In search of free texts

The Restaurant of porking paths

2011-08-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

Museo del Jamon

On a rare, grey gloomy day, with Cambalache in the air, we trotted in with our snouts held high.

If a group of cannibalistic pigs decided to set up a burlesque house-cum-Spanish tavern for cabaret and dining, it might look a little like this. There was no singing – thankfully, though it seemed like there should have been – just plenty of scoffing sounds, not quite oinking (they were too busy with the business of eating).

With its old world, wooden charm and varnish; and, at least partial, privacy from the prying eyes – of those waiting on, and waiting at other tables – a must for any piggish diner.

It was much more stylish than our pigsty, pig-stylish you could say – for posh pigs. Alas the same cannot be said of the clientele – it was full of foreigners feasting on all things fleshy; all that was missing was our communal trough.

When asked about their pork portions, they told us:
“9/10 greedy pigs prefer their pork from the Museo del Jamon.
This ham will have you squealing with delight, and will make you squeal with piggish pleasure.
We’re addicted to the piggy. Who said religion was the pork of the people – pork is our opium.
The best looking piece of pork I’ve seen since Miss Piggy; just don’t tell Kermit – he wasn’t on the menu; you’ll have to go to a French restaurant to eat him.”

Being pigs, we ate sea food, we’re not cannibals.
As for our meal – we’ll leave that description in the capable trotters of our preferred blind porkteno piggy poet, who wrote a poem about dining in this very restaurant:

The Old Restaurant and the Sea

Ravenous fish caught by fishermen’s bate,
Enormous cylinder shapes of pasta
Swimming around the oceanic plate.
Teeming with a pescados plethora
Aromatic seafood fresh from the deep;
Unusual herbs with flavours sublime.
Rare is this treat, as it’s not very cheap.
Artists created this seafood shoreline,
Nautical noshing and nausea free,
To fill your mouth with the taste of the sea.

J.L. Porkers

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/competitions/review/

TARNISHED

2011-03-03T22:46:00.000-08:00

They met in Central Kampala, near Kintu Mbiti’s birthplace.

Sehr Tariq was born in Lahore, but moved to work in Kampala when she was offered a job with a textiles business owned by Akram Tariq, one of her cousins, who was born in Uganda. Her job involved a smattering of secretarial, typing and receptionist duties, along with some accountancy work - all of which she found a frightful bore.

Kintu had been employed by Akram to drive the textiles to and from factories and retailers, before relaying the accounts back to the office. This is how they became personally acquainted.

It was a cosy little three bit operation that thrived for a number of years, until they both started to sense the bad vibes reverberating evermore profoundly, making their stomachs churn faster as time went on. They had considered leaving, wither they knew not, even before the country became overshadowed by an apprehensive atmosphere, which had been cast by a grotesque, larger than life figure - larger at least than most of human life forms to be found frequenting Uganda’s impoverished backstreets, urban slums of Namuwongo and rural dwellings.

On the forth of August 1972, the "dukawallas" (a colloquial epithet for entrepreneurial Asians) were starting to be kicked out by Idi Amin, or God, if you take an Idiot’s word for it (as they privately joked), who had created this tsunami of Indophobia - a term Sehr had always loathed, claiming that she wasn’t even Indian. Kintu decided that he would try to get out as well, being unwilling to part with her. As an unmarried pair, without British passports, they had to make do with West Germany.

Although they didn’t speak any German, both of them found low paid jobs working on the curve of the “blue banana” in the Ruhrgebiet region, living mainly in Dortmund, before vainly hoping for better times in Düsseldorf. They worked in various factories and warehouses that littered the green valley, going where and when they could find work, which was always hard, heavy, smelly, and noisy – on top of all this the hours were long. He was fed up with receiving dirty looks from dirty workers. Meanwhile, she was starting to wish that her parents hadn’t named her Sehr, on account of all the jokes this bred, none of which could she understand until it was finally explained to her by a kindly female shopkeeper that her name meant “very” in German - but at least that was the one word she would never forget.

Looking for other, better, easier jobs proved unsuccessful, but they were starting to burnout. They talked endlessly of moving on, going elsewhere, travelling on to other countries, and no longer restricting themselves to cities nearby, like Düsseldorf - not anymore. Their dreams of leaving did not come from the temptation prompted by anywhere else on earth, but merely the increasingly unwelcome responses they were receiving from the far right corners of their newfound homeland.

Occasionally they found death threats, in poorly written German-English, which had been thrown through the window - or a dog turd, meticulously placed through their letterbox.

“You haven’t been ordering that dog shit again have you Kintu, how many times have I told you now?”

“Sorry love, but now, at long last, I’ve finally completed my faeces species collection.”

They made light of it. They knew this was better than being scared, or trying to do something about it, that would only make things worse, even if they did know who it was. They felt as though it could have been anyone or everyone they had never met there. However, there’s only so much time one can tolerably go on living and working without being driven to act upon the overwhelming desire to escape from worry. Worrying about what will happen next, what will they come home to, will the window fitter rip them off yet again, if he turns up - and if not, will they have to sleep in their freezing cold house with a window missing for the night again? At least all this would make her case more sympathetic when asking Akram for help.

Sehr had been reluctant to ask her cousin for any more favours, but when the desperate prospect of unceasing perspiration and persecution finally dawned upon her, facing up to her squarely and unstintingly as she stared blankly at her reflection in the mirror, she knew that she had to ring him.

Then was their winter and its discontents

Akram said that he would look into the possibilities, and spoke with immigration, who said they had to make a claim. This was eventually accepted, which enabled them to live and work there, for a time, until a renewal must be made.

Akram asked them to visit him first, where he lived in London, and then he would suggest what they should do next.

Now the coast was clear. After quitting their jobs, and saying goodbye to their one friend, the local German woman at the corner shop, they both left, heading for a relatively receptive, if reluctant, England, to start a new life.

She was pleased about the new opportunity to start again and perhaps make more money, which they would soon need were they to survive much longer.

Akram told them that London was too expensive, even then, but he had some friends who owned a property in a western Town, and were looking for occupants - it was cheap enough for them.

They settled in a boomtown called Swindon. There wasn’t much to do there except pay the rent, but at least you could find a job there to do that, which was not something you could say about many parts of Britain when they arrived during the freezing fag end of 1978, the winter of discontent. For them, however, the economic factor failed to hit them quite as hard as the climatic, freezing cold, northern sea wind chill factor. This was something they’d never experienced before, and never wanted to again. They even considered moving somewhere warmer - anywhere, in other words, they thought at the time. Soberly, they remembered where they came from and why they left. The couple appreciated being two of the luckier ones, realising that many people don’t get the opportunity they had been given. So instead they learnt quickly to grin and bear it, by adopting the British can’t complain attitude - and more importantly, they bought a powerful heater and a thick warm blanket.

They found jobs quickly enough. He worked with all the insecurity that comes with agency temp work. On top of the meagre pay packet that came with this newly procured employment, he was rewarded with the opportunity to involuntarily learn and memorise, more so than any other part of the Town, in more mind numbing detail than either desire or necessity dictated, the entire cold, grey, detached, prosaic urban landscape and topology of, the aptly named, Commercial Road district.

Despite already being the mini metropolis of Northern Wiltshire, there wasn’t much use in Swindon, at that particular time, for the variety of languages he spoke, which included his native tongue, Luganda, and his dominion over the trading talk of Swahili.

She found it difficult at first to find any work, even though she was relatively more educated than Kintu. She also brought three languages with her, Urdu and Arabic, which she found to be of more use than her lover’s. Her multilingualism eventually helped her find a job in a community centre, which served a predominantly Asian subcontinent immigrant population. Thankfully, it was close to where they lived: a small, but cosy, red-bricked terraced house.

In landmark terms, it was between the bus station and the county ground. Cartographically speaking, however, their house was situated in an area North of Fleming Way, which dribbled below a broad neighbourhood. This was closed in at a right angles by Corporation Street, the notorious rouge Manchester Road, and (any driving football fans nightmare) County Road, which led to any drivers worst nightmare - not to mention that of cyclists, pedestrians, pets and unsuspecting stray animals as well, of course I’m referring to - the world’s most famous, and only, magic roundabout.

When Sehr started teaching some local women English, she found that - even though they had lived there for years, if not decades - some of them barely spoke a word. This was a challenge, but with a little help from the rest of the class, she eventually made some slow progress. She also knew enough Arabic to teach other Muslim women from a variety of different countries. Even though the class was open, in theory, to men, they never turned up, preferring to be taught by other men at colleges, or privately. Sometimes there was a problem when the women were from India or Bangladesh, not only because of the geopolitical tectonics - which the couple never had much influence on anyway - but also for more cultural and personal reasons. The students thought less of Sehr for having moved to Uganda in the first place, a sentiment shared by some Pakistani women as well, but when they found out she was actually living with a Ugandan, they were somewhat shocked. However, at least this made the lessons a little more exciting than phrasal verbs. There’s nothing like a bit of gossip to get even the most silent sari adorned southern Asian woman’s tongue wagging like a post-coital panting pouch. Moreover, she encouraged it, she told them:

“As long as it’s in English and directed to my face, I don’t care what you say about me.”

Slyly, she knew such an invitation to indulge would quieten the rumours more than asking, or demanding, them to stop talking about it.

However, Sehr did refrain from making it public when she became pregnant out of wedlock. When the bulge could no longer be hidden underneath endless lengths of attire and cloth, she decided it was time for maternity leave. She worried about what would happen to the child when it was born. They had a playgroup at the centre, some of the time, but she was reluctant to let the class find out about her babe in arms. She spoke with Kintu when she got home, and decided that they should get married - as quickly and as secretly as possible.

They hoped this marriage might make things easier for them financially, as they had never been rich, and they may well need help with money in the future. He had certainly never been well off, and the reason she went to Africa was to work - this is never the healthiest sign of economic fortune. The problem they found hardest to deal with was the social stigma, which followed from just being who they were. The couple found they now had many more to deal with. The ones they had brought with them, plus their newest additions. These were placed upon their shoulders after their arrival, by the minds of others.

It may lessen their stigmas, by ridding of at least one of them, but stigma is such that it becomes like the Lernaean Hydra. As soon as you chop the most pernicious and visible head off at any one moment, another one starts to attack you just as quickly, until the one you chopped of swiftly grows back to attack you again. That’s if you’re lucky. Else, they all strike in unison, devouring you alive while struggling helplessly underneath the bulky weight of its body.

Sadly, despite their Herculean efforts, they could not quite match the efforts and divine heroics of Heracles’ and his nephew Lolaos.

On account of some minor, if frightening and insulting, abuse received in various Parks they had visited in the Town - as well as, oddly enough, most other parts of the provincial Town beginning with the letter P - they preferred not to stray, in solitude, too far outside of their comparably cosmopolitan region encircling the community centre. Only so many times could she be subjected to the P-word once a day. She mused:

“At least it makes a change from the D-word.”

They laughed.

When they had first arrived, they found the sense of humour too dark for their taste, but they had soon come to find use for it. Sometimes it’s more efficacious to fight fire with fire than with something wet, like water.

Not to imply that Swindon is the most racist place on earth, far from it. They could have been worse off, in a big city or countless other grim Towns up North, especially when the riots really kicked off in 1981, the spring and summer of our discontent. But they had to deal with the people around them, as we all, unfortunately, must do.

He’s afraid of Virginia Woolf

2010-05-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

lupus est homo homini

Virginia Woolf Society
7pm
1st Thursday of each month
@ Friend’s meeting house

October

Hmm, looks interesting, what day is it, Thursday? And the date is? Let me see, um…what is it, must be, well his birthday was on the, oh shit, that bastard Howls, always preying on my mind, forget it, now, where was I…so, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, yes, it’s today. Good timing, for once I find out about something before it happens, good. Now, what time is it? Six, no time for a bath; well, it’ll be a bunch of crusty old men anyway, as usual, um, what’s the time again? Six? Shit, where the hell is this place anyway - Friend’s meeting house? I’ll have to check, where’s a directory? Maybe I’ll just ask someone, um, she doesn’t look very friendly; maybe not. Well, maybe it’s that place on Station Road, I’ve got time anyway.
*
-Good evening dear, you look like a lost little lamb that’s strayed from the herd, are you looking for the pack of wolves?
-Sorry? Wolves?
-Yes, Woolf’s, get it?
-Ah, yes, so this is the place.
-Indeed it is. You can call me Miss Lovell.
And you are?
-Fearless, Alfred Fearless.
-Are you indeed, well, come along; meet the rest of the girls.
*
-Let me introduce a new lamb for the slaughter; or perhaps we should refer to him as our “little lamb laid on the altar”. Get it, girls? Ha ha ha! Don’t worry your pretty little head about that boy; it’s just one of our little private jokes. Now girls, don’t be afraid, he’s Fearless, but we can call him Alfred - can’t we Alfred. We’re all friends here.
-Uh, yes, OK.
-Don’t be shy. So, what do you think of our virgin?
-Sorry, I, yes she’s, um…who?
- Fearless and witless…you know, the Woolf woman, our Virginia.
-Oh, yes, very thoughtful, flowing with ideas, a font of wisdom…
-Oh my...You’re just drowning us here with your clichéd aquatic metaphors, quick girls, “To the lighthouse”.
*
-So, lamby-kins, what did you think of my talk, I haven’t scared you off, have I?
-Uh, no, no, I was a bit in the dark, to be honest, a bit lost at sea, you could say…but you illuminated it, with your flashing rays of light.
-That’s it; I’m putting you on a strict metaphor detox diet for next month. Leave the lyricism to our Lady Lupus. Moreover, we’re doing “A Room of One's Own” next month, so get reading. Well, must dash, twas a pleasure.
-Yes, bye then. But I thought that was by a man, E.M. somebody…

November
-Hah, our black sheep has strayed again.
-Alright? So, I’m the only man again, then; is this a women only society (as it’s so unpleasant to be locked out)?
-Very good, but sometimes “it is worse perhaps to be locked in.” So my little lamb as white as snow, what did you think of her little “essay.”
-Yes, it was very sad, the thought of all that wasted talent.
-Yes, don’t you just hate yourself?
-Sorry…but is she’s being serious here? It seems a little naive, epistemologically speaking, looking for Truth, Facts. Thus Spake Nietzsche: “only interpretations…”
-Oh my wooly little friend, she was being ironic; you know? Showing the naivety of the “narrators,” I use the plural, for obvious reasons.
-Huh…and all this about Queen Austen, I never understood all that; subtle sustained irony, so I’m told. She wasn’t a patch on Willy!
-Oh, you are a lost little lamb aren’t you? Silly Billy…but I don’t think we should ask: could women have written the plays of Shakespeare, given his opportunities? Instead, we should ask, could a man have written the Novels of Austen, given her restrictions?
-Well…I think that you’re just ripping off what Woolf wrote about Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy: that if he’d “lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady…however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written WAR AND PEACE.”
I think we should ask: what if chimpanzees were given £500 a year (or perhaps bananas, or even nuts, whatever they like, after all, you can’t think well or write well, if you haven’t dined well), and a room of their own (not to mention a typewriter - or laptop, or notebook, pending their astuteness)? Would they come up with the works of Shakespeare? I think not, but perhaps those cheeky chimps could churn out the wooly, waffling works of Woolf.

I also think that Woolf’s works are just a load of elitist ramblings anyway. I’m glad she killed herself. Shame she didn’t drown herself earlier; stupid, loony dyke!
-I say…well, there goes our wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Fin

Rubbish men

2010-03-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

One night, a man named Baz Sura heard the sound of the rubbish men driving by his street. It was late; it’s common for them to do that during the night. They used to do it earlier, at 11 or so pm, but he had just realised that they had been doing it much later for months now.
This prompted him to forget about the book he was trying to write, and indulge in some idle revelry.
He dreamed, fantasised even, of wandering the streets late at night when all was so rarely quiet, with no people or cars to disturb neither him, nor the still of the tender, silent, sleepless night.
What was odd about these imaginings was the presence of the rubbish men. Their faintly heard presence was still perceivable as they passed by; their discordant banging had still not yet slipped away from the subconscious theatre of silence, and the solitary scene that was being dramatised upon a stage within the memory muscle of his cerebral cortex.
He watched them with his mind’s eye as he followed them, from a distance mind you, to avoid the sight, sound and especially the smell of the rubbish-filled lorry.
He thought to himself, as he was always alone, that he might go after them, but he decided it was too late now; they had already been and gone; or bin and gone, rather. Well, he would never track them down now anyway. So instead, he decided to wait until the following night, and be ready for them. He knew not for what purpose exactly; to see where they go, out of idle curiosity. It’s hard to say. Sometimes one must fulfil a dream and uncover the nightmare first, before one can move on from it, and get over it.
He was pleased that something like this had come up, just to take his mind off things, to take a break, and not have to think about his writing for a while. The writing wasn’t the problem; well not the biggest one anyway. He never experienced writer’s block, quite the opposite in fact; he wanted to know how to block the writing runs when it poured down upon him like an English hailstorm, or a Maharashtra monsoon. He sometimes considered ways of constipating his compositions, and wondered what kind of literary laxative he had consumed to enable prose to pour forth so fruitfully and futilely from his plastic pens. More than this, the literary thorn in his side was the unenviable and unedifying endeavour that is editing. Trying desperately to meld together all manner of miscellaneous fragments, from many different places, that don’t really belong together, until they are buried into the pages of a book and stored.
He carried on struggling with his editing ennui while looking forward, excitedly anticipating the night to come, as if he were a boy again at Christmas time, when the myth of Father Christmas was still enchanting, instead of delusory and disappointing.
On that sour note of unmelodious memory, he decided that he’d had enough. He mentally clocked out and turned in for the night, after a long session of banging and pounding his fingers upon the keys.

When he awoke from his token nap, he felt like venturing outside. Just for a few moments, mind you; but even this was a rarity for him. He didn’t want his usual Spartan inmate breakfast, consisting of leftover stale bread and almost clean tap water. Today he wanted something he could taste, which was high in calories, a heavily sugared snack treat that might give him enough energy for the long night of moon walking ahead. However, not something so indulgent that he would have stomach problems later, as finding a clean public toilet during the day is hard enough. If you think the city by day is an open sewer, you can imagine that when night finally falls and spreads its blanket of darkness upon the snoring millions, the city becomes even more of a public toilet. Who is going to see, and what would that do about it anyway? Still, it is odd to find someone shitting in public. I only remember ever seeing it once at a train station in Mumbai; but it was a child, and they are always forgiven for everything. They haven’t been socialised yet; at the tender age of a toddler they haven’t even learned to be disgusted by faeces.

He went to a small supermarket nearby to see what he could find. He still fancied something sweet, chocolaty; maybe a mousse, like the Chambourcy hippopotamus mousse he used to like as a child. Or a double chocolate gateau, like the ones he annually ate surreptitiously at Christmas time, when the other family members were busy watching soap operas and extended Christmas specials.
He knew he’d regret it; but when he found such a gateaux, he couldn’t resist. No hippo mousse though, as he used to call it; they don’t make those here, he lamented.

After reluctantly paying at the checkout, he made his way back home, stored his purchase safely in the fridge for later, and went for another light nap before his big night out on the town.
*
Winter had just started, so by the time Baz woke up it was dark already.

The dark and damp night was being forced by the seasonal boss to work unpaid overtime. This pleased the night none too much. The temperature had already warmed up as far as it could reach. Besides, during its graveyard shift, one of the perks of the job for the working night was freezing people, giving them colds, watching people kill themselves from depressive seasonal affective disorders, or from jumping off of bridges onto brick thick ice, thinking the water would drown them, only to be killed on impact. Even successful suicide attempts can be as accidental, unintended and moronic as unsuccessful ones.
Even funnier than this, however, was observing OAP’s as they froze to death in their beds.

Baz quickly got ready, and waited for the rubbish men to come and stink up the neighbourhood, as they did every night.
When he heard them, he made his way down to watch for the direction they took, before following them slowly.

So few people traipsed the streets that the direction he was heading in seemed to make it obvious to other masochistic and/or misanthropic night strollers what he was following. A drunken man even shouted something at him. It sounded like he said:
“If you’re so keen on walking with the rubbish men, why don’t you become one, they’re not fussy, they might even hire you.”

After his initial response of bemusement blossomed into the blooming blues of comprehension, a fuming and furious feeling of being insulted followed, which stained his sensitive soul until he remembered a line from Seinfeld: the episode when Kramer remarked that bums were always walking the streets, so why not strap something on to them.
This cheered him up no end. After a few chuckles to himself, he finally realised why he was here: he wanted to see where the rubbish ended up.
He had some vague idea that it would go to some landfill site, somewhere out of town. He had learnt that much about the practicalities of the governmental policy from the environmental campaigning he had done as a younger man.
He realised that they would not drive as slowly when going there, as when collecting the city’s crap piles. This made his plan pointless.
Unless, that is, he plucked up the courage to ask them if he could tag along; just to see where it goes. He knew he might have to offer his services in return, not to mention being thought of as eccentric in the extreme; but this was no more than he was accustomed to anyway. He thought; what the hell!
He hadn’t been on a journey for years now. He was adventure starved; but sadly, this was the only scrap he could find in the bins that lined the streets with filth.
He had often dreamed of working like this; only aboard a ship, instead of a moving skip on wheels.
He wanted to work on a cruise liner, and sail the earth like his colonial forefathers did; even though he had once read some campaigning materials co-produced by War on Want and the ITF (the International Transport Workers' Federation). Amongst these included a report entitled Sweatships; the first chapter, of which, was called “Dream vs. Reality.” He knew which one he preferred. Like the tidal rhythms thrusting the vessel hither and thither, a myriad of musings ebbed and flowed in his mind. He dreamed of serving semi-naked octogenarian yuppie millionaires piña coladas upon a windswept upper deck. These sundrenched dames, drama queens, and cancer-kissed crinklys, sprawled over their sun bed royal thrones and wiggled their burnt, sweating bodies for him to feast his starving eyes upon their flamed grilled, sizzling and salivating juicy fleisch, like a snorting porker who’s just won the truffle “lotto!”. The presence of these perspiring, polygamous poly-Gammys, and sugar Playboy Gammys turns the term Sweatship into something of a double entendre.
Later, while serving them Ragout de Poulet a l’ail en vinaigrette chaude followed by biscuits aux amandes, the wily old women would whisper their room numbers in his ear while the bosses were taking their umpteenth power nap to shelter from the boiling and baking afternoon heat of the reflected ocean sun.
Such reality-checking reading material gave him the disillusioning impression that employees are treated little better than kidnapped Indian slave children, who are sent down to illegally mine minerals. Cruise workers were confined to the dark and insalubrious lower deck, cooped up like: an overweight school of sardines “Packt” in a shrinking “crushd tin box”; the NBA MVP annual award ceremony in a midget pensioner’s bungalow; the fat English wrestler Giant Haystacks slumming it in a bad poet’s bedsit; or Dharavians.
Such was his idle romanticism, not to mention his overactive use of simile. However, such oceanic, orgiastic and octogenarian obsessive dreams could only survive among his psyche’s fantasies because he had never tried it. If he did, his illusions would soon sink like an indolent sailor, when he discovered the over salty taste of a scurvy-suffering, sea sickening life on the ocean wave.
Instead, he preferred to get lost in his delusory desires as he dreamed of stopping off on tropical Polynesian Islands. Fuelled by the inspiration of Paul Gauguin’s pure, primitive paintings of the equally erotic and exotic Polynesians; he yearned to be castaway and washed up on distant shorelines, to be resuscitated by bronzed and brazened beauties before being rested, relaxed and reposed in their cosy wooden shacks.
But alas time was running out, and he could get to grips with their native tongue; so back to reality he came, as there were things to be done. Things he’d rather not do.
He romanticised about wandering the streets alone. Not having to beg smelly rubbish men if he could help them cover themselves head to toe in other people’s crap.
Nevertheless, that’s what he did. After much reluctance and procrastination, I should add, fatigue finally forced him to assert himself, and “assay the power” as Lucio rhetorically urged Isabella, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
His request was initially met with suspicion and disbelief, swiftly followed by utter indifference.
There was room in the wagon, so they didn’t give two hoots about what ass perched on it.
This was the gist of their mannered response.
He felt he should talk to them, lest he felt rude, not because he wanted to. However, they seemed so eager to get on with their job and get to sleep, that they looked unapproachable; for which he was thankful, as he too was beginning to tire of this tawdry trip to the tip.
After holding his nose for over half an hour, he was anticipating a long awaited and welcome breather; but, to his despair, his nostril hairs only sensed and found was unfair, foul, “fog and filthy air.” As he hovered through, he could conclude only one thing: the smell was ghastly.
He regretted not bringing with him something more to cover his nose, as all he had with him was his scarf. However, what he needed was an oxygen mask, or a gas mask; like the one his grandparents used during the war. He saw two of them at their house and wanted them because they were Disney specials and had the faces of “Donald Duck und Mickey Mouse. We’re all living in America.”
Even during this moment of bourgeois selfishness, Baz was still able to spare a thought for all the Mumbaiker gandi basti children he had witnessed, both on television and in person. Viewed as animals by higher castes, these children are forced to navigate their way through nauseating haystacks hoping to find the illusive needle, thread or anything else of value, to recycle and sell, like those fictional furry, protruding nosed species The Wombles of Wimbledon common – the preferred children’s programme of Baz’s infantile years in Britain. These Indian children, who are frowned upon and looked down upon as mere beasts by their Brahmin supposed superiors, have to scavenge for anything edible, they are perceived as Palaeolithic savages, or Pigs and mongrel dogs routing for Italian perigord truffles in the Tuscan woods on a dewy, dawn of a summer morn. Crouching down on all fours these so-called Slumdogs crawled, amid the ruined, remains of old slagheaps, which had been mutated and moulded by modernity into kitchens and kiosks for the untouchable infant Dalits, who had to live on and off these foul and malodorous mountains of waste land, literally.
He was more than ready to head back now; but he saw how much rubbish they still had to empty from the muck machine.
For a second he feared that they may leave him there, resenting him for just covering his nose while they just got on with their dirty day job. So he rolled up his sleeves and decided to muck in. He grabbed hold of one bag at a time, and placed it where they were throwing theirs. He imagined they were mocking him, even if he spared no time on witnessing it. They suspected that he wanted to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible, just as they did; rather than being foolish enough think that he was exerting himself purely as a token of his gratitude for this smelliest of nights out. They didn’t care. Any help with getting this shitty job over and done with quicker was always welcome.
He took a brief moment to scour the rubbish-strewn landscape. It seemed like a visual trick, in this less than velvet half-light. He couldn’t decide or make out what he saw.
Had the million different kinds of muck been turned into a golden order, or was it still just an endless collection of scrap waste? He looked, and then looked again, each time seeing the alternate view, never seeing the same one twice.
The smell was still there, he thought, even though he couldn’t smell it anymore. For a second he desired to stay there for just a little longer, to watch as the sunlight started to emerge from the clouds, and through the warm hot air steaming from this city-sized scrapheap.
However, his temporary colleagues unceremoniously reminded him that this wasn’t a guided tour, and that they all had wife-warmed beds to go back home to, and didn’t want to be farting around this shithole all day for nothing.

Their work was finally done, for another day anyway; while his labours would begin again, as soon as he returned home. He looked back once more, longingly, at the golden tide of trash shimmering in the sunlight. He dug his nails hard into his arm trying not to cry. He knew the rubbish men had more than enough material to satisfy their work weary whimsy. So he pulled his cap down as far has he could to cover his eyes, slowly trudged heavily footed towards their escape vehicle, flopped down on the seat and bowed his head down low.

They scrambled for their seats and drove back to the city. They would be back tomorrow. Fortunately, for all concerned, Baz Sura would never set his eyes upon this rubbish nor this suburban underworld for the underused ever again; and more importantly, it would be the last time that his averted nostrils would so quickly grow accustomed to the inhalation of this putrefying and un-poetic wasteland.

NO MORE

2010-03-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

No more food to eat
No more gas to heat
No more water to drink
No more thoughts to think
No more love to take or give
No more chance or will to live

No more rope to hang from
No more blades to slit wrists with
No more ink for suicide notes
No more paper to write them on

No more nukes to burn us
No more comets to destroy us
No more prophets to deceive us
No more Christs left to save us

No more to save
No more to destroy

Failed entrails and one prize winner

2010-03-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

My
One
Won
Prize
For an
Entry in
A Writing
Review of
Restaurant
Competition
Lonely Planet -
Plus compilation
Of Failed entrails

I won a prize
And lost the rest
But who is to say
Which is the best?
Antipathetic contest
Judges cannot suggest:
“These works you will detest”
So why not put them to the test?
Read, perchance, to be impressed.

Hoping for extinction

2010-03-07T12:39:00.001-08:00

I’m hoping for extinction
I want to take my life
I’m hoping for extinction
But I can’t use the knife

I’m hoping for extinction
I envy dodo-kind
I’m hoping for extinction
I don’t think you will mind

Where the hell are we going?
There’s nothing worth knowing
Death destroys our life’s meaning
Life spat in my face now I’m leaving

I’m hoping for extinction
Life’s a waste of time
I’m hoping for extinction
It should be made a crime

I’m hoping for extinction
We should be neutered in our prime
I’m hoping for extinction
Cos we ain’t worth a dime

Where the hell are we going?
There’s nothing worth knowing
Death destroys our life’s meaning
Life spat in my face now I’m leaving

I’m hoping for extinction
We’re heading for despair
I’m hoping for extinction
Does anybody care?

I’m hoping for extinction
It wasn’t worthwhile
I’m hoping for extinction
So why can I still smile?

As You Fight It

2010-03-07T12:38:00.001-08:00

All the world's a ring,
And all the men and women merely pugilists –
Some sluggers, some swarmers;
And one man in his time fights many bouts,
His matches being twelve rounds.

Last bell of all,
That ends this strange eventful match,
Is second childishness and mere KOblivion;
“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

This be a curse

2010-03-07T12:36:00.001-08:00

They fuck you up, those classics past
In leather volumes bound to last,
They fill you with anxiety
Or dreams of notoriety.
But they were ignored in their time
By publishers who couldn’t sense rhyme,
Who took one look and turned away
Or lost it in their filing tray.
Old poets pass pessimism onto young
It heightens like a paper pile of dung,
Stop writing as early as you can
And don’t publish any works yourself.

The garden county of Yorkshire’s footpaths and demonic pitchforks

2010-03-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

The Yorkshire moors haunted by Heathcliff and child murderers.

A Moroccan is on trial for raping a traveller,
He wasn’t the first: Yorkshire had its own ripper.

Acid thrown in the face of a woman who complained
When delinquents sat talking throughout Harry Potter.

Race riots rousing the explosive ghettos:
Chapeltown, Harehills, Ravenscliffe, Holmewood.

Insulted and spat at, scorned and insulted,
From Quarry Hill to little Beirut.

The bombers of Bradford: becoming a cliché,
Replacing the scared memories of World War two bombs.

The war of the roses has not yet ended.
The white rose of Yorkshire drenched red with blood,
Blackened by soot, and “dark satanic mills,”
God's Own County going to the devil:
BNP becomes MEP
A bigoted leader elected to represent Yorkshire.

We two Queens - A cruise carol

2010-03-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

We two Queens of Wiltshire are,
To win, we’ll write for Samuel Cunard,
Dreaming, hoping, fantasising
Of a cruise aboard white star.

White Star of saunas for muscles tight,
A room with a desk so I can write,
Southampton leading, Zeebrugge proceeding,
Let us have four perfect nights.

Aboard a queen on seas to reign,
Words I write to her entertain,
Ours for four nights, yours forever
Lest you let us there remain.

White star of theatres to excite,
Stars on film screens to delight,
Bruges leading, Rotterdam proceeding,
Let us have four perfect nights.

“Words, words, words” to offer have I,
For marine luxury, I swap my pigsty,
Eating oysters, champagne tasting,
Joyful, salty tears I’ll cry.

White star sailing come twilight
Awestruck by the sublime sight,
Amsterdam leading, Cherbourg proceeding,
Let us have four perfect nights.

The dream of mine is an endless room,
A Borgesian library with infinite volumes,
Reading, thinking, writing, reciting,
Watching words begin to bloom.

White star of dinghies to inflate,
Channel sailing until late,
Normandy leading, Southampton proceeding,
Let us have four perfect nights.

Ship of beauty, a sight for sore eyes,
Land envies sea that engulfs her size,
Breaststroke, frog kick, doggy paddle
Below “De sterrennacht” sapphire skies.

White star of partying till light
Letting the atmos ignite,
Southampton leaving, Wiltshire proceeding,
Let us have just four more nights.

Wake up, little Zuza wake up

2010-03-07T12:22:00.000-08:00

Zuzanna Sobkiewicz is a Katowice-born Polish Berliner, with boundless enthusiasm and zest for life – be careful though, it’s contagious; even I caught it. She’s capable of bringing cheer to the most miserable of souls, in the depressing darkness of a Northern European Winter, with her wacky brand of humour.

We met at a swanky party, one of those über-chic soirées; where all, us, beautiful young things go to see and be seen.
She hosted me when I had nowhere else to go. We listened to bleak English music, The Cure mainly.

This culture vulture par excellence, perhaps Berlin’s (still living) answer to Susan Sontag, took me for a walk in the park, to an art gallery in X-berg, and an Elvis party – thankyouverymuch. At this gathering, I was introduced to a whole host of colourful characters and friends in her Bohemian clique; and experienced the unique, scathingly critical authenticity of the Berlin szene life. This subculture is typified by its irreverent and liberal attitude towards booing at performers on stage. On subjects subcultural, she is a fount of knowledge: helpfully explaining how to decode a so-called good skinhead from a bad one, by studying the subtle semiotic nuances of their bootlace colours.

Zuz helped me immeasurably to remain vertical during my well-intended but ill-conceived and masochistic decision to accompany a group of cherubs to go ice-skating. Had she not offered her gliding guidance upon the ice, I probably wouldn’t be writing this now (without the aid of a wheelchair), as I’d either be dead, or paralysed by that foppish opposition to my predetermined fate never to glide upon the ice as only Polish ladies can.

Alfredo (our mutual friend) and I were always changing the subject upon her arrival, pretending we were talking about suicide, death, and depression, when we were only ever talking of her.

She has continued to be an invaluable help to me, especially by liaising with a Berlin Travel agent to assist me in changing my return flight date. This was imperative because, while travelling in Brazil, a gang of gun wielding favela thieves hijacked the bus, robbed me penniless at gunpoint, and left me broken and traumatised.

Zuz even tried to help me fulfil my raison d'être: to live secluded, in a small desolate mountain hut, hidden away amidst sublime wilderness, shadowed by the Bieszczady Mountains of South-Eastern Poland. Alas, it was not to be.

Back

2010-03-07T12:19:00.000-08:00

A pretentious but filthy lad claims to be a bacteriologist when a lady unexpectedly pops around to see him, a few days after they first met. The pretence is hard to maintain.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It puts off most girls.”
“I’m not most girls.”
“True enough.”

Weddings and a suicide

2010-03-07T12:16:00.001-08:00

The author of a romantic self-help book used all his mistakes to provide bad advice to readers, hoping they would mess up their love lives and become lonely losers like him.
He feels embarrassed, regretful and depressed when he starts receiving thankful invites to reader’s weddings.

Angered teacher, adoring pupil

2010-03-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

“Your essay didn’t run cohesively, from start to finish; it was very haphazard. Write it again.”
“But Miss, I was just subverting male phallocentric hegemonic paradigmatic structures – I did it for you, Miss.”
“We’ll have none of that nonsense here sunny Jim, not on my watch.”

Obituaries

2010-03-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

A married Argentine couple bravely risked venturing to a Darwin exhibition; contracted swine flu and died.
Curiosity killed these crazy cats (Darwin’s, not Schrödinger’s), when they made their Faustian pact with Mephistopheles: trading knowledge for their lives and souls.
Losers in life, their deaths’ win this year’s Darwin award.

Tears for Toro

2009-09-14T00:09:00.000-07:00

A dance of death, upon this year’s day of the dead:
Bull with capote de brega in cold blood red
Under the Volcano and colour blinding sky
Lustful for sangre onlookers ask: who will die?
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,
For a dead bull, where were poet Lorca’s tears?
Infernal machismo’s death in the afternoon
Gallant glory or gutted, gory: blood pours soon.
Horror of a bull fight, The Disasters of War,
Toro defenceless against the armed Matador;
Endeavour to ban this bloodthirsty so-called sport
Remember the dead torito: spare him a thought.

Orange book group

2009-09-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

Orange book group

Chris Border knew no one, had nowhere to go, except home, and nothing to do there, except read.
Today he ventured out to hunt down the book he had hungered to read.
Such excursions were rare, so he had to remember how to get back home, to his cold empty flat in Shoreditch. From Green Park, along the blue line to Warren Street, walk to the pink line at Euston Square, until Whitechapel; walk along the Orange line until home.
As he stood waiting for a seat, he thought how reassuring to live so close to the tracks, aside from its underused logistical commuting convenience.

He finally finds a seat, and starts reading. Moments later, he notices a woman peering at him. Chris also does that whenever he sees someone with a book, just to get a sense of the person, to make a quiet judgement, and think of it no more. However, she was more persistent, and she even looked a little familiar, like a woman he had seen on Late Review a few times. However, people are many, faces are few and bone structures are largely uniform.
Too many ugly people, not enough pretty skulls…
He would often change the words to songs in his head, which intensified and changed the value of the words for him, by making them more in tune with and pursuant to his own morbid and decadent aesthetic sensibility.
He flipped over his book and, on seeing the photo, the penny dropped, it was...
She had seen the book he was reading and used it as an invitation to start talking to him.
She invited him over to her house, and even offered to cook for him, if he agreed to give her feedback on the book, when he had finished it. Like some literary form of regurgitation, only with Penguin books instead of actual Penguins.
So it was agreed. That made a date of it.

*

When he arrived there, she was not alone.

“This is Patricia,” announced the authoress, in a bellowing tone.

A scary looking woman with dark hair, a ball breaker, he decided. He was sure to be careful what he said, lest he be pounced upon.
However, she turned out to be cordial enough, flirty even, which intimidated him a little. He was not accustomed to the attentions of the scarier sex. For this, he started to wonder if he had been invited there under false pretences. When would this writer start prompting Chris for his infinite wisdom and critical expertise upon her novel?
Over dinner, he presumed. He waited patiently, wondering whether to launch prematurely into his pre-planned lecture, without being asked. Well, she had invited him, and even cooked a meal, the least he can do is wait.
The wine came out, bottle after bottle, and all this before they had even started eating. This is a recipe for disaster, he thought; but they were paying for it so he just went along.
Too much alcohol on an empty stomach fills one’s bladder all too quickly. He asked to be excused, then stood up, looking lost as if to ask: so where are the toilets?

“They are down the corridor, second on the left,” dictated the authoress.

He took a few more moments than were strictly necessarily to collect his thoughts, as he often did when in no great hurry. However, something important was missing from these musings: a rare and priceless edition, he thought.
It was the answer to his preoccupying question: just what did these women want with him?
He flushed, and made his way back to the dining room, whereupon his question may be answered. However, so shocked was he by the sight, that no such thought arose.
During his bemused pondering in the bathroom, they had stripped down into their birthday suits and started eating their food off each other.
How disappointing, he thought, this was not a proper meal; uncooked, like all the food on display - just fruit, oranges mainly.

“So tell me, how did you like my book?”

“What, now?”

“No time like the present. Besides, if you are too harsh, I will not be so upset; I will be distracted.”

Not knowing where to look was a feeling he dealt with on the tube by concentrating on his book. In the absence of such comfort, he settled for a fixed spot by the window. This way he would not be overly distracted by their proceedings, yet he would still be looking in their general direction. He did not what them to think he was impolite; he was their guest. Moreover, if he was too standoffish, he feared they would be more inclined to invite him to their party of two, just to torture the poor soul.
Nervously, he started his lecture:

“Well, it was an expression of Cixous’ Écriture féminine par excellence.”

“Really, I have never read her,” she interjected abruptly.

“And you manifest the feminine voice Woolf described, in her seminal study on women’s literature.”

“I am not a big fan of Woolf to be honest; she is a little too tame for my liking. I prefer someone with a little more passion, you know what I mean?”

“Like her, I suppose,” he said, while looking at Patricia; who was too preoccupied and engrossed in what she was doing to notice any acknowledgement of her presence.

“Anything else?” asked the authoress, curtly.

“I did have more but it has slipped my mind. I should have written it down.”

“Oh well, there is always next time. We will have to do this again sometime. Just tell me when you finish another one of my books. Then ‘shall we three meet again’.”

“Sorry?”

“You must be hungry, take some fruit for the road, we have plenty, take whatever you like.”

“Um, ok, well I will just take a couple of these.”

“They are not the only fruit you know.”

My wed dream

2009-08-31T13:29:00.000-07:00

Here comes the priest
Not late at least
To bless our union till we’re both deceased.

I am the groom,
Love soon to bloom
Into a flower that will not consume.

In a Gothic church, an organ sings
Married with church bells’ dongs and dings.

There’s the best man,
Rings in his hand,
Not like the last time when I married Anne.

Two rings: twenty-four carat gold,
But that was just what we’re told.

Here comes the bride,
Mouth smiling wide,
Parents are crying and bursting with pride.

She lifts her white deceptive veil,
She is no virginal female.

Here comes the kiss,
Not one to miss,
Does she still feel for her ex-husband Chris?

Down comes the rice,
We’ll cut cake slice,
Which better taste good for that high-rise price.

Consummate vows on honeymoon
In Malibu, it ends too soon.

2009-08-09T13:03:00.001-07:00

Letter R.I.P.
30/07/2009

Dear reader,
I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret. I haven’t told my lover yet, but I will eventually. His name’s Juan Pablo by the way, or J.P. for short. I just had to tell someone, to offload, or I would just blurt it out unintentionally, and that might be the end of it. Indulge me for these few moments by playing daddy Freud while I unleash some long suppressed catharsis upon your listening ear, perchance to be cured, or at least be temporarily relieved of the emotional burden. At this early stage of our relationship, I’d rather not place the pressure of excessive responsibility upon your shoulders.

“O fool, where art thou?” This is what I say to J.P., as he likes me to call him Odysseus; and because, like the mythical hero, he is also a fool, he is easily fooled, a naïve fool, but a lovable one. And he is all mine now.
Even though J.P. compared his ex-wife with Penelope all the time, hoping that she would become like the mythical Frau Fidelity, perhaps such idealisation of her was the very same reason why she turned out so differently. She resisted what her husband wanted her to be. Not because she didn’t love him, nor because she loved someone else. But just because she wanted to be herself. What she considered herself to be was not the woman she was born as, nor the manmade maid and woman made maiden she had become, but the womanly self she chose to become, a self-made woman.

Ironically, she ended up being what she didn’t want to be anyway, and with someone, or something, she didn’t want to be with; just as her husband has. Therefore, it looks like I’m the luckiest one, or just the least loser, if not the winner.
No winners in love affairs and warfare,
Fucking and fighting are more foul than fair,
As we hover through the thick and filthy hair.

J.P.’s wife was not like the mythical Penelope, she was no weaving woman, she had no loom on which to weave, and no thread to weave with. She didn’t stay at home, like me, the ever faithful wife, waiting for my man, the hero, to finally return home, from the home front away from home. If anyone was Penelope, it was I, only without the lust for weaving.

I was never a whole woman, but when my husband died my sense of self became more divided, not resulting from mourning, but because of others’ expectations of grief from me.
I had to balance the concealment of my private, buoyant break dancing and the unveiling of a public pseudo-breakdown, just to keep up appearances, for the sake of family, friends and nosy neighbours – I am not the only one of those round here. To prevent further fragmentation of my psyche, I resolved to avoid everyone by roaming no more outside, during daylight hours. I threw to the wind those dead, dark, depressing duplicitous days, and ventured beyond my front door during the enlightening night-lights of the shady streets. I had always been a night owl anyway, which helped me catch them at it, in the act of the double backed beast of betrayal.

Thankfully, I had plucked up the indignation to stake out the crime cum scene, to indulge in photographic detective work. At first, they were blurry, from a distance. I needed to shoot them from a good view; otherwise, they could have been any old adulterers.

After a while, I began to get in tune with their sexual biorhythm. First, I got the hang of capturing his horsey hung manhood. Then I focused my lens upon her horny performances.
Penelope never put any sexual effort in for J.P., even though, or perhaps because they were married. Only for Eurylochus, my husband at the time, did she dress as a whore. She wore a tight white latex miniskirt, red high heeled kinky boots, and a silky royal blue chemise, with the top three buttons undone, revealing her wonder bra supporting her wunderbar bosom, bulging out of the frame, and wobbling around like those of a drunken Bavarian beer maid on the last of Das Münchener Oktoberfest.

Gradually, I became more courageous. I even stalked by night hoping for the jugular. They habitually humped each other upstairs, and had their thickly woven curtains drawn. One night, however, a fit of lustful passion must have overcome the sickening creatures. They were dying for dirtiness, debauched diversion, and pleasured each other with la petite mort in the living room instead. The telly was still on, fortunately for me, so they didn’t hear me positioning myself and getting pricked by a rose bush. They would look lustfully at the telly all the while. At least his clit licking, buttock banging and finger fucking took their attention away from me banging my finger away, up and down rhythmically, on the clicking camera button.
Who knows what filth they must have been watching, during this multimedia ménage à trois? The TV was adding some primitive spice to their saucy, salacious, insalubrities. Maybe this disgusting visual diversion helped ease their guilty consciences, or just distracted them from what, and whom, they were doing. They were doing each other, like naked apes, monos desnudos.
The crab claws of her nimble fingers pleasured his testicles and phallus Capricornus, before she took the Capricorn by the horn to ride upon him like a whore form of Lady Godiva upon her horny horse. This sound and spectacle accompanied the sounds of the savage jungle, the Tristes Tropiques, between crab dance of Cancer and the porn horn of Capricorn. Their harmonised, high hormonal moaning was disproving the alleged incompatibility of these zoological zodiac signs, and affirming the daily dampness of a female Cancer’s ever eager beaver.

The cyclonic speed of his fingers in the clitoral eye of her hurricane triggered tidal waves and tsunamis of orgasmic, paroxysmal pleasure, drowning all signs of intelligent life on the mainland of her highly sexed psyche.
He was worshipping at the tit totem, and tabooed buttocks in his private fertility cunt cult. Plucking the forbidden fruits from the golden bough of her sexy smooth body; digging his teeth in to her pulpy, fruity flavoured, juicy flesh to the bone; salivating, savouring and sucking her juices dry to the stone. Drinking the nectar of her golden shower streaming down from a summer storm cloud of cumulus congestus lust, forming the thunderous thrusting, lightning longing and storming sparks of a cumulonimbus cumming climax.
She sucked on his rhythm stick, semen seasoned, salty and smelling of Swiss cheese, making him yodel like a high Brown hyena on helium while humping a Striped hyena with her hymen still in tact.
While copulating and copying soft-core porn performances, he poured his cornu copiae, full horn of plenty, with its milk and honey into her basket, she then suckled it, as Jupiter once did.

Although I had private viewing access to this live and direct sex show, I couldn’t spy with my less then panoptical eye what was on the TV, but it sounded naughty. The unmistakably sultry scream of a howling melancholic monkey, which I imagined was pleasuring his penis, entered the fuck cacophony caused by that Penelope woman wailing wildly. Like ethological, wildlife sodomising documentaries, such sexual sights, of fright or delight, are free viewing for anyone bold enough to behold the neighbourhood randy couple, or swingers club. These shrieks of the wilderness ejaculated some exotic sperm over their Amazonian amorousness as they explored each other’s intertropical zones, getting ever hotter with no ozone layer between them, intertwining with their erogenous zones, humid, hot and steamy. Their climatic tropic of caprice is still without climax. Their demented desire is deep, dark, damp, sweaty, sweltering and moist, leaving them breathless, panting for oxygen and carbon dioxide. He makes his way through the forest, the thicket, until he finally reaches the golden stream, shimmering under the blinding sun’s rays, plunging himself into the ebbing and flowing waves, drenching his burning and boiling bronzed body underneath the waterfall. She cums under his breath, until he hears human voices and drowns, oblivious in the oceanic nothingness; while the waterfall she has become carries on through it all.

One of the voices sounded like a prominent wildlife presenter, but I couldn’t be sure, such is that low seductive whispering tone he always talks in, as though he were Oedipus whispering sweet nothings in to the ear, and other orifices, of his beloved mother nature.

After about quarter of an hour, I was running out of camera film, but I still had enough I thought.
The lace net curtain obscured my vista, so I tried to get right up close to the window, and look through the little cracks and holes to get a good view, a good G-shot. I felt like a perverted, pornographic photographer. I was voyeuristic in those moments, when trying to get the most devastating criminal evidence of orgasm, to gain justice for their jouissance, while ensuring their, or at least her, recognisability. Men look the same whether having sex or not. They seem to want it all the time, at least this brute anyway. Whereas women’s faces tend to transform completely, as if they had turned into another woman. I imagine men must get off on such sexual mistaken identity, if they can keep their eyes off the tits and look at their face or into their eyes even. Although this facial façade is tempered, so I’m told, by the occasionally off-putting glare of moronic oblivion, which casts the wrong kind of dampener upon the proceedings. My unfaithful and now thankfully dead ex-husband, Eurylochus, told me that once, the idiot. He didn’t tell me who he was referring to though. First, believing him to be talking about me, I worried. I’m so vain, I would have bet that he was talking about me. This was before an even more troubling thought started to preoccupy my disquieted psyche.

After I had found out that he’d been doing the rounds, with Penelope as well, I realised that he was referring to her. She didn’t look too clever, lying there like a dog having its balls rubbed, licked and fondled. Even though that’s what she was doing to him. I saw that for myself, for me she was just a bitch. However, for my former husband, Penelope was his dog, the man’s best friend, even though Eurylochus had been J.P.’s best man at their wedding, as J.P. had been his at ours.

It looks like things turned out happily ever after, for J.P. and me anyway. We weren’t a match made in a celestial special of Blind Date. Yet, what is a match? A match is absolutely nothing but a war, a competition, a fight, a boxing match, a good combination of punches, not a good combination of people. Good matches don’t exist. God doesn’t match make, even if God did exist. Cupid doesn’t match make, and there are no matches made in heaven. The only metaphysical matches are with Mephistophilis, keeping the infernal flames of chthonic love firing.

It didn’t work out so well for Penelope though. Now, as a punishment, which she had earned, all that remained for her was his tombstone to cry on, all she had left to do was water the roses, with her salty tears, at the grave end of my ex-Eurylochus. Moreover, still being his legal wife, I made sure that I chose and dictated the script of his epitaph:

Love and marriage don’t go together like a horse and carriage
Rot In Purgatory

Yours writerly,
Simone de Buena Vista
A.K.A. Circe, to my lovers

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2009-06-12T07:46:00.001-07:00

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