Tuesday 22 February 2022

The Wastemen - a rare departure from formalism

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!


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