Grand Gestures On The Coffin Lid

New Years eve is almost upon us but the resolutions, those candy eyed flights of fancy, again have failed to inspire me to make changes in my life. If I subscribe to the notion that I would be wise to alter something, for better or worse, then it implies that life right now is lacking something. And it is not so it wouldn't be fair (or just) to scribble a half hearted list to myself on New Years eve.
Why on earth would anyone want to try and live a perfectly moulded life in the first place astonishes me. A world like that isn't worth having, the fairytale would bore me to tears. Life needs calamity and chaos, it needs to feel the sharp end of a knife or gun to make everything fair in its strange otherworldly logic that is beyond our grasp.
To myself I enjoy pain at times, it lets me know I am alive and inspires thoughts within my mind that could never occur if we lived in CottonWorld with the fairies and talking woodland creatures. That place would become sterile real quick.
If you really want to give up smoking (New Years Eve's Best Seller) then do it now why wait until January 1st? Get exercise now! Be kinder to old people/children/animals/whatever now! Do it all right now! Now! Do people crave order so much they can only be spurred on by the begining of a lousy month? And these wintery months are bad times to be making changes anyway because the early dark evenings blind us and we are all mad from frostbite. (Austrailians crazed from heat).
This new year might even be the time that grim blank space currently after your birth year gets filled.
The general public might feel more secure writing lists and I feel no hostility towards anyone bringing positive changes to their lives, but its not for this booze soaked poet. I could never remain honest if ever I were to have to rely on a Do & Don't Do list. To me it is only more rules and I have a terrible allergy to those.

China Rocks

In China they have a saying regarding the death penalty - kill the chicken to scare off the monkeys - or words to that effect, and I am in total agreement. If you are greedy (or stupid) enough to attempt to smuggle drugs into China then you must accept the fate that awaits if you are caught: execution often by firing squad.
Todays execution of EU national, Akmal Shaikh, has stirred up the issue once again, with Britain condemning China and the tabloids screaming 'Mentally Ill Man Executed!' The shock! The horror! (The bile inducing support for criminals). What exactly are the UK angry at? China carrying out THEIR punishment for THEIR laws? I find it arrogant in the extreme that Britain thinks it can tell another country they shouldn't execute a criminal because he/she is British, especially a country with zero tolerance toward criminal behaviour as opposed to here in the UK where we seem to go out of our way to make criminals as comfortable as possible.
We have people who do not understand why anyone would risk smuggling drugs in such places as China and trot out mental health issues as some kind of excuse for their transgressions. Allow me to help here: there are, believe it or not, bad and greedy people in this world, people with clear minds (before they recieve a death sentence) who are more than willing to attempt to make easy money on the smuggling circuit just like there are burglars who continue to steal knowing they could end up in one of our plush prisons.
Shaikh tried his chances, lost and is in his grave because of it. Britain's lily livered can huff and puff all they want but the smuggler is dead and good riddance to him. And no, this execution won't deter another criminal to try his hand at smuggling because its plain to anyone that the death penalty isn't about deterence - its a punishment. However we'll chalk it up as a bonus if somebody is indeed put off by these events.
There should be no sympathy directed at Shaikh, nor should China be shunned for following their laws. They ought to be applauded and I only wish we treated our criminals with the same strict hand. (I doubt they have feral teenage yobs terrorizing pensioners and swigging cider on street corners).
Drugs cause an infinite amount of misery, which rots communities. One less smuggler is a reason to be championed.
'Oh but this poor man was mentally ill!' Cry the cotton hearts. Yes dears, they all try that stroke on death row, shame on you for believing it. If Shaikh had gotten away with this he would have been taking his mental illness all the way to the bank. Think about that.

Glitter On Sagged Bubonic Fowl

In times long gone it was public executions, today we have popular culture and a strange obssession with celebrity. Of course people have always taken interest in someone who stands out from the crowd; the poet Lord Byron's wife Annabella coined the phrase 'Byronmania' in reference to the interest that surrounded her husband.
But this is something quite different. A giant bullshit machine, trampling a stupefied audience while chewing innocence and spitting it into a Z list spitoon. Or a flatulent ogre stumbling through forests of camera lenses in a feeble attempt to eek out attention. What septic troughs to wallow in.
And the less said about those colon headed people that stare out from glossy magazines with sickly grins brushed over their faces the better. Oh the pearl white teeth, the marble skin, icy blue eyes without a lash out of place! Such beauty! Styles to keep the uglies at bay, as airbrushes do the same with wrinkles and nasty creases. Heaven forbid should they be caught with their gut spilling out from a tracksuit bottom, or a crusted toenail....Or actually speaking the truth.
All hail magazine covers! The new fountain of youth allowing a never ending story for plain Janes to hang their image on. Hoodwinking the gullible into believing some people are born perfect. Tasteless paper junkies.
Is anybody really attracted to those blemish free windbags? The china doll madam posing like a compound fracture breaking free from cellophane. Does it kick peoples groins? Fuel their coke?
More importantly does everyone, or even only a handful, believe the picture before them? Have the crocodiles tricked the sheep into falling for the myth that fame and wealth turn grubs into swans? Yes, miserably they have.
But beware, chasing Cinderella is a lethal and cut throat pursuit, where only plague-like diets and monstrous egos are allowed to win the day. You will abandon dignity if you decide to play and as for being spit polish perfect, one might as well put a walrus on the greasy cover for all the truth todays singing brats say about perfection.
I have kept shelter with crazy kinds of crazy in life's formidable shadows, been witness to every type of megalomania and skulldugerry but these newer flock of flamingoes on the shelves, desperate and strutting, bring bile to my throat. A rotten type of gag because the olive skin and lily powdered hair, the pencil thin waists and blood cherry lips do nothing to turn my head and swindle me. Withered scarecrows have no spirit.
I know of eagles, stern lessons and stunning views of breast valleys and ocean fronted thighs. And the glossy dolls, those pale, straw kids have nothing but heels across their fishy mouths. The carbon copy menageries do nothing for lust when one has seen the gin angels. Herd flesh all you want - the sandbags of monstrosities get taller with each page.

Christmas Saddles Under Crisp Eyes

I have already become numbed to the festive season and we are still eight days short of Christmas eve. Whether I have become jaded and cynical, or weighed down with a peculiar form of depression I do not know but there is no excitement in my bones. Im certainly not looking forward to it like an over eager child, straining at the leash.
Of course when we reach our adult years one is bound to adopt a less dizzy attitude toward Christmas as children have the upper hand in this holiday due to their innocence still allowing the belief of Santa Claus and the promise of loot under the tree, but its deeper than that. There is no 'zip' in in my soul, no spring in my step as we hurtle toward the goose feast. Even when writing empty emotions on cards I feel a giant weight in my hand (perhaps due to my brain knowing that what is being scrawled among the glitter and red robins is bunkum, total bosh).
It wasn't always this way; growing up this time of year I was as full of magic and wonder as any carefree child. As soon as December hit the calendar I would begin striking off the days, pulling the season in with every stroke of my pen. I would even listen out for bells ringing in the night sky and searching for a streak of red among the stars on Christmas eve. Nothing bad in it I believed, totally seduced by the festive charm.
How different it all feels today as I hammer (the correct word considering my mood) at the keyboard, a giant starry boughed tree in the background like some kind of green ogre threatening me to be jolly or else. A rubber inflatable Santa lurks beneath it with a deranged smile painted on its face, eager to throttle me should I turn my back on him.
Is it me or have Christmas decorations taken a turn for the worse? Cards long ago discarded any semblance of taste and now the baubels and plastic trinkets have gone the same miserable route. Shelves heave with cheap sparkling ornaments, and grotesque looking figures of the Nativity which would be more fitting in a chamber of horrors rather than a window sill.
Were it left to me I would choose a black tree and hang miniture nooses and electric chairs from it while adding bloodied fake body parts from Halloween to achieve a grisly effect, echoing the gloom in my heart. The fake cheer has rattled around my ribcage long enough, im quite ready to heave it out.
I try not being a ghoulish grinch and would welcome relief from the grey chain which sag heavily on my shoulders, but nothing is there. One cannot revive a heart so stubbornly set in gloom, especially since the spirit is gone. Perhaps im being overly melodramatic in the last sentence but things do seem rather dismal as we get deeper into December.
One thing I am grateful for is the fact I rarely watch television because if the titbits I have seen and magazine headlines are anything to go by then FSO (Festive Season Overdose) are on the cards for many poor souls. The Christmas Specials of yesteryear have disappeard into the ether, leaving way for vile bumper doses of reality based talent shows and preening, self absorbed minor celebrities caked in make up. It is truly wretched.
Everything is over done, and the true meaning of the occasion is almost ignored totally. But to remind anyone of this is to be called a sourface, or old fashioned. I enjoy a drink much more than the next man but I always have time to stop and raise a toast to the holy man. Some people think Christmas as a giant gift fest with the chance to show off astounding gluttony. (Saying that its always nice to watch these empty headed mortals suffer in the following days from the vulgar binges).
In November I decided to celebrate Thanksgiving, and a turkey was roasted and served with other fine foods. Being Welsh it was a no frills affair, there were no carols sung and tinsel giddy trees did not stand moronically in the corner like a scolded child. It was basic, a fine dinner with thanks being offered that we had it. Furthermore there was no tsunami of wrapping paper to get rid of, and nobody cried for the gift they did not get.
It was how I envisioned Christmas to have been in the begining. Before advertisers and other sharks sniffed blood and packaged and sold it to the greedy like a desperate whore.
Humanity has a special gift for ruin. Ho ho ho ho.

The Saltboy Guru

A good guide to debate or lecture should be - the less one has to say, the more people will hear it. For instance I am not a stranger to long words and technical details (the 'scientific ballads' as I like to call them during whims of grandeur) but in many arguments they are useless because ones opponent may not understand them therefore leaving the entire debate floundering in the ashes.
It is all very well having the mind of a god and the tongue of a saint but precious little it will do in a rabid, fists-in-blood battle of words with a livewire, self-depreciating redneck. One must have lighter stones to fall back on and as a wiser man said once, sometimes less is more. Much more.
Fancy talk all you want but it does no good and if someone has a message then they are best keeping it wrapped in every day words because more people will hear it, more people understand and embrace it. And this reasoning is not due to the masses being ignorant but down to instinct, people react better to butter than a stubborn walnut shell that is thrust onto their plate.
A nightingale's song is beautiful but the buzzard mews louder, not through superiority but simply by being bolder. She nails it with a solid, down to earth thrust of a mouthy beak whilst sometimes the smaller bird though big in song, stitches the words getting them trapped in a thorny gullet.
Dainty soliliquays impress but a tin whistle is deafening and will win everytime where numbers are needed to rally for a cause.
This is why the google owls get frustrated by bastards like me hogging the limelight. They try to steal a little attention, (mainly to keep themselves warm on often lonely evenings), but always end up as envious wrecks at the closing of the beer pumps, resorting to spiteful insults in a pitiful attempt to claim back a small bit of dignity. They depise me and all because I can reach into my soul and dig out a piece I am willing to make fun of, something these armchair warriors could never do for fear of their paper thin self esteem shattering into a million snivelling pieces.
This is part of the reason I look at myself in the mirror and allow laughs to tumble out of my cirhosis addled liver. I would be irritated to discover I could be hurt by an idiots ramblings. Those who spout garbage from the pages of philosophy have not learnt from Life and deserve no applause. They rest on carcasses of better men and are content in doing so for they have no mental fabric of their own. Lazy eyes in a world of mirrors and stars.
At least I have felt emotions from the cellar. I have dipped my snout into troughs of addiction and public scorn, and I have learnt in savage lessons how to build an honest and genorous spirit. No lies will fall from my gin bloated tongue, there are no curses inflamed by my self pitying balloon. All is well on Demon Street, I do not find thrills in drunken assaults on weak, unsuspecting wretches sleeping in brackets (the shop doorways of the writing world).
The funniest thing of all of course is the weak in this case are not weak at all, they are bored, tired of the bleating of the gothic herds, who in their words would'nt be called herds but of course they are. Herds of blood being sheparded into trends that the new hits and modern cinema have decided for them.

Days Of Black Figures

Finally I have it! It is in my sweaty paws like a withered cadaver that has stopped rotting and been born again. Long and bloody have the years been since last I drummed out a game from it but now its back and I intend to sink into pints of dark mild beer and attempt to rekindle an old memory.
What is it? I hear you asking, what is this magic that seems to have etched a grin onto this writers normally death's head chops? Well its a ZX Spectrum 48k computer. *Sound of high anticipation falling to the floor like stale jelly* And I feel somewhat revived; rejuvenated from a grim coma that has hung about my shoulders, earnestly picking at strips of joy.
It must be a slight case of madness because I press the familiar rubber keys on the computer, willing my 11 year old self to appear like mephistopholes from the dust. I read some of the blurb in a booklet that came with Sinclair's old gem, boasting of 'top quality graphics' printed over two decades ago from a time when Space Invaders was todays Modern Warfare 2.
The Spectrum is lighter than I remembered but the small band of rainbow colours on the bottom right corner bring the full force of memories back, nestling into my mind like lost cubs suddenly found a home.
Another thing that catapulted me back into the mists of time was the tape recorder that came with it. It was exactly the same model as I had owned in 1981 and bought at Boot's (which if im not mistaken was where my mother had purchased my original recorder). Spirit of Christmas come to visit indeed.
People forget how easy it is to play videogames these days. Simply pop the disc into the console and one is almost instantaneously whisked off to the game world. Not so with the Speccy and other computers from that garish era. Software came in the form of cassettes and before playing any games the tape recorder had to be plugged into the Spectrum and the cassette game loaded which took the best part of ten minutes. Thats if it loaded at all on the first load, it sometimes took three or four attempts.
Another thing to vex the soul was tuning in the computer to an available channel on the television. I had forgotten how testing it could be as I tried to fine tune the picture showing the white Sinclair home screen. It seemed as if the machine was stubbornly holding back its best picture quality until I found the channel number of its exact choosing.
But to be honest none of the annoying aspects of retro gaming bothered me even as the back of the television had a waterfall of black knotted leads. As a young lad on Christmas day, sipping on a pint of mild ale (my one pint ration) and stabbing Russians as a Green Beret in games publisher Imagines classic title I was in utter bliss. And so it will be again twenty eight years later I have determined.

Fresh Fish, Keyrings and Butterscotch

Pembrokeshire is the pride of Wales, and should be visited by anyone who is (A) looking for jaw dropping beauty and (B) of sound mind. There is no excuse for skipping it should you be a visitor to our green lands, (and if you are British then even the devil has no possible excuse for you if you have not been).
It is all one could ever hope for and more. Indeed a loud hearty cheer ought be heard upon passing the Croeso I Sir Penfro (Welcome to Pembrokeshire) sign. I do it every time hoping my 'hwyl' rings along its rugged coastline where both mighty legends and weekend paddlers have been awed by the scene before them. From castles to bars, and monestries to beach side chip shops, it would be a very dim (and probably close to death)individual who would not be thrilled by its charms.
Solva, Freshwater East, St Davids (Britains smallest city), Tenby, The Preseli hills, St Govans, Amroth, Porthgain, Bosherston, Carew, Milford Haven, the list goes on and on of charming little places to seek out. And each one has a different 'feel' about it.
Should peace be your thing then Solva will delight with gentle walks along the river and stunning views. For those seeking a little more then the ever popular Tenby will provide with its bars, restraunts and beaches, a magnate for tourists (or 'grockles' as they're affectionately known).
Tenby has a special place in my heart, and seems to hold the very spirit of my youth only rivaled by Porthcawl many mile away. I still remember the joy of buying rubber snakes and pistol keyrings in the seaside gifts shops that had beachballs and other inflatable toys hanging from their fronts. And these shops still flourish to this day, feeding my inner boy memories of when the sun shined always.
And the fish and chips in these towns, (fresh cod or hake usually but other fish are offered) are simply to die for. Fresh caught off the boat and coated in a batter which melts in the mouth. Food for gods and devils indeed, and factor in the busy pubs serving chilled ale and you have a irresistible menu in your lap. Of course Pembrokeshire offers a wider choice of specialities in its numerous restraunts but personally I find freshly cooked cod, smothered in vinegar to be perfect for sea towns. A mixture of tradition and tribute.
Whenever I visit I find myself going back in time buying paper bags of boiled sweets and butterscotch and playing on old arcade cabinets. Parts really are unchanged from the 1980's, and obviously if one cares to tour one of the counties many castles which are still well preserved then time goes a lot further back than 1980.

Fleeing From Blood

Vegetarianism is a funny thing. I was one for just over a year and a half and never felt worse in my life (which has included rehab and life threatening hospital stays due to alcohol). Committed vegetarians will spout about how they don't feel weak but I beg to differ. I felt weak most of the time during my stint, and not only that I become a pasty looking individual.
The fact is human beings are programmed or designed to consume meat. How far would a vegetarian caveman have got one wonders?
Yes there are clever arguments testifying to the power of the Lettuce and Tomato but truly the carnivore is king. I adore meat eating, every chunk of flesh I tear at feels good slipping down my throat. I sit eating and content, satisfied that vegetarians exist on a hollow diet. One with no substance whatsoever and as the blood from raw meat swill in my guts I am refreshed.
Vegetables are not alien to my diet but they are a side dish; straight and boring like sheet metal or beer drunk from tin.
There is nothing like dining on freshly killed rabbit or trout newly fished from a stream. With every forkful I can taste the river mixing with sweet potatoes and butter.
Another oddity regarding vegans is the food. Supermarkets are filled with vegetarian bacon, burgers, and many other meat copies. How so? Surely those opposed to eating animals ought to be distancing themselves from having meat-a-likes on their tables? In the same way as recovering alcoholics do not drink alcohol free beer, these people should want nothing to do with beefburgers, whether beef free or not. I have even heard of vegetarian duck!? Ive not seen it but presume it to be a dollop of tofu shaped like a duck. Are vegetarians so weak from lack of meat they cannot be more imaginative with their food?
Perhaps they could shape the food into snowflakes, colourful ribbons, peace symbols and doll's houses?
I am not totally hostile toward vegetarian foods, in fact I enjoy meat free lasagne and pies. But in no way would they satisfy me if I were to become veggie again. Stuffed peppers are great but stuffed lamb's hearts are infinately tastier. Blood is fabulous and makes a fine soup, there is no substance in shrubbery.
Argue the power of the sprout as much as you want, there is no denying that mankind would not be here had we never killed a beast. I put a lot of blame on Disney cartoons and others of that ilk who have humanised animals. It stirred some peoples conscience but in the same instant took away their spirit. In much the same way that good rock n' roll was made from over indulgence in alcohol and drugs, Man did not win great victories in wars by eating pumpkin pie and lettuce leaves. The man with fine meats in his stomach and fire in his heart will build empires whilst a man fed with carrots only sees better in the dark.
The vegetarians meat eating instincts are still embedded in their (wilting) spirits. When they deny this they lie pure and simple. If we could somehow read their minds accurately there would be thoughts of meat stamped all over, salivating over bacon sandwiches. An ideal setting, if this were possible, would be a barbecue where lamb kebabs, thick, succulent steaks and racks of pork ribs are being cooked. Their sensors would ring in jubilant joy from the smells and sights and they would break in an instant if only they would be honest with their bodies.
Of course people will argue until their blood boils in defence of their acquired life choices, and many will resort to violence when all rational paths have been exhausted. And this is especially true of animal rights activists perhaps proving further that abstinence of flesh distorts the brain making one susceptible to violent urges.
Nevertheless the heart of the matter (sizzling, tender lamb's hearts) is that vegetarians are wired like we raving carnivores; with a taste for well cooked flesh, served with a chilled Chablis. It is impossible to escape nature, even the type of greasy nature served at fast food places. Vegetables (like koi ponds and flowers) are best looked at than eaten. Colours are for the eyes, raw meat for the stomach.

An Agent For The Holidays

Tomorrow it is Thanksgiving Day in America and as an eager participant of over indulgance and alcohol I shall be celebrating with gusto as if the hounds of hell are at my heel. Nevermind that I am Welsh and living in the wilds of West Wales, the turkey will be roasted, the bread sauce whipped and Jagermeister chilled to within an inch of its beautiful life.
November is usually a miserable month in Britain, with its dark early evenings and biting, cold winds so hijacking another countries holiday to brighten up a few days is a much needed boost to the chilled marrow system.
The modern Thanksgiving holiday I understand stemmed from a 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, where the Plymouth settlers held a harvest feast after a successful growing season, so it might be argued it comes from the British. And as a limey desperate for action I have taken this information as licence to celebrate on turkey flesh and alcohol.
We globally share so many holidays I am suprised we haven't latched on to this one too. Little matter regarding the real meaning as most have abandoned the spirit of other more grand holidays. Halloween has become a gore fest and Christmas long ago been insulted by greed.
Thanksgiving 'feels' like a dressed down version of Christmas from this side of the Atlantic. It is how the Silly Season should be without the silliness and without being bloated to vulgar states. We know of Thanksgiving here and some celebrate it (I cannot be the only one can I?) but we don't laden it with gifts and carols. Of course if I were to skip over the pond it would no doubt feel different but as it is right now, to a writer hammering this out from the lush, green bosom of Wales, it feels right.
Eat, drink and give thanks for Life and a bountiful harvest but forget about the tinsel and gaudy baubels. Who had the Christmas number one song, or gave the biggest gift is neither important or classy. To be blunt they serve only as further proof of how cheap a person is.
It is quite honourable to give thanks to simple things and for one will be in merriment and giving thanks in earnest. It is the only proper thing to do, and one can only hope next months festivities get restored to a more humble level. We are supposedly celebrating the birth of a Saviour afterall. Humans are ever so fallible and often get lost to real meaning and all the cards and glitter in the world won't mean a thing if we forget that.

Death's Head

The dead lay warm in their graves as the sun and seas roll over them oblivious to their sleep, and not only am I envious of the warmth but positively fascinated. The subject is a burning vine through my heart, a stitch in my hungry soul.
One would think that the amount of time we spend dead is sufficient reason to stop me from constantly returning to the grim topic but like a cat toying with its terrified prey I find reason (and occasionaly comfort) in wallowing in morbid thoughts and ideas.
Executions, alcohol, disease, tragedy; everything skull shaped invades my mind. Blood salts my insatiable tongue. I see no joy in death and do not possess the serial killers lethal attraction to it, I am plain morbid. Ghoulish, I delight in the title. I want to read the eyes of someone being executed to look for clues to the afterlife.
There is nothing new about writing about death, my ilk have been immersed in it since time began and I have decided to add my thoughts to the grisly mix. I ought to be comfortable with death, afterall it sits on my shoulder daily like a stubborn imp but I am not. There is little fear in death itself, more the dying. I doubt Id be courageous under gunfire, but quite settled in drinking myself to the grave. (A long process with lots of pit stops I should imagine).
What frustrates me the most is leaving a loved one behind - that death can rob us in such a miserable way is an affront to all that is decent and fair.
We can think this without sounding like a spoilt child because the ultimate plan is beyond our reach.
There must be clues on the face of the dying. Is it in the grimace of pain? Or in the pinched look on a corpse? Some people are quite peaceful looking after leaving their mortal shackles. Beyond suffering, their final silent statement that death is not so bad afterall.

Dope Fiends Suss Another Cafe Window

Click: 'And local councils have unveiled...'
Whirr..Click: 'This weeks top ten....'
(Teeth grinding)
Hiss..click click: 'Rain followed by high winds..'
(Blood swells against temples)
Whirr..Hiss...Click: 'Visit the Butterfly fair for all your sober needs...'
Off Switch/Switch Off

I have quit tuning in to British radio. I can't abide the popcorn being drilled into my ears and butter plugged up my ass. It used to be a constant background noise competing with songbirds and wretching but ever since the Celebrity Tsunami hit our isles and people became obssessed with reality television, I cannot suffer it any longer.
The music is stale and the stories tedious, and the less said about the irritating jingles and advertisements the better. The airwaves have become high on voltage, making tongues drool and knocking eyeballs together like bells in a storm.
You surf the wicker man frame in hope of discovering a distant oddity or raging choir but each twist of the dial brings more shitty dough. The jewels have fallen out of the speakers and there is no panic on the streets because audiences are numbed, they have swallowed the lie that 'celebrity' makes the world go round.
And this is where the internets tricks come in to play. With two clicks of the mouse I am able to access radio from around the world, and American radio I have taken to like a werewolf to buxom damsels. Of course there are still annoying adverts but being a newbie (to stay within internet speak) it is all fresh and exciting, seldom do they grate on the nerves. Also the stations I have discovered do not seem starstruck with rotten celebrity/reality shows.
Its as refreshing as a drunkard finding a new watering hole where all the regulars have deep pockets and long snouts.
Granted the weather and traffic reports are not very useful, and the local news bulletins not critical to learn but it is still better than sitting through snippets of local mush. And hearing the names of alien road names and boulevards at least adds a peculiar layer to the days chapters, the buzz of travelling without leaving the home.
I can't imagine ever going back to local radio now that my net has snagged such foreign baubels. Doing so would be similar to returning to a bar you had been barred from in that you would be familiar in its surroundings but still hold resentment for being banned in the first place.
Radio in the UK has gorged itself so much on tabloid tales and petty scandal that it has become bloated, weighed down in bullshit. Its stilt legs have buckled under pressure from the sugared gossip of the world and no amount of oiled cleavages could rescue it. Only the soulless now follow their rancid scent, and stale tigers need disease to reignite their flesh.
Of course im not as naive to think this grave new culture hasn't reached the United States because it has, the glossy virus has spread worldwide sending millions into an idle hysteria but it hasn't filtered onto the stations I frequent and until they do I am as happy as gas with fire amongst the truck driving ads and reports from death row.

Bile Delicacies

Alcohol withdrawal can be pretty messy and is always uncomfortable (I claim the understatement of the year) but along with the tremors and sweat comes a beautifully gothic image. One exclusive to drunkards and the occasional pill head. A picture of sick delight; a human being going through spastic motions, behaving like a wounded animal wishing for End.
It truly is a marvellous scene if one looks beyond the clawing fingers and itching ribs, and one I have acted word for word many times; sweating out toxins, fits which make you believe you are about to plummet into death, bringing up bold blood and zany green bile, watching shadows become fiends on the walls, vices crushing kidneys, carousels stirring the mind, anxiety beating the nervous system like a sadistic elf toying with kittens, feeling murder in the guts, it never ends.
This crazy beat up pantomime and the will to go out and do it all again gets more vicious as the frame gets older. And the sick persist. Stubborn gluttons wallowing in whiskey and gin, only to try absolve their sins by fire and withdrawal.
It would be a fine method of torture, and get fantastic results, either in the drunken stage or the subsequent withdrawals but the cowering yoghurt masses would deem it too cruel. Too unusual, even if the act of drinking has become more natural than brushing ones teeth.
There is undoubtedly a dark side to alcohol, a place of utter shame and darkness where wet brained zombies wail for the clink of a bottle and werewolves lurk in anticipation of a good meal from decieving them. But there is no denying the beauty in such images, subtle bright streaks born of raw actions and emotions. In much the same way as Victorian asylums, there is always a lush pasture to be found in hell.
Withdrawal is a terrible thing to have to endure and many agonies are unveiled to the temporary crippled man or woman. Fever seems too gentle a word for it is like being visited upon by ghosts intent only on carnage of the flesh and twisting the brain, and time and again I myself have been silenced by its leather wings.
It is vile and it is also exquisite. Plentiful in horror dreamscapes like koi fish swimming in fetid swamps. Fantasy framed in realities realm. There is a daring to the chapters of suffering, a devil may care attitude which attracts the ghoulish hoardes. To some (and I exist among them like a fat gargoyle) there is charm found in sickbeds and coffins, and we grow from them, morbid stalagtites glistening with fresh luminous bile.

Kerb Crawling With Rotting Heads

People get all dressed up like stalkers on a Saturday night hoping for a giggle and maybe meet someone they are attracted to and settle down. But a month later when the make up has been shovelled off and the chat up line withered like a slug, the attraction is dead and like the last choke on a cigarette, peoples lives begin to resemble cold ash.
Drink got me at an early age. Smoking caught me earlier and sex was my first addiction. Boy or girl, it didn't matter. Both were the same with closed eyes under a blanket. Nobody knew. An orgasm is an orgasm. (Although different faces do sometimes rile the fantasy).
I remember once receiving oral sex on a sand dune from a girl with a passion for slugs. I closed my eyes gently in that blissful way, tilted my head upward towards the moon and tried remembering the most popular girl in school. It didn't work, my brain was in a spiteful mood and I kept picturing boys.
In school I was the freak. The rat-tat-tat machine gun stutter of my lips could be heard on every corner of the playground. 'Here comes Tommy gun!' The sterile bully doomed for failure would spit.
Cursing both teachers and pupils, I would prowl the corridors in search of my next True Love(tm). The eternal handshake did not seem possible then.
Sex was rampant on everybody's lips. Every dream reeked of condoms and suspender belts, each holiday had a conquest. But Cupid could smell the rot, firing his most faithful shots into loins not hearts.
What was sex at that early age?
To me it was sinister, a monster. Friends would speak of sweaty fumblings at the back of the weekend cinema or cheeky fingerings on the school coach on summer trips.
It remained a cyst to me throughout those ridiculous but beloved years.
Not one kiss dressed my lips. The only consolation I had was knowing the fantasies inside my head were better then the lies and exaggerrations whistled by other, more insecure boys.
Pornography introduced me to sex. It was the knight which slayed the demon, and I was no longer afraid of sex. Instead I feared women. The first kiss, the first caress of drunken skin filled me with dread.
The first sexual conversation I had with the opposite sex was during a correspondence with a young woman four hundred miles away. The souvenir perfumed stocking she sent me now lays under a bed of dust in the attic.
Sex was a giant hurdle and alcohol became the springboard I used to get over it. I was always a cheat.
At sixteen I had the sort of qualities that I didn't like in other people. I dismissed habits that I often did myself. I hated the Pepsi and Adidas kids but drank and wore them both.
My years of vice were plenty. I cavorted with whores, splurged on drugs and had oceans of booze. Teenage boys tend to chase girls, I headed straight to the Co-op top shelf. It seemed all my desires were found on the highest shelf in those days. The unattainable, perverted itch.
The evening on the dunes with the slug girl pricked my sleeping penis, tuning it to stench and vulgar dribbling. I awoke with it and refused to listen to moderation. When you meet a tramp dressed like she was I always discard limits.
Neon lights were flashing red, blue, red, blue in my lusty mind like a multi coloured abbatoir on a first acid trip. A sucked dick doesn't have a conscience and this vegetarian girl blowing for gold was raw meat to me, sending horny ideas into the stratosphere.
What a fine introduction to oral sex! One minute im murdering slugs and swigging vodka, the next there is a strangers head sucking on my zip. I actually imagined birds flying overhead having smiles instead of yellow beaks and winking gormlessly at this perverted abandon.
It clouded the attraction to sex for me slightly. I had always believed in fairytales. Princesses locked away in castles by kings who were interested in incest.
The girl I encountered on the sand dunes is probably smoking someone elses flesh now. Someone with a hard on for frogs and wildlife.
I lost my virginity at eighteen and almost instantly regetted it. Consequently I have been searching for it ever since; in bottles, bins, drains, cemeteries. Even in the sex of other women. Quiet girls, modest girls, girls who enjoyed fucking while I was drugged and drunk.
Indeed I have known both depravity and Love since casting off the sober bowl haircut I wore to school. And depravity stings less.

The Conger Alley

A sunbeam would light my cigarette if I still indulged in nicotine smoking that is. I put the stinking habit to the wall, blidfolded it and fired until its tobacco guts scattered to the wind as soon as I noticed ugly, yellow stains spreading on my fingertips.
But if I did indulge I would not use a lighter. Sparks from my flint teeth could light a cancer stick, or as I said first, a sunbeam.
The tar that clings to my lungs now will have to stay there of course but sometimes a cough feel like a tombstone in my throat. Well deserved too.
I dislike smokers, their illnesses are rightly earned. In fact if I were to speak honestly I dislike most people and distrust them even more.
I talk to books and walls nowadays (although I only speak to bricks if a wallflower grows on them), I find pages more reliable than society.
I ventured out into society once and was bitten by its ferocious jaw. I tried to cushion the roar of teenage engines, scruffy boy-girl scraps and corner street tarts with beer but it didn't work. At least not my advantage.
Every weekend hooligans with no idea what real trouble was would gather to form a frankeinsteinian garbage of smoking, swearing and fingering and myself always being drunk became known to them all as a rebel messiah with the devil in his eyes.
Each night I would stumble, denting locomotives with each step and the street greetings would shower me in a volley of teenage teething rings. Of course I was a poster boy to them, a certified lunatic of cool. A body of broiling snakes and leather fury.
It rankled that nobody really bothered to sit with me but the blame is with myself, too high-handed and separtist for my own good. In truth my hand had never fully plunged into the studded barrel of vandals, and whatever pinches I did manage to pull out of it were miniscule and not worthy of obssession. Still in my crippled thinking a half baked respect was better than solitude.
With a junkies warpaint blazing on my flesh I could crawl into certain notoriety and hide in the fragile shadow. I found no one there either.
The exaggerations and yarns I spun only dug me deeper into bony clutches and on sobering up regret would be upon me, flashing its pus.
On warm days the local harbour and sand dunes became my drinking haunts. Bitter sands like a pikanter sauce littered with driftwood, dried seaweed and lager tins. A ribald throne from where I could look across the sea where Gower and Rhosili rose, green forboding leviathans which you believed you could touch if your aim was true.
Sometimes I would lay back against the distinctive red topped lighthouse that locals seemed to love. It became my temporary headstone as I rattled through the gin, the horizon laid before my eyes like a celestial flatline.
There I would slip into dreams of Medusa and fire, ploughing onward into escape with unquenchable thirst. It was a comfortable place to doze, knowing that within twenty footsteps undiscovered sea creatures were chasing fish into conger alleys and deathly knooks.
But as is usual with good things they end, and I would be brought back to life either by a stray dog slobbering onto my rosetted cheeks or by the scent of a ladies hemline wafting into my airholes. Death has never had my full attention regardless of my perilous appetite.
The walk back from harbour to front door was short as the reaper flew but in baby steps, stitched by the devil, it was the longest walk imaginable. The space inbetween each lampost stretched for miles, allowing villains and psychopaths of all persuasion to assail my imagination as I clunked onward to the threshold I considered blessed at the time.
What disasters hid under the soles of my feet? What power was it that lifted me higher than the suckling mob? It stirred. It smirked. It curled its cataract lips over crooked mouth. It never once showed its wings, or revealed its plan, but it cared. It knew where I was heading before I did and it led me as long as I trusted.
Young cubs and vixens lined the pavement as I rolled my eyes down the street, following like a demon flexing its muscle. The tensing fist by my side made them talk amongst themselves, perhaps trying to decide whether I was drunk or mad. Maybe both as I passed unhindered.
I moved through drug dens, dog yards and scumparks filled with the diseased and perverted, never once bothered by the blades or affected by the moonlit barks. Bad people are aware of something worse, something wilder and whether this tic shines in my eyes I know not but I always reach my vertigo kingdom.
From harbour walls to castle dungeons, a legacy from the dark.

Catching The Appletooth (Alcoholism)

Suffering is not word enough. It seems gentle in comparison. There is not a word for the destructive, evil pains which stem from the bottle.
The odour from popping a wine cork quickly fades.
I associated a bottle of alcohol with a vase of flowers, the flowers themselves being the intoxicating spray of bubbles that set me free (free from what I did not yet know as I was only sixteen when I gave myself that poisonous bouquet).
Never have I been so wrong! Flowers don't grow from the bottle, only thorns and getting caught in that thicket is an experience only alcoholics can describe.
When I took my first drink I was unaware of the addictive personality that stalked tiger-like in my system looking for a vulnerability which would bring me down. At sixteen I began the descent into a private hell.
There were parties, drinking with friends, summer holiday binges and teenage curiosity. Alcohol has always been a clever demon with an ace up its gothic sleeve. It can take on various guises, one only has to look at the supermarket shelves with the laced colas and grinning lemonades.
I lost my drinking (L)earner plates at twenty years and by the time I had reached twenty two I was thoroughly addicted to booze. Armed with a hard drinking reputation I could be seen being swallowed every morning by an off licence mouth.
I could not let go of the bottle, it might as well been glued to my lips and fuelled further by endless days of kissing the sun, my alcohol intake was increased and I went hand in hand with oblivion. Thinking that with an iron will I could control the drink but with every glass the iron is rusted and withers away to nothing.
For the first few years my body took the full assault; hangovers, trembling, vertigo, nose bleeds, anxiety, aches and shivers. These alone would have made a rational person quit but alcohol had become a medicine, a solution to life's problems and it was available anywhere. I was not capable of rational thought, I didn't even know if I was human anymore. Everything save alcohol and its beautifully grim hold seemed pointless.
The hangovers got worse and days would be spent bringing up bile and other rainbows of sickly colour. The cure was more booze and in my mind its magic knew no bounds. A three day hangover was instantly topped up with wines and spirits. I was deaf to my own liver screaming.
Days got longer with sleep only occurring between three and seven in the the morning but eventhough the days had lengthened the only things I knew I had done was open a bottle or tin, got drunk and annoyed sensible drinkers in public houses, or sober families in supermarkets.
I was young and standing on lifes crossroad and had already thrown two promising relationships to the wind.
When it had finished ravaging my body it turned on my mind and everything went upside down and fell to pieces. It is the way of poison, the only way the thorn can move is by severing and cutting.
I no longer had friends, pride or respect. There was not even a life outside the frantic, urgent drinking. I needed alcohol everywhere I went; in cars, out walking, in cinemas, at train stations, everywhere. If I was ever without a bottle I'd become soulless, unable to do anything sober.
Simple tasks became mammoth chores with being alcoholically spiked. I walked around in the shadow of 100% drunkeness, envious of care free people around me laughing and talking as they followed their lives. I could never lay my hands on a sane tongue.
Vodka; what a wretched word that is to me now.
The Smirnoff days tuned me into a fantasy world, I substituded real friends for television characters, turning them as real as I could without tripping entirely into the clutches of madness.
One or two episodes of a favourite programme made up a whole day in my life, desperately I clung to bizarre fiction. In hindsight I realise that I must have had one foot inside a breakdown of sorts but nothing else knocked at my door.
With vodka in my hand, supporting my body like a noble gentlemans cane, I hid from life, dreaming of rivers flowing wildly with serpents froth. Vodka binges were comfort to my soul but weighed heavily on money and when all funds have been exhausted by vodka an alcoholic will catch the ruffian wind of the Appletooth. Cider drinking.
Cider is the most available drink of them all to heavy drinkers (barring methylated spirit). Everything about it is cheap; the plastic bottles, the two shilling names, vicious bubbles and its foul scent. Even the bile caused from drinking cider looks different, with its neon green warning choking every breath.
I caught the Appletooth and every miserable copper coin was spent in lousy cider shops with dry tobacco air and shifty tills. From then on my beloved vodka was a luxury and it was the ginger whore who banged my liver.
Every minute rotated around alcohol. For nine years I didn't wake up from sleep, I simply came around as one would from anaesthesia. And booze opens newer vices on its sinister, downward path.
It was alcohol which introduced drugs into my world. Cannabis, lsd, ampthetamine, mushrooms, nitrazepam, temazepam, diazepam, even morphine sulphate and a brush with heroin.
It was dear alcohol that pushed the first morphine filled needle into my arm, giving me Heavenly pleasures and it was alcohol that melted the temazepam and crushed the valium to give it an intavenous kick.
Tablets do not look good in a needle but I wore sunglasses of 8% tint. Blinded from common sense and moderation, I wore iron blinkers which allowed sight in tunnel vision.
Alcohol and occasional drifts of drugs. I enjoyed drugs but the sauce is where I truly fell in Love. It was my devilish trigger, drugs a mere substitue. Life is both tiring and perverse in addiction and soon I lost all control.
I call this the semi-madness stage. Delusions of grandeur, talking to ones self,, obssessive behaviour, severe depression, personality disorder, suicidal tendancies and self mutilation (a fleshy, scarred crucifix still swings from my neck).
When it got to the point of switching the television or radio off to listen out for 'other' voices, I knew for sure that alcohol had become an enemy, one not to be trusted or given consideration.
I had reached the grand old age of twenty five and had been drinking relentlessly for eight years. Eight years of shameful lies and wasted coin. Looking back to the beginning of my drinking career the memory darkens. It had started as an innocent fashion accessory with a few laughs along the way, had I known the final chapter the bottle would have stayed on the shelf.
It no longer gave the warm glow and comfort, it no longer acted as a stimulant. Alcohol became a nagging, tedious aggravation.
The reader should now begin to understand some of the agonies it takes an alcoholic to suffer before admitting any wrongs. The hundred sermons and thousand pleadings from those not cursed with the disease will always fall like Icarus in flames, (a point I cannot stress enough).
A wagging finger and lashing tongue will be ignored by the drinker. He or she wears an armour that will not dent with a simple rebuke because alcohol teaches stern lessons. It discards moderation and common sense and nurtures its tragic followers on excess, self pity, selfishness, anger, frustration and deceit.
The lies which have been told in the name of the glass are countless, along with the pain it inflicts on both drunk and sober. The havoc and violence it creates could fill a battlefield and a bruise just one of the bottles many colours.
A clever thing to be able to shrink away from blame which is what happens because alcoholism is more often judged on the person it afflicts rather than understanding of the illness.
Alcoholics are frequently described as weak willed and hopless yet nothing could be further from the truth in the case of recovering alcoholics throughout the planet. It is harsh, all of it because of the disastrous spell it weaves to those involved.
There is no nobody stronger than someone who successfully beats an addiction but before fighting that addiction one must first face it, and getting an alcoholic to admit having a problem is usually the hardest and highest hurdle of them all.
I was caught in a whilwind romance with the Appletooth and was slowly drinking myself into the grave (or padded cell), but while the sauce was still in my hand I was without ear to the voice of reason.
Nothing seemed quite right without it and I came to believe that life would be that much better if I slept straight through it. Death was always hanging around and whilst the first drink gives courage the last one will always bring cowardice.
To be scared of life and frightened of death is a terrible place to be. For years I slept with a bottle under my pillow and I kissed my cruel 'bride' often, with vigour. It was only when my mind had begun to crack and a breakdown sat on my shoulders that I knew I needed a clean and final split from the demon which had kept me chained.
In the beginning alcohol had handed me freedom. It had given me fantasy in the place of reality, I lived in a cartoon and was king of nonsense. But Life (the one that bites) soon rained down in stone and the cartoon was buried beneath misery and empties.
The first step to recovery as has been previously stated was admitting to myself I was alcoholic (it applies to all addicts of course). Without this all else will fail because like the pulling of a tooth, if the root is not cut out the problen will remain.
I felt no shame in admitting I was alcoholic, it is a disease afterall, and instead I felt relief. After years of torture and self abuse I had finally broken the first shackle of my gothic vine.
The next immediate step was detox in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic where I was introduced to fellow drinkers. At first I didn't think my temperament would allow sobriety and in my first week in the plush clinic I was dogged by constant thoughts of one more binge. I had real doubts and many times I imagined quitting the programme to feed my addiction in a homely bar.
I attended many A.A. meetings and was drilled by group therapy and relaxation techniques. It was at one of the meetings that my doubts on a sober life disappeared and I discovered the true strength and determination of the human soul.
Here was a group of people who had allowed themselves to be whipped by a bottle until even their minds had bled, and allowed dignity and pride to slip from their reach.
With alcohol on their lips they were useless, cowering cripples unable to perfore the simplest task, but without it they stood taller than their previous shadow and sunlight was welcomed on their flesh.
After a month of treatment I went home eager to pick up on a fresh horizon without the sting of drink.
Weeks passed and the clouded days I had waded through prior to my stay in rehab became filled with hope. My bank account started to grow again and I found time to do the things that beer had prevented. Fresh air no longer clogged my lungs like it had with alcohol and confidence came flooding back as I busied myself in work.
Health wise it was thrilling, energy raced in my system and my brain found found sanity from somewhere. But still I lacked the companionship I craved. I had been two months without a drink and not a single knock arrived at my door. The 'friends' with which I had occasionaly shared a drink with disappeared. Can sobriety intimitate some people? I believe it can.
Sober I remained and each day brought more confidence, one of the bottles stickiets traps.
Too much confidence is deadly to alcoholics because it leads them to believe they have conquered their addiction and are able to finally control the booze.
It was that, coupled with emptiness that drove me once again to the off licence shelf and with that first drink the macabre circus started to rev its familiar tune.
Everything I had built and restored in those two sober months were smashed within a week. The first drink (which I tried desperately to control) had its claw into me again. A.A was a million miles away, caught once again like a fish thrashing in gunpowder.
The drinking was even more intense the second time around, I drank at all hours and the hangovers, if they could be described as such, were so severe after binges that for days later I writhed in bed, a wounded animal struggling in its near death throes.
Even personal hygeine was neglected as I sweated out toxins only to be seduced by the bottles charms again and again.
Alcohol has a powerful relationship with the alcoholic and the illness is dismissed by the ignorant who have no understanding at all. Why should they? It doesn't effect them.
They see addicts as either a person who is drunk twenty four hours a day or in the gutter with a duffle bag and little else. The ignorant are both deaf and blind.
Nothing in life has ever affected me as deeply as alcohol and from now until I am in my grave I will only be sober for one day at a time.
I am still alcoholic (that part never dies) and I still have scars from the past, but without booze they need not be re-opened. I know that it would only take ONE DRINK to start the hellish downward spiral yet again so these days I try not to look at the shelf.

Steven Francis May 1997

Runway Lights Out (Coming Down)

Picture it; you're in the most successful band on the planet, the whole world wants to know your every move. Privacy is at a minimum, you shower in admiration, get tangled in autographs, smoke with fattened celebrities and mingle in VIP frivolities.
World tours are stamped on the suntan and magazines are as dizzy as the fans for your attention. Millionaire poster pull out. You!
Suddenly something snaps. You look around at four all too familiar walls and realise that all the action has been happening in your bedroom. The only spotlight your imagination, the crowds merely star struck hunger pains.
Reality hits and a tornado of sad faces rips through the dolby cocoon, tearing out the frenzied ocean of racing pulses.
The stage curtains, which opened as happily as a children's fairytale, now close with the savagery of an orphanage. You are alone, once again draped in splendid isolation for nobody to see.
The scene I have described is vague in detail because the details themselves are built on confusion and emptiness, but I for one have experienced this dramatic daydream first hand and am certain I am not alone.
Everybody has imagined at one stage in their life (usually during childhood) of scoring the winning try in a rugby world cup or of 'breaking a leg' whilst trying not to trip over the works of Shakespeare onstage but to have these fantasies crawl around in the mind from childhood onward is a constant burden on the brains reply button for whenever the urge to dance in the spotlight arrives it must be pressed and the desired script acted with fury to an invisible, yet strangely real audience.
It is this urge which I believe to be the center of infection. One cannot suppress the desire to become a flower amongst thieves if the seed is planted at birth because it grows with fierce intent and over shadows all that posess no reflection.
Here it would seem the seed is talent. A gift from God to be unwrapped by the reciever and shown in all glory to the world.
Whether I have been given the treasure remains to be seen in the real world but here inside my head I have been blessed with so many talents that I scarcely know where to begin to tame them all.
Every day I wear a different mask, and those masks are worn to inflate various disguises depending on what I have read in newspapers or heard on the radio.
On Monday I might be a renowned philosopher seeking the chance to put a dreadful deed into contex, whereas Tuesday may bring guitars, cocaine binges and cameo roles to the door of my imagination. Whatever ideas I may have during these days I must see them through the eyes of a different character, and I realise now that living this way is not unlike fuelling life with alcohol and other drugs. A bad day can be made better and a good day bliss.
However living in this comatose cartoon drains energy from every part of the body including the spirit and nothing is worse than waking up to the fact that all along you have been feeding a curious ego to satisfy an audience of selected people.
I am not a master on the tricks of the mind and can only assume that getting trapped inside fantasy is a face of quiet schizophrenia, or occasion when there is an imbalance of chemicals swirling inside the brain. But without getting involved in psychiatric wizardry I am confident that the feelings I have described can be summed up in one word; escape.

Kiss Catch - The Ghoul Finds Love

We are all friends here. I have often skipped over the hurdle on the subject of Love (the capitol L type) but now I feel the time has arrived to spin out my ideas on it. Well maybe.
I have written little odes to a number of ladies but never TO a lady. It is an obvious difference of course. I can see my future relationship being an up and down affair with a crazy bag lady from some obscure village. With an added pinch of serpents luck she will have a withered hand and a nose to poke the fading embers of love with.
I see it now, 'you may kiss the bride!' As I lean forward she takes out an eyeball with her parrot beak.
My first Love was a bottle of sauce that I kept hidden in an inside pocket whenever out. She wasn't too demanding in the beginning and evenings were spent simply kissing her smooth neck and swigging from her glossy mouth. I had a glorious nine year romance with her, but by the end she had shattered my confidence, taken every penny piece and had even started to criticise the way I dressed.
It wasn't honesty with her. In the first stage of our relationship I managed to squeeze in a mistress. She was like a nodding dog in many ways and there is nothing more irritating than a woman who hangs on to your every word as if its gospel. I liked her that much is true but looking back the only way I could have loved her was by loving a different part of her every day. A tedious thing and far too timid for my volatile nature.
All of the others I dated were unique. Cider was a stubborn wench but she had energy, a real livewire. I was never alone in the morning if she was by my side, she could tickle a hangover away with ease and bring me out into the world. Vodka could be a little more tetchy: she shined a light on my darker moods which could cause havoc but if I respected her she could be absolutely charming. I treated both lager and wine equally as they did me, the result was I was never alone but never could tell if they had been cheating on me.
The worst of the bunch was whiskey; she was a vile, vindictive bitch and I couldn't do any amount of right in her eyes. She used me to get back at my gentle nature by clouding my views and feelings and unveiling my hatred.
Port and champagne always had silver spoons up their arses, I fled from their clutches every time.
They were all good time gals but in the end they took it out of me. I look at them standing in supermarkets now eyeing up other men. I am only slightly jealous and the dust looks good on them.
I don't know who or what to love next. It seems such a bitter word after basking on a topsy turvy ocean. I saw my ideal woman bathing in its innocence once. She was so beautiful that part of my spirit left me to be with her. A quiet lady with loud rubies on her tongue, I think she had fractured her thoughts but I was able to pick up on the break and loved her for it. I could have stood watching her all day, the spiders in her smokey hair didn't bother me. A feline jackdaw and all the time my inconsistant jawbreakers were mouthed in silence.
It might have been a dream but I like to think that such a woman exists. The blonde ornament with hoof heels and rubber eyelashes excites me as much as an overweight zero with her burst-water-pipe looks. That type of woman is kept like a pocket watch and only gets taken out by being mistaken for the picture locket of ones wife.
She ought to be left alone as I shall leave her here.
I have searched for my ideal lady many times in the past but since I only flirted with my vanity I always ended up with my reflection. I quit looking after a thousand headaches and a million strange faces and I was alone for a hellish period of time. It took me back to school days where I was considered to be the freak that nobody wanted to touch. A childhood sweetheart was never meant to be. As the other boys in class were beating their puny chests in exagerrated triumph I was left counting my fingers but I was never envious. The girls in class did not have the courage or glitz to fuel any fantasies, they were too busy spitting damp paper at the heads of the fat and freckled.
I read about sex on a discarded lollipop stick I found next to a dead squirrel in fields ajoining the school. No doubt it got to the truth before I did.
In those days I imagined love making as a pissed up grope in the park with a schoolgirl in white knickers and half a bottle of cooking sherry stolen from the kitchen. Maybe I still do, I've never shared my body with anyone long enough to find out.
The same can be said of Love. I would like to say that I learnt about Love through reading Keats, Byron and other magical scribblers but I didn't and the lovely creature eludes me to this day.
And what will happen if I do discover Love? Will I settle down in the quiet seclusion of a wedding band in a nine to five house with a brace of children? I sincerely hope that the combined natures of myself and future queen will avoid that claustrophobic life style.
I do not wish to be married amidst a racket of trumpets and a hurricane of confetti with cameras snapping merrily away like caffiene hungry crocodiles at the anorexic bridesmaids and grown men with hangovers. Wedding photos have a wonderful sense of humour.
Give me a church wedding by all means, scatter the daffodils along the aisle and illuminate the apostles with candlelight but lock ceremony away, close it in a book. A marriage is gutsy enough without over-dressing it in frilly bells and icing that twinkle like loose change in a dingy betting shop.
I will find Love one day either standing in a queue or weeping at the funeral of a God, and when I do I will lay down and sleep with my frail figurine until we both discover truth and serenity. Divine knowledge shallbe given to us wrapped in old newspapers and hatred will fold its arms and wait for death.
I cannot see my own footprints at the moment but I can hear tomorrow in the distance. It is coming on a dragon's back with the smell of eucalyptus on its breath and a flower behind its ear.
Let us dance and raise a toast to Love.

Do We Need To Listen?

Britain once thrived on new ideas. The magic of the UK market. We do not need pickled buisnesmen, fat on fat, to tell us what is or is not a good idea. They are drunk on others ideas. Pilfering honest concepts. Talent shows and buisness shows are terrible ideas, thought up by greedy minds. Trouble is we are easily fooled by plastic teachers.

Holiday Of A Lifetime

Life: four letters which fill in the blank between Birth and Death in a swift lash of the tongue perfectly.
Letters that once placed in the appropiate order, undoubtedly make up the most precious word in the dictionary, and regardless of its size, the biggest. The reader will find these statements obvious and apparent, but the word LIFE means more to me than following a daily routine then shaking its sand from my shoes as the itch of sleep arrives with the turning of a duvet at night.
Breath is secondary due to its emptiness. A heart that simply exists to breathe is not entirely functional as it beats constantly without rhythm or purpose at scarred images of life as it was. The past is dead.
The elixirs of Life to me is morning cigarettes, fingernails covered in coffee cream, dust gathering on ancient maps, the smell of petrol in a garage, soup by candlelight, cobwebbed biographies, standing on a windswept wave crashed beach and laying idle on a pile of work desperately seeking my attention.
All of these give me unlimited pleasure, and give to my heart the reward it so rightly deserves. Breathing is such a tedious task if done alone, and one must be careful at this stage of Life because as soon as the fragrance of living becomes a quiet odour, the heart itself turns into mere whisper.
Eack of us who are given the priceless gift of Life ought to have at least one glimmer in their spirit, one sparkle, regardless of circumstances. Life should be treated as a unique, new experience for the body and a holiday for the busy soul, it shouldn't always be taken so seriously. Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage and I believe we should all play the jester, or a child. But not a sensible one.
Every day I hear people whining about this or that, smoking their fingers to the bone as they cry, but all they achieve through airing their grievances is slight satisfaction, which is ultimately as futile as the empty heart I spoke of.
I am of course aware of atrocities which have taken place throughout history (and still do), and I can never begin to comprehend the suffering of victims. But for the ones who have been spared the real pangs of misery, to me they sit like the dull weather and I muse upon their perceived frictions in life with some hilarity. Comparing the complaints to kitchen utensils, toolboxes, sugar bowls and other inanimate things.
Consider a pair of shoes for example. Every day they get worn out, drowned in puddles, walked in dog shit and eventually get scuffed through time only to be discarded with the eye holes firmly shut.
That is similar, if not exact as the situations we face in Life, which is why I urge people to take a firm grip and walk in those shoes on the broad horizon of Life and make the heart a shrine to circuses and clowns and not shuffle around in chain gangs forged from self pity.
The years are short enough in this world without shrinking them further to curdle them in petty sighs.
Life is a chance from God to seize whatever amount of pleasure we can get before our souls are returned to the hectic realm of mysteries and hauntings. Returned to sender. I do not know of any other gift afforded to such an amount of people (religious or not)than the beautiful chance to Live a Life.
Life is the biggest of all jackpots and if some people wish to spend the windfall frantically pacing about with worry on their shoulders it is their choice. But I intend to smile through pain, sheltering under the shadow of the jesters attitude and laughing all the way into the Afterlife.

Call Of The Detenators

Its comforting to know that weeds believe themselves to be flowers yet flowers are content to think themselves weeds. It strikes a wonderful balance to an otherwise shambles. If it wasn't for this fact there would be too many toxic peacocks, and much too many deaths.
As a modest man with varied interests I find it doesn't do to push opinions down others' throats. Fine to hold an opinion of course, but taking it by the scruff of the neck and parading it for the masses reeks of terrible manners.
Look at the rabid religious and divine alcohol abstainers if examples are needed. These holy cows think their perches to be a Godly marble and shower us with sober, self righteous hail thinking to educate. Do they really think the gin wolves care? If you have a message, don't kill the mood. Burn it or keep it to yourself because the majority of 'We The People' are thorns and everyone knows thorns are barren. However we do enjoy getting under your skin. *Winks*

On Screen Deity (Sober Avatar)

The internet can be proud of many things. Support sites for people plagued by troubles, adverts for places of work, dietry and health tips, research, in a few more years it may even fix you a drink after a hard day. But such a vast horizon inevitably has its pests and it isn't only the dangerous ones who do harm.
In fact one of the most irritating is the fantasist. The millionaire playboy, special forces trained, with the wit of Shaw and dashing good looks who sits in Simpson's Y fronts in front of the computer to prove a sense of humour lurks within his caffiene addled brain. Proof for himself that is for to these pathetic specimens there is only self.
Every chat room has them: the one who saved the world, the one who penned a classic, the one who drinks the most, the legend in a string vest. They crawl over the forums like leeches, desperate to be the best and wallow in some tinted glory. Eager to show other users how to be a superhero while dribbling saliva and sticking the letters on the keyboard with God only knows what.
In the real world they are timid, subversive, skinny characters with certificates in woodwork and sick notes from the doctor but in front of a 12" glowing screen they become Something Else. A supreme being, ruler of all (including Tigger the house cat and the garden with rusting barbecue).
Success comes easy to a nice looking avatar and there is no need for study or training in their chosen profession. A creative imagination is all that is required, however a nasty, insolent tongue is a bonus.
There used to be men in pubs telling anyone gullible enough who'd listen they were 'in the SAS but can't say too much.' These heroes of teatime have descended on the internet en masse. Posting ridiculous ideas or claiming to have been part of some legendary event.
The human mind has created truly stunning works of art, and made some awesome discoveries but no matter how great we can be, these poseurs and shameful liars hiding behind a glossy avatar will always remind us that we will always bleed. They are proof of a glaring weakness in our make up.

A Chit From Rehab

A funny place filled with smiling, paranoid faces. Every so often a nurse or waitress calls by with food but beneath the sugary greetings there is nothing. The round window in the door reminds you of a hatch in a prison cell, its glass freezing with every touch.

'I know that tea
will be the death of me
in this slab that keeps my mouth from alcohol.'

It is a confused place, this stately house which would never invite my crazy lover - the ginger lady. Sorrow walks on its clean, plush carpets, dragging its tail of misery to every level of despair. The desperate crew of '96 are here within the clutches of sobriety and on the doorstop of intoxication.
Everyone behind the diamond veil of the building has a tragic story etched into their swollen hearts.


'What sweet tears weep from inside!
Cravings rattle the bed
like a snake jigsaw,
doomed to shy away from glass lips.'

Each word spoken is filled with thorns to rip our strangled emotions from sore souls. It takes a mighty tattooed Jesus to carry this cross and my shoulders are much too tired for words.
The occasional sunbeam filters in, usually in the shape of pretty, tinsel coloured tablets which bind the mind and burned nerves to bliss. But these are mere splinters to an otherwise lead weighted shadow, and ultimately little comfort for comfort is a lost word in rehab.

'Quiet whispers to the sober moon
send buzzing stars into a jealous frenzy!
The beautiful cake eaten
candles blown like dry ribs.'

When I leave this holy hangover-free castle of wreckages, I want to remember this sparse time to feed the memories to the beast of beasts which will surely come hunting, looking for the door to my soul.
It is a tombstone life in here, the glowing life vein outside severed and we are constantly subjected to alcohol's spite.

'Over rivers of bourbon
where once we put our livers to sea,
we sail to a land of drought.
All madness here is drowned,
starved on sober air.
Are we finally free from insanity?'

This gothic house which has been a jail of mixed sensations for a month, now shrinks in the distance as I disappear into an unknown forest of oblivion. All the chants and mantras in the world cannot damp the toxic fires for the flames are fed with human spirit, the immortal foe.

Steven Francis, April 1996

From Blood To Dream (Dal Sangue Di Sognore)

Part One - The Blood Cats

Deep in a vision of uncontrolled nightmares came a wave of madness so fierce that I almost drowned in the sweat on my pillow.
Lying naked on my bed, my magic carpet, I sealed my eyes with gallons of cider. But not before opening the window to let the demons in.
Soon the singing from the radio was dulled, I was in a field full of market stalls and drunk people collecting stray, hungry cats.
It reminded me of a funfair; mud, cheap smells and greasy rides. I knew no soul and after I had gathered four cats soaked with oil an overgrown cottage caught my eye in the far corner of the field, and I went to it.
There was no door, I had to tip the cats and myself through a window which ripped my sides, bouncing the ribs.
The cats scattered in all directions, under beds, chairs, one even crawled under a corner shelf. As I peeled myself off the sticky floor I felt at home, I belonged in this rats nest. This eerie yet cosy cottage was my castle and me not being quite myself was its ghost.
Obeying the theme out I went again in a mad hunt for cats. Drug pushers tried selling me different states of mind but it was no use, I always declined. The one I have now is too unique to allow a foriegn buzz.
I found cats and kittens everywhere; some were stuck up to their stomachs in mud, a few were on hot bricks in fish & chip stalls, and the scruffy ones were smoking knackered joints behind the PET MICE FOR SALE wagon.
After rounding up eighteen cats and caging them in clouds I sat down to dinner of chips, peas and a book of Coleridge's letters. The racket of the funfair outside rolled on, a mixture of mud slaps and battered pop music.
It was a grand meal, chips a little thin and some of the poets words hard to swallow but it sat fine in my gut. When it was over I crawled under a bed to feed my feline herd, then went over to sit in a plush red armchair to try and escape. I felt peace here but if I stayed too long it might trigger insanity. And dreams move like fire over a dry page.
Suddenly a machine gun-like RAT TAT TAT from the window pulled me from the lullabies core, dashing escape. I walked to the window, faintly I could hear the sound of giggling girls in the darkness. Instead of opening the rusted latch the glass pane simply shattered as I got nearer.
Outside bathed in fairground lights stood three smiling young girls begging to be let in. They were clutching pebbles, ready to assault my window once more.
My first thought was to try and rouse myself quickly but before I could sober my head the girls were already clambering and clawing their way through the exploded glass.
They lead me to the kitchen and introduced themselves in turn. The first was called Thea Pierrepont, in her spare time she loved to sit on top of Christmas trees spreading goodwill and cancer. The second girl was Clynde who had teeth like a typewriter and razor blonde hair. Sable Mable was number three, she had four eyes and smashed bloody fingernails.
In a matter of minutes they had prepared another feast, a banquet of venison, goose, rabbit,fine wines and the best gin. I was told to eat and share my thoughts and fears with them. All eyes on me, I sat at the table, ready to pour vinegar into my wounds.
I sensed Thea Pierrepoint wanted to slice open my eyes and soak in the stories they contained, instead she sat crossed legged on the floor, probing.
The flame of a black candle in the center of the table warmed my cracking face. Me the prince lost for words! Clynde passed me a pint glass filled with wine to loosen my desert lips and I emptied it in one.
I was on the third bottle and fifth chicken leg before regaining any sense of sanity, and always the eyes drilled into me.
Sable Mable put her cobweb like hand on my arm as if for comfort. Madness coiled slumber. Were the demons in girls clothing going to cure me of my fears? Or were they going to alter my thoughts, twisting them into mutant, cruel ideas? Was I going to awake utterly mad, forever writhing inside a strait-jacket, brain fried asleep in my skull?
The food before me had began to rot. The girls getting restless.
A cat filled with cannabis smoke made faces in the window.
I told them about drowning, oxygen starved, kissing Death. An agony, a horrid way to exit. The girls nodded together as if agreeing and a baby unicorn drowned in my wine glass.
Another terror was clowns. Nothing sinister but I couldn't face being laughed at whatever the reason. And painted smiles are dishonest. Cowardly even. Parade emotion, however sad.
The same as the unicorn, a clown appeared in the cottage and was hung by the tubes in his heart.
Clynde told me I was safe from anxiety then offered me sex in return for the chain of skulls tattoo on my arm. I looked at the damp patch between her legs and declined. Sable Mable offered me the chance to have alcohol run in my veins forever without being poisoned. Temptation almost swayed me but no! I had to wake from this bizarre outing in my mind.
Thea Pierrepoint was different. She wanted me for destruction, killing for the pleasure of killing. She wanted entire species slaughtered; animals, plants even mankind. A sadistic orgy of razors and torn flesh.
I got up and managed to walk over to the broken window to see if the carnival of intoxicated cats had gone.
Thea and Clynde swapped evil stares with each other. Sable Mable covered her eyes with lipstick.
There was no funfair anymore. No stinking, twinking mud nor drugged cats but there was an atmosphere that could have filled a hundred asylums. I asked myself 'have I died in my sleep? Is this hell?'
Suddenly as if to answer my question, the girls crumbled like dried leaves, leaving a velvet pile of dust where they had sat.
The stones of the cottage fell around me in dreamstate, yet I was unharmed. Where the mud had been was now a mist which smelt of burnt flesh and every light that had crazed the funfair flew and smashed in the air.
Finally I got the feeling that I might be awake but alas chains and shackles arrived next. A terrible world of madmen and mouth restraints.

From Blood To Dream

I was taken shuffling with steel on my wrists and ankles to a large, vile concrete world filled with lunatics, who for breakfast fed on excreta and sucked on the dribbling erections of fellow inmates.
My cell was to be shared with a misfit named Leaf Gritt, who licked the walls with ideas of escape and spoke sexually about his long dead aunt. His crotch was rubbed a lot. Hell had no other world.
We were locked up twenty three hours a day, but the exercise period offered little relief.
Once I actually witnessed a hulk of a man put rotten meat on his tongue and let a fat python crawl into his mouth and disappear into his intestines. In this doorway to death it was considered normal sport.
Back in the cell Leaf tried biting into his bony wrists, a feeble attempt at suicide because the governor had aleady removed his teeth after a previous manic spell.
I sobbed, my tears turning into laughing wolves on the tiled floor. Even my sorrow turning on me.
In the sixth flick of sleep the governor summoned me. My cell mate cried for me and got his eyeballs sucked out. With arms bound in barbed wire, and vine and thorns twisted from ankles to neck, I stood of a oak table, stinking with lust.
Not wanting to see the beast behind the desk, I slowly lifted my eyes, trying to steel them against suction. It must have been a trick of the dream for the being which sat before me looked normal. I relaxed a little, enough for the thorny chain which bound me to slit a smiling wound into the skin.
The governor stood and paced the chamber for a time as if considering cruel intentions. I felt like Christ, he was my Pilate.
Then when he finally spoke something did unnerve me. I noticed that each time he said the word PAIN, or mentioned anything PAINFUL, his eyes would change from a beautiful blue to a glowing, sickening yellow. My flesh froze.
He ordered two guards, hideously deformed like a spider and fly in one, to take me to a chapel of rest. I could smell the dead as I was dragged along a corridor.
The chapel itself was tiny, grim and filled with bones. Tufts of muscle and sinew still clung to some, fear heaved in my chest.
The Spiderfly dressed me in a purple shroud, the open casket I was placed in had torn satin walls. And as I lay the governor entered the room.
He had changed his appearance now. A twisted, disabled dove of peace. Never to know why but I smiled a little.
The chains fell in the casket but movement was still impossible. A statue prepared for Death in a gift box.
Still I felt cleansed, as if a cherub had washed me in port the frightened child I had been in the cell had vanished. When one dies then to reach Heaven one must first taste hell. The governor gave me a look of comfort.
A crucifix of outstanding gold that gave no doubt of there being a God was heated until it turned white and placed on my chest. I was in a state of bliss, in a natural high. I turned on a cotton cloud, no longer in the hellish dungeon but in a cradle. I demanded another dreamscape.

Grilled Cheese & Cider (More Blood, Deeper Dream)

Part II - Vulgar Dawn

Cheese stirs dreams. It is the LCD of the sleeping brain, good and bad. Cheese on toast was the particulatr culprit for my visions. Lots of it washed down with crisp cider.
The nightmare I experienced in my previous rest had gone, there was no trace of it like it had never been. Who was Thea Pierrepoint? Or Leaf Gritt? I had no clue.
The surreal movie that I watched behind heavy eyelids on this second occasion was different, somehow reminding me of black and white films. I spread my legs in bed and suddenly I was in a room filled with bearded men with bulging eyes, the pupils floating like dewy tadpoles.
They were friendly enough characters who offered me one of the largest measures of brandy I had ever clamped my talons on. I drank it eagerly then looked around the room again, hoping not to see any demons, gobblins or anything not familiar in the real world.
Not a thing, although the posters and pictures on the walls were disturbing. Every one depicted a heart in different designs; broken hearts, crushed hearts, hearts gripped in steel fists, shredded hearts and most bizarre of all a heart being pulled from a Jack-in-the-box by a rabid looking dog.
The smoke in the room was sickly, they might have been smoking limbs. I wanted none of it. It was not drug smell, it had the aroma of dried fungus but the music was familiar. I'd heard it before during a drunken stupour in the Little Club tavern.
A man whose beard was on fire handed me another brandy. I refused this time, I needed fresh air so slid over to a window. Taking a lungfull of air, I noticed the view was a lush, green forest. A dragon sailed past, its wing almost decapitating me. Strange, the view from another window was under ocean waves with dolphins and submarines in bad moods.
I decided to go upstairs and look through the top window. A man whose sober face had escaped him lay half dead on the stair. Dead to the world or the world was dead to him.
Hearing lusty sounds of love making in the first bedroom I skipped to the next one. Bearded ghouls in the throes of passion are a miserable sight.
The door opened revealing a carpet covered deep with cigarette ends and broken glass. A rat spewed in a corner, as I crossed the floor of empty debauchery to reach the window.
The scene outside was of two drunkards arguing through spittle and whiskers. Nothing else, not even a street or floor as if they were rowing in mid air. The love making in the other room stopped, I thought of going to it but when the voices inside started to aruge like the two drunks I decided to keep it shut. The room was not meant to be opened so I went to the bathroom window.
The door handle was soft as butter and as I turned it the brass melted, and there was shouting downstairs.
On pushing open the door I felt as though Id rolled over in bed, not a simple turning over it was a complete roll like I had somersaulted and kicked my wife out of bed. Hearing no yelp the dream steamed on. Cheese and cider playing with my mind.
The mad bathroom yelled at me, there was no stained glass so with rot in my stomach I peered outside. Instead of hells chapter of beasts and ripped souls in front of me were the long dead; Sid Vicious playing croquet with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on a freshly cut lawn, Jimi Hendrix had married Jane Austin and was being brought slippers and Albert Einstein had taken up skateboarding, street jamming with DaVinci.
I must have laughed in my slumber for I recieved a sharp nudge from my beloved after which I awoke breifly, a glass half full of cider on the bedside table winked. With a fermenting heart I drank hoping to travel back to the house of beards and landscapes.
Passing through a dream of sobbing one armed bandits, crying smiling coins I reached my crooked destination and went running to the bathroom again to see the dead artists and passing the forbidden lovers room who had evidently made up as grunts came from behind their peeling door.
There was no butter door handle, this time it felt like cold iron. As I tried turning it another rat was sick in the narrow corridor and laughed at his emptied innards.
The vathroom looked different, I knew as I walked to the window that my dead heroes were gone forever, a heart sank in a steel locket. Gripping the razor bladed frame I closed my eyes, took a breath of musty air then opened them again.
Christmas and birthday cards lay strewn across the croquet lawn, a tear mingled with sweat and I felt pain and happiness in one swift pang.
Hearing a noise behind me I turned to see one of the beardies holding hands with one of the spewing rats, behind my eyes I felt a terrible electric shock.
I was alone, afraid in a dream I had readily flung myself into. Was it possible to commit mental suicide?
Beardy offered me a drink, I refused telling him I needed to get through the window of dead idols. What happened next, even as I write my hands tremble and my mind cries.
The rat which had seemed friends with the man grabbed his tail and scrabbled to a hole in the wall and as soon as it disappeared into its stony portals the hole closed like a stubborn mouth swalling vomit.
Alone now with the whiskery giant, skin crawling, mouth dry. Then, slowly at first, the long beard that had grown past his waistline began to shrink until he was nearly clean shaven.
It had probably taken him a decade to grow his badgers nest and now it shook me, it was my fault it was gone! Screams came from downstairs, sounding like hell again but my eyes were transfixed on the newly shorn man.
'Ten years to grow', rattled my brain, and with this thought he whimpered. This giant fist of muscle actually whimpered!
'Ten years of messy growth,' again whispered my head, taunting him now but no whimper followed. Instead the quivering lips curled to bare sewer green fangs. Laser eyes bore into me, shaking me to my roots.
I must have tossed in bed because in that instant I heard more howling from below and threw myself through the window of hero spirits.
The pile of Christmas and birthday cards cushioned my short fall but I soon doubted the wisdom of my stunt. Had I killed myself in dreamstate? Was my beloved wife sleeping nex to my cold body wearing a worried expression on my face?
Bad trip, it must have been mouldy cheese. Or could it be that maggots had poisoned the apples the cider had come from?
I picked up one of the cards piled around me and opened it. 'To Grim Chops, Happy Birthday!' Scrawled in chalk. I picked up a Christmas card depicting a black bearded Santa Claus being pulled by his intestines by rabid, frothing bulls who had ripped his bloated belly open.
I had no will to open it but there was no need, I already knew what it said by stroking the braille like cover. 'Merry Mourning Ghoul Boy, Love Grandfather!' In the real world he was long dead but the dead walk freely in dreams.

(I was awaking.)

Only when the heart stops Loving do pyjamas make way for shrouds. Had I been walking with Death? Had the bed's headboard briefly been a tombstone happily declaring R.I.P?
I looked for my legs amongst the generations of greeting cards around me and got up. The window through which I had jumped was gone, and my sight was fading.

(The cold dawn skipped on my chest.)

It felt like I had been lost in the middle of a Christmas tree with darkness on the inside whilst outside was lit by twinkling lights and merriment.

(I was awake.)

The Struggle To Maintain Ambition In A Dead Town

I am much vexed by this town of miscreants! This town which shuffles on its way, a village of hedgehogs!
Why nobody has taken up the sword and cut loose I will never know. The people here are buried before their deaths and little do they realise.
I wonder at the fish, who with each tide return to lap at the dirty hem.
Had I the freedom of the ocean I would 'ave skidooed from 'ere. But time will come, I shall sail from the port on words, and wipe the putrid cemetery mud from my boots forever.
It takes a narrow minded simpleton to live in this crooked place of gossip and church. Cowboys and lunatics the lot of 'em! They would'nt know culture if it paid their wages.
What good are people if their only pleasure is a debauched weekend?
I cannot even speak in this wretchedness. It used to be a beautiful village full of promise, until I woke up and realised with a crushed hope that I was looking at it through bottle smashed eyes.
Now I am free of that curse I can see what surrounds me. Out of the screaming frying pan, into a hopless fire.
What are the ambitions of zombies? What of their dreams? I can imagine the answers falling miserably into something like this. 'Well, those sicks numbas comin' up on Saterday wud be nice!'
And what they do with their million pound handshake? 'Erm...new howse 'an car, holadays for the missus.'
It would be like giving a homocidal maniac a bowie knife then wondering what he'd do with it.
On occasion I find it difficult to express my feelings for this town.
The air is clean and some nooks and crannies are pleasing to the eye, but everything else is funeral black. Certainly no vaudeville springs from the heart.
A few poems have been penned, but my childhood in the town was my inspiration there. It exists no more.
Now it has become solemn; a drab clawfish of a place, filled with alleyways and secret routes which I must escape or go mad.
The scenery is not blame here anyway.
Ambtion! Ambition! Ambition! (Of course it is spelt AMBISHUN here). Work, shopping and pubs. A chained life.
I must confess my bones cry for more than that. I feel that having been dead for quarter of a century, now is the time to LIVE, if live I must. Now it is time to reach out and take!
The whisper of this blasted community has slipped forever from my lips. I will not feed the hell fires. Burn the buildings and hang the idle from their penniless tongues! It deserves no recognition from me. I would not carry its colours on my pennon in battle.
Twice the cursed pit has tried to bring me to my knees. But I shall struggle onward and carve my name away from the haunting wind. Ambition is the key here.
Ambishun!
Ambishun!
Ambishun!

22 July 1997 During a foul mood.

Soul Gaol/The Other Side

ALONE is the most dreaded word in the dictionary to me. It is empty, cold, devoid of flower or song. Cruel without joy.
Sharp to touch, it cuts through flabby muscle to the bone, and buries misery beneath the skin. When one has been visited by the beast of lonliness (for it is truly a beast of torment), they will be familiar with its lingering odour and bitter taste which chews to the spirits core.
Of course everyone wants to be ALONE sometimes, whether it be from family or friends, the word becomes COMFORT in this instance. A chance to gather thoughts and think sweet nothings, (or imagine morbid circuses depending on your persuasion). Alone time with voices in the background is refreshing but when a person is utterly ALONE, with nobody but whispers and reflection, it becomes terrible. Months grow tiresome, years go blind and hopless.
When you shout foul lullabies into darkness and hear replies echoing in their own tongue, it fills the heart with desperate tragedy. To be ALONE is the curse of the sad, being sad the curse of the lonely.
When one has nowhere to go but the grave, and no hand to shake save their own, the world becomes like a skull without skin or life. It is a tedious affair having a heart that beats for nothing, Being ALONE in the upstairs downstairs monotony of the home, no matter how splendid the house or pleasant its surroundings, the house becomes prison. The most wretched prison of all.
Wretched because everything is disguised with comforts and one may come and go as they wish, it holds nothing of the body. One may even tear it down, brick by terrible brick but would accomplish nothing. An empty home is a place of a thousand sufferings, holding the music of the soul in chains. Every single note is lashed to despair.
With each new dawn the heart prepares itself for fresh woe. If it skips, it skips by accident or murmur.
Were cherubims to play the music of a lonely spirit on their willow harps, the notes would fall dead and stain the Heavens with a sombre black.
The rules of the soul gaol are simple and few.
One is permitted entertainment but not appreciation. Good food and splendid gin but no taste. Breath is allowed but Life is not. One may go wherever one chooses but must (and will, for it is this reason the prison is disguised as home) always return.
A person who is truly ALONE may have everything, and still have nothing at all. It is the simpelest of all curses, to be born with a wooden spirit which burns solitude throughout Life.
Perhaps the most painful sting to a lonely soul is the fact that it will never learn the of crime which has forced it to exist in a sterile box, away from the laughter of the crowd. Was it a fallen angel? Had it wronged a God in a previous Life?
Entire days are spent scrabbling in the mind, searching for an answer, a piece of comfort. But the solution is hidden behind happiness on a shelf just out of reach.
ALONE. If it were a drug it would be feared more than heroin or cocaine, its effects devastating. It is little wonder when one reads of maniacs running amok amongst innocents, shrieking like banshees. Society contributes to their plight by ousting them from its fickle mob
It is of no use telling a misfit to reach out and find friendship because their mind is already numbed. They can play the jokers card and cultivate counterfeit relationships but when those are torn asunder the wounds bleed forever.
The sentence is Life, and what a foul life it is until death arrives like a golden shrouded saviour. Nobody can make a soul. It needs the hand of God.