At one with the mind in the maggot of the universe: Teasing the base of tinfoil with a flame the powder heated black and resinous and a thread of smoke sucked thru the tube I held lung-deep until the walls began breathing. I spat in the kitchen sink. A helicopter whirred above but otherwise the bedsit was silent when I then connected the portable speakers to the MP3. I played Suicide. And in the space between Ghost and Rocket I was unravelling those under-thingies and said damn at smeared in the gusset a kind of colourless pâté and I said damn lots louder.

I bolted to the bathroom. I hung for a bit making noises over the toilet. Then with the cold tap I wet my hands. I dried with a teatowel. Then I made a black tea, took my jeans, socks off, I put on trackie bottoms and sat surveying from the bed my wee empire of dirt . . . this morning’s half-drunk cuppa with a dead gnat floating in it, the dinner plate of baked beans, the dozen cig filters dotting the carpet, the damp ball of bog-roll. And if it wasn’t for Suicide whooping there was a (some percent) chance hearing the rat under the floorboards . . . but yeah.

The slim Kollideoscapes opened at the onionskin, which I unpeeled and traced a fingertip over the twig-twirling font spelling Carlos McCondo. I turned to the title-leaf. It said Tito Androgynous and the background was stylised with splats of Goat's blood, I said. The first few numberless pages, too, the print, to my eyes, was more glyphic or like scribbles than your basic alphabet.

I chucked the book on the quilt, got the tinfoil, and my gaze went out of focus at a moth crushed dead on the wall.

When I opened again the title (parodied like a Dalí) had two fat clowns on camels. Trollop and Chimera it said and my eyes snaked down page one and blinked at three lines of page two but then I said Jeez and got up and made a tea. I set the mug on the table next to the bed and I splayed watching a kind of will-o-wisp from the brew that was steam.

A phrase, Link Wray as a zombie, an image of him shuffling over a desert road, came to mind . . . 

Half a second later the radio yapped: Happy birthday Daley Thompson! Happy birthday Kate Bush! This is Lick FM at seven thirty-err - Now another Kate, a cupcake baker from Dudsbury’s emailed in, she says: This is the age of crawling on your knees is what my ex hubby pleaded.

Rain came down outside. Traffic noise hissed thru the window. Scratching my ribs and thighs I went in and out of sleep until some point mid-morning upstairs stamped with a series of b-whacks. I got up for a pee, a cuppa and smoke, I put on a three hour Smiths and Fall mix but the shitty speakers had no bass.

Hunkering in the quilt, I peeled the onionskin and a shoal of molecules floated over my retinas and by opening and closing I saw the ink of the illustrations and the titles like shapeshift . . . 

Twelve Gnats, Two Gangs of Velocity, Two Nebular Klansmen, A Windmill’s Tale, All’s Swell That Dead’s Swell, Ant & Clear, As You Lipo, The Comedian of Roars, Coriolingus, The Cymbals, Hamlaugh: Prig of Dinmurk, Harry & Falsetto, Harry: Portrait of a Mind in a Sewer, Harry the Hatred, Harry the Savage, The Jealous Seizer, King Juice, Kung Liar, Love Your Life Lost, McCondo, Meander for Meander, Merchants of the Abyss, Merry Whales of the Wind, Miss Simulator’s Dream, Much Do Bout Nobodaddy, Oh Fellow of the House of Swords, Prickles in a Tyre, Ricky II, Ricky III, Rome + Jewels, The Training of the Tapir, and it returned to Thundering of Prosper.

All afternoon I dipped here, I dipped there, read half a page of one title, a full of another. And while outside a house-alarm kept bleeping and a couple of hire-taxis tapped the horns and in a nearby chestnut the maggot-pies yacked and yacked and them upstairs sounded though they were playing football, there was like a silence as if I had in earplugs. I thought of the undead Link Wray, which was a dream and my yawning belly woke us. Then I kind of watched bacteria with neon tails swim on the film of my eyeballs until five ten minutes later I was in TESCO in a longish queue of mainly couples with baskets of Saturday night treats like Irish steaks, tubs of cookie dough, bottles of rosé.

The porcine at the till (looked like Pauline Quirke) said: You got Clubcard? You want Clubcard? You want save money with Clubcard?

I unlocked my bike and a Fitter Happier voice came out my mouth as I recited every digit to (what I’ll call) a we-are-the-robots poem . . . 


Thru the widescreen TESCO pane the security guy stared mind-boggled as I scrunched the receipt, dropping it down a drain. And I got on the saddle, went past Chicken Run where a woman who'd mermaids printed on her sarong was eating a dumpling. She shouted us. Did I want business? I steered into Gooch country. Following a bird or a bat that was flying in like figures-of-eight lamppost to lamppost, I could hear the wings flap on the air and I went past a council house with portholes for windows and screwed into the bricks it had one of those blue plaques . . . It were on this spot, it said, where the English Elvis, melancholic poet and writer, Steven Padraig Morrissey, purchased his first 7 inch single.

At Claremont-Alexandria the woman from Chicken Run rounded the pronged wing of a MAZDA Taipan. She smiled. She’d a gold fang. And slinking over to us she laughed gravelly and said: You’re name’s Ooze. 

But just then a matted hair woman with a hint of moustache approached with like Mexican skull pendants in her ears and holding this sprig of wild flowers and she was twitchy and panicky, spitting words every other of which began or ended in zed. She pointed at a lamppost. And it wasn’t humming but then it was humming and to the sodium bulb she said: Look the Zoas! Look, she pointed, look! The Zoas are here!

An army of flying insects melded into an orange clot of air. It’s a fuckin melee, said Chicken Run as thousands of bugs hovered like spiralling like a satanic phantom and I said fuck at the variety of bluebottles, horsefly, different midges, I thought a ladybird, dancing wasps and bees. 

Get off!

Chicken Run yelled flailing about with a dragonfly trying to land on her sarong and two big things circled me before chasing her up to the Windrush.

The insect woman said: Please, please! She pressed with her thumb an invisible lighter. Yes I said and noticed her barefoot. When she took my disposable the swarm dived and I had to duck but she scampered onto a nearby hummock of grass and the mad bugs followed. Loads landed on her shoulders. She’d a cardigan on and a thick carpet grew down the arms and ladybirds, a clump of were in her hair, while a butterfly clung to an earlobe. She stood squirting from a canister that said Petrol Lighter Fluid and she was chanting about the Zoas the Zoas the Zoas, and next I know she had dropped into a lotus.

At the first spark the bugs exploded in all directions while she sat in a ring of blue yellow fire. Her cardigan was speckled. Tiny dots of shite there were, on the shoulders. But then I heard a shout, a guy saying: Mrs X! Mrs X! Mrs X! And two figures, one ahead of the other, strode down the slab gulley behind the Park Health Centre and the first who could have been man or woman gasped at the dying flames and the second was the guy and he was wheezing and he said: What’ve you done to her?