat I wanted to get stoned I wanted to be alone and on the deck alone I was when I saw her beauty swelling I felt like yelling about her glory to all that were near enough to hear and after a few drinks I did I truly tried to lift the lid on what we were seeing and how harrowingly free beings like me start to feel when kneeling below her colourful cords.

How small do I look to her? I wonder whether or not it even occurs to her that I stare it’s hardly rare for men to look when her astral flares begin to tear up the lackluster sky that has always made me too tired to try anything but she excites me and entices me to be something before she makes me sigh with a mix of awe and wonder she’s soft as snow powerful as thunder she’s thrown my beliefs asunder I don’t fall for things too often my heart has never softened for anything really merely for family and occasionally friends I never thought one entity would bend my mind this far from myself and my reasoning but she has and I can almost hear her singing in the silence of the sky drifting by I know she’s small to her someone the sun but he’s got none of her attraction nor her finesse he’s boring and annoying always prying me from my snore strung fantasies seizing my time teasing me his baking heat in a lifeless blue sky always dry always hot failing to care about his subjects beating our necks with his rays until they’re raised and red and practically bloody all the way to the top of our heads; if I had my way Man would protest his rise indefinitely so that we could forever be basking in my impossibly unchangeable and unattainable loves caresses that catch our eyes from above her curls unfurling limitlessly lingering endlessly sending my heart and my speech into stutters and my passionate roars into boyish mutters I’m in awe forever my jaw tethered to the floor my mind left to stir in the unrealities of what will probably never be but that doesn’t stop me dreaming because she’s still gleaming somewhere out there and although she doesn’t care for me as I for her I don’t think I still stare at her never blinking so that I don’t stop drinking her sultry solar display in; true the unattainable aspect of this all does fill me with an unusually painful brand of dismay that will surely remain no matter where I stay or how many girls I lay in a million lifetimes she’ll always be there flowing behind my rhymes like Maude for Yeats only minus the bitter hate that that old failure felt the radiant nature of her florescent curves swerving so smoothly through the atmosphere has melted my mind into tears leaking through my longing eyes but I don’t cry half as much  as I would if I were unable to see her swirling in the dark night of the sky and igniting it with her endless glow that spreads across her baying body head to toe flowing going everywhere she can so that all men may be inspired as much as she has inspired me wiring her priceless wares throughout the sky.

It is for selfish reasons that I cry because I want to be the only man that sees her occurring her body curling beside mine in the night as I lie on my mountain top tears stripping sleep back from my bewildered eyes; it saddens me that she'll never try to stay with me but what saddens me more is that at sunrise I'll have to see her die again and that is surely a sight that humbles all sane men.      

Beware: Live Dog Roaming Free in Hadley - JLG Clift

Fires burn to make things darker it’s a camp side jam tonight the show stealing fingers of the flames fingering the air which is tearing apart like dirty pads of cotton wool tainted and painted by the fads and the fraying ropes of smoke that the ginger digits have provided; these people have confided in the forest; this is where they play and drink and smoke and chat I’m turning off my phone watching the low res glow go completely so my mum can’t reach me to ask me where I’m at because I don’t want to say I want to stay in my tree top where the leaves are already turning from green to brown in the long frown of the sun at sunset before the ket came out; we’re raving in the middle of a heat wave and the trees are fast becoming hangers for the leaves and their fruit to dry out and die on the leaves and the branches are crooked and breaking the tree was shaking as I climbed up but I didn’t care I like being closer to the sky I always stare at it’s always black it’s always still and it always will be there’s a serenity in its silent colours and its dandelion moon that’s blooming fully tonight but its glow will soon slowly flake and flutter away as the day encroaches or the crowds of rowdy clouds much darker than the bark beneath my floating feet;  dry twigs shout in an unknown naturally grown language they crunch and crumble under Creepers and clumsy couples fumbling on the crackling floor and under bottles that have been launched from scrawny hands at the night but they never quite make it and instead hit the ground and shatter and with a clatter they fade into the tawny sticks and the leaves brown bottles disappear better than the rest but the rest vanish too in time; there’s almost a mind to the woods that makes it cast its haggard hood of aged foliage over the broken and the decayed smoothing out the fraying edges we have made not with the neurotic neutering of hedges like the housewives in my cul-de-sac do but merely with a pile of leaves that have never spoken in their lives to me before tonight right here and right now.

I listen but I do not understand the words of this land anymore if I ever did and that fact makes me sore deep down but I scaled up from the ragged jagged roots rising from the ground around an old oak tree to the tip to the top moments ago not to converse but to see the sights of these people in the lightless night and now I’m watching a group of girls in Topshop onesies drop for the first time and I’m seeing their eyes light up staring at a sullied plastic cup; we’re well beyond the static of the fire now and free from its shadows though these onesie wearers don’t belong here I’m afraid they were never to see the cup that’s being displayed on the dark of the marked up floor left here by a toddler before sunset god knows how long ago back when the children used to go here when they were small.

 Now they’re big and they’re here again but they’re still so small from where I sit a lit cig in my lips rum in my hand hand on my heart I swear to god I don’t think they’ll ever truly depart from this place not really not nearly as much as one thinks they could or should depending on the person this cup and this drop will still irk them decades from now when they’ll be wondering how and why and when they let themselves go crying in counselling sessions a repeatedly resuscitated recession still piling up around their ears sensorium overload towed out all those reluctant emotions and all those teenage notions so much that they’ll start to see the stability of their existence as a crutch and they’ll throw it aside to try to clutch to what was but they’ll never quite catch it because it’s not them anymore and that realisation will rot them to the core.

I’m back from the curls of the canopy to the flaming sea amid the logs that are being flogged by the whips of these cocooning waves tripping into and lipping everything in reach constantly;  there’s a girl with no face close to the flames her hair blowing around the dark of her jaw (the one who I think arranged this jam) who’s talking about this guy she scores from now and how I should tag along to pick up a few grams for the next time we meet here on her birthday which I think I’ll skip on not because I hate the girl but because I just don’t want to drop with these guys I’m going to pop my MD cherry with my oldest friend who spends his weekends on New College ferries discussing literature and life over cheddar and sherry.

At least that’s the stereotype that some people here would have you believe from my own personal experience I can tell you the hype about Oxbridge kids and their unhealthy amounts of wealth is a farce for the most part they don’t all watch Wimbledon from centre court they don’t all snort their savings away through 50s the ultimate distortion these people seem to have treading and threading through their heads is that all Oxbridge students have a fortune to squander on drugs in the first place it took me a while myself to face that fact it was hard to except that I was wrong and that’d I’d placed my faith in the wrong sources that often course confidently throughout my life but that fear is long gone now and I’ve divorced myself from the slithering source. I’ve been wrong about so many things the idea of my words being false doesn’t raise a bead of sweat to my brow and that’s freeing, being free to be right or wrong being free to be here and gone from minute to minute merely riding with life not trying to win against it life’s a competition that I cannot deny however I don’t need to constantly try curb stomp it into submission I can just sit and talk and walk with it and see what it has to say.

 There is a sense of the real of the here and now and how it could all go at any moment the fire foaming at the mouth rabid the opposite of languid even in its dying days the flames starting to head south down the logs into the dirt they’ll extinguish soon no longer able to flirt with and hurt the air; sensible thought is dwindling we’re all too gone to find more kindling so we walk up into the commons and we lie down under the scars that we call stars; there used to be cows mooing here decades ago I’m sure but now there are cars honking and booing on dark roads freshly paved their lights making slaves out of the black of the night as they slice through it around my fearful ears. I don’t like the noise I feel like the last boy of the forest to be honest I’ve painted my jeans and my blazer in its bark and it’s mud although it’s too dark to see the marks right now and I feel alone I feel like I’m the only one tired of seeing cars and trucks and road drawing blood and swabs of visceral vegetation from the veins of this part of this nation in their motorised mobs; they’re the fires don’t let the suits and tan fool you they may be human but they’re hands are spanning outwards to tear the world down like the flames do when hidden in their mounds of smoke and only cowards refuse to see it.

The girl with a shadowed face is still talking now about this article from years ago about the disgraceful displays of child pornography at Neverland that never happened or existed to my knowledge she goes to a sixth college I think but I can’t be sure and don’t want to ask because I don’t want a drunken girl with no face to take me to task on the fact that I’m not paying proper attention; I’m just thinking of the clouds and the fact that they’re not there to hide the stars like they usually are and it’s bizarre that they feel we deserve to see their twinkling crinkling shimmering display; I know I should feel dismay after all they die so that we can see them and it’s depressing in theory the idea that in order to be seen as stars they have to corrode and implode because that’s what people like to see but the feeling of awe at the sheen of their demise won’t leave me be and it’s funny that it doesn’t even sadden me at all. I remember being young in summer in Swaziland and living to catch a falling one a kamikaze star raking glitter across the tar of the sky shooting down into the world it died to lighten and enlighten angry tired burning frightened it landed with a crash but it barely made a gash on anyone’s heart or soul apart from mine.

I meet a girl hand outstretched upside down she was on the ground her hair rustling in the farce of AstroTurf grass the cricketers put down to keep the brown of the soil off their cricket whites I study the red on green the green on red the colours colliding about her feathered head and its foxy features that remind me of the creatures that used to live; where we blaze and gaze out when we should be looking in they grazed on this spot but now they rot under the black of the tarmac trying to reach even after death through the cracks to the sky only to find there are no cracks just the absolute of industrial motorway black. She’s here though, she’s alive, she thrives she strives for more than most here no fear for the future to put sutures or her world view to steal the hues from its spectacular sight; her association to an elegance and her irreverence towards the scorn of the norm are qualities I thought caught fire and died out long ago the fact that she still possesses them makes me want to know her some more so for the first time tonight I speak candidly and she replies. We rise and chat legs cross on the green of the ‘grass’ the sounds of other conversations have been getting in the way all night but not now even when the other voices start to tower into Empire States and Shards I don’t find it hard to ignore them. We talk about film and futures and features we hope to make together and her plans and mine I didn’t think I’d find someone who saw something the same way as I did at a place like this in the mist of these people that used to meet under the All Saints steeple but that now fool around in the forests instead.  

It’s been a night and this girl has definitely been the highlight it’s nice to find someone you didn’t expect to find from time to time to keep life liveable we go our separate ways at the bus stop I felt like we could have talked the moonlight away but we don’t this time but we will another fingers crossed I usually get the feeling that friendships will be lost eventually but not on this occasion.

I board the bus blissfully bored by the nothingness of the N20 there’ve been plenty of sights tonight I won’t write them all down in one sitting because for the most part I’d be resubmitting stories that I’ve already told stories of drugs and drinks and wild egocentric suburbicidal kids that never think and the horrors of house parties and nauseous tendencies of neurotic neon lights and cautious cowards throwing trembling fists in pointless fights and sudo-Bateman-ites and boring songs about the throngs of unjust despair that the Little Man pretends tear his lazy little life apart accusing everyone of being in the wrong. I don’t want to repeat myself there’s a wealth of material to be found and I want to be bounding through it eternally.

I turn the key in the lock and walk into my flat there’s a clock ticking the second hand flicking by and by swatting clotting into the pure of unrecorded time I think back as I kick back in my room about what I saw on my way back from the fumes of the fireside jam but before I was caught on the camera of that late night bus, about a sign I saw walking back from Hadley with the crowd I sat with on the fake of the floor.

‘Beware: live dog roaming free in Hadley Lodge’

 I spotted the old mutt black from face to tail through his gut sagging dragging himself along barely to a shoddy shank of lamb through the B of the sign on the gate he was being kept behind and it racked my mind that they could say this dog was free when he was so clearly being held captive from B through the L through the D through the R through the F all the way to the E and well beyond and above thick black lines on against the sugar shaded sky composed of cloud now lock out the world and block him inside. The dog was slow to respond to my whistle and when he did he didn’t come to bark or to charge and merely continued to gnaw on the gritty gristle of what could be his last meal. I felt a connection between us I wanted to call him over I wanted to feel close to another animal just like me. But I couldn’t. They told me not to stay, they said I’d miss my bus and sadly instead of speaking for myself I listened and I obeyed.

The Night of Cultureless Vultures and the Mourning Nature of Mothers - JLG Clift

We’re on the roof and the sun’s rising feels like it’s apprising slash describing something to us wings of birds flap hollow beaks wrap against the trees and the ground and the mounds of mud thud after thud until a grub is taken from the ground and wolfed down by a mocking bird that’s antenna bound now; there was a time when it used to sit on the brows of the furrowed old willow to the left of this view eschewed by a red brick school and several other structures creating a skyline that looks like fractured fragments of scar tissue on the fading face of the Base Mother of All lamenting endlessly resenting the construction even at this junction right now but repenting is out of the question for us because this is progress and Our Mother’s stress at the site fails to faze us even in the slightest.

The willow comes into sight when I tilt to the right it has leaves that remind me of a torn up pillow gutted and flung about strands still spinning reminding me of the strange fruit that was hung back in Mississippi the strands look like men women children in places at angles in shadows as the sunlight arrives and begins to dart through the foliage in parts when we’re off our faces either bodies or ratty shoe laces from an old pair of All Stars like the ones I saw in an Oxfam window a while back the black in the logo the same black that’s being sewn across the powder blue shroud of the sky by the bird a proud beak leading late sunset in colour out of place at this great sunrise the mocking bird’s cries and chirps echo and die trying to usurp the silence of the morning. The bird’s flying east and will become a thin black crease in the distance soon enough.

I think back as the beating black of its wings that have already started to sack the yolk of the vocal rise from the sky fade away into the sky that’s not yet grey but will get there soon I imagine.

There’s a chasm in Victoria I cannot possibly fathom or describe in its entirety that throbs and thrives from Pacha like a gash all the way to Southbank the evening sank quickly for us arriving at twelve miners were we mining drinks from 20 something’s acting like the moronic minors we’d meet on the 134 later that evening this place was teeming with spray painted prats fat and bloated ‘locked and loaded’ ‘rocking out with their cocks out’ boarder-line knocked out on the vulgar vinyl sofas by the overpriced booze.

"so Pacha’s shit"

"and Proud was waste as well"

"fuck Aquila and their dry prize draws"

"mate I’d have more fun on the Moors with the Wests than I'm having right now"

After we were done sweeping drinks we broke the link in our VIP pisstake wristbands and propelled them into the air with our hands watched the florescent strands twist before they landed of the ply board roof of a burned news stand not as planned but nothing’s planned I don’t understand the point in planning time spans itself randomly through our lives instances of chance dancing in enchanting trances daunting haunting flaunting hope and beauty that moves me and makes me think of the instances of chance as salmon swimming upstream scales glistening I’m always at my best when listening to their movements and swimming with them in the hems of my existence.

We tried haphazardly to reach the London Eye because it was big and blue and distant and on and there but we didn’t care for the sight really and were happy for the city to get in the way of the jumped up Ferris Wheel that never made us feel anything but contempt and confusion about why people go there and why they care in addition to a touch of despair over how much they spent to have what is miss-sold as the finest view in London. We found the finest view of London last night with no sights to been seen and no tourists to be found a place people pass by caught up in the rat race never looking properly. Well we did. After we took a piss on Parliament and threw a happy meal Big Ben’s way a half-eaten quarter-pounder splattering with a patter just short of his face as three came around without a sound and I’ve heard at least fifty different ways people can ask for a fag or a drag of yours if they were feeling less cheeky tonight; there was this one woman who was a tangle of fraying edges no distinct form (thanks in part to the drink I confess) just old carrier bags and a withering shape not blubbering at all but not smiling either beyond the surface disjointed from the appointed society wandering about in the wealth of the city all doors closed to her the tape holding a ruler in place as a splint on her forearm made my mind stir with questions about how and why and where and who if there was a who but I didn’t care for the truth I never do; I make my own. The blur calmly asked for a drag but I gave her the whole cig she smiled a toothless smile eyes glinted like a worn-down-washed-up-rinsed-out-wild-child in the tawny tar of the fag on fire and then she departed disappearing down the street with her bags now in her rig which was a shopping trolley from Tesco decked out with a broken brolley on the left side and a flag being dragged back in the black of the wind that used to say something, maybe, but the design was so moth raddled it was hard to tell I hoped she’d do well on the streets I hoped she kept shoes on her feet I hoped the sleet and the sheets of snow that will blow down onto this town and this city in less than a year would take pity on her because although I have little sympathy for are-nows or have-beens when things go awry I always hope it works out alright for never-weres who always tried and failed.

We found our view at the foot of a man who died Nelson on his column solemn eternally a well-dressed golem without a hunch in his back without fangs of stone protruding from his mouth poised for fevered attack on passers-by waiting to make their dry throats wet with their ruddy blood and his slithering saliva; there were drivers in dark cabs and night buses honking at us as we scaled the platform to see the norm of the city the torn tips of my boots grating against the corroding granite fashioned like a buckle over this section of planet; we paid no mind. 

His jowls were hanging loose even in bronze and on my way to the top platform I thought briefly back to DJ Gonzo at Pacha who’s set was actually pretty decent recent music mixed in nicely with the Ibiza sounds of yesteryear I went to the second floor to the top tier to the bridge of glass walls and chesterfield doors and saw the roaring people passing looking like locusts that were soon to be lambasted Loca People playing loud these people strutting their stuff proudly but despite the labels and the lifting miniskirts and the unbuttoned shirts and the lights the sight was dull cultureless vultures vying together on the dance floor and over Zippos outside and neon fish bowls like scavengers hollowing a gazelle into a hide turning the herbivore into horror taking her core out by the beak-full until nothing remains but her skin and her stains on their claws and the bits stuck between bleached teeth lurking in their sculpted jaws. I looked down and saw the quaking crowds in strobe light alcoves defined by ropes it’s hard to cope with anything when looking at people with everything waste it all and in the glass wall at the breakdown of sound the lights changed in range and tone from reds and greens to whites and blues and in the brightest of hues they disappeared from site and were replaced by myself staring down at all that surrounded and me. It dawned that there was nothing to see. Not really.

Nelson and the site at the square however were enough more than maybe as crazy at it sounds there was nothing exceptional about the view two musty buses and a staccato flow of traffic and black tarmac between the whites of the midrise Victorian and Edwardian buildings with the moonlight’s gilding for decoration we’re a nation of people in the dark until they see this side of the cityscape some rooms off some rooms on it looked like masking tape had been draped across the buildings’ faces in perfectly random places. Nelson never tires of this hence the mirth on his mouth this is a victor's view in its truest form just as stunning in a different way to this lawn at this sunrise. We went no further south than there and took the bus home and heard these teenagers ranting about race and the murders in Woolwich digging a big hole for themselves in my book talking about it as a travesty with undoubtedly it was because all death is tragic who wouldn’t weep at the idea that the magic of thought is ending but the reason this conversation is trending at this moment on this bus is because it happened close to the home of these guys covered in the paste of a foam party show-offs with nothing to show that know nothing blowing suds onto the windows and writing messages Gillette got to block the stars in the night from my eyes tonight.

“Tony was here”

Whatever, it’ll be rubbed away soon like it was never there.

We got off the bus with a couple of cusses as my foot hit the crust of the curb with a crack it was cold but there was a crisp cobalt sky starting out at 4 roaring colour around the mint green of the small clock tower on Woodhouse Lane that stopped working long ago at a time; I found it hard to read; we got back to my mates and watched documentaries on nearly mute we saw some menacing monologues this Northern glory hog his mog covered in mattered beard he’s good but I don’t know why he’s revered as much as he is but he’s good enough to enjoy when behind a rizzla packed with the nicest of vices the device flickers in front of me in 1080 Dee-Pee depicting a sisa man fanning his light bulb bowl with a paper to get his crack coals glowing in Athens with the smoke growing in the pipe and the black tripe forming around the cream of the rock I think of glaciers melting in the Artic the interviewee tells me through the camera the recent rise in drugs is because of flailing market but sadly this is the only sense his mouth dispenses between his bouts of hopping fences and fending off the mobs of men that function as death squads behind closed doors I’m sure. The laptop ran out of battery but to be honest that didn’t matter to me because I wanted to go out on the balcony to see the canopy of sunrise roll out to be honest I was getting sick of Youtube advertising which has been rising in its frequency for a while now as if I want to see some boardroom of bile bound men using sex appeal and slogans tout their wares. Since there was no balcony the rooftop had to do so we climbed through the window and sat on the slats of rooftop to mop the disgrace of the club and the majority of the places we saw tonight from our minds.

It did and now I’m rid of it all.   

It’s all done it’s all passed and it was worth it because at last I get a second chance for a better view the blue of the grass and the green of the blue bells and the writhing red of the trees and the indigo of the iris and the violet of the roses in their naturally striking poses I got those colours mixed up I suppose but it doesn’t matter because they’re merging together and the beauty of their combination through my widened eyes makes the sight even better the petals are wet the scene feels set in the glow of the sun soon to run away perhaps but at least it has wrapped its hand around the garden to soften my hardened heart concreted by defeated notions and bitter emotions about my loss of Romantic ideals I feel the colour, particularly the teal, it feels healing what I thought were bodies in the shadow of the willow are now peeling back to reveal what they really were just Willow’s leaves in lustrous locks stirring in the breeze. I think of the nature of mothers and think of the sun as the offspring of a mother and her lover estranged loneliness made the Mother mangy it wasn’t our building or our actions that made her eyes hazy with tears entirely it was the years of constantly piling fear that she would never see her sun who’s come back to cast his shroud but at the same time lift hers but nerves will get the better of him soon and his hand will retract and the black and the grey and the gloom will return. I don’t know when he’ll come around again, but I hope he stays for breakfast next time I hope he can last longer I hope his will gets stronger. And I hope I’m here to steer my eyes towards the reunion and their fusion. One day, one day, I pray he stays so that I may witness the rays Romantically again.