THE CRESS WARS VETERANS

Macauley Culkin’s sulking,

Skulking in a corner with not so little Jack Warner of Warner Brothers.
Mothers driven to despair, by chauffeurs who don’t care,
En-route to nowhere.
Nowhere Man, Tomorrow’s People,
An ancient building with a modern steeple,
Steeplejack Warner bathing in a sauna has torn a ligament climbing out.
Climbing doubt reaches its peak,
Hiders hide and seekers seek,
Jacob Marley and Jacob’s Creek,
Incoherent references, so to speak.
Marleybone station, the Stations of the Cross,
The revival of Christian values, a revival of interest in Bros,
Moss Bros, Stirling Moss, gloss paint, faint floss—candy and dental,
DVDs and blue ray for sale or rental,
Detrimental, regimental, militants, the military and their artillery,
Capillaries, in a similar vein, connected arterially to the inner brain.
Hemispheres of the brain in the western hemisphere recognise where international, cultural differences appear,
Like saki and beer, football and gear,
Gearing up for a change, changing gears,
Shifts attention from motorised vehicles to outfit changes.
Changing times, time for change—two clichéd phrases from the limited range of politicians.
Statisticians’ traditions include lies, can involve spies and sometimes, even, the consumption of pies.
Thighs riddled with cellulite shake and quiver in the night,
Not gone into gently like a subtle Dylan Thomas allusion,
Maya represents the Hindi vision of illusion,
Whose intrusion clouds our reason.
The mating season, seasonal work,
A job for the summer and the winter to shirk,
The winter of our discontent, winter mixture,
A mixture of snow and sleet,
Making winter complete.
Completed tasks, good jobs well done,
Concreted casks containing diagrams of diaphragms
Disturbed by hiccups and the records of dire prams,
That once got pushed by our ancestors.
Ann’s cess stores stash the slash from those who fought in cress wars,
Now—bores—these vets walk their pets,
Making bets on pointless outcomes.
Out come their old war stories,
They’re like born-again gore-Tories,
These relics reliving their past glories,
Looking back through a rose-tinted haze at the good old days.
Romanticising the backdrop of global warfare and genocide,
With ignorant pride, they confide they’re currently terrified,
Of anonymous, lawless thugs,
Who claim benefits, steal and take drugs,
These mindless yobs should all get jobs,
Whether or not they get paid,
Simply because their predecessors did,
Thankful for each day they stayed.
Despite being poor and fighting the war,
Life was good, like during the blackout—
For that was when, mostly, they got laid.
If life was shit, they didn’t mind a bit,
Atleast they weren’t afraid.
They knew what was what,
They didn’t have a lot,
Still, there was no such thing as a communist plot!

THE TRAFFIC WARDENS' ARMS Part 2

Sharon wore a leather kilt for the floor cleaning that was necessary after she’d glossed her ceiling. Chewing her tongue, humming along to the speeded up bagpipes playing through her headphones killed the time until she decided she deserved a tea break. Waiting patiently by the kettle, not watching, until it boiled, she praised God when it did. Pouring water on the meticulously placed teabag in her favourite cup, she frowned at the hairline crack running from its rim to Princess Diana’s hairline. When she’d finished her tea, she ritualistically enfolded her cup in a number of tissues of different sizes and colours before locking it back up. Along with an embossed leaflet about the guessed width of a giraffe’s neck and the darts trophies stolen, by her brother, from jumble sales.

Bored with the radio, Gulliver went jelly shopping to shrug off his feelings of being like a brick in an armchair. He squeezed packets of jelly stacked on supermarket shelves with arthritic fingers, exclaiming with almost sexual gratification to himself. He bought a jar of Brylcreem, which he opened in the store and applied liberally to his hair, before returning to the jelly. He chose eight different flavours and bought three packets of each, his lips and chin glistening under the store’s fluorescent lighting as he salivated at the checkout. The cashier’s name was Sally according to the badge on her right breast, her face a sea of freckles with a split for a mouth that demanded money. Smiling, Gulliver wiped his lips and did his flies up, then blew his nose and fumbled for the right money. Leaving the store, he felt euphoric; he was ‘jellied up’ and on a roll. He’d go home, lie on the sofa and eat the jelly. With the radio switched off!
Indoors, Gulliver carefully unwrapped each of the packets of jelly, tossing the packaging in the bin before devouring the contents with great self-satisfaction. After eating a few packets, he felt full so, not being greedy, he stopped consuming, sat still and spent the next few minutes in greasy silence simply thinking about the recently consumed jelly. Then, suddenly, he suffered a horrendous attack of arthritis.
‘It serves me right for eating all that jelly,’ he told himself; despite the fact the abrupt affliction was medically unrelated. With a typically English trait, Gulliver ruined his previous jelly revelry with severe, self-inflicted guilt lashing.

Having finished floor cleaning for the day, Sharon rang the giraffe-neck-width-guessing chat line (at a rate of 48p a minute) to dissipate her loneliness a little. After her call, she painted her fingernails and decided to go for a walk. She closed her front door on the smell of gloss paint and, outside in the street, bumped into her friend, Jane. When Jane got up she linked arms with her friend and the two women walked together until bumping into their mutual friend, Zoe. She, too, linked up and the trio perambulated in unison. They were heading in the direction of the recently ablaze wig tunnel and Jane was whingeing. She was upset because she’d split up with her boyfriend, who’d become a traffic warden.
‘Never mind,’ said Sharon and Zoe.
Before adding that they’d warned her about him all along, but they didn’t like to say they’d told her so.

To read The Traffic Wardens' Arms in its entirety visit:
http://ambulant-literature.org.uk

THE TRAFFIC WARDENS' ARMS Part 1

Following a failed séance, a woman agitated a mop in a bucket of hot disinfectant before swishing it across the creaky room’s bare floorboards. Her name was Sharon Platt. She was overweight, dressed in a khaki sarong, a bin liner wrapped across her breasts, as she savagely swiped the already clean floor, listening through headphones to a military brass band. Glancing through her window, Sharon noticed the wig tunnel was on fire and immediately thought of ringing the fire brigade, but, then, she thought, somebody would already have done so. She was right as a matter of fact and this is what happened:
Person ringing the fire brigade, ‘This is an emergency—the wig tunnel’s on fire!’
Fire brigade, ‘Wig tunnel on the Kafka estate, is that?’
‘That’s right only you’d better hurry. There’s loads of smoke coming out and you know what they say…’
‘Yes, they say, “There’s no smoke without fire” and we say there’s no fire without us on the end of a well-aimed hose!’
Hoses were indeed used to extinguish the attention-grabbing fire in the wig tunnel. So, Sharon, now she was able to without distraction, resumed her frantic floor mopping after mopping her sweaty brow, soaking, in the process, the sleeve of her jumper.
One hour, Sharon’s mop caught on a nail protruding from one of the floorboards. Cursing, she elbowed a hole in the plaster and lathe wall she stood too close to and cursed again at the mess on the floor she’d accidentally created. Frustrated, she rent her hair. In need of shelter, she rented the room that, now, provided a source of gloom; she felt the floor would never get clean. Her eyes rose to the ceiling as she cupped her hands in a gesture of supplication. It could do with another coat of white gloss she mused, despite having had four coats the previous week. Behind the skirting boards, sounds of radioactive mice explosions startled her into placing a fiercer grip on her mop’s handle.

Gulliver Trent, window-cleaning barrister, was sent from Kent to check distances between emptied shelves in Croydon premises. He used this work to focus his attention away from his arthritis, which agonisingly preoccupied him. In his leisure time, he sought the company of traffic wardens. They were cool he thought and he liked their attitude, often taking drugs and drinking with them. Gulliver sent photographs of some empty shelves he’d measured the distance between to the DVLC, along with a thank you card for traffic wardens. Apart from his affinity with traffic wardens, Gulliver was close to a giraffe-neck-width-guesser from Hull, who died in an accident with some thin ice. Gulliver was devastated and organised the explosion of a shopping trolley next to a parking meter in Hull by way of a farewell tribute. He also persuaded nearly ten local traffic wardens to hold a brief vigil at this site. People close to Gulliver attributed his subsequently odd behaviour to the tragic loss of his friend. On one occasion, he’d disrupted a backgammon championship being held in East Croydon by attending as a pun—with a piece of rotting gammon selotaped to his back. The fish created such an appalling smell, that everyone associated with him, that no one would associate with him, except, of course, for loyal traffic wardens.

To read The Traffic Wardens' Arms in entirety visit:
http://ambulant-literature.org.uk/ (Simply find in the links below and click)