The Grudge Sludge Express Way (For SOmeone) - JLG Clift

There’s sludge and right now behind a bronze and beige patchwork of weeping skin leaking beads that turn to snail trails and badly drawn eyebrows that are knitting nothing in their sculptor’s fever sleep it’s going through veins like rotten fudge forgotten by some kid behind the radiator when they were small and speechless but now they’re tall and they can talk and the sludge of yesteryear the one that people fear now stalks through her slumbering body and the body of her child who’s alone in the kitchen at the witching hour the sour faced clock ticking and tocking the highchair rocking and nearly falling every time the child moves; the lights are switched off the moon raking across the chequers board of the kitchen floor red against black with a gloss of cool tundra white moon light and the drool of the child trying to drink from an empty Sippy cup and crying and dying in her plastic highchair; her skin’s grey the chair’s flaking fuchsia and is fastened too tight it’ll be replaced by a wheelchair soon enough if she lives long enough to get there; the child’s eyes stare down down down through the crack in the canvas of the red tile near the sink split in two the child sees beyond the black she sees the rot in the crack the termites wrapping against the light wood foundations rotting them right through to make way for roaches and the bustling armies of rats and locusts pouring in by the coach full and on the TV there are talks of the UKIP nation are afoot.

The urban deconstruction crew’s thriving on the surfaces in cold cups of cheap tea in bottle caps in rotting white bread baps in half eaten ready meal stews from the off licence that right now has the N20 twisting through defacing it spitting glass and wholesale bread and brick and display and shelf all at once splitting the head of the keeper asleep at the till against the sill of the shelf coated in the wealth of obscure cigarettes all the packaging now torn and charred and splattered the street empty apart from debris the block the night the child the people the place are forlorn and laid bare bloodied and beaten under the glare of a half shy moon curling into a wry smile as clouds come close and for a moment the shroud that the grudge sludge has cast over the mother and the child has spread outside. But it doesn’t last, and before the sunrise the moment has passed and the sensation of dread has once again retreated back to the flat to sack happiness from the barely family’s howling heads and all that the girl can think about in her second hand bed is what people have said about her.

 She used to be wild and fun a sunshine child but the trudge has changed her the news strained her and aged her she asked the lord who had a score to settle who held a grudge so grotesque in proportion that they gave her something that not only ruined her but forced her baby into concussive currents of contortions for life; true she refused the abortion (a fact that haunts and taunts from the back of her mind) but that’s because she didn’t know about the sludge back then and she wanted a child to remember the cruise and the man and the view and the sea and the night they spent with oysters and tequila under stooping palm trees in Ibiza the sound the life the clubs the bodies of youth rubbing up against each other starting to chaff she saw them as neon wraiths from years ago back when she used to go down there and make mistakes to skipping drums and synthetic snares well she made one last one and it’s cost and now the girl is lost and all that there’s left to feel is the empty of her life and the frost creeping up her toes to her head and the knowledge that she’ll soon be dead.

There’s no cure no core no root to the problem to shoot at everything’s raw everything’s sore she roars but no one hears because no one’s here and all that comes out are the tears; she’s got 2 years left at best and then the beating will cease in her beaten breast and she will be dragged into premature rest and the child be left to suffer alone to feel the home once again become a house that’s doused in dismay and disease she’s posted the keys to the place to a friend in the hopes that someone will find her when her end does come when the sludge as made it to her brain through the lull of her brittle skull and finished its journey completing its STI manifest destiny that the friend will see the key and come to set the child free as well so that the child does not have to suffer the pain of the swells of savage sensation slithering inside finding every year of life that she tries to hide away and dragging it out covered in the sludge into the grey of Autumn day as if to make some point some display some warning to all that watch her body being taken out in the morning with the child in tow crying and still dying alone now that no one cares to hear because they’re too busy having fun to care that death is near lurking in their loins below the ratty pockets of skinny jeans filled with lint and ripped wristbands from fringe clubs and copper coins.

In her obituary in the Hoxton Times she’s put a warning in place of her life story below the picture of her face the words are small and smudged and brief and are met by the immortal youth with cynicism and disbelief: The grudge sludge express way is here to stay and it’s cumming to a groin near you very soon. The page is balled up and dropped on the street and dragged away past multi-coloured Converses and Docs harbouring feet the sheet of paper blooming as it unfolds like a flower that is forever ignored the warning written off as a scare story that will never be read or told again, just relived because the grudge sludge is the sludge that everyone will give everyone eventually it came for her and mark my words it’ll come for you and for me.  Mark the words.

'The boy opens a book he shouldn't be reading...' - JLG Clift

The boy opens a book he shouldn’t be reading the one on the highest shelf the only one that’s had its coating of dust taken off the one that holds a wealth of wonder the one that brings about lighting and thunder outside when the boy discovers its hiding spot and takes it down to read late at night when the babysitter and her boyfriend high on cheap draw from their suburban supplier who hangs out by the dyers at the Laundromat are out like lights on the couch Mafioso shouting on the screen but no level of noise can drag the girl and the boy from their world that’s on zoot mute; the boy could shoot his father’s pistol and no one would hear but the boy fears the gun he fears becoming the hunters son he never wishes to insight such mighty fear into harmless rabbits and deer who always run and who’s coats always turn to sundown red no matter how fast they move because they can’t escape the gun or the led.

The boy is well read his father much the same his father a man of great fame in the writing world a man who’s hurled his exploits in their truest hues of honesty and been praised for it: the voice of a generation the man who’s words have bought the nation to its trembling knees the writer that sees his nation for all it is and charts it down the holder of the Laureate crown the man who’s narrators never reach the sundown they were riding towards the man who writes biblically and cynically of nuns as whores and of priests selling scores in confessional booths and of the filthy fret work of the late night back street strip club funk frontman or bastard blues wailed by the black and the beaten negros who have never eaten with a knife or a fork and who barely talk anymore. He writes America, but he doesn’t right it. The boy is not the man he feels that he should be but he hopes what he sees in the book which he isn’t supposed to look in will help him transition from boy to man from no one to someone from burden to son.

The book arches and crackles big black battered and expands into two uneven stacks of bone white paper with tapered edges and wedges of thick black text in columns running down the bone like rot the boy strains his eyes and starts to read the words he’s never heard before; his brows are raised and his mind’s ablaze characters wielding words he’s been told he’s not supposed to say; men are playing gods and something less and something more than changing laws that were handed to them by the core of time whose ancient hands are lined with withering wrinkles as vast as Arizonian valleys and that are eternities wide and full of nothing but sand and skin and the scars of sins that the creatures he created have committed and beyond the reading the hands are starting to bleed now the creator’s in pain he used to strike back at the nations teaming with his creations but the most recent testament of his acts lead us to believe that the creatures are now always acquitted for reasons unknown despite taking his son from his home and despite leaving the creator alone to sob on his rusting throne as his son is torn apart by the mob that he’s saving as they display his filleted corpse picked clean by the reigning vain and the vultures at the scene of the crime.

 The boy, he reads of perverts and tyrants who rise in the mists of marauding mobs lost flares their hands to attract the masses from the black into their sickly bosom false torches false ways false flames to be fanned by the destitute too tired to tell the second coming from the mega church substitute; these men forged from fear and farce go about their days with ghastly godly displays raping pillaging drinking blood and calling it booze the boy eyes dilated intoxicated by the horror sift to the end to find everyone losing when the world finally mends itself by shedding the wealth of the infanticidal, the suicidal, the heretical, the fickle and the fiendish in equal measures that play contrite but only after losing the fight against the Father’s fabled might; they  keep complaining, right to the end time after time sign after sign line after line, that they can’t see the truth that takes their feet out when they have sight but refuse to register the fact because it’s easier to unbind themselves with excuses of blindness but it never works and in time the much feared man with a flowing white beard and robes to match attacks and his robes continue to roll on as he does through the past the present and the future simultaneously serving as the sutures for life that keep tearing apart every time something starts to go wrong and leak puss and blood that flood the earth leaving only arks and listeners around to rebuild.  But in the end nothing rebuilds, the sutures ripple away into the white light still stained like cathedral glass and the almighty, now just a man, turns back to eternity alone to guild his throne and to sweep the bones of his mistakes from tectonic plates.

The book shuts the boy but the paper slates slash his fingertip the book falling from his gushing grip to the floor with a thud for the ages all the rage and all the stages of confusion and disillusion hard to gauge or analyse the boy, the boy, look at his eyes! Black and drained by the pain the title of the book he wasn’t supposed to read drinking the blood into the cover and now the boy can scarcely think clearly the thunder and lightning still going outside; he has had all childish thought stripped from the courts of his mind’s palace he no longer wants toys he’s not even a boy anymore he feels like a dying man that Charon has left to row himself to Hades with only one paddle to reach the obsidian meridian of other side he feels so lost and so used and abused by the crude and the crass and the story of Christ and countless tangible tangents about sheep becoming wolves when a lamb encroaches upon their shores that tear away as the sea reaches the sand and the dirt like a leper’s skin leaking the slick of their sin into the ever darker deep of the sea the boy wonders later, years down the line when time has scabbed over the crimes of man in his short time,  whether the ocean ever regrets reaching out to society. But back in the room the boy hopes for help he’s reduced to silent yelps on the floor boards he has no one else to blame for not being the innocent he is in the picture in the frame that was on his mother’s night stand but that now lands and shatters shredded into tatters by the shards of glass but he has no one else to blame and he knows that; he looks down at the book he searches the cover for the name; the read has left a fowl taste in his mouth and foul prints of dark ink bind his mind and sink it down the crown of innocence slipping from place and it’s rim hacking his nose from his face as it leaves it’s taken him far from himself and his wealth of ignorance and listless bliss he’s a man, he’s only 12, he’s never even had a kiss but he knows of this book and all the horrors that hide in its slithering nooks and cackling crannies; he needs to remember the name in an attempt to tame the words that his parents heard and read the words that they never wanted rattling around his feathered head the boy finds the title, two words, still drinking the red from his finger. The boy sneers through the fearful tears holding back the urge to relent to the need to repent for the read.

‘What’s so holy about it?’

The Dream Deflator - JLG Clift

You thought you’d live

You thought you’d live

You thought that fortune

Or father

Would give you a break

When he took the prayers you gave

And made you feel young

Destined for everywhere but the grave

But he’s not saving you

And now you realise

As I arrive with my crew in tow

Before your leaking eyes:

Nothing you say will change the fact

That you are going to die today

Because your way is not his way

And his say outweighs yours

What he says goes

 

You’re starting to know that now

It’s just too late because the gates are coming

And the tears are running from your vision

But you cannot follow them

No you go down with the flem and the lump you’ve finally swallowed

You sink to the pits of your stomach

Trying to reach the warmth of your core

But the core is cold by the time you get there

You just missed it, you knew you would

But you couldn’t resist

The hope that the rope would break

But it didn’t and now on your dying bed

You shake an old man

Soon to belong

To the wailing lands

As your twin pupils

Learning too much too fast

Swell and expand into black

And fail to retract again

 

You thought you felt humanity calling

For an eternal encore

Well you were wrong

No one liked the score you wrote

And now you’re floating

On the ferry man’s boat

Of brittle wood and broken bones

Made from the rubble of broken homes

Everyone on the boat

All the thousands on the decks serving as

Displays of damp dismay for all those who pass

All think they alone are being shipped

To atone for their sins their groans and moans

Rippling out like rotting ring tones from the mobile phones they used to wield

In the crackling concrete complexes that were tomb stones

for the fields that used to sway

In the breezes of a summers day

But their fate is sealed and there’s no signal to be found

In the dank black of the fatherland underground

Where the only sounds to hear

Are the claps of the ferry man’s oar scoring the surface of the river

And the wails of the dead drawing near

Coming home

Through the copper gates

Through the untiring strings

of neon fires their age untold their tongues scold

as they roll from waves into cones on the bay

where the original sinners pay for their displays

Broiling between the vinyl black of the larva frozen cold

To kneel in the sea of the scorched salvaged and savage

Before the Thinker’s throne

The clone of cleanliness with clipped wings

Crownless: the king of the things

That the other king rejected.

And I am one of those things

That he brought back

From the black around the throne

To roam the streets and the earth

To chart the believers in their weakest moments

When the bleakness bulges and bellows above all

I chart the mirth they always thought would stay

Leave their faces as they see that god never answered their calls

Or replied to their letters

And that there isn’t a place set at his banquet

For them

There’s just the pit and the black

And the racks of people just like them

Boiling in the cherry coloured flem

Of the lava in hell

Where the rejects swell and pop apart like champagne corks

Into sizzling shards

Repeatedly

Ceaselessly

 

 

Behold all still alive

I am the dream deflator

And this is my crew

And we thrive

On the crops that the Final Man’s scythe

Reaps

We capture you weeping

As you tire and close your eyes

And try to tell yourself that you’ll just be sleeping

I am the dream deflator

And you can watch me in action later

Channel 4

After the news but before Fresh Meat

I’ll taunt another man crying

Swaddled like Christ

in unwashed sheets

 

and you'll just watch

The Twins - JLG Clift

Sisters bursting mental blisters with copper nail scissors blood and water gushing out of the daughters in the midst of the monsoon nothing better to do their copy of Twister was tattered and scored and the board had no arrow they didn’t know where to put their feet and no money had stayed in the monopoly game they used to play it’d gone away in fives and tens and hundreds over the years and no there’s nothing left to go and there’s nothing to show for the exit just the red pits of plastic where they used to stay. There’s nothing true about their world or their lives clouds dart and dive dirty woollen knives burying themselves in skies that are all beaten and blue the moon’s full and flawless at the sky’s heart like a cue ball; the twins with matching heads of brittle beige hair twined up into balls with Chinese chopsticks whittled from red marble sit in living reflection no connection to anything nothing lasts neither cast word nor shadow no light below or above they’re just gazing getting nowhere just staring; there’s nothing but the haze of the weather and the harsh contrast between the shouting of the storm and the silence in their Ivy League boarding school dorm red bricks crackling like sticks in Brownie brewed flames back when the twins fought the leering wilderness of wild frontier peeling and popping in the hurricane rain ripping the colour from the stone as it falls from its home in the sky alone to die no not to die it never lived but it’s given millions of lives and now its mad now it’s sad and it wants to take some back the element lacking all remorse steers its course like the horse of death towards the sisters in silk kimonos of red white and blue with skin of milk and teeth of pearl girls drawing breath but for how long? The girls are too wrapped up in the sight of themselves to realise something’s going wrong their eyes blue and green have never seen anything so fierce have never seen nature before have never taken their eyes off each other but now they do for the drunken mother with a hurricane hush her whips of wind rush towards the twins who are guilty of nothing at all beyond self-absorption their world falls into twisting whistling contortions around their ears years of memories whirling around the silence of the dorm drowned in the sound of the scornful storm mementos of once-weres and never-will-be-agains razor sharp sugar glass from souvenir chandeliers floating with feathers from pillows and stuffing from teddy bears tear the skin and the silk as it glides on so slow it looks fast the blood from the girls drawn by the past cycling in the chrome rungs of the cyclone their faces are beaten and blue their skin white their eyes red; Liberty and Ivy the twins of America lie dead their bodies threading through the rubble like vines that have been cut down for reaching too far up into the crown of the atmosphere too fast too sharp and it is here where they died that they will lie found but unmoved their moods drained from their bodies their existence unchanged for the most part; they’re still looking at each other lying in the crackling covers of what they used to own alone, not even the vulture of the hawk or the regale now balding eagle dare to pick the flesh from these girls enmeshed in the rubble their memories in pieces poking out through the foundations like pre-pubescent tufts of stubble because the birds of prey that fly far away from the praying nation paying hand over fist for the actions of the dearly missed daughters know that the flesh is not worth the trouble that it brings after the taste has faded Ivy’s eye tastes like apple pie before it turns putrid and before the twin in the rubble becomes bone, a relic in relics and rags sagging into the shit shaded salt of the land that gave her and her sister birth and has now taken it away because the Twins of America had outstayed their stay and had become lazy, too lazy to even play anymore, too lazy to follow the laws she set out for them; she’s been working to weed the twins out for a while she’s lined their stomachs with dollar green bile that burns right through them in her flem she has spat down disease after disease to try to bring them to their knees to try to stop them staring at each other and look upon their mother and their killer who has now spilled their blood for another, their brother to the East.  But this action, the mother knows, will not give her peace either nor will it enable her to live any longer gleefully, but if the mother must lose herself to her stirring mass of iconoclastic children vampires by choice that take chunks not with their teeth but with bulldozers and oil drills driven in their millions by the voice of a thousand tongues from the top of its lecherous lungs then she will take a few with her she will take what she has given back as the children continue to hack away until there are no children left to speak. The mother will die, meek and mangled in the silence of a world without nations or occupations; a creation left alone to roam freely on its axis, free to be; that is what the mother wants to see.

Seven Past Seven - JLG Clift

It is summer. I am 15 years old. The grass is long in my back garden and it’s been dip dyed back to its dull dying tinge. The beige of sunburn is creeping down through the day as the shade shifts away. It’ll be at the root by sundown. I sit in my room, my box room, my little box room with red walls that have only been painted half way up and a green carpet that can barely be seeing between my drift wood bed and my desk that houses a formerly silver TV/VHS that breaks my childhood favourites whenever I put a video in and press play. A scratchy vinyl of Microcastle is the only constant sound in my life and today that is fleeting. I can barely hear it anymore. It just keeps skipping but I don’t have it in me to just pull the plug. There’s nothing in me anymore.

A Tesco own brand fan from 6 years ago whirs barely blowing at the furthest end of the room on a stack of books that I’ve never read but say I have if anyone ever ask but no one ever asks me.  Dust spirals in clumps around my room from the baby blue blades that have never been cleaned; I can trace the air current if I watch them for long enough, I know, I’ve done it before. The clumps would be bigger but the rusted grey grill of the fan thins them down but it doesn’t stop them. Dust is the closest I’ve come to pollen all July, longer maybe I don’t know. I don’t leave the house and I took the calendars down and broke my clocks. I didn’t want to judge things by time. I didn’t want to live another day enslaved by it after everything but my chains still remain and keep getting heavier with every tick. I never want to see another 11:09 as long as I live. I hit the wall sometimes when I realise that the time comes and goes no matter what I do.

It is the middle of the day and through the static of a shoddy signal I am watching a Countdown rerun upstairs. I don’t leave the room until mum’s gone to work and Rachel’s left to do whatever Rachel does. No one sees me anymore. I don’t leave; I’m not sure whether you can even call yourself alive if no one’s around to see you living. I’m not living, I just happen to be here. The walls are collecting moisture at their corners, the house is sweaty and sick and even though I haven’t been outside today I know the house looks sad. It always does when the sun’s out, something about the way the shade gets thrown at it. My hair is long and greasy and the drops of sweat slithering down my scalp make it feel like my hair is crawling from its roots and raking down my back and into the coils of my stained bed sheets: peroxide hook worms that used to hang on my crown now roam my room. I’ll never see my hair again. My nails are starting to corkscrew into where my finger prints used to be before they burnt away.

I call around, no one’s home; no one’s around to come round to mine. I forget what happened sometimes, just for a minute. I want to get up, I want to move, I want to wash and eat and run and do all those things kids on daytime television do in good weather in their Californian gardens with their care free friends from good neighbourhoods. No I don’t. I just think I should want those things. I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to breathe but I don’t want to drown. I don’t know that I’m able to want anymore.  That's a part of it all.

The floor’s splintering away beneath my feet on the plain between my room and the bathroom, I drag my soles across ash wood shards but I don’t feel much. I barely bleed. My mirror is still shattered in the sink; no one’s cleaned it up. I still feel that, I still feel the reflection of the person I didn’t recognize splitting my knuckles as it disappeared into a dozen reflections of the ceiling then the window then the light bulb then finally the underside of the faucet rocking back and forth at the bottom of the mildew laced basin. I did it so I wouldn’t remember, but I remembered anyway.

It’s 3 in the afternoon. I have been lying in an empty bath for a while now silently. I don’t sleep, my eyes just close and then they open again. I don’t sleep, and I don’t dream. I just remember. Remember the class of boys in black blazers and grey slacks with tartan ties and boiling eyes and bubbling lips and leaking cheeks and sizzling skin turning into puddles in a mist of accidental mustard gas that my oldest friend had made in science class just to see if he could.

He’d been talking about it all year, talking and talking, Dennis gnawed my ear off talking about how amazing it’d be to make some. Not to use, never to use, Dennis wasn't crazy like people said; he just to know he could make some. Dennis wanted to know what I felt like to do something he really, under no circumstances, was never supposed to do. He told me that less than 1 per cent of people will ever know that feeling; Dennis always wanted to know everything. He wanted to know what everything felt like, he wanted to feel everything the world had to offer, he didn’t care whether it felt good or bad, all that mattered to Dennis was that it felt.  Dennis was just fooling around, he never thought it’d work, he thought the wiki recipe was bogus for a start and so did I; I wasn’t at the other end of the room because I thought it would work, I was just buying a tens off of Messai while Miss was out.

There was a hiss and a fizz like someone had dropped a couple of Mentos in a bottle of Coke, only it was more aggressive. I turned just in time to see the student most likely to do anything turn to nothing on the spot. I watched his bones turn to stew in his cheeks; I saw his blonde undercut become a steaming broth on his crown as his face slipped down his chest down his trousers to the floor.

They said the fact that I managed to ball myself up in the incubation chamber saved my life. I told them I didn’t see anything, but I did. I saw it all. To dodge the slew of sensationalist journalists I  said I closed my eyes, but I had them wide open. I told them everyone died quickly at the funeral where there was nothing left to bury because anything that got put in the coffin would just have been absorbed into the sheets. I never told them I had to hold the glass panel down with bubbling hands as my science class came charging towards me for sanctuary their palms peeling away into pastel pink paste on the pane with every swing they took to break it open. I had to hold the glass down, through all the screams, through all the begging, until my friends became nothing more than mounds of sludge around my incubator. Dennis was the last to go.

I still see his scream, the vocal chords pranging like plucked strings through his vanishing Adam’s apple and between the strings I remember the clock face and I remember the time. 11:09. It only took a minute for it all to happen, maybe less; break started at 10 past. At 11:09 I stopped being a child with friends, I became the Joseph Merrick of Muswell Hill suburbia; I became the major piece of evidence in a borough wide lawsuit against AQA; I became a piece of prime quick buck journalism: the burns victim survivor of a disaster in a secondary school science lab brought about by negligent teaching and a dangerous syllabus. I stopped being handsome, girls stopped looking at me and left the room when I so much as breathed. I stopped being called Jackson. I stopped being called anything. I stopped playing sports, I stopped talking, I stopped being. I can still hear all the gasps as the firemen carried me out. No one knew who I was; my own mother didn’t believe the doctors until I told her myself. She’s never been able to look at me since, she just leaves for work and comes home and stays downstairs. She doesn’t speak; she never comes up to my room. She leaves my meals half way up the stairs and then runs for safety behind a locked door. I’ve forgotten what she looks like nearly, and she’s tried her best to forget me.

I don't remember what she sounds like anymore, I think there was a northern twang to her voice but maybe that's just something I made up.

It is seven. I am smoking the tens I got from Messai, the tens that I was buying for Dennis.  I haven’t smoked once since Dennis dissolved. There’s no tobacco to cut it, I roll a purey as someone on Deal or No Deal gets the crowd to chant YOLO increasingly aggressively as the seal on the last box is broken. It's almost tribal. The player swapped out at the last minute. Everyone’s on tenterhooks. The zoot tastes like ash and gives me nothing but a cough.

It is seven past seven. I am tying the school belt that I will never wear again around my neck and I am pinning my belt to the ceiling with a nine inch nail I pulled from my shelf that housed unread classics. The leather tenses and cracks, cold, tight. I jump from the bed I used to bounce on when I was small and the box room felt bigger. The whole room thuds and ripples in my rolling eyes and in my double vision daze the rouge of the red rambles up the walls all the way to the ceiling and the room looks complete. I realise the room isn’t sweating anymore and that the beads have turned to shards of permafrost on the walls. Mum is sobbing in her sleep. This is the time she doesn’t want to live through again. My feet are drifting down towards the carpet. I can see the carpet through my soles and the carpet is bare apart from the dust. The belt thrusts through my neck, lynching nothing but air because I’m not there to hang; I’m not anywhere. I’m a suicide hiding from the light in the darkness of my last Summer day. I forget that too sometimes.

The player got the penny. I think. Can’t remember, catch it tomorrow. Same time, same place.

It will still be Summer. I will still be 15 years old. And the clock in the lab will continue to cycle. And everyone will be moving on by doing the same things over and over again. Time repeats. Time repeats, so we do.

Party People Lurk Below the Pharaoh's Steeple - JLG Clift

It’s the wildest Hippie fest I’ve never seen or been to daisy-chain-child galore dry ground beneath bare feet psychedelic dyes on big cotton sheets are the staple contents of the big coloured tents that are up all over the site and stay on the ground like lazy kites too lazy to expand into the crackling black of the neon night here at Glastonbury; I lie in the sunset picking berries from a bag for life that was filled to the brim by the Fruit Troops supercharged on MD and flower power they decided to shower us with healthy snacks in all of their wealthiest colours: techni colour rains of red and blue and black and green and yellow thud around us into the lime green of the grass and the golden brown of the camp grounds; we’re mellow never dropped into a good trip when it wasn’t night out before my hands are turning into cat paws and I’m batting around a ball of apple come yarn strung loose the fraying strings sing about things that I can scarcely decode and there’s a maroon toad where my mobile used to be ribitting rings rippling towards me at warped speeds; the seeds from my tangerine are little men who leaned on their sides one day and can’t remember how to rise they have no eyes and no mouths and no lips and no hips just arms and legs and stories that erupt into orchestral snoring because they get bored of telling them half way through; the chorus of snores and the flailing strings spilling new age lore are failing to feel me with dread I just let them unfurl around the curls of my eggshell claws as I shred the ball to threads the day starts to come through as the woollen apple thins gin’s going around and is going down my throat I take a toke of something good that a man who swears blind he’s a hermit crab offered me (he’s a PCP freak my newly engaged mate with the pierced ears opening into black holes filled with bright white light tells me) his tent’s bold and red and fused to his waist with duct tape that looks like a jagged band of solder.

Jagger’s playing loud and proud as ever writhing between the strings of the freshly baked night set to simmer the crowd showing no signs of thinning just flowing and going and going out and out from the front of the stage shouting raging waving caving in at sections like a fumbling scrum all their fingers toes and thumbs missing prints all their faces whitewashed of expression in the neon tint the crowd of everyone rushing forwards the people gushing towards the frontman but the bouncers bear the brunt and the rouge stunt comes to nothing more than a stage full of punts to the teeth and fists to the face and the crowd of everyone races on in pulsing waves slaves to the beat feet to temple but despite the chaos their movements feel so gentle from back here tears of joy rolling down my reddened cheeks and still the strings and the hermit man speak and I’ve become weakened by the wonder that surrounds.

The Hermit man started to look older and kept getting older and lower as the day turned to dark in the flowing glows of the headline act his crab claw hands that had their youth intact only hours ago withering into tired clumps of shell at the end of scrawny arms that used to swell with muscle; he’s been coming to the hustle and bustle of the festival since he was eighteen and although he’s been haggard by the fun he’s had he’s not mad at all he’s smiling his incomplete smile that’s met crystals of meth and sheets of worn concrete many a time for either crimes or for existing depending on how much of the fact is in his blistering barrage of exploits and carnage that conjure echoes of Thompson’s coverage of the Nixon campaign and it’s hard to take the strain of the Hornby train that’s now a viper fixed on tracks threading itself around my head and neck my paws are still taking the ball apart it’s down to the raw of the core now it’s all pinky and pulpy like pot noodle porridge mixed with synthetic yarn drooling clear tar that feels like toe jam as it slams in wads and clumps with feathered thumps onto my face chunks and chunks that I can’t even see and can scarcely feel are more real than the steel of the stage or the sage wisdom of the Hermit man part crab part man part can who’s going to go back to driving his (repeatedly) keyed white van come Monday it’s Sunday but I want to stay I want to get baked on cooling brownies cooked on gleaming golden trays I don’t want to deal with anything except this malaise of mixed mirages and the great sounds that used to only greet the walls of suburban garages but that are now hitting the stage with a passion and a rage and an energy that rips through me repeatedly riff by riff drop by drop until everything’s gone even my name: I’ll be Mr Smith member of the crowd of everyone, no forename to frame my face or my life Mr Smith free of the strife of my inner city job and the well-dressed mobs rutting in packs like mutts in their lifts and trains I want to hang on here in this farcical plain where I’m not maimed by the claws of reality but my mind is already starting to take me from the tame of my trance and I’m starting to see the people that I thought were so pretty dancing for what they are and what they were and what they may always be acne scarred teens hopped up on Mandy stirring in circles like teaspoons in old cups of tea left on the side too long gone cold getting old and stale turning pale in the grey display of sunrise the colour in their cheeks was only there by the grace of the neon and the strobes and the face paint and pretty soon we’re all going to leave to be tainted by the stains of suburbia and city and countryside but I don’t feel as sad as I might, this people’s palace found under the Pharaoh’s steeple will be here next year for us to all come to hide and vibe in again and I will drop under the small top of my lazy kite again and I will be free to see the world through my intoxicated psychedelic sights. For the right price of course.

 

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.