the night before the night before the night

"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change... Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."  

- william s. burroughs

"An Experimental Approach to Understanding Burnt Fish Bone".

It was the ballad of the burnt fish bone, an obtuse riddle at best, which took Pablo Dillinger and Jody the Hat over the edge and out to the island.

     The hull of their boat was painted red on the outside.
     Crudely carved out of soot blackened planks saved from the church fire. Pegged together without finesse.
     If the paint was an afterthought then so was the sail, strung rather than rigged through sad masts, the pair of them hunched under it at the oars like two crows in a half destroyed nest. Frantically rowing in spite of a robust wind.
     The Hat peered out across the water and spat into the palm of one hand, the oar falling back in its pivot.
     Pablo Dillinger let out a curse.
     Tortured more by the waves lapping up between exposed channels running the length of the boat than outraged by his comrade.
     Terrified lest they go under.
     To perish there among the crabs and anemone sewn across the dark seabed.

siblingshot on the bleachers

'cause sometimes half-assed

is better than nothin' at all...

new year's spoiler | 2nd coming, or the return of a spectacular non-event

the chimney ruse is just a con

While there may be scant few who remember, and less still who give a f@ck, it does not escape me entirely that nearly a decade has rushed by since I broke my promise to defile the bleachers with a bespoke reading or two.
     Well. The ego has shrivelled, the eagle never did land, but the idea which first began percolating down through the topsoil all those years ago to where exhibitionism lies buried continues to fester like human papilloma virus nursing a grudge deep below the skin.
     The monkey may be rusty, his performance wavering, but feed it a couple of tabs of Viagra and the organ still grinds.
     And so. This year coming, plans are afoot to resolve the unconscionable and break out the mic. The logistics remain hazy. The physics untested. But rest assured, the programme is scheduled. There will be a gnashing of teeth. Amen.

spek weh

"weh put the wee in weegie."

"thrill to the glottal stop!"

festive fun on the bleachers!

hey siblings!

fancy a little festive fun on and off the bleachers ?

Simply print off as many labels here on the bleachers as ink allows and cut them to size. Watch those fingers, now... Then, using one of mom's discarded needles - clean zone this season ? A visit to grandpa's may be required - carefully prick
a small hole in the centre of each circle and string together. Voila! Your very own XXX-mas decoration! Go on! Fill your friends with envy!! Happy holidays!!!

66° 32' 35" north in keds

one of these days i'm 

gonna get organized

a christmas carol

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” - charles bukowski

I squeezed the trigger and watched the fat cunt take two slugs squarely in the face. All because I did not want to get too close. His card was already marked. Terror. Not so much a stone as a sack of delinquent imps writhing about his throat. Wretched. Jockeying.
     Contagious as an curse.
     The first round, more fortuitously than by design, struck him between the eyes.
    The second hit him just above his right cheekbone, depositing on the wall behind him an inverted triangle of scalp the approximate shape of Barbados.
      It was the closest the cunt had come to a holiday since 1992.
      I felt all warm inside just like Santa Claus.

and the privileged will eat themselves

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside... remembering all the times you've felt that way.” - c. bukowski

Rain threatened. An ugly purple glowering. I was listening again to some Charles - Bukowski not Ray - while my ex-wife dressed the truculent seven-year-old between coffees. '90 Minutes in Hell', via Nothin' in Sacramento. 
     Three short damaged pieces. I did not get so far as 'May Make Paris Yet' before the doorbell chimed.
     The visitors are slick customers. Bearers of gifts. Their sleight of hand when trick or treating is easier overlooked.
     Things are seldom what they seem.
     The outcome is often a far cry from small change cultivated.

     "...red on the outside with blackened channels, charred tansgressions touching 1mm at the bone."

     Swine flu in the mouths of fish.
     The hand-written note on the back of a folded playing card unsettled me. 
     It conjured for me notions of plague. Bubonic transmissions. That "1 mm", though, seemed altogether too modern. Anatomically precise. 
     The metric overture to an excision. 
     Last night I had a dream. The Chinese had invaded. Or maybe the incursion came from dead space. Pregnant realms deep under. Whatever. 
     Twenty-three to thirty of us were detained by day in a 're-education centre'. Permitted home under cover of darkness to complete an assignment. The Chinese were coolly efficient. Suave and clinical in their Jimmy Chu suits. Papier mâché Mao Tse-Tung masks.
     I had a crush on a female translator with obsidian eyes and a bull horn.
     She promised excellent head without once delivering on it. 
     I did not complete my homework. The deadline came and went. I stepped over tables where the privileged dined. Plunged down winding lanes.
     I walked hand in hand with the visitors.
     Slept fitfully on corners. 
     The very next morning I was outnumbered by a gathering of Caucasians slyly unveiling beautifully executed Cartouches celebrating occupation.
     They disembarked from a gaily painted bus.
     Jewelled porpoises rode the wings through an ocean of supernovae.
     Sperm whales the size of trawlers devoured entire galaxies like so much plankton.
     "You, who have done, have done well."
     The charming young woman behind the bull horn beamed.
     I fled for the bus stop with my bottle of Peptic Liquid wrapped in a paper sack. 
     Aniseed. The Peptic Liquid, not the sack. There is a world of difference between heartburn and underlying condition. When I was a young man, I suffered from heartburn a good deal of the time. 
     A little Milk of Magnesia always worked wonders. 
     I sat down to the desktop monitor as soon as I'd made coffee. Punched open a tab. Googled the line as I remembered it. 
     The computer is growing too sluggish to be smartly useful, the beach ball spins and idles. Like its operator, it may require therapy. Psychiatric intervention.
     The search yielded more than one result.

     "illustrate the taphonomic complexity involved in the formation of burnt fish .... transgression, supra-tidal berm building, ... fragments smaller than 1 mm in size. ..."

     "DNA from burnt bone in the early stages of burial. Nicholls. (2000) also considered bone mass as a ...... in the site at all levels, particularly in the 1 mm fraction'. ...... transgression (c.6000 BP). Thus, the archaeological record ..."

     "An Experimental Approach to Understanding Burnt Fish Bone". 
     Well. I am no chef. I might occasionally dabble with sauces on the side, but my skills with a griddle are strictly third rate. Tuna. A breaded haddock clumsily tossed.
     I don't remember consulting any recipe. Folded between Mesozoic deposits.
     King Charles' 90 minutes - 12-14 of them, at least - has again given me pause for thought. The finances are not good. I am working up contingencies. Drumming up a sweat.
     The poetry waits on its implementing.
     The telephone rang.
     "Hello ? " a passive aggressive voice intoned. A woman's voice. Crisp. Smouldering. Shot through like a neon frog charred with cigarette burns. "We have your son here at the office. He does not look too good."
     "Well, " I said. "That's a matter of opinion."
     "No. No. He does not look good. Period. You will have to collect him."
      The older boy. His condition, apparently, critical.
      The irony, of course, is that Kerouac - up on bricks - was more often off, than on the road. Visions of Neal. Cody. The train hurtling past his bedroom window as he sat at a desk and fed white paper in and out.
     It was the rhythm which appealed to me, I think. The music of it. Before Eliot. Plath. Camus. Joyce. Stone. Trocchi. Ezra pounding.
     An unabashed exuberance. Sharp creases duly crumpling. Exploding into fragments.
     "Listen," I said. "You'll have to wait. I have bigger fish to fry."
     Well. You are familiar enough with dipping those little squares of paper. The litmus test. Coming up red. Indigo. Occasionally a neutral yellow green. 
     The rainbow in a bruise.
     It's all the forensics I know. 
     Maybe a Pablo could make sense of it all.
     And my older son ? Thank you for asking, he's doing quite well. A lukewarm glass of milk was all it took. 
     A pavement cafe.
     A couple of weeks in Portugal.

R.I.P.

Family Visits

I.II.III.IV.V.VI.VII

"I'll tell you what i generally do
- and this is kinda crazy -
well, we go round and visit a lot;
we go to people's houses..."

do what thou wilt.

illustration by ib.

pinball

He walked down the street and took a bus to the airport.
     No box of lights.
     The sun through the slatted fence blinked at him like a strobe. It made him sick to the pit of his stomach.
     The road once he got on it was uneventful.
     There was nothing to save him painted on the bricks sliding past.
     He got there and did not think to check in. He held no passport anyway.
     He went straight to the cafeteria.
     Watched the planes roll in only to take off again two or three cups of coffee later. No broken wings or supports in splints.
      It cost him twenty pence just to urinate against a wall.
      He got the bus home and disembarked with a sixty a day habit.

twin decastich for hauf blind fucks on a glesga sofa

fat cunt

The fat cunt upstairs is limping again

through the early hours

a three-legged elephant locked in a trunk

psalms from Postman Pat

recited at the top of scorched lungs

he would go over the balcony as at the Somme

so entrenched is he in his night of the soul

and his doctor has spared him antidepressants

a sick note rubber stamped

on the flat screen rattling like an MG 08

butcher’s girl

I am hankering after your calves

a butcher hamstrung at the foot of his larder

the indecent swell above the ankle of one laced boot

those dimples sleeping behind each knee

I am smitten by the timing of your tide

that erratic flow inside the seam of your tights

girl’s shorts

I am gladly bludgeoned

a servant to your footsteps on the stair

a harvester of unspoiled fats, meat, marrow

well well well

A torrent. A cloud burst. 
Cats. Dogs. Now and then, spit. 

An oily smear across the t.
A single droplet dotting the i.
 
The passage of water eats words
the stutter of consonants
a paragraph that can not swim
 
A voiding of the vowels.

diplomant 2.0

"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

All flight paths to perdition converged on P'Yongyang. A ridiculous haircut.
     He sat snuffling Cointreau like a spoiled little bitch. All that was missing was mink, a shard of ice off the shoulder.
     He sat trailing a long shadow.
     It spilled off the stool and onto the floor. Climbed up the washing machine and ate into exposed brick.
     An inky aspidistra itching to shed leaves.
     The decor was frigid. Magnolia. Baked tile. A tea-towel hanging next to the porthole window. A map of San Francisco in the shape of a heart. Pier 39; Fisherman's Warf. Bleeding out toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
     Alcatraz.
     It was a night for arseholes.
     Buses in the rain.
     He got down off the stool and threw open the door. Fell twice, while cueing up George Jones.
     The cigarette glow mashed across his face.
     Aside from ghosts, he spent Halloween happy hours holed up alone. His left elbow practically in the kitchen sink. Flirting with anxieties.
     He could not wait to buy himself a dog. A Shih Tzu maybe. Teach it to squat in a sandbox in the corner like an infant spilling out its pants.
     The right hand a paddle as eager to chastise as reward.
     Like a bitten ring left in the ashtray, the tail of a dress shirt caught in the closet, he gave himself away. From here, under the ceiling light, he could glance back between the years to count close friends lost.
     He missed each more than he missed his mother, his wife, that was the still pulseless heart of it.
     His legacy was a tumour ducking into a taxi like an engraved folding blade.

shoot

"you cannot shake hands with a clenched fist." - Indira Ghandi

Me and my dick have seen better times.
     I say this, in part, to rattle an acquaintance so anal grammatical treatises are practically dropping out of her arse.
     In the main, I mention it as a nod to fumbled moments better spent.
     That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, some say. That which doesn't quite snuff out the candle has a propensity to simply maim instead. My pissy old dick is not so much a monument as an embarrassment: wrung out; battered; a stub of rubber cod after years of legally prescribed chemical abuse. The head all scarred and listing like a middle-aged spastic trailing a shopping cart full of kelp home after dark.
     A target for sticks of two by four. Crumbling bricks.
     Well. I refuse to tie it up in latex as a gift. Leaking pearls before swine.
     It limps on as we all do. Tiny wind-up soldiers marching in circles. Straight off the kitchen table and onto the linoleum.
     A runaway jihadi hoodwinked into modelling a suicide vest.
     We are all of us, at the end of the day, survivors of sorts.
     Rewind the tape. Spit it out. The morning anti-psychotic. The gastro-resistant gelatin capsules.
     Doctor Feelgood is in rehab and unable to answer the phone.
     My tumescent appetite trembles on the wire.

pollen

"...don't bite the hand that feeds you, it's said. I'll chew the f@cking digits off the first paw that rattles my cage." - ib

Outside in the quadrangles bees hustle atop the daisies.
     Jockey and drone. Inch and fart.
     Strung out. Buzzing.
     Pursuing the amber dust which underpins their shantytown.
     I sit nursing the hole in my tooth while the half shogun slam poet from Negril lays down his Mocha. Chases a crumb from the dreadlocks fizzing onto his lapel.
     His giggle tumbles out the nostril like a finely tuned summer sneeze.
     "Half past four is good," he trills.
     A master at racket ball, he squashes the opposition with a well timed glance to the midriff. He prides himself on his athletic bent.
      Less so, that priapic pilfering waist deep in the bowels of the lower third.
      It's a long way down from the twenty-second floor.
      The smile recedes abruptly and his eyes narrow as if surprised to find me there at all.
      He offers me a finger of shortbread.
      Berates the stricken of heart apropos of nothing and glances at his watch.
      "Hmph," he huffs.
      I look to the spaces lurking between bookshelves. Newspaper clippings. Marley's martyr. Despite ghosts past he is astonishingly far from advanced in years.
      The skin peeking out from under crumpled linen a youthful laundered suit.
      Up here in the ivory nest where the bumbling hover the reception is peculiarly rarefied.
      I vow to flee before he smashes my ball down centre court. But not before I deliver up a map. Surrender it entirely. His head is still dizzy with hurricanes. That perfume etched in the seam of Irene's raw silk knickers.
      Some fool's nectar.
      It's why I read so little, these days. The fear of synchrony.
      Religious intolerance.
      Road rage. 
      Pygmy villagers brandishing torches to light the failing thread from one paragraph to the next.
      "Ah well," he concludes. "I can't promise anything, but let me wish you all the best."
      He reaches across the desk to clasp my hand.
      The old magick.
      Invitations. Ropes which maim and cripple.
      Burn.
      And, lodged in the corner of his eye like an aristocrat in exile, something which resembles disdain.

eat poop

Eat poop! the mimeograph chants. Each letter rippling on the t-shirt's bib where he drops down in his armchair.
     A sackful of rubble upended from the rafters.
     The years, as they are wont to chime, have not been kind.
     Springs eaten at by various body fluids protest and expire. Explode. Cockles and whelks sewn beneath the waterline disintegrating in clouds where fishwives dance in lead clogs.
     Pablo Dillinger, errant choirboy, sibling to that medieval guild, is never hasty. Too rotund by far, a portly disciple, he is slow to respond to flattery or jibe. "Later" is his mantra. A Vedic hymn fallen on deaf ears mostly.
     A sullen mediator. A sulky correspondent.
     A Prussian brat.
     News comes to him that some words or other have been published in Sacramento, of all places. News falls unheralded out a trove shipped across the seas, greedily received, plugged through all the same by this dreadful pause he is powerless to commute.
     Red and black. Well, more of an orange. Dusted with ochre.
     It reminds him of the thirties.
     Bertolt deconstructed in the wings.
     Bottle caps studding the stage where the have fallen on the comet tail of Kristallnacht.
     Skulls.
     Even as the first air strikes detonate benignly, the scaffolding has come down. Labourers have fled. Joiners, painters. Bakers of bread.
     Pablo carefully unfolds a yellow slip. Until it occupies the space served up on a napkin.
     8½ x 14, halved.
     No staples. 
     He hoovers up the ballpoint.
     The brotherhood has been busy.
     Fuck, yeah.
     It tickles him immensely to learn that the word is right now in the process of being dispersed, undiluted, to see his initials in print, to think of entire paragraphs dribbling into corner culvert incontinent, or spirited away half torn under the windshield wiper of a runaway blue and silver civic bus.
     Fuck the Ministry.
     The primary content is thus. A 9mm parabellum handgun, fully oiled and loaded, manufactured in 1969, parcelled in a tricolour of vests. A panther on a leash.
     If we are not yet despondent we are disconsolate, nonetheless.
     No fleas on Ahab. 
     He already has paid six years in advance while on remand waiting.