Periwinkle. Punctum.
Bullwinkle. Punch-in.
Wrangle. Rankle.
Tangle. Tingle. Tumble.
Breath.
Rumble. Ramble.
Raggle-taggle. Tittle-tattle.
Bedraggled.Bedazzled.
Numerous subspecies of lemur and marmot. The territorial jousting of small birds.Herds of zebra.
Duels in Turkmenistan. Extravagant moustaches.An army of civil servants.
Rust-belt towns.Immaculate furrier.Yak herder.
Humble. Hernia. Fumble.
Feral FeudalDeferral Funeral
Fumigate.Infuriate.Infernal.
Internal.ArousalAvowal.A vowel.
A tealA towelA ternAstern
Avast.A vestApieceA pest.
Vermin.Goering.Bull ring.Bowling.Bowing.Scraping.
Lady-in-Waiting.
Stolen. Beholden. Embolden. A rodent. ArraignmentApartment. Department. Deportment. Deployment. Anointment. Appointment. Goulash. Ghoulish. Foolish. Furnace. Furnish. Thunder. Asunder. A cinder. Timber. Tumbler. Timbre. Tamper. Temper. Tundra.
Whitechapel Bell Foundry._________________________------next!
Belarus. Bellicose. Belly dance. Benidorm. Benilyn. Becotide. Lots of buildings made of reflective glass. Cruise liners which were once oil tankers or aircraft carriers. Spy satellites. Bugging devices. Security breach.Bunions. Bullion. Bouillon. Bunyan. Bunyip. Recreational crime.
In a new and daring scheme poor countries are to be paid to fight wars for rich countries. The Minister for Defence, Sir Anthony Montague said, in a press conference this morning “We’ll supply arms and other essentials of course, and rest assured all equipment will be of the very highest quality. We will also provide training and ensure all wars are fought fairly and within the boundaries of the Geneva Convention. All the third world need contribute is manpower. These are countries already accustomed to war and hardship and for them the cost of human life is cheap. Believe me when I say we’re paying well over the odds.” It’s one of those rare and exemplary deals in which each side profits, not least because many poor countries have a chronic problem with overpopulation. As well as providing jobs and a much needed boost to failing economies, population levels will be drastically reduced meaning more food, jobs and housing for the survivors. In addition to providing employment aid will be increased to all participating nations.Never again need we be faced with sobbing mothers or maimed soldiers on our television screens. We needn’t worry about our young men being trained to be killers or the threat of bombs falling on our cities. The blood will no longer be on our hands, we’ll subcontract it.Poor countries provide the solution for a number of the developed world’s most pressing problems. Take waste for instance, whether it be industrial, radioactive or simply household. Many of our landfill sites are already full to bursting and strict anti-pollution laws have tied the hands of some of our biggest corporations. No problem. Simply pay the poor nations to process it. Or what about overcrowded prisons? Let Africa have our criminals, they’d jump at the chance if we offered the right economic inducements. What applies to waste and criminals applies equally to the refugee crisis. No problem is insolvable; it just requires a little touch of the visionary. In fact, why should we do anything? Those people can run our transport system, supply and distribute our food, police our streets, staff our hospitals, maintain our sewage works, teach our children, work in the service and hospitality industries, cook, clean, sell, build, manufacture and so on, leaving us free to dedicate ourselves solely to governing and the culture industries. All great civilizations were built on such foundations.Buzzards. Bustards. Venal. Vestal. Vested. Vichy. Velodrome. VATICIDE!____________________________---
next!
picalo. picador. pickaninny.pick. puck. peck. peek. pack. pock. pox.keel. cale. coal. cool. coo. coup. coot. cleat.clash. clack. clique. cleave. clan. clap. clog. clod. cloth.kith. kin. kip. pith. puff. pique. pec.
children unable to procure drugs have been hurling themselves in Londons canals in the hope of contracting a new strain of Wiles disease said to cause fevers, night sweats, giddiness, disorientation and astonishingly vivid hallucinations.
The Express have been doing a phone in should refugees be sterilised before becoming eligible for benefits yes or not sure? but that's not really news..._______________________-----
next!We’ve always been an Aldershot family, as long as records go back’
‘The oldest things in the world cease to act as agents, silently retreating into millennia of memories.Memories not just of men, their kings and queens, heroes, leaders and rebels…Their wars, revolts and revolutions, times of plenty and times of poverty, moving from victory to defeat and back again, bountiful harvests and failed harvests, strong leaders and weak leaders, the births and deaths of religions, beliefs, scientific theories, superstitions, rituals, bloodlines, cities, civilizations, languages…Memories not just of the forebears and forerunners of man, the bipedal apes, the evolutionary dead-ends and giant leaps, the extinction of species, mutations in DNA, forests turning to deserts, oceans to forests, deserts into citiesBut memories of creaking slow-moving ice giants, memories of the land separated from the sea, memories of primordial chaos, memories of the truth of every cosmology/’G.A Moore.
The mur mur
‘Those images which won’t form, which coquettishly elude the gaze of the mind’s eye, which remain indefinite and tremulous , we sense their presence, teasing, at the edge of vision .The same sirens have driven great men to madness, as, inflamed with a terrible passion they seek follow the song to its source.’A.C. Pendrake.
of a fountain in a tube station.In the morning the fields are covered with frost.
‘Completely unaware of my body and any sense of self, time or place, auditory, tactile and visual hallucinations of dazzling detail and lustre filled the whole of my consciousness. I drifted through the plains of space, warm and bathed in light and colour. Planets and stars hove into view and I was buffeted by competing gravitational fields. There was music, music which was pure sensation, the ears, erogenous zones tickled by air molecules. Whenever I think of the music I heard then and I think of it often, I feel an ache of deep loss and sadness, so far away does that beauty seem to me now, the gates of paradise opened, and then closed again, forever. Bliss-struck, sweet waves of bliss racked me and all I saw and heard was just an expression of that bliss, that feeling of a pleasure almost too great to bear.’Greg, acid casualty.
‘Memories can come to seem like locked rooms and the experiences and sensations we associate with these memories can be thought of as locked up inside these rooms alongside the events themselves.’
BB Belle.
Nightfires which make silhouettes of us all. Frightened birds seek the sky.________________________----
next!
a romance.
in summer, idling away the lengthened days by the fountain in Victoria Park. Cassandra would catch the swans by their necks, and would break them, almost delicately. Indeed, her grace and economy of movement is what intitally attracted me to her. her neck is itself swanlike.
then she nicked a young boy's frisbee and tossed it into the branches of an extremley tall tree. i laughed along with her, but uneasily. her sense of humour is cruel and she has little sense of where the boundaries lie.
and yet, she sings so beautifully. do you what song she sang to me that day? she sang me the song about Skye and bonnie Prince Charlie. she teased me and said i liked to dress up as a girl too. it did needle me, for i feel she is constantly casting aspersions on my masculinity. it makes me unsure of myself. before with girls i always felt in control, they looked up to me, reassured by my easy dominance, but she, she has emasculated me.
sometimes she laughs when we make love, or does things i'm not comfortable with, like sticks a finger up my arse when i'm going for it, or, without warning, yanks at a clump of pubic hair, squeezes my balls, or lets her teeth sink into my cock, causing me to yell in pain.
it's worst of all when her friends come round. i feel as if they all know something compromising about me, as if they are all secretly sharing a joke at my expense. encouraged by their cackles of glee she devises more and more elaborate ways to humiliate me. she makes jokes about the size of my organ and my inadequacy benaeath the sheets. she mocks my job, my income and my prospects. i don't know how much i can take.
sometimes she can be gentle and will coax intimacies and confessions from me. she encourgaes me to share my feelings, but when i confess weakness or reveal my vulnerabilty she turns on me at once and accuses me of effeminancy. she will not hesitate to use information gleaned from our most intimate moments together against me, bringing it up in front of my work colleagues and other people i feel it is important maintain face with.
my mother says i look much thinner ever since i starting seeing her. it's true, i look a mess. she's trying to take my pride, she's trying to destroy me. friends tell me to leave her but they don't understand. they don't understand how i'm bound to her, how i'm dependant on her, addicted to her. i would endure any torment to watch the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, to see that soft ring of bellyflesh spill ever so slightly over the top of her trousers, to see a flash of pale ankle between sock and trouser cuff. these are the things i live for. to be a worm in the soil she treads on would make my heart sing._________________________----
next!
‘of course they remain the scrawlings of dilettantes and dabblers, a product of a deep-rooted self-delusion’
‘mawkish, over-egged, impoverished.’
‘intellectually bankrupt. Politically unengaged. Insipid. Sentimental tosh of the most contemptible kind.’
Hundreds of Chinese migrants try to look inconspicuous, waiting, at 6 in the morning on the edges of Hackney marshes, waiting to be commissioned to sell pirate DVDs, teddy bears and plastic toys which flout EU safety regulations, handheld electric whisks, packs of pornographic playing cards, bootleg CDs, battery powered pendants with flashing bulbs…
‘One of them Kosovos come up to me the other day you know. Leather jacket, mobile phone, all gold on him, and he was asking for money you know! I couldn’t believe it! They must have some type of scam running. They all got bare money’
the owners of rag trade sweatshops. Smugglers of illegal immigrants. Men selling women to other men in East End pubs.Battery farms in which pigs are kept, upside down, legs thrust through holes in the tops of the cages. Hens with clipped beaks, legs cut off at the ankle, wings stapled to their flanks. Gorillas dressed as bell boys in expensive hotels. Cows with the names and addresses of brothels branded in huge letters on their sides, left to roam the streets as mobile hoardings. A sedated bull charges woozily towards the matador who blinds him with a skilful thrust to the eye. OLE!
Needlepoint.
A lighthouse keeper teaches himself Russian long into the early hours of the morning.A slender schoolboy lifts dumbbells, face red, veins bursting from the temples, arms quaking with the strain, goaded on by the hope of one day humiliating his tormentors. A woman rubs at her verruca with a pumice stone, squeezes the blackheads on her nose, shaves the hair from her armpits…
‘don’t phone my phone again you slag. When I come round your yard tomorrow I want head, and I’m bringing my mate with me.’
Knitting patterns.
Penguins languish in concrete pens, sliding listlessly down the slopes into lukewarm water.Some chimpanzees masturbate incessantly, while others beat their head against the walls, in the hope of dashing out their brains. Females offer swollen rumps to the dominant males who just sit there, staring into space.
The television whispers to us in our lonelieness, promises us companionship, and in our desperation we sit with it, for hours we gaze into it until to switch it off seems saying goodbye to a lover. We sit there before a cold grey screen for a while, hugging our knees to our chest, feeling sad.
Young girls, raised from birth in laboratories are force fed junk food in government experiments, ballooning in size till their legs are unable to support the weight of their bodies.
Frolic.
The electronic tag triggers an alarm if the curfew is broken. The subject must adhere to a strict timetable designed to inculcate discipline and obedience. The subject is woken at a regular hour, must eat a prescribed breakfast at a prescribed time, must exercise all major muscle groups for a period of one and a half hours, must socialise with friends chosen for him for this purpose for a period of 2 hours, must complete an intellectual challenge daily, chosen according to his mental ability, a problem of mental arithmetic, a cryptic crossword, a translation of a poem from a foreign language or some other such task, must spend time alone with his thoughts, must go outside and commune with an element of nature, be it a river, a hill, a meadow, must nurture his creativity through approved outlets, the painting of picturesque landscapes in watercolour or the composition of love songs on an acoustic guitar (these are to be chaste and heterosexual)…
Tomboys play kickups in an empty car-park till the sun begins to set and the encroaching gloom makes it difficult to see the ball.
A boy who’s never been in love composes love poetry
‘how do I love you? Let me count the ways. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, no, I grow tired, there are too many ways’
random acts of violence. Eruptions of the repressed. Explosions of real bombs. Real deaths. Real grief.
Tummyrot.
An Indian saint, penis sellotaped to thigh so it can never rise erect, feeding on sunlight and dirt, a stick held in his left hand to beat away any woman who dares approach, a stick in his left hand to beat away worshippers and curiosity seekers.
A child captures a pigeon and methodically strips it of every feather before setting it free.
Rainwater collects in bomb craters, miniature lakes for boys to launch paper boats upon.Children collect shrapnel, helmets, trophies from fallen aeroplanes, pieces of fuselage, a propeller, instruments to measure speed or altitude, chase each other with guns from fallen soldiers, dare each other to take shortcuts through minefields.
The execution of the king. A sad looking head in a basket.
A bruise, brown, outlined in purple, spreads across a thigh.
‘I have to sort of watch my back round this area now, cos some boy tried to jack my phone just last night so I kicked the shit out of him, badly, but if I see him the next time, and he’s got boys with him, I’m gonna have to fucking run hard.’
Some man from the caryard said he’s give me a tenner if I bring him some alloys…
Cycles of violence, ever escalating.Sores. Lesions. Wounds. Fractures. Internal bleeding.
Hoods pulled up, scarves cover faces. Knives tucked into waistbands. Cudgels, lengths of chain, claw hammers, baseball bats, iron bars, sharpened screwdrivers, bottles concealed under jackets.
Heroin addicts dreaming of a complete retreat into mental space, a way to lock the door behind them.
Charlatans, harridans and mountebanks.
A boy catches himself gazing at another mans chest.Feels guilty admiring the curve of a calf muscle.A long fingernail raked across a cheek.
A naked moon._________________________----