#youknowwhatsannoying

People On Facebook Who's Name Be Like "PrettyFaceAssNevaTrippingOffNoNiggaJohnson" N They Be Ugly As Shit

people who put a Z instead of an S on everything

texing a long ass message and the person replies with one word -_- like wtf?

when ppl cant handle their alch like shut the fuck up and get out of my face

getting on twitter seeing females tweet shxt they dont even DO their DANG self

how some loser think they can fight better after they get some new tattoos #YoureSTILLaBITCH

late may 2011

the brief spasm:
a good portion of clear jelly glistens
painlessly from the anus.

yeah,
the stomach rebels, protesting
the seven hours sleep in seventy-two, the
caffeine in pills
and powdered coffee and the
three flights and the
bad dinners in bad hotel dining rooms and the
days of good behaviour and the
shocking divorce
(if truly meant?)
from every
van driver and
painter-decorator
I've never known.

after the rain

business trip

 

 

no women

So I'm here in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, getting towards the end of the stuff I came out here to do for my job. After two days of back on forth on points of detail, the dust is settling. Settling everywhere. On every surface: every window pane, every inscrutable shouty shop fascia, every horn-honked ripoff taxi; and in every fold of my fried brain.

So I'm sitting in the the lounge part of my dusty little hotel suite, on a turqoise sofa and in font of a burnt orange wall. My torso is warm and my feet, crossed before me on the bright brown table, are cold in the down-draft of the noisy air conditioning unit. It's about 40C outside, I think. My winter weight suit is resting on the back of a chair.

So much of what we've glimpsed out here is entirely alien, and it may be that there's a longer piece to be written about all of that when time allows and when the muse strikes. In the meantime, one feeling wants to get out and make itself known. It's the very peculiar feeling I got when seeing a woman, wrapped from head to ankle in black at lunchtime. Her face was not covered, but her sunglasses were big black ovals hiding her self somewhat from the watching world. Her feet were dainty in jewelled sandals and she stood on the step of a shop opposite the restaurant where we were sitting down to a Lebanese meal. A realisation struck. She was the only woman I'd seen properly since emerging from the airport terminal on Monday morning. Other than this lady, I had only fleetingly glimpsed scuttling black figures in the far distance and several stories below me when I was by the grimy picture window of the hotel dining room last night.

Every hotel desk clerk: male.

Everybody who has served me food: male.

The staff cleaning the hotel rooms: male.
Every driver and every passenger of every moving vehicle: male.
Every single pedestrian on the teeming pavements of the busier streets: male.
Every shopkeeper seen looking out from his premises: male.

It's another world. Really. It's a strange feeling suddenly to see a woman, having not spotted one in a city of millions for many, many hours.

riyadh

this wide dry city's smeared
unlovely dust insinuating
the tight sinus and
the burnt stink of aircon
as this SUV
hornbumps
through lines
of speeding wrecks
running
on gasoline cheaper
than cola;

this faded hotel's bleakly
empty restaurant:
the 'chicken scallop':
a faint taste of spice, and
in the darkening below that
traffic surges
restlessly restlessly on, but
going where? there's
nowhere to
go,
is there?

yeah, it's there

yes, so that man scot young has been as good as his word. my short piece the end times radio network is, as promised yesterday, up on his DEUCE COUPE webzine, along with five other pieces. it's the last of the pomes listed for may 24th 2011, so make sure to do a little scrolling. on the plus side, you'll get to have a look at some other freshly minted writing along the way.

anyway, thanks muchly to scot for accepting my little offering.

get in the car

so there's this dude by the name of scot. that's right: scot. one 't' not two. scot. not scott. seems he's the brains behind two webzines where poesy gets collected: RUSTY TRUCK and DEUCE COUPE. 

there's an automotive theme here, right?

the TRUCK includes stuff by my two pome-pals, M.P. Powers and Misti Rainwater-Lites. the COUPE is minus Misti but Powers is there - and will be joined soon, it now seems, by your humble scribe my own good-damned self. scot let me know I should soon be seeing one of my bits up at the COUPE shortly. so look out for that. and check our both zines in the meantime to see which other nuggets might shine for you.

yeah.

back to the old school

In a work capacity, I spent about ten years rubbing shoulders with executives from the corporations whose efforts have combined to bring you the connected world in which you now live: mobile operators, broadband service providers, the incumbent wireline telecoms firms of many different countries, digital 'content' developers plus the vendors of all the underlying network infrastructure, billing systems, data clearing houses and so on.

It was with these guys in mind that I wrote the opening stanzas (Does my stuff have 'stanzas' in any meaningful sense? I don't know. Ask someone who knows about 'literature' or 'poetry'. I only read with a view to refreshing my personal schemata, not with the gimlet eye of the technically proficient critic.) of a bit of poesy I put up here some weeks ago.

In that poem you can read the kind of thing I heard on a regular basis at technology conferences: execs extolling the power of their firms' particular variants of the widgets needed to power the connectivity that has affected almost everything most of us do today.

Affected how?

Well, these are some anecdotes of my own:

It's 1988. I'm 'studying' for my A Levels in what was then referred to by its legacy name 'the tech', a further education college in one of this England's small cathedral cities. My girlfriend has a fascinating personality composed of elements including the following: sense of humour very much in sync with my own; good taste in music (from my point of view); healthy sexual appetite (i.e. wants to have sex quite often); a basic goodness/decency; extremely quick to anger; rarely interested in conceding the point that she may have contributed in any way to a misunderstanding. She and I become acquainted in the first place because we are in the same classes for history and English literature. The teacher (styled 'lecturer' because it's an FE college) of the latter arranges for our class to see a performance of Coriolanus (the class clown never stopped laughing at the fact that this name contains the shorter word 'anus'; he also sniggered EVERY time the name of the heroine of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was read out loud). We are free to make our own travel arrangements, so my girlfriend and I decide it will be much cooler not to travel with the rest of the class. So we arrange to meet on the morning of the appointed day. I stand waiting for her at one of the town's two railway stations for a really long time. She does not arrive. I rack my brains, thinking of whether something I might have said (or not said) or done (or not done) could have induced a fit of anger such that she has decided not to show up. Unable to think of anything this time, I am suddenly gripped by the fear that for the zillionth time we have had a misunderstanding about precisely where to meet. This turns out not to be a baseless fear. I hasten towards the town's bus station, which is nearby. About halfway there, I encounter my girlfriend and her boiling rage. All these years later, I have no idea who fucked up. Either way, one of us thought the plan was to meet at the bus station, the other thought the railway station was the place. It all turned out OK. We had plenty of time to get into London, mooch around a bit and rock up for the play.

This scenario simply couldn't happen today. Mobile phones have mitigated the risks of something like this down to zero, I would have thought.

Similarly, it's now possible to meet someone 'at' a football match - i.e. one can head towards the stadium in which a professional football team plays with a plan to meet friends or family members, having made prior arrangements no more specific than 'I'll text you when I get there'. In that latter utterance, the word 'there' really just means 'the general area around the ground.'

These are example of progress. Mini-miracles, transforming life for the better, even if only in relatively trivial ways. I could, drawing on all those meetings with the people behind the enabling technologies and corporations, flag up examples of far more significant ways in which people's lives have been improved by this communications and data revolution. I can't be bothered, though.

So, I like to be connected and I can even be minded to evangelise a bit about all that sometimes.

There is one form of connectivity, however, from which I have decided to remove myself forever: Facebook.

It seems I'm not alone.

This morning, I noticed that my Twitter account had a couple of new followers, neither of whom are automated spam androids endlessly spewing links to dubious articles about search engine optimisation. One of them seems to be quite an interesting person named Emily. She writes very well and is funny, I think. I have no idea how she knew of the existence of my Twitter account, or if she's followed the link from there to this blog. That's something I quite like about Twitter: chance encounters with completely unknown people who seem like they might be interesting or at least be interested in some of the same things or ideas as oneself. Little emotional investment is required. If the person turns out not to be as stimulating as initially appears to be the case, you can just forget about it. If they do: bonus.

Emily has written a nice piece on her own reasons for quitting Facebook. I found it amusing and everything she says makes sense to me.

I was very familiar with the notion of the person who shares far, far too much information in real time. My most notable example was my wife's stepsister. For several years, I knew: when she was craving an overcomplicated coffee-based drink from Starbucks; when her back ached and how badly; when she had tidied her flat and how long it had taken; when someone had been rude to her in the supermarket and the precise nature of the offence; when she was stuck in traffic; when and where she was going to have a tattoo either added to or removed from her densely illustrated body; etc. etc. et-fucking-cetera.

Emily's point about relatives knowing one's business struck a chord too. Thanks to Facebook, my US-based father-in-law thinks I'm a 'communist' because some of my status updates contained words of criticism about the government the people of this country have been saddled with since last year's election and because he saw pictures I'd taken on the big TUC anti-cuts march a couple of months ago.

Some of my other reasons for disentangling myself from the vile Mark Zuckerberg's strands of the web are a bit different:

• Uncomfortable blending of private and public personae: I am not really the same person when in work mode as I am when in non-work mode. I have learned (albeit more recently that I should have) that it's generally not a good idea to share my real views on politics, society, business, human beings and life in general with my colleagues. It seems a lot of my opinions are a bit non-mainstream and that some people can find some of them a bit unpalatable. It also turns out that this can affect some people's perception of my ability to discharge my professional responsibilities or of my ability to 'fit in'. Facebook blurs the professional/personal distinction that I've taken care to keep rather sharp. This is because of the propensity of current and former colleagues to 'add me on Facebook.' I've even had a case of a former client wanting to 'friend' me. Awkward.
• Seeing the 'real' you: In the case of my wife's stepsister, and, I'm guessing, with people in Emily's network, irritation springs from too much detail about the mundane. Another problem for me was around Facebook spoiling a generally positive impression of people I liked without knowing very well. Often it would be someone I'd worked with for just a few months some time in the past - someone who'd seemed personable, amusing, friendly and reasonable. Thanks to Facebook, people of this sort are transformed into individuals I decide I would probably dislike were I to spend more time with them: the guy who thinks it's alright to dress as a Nazi for a fancy dress party; people who think Boris Johnson is 'a legend'.

So, this is why I quit Facebook and why I'm enjoying writing here and Twittering gaily with no reference to my real name.

Is there a downside? Maybe. Facebook reconnected me with a lot of people I'd not seen since the end of the analogue age. I had some fun reliving my nightclubbing days with some of these people. It also made it a little easier to keep in touch with friends who live in other parts of the world. These benefits, however, were more than outweighed by the bad bits.

I went to buy jam on Sunday morning

on the speed of reading

No lit-crit here. Well, precious little. It's not my bag.

One rather facile observation, however, on the reading of books:

It's striking how much longer some take (me) to read than others. Case in point:

• The New Life by Orhan Pamuk: getting on for two months of pecking away at it on train rides in and out of London; often hastening the feeling of sleepiness at either end of the working day
• Liver by Will Self: two days of reading it only on train rides (admittedly including a couple of longer-than-usual ones) - 140 pages read, i.e. about 50% of the way through

I've skimmed a few reviews that suggest Pamuk's work is "complex and challenging" and demanding "continuous contemplation". So maybe that's it, and maybe it's not just me. Perhaps the fact that it's a Turkish work means that it isn't littered with easily identifiable points of reference (my experiences of visiting Turkey are pretty limited) and so it's hard work trying to visualise the scenes set. Self's book, in stark contrast, opens with a whole section/story set in and around a Soho that's instantly recognisable to me.

No big point being made here, much less any real conclusion being arrived at. Just a bit of idle musing on this sunny Saturday morning.

The Pamuk book and the job of slogging through it were what was alluded to in a bit of poesy I jotted down here a little while ago.

fame at last

oh joyous day kalloo kalay
that man Shawn Misener has only done gone
and put one of my fuckin POMES
up on his CLUTCHING AT STRAWS place:

here it is, in all its glory:
the information society

'ave it!!!!!!

NW1

somali matrons
ululate
at splashy late traffic
surging over burst water mains
and
little girls'
big legs
of nylon
under denim
conversely sturdily pad
their way
to the gig
these gritty breezing evenings
and make me feel
old
as urchins
want their ball back
and
purplehaired,
she emerges from number 30,
lights the marlboro light,
smokes and tosses it
out to this gumdotted
pavement where
late drones scatter home and
a beardy flat cap seethes in cider,
rolls his own
and coughs
on the bin-lined
front step
of number 31.

the world at my feet

a gutter dusted
with a million cigarettes,
a black plastic comb,
and one green glove
I've seen
every day
for weeks
in the dry brown litter
of long fallen blossom

a review of clogs

clogs weren't ever on my shopping list
I didn't consider worthy to spend my money on them because
of their rough design.

but never say never. why?
well, I am quote:
"for the fastmoving, no-nonense, GOAL-ORIENTED woman that
does not have time for aching feet"

this great company restyles this
old and comfy shoe and now it looks
more appealing.

also, I was persuaded by 
the DRI-LEX®  (the moisture-wicking lining),
it keeps dry even when I'm wearing them extensively.

of course, I don't dare
to get out of the house with them,
but I'm wearing them
every time
I go for a trip!!

because I am feeling really good with them

POSTED BY EKATERINA
on the
weirdly
worded
SHOES REVIEW written
by and for non-humans,
by 1,000,000 pixel-monkeys with iPads perhaps and
brought to your eyeballs by
the robot spider that crawls
to your tweetdeck
to follow you
follow you
follow
you

permissive routes

NO
cycling
ball games
rollerblading
skateboarding
barbecuing
cottaging
fucking
fun

except
on permissive routes

candy sticks

hammersmith and city line

#justsayin

I love places that serve breakfast all day and I think every restaurant should.

#thatainttheone if her stomach sticks out farther than her titts and ass...

Selena Gomez is just 17 days older than me ...LOLz

I'm just a fresh ass nigga flat-out

Females don't come around me with dead flat dolly shoes! If I girl don't have swagger, I aint interested

I really REALLY want to go out to Dinner soon with alll my pookies <3

high st.

lips and arseholes

I was Little John. He was Big John. Sometimes. He was also called Mad John.

He was a proselytising vegan. On our road trips, if somebody unwrapped a pork pie, scotch egg or Cornish pasty at the motorway services, he would darkly opine thus: "Lips and arseholes."

"What?"

"That thing you're eating: lips and arseholes. The sweepings from the the dirty abattoir floor".

"It tastes good."

"It will kill you. You will be killed by the lips and arseholes of animals you never even met."

"I don't want to meet them. I want to eat them."

"It will eat you."

"What will?"

"Cancer. Bowel cancer will eat you slowly. It will hurt and you will remember stuffing this pork pie into your face at a service station on the way up to some shitty nightclub."

"Oh fuck off."

The story was that he hadn't always been like this. Before a stint in prison he'd been just another sharp-suited, fully omnivorous bullshitter, into clothes, cars and fucking. After his few months on remand, there was something of the Charlie Manson about him. He enjoyed coming across as unpredictable and dangerous, but I never saw him actually hurt anybody. Not physically anyway. Not properly.

"How did you get through prison?" somebody would ask him.

"Acid," he liked to reply.

"Acid?"

"Yes, this mate of mine would sent me tabs or microdots under the stamp on a postcard. It's a piece of piss."

"Why did you want to be tripping in there? Anything could have happened."

"I just wanted to."

"Alright."

The two occasions I saw him roused to anything like real violence were both in and around Brixton, where I was living in a chaotic flat with a girlfriend who was fucking a shitty little homunculus named Ian and with a gaudily painted fright mask who was the girlfriend of somebody who used to torment me and everyone else at school.

One Brixton afternoon, the lunatic from downstairs decided to start some shit.

He was given to harassing us for alleged noisiness, usually kicking off his complaint session with a lusty assault on the buzzer and intercom. He drank all day and sat around waiting for somebody from our flat to return from work, college or criminal activity.

"Why is your buzzer going mental like that?" asked Big John.

"That's Mikey. He'll be saying that we're making too much noise."

"It's the middle of a weekday afternoon and all we're doing is cutting up coke and putting it in wraps. We're not making any noise."

"He will have seen us come in here. He's waited twenty minutes or so and now he can't wait to get started with his usual bullshit."

"Get rid of him."

"I'll try."

It wasn't easy. Mikey was not a rational person. Despite trying very hard to keep cool, I ended up annoying him by refusing his command to come downstairs. 

"I'm not going down there to talk to you, Mikey. You come up here if you're got a problem."

We heard Mikey thundering up the stairs. He pounded on the door.

"Get rid of him," said John.

"I said I'll try."

"Try harder - and don't let him in here."

I opened the door to attempt to reason with the excited Mauritian. Barefoot and wearing a grubby vest, he attempted to barge his way in.

I'm not a big bloke. Neither was he. I was able to keep him from crossing the threshold.

"You're not coming in here, Mikey. If you want to talk to me, you can talk out on the landing."

Mikey was all flailing arms and dirty words. John was laughing inside the flat.

"Who's laughing? Who's fucking laughing?" screamed Mikey.

John emerged from the living room and made himself known at the front door.

"I'm laughing," he told Mikey. "I'm laughing at you."

Mikey weighed up the situation. The younger man in front of him looked large and capable of causing harm.

"Why you fucking laughing?"

"I spend my life laughing at cunts like you."

Mikey exploded: a whirlwind of limbs and snarling curses. John gave him a shove in the chest. The smaller man staggered backwards and found himself at the top of the stairs. He thought for a moment and then pretended that the force of the shove had carried him further than it really had. He made a meal of rolling down the uncarpeted steps. He decided not to go further than the turn in the stairway.

"You pushed me," he screamed. "I'm calling the police."

"Are you, cunt?" smiled John. "Shall I call the immigration service?"

Mikey went quiet and I didn't hear anything from him for a few months after that.

nitelife

knox county, texas

I AM KENT TRAINOR AND I HAVE OWNED AND OPERATED TRAINOR ICE COMPANY SINCE 1978. I STARTED OUT IN THE GROCERY BUSINESS BUT WHEN TIMES IN THIS SMALL TOWN GOT TOO TUFF, I HAD TO CLOSE THE STORE, WHICH LED TO THE BIRTH OF THIS ICE COMPANY.

MY WIFE IS SHELBY. SHE HANDLES DISPATCHING AND THE BOOKKEEPING. WE FEEL LIKE GOD HAS TRULY FAVORED US WITH THIS BUSINESS AND WE WANT TO HONOR HIM BY DOING THE BEST JOB WE CAN WITH WHAT HE HAS ENTRUSTED TO US.

WE ALSO PROCESS WILD GAME.

AND SHELBY  MINISTERS TO KIDS.

right now I'm listening

to JEREMIAH WAS A BULLFROG

by Hoyt Axton.

the end times radio network

"this week we broadcast 59 hours
of investigations to annihilate the mainstream fairytale
of what happened
on September 11, 2001:
THE TRUTH MARATHON", this is
medicine for comatose america, as I
turn my eyes to english skies
and study for the point
of rapture:

behold the pale horse

few are chosen

everything they ever told you was a lie

kids today

the wetlook leggings
indecent jeggings,
pierced midriffs and
spilling hips
of dull shiny girls (white, brown, orange)
who
dare you
with full and pale witless lip
to ask

keep it down, that
shrillbrittle tinny tinkle,
that
brandpacked bang
of buffblack bully in tattoo suit:
the repurposed tribal marking on
gleaming spaces of
screen,
skin,
slickglistening aspiration page,
and everywhere's bedroom wall shown
to the peeper this market
will have you
become.

market day

have a look now,
today,
come on

- tata now
- adios
- actually you won't see me now will you
- you keep telling me that

we got supersweet
english strawberry
there now, look

any bowl a pound here now mum

clutching at straws

A few times now I've flagged up Enrique's Motor Lodge #22, the book of pomes by my  old friend M.P. Powers of Florida and the wonderfully-monickered Misti Rainwater-Lites of Texas.

I'm not in the habit of rubbing shoulders with the writers of the stuff I read. Many of them are dead, for one thing. So it's a new experience to read the work of someone I know fairly well, Powers having been on my radar since about 1998. He writes easy, simple and tough lines. Even if you don't have the added enjoyment of working out which bits of his stuff are rooted in the truths of his life story, I'd say anyone that likes the stuff I put here would also dig the Powers style. Misti's stuff is good, too. Raw, rough, painful splinters of poesy. Works for me. So get yerself a copy, why dontcha?

Powers has been kind enough to suggest I do as he often does - submit bits to the various online and printed small press writing sites, zines and whatnot. I don't really know where to start, because I only thought of making this blog on a whim pretty recently, and have always tended to stay away from anything resembling a 'scene' (not just in the writing sense). I'm not a joiner, I suppose. That said, I took note of the places where Powers has had work accepted and on another whim fired off a little selection of bits to Shawn Misener's Clutching at Straws.

Misener got back to say he likes one of the pieces and that I should expect to see it there in the next couple of weeks. So look out for that and, in the meantime, have a browse of the many, many other bits Shawn has accepted over the lifetime of his site. He says he loves poetry that is strange, head-scratching, absurd, and hilarious and that he'll take a look at anything that's refreshing and forces the reader to read it again in order to soak it up. "No rules," says Misener  "If you rhyme, it better be damn funny." So have a look.

D9057/E2/19/B/2/6

curb

dove white

can we have a sit down?

100% true fact

you're driving along and the car in front is moving painfully slowly and it's narrow with blind curves and there's no way you can get past and his car is in good nick but at least ten years old, a sensible model, and you're like come on, come on why are you fucking crawling along and it's an old bloke and he's

ALWAYS

wearing a hat.

is it the hat that's
slowing him down?

or what?

sartorial advice

men:
don't you know
that that hat,
that
greybeard,
and the glasses

make you look
harold shipman?

I'll tell you what, mate
I wouldn't let you come at me
with a fucking syringe

orhan pamuk (and other adventures)

it's like:
can you understand
this world as it shifts
east and south
just by reading
the AMERICAN and the BRIT,
even the RUSSIAN, the CZECH
and all that?

but, bloody hell, I've given this
orhan pamuk
my time
for daysweeksmonths and
I won't give up (I don't do that)
but,
christ my first turk
is boring
me.

less is more

customers are reminded
to stand behind
the yellow line, this
is for
your
own
personal
safety.

Lti TXII

the driver
(shorts, sandals,
insulated coffee mug):
built for comfort

the cab:
isn't

and as you pass the rank
line of bags and
carriers,
some man
in paedophile spectacles
mutters something
right at you

working late, walking home

the cold dullness in the hip
as the ankle turns
where the paving bulges
as the way home goes
past
the purple turtle,
the free yellow off licence,
the ghost of prince albert
and
the little dog waiting
at the betting shop door;

introducing the
world's most
powerful smartphone

HAND PRESSING
is our
SPECIALITY

RADIATOR CABINETS

keep looking

the readymade priesthood of my end times are
them blessed
with:
vertebrae overlying the spine refusing to fuse,
the extra 21st chromosome (in whole or part),
or
"impaired" interactions with the sinful (my emphasis)
(and their carers).

ALL of these celibately enter my inner circle
in heaven on earth,
that is:
BRITAIN, ICELAND, GREENLAND and
WEST europe...

mesopotamia I give
to the ARAB;

all else is HADES.

10,000 angels are righteous ones who passed

these last
TWO thousand (and some)

years;

they encircle me
on vapour trails brought to you

by my webcam/

from Luton Airport/ and

from Bedfordshire's firmament.

had it been that living man would be turned into such a vapour
at the first resurrection, there would be no need for this second one
coming SOON.

this next coming:
it's so mankind will be perfected
for entrance to the kingdom above, for
complete conflagration, reconfiguration
of earth by fire.

AMEN SELAH

(watch the skies -
keep looking)

tuesday morning

all back to mine

it's in the very small hours that crammed cars
careen hilariously round the edges
of sleeping midlands towns,
drivers high on the pills thrills and greasy kisses
of last night dancefloors and it's
all back to mine

look, look: there's another one

another what?

another person walking on his own
by a bypass
at 5 a.m.
with a plastic bag.
what are they doing, these people?

maybe he's killed somebody

maybe, hey
another one and look:
this one's got a plank of wood.
go round again round again, go back

wind down
the window

WHAT ARE YOU DOING
WITH THAT THING?
hahahahahahahaha
gasps a wasted carfull

what happened here?

can you ever see
a lonely single woman's shoe
cast out:
by the playpark at the littery dog turd recreation ground,
between the empty spaces at the hangover morning pub car park,
hiding under dusty hedges on your muffled canalside crawl
for the eggs and white bread
of the stunned sunday supermarket,
and not think this:

what happened here?

museum 2115

working in the knowledge economy

this static white egyptian battleshipcigarettefactory
blackcats mightily, blazing nightly
and by day sucking and spilling
its lipstick models,
charity queens,
panty vendors,
freaky fashionistas,
tubby wonks,
canny hacks,
pretty marketeers
and
shouty headset jockeys
in and out
out and in
of tatty camden;

jump to it, you jolly jack tars
there's workstreams to build,
slidedecks to run and
rooms full of hot air
to be sold
everywhere.

teenage wanker

the stomping triplesoul brothelcreeper of summer and
the toobig leatherjacket armour,
the idiot hair spiked and dyed
black as intentions when
I lied
as to why
you mustn't come among
us,
or the
yellow-dry chirruping provençal hills of
pitchblack twisty night-roads to
tinny village square discos,
sweltering red tents,
and the itchytwitchy
pro-plus-pepsi trainride south.

really shamefully,
you were de-invited by my
wanker's weak fear
of the snide smiles of unfriends
whose names I now don't remember,
who'd mocked
your sharp nose, big legs, and bigger
wounded, beautiful
and generous heart.

and to repay you
that way
after learning first the rich, round taste of girl flesh
in your patchouli-scented bed
while the pogues shouted,
while your sister went mad and
your dad went cold

and your stupid little dog
sniffed the joy
from my arsehole
those times we fucked hilariously
in the cool orchards
and waving rapeseed
of home.

timelines

caff_mac Catherine McKee

@benpapadee hope so

22 minutes ago

______________________________________

caff_mac Catherine McKee

@benpapadee cya

26 minutes ago

______________________________________

benpapdee Ben Papadakis

@caff_mac you are indeed

26 minutes ago

______________________________________

caff_mac Catherine McKee

@benpapadee C.U.N.T

26 minutes ago

______________________________________

benpapdee Ben Papadakis

@caff_mac I’ve decided... you’re an immature child and I’m too good for you. 

1 hour ago

______________________________________

caff_mac Catherine McKee

Step-up is definitely the worst film I've ever, ever seen.

6 hours ago

______________________________________

caff_mac Catherine McKee

@benpapadee I have decided.... you're a cunt

6 hours ago

hengist road

amen selah

good day and welcome
to the real time theophany webcam
in the back bedroom
of this breezeblockbuiltbrickstudded
home, one of numberless pilgrim soldiers marching
as to war
in serried ranks
northeastwards out of luton and up
to sleeping bedfordshire's wooden hills.

look up and witness the annointing;
the end of secularity is now at hand, as written
in these streaky
endtime clouds

And to you who are troubled: come rest with us,
for the Christ Child shall be revealed with his orbital angels in flaming fire,
taking vengeance on them that know not the Father Almighty and
them that obey not the gospel.

one can often be seen walking the sky around the local area,
unperturbed by suicidal demons dogging one's every move;

the favourite journey: a bus trip down the Hitchin Road and into town:
past the little cemetery and onward to
the by-pass,
only to see the figure of eight, pagan
wiccan witchcraft roundabout at the Jolly Topers pub and
the Nuwaves (ladies) hairdressers;
With a bold shofar shout, one enters the market circle and walks
the pedestrian walkway
to confront the town hall with a righteous knuckle,
silently indicating that GOD rules from the heavens above and all creation declares His glory.                      

on guard

deep joy

Well, the waiting is over. It's here: my very own copy of  Enrique's Motor Lodge Room #22, a book of pomes by two noted Americans. The second half of the silvery volume is populated with the writings of Ms. Misti Rainwater-Lites, a nice lady from Texas. The front end is full of stuff straight from the brain of an old friend of mine, a certain Illinois-born Florida resident, Mr. M.P. Powers.

Powers: what can I say? He entered my consciousness way back in the late 1990s when I waded into a clusterfuck of globally distributed crazies all set on demonstrating who knew the most about the life and works of Charles Bukowski and on burning each other's sorry arses asses in an intricate web of shrill flaming. One strange fuck, a certain Googolplex, really stood out as the bull moose of the scene, bellowing bizarre barbs. He ran a lightbulb store, was all hot for Chevy Camaros, loved to sell all kinds of junk online and once memorably dodged a real-life meeting with a fellow combatant by having a barbecue in a Chicago public park the day the guy showed up on the warpath and all set to commit murder.

Powers could give as good as he got in the lunacy stakes, but there was a sane and principled individual behind the persona. I knew this for sure when I finally got to meet him in the flesh and in a waterfront bar/eatery in Boynton Beach, Fla. about six or seven years ago. Drinks were drunk and shit was shot as boats bobbed and the TV chattered sports scores.

Anyhoo, a quick flick of the Powers/Misti-penned book that reached me yesterday gives me cause to become all moist and squirty at the prospect of giving his (and her) words my proper attention. I may or may not write an actual review at some stage. No promises. I'm a fickle and flaky sort. I can already tell you, though, dear reader, that if you want a hard, dirty hit of good lines then you need to get a very little amount of £££ or $$$ together and hook yourself up to the M.P. and Misti experience. As Rollins said: DO IT.

peanut

The 38-year-old Jensen Beach man who dressed as a peanut and armed himself with a marlinspike was drinking and apparently suicidal when he made the 911 call that brought police to his house.

Ignatius J. Reilly's aunt Emerald said her nephew told people he wanted to die. Reilly was shot twenty-eight times by police while wielding the weapon.

Emerald Reilly said she was told that her nephew was upset when he woke up Friday and realized he had survived the shooting.

Police arrived about 6:30 p.m. Thursday after Reilly called in a disturbance at his home, 33123366677700 XYZAVB St.

Reilly was armed with a 47-foot-long marlinspike, police said. Officers commanded him to drop the weapon, police said, but he refused and advanced on them screaming "I am the Cheshire Cat and I demand the elephant pyjamas of bestial sexuality."

Police said Friday that Reilly was yelling for officers to shoot him, lowered his weapon and pointed it towards officers as he got closer.

Officer Troy Hitler first used a Taser to no apparent effect, then shot Reilly twenty-seven times. Hitler's partner Officer Laird Rapunzel shot him once, police said.

Emerald Reilly, who lives in a Palm Beach County pet grooming parlor, said she has not talked to her nephew since the shooting. She said she had a phone conversation with him about an hour before it happened.

"He was having a bad day. He said that legions of fire hydrants despised his lightbulb store and were molesting his lime green 1984 Chevy Camaro. I didn't think anything of it and just told him it was just that, a bad day, and that tomorrow would be better," she said.

Reilly had threatened to commit suicide in the past and recently had been very down, she said. "He was bothered by the royal wedding in the UK," she reported. "He felt it was a manifestation of an alien conspiracy to smuggle eggplant into the souls of infants."

He also might have stopped taking his medication for attention-deficit disorder in recent days and started drinking more, she said. "He was all about the M/D 20 20. His favorite flavor was the cocoa bean and donkey cum."

Emerald Reilly said her nephew was calling family members Thursday night "like he was trying to say goodbye and evangelize about the asshole of the Whore of Babylon."

His brother got one of the calls and went to the Jensen Beach house, Emerald Reilly said. Ignatius Reilly was wearing the elaborate violet and yellow peanut costume his mother had made for him.

It had multiple layers, individually crafted from the foreskins of rare animals, which she speculated might have reduced the effectiveness of the Taser.

The brother, whom she declined to name, told Emerald Reilly that when Ignatius was hit by the Taser, he shook a little, then "cut through the (Taser) wires with his antique marlinspike and came back at the cops."

Police were still interviewing people and could not comment on Emerald Reilly's account of events.

Hiltler, who has been with the Police Department since the fall of 1845, is on administrative leave while the investigation continues.

Reilly operates a lawn ornament repair business from the home. Emerald Reilly said he was having trouble at work and had been fighting with his 345 lb. girlfriend, Lulu Googolplex.

Martin County Court records show that Reilly has a long criminal history.

He served a little over a year in prison for attempted fifth-degree pet molestation and was released in March 2002.

He was sentenced to 90 days in jail in 2001 for driving under the influence of ghost farts. He was sentenced to 273 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to third offense drunken boating in 2000 and 90 days in jail for a protection order violation in 1999.

"It's sad. . . . I'm not faulting the cops," Emerald Reilly said. "When he gets better, I hope he goes to a mental health hospital and not jail."

His condition at Martin Memorial Hospital was classified under the Homeland Security Act.

some adapted wisdoms

church:
tells you about a god who will punish you forever if you break your oppressors' arbitrary rules here on earth.

the pursuit of happiness:
is a restless, unending quest for an imaginary state, sold to you to keep you believing that there might be more to life than this.

shopping:
is buying things you don't need with money you don't have (borrowed against the hallucinatory 'value' of some bricks and mortar and your ability to keep working) to impress people you don't like (including yourself).

your culture:
is a vast machine designed to mass produce a coarse lexico-grammatical state which ensures that you never build the conceptual models required to understand that everything you ever do is absurd.

disney:
is an insanity-normalisation factory that takes a raw material (european folk tales), coats it in shit (that's the added value) and then stuffs it into your children's heads before they have had the chance to develop unhelpful critical functionalities.

education:
is a euphemism for normalising and maintaining the notion that you are a unit of production and consumption.

nationality:
is a recently invented confection designed to sweeten the taste of being asked to go to war or work in a munitions factory, and is expected to decline in relevance as your loyalty is shifted towards corporations and consumer brands.

facebook:
ensures that your local security forces will become rapidly aware of any signs that you are becoming insane (non-compliant).

waiting for enrique

I wrote a little while ago about Enrique's Motor Lodge Room #22, the book of poesy and pictures recently unleashed by my old friend M.P. Powers (of Boynton, Fla. and soon to be of Berlin, Germany) and my new Texan gal pal Misti Rainwater-Lites. Well, I'm now positively moist with anticipation, having lately received email confirmation that my copy has been dispatched. I can't wait to get my sticky mitts on the damn thing. Yeah, bring it on. Poem me up.

It's got to be good given the powerful testimonials it's attracting from all over God's US of A. Buy yours. Today.

multitrack 700

friday

there is nothing to see here

plum

FUCKING ARSEHOLES

imagine sitting down to design the worst possible way
of dealing with a practical problem

imagine making it slow, complex, corrupt and opaque

imagine thinking you'd outdone
all previous plotters
of fucked up nonsense;

well, your shining edifice of farcical folly
would pale pathetically
in comparison
with this
that we have now.

roy of the rangers

must be nearly fifty,
looks for trouble,
is a one-man provocation,
wants you to say:
leave it out, mate,
there are kids sitting around here
when he bursts
from his halfway-line seat,
just a speck of nothing to
those away end bouncing supporters but
screaming, a lone lost voice:
fuck off you cunts
you northern cunts, you
shitcunts.

right behind him, I join the songs
of 15,000 others:
his swollen red head
turns:
shout in my ear again, cunt
and I'll fucking lay you out;

we're all rangers

give way

henry suck's stacies dick

I'm Rangers too

We got Manchester United in the fourth round of the League Cup. I don't call it the Carling Cup and I never called it the Worthington Cup, the Coca-Cola Cup, the Rumbelows Cup, the Littlewoods Challenge Cup or the Milk Cup. It's the only thing we've ever won and to me it's the League Cup.

So we motored up to Manchester and checked in at a Travelodge in Salford. My dad had started to feel bad on the way up - tummy trouble brewing. He ate nothing when we went to some peculiar Italian place near the hotel and he was contemplating not coming to the match at all. He toughed it out though, and was back and forth to the gents throughout the dull fixture. The home side's second choice players ground out a 1-0 win and we made the mistake of trying to get a taxi near Old Trafford. We must have covered a good mile and a half on a wet and windy night before we eventually flagged one down. Dad managed not to soil himself or throw up in the cab.

I needed a beer and got one from the hotel's rudimentary bar. He headed upstairs, warning me not to disturb him in the night or in the morning under any circumstances:

"When I'm ready, I'll knock on your door or send you a text or something."
"OK."

So, when someone rapped on the door of his room in the small hours, he got up thinking I'd decided not to pay attention to his instructions. When the last bout of vomiting was finished, he'd finally retired to bed wearing a polo shirt in our club colours.

Standing before him was a naked man. Stark bollock naked. Not a stitch.

"Hello, mate. I've run out of the free tea bags. You couldn't spare one, could you?"

My dad tried to understand what he was seeing and hearing. The nude intruder pointed to a QPR tattoo on his bare chest and said, "It's alright, mate. I'm Rangers too."

black birds

We only knew one London cab driver, an old schoolmate of my dad's. He was a motormouthed pain in hole and I'd avoided him as much as I could. By the time I was in my early 20s and had flown the nest I thought I might never have to listen to his bullshit ever again.

But one day we were in the car and heading back from a match in deepest southeast London, i.e. away at Charlton. We pulled into a petrol station to fill up and were sitting there for a moment when we saw a taxi shudder onto the forecourt. Well, of course it was him.

He and the old man can't have seen each other for about a couple of years so naturally my dad was out of the car and across the oily concrete as quick as a flash, smile turned on and hand held out. But emotional displays were not his old friend's style. He looked past my dad and at me through those pebble lenses. Expressionless, he turned his fat head and watery gaze to his school chum, jerked a pudgy thumb at me and said:

'You still driving this lazy cunt around then, are you?'

Then, before dad could craft a proper response, he was peering through me and at a woman who had paid for her fuel and was heading back to her car.

'Fuck me,' he said tonelessly. 'Black birds always look like they're walking around with someone else's arse.'

kilburn grange park

in the early 1970s he was working in kilburn grange park. every morning the place was full of every kind of shit you could imagine and he had to clear up as thoroughly as possible before the gates were opened to the great british and irish public. the toilets were the worst job, especially on the days that men living in rough digs and working on the building sites would get paid and buy new clothes.

a man could buy a suit in burtons and wear it with work boots every day. the suits would be destroyed inside 2-3 weeks. on paydays, they would head back to burtons to buy another suit. the trousers and jacket would be stuffed into a toilet down in kilburn grange park and then crapped on.

he had to deal with that on a regular basis.

today's bukowski quote

I feel I have to cough up one of these once in a while, not least because some kind soul offers regular pearls of crazy wisdom from the Dirty Old Man of San Pedro via twitter and I'm minded to pass on the particularly good ones. Buk fans can tend to evangelise a bit. So, today let's go with:

"If I had to choose between drinking and fucking I think I'd have to stop fucking".

sit down

worried

Hi

Following our meet with Ray have you had a chance to do that key theme/2012 development mind map sheet for Ray?

D
------
No not yet. My plan to work for 1-2 days of the bank holiday didn't happen due to family stuff. Now my laptop is buggered and I'm on the phone to IT. Can't do it until tomorrow night earliest. Sorry.

J
-----
Thats alright.

Are you ok? I hope the family business you had to deal with wasn't anything unpleasant or serious.

D x
-----
It'll be fine. Don't worry!

-----
Oh no I am worried now. I hope everything's ok; good things happen to good people and I'm so expecting you to be completely fine. You know where I am if you want a chat.

Take care mister.
D
-----
Don't worry means don't worry not do worry!! Seriously!!
-----

plum stone

what's what?

a broken plum stone

she picks up sharp little pieces with slim fingers,
plinkplonks them into the ramekin stained pinkish by
last night's raspberries

when the plum stone broke, the ramekin wasn't here,
the ramekin showed up later;
first the plum stone -
then the ramekin

OK, it doesn't matter

luton airport

the polish plumber,
the hungarian barista and
the latvian waitress
zip home and

english dad in cutoff khaki shows
chelseafctattoo on milkymeaty calf;
his brood are all
brrzzzzzipzippringpingpingzip gameboy and
mum is all
wide soft behind,
wide soft upperarm and
jewelled flipflop and

badsuited buyer is istanbulboundwards for leather and

sprawling frum families are all
beard, wig, shtetl hat and
yiddish wisecrack strolling
past the uncomprehending mockery
of some idiot
whose village doesn't miss him

a nice area

this is a nice area

the kids who drinkplay in our churchyard bring up
KOPPARBERG, a swedish pear cider no less,
adding to the
faded stains of
fallen mulberries
at the gate between two (gentrified) houses

none of your white lightning nonsense
round here

walking to the gym

blossom

gold malboro original

print is dead

today's front pages:
£4000 A NIGHT HONEYMOON
Cowell's X rated secrets exposed
HARRY'S TEARS FOR WILLS AND KATE
KATE'S FALKLANDS CRISIS
Cameron is out to trash us say Lib Dems
EU WANTS TO MERGE UK WITH FRANCE

on the telly?
something else

in chinatown

euston road, saturday morning

kelly

lascivious tooth-gap,
steady grey eyes,
kinky waves of dirty blonde,
childsize tiny but
clumpy heels-boosted;
a porn arse in tight white jeans and a
hairlessly glistening pale pink
porncunt, more perfect
than I'll ever see again

screaming unreal orgiastic grinding bliss the first time
we fucked but
it wasn't real:
later acquiescences were limply usual

faraway preoccupied with the great love, the
big young bastard who
went with whores who
didn't care who
drove her to the pills, whom
she loved endlessly;

and I didn't know
before her
that oxfordshire girls burred
pleasantly west country:

I can't go out with you anymore,
she said.

how much

dangerous cagey is the nutter that
each group of stagging amsterdam pranksters must,
BY LAW
include

the one to make you feel uneasy
the older one whose gappy grin and gravel gob says
I can turn
and says
threat of sudden disconnected violence and
I'm HILARIOUS, OK?

as the wandering band disintegrates in the neon smudge puddles
of the sex district
he is seen, roughly booted from a whorehouse:

I told them I've only got a few guilders and asked
how much
just for a cuddle

NYC NYE

christmas eve: rotunda hotel on heathrow service road,
a mcdonalds supper and a fire alarm wakeup

christmas day: steaming grey turkey pieces in airline sauce,
a movie and a long, long line in miami's dark terminal

NYE is NYC:
hebrew national stuffed whole in white buns and mustard bright as rattling cabs and
turned ankles on the clever designs of painfully styled cocktail rooms and
waiting, waiting drunker downtown as her friends dress endlessly across the street and
a bald man of 30 gets asked for ID at the door
of a ladies' salon that's now a bar
and I won't schlep hotelwards, passport-getting in his tow, I want
strong vodka things under a dead dryer and it's all
LET'S GO TO MOTHERFUCKER. IT'S POLYSEXUAL

in my tiny tinsel cowboy hat, chinstrapped and snarling I'm like:
no, no, no
no motherfucker, I'm too old for all that

let's go to bed.

it's never easy

we've waited fifteen years for this and
we've been up and down the country to every dumpish corner
of this island and
we've worried our fingers to the bone and we've worried
our wives, mothers, daughters with this preoccupation

and I tell you this:
take it away now,
take it away after all that

and I'll do time, I swear:
arson, murder, whatever

and I won't be alone

yumi

born in phoenix, AZ
in mexico at five defiled by uncle's buddy and only telling strangers
in las vegas ripened to dark-eyed violet hair precocity;
home alone as favoured sisters enjoy the ride of
circus circus;

bloodied in ten mosh pits dreaming screamo, opening up
to madeup love from further than she'll know

velvet cigarette

she is, she says, the kind of girl you'd get
a pack of cigarettes with,
rail thin, smoke eye, up all night on hotel milk:

I knock
you was sleep
call housekeeping if
you would like room clean