Shares a marble sandwich
With a Mr. Finnegan from several headstones down
And no more how’s-your-father now.
She’s a cockeyed optimist
Who can’t resist
This final white parade.
Allthrough she nows it’s sometimeattic of belusional dehaviour and splitzophrenia, chicaned help thanking that de pravious abverse odder song had bin abider. She stoops out from the councealing vagitation unto the groen lawnings ab Sent Hinderus joystirs the delayrious psychodelphic untheme slydes into its catch Icarus.
So she waits for God, oh what’s the point
Of all these tears?
Letters of the alphabet are pouring from her ears
And all her words are mangled
And her sentences are frayed
To black hole radiation
In this final white parade.
Delyrics, fearsome risen, meek her thank o’ Somewill Backitt, hom she whoopes wel come and fizzit soon. He’s bin alloyal friend to err, hus Sum, and it’ snotties falld vatican’t be comething moor. She walks acrass the gross toherds the medowse weaver fating song contimbering to cadger ear on interdistent ghusts of wint.
Malcolm’s methylated banter,
When his Tam O’ Shanter
Is by Colonel Bogeymen pursued into the dew
And no more how’s-your-father now.
Prisoner at the bar,
They’d raise a jar
For every serenade he played.
Staunding bider raydoom intrance, her sweet’ners Peatrickier has nowse inner and is waifing hippily, relived that shizzle right. Lucia tarts to walk a liffel feister, denderrun. She dips and skances in de light, her shedoe lang uponder trilliard-terrble baise o’ day asoiloam lorn. It’ spin anutter pafict lucci die, hor whele life samewho fulldead inter it from pauppa’s word nowtivity to Jimsthorte cemeteary bedstone. Ivory day is like as know-globe with the untired uniqverse curtin sudspinsion, fullove myrth and literatunes and herstory, an’ divery daymarch like the next. She rashes eagirly thruwards the dosspital, towords the mocean’s featherly himbrace.
Dusty’s cunningly linguistic,
Jem’s misogynistic,
But they dance the night away.
Manac es cem, J.K,
And no more how’s-your-father now.
Grinding signal into noise
The crowd enjoys
This final white parade.
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight, Lucia dawnsees on the meadhows grase.
So we wait for God, oh what’s the point
Of all these tears?
Letters of the alphabet are pouring from our ears
And all the wards are empty
And the beds are all unmade,
And we’re walking through the blackout
On this final white parade.
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight, Lucia dawnsees on the meadhows grase floriver.
BURNING GOLD
Smoulder-bearded, blind with tears of laughter, Roman takes Dean’s hand and drags him from the crackling nursery, little streets on fire behind them. Out in fresh air, grabbing their still-sniggering kiss behind a rolling screen of acrid grey, Roman can smell all of the potential never-to-be-realised cash as it’s cremated, an expensive stench diluted and dispersed in the slum firmament, into the dead-end Saturday, the hard-up afternoon. He’s still got that big painting in his shrunken monkey head: the giants in nightshirts thundering the fuck out of each other with their blazing billiard sticks, a precious gore of ore sprayed molten from the point of bloody impact. For Rome Thompson, snogging with his lover-boy there in the choke and uproar of the moment, there at that specific junction of his self-inflicted and unlikely roughneck history, there in the Boroughs and its timeless holy fire of poverty, the violent and unearthly image does no more than hold a mirror to real life, life being an affair of rage and pool-cues and colossal brawlers bleeding wealth. Of stolen kisses by the pyre of art, a kind of currency gone up in smoke here where the mint once stood, here where they hammered out the coin more than a thousand years ago. Behind a drifting cordite curtain stands Thompson the Leveller, frenching his young man, a fissured, glued-together composite of all his misspent times and misspelled words and miscreant deeds: the sum of his mosaic moments.
While the other eight- and nine-year-olds are learning how to read and write he’s up there in the slate-creak and the starlight, learning burglary. A spidery cut-out shape on a black paper 1950s skyline, it is in the slant and scrabble of the rooftop night that he receives an education in both politics and socio-economics, there at the blunt crowbar end of the economy, there in the fiscal infra-red. Shinning the rusted drainpipes that are too frail to take anybody’s weight save his, slipping head-first through open window-cracks that would defeat those with an ounce of flesh upon their fuse-wire bones, he understands the structure of the world that he’s so recently been born into to be entirely based on criminality, expressed in different languages, at different magnitudes. A warehouse skylight jemmied open here, an interest rate adjusted or a neighbouring state invaded there. The hostile takeover, or sticky brown tape on a pane of glass to stop the wind-chime pieces falling when you smash it. Little Roman Thompson and the boardroom blaggers, all in a great classless commonality of the adrenaline-habituated. Slide a sheet of newspaper beneath the door to drag the fallen key after you’ve poked it from the lock, or spread embezzled losses into the next quarter’s figures. Roman runs with bigger kids, semi-professionals, divides the loot, hears all of the instructive sex-jokes several years before his classmates. Nobody can catch him. He’s the gingerbread boy.
Consequently he can’t write to save his life, thinks syntax is a levy raised on condoms, sometimes gets his phraseology caught in his zip. When the authorities he’s nettled try to get their own back by accusing his beloved obsessive-compulsive boyfriend of being a social nuisance, Roman reckons that they must see Dean as his “Hercules Heel”. He reads, though, chewing ravenously through all of the history and politics that he can get his bony hands on, trying to locate and orient himself in socio-economic spacetime. He can’t write, then, other than the odd historical research piece or the slyly vitriolic Defend Council Housing pamphlets that he sometimes pens, but he can read. He can mine information from an electronic or a paper coal-seam, he can organise it in his stealthy nightlight-robbery mind and understand all its essential lowlife intricacies. He can read and he can talk — talk like Hell’s auctioneer as tenants’ representative at Borough Council meetings, making all the most embarrassing enquiries, mentioning the most unmentionable things, calling a cunt a cunt. He’s lost count of the occasions when he’s been evicted from the Guildhall to trot chuckling down the wedding-photo steps and squint up at the angel on the roof, the one that his mate Alma thinks is working class because it’s got a billiard cue in its right hand. He knows his Woodward and his Bernstein, knows all about following the money, lurks in ambush on the cash trail.