ISTANBULLSHIT

Istanbullshit, Turkey gobbles you up
Spits you out, like sauerkraut
A tower bout with a climbing lout
Drinking stout, mucking about
Dispelling doubt
A hammer, a clout
A prison snout
Solitary confinement, a solitary pursuit
A soloist: their purse, their suit
A mute person, a mute button
Cute mutton dressed as lamb
Hung for a sheep
Creep deep into your heart
Impart intimate secrets, in full or in part
In code, like a cryptic toad
Implode with guilt, wilt
Then recover, rediscover a lover
Cover your tracks
Track things down, play with a clown
Before you drown your sorrows
With a friend who borrows
Behave like a lunk, drunk in superficial company
Accompany someone home
Comb your hair the next morning
Warning yourself about vague dangers
Rangers’ fans bitter rivals Celtic’s arrivals
At football pitches where pitched battles take place
Cattle makes pace strenuous in abattoir terror
Terrorise with terror eyes, looking for trouble
Looking through Hubble with stars in your eyes
Disguise what you’re watching
Scotching rumours, tumours growing
Knowing their way round your body
Shoddy workmanship, a workman on a ship
Finds it plain sailing
Failings, typically human
Like being late and feeling scared inside
Denied fear’s fear that will reappear, crystal clear
Clear as day, day and night
Night after night an insomniac struggles
In darkness, with light
Light the way, way out west
The rest impressed with the best
The best of friends ends this.

FORGET-ME-(K)NOTS

The nervous sailor paced up and down muttering to himself,
‘I mustn’t forget me knots…’
He was anxious about an impending naval test of his abilities as a seaman.
But his peripatetic prattling confused a florist passer-by who was hard of hearing.
‘Yes, yes, of course you may,’ the florist beamed at the sailor.
‘I sell lots of forget-me-nots in my shop on the High Street, by the tailor’s.’
Far from amused by this strange clown, the sailor wears a frown.
‘Go and get knotted!’ He rudely bellows.
This startles the florist and some other nearby fellows.
‘Thanks, thanks a bunch!’ Is what I should have said to him,
The florist reproaches himself later on over his lunch.
At the same time, the offensive sailor ropes in a friend,
To assist him with his knots before he goes round the bend,
There is something quite interesting the said friend spots,
‘Funny,’ he says to the sailor, ‘about you and all these knots.’
‘What do you mean?’ The sailor asks, clearly exasperated with his knot-making tasks.
‘What’s so funny? Are you trying to give me the slip?’
If his friend had noticed the seaman’s unintentional pun he bit his lip,
Then, with a shake of his head, said:
‘Don’t get uptight; I’m here to help you if it takes all night.
It’s just a coincidence that has occurred to me.’
‘Ah, Ollie,’ the sailor sighs. ‘Why are you talking in riddles?’
While Ollie employed the hand in his trousers pocket for semi-erotic fiddles.
‘Alright, I won’t string this out…’ Ollie says slowly, self-contradictory in a way.
‘I’ll explain what I was just thinking about…’
‘Well, spit it out, man.’ The sailor spat.
Ollie could see spray orally jettisoned by the seaman under stress.
‘It’s this thing about knots in general… You can see, I guess?’
But in the silence that followed he knew how hard the sailor was to impress.
‘Knots is the nautical term for measuring the speed of vessels at sea,’
Ollie exclaimed triumphantly.
‘As well as being something for which you have to show your proficiency.’
At this point, the sailor considered severing all ties with Ollie,
Engorged with pride and wearing an expression of psychotic glee.

ASSOCIATION TRIGGERS (BEARS)

Facial resemblances are triggered by green and yellow acrylic koala bear.
Panda bears pander to no one.
Panda cars—now obsolete police vehicles—pamper nostalgic TV viewers watching reruns of Z-Cars and The Sweeney in noisy chase sequences.
Polar bears, solar flares, containing imagery suggestive of various types of bears’ faces, along with flurries of sun spots,
While gunshots in a black and white western add to the mythic exaggeration of North American history: a US creation that’s no mystery.
In that part of the world are grizzly bears,
Standing erect and proud or sleeping curled,
Their furry bulks shift in and out of shadows,
The American Stars and Stripes flag is unfurled.
A bear used to symbolise Russia.
An usher directs a filmgoer to their seat,
Where suffering in the cinema’s excessive heat,
They watch 3D bear animations that are incomplete.
Bare all in the glare from a bear bearing down on you,
While, bearing up under the strain, you strain to wear down the bear.
Bear this in mind, the bearlike faces that you find,
Spontaneously inspired when your imagination has been fired,
Some fierce and growling, others tender and kind,
Bear no relation to a cheese and its’ rind,
Or the other layers for which you truly pined.

THE KIDS WHO BURNED SANTA

Timmy and Bradley Gates were seven and eight-years-old respectively. With the gaps in their front teeth revealed when their mouths opened, to shrilly emit Christmas carols, the brothers looked typically sweet little boys. But they weren’t. They were two psychopaths and the people whose doors they knocked on to sing their carols at who refused to reward the siblings’ singing regretted it. As the evil boys would urinate through their letterboxes or pour petrol instead, which they lit laughing.

  On Christmas Eve, the boys were impatiently waiting for Santa Claus in their cosy middle-class home where they lived with their long-suffering, low-IQ parents. The boys had wrapped their parents’ presents, which included a box of chocolates for their mother that they’d emptied of its original contents and substituted with their turds. Among their father’s presents was a butterfly with its wings torn off, tastefully nailed to a blood-stained piece of wood.

  After their parents had gone to bed, the boys crept downstairs together. They exchanged a look of insane complicity before separating by the front door. Timmy took a box of matches and went into the lounge to take up his position by the fireplace. Bradley, clutching a club hammer, sneaked outside the house to shin up the drainpipe and up onto the roof where he stood poised behind the chimney. Unsuspecting Santa duly arrived on his reindeer-driven sleigh, from which he plummeted with the grace of a plump pudding and, with a bulging sack over his shoulder, proceeded to climb down the Gates’ chimney. Quick as a flash, like an evil elf, Bradley swung the club hammer and brought it down on Santa’s skull—neatly fracturing it. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the chimney flue, Timmy had started a raging fire. Mr and Mrs Gates awoke to the horrific sounds of a roasting Santa screaming in agony with severe head injuries trapped in their chimney. Interspersed with Santa’s cries, as he burned alive, were the gleeful chuckles of their sick brat children.

  Merry Christmas, Everyone!

THE ELEPHANT'S CASTLE, OVERHEAD

THE ELEPHANT'S CASTLE, OVERHEAD, a photo by Narolc on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Small-scale sculpture made from recycled materials including wood, plastic, metal, wires and toys.

THE ELEPHANT'S CASTLE, BACK

THE ELEPHANT'S CASTLE, BACK, a photo by Narolc on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Small-scale sculpture made from recycled materials including wood, plastic, metal, wires and toys. Look out for alternative views of the same piece soon.

THE ELEPHANT'S CASTLE

THE ELEPHANT'S CASTLE, a photo by Narolc on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Small-scale sculpture made from recycled materials including wood, plastic, metal, wires and toys. Look out for alternative views of the same piece soon.

CASH IS GOD

Today, cash is God.
You can be brash, vulgar and vile,
As long as you know when to smile,
You can’t be too ruthless, aggressively accruing your pile.
You can be flawed, thick and callow,
In a material world that is this shallow.

RIGIDSKY

‘The Sentry Fugue’s’ source, like a centrifugal force, is a dynamic military composer called Rigidsky.
He stands to attention conducting his own scores with military precision, resulting in A Major influence on his peers.
At the end of his concerts, he salutes the audience’s cheers before he marches off and disappears.
‘A Man Hoovers’—Rigidsky’s popular rhapsody—alludes to the vacuum he felt when not on military manoeuvres.
‘Perfect Pitch Battle,’ for a triangle and a rattle, shows both his composure on the battlefield and in the field of music, his skill as a composer.
‘A Major Blow,’ played on the trumpet, was inspired by the time he struck an officer following a dispute over a crumpet.
‘Orders of the Day,’ a series of piano sonatas, show he’s in total command.
Rigidsky always believed that actions speak louder than words.
Especially, as he can attest, the actions of a full-scale symphony orchestra.
His controversial treatment of Handel’s Water Music resulted in the drowning of scores of bagpipe players, while it proved his fearlessly ambitious nature.
‘I Don’t Want to B flat,’ (in B flat) is a musical interpretation of a punctured tyre’s existence played on various flutes and recorders.
‘Hello, Cello,’ is a cello concerto based on the life of the late cellist, Igor Botweak—well known for his bizarre greeting of musical instruments, which he believed were living beings entitled, like the musicians who played them , to comfortable seating.
‘Tone E, Blare,’ in E flat, contains the longest sustained trumpet blast on record, and is intended as a reproach of former PM, Tony Blair.
In his private life, as on the podium, Rigidsky conducts himself well as far as anyone can tell.
In terms of musical greatness, it’s hard to judge where Rigidsky ranks.
Whereas in the army, he’s a Captain.

ANGELS

Angels’ angles of descent,
Being the embodiment of virtue doesn’t pay the rent,
Smell divine—heaven scent,
Above reproach, above the earth,
Not truly valued but beyond all worth,
Something pure like innocent allure, like light,
A form of power, a powerful form,
Like the tallest tower that’s out of the norm.

Apparently, apparitions follow some traditions,
There are certain conditions,
Terms and conditions apply,
Reads the small print millimetres high,
Conditions citizens are conditioned to expect,
Or to ignore along with their hidden catches,
So they overlook them like their recently discovered bald patches.

Abject and appalling conditions,
Unreasonable and unbearable conditions,
Conditions apply until you die,
Unacceptable conditions, inescapable,
No matter how you try,
So you do accept them but wonder why?