As landing in bed is normal, I cry to the rooftops,
my last weep is sounded by the alarm.
You look confused, my mother doesn’t.

It is dark, you stand by it and wait for my tears to fade.

© Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

I walk to my view and look manly and testosteronely fueled at that fucking beautiful sunset.

God I am an ALPHA male.

My balls quake with sperm wrestling to get out and fight.

Touch me once, I will let you, second time, feel my fury.

I pump and stretch and run and quake, I am what you want to be, queer.

I pump to the toilet and it runs hard, like solid bricks on the Empire State.

Bang.

done.

ALPHA.

© Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

The instrument he is playing is a Buchla 200e, a modular synthesizer, developed in the late 70’s.
I started getting interested in these instruments two years ago when I was obsessed with Radiohead and have now moved on to owning something similar. These instruments are seldom recognized yet they are audible in most of the music we hear today, mostly emulated through computer programs.

To a greater extent I guess I wanted to illustrate how these are the unsung heroes of the musical world. They can produce the softest of recordings to the harshest of sounds yet most people have no clue what they are.

© H. L. Stokes for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

© The Sociable Truth for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Following BNP leader Nick Griffin becoming an MEP to the European Parliament last week, we bring you an exclusive interview with Nick’s Griffin.

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments

I’ll take no offence. It’s only the maybe beginning. Here it is:

When I think about the Bosporus in her lungs my legs go numb and the sound of afternoon Muslim prayer song hums incoherent at me again. That wide dirty river, barrier between dynasties and witness to history, it washed into my girlfriend and did its business before she sank all too solid, even her, sickly Elizabeth, all too solid in an instant to float; thin limbs never flailing with Darwinian intent, pulse slowing to Sundays, her brown eyes as wide as the estuary into the Black Sea.

© Gary Ablett for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

I’m currently appearing in Macbeth which has (admittedly) received mixed reviews. One reviewer on the internet – a journalist named Matt Boothman – was particularly unkind about me. This song is my emotional response to his review.

Warning: this song contains strong language.

By The Glass Band (@myspace) featuring Arran Glass on guitar and vocals, Phil Cornwell on double bass and Kit Massey on harpsichord.

15/06/09 update: Matt Boothman has replied below with a music response

© The Sociable Truth for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 105 comments

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments

He walks to the dance floor and begins his routine,
like a bird of paradise, he cleans his area and fluffs his man feathers (penis)

He starts to move, his glistening body penetrating the air around him,
each turn filling the air with testosterone. His eyes a glint away from sexual contact.

As he turns to me I feel everything stop, I watch him slowly put his arm out for me.

But then i see him slip on a beat.

His face becomes a crisp sheet of hate, and my frown becomes a smile.
A mudhole, my friend, is where you are going.

Toned and sexy now means a destiny with looking for joy.

© Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

A landing on a planet after a journey through space. Chiefly in to make planetfall.

© Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Poker, Poker, Poker.

I’ve been playing poker regularly for three and a half years, and playing well for maybe one and a half. I’ve learned many things playing it, very few of which are applicable in real life without becoming somewhat bastardesque.

1. When you have lots of chips and other people don’t, even if they might have a good hand and could win, you can bully them and win their chips because they are frightened of your big stack, and don’t want to lose and go home early This is very applicable in real life if you are the Tories. Or the United States.
2. Generally people aren’t bluffing. They’re especially not bluffing when you are.
3. It’s very easy to lie to people if they’re not watching you in the slightest. MPs have learned this.
4. Once you’ve been playing poker for a while, people will insist you watch a film about poker, although most of these films are terrible. Many people will insist you watch Rounders. This is a not very good film with Matt Damon in it (there are some good films with Matt Damon in. He’s great in Team America World Police). He plays against John Malkovich, who has a ridiculous Russian accent and who’s tell (some indication to someone’s cards, can be physical in body language, vocal, physiological etc) is to eat a biscuit. This is a rubbish tell, as it would be fairly identifiable by the massive number of biscuits he eats, but not quite as bad as the man in Casino Royale who cries blood.
5. Rounders has a line in it “in the poker game of life, women are the rake. ” This doesn’t mean women are some sort of garden implement and best kept in sheds; a rake in poker is the fee you have to pay for playing in a casino. So I think we’re some sort of tax. I think this quote happens a bit after Matt Damon loses a deposit for his house so his girlfriend is upset with him, and wants him to settle down and give up on his crazy dreams, and have a life of matrimonial drudgery. There’s a lot wrong with the film Rounders, and a lot of it is the attitudes in the previous sentence.
6. People who like the film Rounders tend to think women are rakes, but not in the raffish, gaddaboutway that makes us fun and exciting. However they also think your tell will be eating biscuits and so can be easily beaten.
7. When playing tournaments, you can wear hats and sunglasses with no fear of reprisal. This means you often can’t see any of the cards, making your play very difficult to predict.
8. There are many factors to take into account when working out whether to play a hand or not. The best advice is to play the man, not the cards.  Somewhat depressingly, you can find a way to make someone lose even when they have the best cards, by knowing the right buttons to push and if some conditions are right. Becoming a good player involves working out your buttons and other people’s. Applying this in real life can be quite nasty.
9. Tournaments have certain points where you have to take a risk to win, or you’ll eventually get ground down. This is a nice lesson for life, so where I’ll finish.

© This Space for Rent for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments

© Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Well, my latest Carbon-14 analysis of you came back somewhat cloudy.  It reported that you were 29,000 years old, which I think is off by at least one order of magnitude.  Someone licked the test tube again; I’m changing strategies.

In order to precisely determine your age, I’m sending dendrologists over to cut you open and count how many rings.  (Dendrology is the study of woody plants.)  Apparently you lay down one ring every year, and from this data we can learn not only your age, but also whether or not you have been attacked by wood beetles, when exactly you experienced a drought, and how much nitrogen your roots are fixing.  The operation will be painless and of great benefit to science.  Foreverafter at the international conferences we hold to discuss you, I will be called upon to present your ring diagrams.  These diagrams will be reproduced in a paper in Nature or Science, and I’ll be remembered for putting one of our age’s four great questions to rest.  (In order of ascending importance: What is dark matter?  What are the ingredients in the primordial soup? What happens to moths on their way to the moon?  How old are you?)

So you must cooperate when the dendrologists come knocking.  Let them strap you to the kitchen table and lower the ether mask onto your face.  Because science is the greatest endeavour of mankind; science is the only candle in our century’s long darkness; science is the purest expression of my love for you.

© No Neck for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

There aren’t any cheap sordid paperback novels set in fish and chip shops, but if there were, they might be graced by these titles.

• Fishing for Love
• Open or Wrapped?
• Sar-dame Sandwich
• Vinegar on That
• Deep Love Fryer
• Hook, Line and Sinker
• Chipforking at Dawn
• Trawlerman
• Cockles and Winkles
• Out of Saveloys
• Batterboy Blues
• Briny Afternoons
• Sex and Vinegar
• Dirty Apron
• My Plaice or your Plaice, or Cod?
• It Came Inside A Newspaper
• Cooking While You Wait
• Tasting Mr. Chicken Pie
• Big Portions
• Battered Sausage
• Tartar’s Sauce
• Fishcakes
• Batter This
• Chiphearts
• Vinegar Nights
• Boiling Oil
• Mushy Pleas
• 375 Degrees
• Hand in the Till
• Finger Licking
• Too Hot to Unwrap
• Extra Sauce Please
• Scampi Underwear
• Ethically Sourced, Unethically Sauced!
• Skinned and Boned
• Small Fry
• No Leftovers
• Greasy Papers
• Sashay of Sauce
• Jumbo
• Crabs, Sticks
• Chip’s Butty
• Tender Chicken Combo
• Heaving Beverages
• Clams, Clams and Greasy Fingers
• Up the Halibut
• Self-Service
• Eat In or Out
• Prawn Star
• 10p Extra
• She Couldn’t Wash The Smell Out of Her Hair
• The Fat Drainer
• Monkfish: Not So Holy
• Deep Sea Jiving
• Tickled Eggs
• Love Butty
• Fish Fingered
• Cod To Go
• Haddock Takes Longer
• Asking For It
• Don’t Let It Go Cold
• Finishing Him Off Tomorrow Morning
• Jellied Feels
• Tartare for the Good Times
• Caught this Morning
• Unmarried, Calamari
• Pineapple Frotters
• Caught in Your Fishnets
• Saturday Job
• Five Minutes, Sir
• Double-bag it please
• Smells Fresh
• Too Many Bones
• Hard W-nk In The Chip Shop
• Pickle my Eggs
• Dirty Oil
• Takes Two Cans of Tango
• You’re No Shrimp
• Swallowed A Bone
• Slippery Sole
• Love Crabs
• Fishing For Condiments
• Salt Water Haul
• Wet Fish
• Mexican Wedges
• Family Business
• There is no Cod
• Choking On Every Bone
• Squeezing Mayo
• Can’t Keep It In My Pants: My Wallet
• Flash In The Pan
• Suck My Lemon
• If Fish Had Dicks
• Get Your Cockles out of My Hand

© Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

© alabamaradartowers for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

© Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

The Hoggye

Hoggye! Hoggye! burning bright

On fields green in flannels white,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant mid-deeps or flies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wickets dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the grubber? what the pace?

In what furnace was thy face?

What the cherry? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made Boycott make thee?

Hoggye! Hoggye! burning bright

On pitches green in flannels white,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

© Buster Crabb for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

Sulfur. Olfactory presence of many male armpits, fried breakfasts, bad stomachs, long stays on commodes. Not where one wanted to linger or talk. Not where one craved any kind word at breakfast. And when it happened that booths were shared, then one became angry that anyone took any notice, asked any questions, wished to know the name of the book in one’s hand. That was endurance—staying cold enough that the questions staggered and died on their knees.

Died like wishes. For a hill above the harvest moon, for someone other closer in one’s arms than all thoughts of jumping. Wished without hoping. When one had underbeard acne, bad breath, too much hair, wore two colors of denim at once, had no grace except helpless and animal kindness, then one was revolted to wish. Could not one be spared? For one was so ugly, one’s neighbors no better, and how did they manage but tricks. The princess was charmed so as not to tell that the prince was dried spit on old pajamas, rotted plastic sandals and orangutan lips. And past midnight the enchanted came fumbling from the stairwell to kiss her frog against one’s door—

Awakenings. Music at four, five and six on both sides of the clock. Most hours were safe to assault with kettledrums; the walls were not thick, and there were rules, but nobody heeded. The need for practice was such an unquenchable thirst that the basement held rooms where one could practice all night if one did not mind the chill and mold, or the ghost sense of bright doors in otherwise darkness, where one followed a melody past and past those doors without finding its source in a saxophone, a piano, played without a mouth or hands.

It was after such a vain search one lost night that I dreamed:

A man was looking through his drawers, through his cabinets, his closets. It was dark but not late, and he knew he wouldn’t sleep; there had been no sleep for him for a long time. He lay in bed for hours, but all he caught was half-sleep, for something worried him too much, or there was a pain in his head. Being always home was not so bad, as he had so many books and stacks of old pictures—except there was the pain or what was forgotten or what kept his thoughts under snow.

There was an accident. I know this as a privileged watcher; he does not, but perhaps it slips between the awareness of the papers in his hand—are those bills, letters, what? And the sorting finally leaves his mood and leaves him to sit in his great leather chair with a book whose words remind him of places: arboretum, burgundy, barometer. Except that this book has a marked place—how much has he read? and not remembered?—and the bookmark that falls is a leaf of stationary.

Near this instant comes a change, which is not the realization but the knowledge that the realization comes next without mercy. The stationary quivers as he lays it down: only his address with a woman’s name. The last name is his.

The pear was rust-skinned, rough in the young professor’s hand. When he bit it, he closed his eyes and remembered a foundry yard one November—but when he opened them it was a cool March, he was outside the store while the mid-day traffic rushed. Suddenly he was caught in the flight of a cyclist, pulling the sun on her bike’s silver lines. But then! It was like watching someone go under waves; he didn’t see her head. Before knowing why, he saw her stagger through the parking lot with blood down her arm from the place where she held her forehead.

He was still swallowing that bite of pear as he made the emergency call. The operator wanted to know the woman’s age, what had happened, where she was bleeding, and many other things that he had to ask her, which wasn’t very easy because several people were tending her, and she was on the phone with someone else, and she was crying. But once the ambulance took her away, he wondered about her answers, as though he had the right to ask her only for himself, when there would be time for explanations.

Later he was walking home. The street was full of the shadows of branches. Through those branches, through other branches, the downtown lights. He came to his house and kept walking; the night was too brilliant to go in, blue tuned almost to green. He rounded a blind corner—how dangerous for a cyclist, he was thinking—he was thinking when he saw the bike. The frame had bent from an A into an S. The back wheel had become a thread of rubber spun around two aluminum loops. A woman lay near.

She woke from dreams of dismemberment, there was a light in her face, a man holding it, she couldn’t see who. He spoke, but the sounds passed too soon over her. She remembered where she was and what had happened, all of it, down to the headlights coming toward her and away. She was not so prepared as she thought. This hesitance is often a wish to keep what one has, but in her it was the need to finish what wasn’t, what would be left without form: two histories of incidents that had never been put in books, one on a forest bridge and one on a beach at night, either of which would set 1878 into a new understanding. The man was saying, ‘Brigid, wake up, wake up, Brigid.’ How did he know her name or who she was when his voice was so far that it was any man’s and when his face was hidden?

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want help, I know what’s here. There were dreams about it—I can’t tell you—just go and let me.’ She closed her eyes. When she opened them to see if he was still there, he was, and when the ambulance lit the street she saw who he was.

The young professor continued to hear the same answer: critical condition, only family or requested visitors, no others let in. He had gone home at three in the morning and come back in four hours, skewered on a half-dreamed thought from which he could not deliver himself. So a day passed in which he did not work, shave, change, or eat. But in seven days nothing was said of the patient; no condition, no information. He went back to school and delivered a lecture on East Berlin that he did not afterward remember, and at night he walked around the bed, stepping through and through a small field of moonlight.

One week later a letter came. If anyone else had known the details and hated him, he might have thought it a hoax, but it had the sound of her letters, and probably no one who hated him knew the details. Still he wondered whose hand had arranged things this way. Once he had seen a man with her, but far off—never the face. He thought of this man as he read the letter, which was not signed or addressed and was written on crumpled letterhead from their department:

Those days you waited, did you tell yourself that it was more than grasping? Grasping for a life that was not yours and shared nothing with yours, not even when once in the same bed (forgotten) when we made all foolishness then. You came because you wished your hook in me again, to get it in and twist a last several inches and gratify your sense of owning me. But I’m not writing to forgive you. I’m writing to say the last that’s possible. Since you kept insisting that something be said, here it is. Accept it and try to absorb it in the whole, which is more than what you or I lost and bigger than what a woman thinks of you, as I always tried to tell you even though you never listened.

In a year he began to see a woman who was very quiet and could not tell him what she was afraid of with her silence. They were walking at night on the edge of a quarry that hid a lake; far down lighted windows drifted in the water; she was wearing black as at most times, and her hair in the fall wind was tangled and dry. ‘Do you look at a piece of land,’ she whispered, ‘even someone’s backyard with a swing or a clothesline, do you look at that and realize that anything could have happened there?’

At home he fell prostrate in the kitchen. A face came to him, but it wasn’t that yet; it was the recognition: how does one know? Is there a sound that when you hear it you know that you have never heard it, will never have heard it, will never hear it, will never have a second longer to describe? And if not, did she know she was gone?

One day in summer when even poison ivy seemed to bend under an excess of living, I ripped out the page. I laid down the pen parallel to the grains of the desk and walked away, and that was it: all the work of a doubt.

In the main points (according to this doubt) I was correct to life, but in one sense I made a perilous adjustment: Whenever I studied one character, I found that he wanted to kill himself. It was the strangest problem. My people got angry and jealous as real people do; continually they found their first judgments wrong, they heard their children disown them, and they saw their desires folded up like dry leaves. But they also knew life when life was bright—when you have walked a long way under stars to a house where you have never been and realize of a sudden that there is such a long way left and you are not tired.

Every evaluation should have led to a balance: one should have been neither for nor against, for one was only living, and living meant desire for living. But with these people it would not be so. Was it so for me? At the time I was reading the author of Fenitschka. That certain minds appeal to ours at all is a mysterious proposition; why her confidence won mine I cannot say beyond that analysis and poetry stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Yes, there was darkness; the absence of God did not lead up and forward but down to horror, to winds along the cliffs without light. But in this absence and bitterness one lived, and one revered. Comparisons begin beneath our awareness; so it happened that I read a sentence about Paul Reé and did not know at first why I felt guilty: that it made me remember.

My first reaction had been to blame her because she was young and would not promise to love me past a difficult future; I punished her for that. Every exchange was an effort to hold down and take the advantage, take what was not offered and more and more and when it was done to walk away and forget it. When we do this with the body there is barely evidence; when we do it with the mind there is none. How she felt could be guessed; what she thought of me could not, and I had no hint until reading that sentence:

There were many extraordinary things about him which, in my youthful inexperience, seemed to me quite natural and self-evident: above all how invariably good-hearted he was, which I had no way at first of knowing was a result of a secret self-hate, so that his total devotion to a person so different from himself, this “selfless” act, was experienced as a happy deliverance.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York : Paragon House, 1991), 54

After she left me, I tried successive ways of thinking about it until it was certain that none would help. I remember one night in the alley behind a bar; I was kneeling, where my friend was I did not know, whether I was drunk I did not know, my hands were out of their gloves and resting in the snow, it seems I was taking my coat off, but that isn’t certain. The only clarities were the snow on my knuckles, the bricks, and the lines of a fire escape and the heavy cylindrical weight through the light-falling sleet. After that night the presumption was that I would end. We think of ending the will as a willful act, but it was more like a clear fact emerging in focus the way we forget a dream after waking and then, one minute later, remember it all.

The willful act came three mornings later. I was awake before dawn and not thinking yet; the blanket was over my head, and I saw grey light through it, and my first thought was, ‘I am breathing.’ By waking degrees I realized that accepting breath means accepting every experience and condition of breath—and this was how I slipped the noose off my own throat.

But how to save my characters? I had to solve this doubt or I could not write. My life, like anyone’s, seemed to consist in petty needs, desires, and angers, but when I remember that year, its cubicles, libraries, train stations, sidewalks, and cues, I see that my doubt never left me. That is, until a new thought gave me peace: That in each life, love was the leak, the weak leg, the overripe spot, and in each life, love had failed its promise.

So the despair of unfulfillment was a general despair. Yet there was no general solution. And of course despair needs a solution; when nothing is done with it, it eats the surrounding mass in ever wider circles. I saved myself through a specific solution, the only one I was capable of, and for the people caught in the webs of my stories, there could be no such help.

© Johannes for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

The public demands answers today as it is revealed by an anonymous leak that Under Scrutiny, despite the vast salary he is paid by alittlepoison.com, has claimed for the following items on expenses:

• Six duck heads
• An R Kelly fridge magnet
• A hot water bottle in the shape of David Cameron’s face
• A Wispa bar from the Bristol Marriott hotel @ £3.56
• One Pay Per View film ‘The Lion King’
• One Pay Per View film ‘Decoys’, an adult film about alien sex workers
• A pair of green socks, thought to be for his lover
• A peak time bus ticket to Alton Towers
• A peak time return ticket to the moon
• A fridge magnet showing under scrutiny on the moon with Elton John @ £111.90
• A six-pack of ‘Ambiplex’ to feed his cat, Cockula
• A trout
• Polygamy lessons, Islington Tantric Health Centre @ £600
• 156 visits to various tanning salons (throughout 2007/08)
• Stained glass windows installed in attic of second home
• Sky TV ‘American Heroes’ film and sport package
• Three business suits tailor made from white lace
• 17 x Eurostar tickets (First class, return)
• 12 x vials of croissant digestion aids
• Monogrammed hammer and tongs
• Hair care products @ £620
• Hare care products @ £570
• Care Bear products @ £30
• A ‘Best Of’ Stephen Fry box set

Rob Haddock from Scrutiny’s constituency said ‘I find it particularly outrageous seeing as I wrote to him saying I needed to be relocated to the moon because of carbon monoxide poisoning and he didn’t even reply.’ Ben Hobbs added ‘My lover has no socks and I work thirty hours a day to save up for some. He should have to buy everyone a pair of socks out of his own pocket.’ Yet Maeve Binchy was more sympathetic: ‘These look like necessities to me, I think he is doing a wonderful job’.

What is your view on Under Scrutiny’s spending spree? Do you know of anything else he has recklessly bought with public funds?

© Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

© Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

They kept getting the body half out of the water, then fumbling it and flopping it back in. One of them had got hold of the arm, it was jammed in his armpit like a baguette, and his other hand was buried in the folds of the dead man’s trousers. The policemen were getting pretty annoyed. They kept heaving and hauling, and it kept slipping back. It was like a tug of war with the river. The river didn’t give in.

Eventually, though, they broke the river’s hold. The body leapt suddenly out of the water as if it had been shoved from below, and all the policemen landed together in a heap on the deck of the boat. The gulls flapped their wings and screamed, but they didn’t take off. They were hard to satisfy as an audience. Like the rest of us, they secretly wanted something else to happen.

The body was out of the water alright, heaped on the gunwale like a soggy carpet, with only the left hand and left foot still trailing down into the current. When the policemen tugged on these, it became apparent they were sticking on something. Further exertions revealed a strange thing. The left hand and foot were attached, or fused, to the right hand and foot of another body.

They hauled the second one out with less effort. It seemed to come easier that time. This one was a woman, her dark hair as tangled as hair plucked from a plughole. Her left hand and foot were attached, in turn, to the right hand and foot of a third body.

The gulls were really watching now. So were us spectators. The policemen got the three bodies up, grunting and cursing over the water, but the left hand and foot of the third was attached to the right hand and foot of a fourth, and it became obvious that things were going to go on like this.

It was a human paper chain being dragged from the dirty river. Some people took pictures, but mostly they were silent. Nothing like this had ever happened before in our town.

I stayed on the bridge for about forty minutes, counting body after body. The policemen were really exhausted now. Their boat sat low in the water. When they got each new body up onto the gunwale you could tell they hoped they might have finally reached the end of the chain, but always another right hand bobbed up, another right foot. They started taking cigarette breaks, staring gloomily at the water. The seagulls watched, and preened themselves. Some of the spectators moved on.

I went to work, put in half a day, and came back to the bridge at lunchtime. They were still pulling bodies out, but new policemen had come to relieve the first lot. They’d got a flat-bottomed barge from somewhere, and already it was half full. There were men, women, children, old people, black ones, white ones, all strung together. There was something relaxing about the scene. It was one of those hazy, slightly luminous days.

Next morning they had to get a second barge. They brought in one of those sand-dredging boats from further down the river. Police divers bobbed in the water like seals, the sun glancing off their shiny caps. They kept swimming down to take a look, probably climbing down the chain like an upside-down rope ladder, and occasionally one of them came to the surface and shouted out to the policemen on the boat: ‘Still can’t see no end to it, nothing to do but keep pulling!’

The three gulls were still watching from the buoy. Or perhaps, like the policemen in the boat, they had been replaced by others.

And so it went on for a couple of days. We got used to it. ‘It’s a good thing they’re clearing that riverbed,’ people said in the place I worked. ‘They must have been down there for years.’

‘That’s probably why we got floods last summer.’

‘Must have blocked the drainage right up. Be a menace to shipping if you left it much longer. High time they got the job done, if you ask me.’

It seems strange now that no-one asked who the bodies actually belonged to. The police ran out of boats in the end, and strung the sodden human chain over to the river’s far bank and along the open ground by the rail tracks, utilising an empty warehouse to store them in. I suppose it was assumed they’d identify them there, so we wouldn’t have to worry too much about it. They cordoned off the riverbanks, but they couldn’t cordon off the bridge. People took to gathering there. Sometimes they packed sandwiches.

After some time, reports began to circulate about people disappearing.

Someone at work said her mother had vanished, and someone else misplaced a teenage son. The corner shop at the end of my road failed to open for business one day, and when no junk mail arrived for a week I realised the postman had stopped coming round. Certain doubts and suspicions began to be aired. People said too much was being unravelled. They said that perhaps our river of life had turned into something else.

I wasn’t affected by these murmurs, until one morning crossing the bridge I saw the unmistakable sight of the face of one of my ex-girlfriends rising from the water. I’d tried phoning her a few days before – a matter of a small amount of money she owed me – but she’d never returned my call. I watched her body pull smoothly through the river, breaking the surface of the water like an otter, just another body in the spooling chain. Her left hand and foot were fused, I saw then, to the right hand and foot of the corner shop owner.

By that time the police had rigged up a kind of winch, powered by a small diesel generator, to minimise the need for human exertion. The mechanism needed to be monitored constantly, as sometimes limbs or hair would get snagged. I ducked the cordon and approached the man on duty, who was watching the chain with watery eyes.

‘That one there’s my ex-girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She was alive a week ago.’
The policeman merely blinked at me. It looked like he’d been awake for days.

‘Can you stop the engine?’ I asked as she came slipping up the bank towards me, following the slick mud track of the others. ‘I mean, she shouldn’t be there. I know her.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, that’s out of the question,’ he replied, looking sympathetic. ‘We haven’t got time to stop, I’m afraid. The divers say there are loads more down there. We’ve got to get to the end.’
‘But what if it doesn’t end?’ I asked. It spooked me. The thought hadn’

t occurred until now.

‘Everything ends, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘Until then, I’m on overtime.’

By that point my ex-girlfriend had passed us by, and been reeled up to the warehouse. Through the open doors I could see a great spool of bodies revolving slowly, like a ball of wool being wound. I stayed on the bank with the policeman awhile, watching them slide past. I tried to spot other faces I knew.

One guy I thought I might have been to school with, but I couldn’t remember his name.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time that night, and then I awoke in the cold before dawn to feel the bed moving beneath me.

Then I realised it wasn’t the bed. It was me, sliding over the mattress.

I managed to flip the light in passing, but it didn’t illuminate much. There was no-one else in the room with me, no ropes or anything like that. I grabbed onto the post at the end of the bed, and tried to resist the pull.

But a large part of me didn’t want to resist. I wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep in my mind became conflated with the tugging I felt on my limbs, toes and fingers, on my stomach and groin, on the hairs inside my nose. All of me was going the same way. I could feel the blood pressing up against one side of my body, the saliva in my mouth making one cheek bulge. It would have been easy to let myself go. I’

d slide through the door like a wet rag and down the stairs past the doors of other flats, along the pavement, down the hill, through the damp grass of the park and downwards to the river. My right hand and foot felt the ache. They were lonely. They wanted something to hold. I thought about my ex-girlfriend down there, and about all the others. My body wavered in the cool air as the early light came up behind the blinds.

Eventually, the tugging stopped. It didn’t want me any more. I was deposited gently back down, and I felt that sensation you get when you push the palms of your hands together for a long time, until your muscles ache, and then let go so your arms float magically up and away from your body. A feeling of lightness and relief. I was very hungry.

I made myself some scrambled eggs, drank a cafetiere of coffee, and made my way down to the bridge. It was a cold, clear day.

A crowd had already gathered on the riverbank. The cordon had disappeared. People were blowing on their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm.

Everyone had the same slightly wild-eyed look, like horses spooked by a plastic bag. Their cheekbones stood out very clear in the light.

They were all standing very close to each other, the policemen mixed in with the rest. Many of those assembled there had woken to the same thing I had in the night, or else seen lovers or small children vanishing down the garden path. Some had had closer escapes than me: there were streaks of mud on their clothes and pyjamas, wet grass clippings in their hair. One man even had pond weed dried down one side of his head.

There weren’t very many policemen on duty, and the ones there looked ill at ease. Presumably some of them had ended up in the river too.

They were already letting the spool unwind. No-one had to give the order. All they had to do was switch the generator off, heave the chain in the opposite direction, and stand back to watch it unreel itself back into the greasy river.

We stood there for hours. I lost count of the bodies. They flowed past at increasing speed until the faces were just a blur, unrecognisable as people we lived and worked with.

They slipped back into the river soundlessly. I didn’t see the water level rise.
When the last body slid under the surface – or the first, depending how you see it – the whole crowd lurched forward a step, as if it had briefly lost its balance at the window of a tall building.

The three seagulls launched themselves from the buoy and reeled around, screaming.

The next morning I went to the corner shop to buy a newspaper. The owner was restocking the fridge with milk. The floor had been mopped, and the counter wiped down. There was sleep in the owner’s eyes, but he nodded and smiled.

‘I haven’t seen you for a few days,’ he said. ‘You been on holiday?’
In the afternoon, at work, I called up my ex-girlfriend. She didn’t answer the phone that time either. I guess she was out doing something. The money didn’t bother me much. I left her a short message.

Image by Tom Nobody

© Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Example 1

Man travels back in time to 1970. Unable to buy anything with pre-metric coins and notes. Arrested for counterfeiting. Spends five years in prison. In the meantime, time machine has decayed and is unusable.

Example 2

Woman travels back to 1430 wearing a red business suit. Unable to speak the archaic dialect. On second day after time leap, is declared a witch by local church leader and nailed to a tree.

Example 3

Man travels to 1921. Alongside existing film cameras records production of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid using Full HD Samsung camcorder.

Example 4

Man travels fifty years into his future. Is unable to use futuristic public toilet. Is arrested for public indecency and subsequently housed in institution for the mentally backward.

Example 5

Family spend weekend in dino times. On returning, father accidentally erases photos from flash memory card.

Example 6

Man travels to 1962 and performs gig replicating Jimi Hendrix’s later performances. Half way through first song is arrested by plain-clothes TIME POLICE.

Example 7

Girl travels back to own mother’s childhood to see how much she likes eating spinach.

Example 8

26 AD: Jesus uses power of Ark of the Covenant to become world’s first time traveller.

Example 9

Man comes home drunk and activates time machine by accident. Is sent forward to 6am the next morning. With insufficient TIME CREDITS is forced to proceed straight to work while still drunk.

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

And so my guide and I came to a place called Kings Cross Station, where I saw lots of men climbing in and out of big metal tubes which would then slide away to other parts of the country on a kind of metal girder. My guide told me these were called trains, and that getting in them was called travel, and that the people practiced travel for both necessity and recreation, which I was glad to learn.

There followed an incident at this Kings Cross for which the leader of the country did severely reprimand me thereafter, which I will relate to you now. At the station there were a great many people and they seemed to be moving about in a most perplexing way. Each man, woman and child had with him a sort of oblong box which he did drag on the floor behind him with a mechanism of plastic rods. These boxes did run along behind them but much confusedly, tripping up their companions and slowing down the whole movement of persons. I asked my guide why the people were dragging these boxes, especially the small boxes, which perplexed me greatly, as they would have been easily carried by almost any man, woman or child. My guide at this point grew agitated and said a great many words that I did not understand, though he did tell me that the boxes were called luggage and that the country was very much divided on whether they be good or no.

As we moved across the station to the trains the people on the ground grew very plenty, and some of the luggage did catch on my feet, and I did crush a few boxes, at which point my guide did grow yet more agitated, as did the box-draggers, and much altercation did begin on the ground below me with one man –  a great strong fellow with a very inconsiderable box which he could have easily carried – calling me a monster and ‘clumsy’, which I did not understand at the time but which was later explained to me.

Seeing the great discomfort these boxes afforded my guide and a few others who had gathered around him, I thought that I may do him some favour from my great height, so I did unsheath my manly parts and I did piss onto the crowd with the boxes, a mighty piss that did scatter the people and flow away their boxes, clearing our path to the trains. My guide was much pleased, though there was much shouting, and I was punished thereafter and obliged to make amends by washing the piss off all of the boxes in the great Trafalgar fountain.

© Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

Listen out for the first live performance of Edith, previously featured on this site in February.

More info: The Glass Band @myspace

© The Sociable Truth for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments

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© Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

© Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Any settlement is a Palestine settlement.

The middle east has been this way just recently.

Each asp has its fangs in a heel.

The middle east has been this way for twenty years.

Every child that sticks its tongue out is a devil.

© Johannes for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments

The relationship started well.
Many hours were spent hugging in a warm corner of the living room.
I turned my garden into a bamboo field.

It was sweet, it took the loneliness away and he looked at me with warm eyes.

It was later on, things became difficult.

His fussiness, his inability to find a girlfriend and his neediness caused our relationship to turn sour.

It was the day I found him rummaging my cress field looking for bamboo.

I sent him a note. He ate it.

Now I have a place for his fur.

© Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments

© Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

© Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Much like the unnecessary slew of loan offers and takeaway menus that come through my letter box, most emails I receive are unsolicited dreck. And unlike my alcoholic butler, Gmail’s filters do a pretty good job of sorting the wheat from the… uhhm… spam.

Recently I’ve started to spend more time in my spam folder. The fake names the spammers use to beat the spam filters are exceptional. They’re often much better than character names our Hollywood screenwriters come up with.

Today I received an email from a Jesus O’Brien. Who wouldn’t want to see a film with a character called Jesus O’Brien? A dead man, that’s who.

I’ve taken a few of the senders’ names and have attempted a film synopsis for each one.

Honestly, I couldn’t make names like these up.

Jesus O’Brien

Young, Irish scientist travels to New York to escape the Troubles. Accidentally drops his lucky four leaf clover into a secret military space weapon he’s been working on. In the accident he gains faith healing powers, and turns green. Colin Farrell to play.

Eve Sargent

Hard-nosed London police sergeant Eve Sargent (Renée Zellweger) fights for female emancipation in the male dominated world of the 1970’s Metropolitan police. Drives a brown car and smokes a never-ending cigar throughout.

Chase McElroy

Handsome pilot Chase McElroy has an action-packed 48 hours to travel the width of the U.S.A. in an attempt to clear his name after his co-pilot steals his identity and goes on a spree of sex crimes. Catchphrase: “Chase me!” or “Chase? Me!” or “Cut to the Chase!”

Deidre Rucker

Deidre Rucker (Emma Thompson) is a New York novelist whose ex-husband is getting divorced from her ex-psychotherapist. Feels like a Woody Allen film without Woody Allen. Everyone in it seems to live in a million-dollar apartment. Really boring.

Woodrow Maldonado

Retired professional GOLF CHAMPION Woodrow Maldonado (Tim Robbins) thinks he just can’t go on. It’s up to a street-wise eight year old from THE GHETTO to help him change his mind. Music by COLDPLAY.

Tyesha Nona

Tyesha Nona (Jennifer Connelly) finds herself in legal jeopardy when her patented computerised exercise wheels become self-aware and start crushing their owners. Music by KATY PERRY.

Kirk Strickland

1954. Sexually frustrated hotel detective Kirk Strickland falls in love with the hotel’s new exotic guest – the quirky, infantile frenchlady Audrey Tautou. She turns out to be an ex-Nazi, he turns out not to care. Starring Kevin Bacon and Amélie. Music by ARCADE FIRE.

Gustavo Walls

After heart bypass surgery, renowned art dealer Gustavo Walls (Russell Crowe) realises there’s more to life than some crumby old paintings. Three hours long.

Taylor Crawford

Taylor Crawford still lives with his mother. Things change for the ‘more exciting’ when, on his thirty fifth birthday, he’s drafted into the American Civil War. Staring McCauley Culkin, if he’s still up for it.

Wayne Slater

Things just got crazy for ace ice skater Wayne Slater! That’s it.

Oaza Cerecedes

Oaza Cerecedes (Forest Whitaker) is crazy about the ladies. But his lecherous phases can’t carry on when his girlfriend Mazie makes him raise two babies! Heavy product placement from Mercedes.

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

Dear Sara Chincello,

Following on from our recent conversation, and after careful consideration, I have decided to agree fully to your terms. As a new tenant of Meridian Estates, I feel refreshed and relieved by your generous offer. In my youth I shared a small room with my four brothers, and as the room you propose is a generous 10m by 8m, I have no reservations about bedding down with the other twelve.

I understand that Visas can sometimes be a problem in this country, and it is for this reason that I particularly appreciate your willingness to overlook the unnecessary immigration hurdles. I assure you that we are perfectly happy with the lack of sanitation in the room, and do not require windows. We would, however, like to accept your generous offer of a small green plastic mat to bring a bit of colour to the concrete floor. Since the closure of Bexley Stables, we have also agreed to accommodate a few small horses until alternative arrangements can be made. I trust they will find adequate grazing in the neighbours’ window boxes.

I would like to extend the horses’ personal thanks to Mary Kant, Miles Davis and yourself for being such great friends. If it wasn’t for the patience and understanding of Meridian Estates, we would always be suffocating in the nosebag of inadequate housing. We all look forward to occupying this property for many long years to come. Occasionally Greenwich hails a “Local Hero” in the NewsShopper Newspaper and I’m going to suggest that they crown you – Princess Sara Chincello the Monarch of Housing!

I really hope that you and the other ‘Meridian Martyrs’ will come round one evening to stroke the horses and see our wormery. Did I mention the wormery? It will be like a regular wormery (for converting biodegradable household waste into fertiliser) but instead of regular garden worms we will be using tapeworms. We hope to construct it on the front doorstep where the neighbours will see it.

These tough financial times in which we crawl through the muck can be a dribbly drain on our sense of fun – Let’s unblock that drain together!

Yours truly
Peter Trowles MBE

© The Sociable Truth for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | No comment

© RobotDan for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | One comment

Here is a list of terms that are slowly but surely being used in the modern vocabulary of football fans, players and referees.

1. Home Goal – Used to be own goal, but this is now used more often. This is when a player takes the ball to his/her own goal and kicks it in (their own goal).

2. Putting it in the Soup – To miss the goal and the ball to end up in the soup.

3. Leaving your head in the soup – When a player is not playing well.

4. Cuppa Soup – Young players are often referred to as this.

5. Dam Buster – A penalty that involves two balls, one kicked with the right foot and one with the left of the same player.

6. Beaver – Two goals scored at the same time when the Dam Buster is in play.

7. Slag Heap – Celebratory dance when a team wins, starting with the team descending on the team’s own goal keeper. Human Pyramid is the result.

8. Snotty Botty – When a player begins arguing with one of his own team mates on the pitch.

9. Manager’s Special – When a manager urinates into the team bath before they get into the locker rooms. This usually happens when a team loses (on big occasions, this can happen when a team wins).

10. Custard Cream – When a player loses control after getting a red card and held down by his own players and filled with as much Mr Whippy as possible, and then sat on until vomit happens.

© Rowetta Onions for alittlepoison, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments