i learnt from the A-team how to build a time machine out of a toothbrush, a betamax, some copper wire & a cake tin, and went back and visited myself when i was fifteen only for my past self to laugh in my present face, steal the device's remote control away & leave me stranded in 1998, whilst he escaped to the present day. see i'm an embarassment to my younger self, i've sold out every other naive ideal he ever had, and to him i must resemble some bandwagon jumper or a junk sculpture turned back to junk. school was cancelled today due to falling planes, and no-one even questioned my sudden growth in height & stubble, i bumped my head on the hotpipes i bruised my chickenscratched face, claimed i fell off my bike when i can't even ride one, as me & yasson watched mr. thomas crash his car into southbourne co-op like so many lego houses, steve declared a national holiday with a pirate theme, every isolated community is invited to swim and avoid giant spider like robots laying waste to the landscape, see you can tell a dream apart by the tiny details like a green t-shirt that should have been red, or what's apparently a washing powder bauble on my mother's head, or a club where no music plays but everyone's dancing the same in which you're trying to keep a tablespoon of gear & golden syrup upright in your jacket pocket so as not to be mack.

an electrician sparked me out. end of. and of tradition? chris fell off the wagon and he loudly admits it. no-one heeded my decree to stop being serious and be jovial, business business: an art exhibition in a mental hospital featuring peace signs and smiley faces. recieving dust & blims upsets me more than errant memories, jeff. how could a blind man play pinball? i'm so hungry my jaw hurts. "he used to dress up as a tree" we saw bonafide trainspotters at fratton station on a fly specked old hamburger in alan's bin day or more likely pizza crust finally something that crumbles another dull football day with stylus in hand and no jump button the source of much amusement obviously in every advert break in this narcoleptic week. i can't stop moving slowly even when asleep my ears fold up close up colour inkblots in credenzas in the most inappropriate places face down in a shopping trolley my coat ballooned in heavy wind and nearly blew me down the street backwards it was like when my dad tried to put the fence back up during the hurricaine of 1987 i watched from the kitchen scratching pock marks out of my chickenpox spots. snorted an eraser deep into my sinuses, i stomped on her fingers even though she bought me a pencil case, we were told not to beat the haemophilic kid until he bleeds, but being kids this just encouraged us further. the gravel walls of the outdoor classroom huts were our favourite thing to throw him into repeatedly. i hid my suspension letter unopened under my bed with my millenium falcon i never should have scribbled all over in biro and i came in the next day and the bastards didn't tell me for two days i was suspended. an over zealous pupil brought a landmine into school and nearly blew us all up it turned the headteacher's hair grey and he was alright when he wasn't directing the shool play i got demoted to being the innkeeper again after i fell off the stage as a lamb in my first nativity play no wise man or angel with crimped hair & ornamental harp no wings just one line and an offstage role in a pointless amd humilating costume. (so i messed it up and said there was room in the inn, that'll learn 'em) i have a date on my estranged dad's birthday, april the 4th with a care & support worker who just got a divorce she's the first attractive woman that i've met in months we're going for coffee, i'd rather get drunk her turn-offs include: bad breath, book burnings and people investigated for claiming benefits whilst working when the DSS turn up outside your house with a copy of your first album on the car stereo blaring out with disappointed and accusing looks fixed on their plastic faces. discussing the concept of mickey mouse courses (definition: an enjoyable to attain qualification that will sadly have no bearing on getting a real job at all e.g. my A-S level in film studies and most creative vocations much to the school-leaver's naive dismay) "i should have paid more attention in class..." "everyone messes up their first year in college..." "my careers advisor told me i'd be a street sweeper..." "my careers advisor told me to drop out." "i wanted to be an astronaut when i grew up.... or a dinosaur." stout stick & snuffbox in hand i seek solace in sour times lining my stomach with soap & lanolin drinking sheep dip filming myself being sick on the camera in my phone i haven't topped up once since i bought it as new with about a hundred dodgy texts of pre-pubescent phone sex on it, i was bumped again but i couldn't be bothered to get a refund or an A & E I.O.U. "masturbating into a severed fish head" or "pulling undigested peanuts from your anal beard?" these are the most stomach churning words i can think to write. me, fred schneider and the scatman went to karaoke night where yasson got thrown off the mic for beatboxing, but it was better than his 'come on eileen'. the rhythmn of this bouncing dot on the lyrics is all off and i could do this rap if i wasn't distracted by the fact that it's out of time, honest. the built in sell-by date of referencing popular culture is nothing but spit n' sawdust in a mist of drizzle. nitpickers draw an artist's impression of the big bang and claim all authenticity: this is an impossibility. the longest time a headless chicken has ever been kept alive for is eighteen months, it drunk through it's neck before it choked on it's lunch of spit n' sawdust in a spit n' sawdust pub. i fair lost my appetite for surf n' turf etc....... my creditors are closing in i can smell their breath in debt and out of my depth resurfacing with the bends. eve wanted a new fig leaf so the serpent offered her a low interest overdraft on her bank of eden account, and that's how man was thrown out.... [some sort of vague moral about temptation] money's made of paper so it doesn't grow on trees it grows within them like a tapeworm or a fatal disease. cut off your nose to spite your face. van gogh's ear was lost in the post, he blamed the post office. he must be turning in his grave (unless he was cremated) to see picasso's name associated with distinctly dull cars a blatantly second rate legacy and as for art? it's dead. all that's left is a petulant poltergeist throwing pigments at critics with cataracts grown over eyes collage courses just teach you to promote and advertise emulate? i'd rather bite myself like the above lines. and i preferred professer burp's bubbleworks over any rollercoaster. the queues of screaming children and the over salted / over sugary food. but anything is preferable to this circus with it's one way gift shops in which the alarm goes off if you try and exit without buying anything / purchasing. trapped in a rickety mine cart ride: the dizzying highs, the terrifying lows, the screaming on the way down middles, and the backwards corkscrew into the bottomless spiked pit (the spikes are on the side, by the way, as it's bottomless) the clowns on the log flumes are wielding lumberjack's axes: "that's part of the fun" and if you get disfigured horribly you get kidnapped to avoid any sort of compensation issues and the rapids in the swimming pool nearly swallowed me up like the toddlers in the apparently bottomless ball pit (not to be confused with the aforementioned spiked pit which is also bottomless) all this under a black-on-black striped motif tent lit by neon black floodlights and other science of non-sense. we thought it was a port in a storm of endless void, a warp point, if you will, now we're forcibly re-employed, trapped in mascot's outfits handing out explosive toys. drunken artist's impression of an evil clown: it's not very good really. england floated away, joined the northern continent.

a man once said to me: "you should watch the news more and read more poetry" i replied: "all speech is poetry and all poetry is news. what would you rather do? get a celebrity scoop from a heartfelt song? or from someone who met them once on a one night stand allegedly? i often listen to the speech patterns below me as a melody in the morning inbetween sleep and last day of school dreams or losing luggage in the woods dreams or... you get the idea, i set the scene. frank zappa's music was based on speech patterns and not just the notes to hit or sing, plus theres john cage and karlheinz stockhausen, and any mispronouncement is entirely my own fault... it's bruised hope splattered across the catseyed road with six foot high speed bumps and the wreckage of dead drunks to either side of us, my pet hate for today is the cyclist who thinks he's playing paperboy in the neighbourhood of gargoyles, or the depressed snow leopard in a dusty zoo cage next to that of the rhinos shorn of horns- a grey stump with a white spot where an aphrodisiac once was snatched like an adult says "got your nose!" to a gullible child. i'm sowing the ground with salt, the elephants with stubs of tusks may trample mud huts but not tudor mansions unless they're very large elephants. and a giraffe's legs are naturally vulnerable to snapping under their own weight unless they're very small giraffes. that lion don't want to play badminton with the middle class smart house wife- he wants to eat her arm, midget relative." "nothing is ever finished, only abandoned, micheal jackson wrote parts of the soundtrack for sonic the hedgehog 3 for god's sake. i was originally a sketch artist but now i enjoy exploring other media like getting pissed in front of the TV and doing fucking nothing... then i wake up in a bed of my own hair to discover to my horror i've gone bald in the night and now i closely resemble friar tuck... fuck." "i put it down to poor diet...." "i put it down to poor diet...." "i put it down......................." i am viewed as having lapsed into the renegecy of obscurity because i don't brag, battle, boast, bitch, big-up or bout with the cypher open mic crowd. instead i'm writing the album about dream geography of childhood, mother earth and the man in the moon- their affair was a big bang. these are lyrics that you wouldn't want to ad-lib in case you looked bad because you probably can't understand them anyway- whoops, i'm sinking to your level now, back to bad habits, back to old habits, the director says-"CUT!" thatched house aflame, do the painfully slow old man shuffle, the ether walk. what would you take out first from your burning building? your photo albums record collection PC or maybe just the fire? down at the surgery and we are strangers we are sitting as far from each other as humanly possible. this is no hospital bed with a clipboard and maybe a graph in front or a heartbeat waveform shape on a monitor, it's bedside manner is always impeccable. the man in front of me drove tanks over trenches at my age now all he has to show for it is a tarnished medal and a hearing aid he says: "the face on mars is a chamber made of clouds" a kernel of truth: if you heard the ringtone of a phone buried underground would you dig it up in time to answer? she powerdressed to the point that i couldn't trust her. is multitasking really the only thing that seperates us from the animals? are we bottlenose dolphins jumping through hoops? who would you throw out first from a hot air balloon; sigmund or shakespeare? i'd rather have a grassy knoll or hill to roll down any day... this is the song of the indecisive skin shedder, the only horoscope sign that's an inanimate object. but what rankled most was the office she worked in shredding paper wasting talent by jingo! my girlfriend gave birth to a kitten with bird flu and the vetinarian's reception queue is a conga line of sleepwalkers, a zombie procession of rubbernecked car crash reality TV. you're lagging and the internet is swelling with the websites of the dead, now everyone can be remembered forever... welcome to the house of the hungry ghosts, situated in the village of maudlin, outside chichester. singing the shop window bed blues as i sleepwalk down the middle of the road. the pubs have all closed and i've missed the last bus, there's no streetlights or pavements and i'm walking in the woods... i encounter a cycling waiter on his way back from wetherspoons who i vaguely remember yasson introducing me to earlier in the then rosy alcoholic haze... sitting with tom of hakuna pesa outside the cathedral gates and we're debating on "how the things you own, own you" inbetween saving money spiders, but i love my duvet too much and never enjoyed the hippy campsite expeditions except for when we had a 50-strong forest game of manhunt.....

it's the hi-larious decline of the cargo cultists and the voice of god that washed up ashore we were stick figures hiding behind oversized masks around the television a religion was formed. it's the hi-larious decline of the cargo cultists and the voice of god that washed up ashore a beach by the husk of a burnt out helix with yellow windowpanes like cracked tooth and jaw two women above gossiped from opposite bedsits from a distance their symmetry it resembled eyes it's brow was the spine of a satellite dish ginger ivy creeping up on all sides accidental erosions mouldered grown into noseholes a mossy facade across which a moustache climbed drainpipes made the faint shape of a pair of glasses then i blink again, it was just a trick of the light do you ever get the feeling that you're being watched? following crackle of white noise i discovered the box that became the basis of all our religion that became the basis of all our nationalism. we were stick figures hiding behind oversized masks we really knew nothing of the ways of the mainland we dredged up the relics of an idealised past we should have buried our shovels and stuck to whaling the wind up merchants brought their documentary makers and before we knew it we were reality TV these days eveybody's been a celebrity... therefore we bankrupted the media overnight. waxlit with what white noise looks like. we bark & bite ourselves, pandora's idiot box still educated us of no longer did we have a direction at all we learned the meaning of the word 'superstitious' incurred a hefty fine from the money-wth-menaces BBC just as eskimo's igloos became council estates i say tuck in your shoelaces, we have work to do we are taking this to the counsel. it's the hi-larious decline of the cargo cultists and the voice of god that washed up ashore we were stick figures hiding behind oversized masks around the television a religion was formed. and we never knew that we needed a license....

you can't collage without content, can't make a silkscreen out of a sow's ear can't montage the unconscious into flowers with teeth but they can grow in the gutter outside the bathroom window opposite mine now that's tenacity of life and a sense of wondermental well-being that is all the more euphoric for being so fleeting i'm lying trying to convince my ex that i haven't done a bean in.... "four, five, three years" to make her look like bigger addict as she sits with her nipples clearly showing to this whole sordid club and my mates raise eyebrows across the room in disbelief at my made up on the spot spiel particuarly alan whose wearing his best concerned face under the sickening neon. all the taxidermied animals came back to life one by one. the mouse tail sticking out of the snake's mouth looks like an elongated tongue. a sight not for the lily livered: "you have the liver of a lily!" and a high disposable income is the stuff of ex-spoilt brat dreams. ride my high horse to my soapbox, a hot bath is like a warm bed that scalds the itch off, there's more than one way to rut your way out of a rut. bitten off more than you can fit in your mouth? dislocate your jaw and twist round to get the pink leg sticking out at a jaunty angle. watch the lump on it's way down.... the red carpet has teeth, it spits in the plug socket dereliction of duty, kitchen choking on black binbags waving a clenched fish, and when someone finally cleans it the white surfaces blind you..... in spring i make from my second duvet a vaguely female shape to cling to while i dream awake playing snakes & ladders with monopoly hotels on cracked crystal staircases. one misplaced nasal hair can set off a sneeze... the red carpet has teeth, this is written in condensation it feels so good to breathe after attempting to remove the hiccups. two schoolgirls take turns trying to rip flora's head off and a winged rat disease bag pigeon hops by on one leg. i communicate with amy via a system of winks nudges and kicks under the table when retaking your GCSEs don't choose to sit with your best friend, your secret girlfriend and your dealer and still expect to pay attention, blaming failures on other's distractions when i was better at the latter than anyone else.

i plunged into the pre-rendered realm of the unpixellated. a riot of undead in a trampled muddy field. the weather so mild i went to the pub in my dressing gown and explained how to levitate in the meditation position for brief periods to a crowd of disbelieving faces. buffeted back & forth like cows and cattle prods in pinball tables - whatever happened to them in arcades? now it's all fruit machine LCDs and pushing pennies what happened to the gleaming pristine future? i thought we'd all be living on the moon by now... with canines in tiny spacesuits and cars that fold into small briefcases. this is written in pouring rain, drawn in quarters like an exquisite corpse of taxidermy bought at auction a tamagotchi with real organs spliced by some franken or ein-stein i used to minesweep thats stealing pints from paying punters i'm not proud, just hungry it's nothing to shout about too loud, it's ugly. it's a barbeque in april shower: i am soaked to the skin. does eating nothing but chips constitute a balanced diet? spiked on staple spot of blood an elusive splinter, an enigma wrapped within an enigma and other tongue twisters, and your sister, she has twice as many times of the month. my clapping sole and compound blister led to massive callus lumps on the outer edges of each big toe on my two feet. from space you can still see the most yellow house in southsea ever, according to pete. bewailing your lot, a catalogue of errors. i shaved my head and rubbed it on the moulting cat to get a full head of tabby hair straight back no quickfire cure to pattern baldness as you still need some stubble to work as velcro to attatch to the fur of feline i recommend 0.5 grade and an elderly moggy such as mister roberts' cat bobby who's nicely docile due to her going senile she sometimes walks into doors but can still jump a storey down to reach the ground floor when it's feeding time leaving a toupee trail behind in the wake of where her tail once was i hope she gave hairballs to the dog that bit it off that's bobbykins the snob cat i got my wig off.

the meatmarket's just a shark bloodlust feeding frenzy with neon lighting the colour of gore. the cattle advertise each orifice in turn, drenched in sweat & glitter. a thousand conflicting & acidic scents blend into one overpowering smell: desperation. waveform radar fever dream: rubbing sleep from eye's crease we realised swiftly we were still in the game. t-shirt tan sunstained looking like i work with both arms warmly snug up a cow's arse. there are 5 ways to ascertain if life's too good to be true. my ideal woman's a gorgon with octopus hair and massive stocks & shares in unfair business practices instead i'm stuck with this backwards ex desk job pig who insists on going clubbing, on which i wish nothing but a pox. anyway i dance like a mime whose really stuck inside an invisible box. spin drunkenly and take off that's when i realised the vacancy in the rave scene. the beats were in time but nothing was in key. it's more fun chewing gum and spitting it out to... stick to someone's shoes.... "stop grumbling, these are the best seats in the whole cinema" said a student nurse as she tapped my shoulder and i end up championing to her / extolling the virtues of dying underage when it was still exciting to get served. can't recreate in this sponsored factory always nerve-wracking enough wearing my friend's watch. knackered cursing my useless morals. it wasn't like this when i hid my school uniform under my abnormal clothes at the chichester inn, in chichester, imaginative name i know. i hate bunking the train ah for a freedom bus pass to go back to school taking only a change of clothes. i might as well wrap this scarf round my whole face for the relief of all bystanders. time punctuated by crunch of throat sweets.... dear diary: stop reading me. half the pages are missing the margins remain hinting the jagged edges of events censored removed i've been misconstrued. a modulated signal (repeat x2) the official measurements kept in temperature sensitive rooms in abandoned office blocks windows peppered with pebbleholes. i sit in collapsing car park wrapping xmas presents for the girl whose about to become my ex. cut to watching daytime television with your mum so we don't discuss anything untoward or on a subject you want to avoid (like coitus) portion out the rationed intake of mother's medication and let's feed her also on false smiles and forced jollity that will keep the soldiers smiling in the trenches. "we can't possibly miss the paint drying show!"

in a haunted shopping centre, two failed musicians on pest control compare notes on ideas they had before more successful artists- who of course got the chance to use them before us, lucky cunts. i brandished my holy water super soaker and i returned from the cellar levels to hide my tools safely away from the unknowing public up above, concerned only with groceries and what to wear tonight. i'm unsurprised, end of overtime unpaid as usual we retired to our usual pub...encountering an outlandishly dressed stranger who gives us a conspiratoral nudge and says: "i've got this new drug, it's kind of like being drunk, the come-ups like a punch in the face from an 8 foot punk, it's even better than the bug powder found in 'naked lunch', trust me, try it once and ervery other substance will be suddenly defunct" i took two and thanked him, haggled on the price cause they resembled aspirin, got another pint each and sat back down in semi-sarcastic anticipation of being bumped as all experienced drug cynics do. the first thing i noticed was the slight pulsing of the brickwork like the pub had become the stomach of some vast undersea beast, or the palpitating heartbeat from the interior of a colossal organic vessel. i shrunk to the size of a white blood cell and the colours began to melt and dribble to the bottom of the plasma screen like everyone's faces were bleeding off, and outside the cement rose and fell with the same pulse like the earth was struggling to breathe under the road and suffocating, and the clouds rearranged into indistinct shapes & symbols, a man turned from his mirror and grinned at us from the sky- which frankly scared the shit out of both of us, really." i took a trip through a ghost town of creaking sails, and i came up on my very first boat ride to hayling island where the first thing i saw was the last thing you'd want to see in this situation. i made it to funland and viewed a city in the sea- fifteen minutes there & back to the mainland to snort ritalin with 'the best of friends' crew, two smokers in the corner pull a teenth in a buche each. i mong in contrast to the hyperactive witch on my right, and her accomplice keeps trying to guess the skeptical's horoscopes and interpret their meaningless dreams of guinea pigs, and in the middle of this i watch a couple have an unintentionally hilarious arguement about where to sit. we try and listen to one half with sympathy when his girl's out the room, but none of us can help ourselves laughing in his confused face. sorry dave, but we're unable to take anything seriously in this state; "i think the two people tripping in this room are acting the most sane" i would later in my diary somewhat dubiously claim. in discussing the ambience of this room... wallpapered with tiny interlocking cogs of light, resplendent in their intricacy. in tense anticiption he munches on the wrapper of his cigarette packet. losing your phone on the train, the situation as follows: (1) phone is left on train between portsmouth & brighton (2) on ringing phone, a girl answers and tells jack she'll hand it in (3) on ringing the phone even later out of sheer paranoia, we find the girl has recorded her own answerphone message that begins: "hi, this is jack.." (4) several months later, the phone (supposedly still in the lost property box of brighton train station) turns up in the window of a second hand shop in portsmouth with the same identifying toothmarks on it's antenna..... but back to the room. i'm testing defences of net curtains. it's messy acid, so time for a bong. using a bit of paper as a prop or visual aid it was explained: "don't look in mirrors" sit in the shed playing bongos or dance in the hallway or maybe just watch the posters coming alive. she stole your seat out of principle for a whole minute question the absurdities but don't photocopy this 8 hours of fun, the classic question: "is this it?" the first time always tends to be a disappointment. "i've got that fucking toy car!" "we're in the bubble now." "we had a safe but we didn't have the key for it." and number #3 yelled: "that's the way to come up!" the sky was like a torn and flapping rag of black velvet, and the crunch of crisp snow beneath scuffed boot sounds like a mouthful of munching crisps, a moustachioed midget leads the witches of eastwick to the point where beach meets water and they dip tentative toes in, the video camera zooms in to view passengers on a ferry in negative and the clock tower on the opposite island near where our visitors reside, by blinding torchlight, you were so surprised to see your music teacher at jack's front door the next morning, you claimed: "that would only be stranger if that were my mum." and last night the monochrome of the posters on the black & white wall became a rainbow of tasteless tiles and wallpapers. both my ex on the sofa and my girlfriend lying next to me are growling like tigers instead of snoring in their sleep... i turned to see her ear become the pierced lipped mouth of a ruddy faced ogre... her lobe was its protruding point of a chin... and the rings in her tregus tattoos on its cheeks... from the eardrum expelled a chuckle... very throaty... as that of one enjoying the joke on me.

in intense rushes like headlice super strains evolved & mutated to be resistant to all but combs numb fingers twitching a painful scrape of teethgrinding while they're squirting dirty needles into the empty beercan i can't help but close my wide eyes & briefly bliss out i can't help but rest my beehive buzzing head & mong out without a thesaurus micheal crichton sounds wooden orange juice & fourecks, a bite of honeyed toast a single shard of pear that i'd never normally touch but acidburn stomach churned into rancid yak butter in green tea i throw up with minimum fuss, but are these retches or just the hiccups? "your obsession with organic processes within your own emaciated body is... getting boring now" you never hear a scottish donkey neigh or a dog bark in french, do you? i'm starting to annoy myself it feels like every other word i've said tonight has been: "sorry," "alright," & "you know what i mean?" stepping over the junkie half passed out in the recovery position self-pity is a swamp & i just aborted a diary my sideburns shave themselves, broken bones & marigolds the two way woman looking through a one way mirror shaving jagged protrusions pelted with ketchup by gang of adolescent postmen after a long time songwriting & on PC i get up too suddenly & vision swims black my ankles seem suddenly stuck on at the wrong angles and i collapsed seeing glitter clarks indents on the bloodied carpet the mumbling man with the just scabbed over gash on his neck (taking his first hit since getting out of prison) tells me not to take the piss, he got shook up, thought i was having a fit we compare guitarist's calluses and then i try and bring up empty stomach's non-existant contents, resting on toilet lid. i finally made a pool of stomach lining in the secret park by the bench on which i noticed (inbetween sticking fingers down throat) the slat we tagged our name on two years ago ((and wrote 'steve-o is a paedo' on) is gone like granny scooters, most morris miners & the morning-after pennyroyal tea like steve-o will soon be as he's moving to manchester i try and roll on like heads hit with sudden recollection of yesterday afternoon on way to course walking to community centre i saw a tyre roll off a passing car & neatly into a mechanic's open garage. and last night's hallucinations were of phantom punctuation and the inevitable scatty black cats. now i'm cooking my first meal in 36 hours and i'm wondering whether i'll even be able to stomach it yet. wishing that i hadn't left fresh loaf of bread in gunter's fridge as i previously predicted i would, and did. heavy breathing like prank caller every time i have to slightly exert myself. i know my gut is shrinking, all i shit is liquid waste my teeth corroded by same shade vomit & paste and i'm too queasy to brush them anyway, i'll maybe do it on sunday for now i lay jesus-bearded reading mark E smith's biography and i'm strictly playing all my mellowest music that at it's peaks send beautiful chills up my spine (and the back of my head like the aforementioned lice crawling over) whether i was coming down or stone cold sober. i just force-ate & even before i put down my plate it escaped by usual way but wholly undigested. and i thank myself yesterday for leaving a mix readymade..... thank you. it's the fragile headed stagger reminiscent of late '98 all i needed was a foster brother & a cassette tape that i now play back, it should be blank but says: "when are you going to lay this habit / hobby to rest? when you end up like your flimsy father eating himself from the inside-out? with gout, punctured lung, broken ribcage, purple bruises to show like the brown stains on his nicotine plated teeth? (if you're our old colourblind acquaintance) you should have learnt from your 21st birthday to copy not to cut & paste lest you wake up about to be sick with limb pains & aches... this is an understatement, not exaggeration produced by the most rotten & basest instinct." crawling at a snail's pace to lift toilet seat and i couldn't walk for three days "you better hope the next two ugly mornings aren't the same" (still i can't complain, back in last week i would have killed for company to write words with, and no television) but every time i get up vision fuzzed inconsistent and my wide saucer eyes dart as if swimming through darkness or blinding floodlights tonight i'll have to sleep with the light on at least from my PC screen i just made the background white again... a searchlight to find missing mobiles & keys... oh! if only i could take my batteries out & shut down to sleep mode later that night.... toetapper / tearjerker my feet webbed with sputum like they should lead up to frog's legs scrabble for sweat-soaked matches as in point & click / graphic adventure (which again sounds as pretentious as calling comics 'graphic novels') look about quickly before flame reaches fingers in this pitch black room the sky outside's a dull rose tint like i'm staring through barred window for the rest of life sentence wistful knowing i'll never see the outside again. flick fragments of flint steal secret of fire from tiny tea light haggle with hapless hack heckler razored & rashed, scalded & scorned. maybe i just dropped off for a moment and i was awoken by fireworks let off at 2pm! i've finished the book resorted to the buche again why can't someone invent a reverse version of caffiene? i tried camomile tea it just gave me a migraine an hour later next door resort to hurling turned on rape alarms out window to deafen the idiot revellers below. she used to take her pet albino rat everywhere she'd go it was okay till it stole our smoke & she insisted the female rodent sleep in our bed usually right under my feet until she somehow found her way into the walls we still hear her scratching from within even now.

on a night like this the quilt seems to shrink until it barely covers yuor cold extremities. it's supposed to be the middle of spring, and the bedsprings feel sharpened... and dig into your ribs teetotaller in lager endorsing shirt with purple lips hung in folds from yellow tusk like teeth artichoke heart and ginger captured in it's purest form i discreetly tell the gypsy woman her left breast is poking out i carve a woodcut in the waning light, in the ghostlight of ectoplasmic lantern i shook her by the shoulders & begged her "help me quit" she just shook her head and said: "you're too far gone for cold turkey now, you'll just have to work round it" and our magpie prime minister is more like a pining magister pinching prime numbers from under the nose of timewasters clockpunchers watching the clock as if it's only a matter of time before a secret comes out. (extorted be thy name) outside the co-op a discarded go-ped with a missing wheel nearly trips up a six year old weighed down with a heavy chemist's prescription bag, past the wreathes & flowers on the zebra crossing, a grey haired old man sporting an acid house smiley shirt hunches behind his trolley unsmiling, he washes his beard with a tiny windscreen wiper, a small piece of churchyard shade allows me to briefly read the predictive text i'm writing blind, a maroon briefcase on my lap filled with alphabetti spaghetti serves as a makeshift laptop with an etch-a-sketch screen, the company that makes generic citalopram hydrobromide tablets is imaginatively entitled Generics UK (Ltd.), man with soap allergy finds his dead baby's dummy in the cutlery drawer, nothing's built to last anymore, there are two types of people and both of them are addicts. thick sock on blistered heel, a thin out of season christmas affair on it's unblemished partner, synchronised sniffing of a cocktail of crushed glass, why do parents say they'll always be there for their kids when they know in all probability that's as much of a lie as the tooth fairy practicing voodoo with fairly-purchased milk teeth? befuddle the udder! when i wanted to be a mad scientist and made a moth out of bathroom products to me watching sport was like waiting for the train: you don't watch the clock or it won't move... and when the end seems in sight... it always goes into extra time... i saw entire advert breaks jump on the bandwagon or maybe a private carriage on an overdue train... they're always late.... a barrow.... nurse pours talcum powder in the mouth of elderly invalid in tye-dye & tracksuit and unkempt hair... man with ice cream moustache inextricably entangled in vegetarian voodoo... and my second biggest influence is begging for freelance work on myspace.... recurring dream in wheelchair hopping speed bumps in country footpath... sikh in a yorkshireman's flatcap, this table has no legs. the remains of the day raked over like bonfire ashes scattered in rememberance of heat. my stinking workplace... the manky chair. neck cannot take weight of head.... a fly hits the candlelight and bursts into flames.... i'm writing this by candlelight and curtains aflame and i'm running out of stuff to burn. all that's left is the playscheme parachute that broke my collarbone & the polaroids of picking blackberries as a child that looked much better whilst developing......... hah......... it's pretty obvious what goes first............ when england drifts away joins the northern continent & the second ice begins a monument to our overstepped & arrogant confidence our wind-styled strands of hare-brained scheme, we doorstep gossip merchants this is a field day for the neighbourhood watch with circuit breakers frozen over and reading by the light of mobile phones and positive ion generating monitors with the brightness and contrast right up. our depression is like looking through a dirty pair of glasses- we think we can see clearly till the day we clean them, think we're acting logically when it's cynically, just make up and be friends! prise your bike from the hedge, stabiliser wrapped in fence that's just stakes of wood crudely wrapped with barb wire like some sort of van helsing defence & security PLC, all trademarks pending, being that pedantic i'm surprised you don't get pestered by dyslexic lynch mobs regular like the paulsgrove paedetrician who is not an urban myth whatever tabloids like the mirror claim. the unmarked empty-night mystery pill game & it's fleeting buzz of psychosomatica soma drops gathered from bottles placed beneath stalicites in slippy-slidey ice land's frozen cave sapphire walls roll back as far as an eye caught inbetween 2 endlessly reflecting mirrors can see and at the edge of vision you squint blindly at falling icicles, haunted icicles in the ghostlight of cold. a single distorted intercom squeak. a shard of glass in the head. he throws down the joypad in disgust, goes to bed to replay the same level over & over & over again in his head same scene stuck record like my neighbour's conversation... respawn, respawn, mad scramble, die, respawn... battered from all sides by tranquiliser darts, the rhino loose in the city pirouettes & plummets to the grass of an ordinary city park in this darkness has become something much more sinister. every policeman in this city is out tonight hunting piggsy and every noise slightly like a motor or a sawing sound makes me cold sweat another wrong move and i'm a fucking teabag perforated from all angles and splattered across this frozen trainyard for the eighth time tonight. boxgrove is covered in ice, and i am out hunting for a friendly looking polar bear who is the dream incarnation of a cuddly toy i was sleeping with that night (my parents had told me that this particular soft toy would "protect" me from bad dreams.) i get the odd glimpse but struggle to keep up with the bear long enough for it to stay in my sights. sliding round the corner i hear a heartbeat and ahead see another galloping monster, coming straight for me. i turn and run for home but slip up on the ice repeatedly and cannot lose my pursuer. i manage to get to my back door and run upstairs- but halfway up the monster is upon me, scratching my back with dirty claws. outside my parents' door i yell but they tell me to shut up and go back to bed. the monster is yanking out my hair in bloody clumps, taking scalp with it. i lose consciousness and wake up, terrified, sweating buckets. i refuse to sleep with cuddly toys again, reasoning that if they don't stop the dreams, then they must cause them- another superstition. by now my parents have given up trying to get me to sleep with the light off, or even a nightlight- i have to have full lighting to even consider feeling safe enough to sleep. i see every dark shape as a monster out of the corner of my eye and am constantly, restlessly, twitchy.

the packaged snakeskin sheds all personification and the ceiling weaves like in 3 rooms i used to sleep in and my almost in-laws' living room around old fashioned lamps like lanterns down imagined victorian gaslit sidestreet the tetanus rusted nail that sticks from the miscellanous firewood stuck out on some stranger's doorstep with a crate of fruit pulling pallet trays out of the factory soundproof headphones reading lamps effects pedals the fireplace swallows all sometimes a blackbird may fall down a filled-in chimney and find it's way through the mousehole like gap in my skirting board to flap around the enclosed indoor space in a mad panic eventually breaking both wings and collapsing in a heap among the remnants of childhood you always meant to throw away but never got round to getting your fingers trapped down the back of your armchair with all the lost loose change dust under your half-mooned cuticles sitting surrounded by dismembered computers tweak another dial left click right click double click and a carrier bag with a cheery greeting pretending to take someone seriously as i try and keep a straight face my eyebrows raise in disbelief at certain techniques too tiresomely technical to go into any further detail lest you lose interest and fall asleep (i know the feeling) this is a scene as in a canvas background painted fake suddenly the drudgery of bottom-rung employment seemed attractive. punch-cards and punch-clocks spiked punch thrown punches. let's just drive round and round the roundabout forever i am too scared to assert myself and make a turning you should rename yourself 'the contortionists' but there is no escaping from your tired parlour tricks rigid expressionless expect no depth here. sperlunking an anthill or abseiling from a molehill this is shallow wordplay dropping hints like anvils from great heights with ample space for improvement never exploited: "does it do anyone any favours to be associated with this?"

you know no-one gets all the self-referential in-jokes & punchlines ow, my splitting sides! well.... no, not really. slap each other on the back and slap your knees my sides are splitting..... well, not really. there is only room in this room for you and your ego. guest list +1, you always bring your ego sitting next to you and hogging your popcorn or maybe your girlfriend's overpriced gelatine sweets. you'll never live up to your ego permenantly in its shadow and speaking in its echo a huntsman's duck call stuck record a yes-man's lot in life and your idols are like legislators with legitimate ideas everyone pillages this is the opposite effect to what's intended, surely? but me i am a cartoon a composite character a nobody a double negative pinch yourself- you are awake and this is spring cleaning i want the freedom to opt out, not self improve (this isn't open for discussion) to the double standards duo the same old hiphopcracy they're like a million monkeys banging typewriters randomly & expecting shakespeare much aped in parrot fashions.... it's a psychogenic threnody, see we like to imagine misery for we are backward mediocre-at-the-best-of-times MCs. london bridge is burning down, burning down, burning down london bridge is burning down, good fucking riddance. i've been looking for so long for something new, but i'm not allowed. it's like stepping over two rutting grasshoppers whilst trying to visually express the rev of a motorcycle engine to a child born deaf. as for the see-through ghost writer, my penpal is also my pen-name i paid for each & every blank cassette tape, by the way, mate your pseudonym's demands bemuse us like him trying to comprehend a collectivist state instead of trying to scab money off the homeless for bud & calling it 'budget' and how do i trust those who use others in front of me? ask little mark james if there's, uh, any correlation between a certain person's visits & certain things going missing? it's an optical trick- now you see it, now you don't. it's a pseudonym- he hides himself behind a false identity, it's an audio hustler- sells you what he thinks you want to hear i.e. a yes-man and the rest of the rats fled the sinking ship for the gutter or the stars a long time ago the boastings of a bunch of cast-off marvel characters as flat 2D & harmless as a cardboard cut-out cactus every quip a cliche an action film would cringe at you can't get past syntaxation with egos intact po-faced repitition of supervillain battle raps why do you always explain your plan to the trapped protaganist before you kneecap & decapitate him in some elaborate contraption? can't you examine this logic for flaws? dangling upside down slowly descending into some sort of bubbly foaming pit of boiling goo at a mind-numbingly dull speed i easilly had time to cast off my shackles and make it back to my average council flat see i'm no superhero- i don't pretend to be one you could be anyone except yourself. i've been looking for so long for something new, but i'm not allowed. it's like stepping over two rutting grasshoppers whilst trying to visually express the rev of a motorcycle engine to a child born deaf. it's a psychogenic threnody, see we like to imagine misery cause we are backward mediocre-at-the-best-of-times MCs. is this megaphone even turned on? a metaphor is not a simile i hate to state the obvious but obviously the rest of you all seem to think it is! hey, if i insert the word 'like' into a sentence then it must be a metaphor! perhaps you should learn to speak your own fucking language? your catchphrase is getting repetitive stop talking about superpowers you don't even have! when did you last save a child from a burning building? or even an old ladies cat from a tree? can we have our ball back, please? deflated half-baked head under hot sun one can only elaborate on the truth for so long a song is a lie you pretend to live in. you're burning aunts with a green magnifying glass you're cooking with placenta a flame with a gym membership explains that water vapour: "is a more harmful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide" whilst riding a dying whale up the thames or flogging a dead horse into playing buckaroo. shaving over spots, skin peels in strips of dried PVA glue. you are too battle of hastings 1066 arrow through the eye and all that, superpowers you don't have and slang slang slang. with enemies like this who needs friends or a king's ransom in bong mix?

me, buju & yasson get chased by some blue-robed and sinister looking stranger back to the house. sitting in buju's room we puzzle over this, then i jump up in surprise to see a black-robed monk looking through the first floor window as if he's floating outside. he disappears from view and i sit nack down, shaken, angrily complaining of these stranger's audacity, saying: "i can't believe one was just looking through your window! he could still be standing outside in your back garden!" i'm directing these comments to buju, but when i look up i realise i'm alone in the room... and i've actually been talking toward another sudden face at the window, sneering at my shock like he's challenging me to do anything about his presence, smiling mockingly as if he knows i won't. i get up to shout defiance back but can't move properly, like earlier on when i couldn't stop running in slow motion, the face just peeking over the windowledge laughs and, without any apparent need to support himself, rubs a spot of condensation off his glasses. i'm paralytic and powerless. the way the autumn went as a result of a breakdown due to lack of protein my molecules are attached to my layers of shirts in the stem cell research conserve drinking liquid nitrogen my intrinsic tissue performs a partial role with an inborn timer dessicated, decomposed the habitat of beatles, a barren character sketch. at the turn of the century he doted on rifle community but has since seen the light and returned to the fold. dabbling in the domain of raised eyebrows and patents, thermosetting an out-of-date formulation with no potential, outlaw sculptor with a dilemma of the twisted artery, a bear's fingernail, scaled rollerblades and other flippant terms. the retractable paradox- a fad or a golden age? this framework endangers the increment's tie, an ostentatious display of understated incongruity, his anachronisms had reached a landmark status and he bowed out gracefully and moved onto better things. i bought the war memorial monument at the church jumble sale and erected it at the secret penninsula unininhabited and unpublicised with thunder lizards right next to the medieval construction site, maybe a monastry? the blueprints will speak for themselves, cousin of puddles a strip of bark makes a tunnel for a muskrat to feed on interupted in your nightgown, a power failure a winding graph line, a suppressant heritage i was a scruffy child and still am and always will be i'm trying to scratch the indian ink out my left knee where a word was tattooed with a safety pin. motheaten correspondance dwindling away to junk mail & bills. we teastained the paper to make it looks like an old map i used to see behind my eyelids when i closed them. i'm a vocoder & a wheelchair with a person somewhere between. on a drip feed throat tube, purple bruised to red every colour of the spectrum and the man with brain damage in the bed opposite bangs his head against the wall. an alzheimer's patient gave me the address of his stable he wanted me & rough design to take over his business and offered us a gaslit caravan as home in chidham where i went to my first disco and found a hole in the dancefloor to peer down to the groundfloor from the first floor where we self consciously danced to babylon zoo & the prodigy's 'firestarter' on nothing more stimulating than cola & sweets stealing packets of sugar from chichester cafe to eat in the library while i'm gently removing the security tags from the books after school i used to have to wait for the last bus home to avoid the fish family who dragged me through the mud and stole my lunchbox & left my tie wrapped round the top of a bus stop now i stand on a soapbox, tongue flapping & yellow surrounded by second hand equipment, dusty cutlery & flies. enter: disparate rag-tag trio, scuffed shoed "the racket was marpolactic, raucus & unhoned, raw" the walls were plated inch thich in dispelled nicotine fumes our exhalations became painting by talentless minimalist simply entitled 'yellow #6' and sold for amounts ridiculous i guess tristan tzara got the last laugh at art after all and marcel's legacy of irony-free imitators the humourless who never even got the joke in the first place music now only viable format for poem who reads & writes these days other than writers? learning english the archaic shakespearian way is enough to put anyone off reading for life. theatre the refuge of recluse upper classes. on a drama school trip, myself and nick lander sneaked out to beg twose from a car park cig man in a white zombie longsleeve under white puffa jacket. he gave us saves on the fag as we asked him to explain his outlandish attire to us naive schoolkid kerrang scenesters a big contradiction, or so then it seemed to us and the conversation was far more inspiring than west side story or whatever rip-off play masquerading as adaptation of aforementioned and arcane shakespearian shit. i can see his smug face now- old hat, old man, old dog, old tricks the old school's like the '50s compared to pink floyd... in fact i retract that, i take it back and.... said instead the new schools still stuck in rut timewarp of g-funk and double-u-tang like i was two years ago, all bitch brag boast bout and big up with no nutritional substance like living off penny sweets, drugs & no roughage you spent less than tuppence & expected some depth?? better off digging holes in the coast with your fingernails and a y-shaped twig as a makeshift metal detector it says the treasure's in the sea so i suggest a long walk off a short pier don't forget to dig deep now! when amputation seems attractive: still limping as if one limb is longer than the other. feeling like nathan bellringer on trip to physician when did i hotrock this cyan shirt into a fishnet mess?