And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out
But draws the mob’s attention with his cry
That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown,
Jesting as they attempt to tread him down,
His careful lyric ear affronted by
Their hateful voices everywhere about.
“He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg,
Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.”
Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit,
Is held down by the leering female brute
Who’s carving her initials on his arm
Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg
Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet,
Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout
As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire,
Resurfacing to hear the bard enquire
If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about,
Told in reply that he’s just down the street,
At which the children leave. The cackling throng
Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways.
They kick Den harder as the band begin,
They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin
And as the joyous, tumbling music plays
These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song:
“Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we,
Up here near fifty year now, man and boy!
Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale,
So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail!
Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy
Our pie-eyed paralysed posterity!”
And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some
Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes,
Target for every last ethereal thug.
Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug.
Not even memory of his name remains
Nor life prior to this warped delirium
Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal
Competes now with the music’s weave and wail
As the two writhe in what appears to be
A pissed-up paradise or purgatory
Where bygone barbarisms still prevail
And the perpetually present poor are real,
Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass
Before distraction having the semblance
Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums,
Frog-marching there before him as he comes
A mangled man whose babyish countenance
Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass;
Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime
And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?”
The vagrant phantom loudly now decries
His captive’s deeds and whimpered alibis
Though Den, just then pressed down beneath the floor,
Cannot discern the nature of the crime
Yet sees its punishment. For his offence
The prisoner, stripped of his torn attire,
Is made to kneel, unsure what to expect,
While Kenny, wooden phallus teased erect,
Learns that the roughneck revellers now require
An act unnatural in every sense.
As both performers start to moan and bleat
In their abrasive coitus they enthral
The spiteful, spectral spectators, who sing
“We’re jolly and we smoke, but here’s the thing.
There’s some stuff that we care for not at all
And serve rough justice here above the street
Where all the arseholes of the ages meet,
Thereby democratising Milton’s fall
With Satan overthrown and mob made king!”
Den feels as if he may be settling
Back to a real world almost past recall
Through spit and sawdust at the phantoms’ feet
Into an intermediary zone.
As from some party in an upstairs flat
He hears the rosy-cheeked man’s howl of pain,
Forced to do that which goes against the grain,
Then sinks back to Fat Kenny’s habitat,
In darkness with the lamp-bulb clearly blown
And finds, now the experience is done,
His host slumped on the couch; him in his chair.
The jumping up and pacing, it would seem,
Were merely part of his unearthly dream.
Exhausted, leaving questions in the air,
He slides into a kind oblivion,
Knowing, as all thoughts into shadow pass,
The dead to be a literal underclass.
Out of grey nullity to consciousness
He comes, reluctant, one fact at a time,
Aware of self, of where he is and when,
His body in the chair. Eyes slitted, Den
Notes, after the stark, solarised sublime,
That there is colour, though not in excess
Nor well-distributed. The sun, discreet,
Leans through the curtains to bestow a kiss
On Kenny’s slumbering paunch. Beneath Den’s tongue
He finds and spits out the exhausted bung
Of salvia then, needful of a piss,
Rises unsteadily to his bare feet
To navigate that unfamiliar place,
The hallway with his bag, Fat Kenny’s coat,
Then up loud, bare-board stairs to find the loo.
Fully awake now he peers down into
Stained porcelain, the filthy toilet’s throat,
Its exhalations lifting in his face