|
Jimi played the Bingo Hall
http://20six.co.uk/john
powered by
20six.co.uk
|
Snapshots
It feels like I’m suffering from shell shock, lack of sleep and I think I’m fighting a battle, constantly, stuck in the middle and the children keep crying and I can’t make them stop and the more they cry the closer it takes me to a new day and I’m suffering shell shock, lack of sleep, stubble and a thousand yard stare another dark night of the soul laying awake in the moments of silence thinking about the noises that are coming from the street outside, burglars or monsters?, but it doesn’t matter, I’m powerless to fight either so I toss and tune and add numbers but it doesn’t matter, none of this does, who’s going to read this? who’s gonna help when I drown? Ants run across the floor of my life, the floor is dusty and in the corners loose hair has fallen and is gathered and I can’t see a way out of this. I am living shell shocked shuffling along somnambulist and I drink tea at work to pass the time and I daydream of sleep on the tube and I try to grab five minutes of sleep in the toilet at work but it stinks of shit and I can hear the man in the cubicle next door to be straining and puffing and I hope he’s shitting not wanking, it’s all to unpleasant so I walk outside in the breeze and all I want to do is sleep and I look at the homeless and the tramps and am jealous because they are fast asleep, slumbering on the concrete, sleeping bags and jumpers as duvets and a thousand feet march by them but they don’t care, their asleep most probably dreaming of better days, a plate of hot food, a bath. I shuffle along back to my office, back to my desk, I drink tea to stave off the boredom. I think I can hear my children crying from here, maybe it’s an echo, maybe its’ from last night, spinning around my head in a loop, a spinning loop that is going round and round and I tap away on the keyboard but the crying and screaming is still there.
I am shell shocked but I am not in a war, I am not in a trench. I used to run. I used to laugh. I used to be someone different. I am miles away.
|
|
|
the sun is sitting pretty up there in the bluest sky and it throws down rays to melt ice cream and warm the soft skin of that woman there laying on the grass, dressed lightly, leg outs where
men with paint spilt on their jeans and 3 day stubble sit and stare, thinking thoughts they couldn’t tell their wifes, dirty thoughts of illicit sex , sweaty, the idle thoughts of an idle man ,
, and they sit and stare, swapping jokes and tale that are elaborated on and made to be funnier then the actual fact. (in actual fact their lives are as boring as mine and your, they are just nosier then us.)
The sun is playing with us all.
It’s ephemeral.
But it won’t be long before winter comes and scarfs and jackets and gloves replace t-shirts and shorts and all the flesh on show will be covered up and the time will seem to slow down and the colors become muted and night crawls and creeps along the horizon but for now, cheers raise up in a room over their, a goal, and flags are waved and songs sung, a ball hits a the net on a TV, the games live but in a different time zone, the wonders of a modern world with instant news, transatlantic flight, men on the moon, war and the world is truly getting smaller, one day it will fit in my pocket.
|
|
|
ffice ffice" />
Last night I spent hours laying on a bed in a hotel room listening to talk radio.
Lonely nocturnal voices from the hinterland and the suburbs spoke of killer birds, sleeping with your best friends daughter, is it ok to eat tinned food after 75years?, why don’t famous people die of AIDs anymore?. A woman called and spoke for 20 minutes about the fact she kept seeing clouds shaped like John Wayne, it was an omen she said, but as to what she didn’t know? a man called offering tips for catching fish, strangers discussed knifes, (general consensus they shouldn’t be used on humans), a granny from Halifax wanted to see all immigrants shot or at the very least, sent back to where they came from, a man with a stutter wanted us to hear his story of when he meet a ghost (he shook it’s hand and they spoke for 14 minutes before the ghost disappeared). A caller was cut off. A man discussed the finer points if Satanism. Can you have to many tattoo’s a lady asked? If you have sex with a male sheep does that make you gay? An upset woman called in and said her father-in-law touched her one Christmas while he was drunk and every time she hears bells ring she freezes and cries. A man lost in a strange town called in for directions. A crap joke about 4 elephants in a pink mini. A caller from ffice:smarttags" />Somerset, Violet asks if any listeners can see any strange lights in the sky. Violet reckons she can see shimmering cigar shaped lights darting across empyrean vastness. The calls keep coming in. No ones calls in to verify this but a man, who sounded ancient called in and said during the war when he was camped out in a bombed out building one night, and the roof was missing, and the stars looked so close so close that he could reach up and pull one down and keep in his pocket and give it to his wife, he was looking at the stars, deciding which one to steal when he say a flashing light that hovered, blinked on and off then shot vertically in the air, straight up. He watched it till it disappeared. He then recalled how he saw a Germans head explode. The caller trailed off and another caller came on, shouted Wank and hung up.
The inane conversation cocooned me and lulled me to sleep.
And today isanother day and the rain is dropping like spilt milk from a sky that really couldn’t care.
A colourful canopy of a thousand umbrellas cover an ocean of people making their way here and there.
|
|
|
Working on a wet Sunday i nSoho
Looking down onto the alleyway below, a man is standing with his back against the wall, his old bruised leather jacket brushes against the stone wall and flecks and flakes of old brick splinter and fragment and fall to the wet Sunday ground. From here he looks anywhere between 30 and 55, but he looks lived in, well worn like an unirone suit, crumpled, his tired ruddy complexion is visible from my vantage point, on the fourth floor looking down.fficeffice" />
He stands against the wall.
Footsteps splash lightly on the wet tarmac. From theright of my field of vision I see her making her way down the alleyway to him.
The alley way is narrow, dark, litter strewn, it runs adjacent to the main street where people pass in their droves, people out shopping, going to work, lovers hand in hand, drunks staggering, and the alleyway is inconspicuous to most who pass by, oblivious they are, wrapped up in conversation and thoughts, head down and moving on, light rain pitter pattering from the heavy clouded sky and the people turn corners and disappear into the rest of their life’s, but the alley way is here and in it stands a man in a leather jacket and a woman.
She get closer to the man. She is dressed to type, boots, stockings, short skirt, tight top, tighter jacket, cigarette dangling from lips that seem to be tattooed red, gold earings, bottle blonde hair and I can see her roots.
They are face to face, words exchanged and she turns round, back to the wall and he kneels in front of her, pushes his hands up her thighs, pushing up her skirt and with one hand he pulls aside her knickers and he starts to lap away at her pussy, lapping away like a dogs who hasn’t drunk water for a month. On his knees, head in her crouch, she leans back still smoking her cigarette, in fact I think she lit another one. Her face shoes disinterest, boredom. It’s looks like a vacant parking lot. She takes long pulls on her smoke as leather jacket man laps away. Rain continues to fall, small droplets roll doen the crack of leather jacket arses.
After a few minutes the configuration changes and she’s on her knees, cupping his nuts in one hand and moving his shaft in and out of her mouth, skin drags on chipped teeth, red lip stick marks smudge on skin.
His face is contorted and I guess hers is still framed with detached, melancholic boredom.
Seconds pass, his legs shake, her head pulls back and from the side of her mouth she spits out a mouthful of spunk. It lands in a puddle. It floats.
He pulls up his trousers and throws money at her. He walks off, down the alley, she lights another cigarette and I shut the window and return to work.
|
|
|
I’m hanging from the hand rail on the tube like a monkey, lolling side to side with the ebb and flow of the train rumbling along metal tracks. Like most people I see I have headphones in my ear and I’m trying to guess what everyones listening to. Man in the blue suit, looks like classics man to me, woman to his right with the nails, probably something poppy, nothing to risky, nothing to loud, the girl there with the de rigour tight jeans and flat soled shoes, and stripped top, something indie no doubt, a little bit of white men with guitars?fficeffice" />
Were all reading our free newspapers and maybe were not, maybe were using the paper as a shield, holding it up to our eyes to deflect the stare of other, this is London after all, no one likes making eye contact. Do they?
Rumbling along in the darkness.
When I get home after commuting I notice my skin has a thin greasy sheen covering it, an invisible suit of grim, the dirty breath of a thousand coughs and sneezes from strangers who brush up against me hang on my every exposed pour.
Germs and dirt cling and climb over me, there is no escape.
You are underground.
The tube carriage is a moving bin, a travelling Petri dish germinating and breeding spores, invisible to the eye, naked under the microscope light.
I am itchy and it’s all under my skin. I need to be hosed down, disinfected, scrubbed clean, washed.
A study said they found new life forms breeding and living in the tube systems, multiplying, existing in their own little dark subterranean world, living within their own ecosystem, feeding of dirt and the shit we leave behind.
A study of things found of the tube revealed that the carcasses of 4 different types of animals were found throughout the network, across the system and amongst all the trains, 17 different types of semen were found, three human bones, traces of 34 diseases ranging from the mundane, flu to the mass killers, Ebola and AIDS. Umbrellas, bags, faeces (human, canine, bovine and feline) rotting bread, toenails, hair, thousand and thousands of hairs and enough skin to cloth an army.
And every time I pick my nose my boogies are black and resemble the carcasses of dead moths.
Your season ticket should come with a health warning.
|
|
|
Sitting above the ground, 4th floor, the window on the left frames a view of a tower, silver and metallic, satellites and aerials hang from it as invisible rays are beamed form here to the farest flung points of the globe, invisible beams penetrating through walls, concrete, conduits, circuits, fizzing and buzzing like static and when you walk past the tower the hairs on your arms seemed to stand up to attention.fficeffice" />
Birds fly a dizzying dance around the tower, flapping wings and shitting in mid flight. Surely a wonder of nature?
Shit falls to the packed concrete with a splat, narrowly missing a blonde and her companion who is carrying a small brown paper bag that contains a brown bread salad sandwich. The women are oblivious to the fact a shit fell from the sky and nearly hit them. . They are talking about tans, footballers, shoes and magazines. A small phone rings and disturbs their conversation.
A courier shouts at pedestrian, it’s better then knocking him over I guess, and pedals off to deliver the news.
Car, busses, taxis, coaches, bikes, exhaust fumes all mingle and melt into a colourful haze as the noise rises.
She walked out of a shop, punk rock hair, sushi pop music tight jeans smoking a cigarette like it was something she didn’t enjoy, and her legs went up up up, complexion as bland and empty as a dessert I saw on a TV programme last night and I looked. In her non cigarette holding hand she had an ice cream and small drops of cold Vanilla dripped down the back of her thumb. I stare, maybe for second to long. She doesn’t see me.
I am sitting on a bench, immersed in the summer shadow of a church. I am not religious, I don’t like stained glass or kneeling. I need to sleep, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Last night I was pacing around the house, rocking my son, whispering, singing lullabies, offering him bottles, and pacing and al the while he’s looking at me, and our eyes connect yet we don’t understand each other, he’s screaming and I’m pacing and the clock is ticking and somewhere the sun is making it’s way over here, to perch it’s self above my head, to announce a new day and I’m tired and sometimes I find it hard to focus and I swear I see cobwebs in the corners of my vision, cobwebs with dead spiders and tiny insects laying eggs, hanging there, in the corner where the dust settles and I’m sitting on the bench in a park in the middle of a heaving metropolis where trains rubble along under my feet and planes fly over head and people just walk by drinking coffee.
In the newpaper today: a story about a man who lived in an attic for 45years, a picture of three bears eating a monkey in a zoo.
A story about a sinister minister and a vicar with a gun.
|
|
|
Alex said today that he was going to stop eating meat as he saw a programme that said sausages contained on average more eyeballs, bones, abattoir floor detritus and teeth then actual meat. He went on to add that hamburgers contained little or no meat, just compressed gristle and the odd smattering of hard fatty tissues.
I finished swallowing my quarter pounder and told him you can’t believe everything you read, see or indeed hear. Not nowadays.fficeffice" />
Just look at the internet, it contains every kind of story, true, false, weird, bizarre, everything is taken with a pinch of salt, urban myths are in fact fact,, maybe, UFO’s exist, people are taken daily from this planet and used for experimentation, they are probed and small tiny metal transmitters are implanted in their craniums, when they walk past radio’s the channels change, the Government train pigeons to spy on us, there is a satellite in the sky can tell you what colour your pants are, grannies carry machine guns, Walt Disney is a frozen Nazi, Oyster cards are linked to massive computers hidden under Dartmoor and your every waking movement is tracked by men who haven’t breathed fresh air for 2 years and bird flu is just a story to distract from the fact oil prices are rising and Wayne Rooneys foot is fucked.
It’s all bullshit I say.
But you never know.
|
|
|
[next page]
|
