The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone.
“I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see.
I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke
The other later.” They both masticate
The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.”
So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak,
Den gulps and swallows apprehensively.
He pales, as if at the approach of some
Fierce, underlying pandemonium.
Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall
So that how long he’s sat he does not know.
The dismal room has undergone no change
Save that its cluttered details now seem strange
To him, and meanwhile simmering below
His tongue the bitter vegetable ball
Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run
Into his belly, past the teeth and gums
To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone.
Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan
As he by subtle increment becomes
Uncomfortable in his own skeleton
And catapults up from his seat to pace
The room, thus to assuage his restlessness
While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk
Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk
At the delay, this possible to guess
Through study of his well-upholstered face
Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue.
“Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz
I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares,
Circling an endless rug between the chairs
As, barely knowing where or who he is
He wades in a dissociative fog
Alone, the lights on but nobody home,
Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid
The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat
Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that,
Some little tramp on crackling celluloid
Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome,
All colour fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den
In antique garb now waddles through the gloom
Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk,
Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk
While in the upper corners of the room
Are gruff, gesticulating little men
In similar attire, homunculi
Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace
The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call
Their taunts, where dirty grey light seems to fall
As from some higher mathematic space
Or proletarian eternity
Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow
Seizes them both. Perspective is askew,
The jeering imps made large as, by degree,
Den and his colleague rise towards them. He
Has the sensation as he passes through
Of fusing with the drab planks from below,
Emerging on their far side in insane
Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor
To nightmare. He discovers that his skin,
Now naked, is that on a manikin
Grown from this attic of the charnel poor
With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain,
Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum
Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled,
As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he
In floor, is seized by the fraternity
Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled
Up to inebriate Elysium:
“The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch
Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut,
Enjoy that good night out without the wife
Pursue an after-hours afterlife
And want for nothing save a head to butt
Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.”
Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell
Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy
The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate,
Its touted goodness decades out of date,
Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye
Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele
Of smouldering reprobates who swirl and curse
About him as he struggles there beneath
Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat
Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat
While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth,
Though some of his confederates are worse.
There’s one whose features crawl about his face,
Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be.
Another, a raw-knuckled harridan
With smile as threatening as any man
Sways to an air that falls conspicuously
Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space,
Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives
To find its source, soon managing to spot
The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums,
Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs
Disconsolately, yet perk up as what
Appears to be their ringleader arrives
To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who
With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes
Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view
Him, if but briefly, noticing that two
Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs,
One memorably fair though lacking hue