The Wastemen
attributed to T.O.Ilets
found & curated by R.C.
I. COMAS, AND LIKES, AND CIDER
Avril was a feckless cunt, breeding
ankle-biters with some deadbeat, mixing
heroin and cheap crack, listening
to dull grime with no brain.
White Ace kept them warm, shivering
on a stained mattress in a filthy squat, needing
penicillin to kill off the crabs.
Their type never surprised us, sidling down Stokes Croft,
the rigmarole always the same: waver outside the Canteen,
skulk onto the terrace, panhandling the hipsters you’d see there
drinking artisanal coffee, jabbering for hours.
Like it’s not like I’m like bipolar, more like a fuckin’ Celiac.
Permanent children, stuck in a toddler loop.
Like my buddy like took me out on his like fixie,
and I like fuckin’ shat myself. He was like, like
like fuckin’ hold on - yeah? - and like down we went,
into the like Bearpit - yeah? - where like there’s like no restraint at all.
She stayed up all night, and went down on her dealer next morning.
What is this stream of consciousness, what does it signify,
this dreary stoner crap? Weed advocate,
you cannot argue, only speculate,
poison the well of discourse with your drone.
There is no respite from your unforgiving speciousness
The very walls echo your unreason back.
Cannabis doth not the tumour shrink.
Science says it: cannabis is not the cure.
How can I still your whining, wheedling plaint,
which cranks up in the morning with your breakfast blunt
and hangs around till vesper like the worst of smells?
I’ll show you boredom in an ounce of bud.
Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an!
Zum letzten Mal wird Sturmalarm geblasen!
Zum Kampfe steh'n wir alle schon bereit!
“You gave me chlamydia first a year ago;
They called me the chlamydia whore.”
And, when from the clap clinic we at last returned,
clutching our scripts and our itching groins, we could not
speak, our brains being maggoty and foul,
we were in truth the walking dead,
looking forward only to a twilit meagre life.
Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!
That cupidinous creepy Mr L,
ticker on the blink, yet in despite of this
contrives to be the slickest masseur in St Ag’s,
With lubricated slightly sweaty hands.
Which now slide, palms down, brush thy cringing mound.
The dirty goat, (that glassy distant look
- so primal! - in his eyes) his slimy beard
tickling, his hoary breath murmurs in your shell
some coarse fatuity: the awkwardness.
Here is the man and heimlich frau, and here,
which we don’t say, bleibt Einäugigerhoseschlange.
His mind’s a blank load, thing he hefts about,
a burden opaque even to himself;
yet can’t, without insight, be damned. I fear
boredom, flailing in circumlocution’s net.
¿Quieres alivien el coño? Thanks for nothing.
If you pass the next one coming in
tell her I mix the aromatic oils myself.
I’m trying to be mindful about things.
Unclean city.
Under the black flags of a false dawn,
a crowd flowed over Bristol Bridge, many
though not so many that you would despair of youth,
with much crude chanting, insults flung about
among the Antifa in gimp mask balaclavas.
Flowed up the hill and right, past Starbucks, also Greggs,
then the descent both topographical
and moral into Broadmead, that Gomorrah
where dwelt not one good man but was like known
where they came up against the line of cops with dogs.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Wanker!
Lounging malnourished and despondent outside Pret.
That hydroponic planted in the warehouse:
Did it ever actually sprout? Will it bud this year?
Or did the thermocameras root it out?
Oh keep the Drug Squad’s sniffer dog far hence,
or he’ll engage you in lamentable expense
Minchia! Questo che pompinaro!
2. THE MAD SCIENTIST
The Old Disgrace, a very tarnished court
in which he took his unbecoming ease,
in thrall to laxatives and overwrought.
His head, on which pulsed throbbing temple vein
(another fluttered underneath his jaw)
intensified his grinning skull’s neuralgia,
making unbearable the neon light as
the perfume of his shambles rose to meet it.
From dentured gob in rich confusion,
at the same time impoverished,
poured viciousness in querulous and petty tones.
Psychotic fantasies, Zizek, Baudrillard, and Mao,
self-indulgent, fatuous, appallingly inane
and overwhelming you with jargon, galloping
perpetually off at tangents, fanning flames
obscuring facts with smoke and dim refracted glass,
cleaving to flagrant falsehood, fell deceiving lie.
Shame burned cheeks, burnished by time to scowl.
Mnemosyne by lute and lyre accompanied
with threnody - markedly devoid of charm -
regarding arseholes and the worth of shaving them,
for which affront, the Senate garlanded her brow
(which is apparently on YouTube still).
Above the reclaimed fireplace was broadcast -
a low burlesque upon the silver screen -
that season’s squalid transfer window deals.
and then a replay of the morning’s game;
in which the Gas’s crude unlettered yobs
filled the Memorial with their obscenity:
Catcalls and jeers, and witless thuggery,
“Ug! Ug!” of burping chimpanzees.
And diverse weathered clumps of slime
Were sold upon the walls; local art
loaned out. Beneath, on sofas, old men gently dozed.
The dealers, making a show of zipping flies,
emerged from the pissoir, the door whereof,
ajar, made audible the toilet’s flush.
Under the palsied artificial light,
his Struwelpeter thatch in static points
stood rampant, then lay flat once more in clumps.
“Your service is shit tonight. Fucking shit. Tonic water!
“Ice and slice! Your service is shit. Shit.
“What are you thinking of? Not lemon! Lime!
“No fucking clue what you’re about. Think.”
I think it was just an accident:
chased by paparazzi, and a drunk behind the wheel.
En outre, elle a omis d’attacher sa ceinture.
“What is that racket?”
Only the soundcheck of the crappy band.
“What is that racket now? Jesus my fucking head.”
The soundcheck. Still the soundcheck.
“I won - I tell you this? - I won a prize. Young Scientist. Tomorrow’s World.”
Tomorrow’s World was yesterday. Besides
the hench is bored.
“How can you hear with all this fucking noise?
How can you hear a thing?”
I read those lips
and view as my revulsion mounts
the crude spasmodic jerkings of his jaw.
“Invited me to CERN.” A bitter pride.
You won’t ’ave ’eard of CERN of course.”
Oh, CERN. Well
Congratulations, fool. You won that prize
when you were young. Now you are old,
the glory – always tepid – has gone cold.
The ingénue, the gullible, may think you wise;
perhaps, to some, the ranting and the rags,
the carping bile, the books in plastic bags
the constant sneering and the open flies
are redolent of philosophic gold.
To us, more lustre’s lost with each retelling; still, we’re told.
We trouble deaf Heaven with our bootless cries:
will no one rid us of this knackered hag,
this flatulate, this coefficient drag?
CERN pygmy! Whenever you pontificate, a fairy dies.
We’ve heard the dentures clacking, smelt the mould,
observed the collapsing manifold.
Congratulations fool. You won that prize.
“What did I do with it? What did I do?
Mostly, I quarrelled with the grands fromages,
confected grievances, and sulked, and lastly quit,
and lived thenceforth on crime and benefits,
spunking my compo in the bookies, where
I’d fix my fellow punters with that gaze
yclept the Ancient Mariner, who shot
the albatross and wore it round his neck.
What was the point of it? D’it have a point at all?
D’it ever have a point?”
The News at Ten.
And if it rains, a cab to Barton Hill,
where we’ll indulge the dealer’s cat & mouse,
the grinding hours of waiting while we sweat.
He’s like, I play a bit of chess, I do, oh yes -
coached by a GM with a name, your ignorance
of which speaks volumes. Oh it does, does it.
So I was like, don’t feel you need to mince your words.
And he was like, alright I won’t, but like
I’m really just kibbitzing. Piss-take, nothing more.
And I was like, kibbitzing was you, like
GET OUT MY FARKEENG PUB
And all the time him giving it about some game
when Fischer was a kid and sacrificed his queen.
And while he blethered heedlessly, Reader,
I fool’s mated him.
Then that brief
appalling hush, and the rest of us ’gan tittering,
and I was like, kibbitzing was you, like.
And he was like, like he was almost blubbing.
I’m like, grown ass man your age, int learnt to lose.
GET OUT MY FARKEENG PUB
I’m like, you can’t handle losing you can do one.
And he was like, and that’s another thing,
that whole You lost get over it! charade.
And then he dropped the gammon bomb, and grabbed
his mock plebeian knapsack and stormed out.
And I’m like, like that’s just like fuckin’ racist,
typical activist Momentum twat
GET OUT MY FARKEENG PUB
Well, that Sunday he’s back in again, all shifty,
skulking, won’t look you in the face, and he’s
like, mumbling how by’s gammon bombinado like
was nothing signified. And I’m like, like,
like just like fuckin’ like kibbitzing was it.
GET OUT MY FARKEENG PUB
GET OUT MY FARKEENG PUB
III. L’HEDOMANIE SANS RALENTIR
The river bank is where they’ve set up camp:
cardboard, a bucketful of syringes.
Some pots and pans, a damp mildewing tent.
A sleeping bag skidmarked with mud. The wind
skirting the gorge is keen. Joggers traipse by.
A pack of diapers, unwrapped, bubbles
in freeze-frame through the wilting buddleia.
The Avon, squeezed like pus, slithers downstream
from Babylon, slickly through channels sluiced
by centuries of loathsomeness; sphincter,
farting away our filth, our packaging,
our high strength lager cans, our Bristol Stool.
Avon, ooze slickly till I end my song.
Avon, carry downstream th’almighty pong.
On Harbourside, the endless orgy’s in
full swing: bloodcurdling shrieks of Erinyes
the ogresses all stout and bellicose
and wearing wings, and matching t-shirts, these
being scrawled with diverse choice profanities,
or other testimony of their wit.
Avon ooze slickly till I end my song
existing in the jungle of Meinong.
The Bear Pit here. Croft Shardik’s hierophants
(Tristram in dreads, Yseult in harem pants,)
in overconfident and strident tone
shall poshly panhandle Derby and Joan.
Frisch weht der Wind
St Werburgh zu
Mein hippy Kind
Wo weilest du.
Chequerboard Ursa on her hind legs rears
over (baiting by curs beyond her ply-
wood claws) the endless circulation of
the charabancs. Run soft sweet motorway
until I end my song, and go and play
down in the concrete catacombs beneath,
the haunt of lotophage with blackened teeth.
My crepitation led me through Gin Lane,
the tunnel where the scag heads crouched. Upstairs
were bodies naked on the raised damp ground:
Marcello and Anita, filmed with phones,
forsaking St Augustine’s crystal stream,
cavorted in the foro publico.
Regarding these, I spake to citizens
drawn by the spectacle to cluster there
choice epithets about the fall of Rome.
Aegri somnia, vitae Bohemiae amici;
asinus asinam fricat, aliquid semper haeret;
castigat ridendo coitum utlagariae.
Sono pazzi, questi Romani!
Twat twat twat
Uggboot Uggboot Uggboot
So rude.
Unclean, shitty.
Under the brown scrape of a cindered spoon.
Mx. Portmanteau the intersectional,
obese, with headpiece full of shocking pink
- WTF Bristol! - documents a slight,
demands, in purged and ugly doublethink,
a lynching by the Twitter thought police.
Followed by tantra with a well-waxed twink.
At the violent hour, when zis eyes turn back
to introspect the contents of zis head,
hx flicks absently through well-thumbed Balzac
and underscores some random words in red.
I’m bowdlerizing Goriot. There’s things
I’m triggered by. Recovered memories.
Zer Adam’s Apple bobs as though on strings.
That adenoidal, implacable drone’s
like something being dismembered in a hedge.
STFU! By listening atone,
and underscore zis victim privilege.
With doorbell clarion Adonis comes,
bright orange, smooth as chicken from the fridge.
Mx. Portmanteau disposes of the crumbs
and of the agency’s formalities;
a transaction somewhat unedifying
- the card machine augments the feel of sleaze.
They shed all inhibition with their clothes.
The twink proves loose and singularly vile,
commemorated by Portmanteau’s oaths
- the prolapse really isn’t quite zer style.
The quintessential SJW
surrenders soon to cold infantile rage.
It wants a staple gun and quick-dry glue,
and an attendant well-starved copraphage.
When brute unlovely fouls the privy, how’s
a gentlemx to stem the tide of beige?
Exactions more than what the law allows,
with coathangers and size eleven shoes.
Hx rings the agency. I may be woke
- still dish him out a beating in the loos.
I won’t be sold a pig wedged in a poke.
Latent sadistic tendencies emerge,
and are exacerbated by the coke.
The intersectional loses this urge
towards day-break. Adonis, traumatised,
wordlessly pulls on jeans and shirt, dry heaves
(the methamphetamine was ill-advised)
and, having long outstayed his welcome, leaves.
Mx. Portmanteau, alone, does not repine
He was a catamite, and not a Jeeves
Der Einäugigerhoseschlange’s klein,
dwarfed by that rearwood windsock. Jesus Christ!
and closes then the door on all the mess.
and drinks in Kino large chai latte spiced;
later, back home, puts on a cocktail dress,
and then perambulates round Portland Square.
“This habit crept upon me by degrees. Observe my gnashers.”
Standing upon the pavement outside Horts,
peels backs his lips, exposing blackened gums.
O shitty city, I can always hear
at every single junction desolate
of every single dank drear dismal street,
the high-pitched whining of a troubadour,
maudlin and amplified and out of tune,
the brute cacophony of the outdoor.
The lotophage
sweats on black tar.
The posh kids drift
into slum life.
Jail time.
Squat
with methmouth sore afflicted, and
with organ failure.
Drinking shots
in farflung pubs;
the few from which
not yet
excluded,
following regrettable
misunderstandings
Like like like
Like fukin’ like
Diane and Jeremy
Bashing
bishop. The underpowered
bike. Potemkin tour
behind the Wall
George Bernard Shaw
went there before
Wank wank
wank
“They lynched her effigy in Easton when
she snuffed. Quaffed her eponymous. And thus,
not making much concession to
the ocean flowing backwards, came we then
to close-knit garbage-strewn communities.
Wraiths clustered at the trench’s edge, gibbered
by pooled blood, this also in Brislington.
“On ketamine.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who are
gagging for it.”
like like
To Hareclyv then I came
Begging begging begging begging
O Lord thou lickest me out
O Lord the shame
begging
IV. TOD DURCH KULTUR
Hassan ye Fylystyn, a quangowcratte,
fobb’d off ye skolars wyth polysh’d bromydde,
evaysioun, and heoff-troth.
And ded ynsyd:
ye vulgaryzer of ye Hows of Bokes,
who stryp’d ye shelv’s of Dykyns, Joys, and Proost,
replays’d wyth jend’r studys and
unyseks bogge
Thou, chompyngge thy sandwyge and braykyngge wynd,
Consyder Hassan who once keppt a blogge.
V. UN RUÍDO ESTÚPlDO
After the torture of no platforming
After the cranium’s chambers have been blocked
those orphan atoms haplessly congealing
after the éclat has gone off half-cocked
after the ruined orgasm, in all
its perfunctory, vulgar charmlessness,
after the breaching of the oath of spasm
after the businessman relieves his stress
after the mushroom trip in Bedminster
after the mushroom trip inside Primark
(one Tokeinesque, one more prosaic, dark -
the tie rack seemed aggressive, quite steroidal
and warped into a ghastly trapezoidal).
Here is no quiet but only noise
Doof! Doof! and mindless tinny wail
rusting nail piercing the inner ear
if there was quiet we should stop and drink
where sullen barista curls lips and sneers.
The mutual incomprehension, the cognitive
gulf.
If there was quiet
and no egoist
If there was an egoist
and also quiet
and quiet
a conducive peace, ok
the odd brief exchange considerate of the need
for quiet
Not this circus
Not this carnival of fools
This dereliction
This relentless festivity
This mindlessness
This raucous obscenity
Doof! Doof! Doof! Doof! Doof! Doof! Doof!
If there was quiet
Not this exhibitionism
But there is no quiet
Only this exhibitionism
Who is the twat who talks always beside you?
In all your selfies, there are only you and this twat.
And when I look ahead up the eternally littered path
There is always this same twat on a BMX
Spitting, shrouded in acrylic, hooded
I do not know whether a manchild or a burn-out
—But who is the twat always talking beside you?
What is that underlying sound
Only the intellectual masturbation
Who are those hooded zombies, leaning
Cantilevered at their hips, over
The Broadmead concrete, shambling in their filth
Such circumstance doth vision circumscribe
Tomorrow’s ‘jam tomorrow’ crieth wolf
What is this Tophet, this Gehenna
When did such debauchery become acceptable
Public disorder and a prelapsarian air
Failing institutions
No new Jerusalem
Tyranny in Athens
Incineration of Alexandria
Nelböck & Schlick in Vienna
Antifa stringing up Jews in London
Unreal
The woman crouching on the slimy steps
Beside the workshop, leading up to Banner Road
Despite her haunches’ exposed state, shrouded
Most modestly her head and said hello
While heedlessly she plunged the needle in
I wished her a good morning as I passed
Being observant of the niceties
Is this decadent shit hole the gateway to Avalon
On this dank afternoon the Avon stinks
Over the tumbled waves the sewage goes
And there the portly fatberg - Disculpe, Mare! -
There are no windows on its essence
There is no insight into its dugong soul
Only that it is an agglomeration
Repository of all our sins
Salve-nos pecadores miserables
Clogging the tides
Awaiting the dispensation
Of the river deities
Disculpe, Mare!
Ganja was being smoked, only the leaves
Weren’t bud but had been sprayed, and the black clouds
Accumulated from the South and West. Over
The Airport, over Avonmouth, over
Barrow Gurney and the reservoir
Then spewed the chunder
BLEURGH!
Data: what have we given?
Why, Friend me, and Ile bee
Thy parasite phlebotomystical
Such splatter’s but thy mark
Of K9, or thy signature or seal,
As good as wax from a solicitor.
BLEURGH!
Data: more parsimonious this time
A plasma. Ideal for a colloid, yes
Some sanguinary strands which raise concerns
Did thou of late chance heedlessly to sup
That firewater savages so love
BLEURGH!
Data: it’s best described as Keatsian
Stuff poet coughs into his pocket rag
There’s resignation, palliative calm
Here’s this, which lately was thy bronchiole
In bloody strands
Prostrated on the floor
Buggered, with the acrid pain flowering inside
Shall I at least set my affairs in order?
In contrast to the collapse of polity besetting us
Poi ha sviluppato un duro colpo per Antifa
Quando fiam uti larum—O herring gull
Le gilet jaune déchiré, mutilé
These fragments I have coughed up from my shambles
There’s easy slip twixt expectant and expectorant
Data:
BLEURGH! BLEURGH! BLEURGH!
