Thursday 28 October 2010

My Anti-Slam Entry: Meaty Encounter

For those who don't know, the anti-slam is the opposite of a normal poetry slam. In the latter, the best poet wins. But the anti-slam, in a stroke of genius, awards the prizes to the weakest, shittest, most awkward, horrific poetry that night... it was so so much fun.

Anyway, this was my entry - it got booed off after 90 seconds because the audience couldn't handle the sheer eroticism of my language. So, here it is, unedited, uncensored and bursting with raw, primal sexual energy:

I first saw her over the meat counter of Morrison's.

Our eyes met.

She was working there, working hard

sweat dripping from her brow

as she handed the long, hot meat products

to customers.

She called out my ticket number:

69!”

Her voice was so hot.

The kind of hot that could melt polar ice caps

and drown all kinds of indigenous populations

living under sea level.


Yeah, that hot.


In my shopping basket, I had my hands on two melons

I won't say what they looked like,

as the erotic tension is best left up to suggestion.


She picked up a sausage that was on special offer.

and arched her gorgeous eyebrow.

Big isn't it?” she said with hushed suggestivenessnessness.

Yes,” I replied. “Like my cock”.


My moustache bristled with excitement,

and so did hers.


The sexual energy built and built and built,

as if Bob The Builder was put in charge

of building a brothel that was meant

to house only well fit prostitutes.


And, suddenly, she leapt over the counter

like a horny, big breasted frog,

and we kissed so hard it almost made me

swallow my bubble gum.


She pulled down my shellsuit bottoms,

got on her flamingo-like knees

and proceeded to suck on my semi-on

which grew into a three-quarters-on,

shrunk to a two-thirds on,

and gradually stabalised at a seven-eighths on.


I pulled my fleshy love dong

from between her beautiful yellowing teeth

and began pulling down her knickers from under her Morrison's uniform.


Her vagina,

which looked almost exactly like the mouth of

a grinning toothless monkey,

was splayed in front of me

and l began to lap away

like a horse, like an ox,

like a jihadist terrorist getting it on with the first

of his 72 virgins while Allah films it.


I could tell by her moaning

that she was going to fake an orgasm pretty soon

so I stopped my jaw-aching oral technique

and slid my Dr. Nobble into her fleshy swamp.


I flipped her over and began rooting her from behind.

She was screaming bloody murder:

That feels slightly above average!” she wailed, excitedly.


I rooted, and rooted, and rooted,

and after three and half minutes

of ecstacy I withdrew, came,

and gave a salty blast of manfat on to her uniform.


We lay back, panting, she turned towards me,

and gave me the best sexual compliment I've ever received.

That was alright” she said.

Wednesday 20 October 2010

Excerpt from new short story: The Battle of Kingsland Road

THE BATTLE OF KINGSLAND ROAD

by Captain of the Rant

Excerpt from the pamphlet Retrospective Study of The Battle of Kingsland Road, p. 7, author unknown

Just over a mile of traffic choked concrete vein runs through Hackney, connecting two beating hearts of mutual disdain. Let us start at the north tip of this vein. Stoke Newington.

They swooped into the area slowly over the years, migrating east for a new life from Islington. Attracted by the RealGrittyUrbanLondon and an itch to free themselves from the ties and prejudices of the middle class. The teachers, the doctors, the businessmen, the mentors, the independent artists, the freelance journalists. The self-propped and the academic. The clean spines of Chomsky, Vidal and Sinclair snugged on antiquely bookcases. Red wine and spliff wind downs, cocaine smeared mirror nights.

Gleaming white paninis – smoothly bragging organic – began to nestle awkwardly against the artificial Americanisms of the Dixy Chickens', with their steaming brightness and their cheaply, deeply fried poultry.

The pubs upped price, the up-funk leak from their speakers building walls, shadowing the estates that briefly peered in from the edges. Tattered homeless punks (heads leaning in doorways, arms clenched around knees, half-smoked cigarettes balanced confidently on beer cans) were likewise acknowledged in theory, but not in practice.

There was suprisingly little tension between the new arrivals and the concrete shouts, just a slowly dimming fade until only the well trained and newly bright remained.

You turn to face south. In the distance, The City's grey haze looms, the relic Gherkin centrepeice illuminating the impenetrable Gucci banknote blur at its feet. You walk towards it (but never to it, remember), down Stoke Newington Road to arrive at the border of Dalston Junction. Here, transparently high rised flats preside over Dalston's sprinkled, cramped trendy bars and Turkish coffee houses...

Let us walk just under the mile south to the next border. Shoreditch.

Formerly a crumpled slum, much like Stoke Newington: hollowed warehouses piled high (sweatshop workers and squatters crammed in), whispered danger zones, blank blowjobs in alleyways, market traders. This RealGrittyUrbanLondon enticed the film makers, the T-shirt designers, the drum n' bass producers who rapidly filled every space with exhibitions, arts studios, mangled electrics. Tossed wraps, with tiny shards of MDMA clinging, swept with the breeze. Prominent local markets were celebrated, then silenced into history dust.

A scene soon gestated. Skilled in absorbing rhetoric punchiness and regurgitating gaudy clenches of style. The fetishisation of the nothing. Polar opposite to Stoke Newington's pseudo-intellectual liberal-left, it fashioned empty anti-capitalism and emptier offence. Extravaganting loudness pioneered.

Between these borders, The No Man's Land of The Battle. Kingsland Road. Afro-Carribean hairdressers, bargain clothes shops, underground Nigerian restaurants...

For the new arrivals on either side of The Battle, it represented empty space to be coloured in. Primed to stamp their own locality brand, they began to charge. Things were going to change. One way or the other.

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Poem: The Great Tradition

On 12/10/2010 I was asked to play MC Angel's excellent night Lyrically Challenged at Passing Clouds (second Tuesday of every month, don't miss out). Every month there is a new lyrical challenge, and the two main featured artists have to write a poem or a song about a topic. Angel picked the topic of 'human's relationships with animals'. Being a twat, I went on an ill advised poetic rant about animals. And here it is:

THE GREAT TRADITION

Saturday night:

Drunk, staggering from the pub

strangled bumbled conversations

are nearly overpowered by belly rumbles.


Entranced like sailors to rocks by sirens

we make our way to the blinding, spilt light

and the twisting steam of the kebab shop.


The sweaty meat is spun, sliced,

bunched in pitta, wet salad and fists

and greedily shoved down.


Sunday morning:

Waking up hungover...

the remains of kebab grease

still smeared on our chins

we tuck into a full English:

sausage, bacon, black pudding

half-drowned in bloody oil.


Late Sunday afternoon:

Mum carves roast lamb in dripping,

dishes up pigs in blankets of more pigs,

potatoes oven cooked in goose fat,

half-drowned in beef gravy.


Great, stout, hearty traditional British food.


Traditional.


By traditional, what we really mean is:

an accepted form of behaviour

so ingrained in society, culture

and near-mythological belief

that we don't actually have to think

for a fucking minute about the impact

or the ethical implications of what we're doing.


Tradition is a detachment,

catching our reason in cement

leading to confused, hypocritical views.

Such as:

we love and care for dogs and cats

but eating them is out of the question.

Yet at the same time we take kids

around family farms, cooing at loveable pigs

and lowing cows

that we're quite happy to chow down.

Appropriating different values to different species

defined entirely by the grind of human lives.

That is anthropocentrism.


And this is speciesism:

the prejudice against those of a different species

ceasing in the belief that they

feel pain, comfort or happiness

on their own terms.


Listen and learn:

there is a small step from treating

other animals like this

to assigning different emotional, psychological

and physical attributes

to peoples from different nations and cultures.

It is the same thought process

that allows white supremacists to refer afro-carribeans as “monkeys”.

The same thought process that

allowed the Japanese military in the early twentiest century

to refer the Chinese as “logs” and cut them down accordingly.

The same thought process

that allowed guards in Guantanamo Bay to piss on, beat

and electrocute anyone who looked vaugely Middle Eastern.

The same thought process that

allowed the Holocaust,

the Rwandan genocide

and all the other millions, billions

of corpses piled up in the dark cranial recesses

of those who oppressed and killed others

on the basis of the colour of their skin

or where they're from.


Our treatment of fellow bipedal primates

in the Hominidae family

(aka, homo sapiens or humans)

is connected by

self-repression and self-denial

to the killing of other animals,

whether it be for profit or sport.


This is no guilt trip.

All I'm asking you to do is

examine your ethical codes and priorities.

Have you chosen them?

Or are they part of an unconscious ritual

which is simply accepted and never questioned?


Your choices are your own.

Just make sure they're yours.