Fatal Chip Shop Strategy

I no longer want

To see things from inside

The same pillow, held.

From now on all is a ‘fatal strategy’.

Even standing in the queue at

The chip shop

Is a breath away from the

World sliding into extinction.

It must be taken to the end,

Retched out to a view

From from outside

The pit, where

There is only absurd

Laughter and one perturbed man

With a scoop full of stuff

That now has no meaning,

As he stares hopelessly

At the salt and pepper shakers.

Now

Last night: perceiving through liquid overflow.
Myself as the sound of too much chatter.
Now: The imagined ideas of staring others;
A backward twist of the belly blade.

The night we didn’t...

I found this in an empty folder on my computer, don't know if it's unfinished or perfectly formed.

You lured me out late

From that drunken hole

I had dug pretty deep

On the docile settee.

You said it was a night for danger,

So I changed my pants and travelled

Through the night on a train:

A pioneer with a can of cider for courage.

That night we didn’t know if the future

Was a minor chord floating on

A wisp of drunkenness...

Crusty Old Men

Fizzing and bubbling on the surface
And the crusty old men
That are in the pubs at 11.
Tragically experiencing a pleasure we all fear.
They have devoured the need for sanity
And when they laugh in that melodious sadness
There is only the ring of truth that is unbearable,
But they bear it, they have learnt to bear it.
We create worlds to avoid this naive existence
And it is we who are trapped under annoyances
We have secretly slipped into our own back pockets.
They have grey hair and ruddy skin and they perform
A pint lift with the mechanical certainty,
A technique honed, of an Olympian of the absurd.
We will never learn the hard won soul
of the men that inhabit the pubs at midday.

Pretty People

Pretty people looking for the Thing

Hazy in delight, shadows fall from the glass into the night

They search eternally...

Sometimes

The day approaches again

And views me slightly askance

Thoughtless thoughts maintain

The pointlessness of the dance

Cider seems like a balm

But one that wants to destroy

My sense of ‘reality calm’

And the wish of the hoi polloi

Too much enjoyment is banned

Hiding is a must, a necessary skill

No one will know you’re a man

Shhhh shhhhhhh mentally ill

Words don’t like the light

Slouching and folding in

Enduring the slow darkening night

Tragic draw of a violin

To be honest I can’t discern where

The future will spit me out

All I can do is gawp and stare

And quiver with fear and doubt

An Evening in Soho. Part 2.

This guy is still fully committed to selling us this...thing; sensing our proclivity for humour he went with it. ‘You know, it’s just like a real woman...except she won’t tell you to go and do the washing up afterwards.’ Now this was funny and I appreciated it, however IT was on a somewhat different tangent of interpretation; when we had first met many years before he had described himself as: ‘half Frank Spencer, half Norman Bates’ and I have never found a reason to disagree with this in the most wonderful way. IT suggested that he would quite like a woman to ask him to go and do the washing up afterwards - I think because of his long standing single status and not any kind of fairy liquid based fetish. Mr Greedy laughs as do I, but I feel the reality of IT’s words more than him. 

Our globular acquaintance, trying to push our laughter further into a place where our money fell into his hands, followed up with a gag about never keeping the thing in the boot of your car, ‘just in case’, and somewhere along the line he utters the word dismembered, which although fairly absurd and comical, doesn’t conjure up the image of sexual bliss. He was skirting on the apex, his humour was curdling before our eyes and we started to shuffle our feet and cross our arms, and in his ignorance he ploughed further into that rut. I politely suggested to him that in future he probably shouldn't use the word dismembered in his sales pitch.

At this point my memory has been mingled somewhat with the decay of fermented white noise within but the next thing that I remember is the portly gentleman discussing how his mother-in-law had dementia, he was obviously losing it, desperately searching for any reason to sell us this thing –I call this kind of strange conversational tick the IT effect; it was most definitely something IT said that swayed the discussion on this new and unprecedented route. Here is Mr Greedy’s story:

‘My mother-in-law has dementia, she got on ok on her own for many years, but now she’s in one of them homes. It’s funny ‘cause sometimes she doesn’t even know who her own daughter is’. He suddenly puffed up his chest, ‘she always remembers me though – always without fail. She always had a twinkle in her eye for me, I think it’s because I was a bit of a lad’. He was insinuating that his virility somehow had the ability to overcome serve degenerative mental disorders and who were we to argue. Noticing our moderate unease at his revelation, he added, ‘I never had sex with her though’.

I don’t want to seem unkind and remember I am a romantic, but this guy did look like he was literally moments away from the Guinness World Records team entering the building and congratulating him on having become the most unsightly man on the planet; so disclosure concerning any kind of reproductive activity, with family members or otherwise, seemed somewhat unsavoury. 

I mean he was really trying to sell us this thing and in fact there was a moment during the previous story that Ian and myself looked at each other with expressions that said – are we actually going to have to buy this thing? So maybe this guy did know what he was doing. But just the thought of finding that thing in the back of a wardrobe in years to come made sure we stood firm. He seemed to sense this too and moved on to what he thought was a more achievable goal the possibly more bizarre looking inflatable sex dolls. ‘I mean, [the dismembered sex doll] is definitely our top seller but a lot of people buy these too’. To please him we each took one from a peg to mull over the ridiculus bloated inflatable with that mouth they all have which looks so painful. I can’t remember who but IT or myself pointed out a particular doll based on a nubile young...lady called Mia Isabella. At an attempt at being subtle let’s just say she had very broad shoulders and something a little extra than the others – maybe now isn’t the time to become subtle – it was a chick with a dick, except the ‘dick’ was more like sad brown off cut form a bouncy castle. I wondered whether at Madame Tussauds they make sure every part of the body is anatomically correct; it’s just that you never get to see that part of the sculpture. Mr greedy made one final push to get through no-man’s-land:

‘No no it’s very popular – if you like that sort of thing, I mean, I’ve never used it, but we get good comments. There are always these’. He pointed to another row of products, it turned out they were vibrating cock rings, but his badinage had lost all its former lustre and we unconsciously contorted our bodies into the words: ‘thank you for your information vendor but will you please go away now’. Being ever perceptive to our silent wishes he did, we had machine gunned him down and he now lay in a bundle of mud and barbed wire in the abyss, which was one of the only fetishes not catered for I believe. We looked around, we laughed some more, then we left with sloppy grins and a good story to go and talk economics with some chums in The Whisky Room at the Athaneum Hotel, not really. We simply wandered out into the night contemplating those hero’s grappling with the sorrows of the Sex Doll.