Staatliches Express

Donned in the gloom-laden hosiery of the unliving, shiny patent black shoes and the red-lined iconic cloak he is to be buried in years later (despite never issuing specific instructions for his undead corpse to be draped in the well-worn comedic capery that pursued Messrs Abbot and Costello), having recently fled the Transylvanian White Terror that visits the local population after the Lenin Boys are booted back to Moscow by the House of UnAmerican Activities, Béla Blaskó, aka Lugosi, aka Arisztid Olt, 180 pounds, six foot one, technically older than Dracula, 30 (+7) years old (Hollywood age), ex-president of the Hungarian actors' union, communist and vampire to the stars, enters Staatliches Bauhaus, stumbles slightly, a consequence of the phial surreptitiously self-administered outside the building school, then pounds the steps to the office of Walter Gropius in the hope that rehabilitation awaits.

An overwrought introduction to chill the cockles of Northamptonshire's gothic rock community is typical of the man. He's gotten his decades mixed up again. The 1880's or the 1980's? Must be the methedone. Or perhaps the garlic.

- Ah! Herr Blaskó. Please be seated.

- Please to call me Lugosi, Herr Professor. And if the Professor will permit, I should very much like to lie down.

- Why ...er.. of course. The couch?

- I prefer the floor if it disturbs not the good professor.

- Not...not at all. Please Herr Lugosi, feel free.

Out of instinct Walter Gropius admires the architecture of Lugosi's prostrate form before him. The slight asymmetry of his widow's peak (aka McDonald's hairline) only serves to emphasize its underlying symmetrical intent. The zig-zagging of the folds of the cape hint at an aesthetic that presages Elsa Lanchester.

There is an aura of sulphur matches in the room. The architect fancies it is from his assistant's smoking, or those apprentices from the crafts guild using his office to play cards again. Strange. No tobacco smell. The pungent sulphur and musty tanginess of Frau Gropius's famous strong cheese and garlic on rye is of a different order.

The reflection of his visitor's breath in his shiny patent shoes takes Gropius aback. It is only early Weimar Republic. Why so cold? And then the breath... It comes from nowhere. Gropius turns and looks at Lugosi's lips. They have no reflection in the shoes. But then, neither can he see any trace of cold breath emerging from his now sleeping guest's mouth.

- Professor?

Gropius starts.

- Forgive me Herr Professor. From time to time I, how to say, nod. It is a symptom of my condition.

- Condition?

- I am plagued by the gothic. Doomed to typecast. Assailed by self-doubt. Existence is highly contingent for the commercially undead.

Lugosi's heavy burr is lugubrious and hypnotizing. In his mouth anon, Gropius's heart now beats in time with his visitor's mythical rhythm. Slowly Lugosi rises. The weight of demetrification, English, America's psychopathic healthcare, the debt to Sinatra, Béla Jr, the hospital bills, the mass production of horror, kitsch, unemployment, high camp, the defeat of the 1919 Hungarian Workers' State, sciatica, morphine, eternity, the four wives, lifts. Hope, the last one. Hope.

- Is there to be hope Herr Gropius?

- The bats have left the modernist bell tower. There is nothing but hope.

- How is the cure to be administered?

- A process of detoxification is to be recommended. The ornate, the gothic, the romantic, the decorative are to be banished in the machine-age man. Form must follow function. If we need to bolt a head onto your shoulders, then we engineer a virtue out of the bolt. The aesthetic of the functional.

- Karloff.

- Who?

- No matter. I am in need of the cure. I am in your hands Herr Professor.

- The enrolment procedure has already begun. I need only to see you draw.

- Blood?

- No. Herr Lugosi. Ink will suffice...

TWELVE YEARS IN BABYLON Vol. 1

  
    
         

   
  

POPPYCOCK

When we remember
the people who were killed
killing the people we forget

We forget to remember
that right now
there are people who don't count
being killed
by people who won't count
the people
they are killing

So
that most people will forget
to remember
most of the dead
most of the time

and Remembrance Day
is when
this should be
most forgotten

THE iNDUSTRiAL SLAUGHTER OF PENGUiNS

Once upon a time, there’s a big bang and the story begins.

What nobody wants to hear is that the whole beginning thing is at best sketchy.

Cosmologists and children need to be kept busy, but for the rest of us, there is no beginning, because then an end has been created... and a theology, and a code of ethics, and before you know it hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of penguins have gone to meet their maker.

The plot line is well worn.

The go/no-go decision is imminent. As the pointed tail of the bird scrapes around the corner, it is a foregone conclusion. The backside of the moon. Curious and comedic. Crack. Boing!

Bopped on the bonce, booted into a huge vat and steamed alive is certainly no beginning for a penguin - only the meat matters now: masticated, oil extracted, the life cycle of the ovum is of no going concern in the scheme of men. Infinity is but a second before the official start. Over and out.

To while away the time, the Archbishop’s most incarcerated envoy enjoyed Penguin classics.

JEREMY CORBYN KILLED NO ONE TODAY

Jeremy Corbyn shot not a single girl or boy in any schoolyard anywhere
Jeremy Corbyn has no atomic capability
Jeremy Corbyn has no diplomatic immunity
Jeremy Corbyn played no part at all in blowing up any twin tower
Jeremy Corbyn is no Middle Eastern Superpower

Jeremy Corbyn killed no one today

 Jeremy Corbyn does not need de-nuclearization
Jeremy Corbyn is no Kim Jung-Un
Jeremy Corbyn is no Vladimir Putin
Jeremy Corbyn wiped no one from off face of earth with secret nerve gas
Jeremy Corbyn is not the KGB
Jeremy Corbyn is not the Stasi
Jeremy Corbyn is no James Bond
Jeremy Corbyn created no ghost towns in Southern Lebanon
Jeremy Corbyn bulldozed nobody’s home away

Jeremy Corbyn killed no one today 

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t Josef Stalin, Leon Trotsky or Menachem Begin
Jeremy Corbyn isn’t your 2,000-year-old imaginary friend
– despite the sandals and the initials
J. C. is no W.M.D at the BBC fed on sexed-up lies for brain dead Netflix phone zombies
Jeremy Corbyn is not the Great Satan
Jeremy Corbyn is no double agent
Jeremy Corbyn is no George Galloway

Jeremy Corbyn killed no one today

Jeremy Corbyn attacked no Hollywood actresses, defenceless civilians or illegal aliens
Jeremy Corbyn tortured no one in any unknown location anywhere near Camp 1391
Jeremy Corbyn did not build Camp X-ray, Camp Delta or Abu Graib
Jeremy Corbyn does not secretly rendition his enemies for torture
Jeremy Corbyn’s allotment is not an homage to the Third Reich
Jeremy Corbyn did not take control of the Golan Heights
Jeremy Corbyn never bombed Dresden or Gaza or Guernica night after night
Jeremy Corbyn is not the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Jeremy Corbyn is not the new Messiah
He’s been a very naughty boy, but Jeremy Corbyn did not kill any Gazans today.

Jeremy Corbyn is no segregation wall covered in graffiti and pain
Jeremy Corbyn is no rogue state
Jeremy Corbyn is no axis of evil
Jeremy Corbyn is not Shin Bet
Jeremy Corbyn is no Leila Khaled
Jeremy Corbyn’s middle name is not Mohammad, Adolf or Otto von Bismarck
Jeremy Corbyn is not Mossad
Jeremy Corbyn did not make Ken Dodd’s dad’s dog dead

Jeremy Corbyn killed no one today

Jeremy Corbyn is not strung out on tramadol, fentanyl, ketamine, synthetic spice or craft ale
Jeremy Corbyn is not Israel
Jeremy Corbyn is not Israel
Jeremy Corbyn is not Israel

Feed your mind. Free Palestine with every breath.

Masel Tov.

DAiSY CHAiNS. PSYCHOSiS AND FOOTBALL

"Trouble with you laddie, is your brains are all in your head.” Bill Shankly

To set the tone, the scraggy-necked, pasty-faced fishwife in the C.U.F.C. away shorts and the generic polyester Sports Direct football top picks the knickers out of her arse, as she casts her skunk eye at number 34 where that smiley repressed hippy lives.

The football game is a crafted match: the teenage pre-schizophrenic bully at the top of the local food chain and his cohorts versus the marginalised ethnic youth coached by the middle-aged skunk psychotic with a barely containable messiah complex, whose six-year-old dwells in a land of early reptiles and oblivion. Wonderful positional play, sunshine!

The tie takes place at the urban fringe of the middle-class ghetto known officially as South Cambridgeshire where the local MP routinely emotes, yawn! And crocodiles weep tears of hollow laughter. Austerity kicks off!

At first, the crowd is quiet. Realisation is stuck on the M1 North of the Watford Gap - miles from the most unequal UK city in the world, or Cambridge as it’s sometimes called. The football team is united. The city could not be more divided.

As an economic war rages, the ladies and gents of the Trumpington Allotment Society inhabit a fertile green piece of earth, a blue marbled paradise, where orchards create community and votes change things.

Meanwhile, on the estate, all is calm. Ish. The pre-match jitters amongst the local unparented yoof are: generalised anxiety, status dominance and ball control. Regulation prison whites. Hands in pockets. Vicious eye contact. Aggression. But mainly lots of good healthy banter and running around aimlessly. Football gives these kids a goal in life, Sir Kenny.

Away from the House of Lords, amongst the sons of the workers, a football game is organically growing. The big match of the gay-looking, marginal South-East Asian and the only black youth in the vicinity against the local disaffected white precariat (2007/2008 season) in the year of a declaration of hostilities by the rentier class and Tory banksterism.

Only most of us are stupid, Heidi. Heidi Hi Campers! Crocodiles are splitting their sides in the stands. Inspired by the mediocrity and monotony that surrounds us all, the beautiful game has begun. It’s a face-off between a local yoof, him of the half-Austrian dad, and the Liverpudlian skunk casualty.

In the death throes of a post-Thatcherized society, labels mean everything. Council estate. Try that one on for size. In the game, labels mean fuck all. All that matters is yellow and red. Pure instinct. Total monkey brain.

The crowd sings like a Pink Floyd album in reverse: Pass at least 5 GCSE’s or you’ll forever walk alone!  

Mad Dad gets the ball and passes to the South Korean who lays it off casually to the third-generation Windrush basket-baller who side-foots it to the youngest in the team, whose parents have come from Ankara to sell delicious kebabs and drive Volkswagen Passats. To spite late capitalism, little Utger in Umbro scores a screamer in the top corner of the metal net. The crowd go mental!

Meanwhile, the six-year-old boy is fabricating daisy chains with a 10-year-old girl, who is a mere brace away from the toxicity of shopping and appearance politics, and whose parents have a loathing for the labels class and gender as an explanation for disappointment, as they contemplate another shift at the local super-hospital that sits on the horizon dwarfing the nearby social housing stock.

The score is 17-8 for the littler kids and the non-white, non-locals, united by mad Dad to occupy the concrete five-a-side cage that serves as stadia to their dreams of flight and soccer stardom.

The bully shows an interest. He loves to succumb to nascent tendencies of violence and domination. A duck to mucky water, he intuits much and understands little, but holds an unhealthy interest in anything on the manor that can be destroyed, so long as it doesn’t belong to the posh and powerful forces of social and economic reaction that hem him in on all sides, like the metal cage provided by the council.

The second half is underway, comrades. BBC supplies the social commentary, as per. John the Mott is sweating buckets and cobs in his trademark sheepskin, as he schleps over the class divide to watch the match.

Over to you, Motty.

As I look out across the estate, it very much looks like the wife’s coming on for the last twenty. Surely, she's not bringing herself on at this stage in third-wave feminism. What's your take on this, Sir Trev?

Classic, John. There’s been an interestin’ situation developin’ between the Liverpool feller and the monkey-brainer with the tendency to go in hard. He’s got a violent streak in him as wide as the Dartford Tunnel... not to mention, her outdoors is oblivious to the threat from the right wing.

What’s your verdict, Sir Kenny?

Aye, well, likesay... had he not brung on the South Korean early doors and the mixed race lad, then the handbags could of got a bit nasty and he’d've been well outnumbered in defence.

Interestin’ match on our hands now, Motty.

Looks like the missus has spotted the six-year-old, marked by a daisy cutter down that left wing, she’s not happy.

You've got to see it from her point of view, all she sees is one unfathered and abandoned 6-year-old.

Here's Dad, beating his pigeon chest, effing and jeffing at the referee, and now red-carded for the second time this week!

What a corker! A sideways glance from the missus. One fold of the arms. One huff of the shoulders. A snort of disdain. Another shake of the head. Not a word wasted. Thoroughly professional performance.

Referee’s whistle goes. Mad Dad leaves the monkey cage. Local juiced-up yoof take the lead again. Respite from psychosis temporary. You’ll forever walk alone!

Pink Floyd take to the pitch, for another rousing chorus of spliffed out bliss and Grantchester meadow escapism which offers relief and transcendence from the daily bollocks that passes for society. But as a tree that stands by the waterside, solitude scores an away win over loneliness. Three points in the bag. Stay up. It ain't finished till they think it’s all over.

OF MiCE AND MENSHEViKS

Trolley misses the poetry of the betting shop, the conditioned air of the public library, the steady hypnosis of consumption, the urban escalator that grinds to a halt at twilight when the zombies go home to change into their  vampire gear, feast on flesh and chips, and plug into the mother ship's mainframe before coffin time calls.  

Now they are more downwardly mobile than most, they have decided to re-locate to the twentieth century. As proud pre-millennials, they've had a gutful of the present perfect and long to return to when they used to matter. Put another way, Melon is considering a move to the metropolis. Trolley has been noting down the sub-text.

"Instead of Shank’s Pony, we can do it proper Troll. Now you’ve gone and taken the significant step of abandonin’ the trolley, you’re as good as weaned, as it were, and we have us, right here, two actual workin’ functionin’ human beans, and one and a half perfectly good bikes. It is to the capital, we must go. We ride to Buckingham Palace. We take up residence in the best unclaimed patch in SW1."

Since his access to female has been cut, and the summer is here, and his allergic reactions to commodity capitalism have subsided, the implicit message needs interpretation. When the happy green wears off, and the cider polish fades, and no amount of cloudless Spanish blue sky, or deep Irish green countryside will sway his mood, the subterranean emotional charge of repressed sexual energy in tandem with substance abuse….blah blah blah…

Trolley eats well and doesn’t believe a word. Fresh fruit and veg. They practically have to give them away. Beige carbohydrates, on the other hand. It's like the great yellow-aped one once said:  "Donuts! Is there nothing you can’t do? Doe!"

"Troll. Troll. Troll… You’ve gone into one again my mate. You gotta stop waking and baking. It’s already past half one. We gotta, at least, get out of Dodge today. "

Back in the land of the living dead, Trolley makes use of the most widely exposed sign language since Liam Gallagher made a telephone call to his ex-wife's solicitor.

"Victor Alpha Roger.. What're you on about, Troll?... "

"Big Fuck Off Telly! The next Mexico match. We need thousands of happy punters, a Mediterranean heat wave and a Zapatista revolution."

Of all his comrades’ crusades against international capital and the flight on reason towards Mars, this was his least fanciful, at least notionally. The overthrow of Nikolae Ceausescu has proved to Melon that to demand the impossible is simply to occupy the sensible middle ground, so certifiably inane is the zero option of there being no other alternative.

It's 1989 again! And Melon and Trolley have mounted mountain bikes and undertaken a solemn journey of intent to the most beautiful traffic islands in London, taking in Hatton Cross, the throbbing gristle of Hounslow, Old Street Roundabout, sauce for digi-gig economy boloney, and finally, The Westway - a living underpass of fertile resistance to the mainstream of contamination and corporate control of the capital.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW APED ROAD SIGNS!

When the fancy grabs the throttle, a left-wing Daily Mail on Anadrex, Melon's rhetorical devices galvanize opinion, even as Trolley's own joined-up discourse leaves him unmoved to act. It is one of many mysteries.

Trolley is too busy looking out for road signs to contemplate such enigma. He pines for the clarity of his Psychedelic AK47.5. Out of battery now. But charged up, it has the power to blow mind-sets. It works by concentrating all the lived wisdom of every cogitation ever made into one blast of psychotropic brain candy. Few can ever hope to derive anything actually useful from all those multiple layers of abstraction and truth. They mainly tend to cancel each other out.

“And where's the wisdom in that, Troll?” says his friend, Melon, a man of action.

Melon can rouse the peasants and the workers. Melon is instrumental. Melon is insurrectional. Melon is drunk.

Trolley remembers his Action Man, the bastard son of American's all-fighting lover man, G.I. Joe, who broke Barbie's plastic heart into smaller and smaller pieces, destined never to go away, but to sit sadly amid the tangle of fishing tackle aboard the world's largest ever floating raft of tat and toxic mesh.

When his man doll melted into Sindy in Trolley's garage, during the one hot summer in his life when he had closed in on the semi-detached nuclear family and a three-square-meals-a-day menu that didn't always come with mashed potato, custard, clips round the ear, Chinese burns, or shut down by insecure care workers on the verge of occupational burnout, he remembers feeling what feeling at home might feel like.

It is the nearest he has ever been to man love. Till now.

Trolley shall have to wait for sobriety to return. Melon is lost for the day. They may have to settle for a lay-by near Junction 38, the wind-up radio and Trolley's beaten up Spanish.

Viva La Revolucion Anti-Capitalista!

 

ViETNAM iS OPEN FOR BUSiNESS

BANKSY v BANKSTERS

YE CAN STiCK YER ROYAL WEDDiNG UP YER ERSE

The Sisters of Mercy plead for pain
The Sisters of Liberty please themselves again
Scream blue murderer into the faces of strangers
Spray holy water into the mangers of Angels
Vote to kill babies /Vote to save lives/ Vote to spite the fates of twisted fish wives

May Day May Day Version 2.0

He's the voice of the Infidel
She's a button stitcher from Cumbernauld
He's Satan's number #1 spy
She's at the Mackintosh factory 9 to 5
He cherishes his Kalashnikov
She loves Strictly and Clyde

May Day May Day Version 2.0

Cardboard cut outs of Presidents
Kim Jun-un and Moon Jae-in stand in
The US sends the real thing: Reality TV on steroids
created by androids/ consumed by dopioids
Even Robots deserve respect, Daddy
I'm not your father, Luke
I'm the bastard off spring of an animatronic marionette
that mated with an AI-powered automaton on Amazon, son

May Day May Day Version 2.0

Somaliland fights Somalia
Somalia fights back
44 degrees in Ramadam
Keep your cool in Karachi
Crash another uber taxi
Ali Bongo's still in charge in Gabon
Tsai Ing-Wei scrambles aircraft for breakfast
in Hopelessly Democratic Taiwan
It's a Doppel Klanger for the Klopp Gang
As they flop in Kiev, billions of chickens die of shame

May Day May Day Version 2.0

Take your hands off our daughters
The Sisters have broken the holy waters
Richard Branson blasts off into deep virgin space
His 7th expedition to spot the pink-headed duck
At £7.80 an hour, who gives a fuck?
Keep your kids dirty; prime them in muck
Rub their faces in the ground
Cake their gobs in crap and bacteria
There're 200,000 more microbes on the fresh spit of a flannel
Than on the sealed rim of the presidential arsehole:
Fact or Fake news?

May Day May Day Version 2.0

Roy of the Rovers returns to the pitch
Back at the Rovers' Return getting pissed
with a sex offender, a youth worker and an alcoholic
- all called Barry
As Harry weds Meghan, not one Afghan cares
That Amal Clooney is radiant in Mustard Gas
Or that the silver fox fails to set off an IED in Prince Phil's glass
Boom Shaka Shaka. The ultimate fairy tale...

Do NOT get distracted; PROFITS will continue to be extracted

May Day May Day Version 2.0

EAT YOUR FROG FIRST

It is a truism universally little acknowledged that two men in want of a good fortune must each be in possession of a sleeping bag.

In all their inebriated deliberations and enquiries, the pair has neglected their laundering. Under the indistinct impression that the Charter of the Forest of 1217 guaranteed freemen such as themselves rights of access, and that anyone posing as a landlord is therefore most certainly a fraudster, over eight centuries of rent arrears have accrued. Now they find themselves without the necessary to lay down their heads, contentment, serenity and lack of adequate planning has delivered them Mediterranean sleeping: al fresco.

Straight out of Dr Cagliari’s casebook, the residents of the civil parish of Harston like to roost in the trees, tweeting, texting and occasionally spamming. Attracted by a DVD, a rogue estate agent swoops down. As its shiny title glints in his face, he flinches and flaps back up to a cypress tree, subject to preservation and order, so as to re-tweet his disgust with inflatable counter-propaganda in the shires.

I, Daniel Bolshevik, indeed!  

The distraction has snapped the travellers out of their procrastination. It has been a while since their last medication. It is apparent, to Trolley at least, that neither the Crash Test Dummy nor the Minister for Re-incarnation has ever been anywhere near Harston in their lives.  

Melon has grasped the frog in both hands. He slurps all over its horny back.  

"We need super strength ciders to take the edge off the psychedelics, Troll..."

Lost to cider-space, there is no stopping him now. The good news is since you don't have to pay for imaginary passengers, they only need two bus passes to get back into town. They are only a few miles hike from the local Park & Strive; they are only minutes away from Bargain Booze Select Convenience.

Another glorious heat-wave in utopia calls. The stodge of topical news cloys: a springy spongiform awash with school dinner treacle that has emerged from out of the central theme. A sofa-bound steroid casualty fat on mixed martial arts and narcissism, the narration has been corrupted by the President's subjective memory again.

Melon is not certain whether the frog has kicked in yet, but he can see a bloated orange blimp on the horizon. He would swear to it. 

He's not the only one.

 

 

A FURTLE iN THE FENS

Years later, as Trolley faces a firing squad of amnesia and neglect, he will forget the distant afternoon on which Melon takes him to Paradise LNR to witness selfishness.

The unstable equilibrium of democratic systems equals more inequality which equals more self-loathing and hatred. The greater the wealth created, the wider the gap betwixt those with and those without. The maths is rudimentary.

As the Grand Mufti takes Kaffee und Kuchen with the Chancellor, Mossad converts cash into public opinion and winds the clock back to 1941. Jesus Saves... in dollars! Vote for Jesus, everyone's favourite self-hating anti-Semite. TRIGGER WARNING! Jeremy Corbyn has left the paragraph.

The attempt to foist a grand Whiggish narrative on events has peeved the pair, whose tendency to resist the social pressures others find hard to turn down has landed them in the middle of nowhere with a pile of unfashionable vocabulary and no agenda to speak of. Trolley is pathologically quiet on the matter, or any other matter for that matter. What matters is reconciliation and truth. The narrative can go fuck itself. It is not the machine we fear, but our response.

Trolley's head Spanish agrees. La memoria es una ficción. La historia es una mentira. Or at least he thinks so. He reads the health warning on the packet: This storification contains almost no or precious little non-organic matter.

There is the rumour of a bus timetable somewhere deep in the pockets of Trolley's memory. A destination has even emerged, but Westphalia will have to wait. They have grown wary of the traffic, and weary of pushing and pulling. So, have discarded their street bikes for now. They can retrieve their belongings, such as they are, on the return leg of their trip fantastic through Babylon by bus pass. A rule of street: make sure nearly everything you own is crap, and then almost nothing gets stolen.

Downstream from the urban ping pong of the city's north side, nestled in a wealthy enclave between early Pink Floyd and the land of Llamas, felicific is Paradise LNR. Spiritual home to Syd "way too much acid, man" Barrett - celebrated for committing famicide, an off-beat world view and a disturbing melody - and accessible to concessionary passengers, tangible to the sensitive and reachable by pedal, it is a reserve of local nature where intrepid, anti-socially housed fig boys can mix and share the favonian head space.

Superbly equipped with a prevailing westerly wind to blow the smell of the skunk and the general pong towards the east, the river Cam forms into a symbol of social apartheid and interesting topic sentence in any sixth-form rap.

Trolley thinks it stinks. His head italics are in agreement with an anonymous public prosecutor from Granada. Por supuesto, todo esto huele a fraude.

As for Melon, he is the star of his own movie. He has learnt much from his association with the region's largest provider of apprenticeships: the drugs trade. A self-directed opportunist, down river has never posed him a serious problem. Flingees and flogees such as he are well-versed in minimal wage fakelore and the misrule of order and law that fervefies his heart of darkness. When not chasing every flibberty gibbet, fizgig and flamfloosie on the manor, that's to say Maureen and her sister, he finds release in fragging a superior officer. Flinging grenades into the nests of those who think twice in one month is a "crime epidemic" helps pass the time in the Fennish sub-urban sprawl.

Trolley has drawn a picture of a person bending over. He has torn out the backside, and in the space, has furtled his forefinger into the cheeks of an ample arse. Bumless, hapless, it is a sorry figure. Melon isn't sorry, he's hungry. He fraunches on the last digestive biscuit and frowns.

Trolley fleshquakes and starts to fibulate. The button comes loose. A freke in the fight for fairplay, Trolley objects, and in Spanish. ¡Cabrón! He mouths.

No fawn guest to fookers or financiers, Melon presses his fingertips to his O-shaped lips, and after a fermata regrets his lack of solidarity, his act of selfishness that has broken their gentleman's code. It is one of their most precious tenets.

- Oops!  Last one in the packet and not shared. Sorry, Troll.

Using up the last of the steam punk vocabulary, Trolley pauses to reflect. It's not as if it's ale. The fascistoid factotum Farrage and his pound shop fallaciloquence would have made much of the matter - as sure as Rachel Booth-Clibborn and Benedict Moore-Bridger are that they would have made a lovely couple, were if not for the quadruple barrel conundrum, Trolley is.

 Time to draw to a close. He traces the shape of a dragon being chased by a pterodactyl. Then, he furtles at Melon. Melon giggles. He is happy for the furtle to be read as a comment on his sexuality. The tension is broken. It is high time they were lathered. It's nearly heroin o'clock, for Christ's sake.

BARRY CHUCKLE iS DEAD

This morning Trolley and Melon are in mourning. The King of Silly is dead, and now nothing makes sense.

The secret to a successful double act: two living members. The secret to dying: knowing when to leave… Off-beat perfect. Pitched precisely at the verge of professionally inept. Theatre of the Absurd for the amateur left-back from Rotherham United reserves that lost his rhinoceros in the library. To me, to you, to me. Some love is so deep it must remain silent...

Melon has removed his check shirt to mark the demise of Chuckle. The soul brother of the act. The dumb dynamo. The dimmer of the dim. Tonto y más tonto. How silly can silly go? No pratfall too prattish. No haircut too daft. No moustache too far.

Dangerously near the point of no return, the deadly serious prospect of a hot-housed planet choking on its own gases, the wildness of silly has created a global scorched earth policy of zombie capitalism. It’s official. Gulp!

Mired in the brown, up to collective necks in deep doo doo, and all the paddle does is stir the shit, there’s really nothing left to do… but laugh. We’ve given birth to our own deaths. That’s one scary mother-nature-fucking-roller-coaster, man. Melon's pants are a brimful of caca. If yours aren’t, perhaps you ain’t been paying close attention, or maybe you're already at the Apocalypse After-Party.

Now more than ever, we need to clown, to laugh, to cry. Post-partum emotions: technology will save us; technology will condemn us.

Without Barry to chuckle at Trolley and Melon are vulnerable to attack from the serious. The local fascist youth are confused. Among formidable wisdoms, the wall next to the underpass is daubed by their seedy misspelt truth, loudly and badly. FREE TOMMY ROBERTSON! Graffiti as early learning social media.

If they had a brain, they’d be dangerous, Troll,” observes Melon.

Ordinarily, he’d whip out his permanent marker to add to the mess. Today, he is sad. So, they walk under the subway that connects with the brand known as Cambridge; the words WITH EVERY BOX OF CORNFLAKES hang in the heat haze. It’s far too hot for Bauhaus 93.

In their contusions of grief, the duo has tired of aimlessness. Their wanderlust is in need of respite. Lacking the locomotion of motivation, they have for the time being fixed their abode in the imagination of another local writer - whose style is less mural.

Even as they remain fictive, they are no longer technically homeless. Trolley and Melon’s raison d’être is to provide wallpaper against which the desirable centre is set in relief, literally. Upstage and entitled to a paying public paying full attention, cheeks of passers-by blow out in recognition that their own fates could be “a lot worse.”

As they cast glances back to screens instantly, they do not see what is in front of them on the park bench: a pair of steel joists that buttress and reinforce the construct construed as normalcy. Across the surface, there exists a matrix of mind control that only a crack smoker can detect. An illusion so full of its own sense of being that it is very nearly real.

Melon has spent the morning trying to remember names: his own, and the other Chuckle, the less good-looking brother, without the serious talent. Trolley’s head Spanish laughs. He hehe hehe hehe. Mangwani Z-trollee. Instinctively, he recalls his own name in Shona. In Zimbabwe, he is a minor celebrity.

Melon’s birth certificate name is something saintly: Peter, Paul, Patrick, Theresa. But, he has always been known as Melon. Serena Williams once lost a tennis match. In her post-partum delirium, after severe traumatic shock and morphia, Melon’s mother lost her mind.

A teenage Caesarean in the 60’s, when they’d open women up like Teddy Bears and weren’t too bothered about leaving the zip dangling and the stuffing coming out everywhere, “Pass my little melon over here then,” is the only utterance his biological mother completed before meltdown. After Melon was scooped out like an over-ripe avocado covered in electric yellow cack, the afterbirth got left inside. The industrial medical practitioners had to go in and retrieve it manually. They dislodged more than afterbirth. As the fruit of her loins was sucked out, Eileen Mary Melia succumbed to reality. A sad arrival.

A sad departure. It is a day of two tales. It is important to appreciate the middle: life.

The local writer has minutes left before society is shut down for the duration of the class war. As he pops out for a filter and a blast of air-con, the pair forges an unfeasible escape down the spiral spine of his abandoned notebook.As the full-blown raspberry is articulated, THBBPTHBPT!!!... Trolley and Melon burst like a lemon. It would have made Barry chuckle.

When the Dead Princess Memorial Park was planned, a crack bench was considered not to be an integral feature.

Pissy jeans around his ankles, a skinny topless man in his late twenties, who could easily pass for 37, sits and smokes free-based amphetamine as he chats to the pigeons. His twitchy fingers twist and turn at a biro. Life is a freshly botched C-section: she has set out her stall.

He reaches for his treasured, wire-bound A4 feint ruled hardback notebook and writes. To me, to you, to me.

CACOSMIA

“Now they were two men, like two strange male dogs, having to sniff one another.”  DH Lawrence

Doing nothing may well turn out to be the best option.

Morally and practically, if what you really really really stamp-your-feet-and-scream want is to put on your favourite stockings and suspenders, and ram a Transit packed with explosives into a Disney Store, doing nothing is worthy of the Nobel Peace prize. Heinz Alfred Kissinger has one, after all.

Doing nothing is preferable to terrorism; doing nothing all day is a full-time occupation. When there is no need to awake bolt upright every dawn, travelate to a designated zone to have your time and motions monetized and your mind sucked out, it can be hard work filling the void. Ask any notorious arms dealer. Giving up the game is a bitch.

Punk helped. Now Abba are back and a trillion dollar Apple has taken a big old gigabyte from the Tree of Information. Go on, you know you want to. Download the app now. Plug into the shiny yellow mainframe so that the rich can harvest your vital statistics. Information retrieval: the new black gold. Give us all your data, OFO - or fuck off! Catchy.

Melon uses standing still as a form of resistance. His £9.99 mobile is symptomatic. No smart phoner he. Mobility is essential for the economically inert. Getting nowhere fast takes years of dedication and half-arsed planning.

He has a new street bike, acquired with the power of observation. The five-minute rule. No takers? Then take it. DJ Shadow is a faded dark pink ladies' mountain bike, super chunky tyres underinflated at a constant 25 P.S.I, half a saddle and a complete set of handle bars.

Even though his senior, Trolley takes lessons from the Master in all things street - save personal hygiene tips. He remembers his first encounter. An acid tang leapt out of Melon's musty togs and assaulted Trolley's entire being till he retched and his ears watered.

These days Trolley is grateful to Sanex. Other toxic aluminium-based product is available. He is minded of the science. We are ten times more bacteria than we are human.

To help kill the planet, Melon blows out of his rusty buttonhole, scratches his William Caxton's and re-adjusts his drawstring. Never Mind the Bollocks!...

Sometimes anarchy creates billionaires. Oftentimes billionaires create mayhem. There are data harvesting machines posing as user friendly bicycles all over town. The busy use them. The bored abuse them. The blind stumble over them.

Despite everything, something needs to happen.



IT DISNAE SMELL

BANK ROBBERS AND LETTERBOXES

The master plan is political
There are men in funny hats in North London
The construction of cliché is key
There are Palestinians on the wrong side of the moon
In plain sight for all to see
There are brown women in black bags hiding in letter boxes

Obsessives fan the flames of freedom
Inside the firewall of Jericho
Your fragment of Stasi
Your piece of Banksy
Your selfie will not liberate you

From self-incarceration
Voters from the Holloway Road

Have long since been redacted
Existential threats come in many forms
As do bank robbers:  the best wear suits not burkas

Nor balaclavas

THE BOUNCING CZECH

His badly bruised face couldn't take the shine off it. This was a once in a lifetime trip, this side of a counter-revolution. It wasn't '68. It was the train to Valladolid. This was the West in all of its finite glory. He didn't waste any time introducing himself. He had no time to lose.

- Hello. You speak English?

- Yeah sure, Stuart answered.

- My name is Pavel. From Prague. We did the formalities, informally and quickly.

- What happened to your face there Pavel? Walk into a wall?, quipped Stuart.

- No. I am attack in park. They stole me my wallet and passport.

- Shit man. How'll you get back to Czechoslovakia without any money or passport?

- This is ok. Because is not my real passport. I have two more. Money is my big problem. Last night I sleep in Retiro park. Some men try to steal from me again but I have nothing to give, This time I fight back better. I have army training. I am national conscript. I must go back to army soon. I give my sergeant some money. He will not tell my captain for 18 days. I have already seen Madrid, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Italy. I have phoney Eurorail ticket.

We put Pavel up that night. He rolled out his army sleeping bag on the floor. An Eastern European Siddartha; he sat bolt upright, legs crossed partaking of the hash we'd scored in the Gran Via and sharing our cerveza with the grim intense pleasure of the condemned man. We should have asked him about the system of repression, about the '68 uprising, the prospects for social change. Instead we sat bleary-eyed and transfixed. His energy was boundless. I don't remember a single thing he said about Czechoslovakia. He was so terse and dismissive. But get him on the subject of Rome or Paris, and he spoke like a man with only nine and half more days to go.

The next morning he was gone. Hours before we'd even stirred, he'd blitzkreiged Valladolid's tourist trail of 12th Century architecture, precious works of art, university buildings and churrerías - delicious sugary high-fat breakfast doughnut bars.. He left his address in Prague and a note: here is map to best churros in town. You must come to visit me one day when finish all this bullshit.

The churros Pavel recommended were the best we'd ever had.

COMMERCiAL INTERRUPTiON

The sun, having nothing better to do, shone out of Samuel Beckett's arse. Aside from a few wisps, even the clouds couldn't be much bothered. Another hot one. Before the end of the night was out, much sweating would be done.

Problematics hang over the dramatic present like a change in tense. Western power declines into degeneracy and shopping. Local non-conformists walk past. The precariat toast the top of another fine morning. Read all about the Great Degeneration! On your Kindle in under a minute. Yours 'til the Sixth Extinction.

Trolley and Melon's inconspicuous leisure is a sociological marvel. For the sake of appearances only, the pair can go weeks without lifting a finger.

Narratively speaking, their non-productive use of time is the death knell of good story-telling. The stories that are told tend to involve highly adventurist leaders who fly by the seat of their pants, as political systems misfire and fail left right and centre, and the rampant maximization of commodities blows up in our faces. Publish and be damned; self-publish and be ignored.

Trolley and Melon seek sanctuary from the many-headed technological hydra that consumes creation and plays the piper's tunes. To regress to the 20th century seems sensible, but there are just too many punch lines and Melon can't resist a good detour.

At the periphery of Melon's vision, there is a leading European statesman having a painful attack of sciatica in full view of the cameras. To keep in with the hipster vote, he manages to pass it off as a regular NATO session with his chums as doomsday clocks another minute closer to midnight.

With nothing much to do, time suddenly appears to be of the essence. The deadline surfing Presidential blimp has burst open spewing toxic orange bile over three counties. Drunken Euro-accented bad guys have parachuted across the Fenlands in a geographical fandango worthy of the name fiasco.

Trolley to the rescue. From out of his jacket pocket, he produces the solution: special grade duct tape. There is almost no problem in the first world that the American military has not solved with the power of Johnson & Johnson's Duck Tape. You'd be quackers to use anything else!

Fire in the sky. Hell underwater. Paradise LNR in Granchester. Melon looks forward to duct taping himself to the burning skyscraper. Jean-Claude Juncker is on the record, spouse, Christiane Frising has insisted it be called Jesus Tape.

It is regrettable, but necessary; stupid, but enjoyable. And at times, it is hard to tell if the Gods of narrative even care.

Trolley and Melon are still very visibly sober. They await the return of the Fennish weather with relish. Onion and tomato.

ANTi-GOVERNMENT WARNiNG



Remember
If it smells like bullshit
And if looks like bullshit
In all probability
It is at least 5% horseshit