Competition entry: The Screamshake

This is a competition entry. The remit: write a poem of no more than 50 lines on 'improving the human'.

The hospital screamshakes

with a newly born blamelessly cannonballed

into blinding lights and cooing parent arms.

Doctors with dead disco eyes take a blood-reading

and inject the goo into the Parent DNA Database.

The results blink as the numbers crunch.

A telephone is grabbed and buttons punched

followed by a clipped robotical relay of lifetimes:

… radical affiliations...

… autonomous collectives...

… millitant... previous...

… 92.7% likelihood of subversive behaviour...

Bursting opening double doors:

Leather law stampfeet

bounce echoes down clinic corridors

and standstill, warmless

retrieving the newborn danger.

Stamped, numbered, barcoded, taken.

The newborn bawls through her history:

At two: Screamshakes her glasswall foster home.

At ten: Screamshakes every shoved warpraganda.

At twelve: Screamshakes the psychologists

with their needles, microchips

and smileless, crippled faces.

Gradually, things get easier. Slower. Number...

Eventually, reaching sixteen, the newborn

shuts down.

Siphoning of revolutionary impulse: complete.

Blank pupils – check.

Drained skin – check.

Manifest obedience – check.

Let loose, a moving shadow,

she trickles down.

Rainlashed streets ache her feet.

Any shelter, any shelter: a tree, a bus stop, a man...

Wrinkles etched deep in young flesh.

But the screamshake still buzzes violent -

a constant itch, a perpetually germinating plume of rage.

Autopilot: a can of petrol in hand,

box of matches in pocket.

She swerves towards a dim, half-recognised memory -

a hospital -

- to turn the foundations of history to ashes.

Article: Giving Up Stand Up

I wrote this article for the stand up comedy orientated website Chortle in 2008. It won their best article of the month competition thingie.

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Obviously, me giving up comedy is no massive blow to the comedy world - I've been going a year, and it was only in the last three months that I felt I had a set that I was proud of. There have been great gigs, gigs where I've been the only person to tear the room apart, gigs where I've completely torn the room apart.There have also been horrible gigs. Gigs in the corner of pubs where no one paid any attention, gigs where no one was really in the mood for my style and, more often, gigs where I was simply shit.

There is one simple reason that I don't want to do stand up right now - I wasn't working hard enough. To be good, you have to gig. Gig as hard as you can ever gig. Be there night after night after night, constantly tightening up your material, sifting through which jokes worked, which jokes didn't. You have to do at least four gigs a week, constantly flexing your comedy muscle or it will, like any other muscle, grow flabby. And therein lies the heartbreak for me: as much as I love stand up, I simply am not prepared to make it my life.

It is not a part time job if you want to be good at it. There is a stand up who started around the same time as me, who held down a full time job whilst going out almost every night. He has now won a particularly prestigious competition for his level, which is well deserved - he works hard, and is exceptionally talented. I had a 20-hour a week job and still didn’t bother with more than two gigs a week, if that.

My last gig (for quite a while, at least) was going alright, and then I did this new bit at the end. It went down well the first time I did it, so I thought it was a decent gamble. It bombed. I fucked it up. I fucked up the wording, the timing, everything. No, it didn't just bomb. It was recieved by pure and utter silence. Standing up there, it somehow felt like more than silence. I covered it fairly badly, left the stage, apologised to the MC and the promoter and when I left the pub I burst into tears. I’ve never wept like that about a gig. I rang a close friend, who consolled me, bigging up my stand up and saying that it takes balls to get up there in the first place. This, of course, is true. But it isn't enough. I was not crying because the joke failed, but I was crying because when the silence kicked in I knew I was not working hard enough.

I was putting in so much emotional investment into the gigs themselves - urinating every ten minutes, my whole body shuddering with nervousness - that I completely neglected tightening up my act. Steve Martin once said something along the lines of that anyone, with enough practice, can be funny onstage occasionally. It will click sometimes. But to be funny night after night - to make it click - takes so much dedication. And it's a dedication that, sadly, I don't have.

Before Faking Your Own Death...

Pack rucksack:
One tooth brush.
One tube of toothpaste.
Two changes of t shirts, pants and socks.
One jumper. One anorak. One pair of shorts.
Tabacco, rizla, filters, lighter.
Two good books(one consiously difficult to keep mind busy. One accessible and entertaining).

No extra shoes.
No superfluous cosmetics.
You can purchase these things on your arrival.

Clean flat:
a good going over, use plenty of elbow grease.
Burn/throw away any pornography, lubricant or weed that is lying around.
Your loved ones do not want to remember you as a sexual deviant swivelling on a dildo who left his washing up lying around for three days.

Take Mp3 player and new headphones:
put only the very best tracks on.
Do not put on tracks you dislike
just to make your media library neat and tidy with full albums
you will regret it.

Take out all the money from your overdraft
in increments over several days.

Leave flight tickets and fake passport on table by mantlepeice where you can see them.

Remember to keep going to work.
It's tempting to shrug these last few days off
but remember the key to this is consistency.
Maintain the same carefully crafted combination
of a calm exterior whilst joyously plotting inside.
Keep pretending you like your boss: smile and shake his hand.
Laugh at his pathetically ribald, self-absorbed, misogynist jokes
even though you desperately want to beat his head in
with that framed picture of his smug bastard family.

Do not get drunk:
the best laid plans of mice and men
go to shit when they get pissed.

Give the cat some sorely needed affection:
stroke under his chin,
tickle his belly,
let him sleep with you in bed on the last night.
Whisper to him that you wish you could take him with you
but just can't.
Say you wish he could understand before it's too late
and he realises that front door will never open again.

Make sure last meeting with partner/parents/friends is entirely normal.
Do not get teary-eyed at the goodbyes
as they do not know it will be their last.
Let them suspect nothing
but do make a point of saying you love them.
You will never see them again
and it is not their fault you are going.
There are extenuating circumstances
that they will never understand.

Write a suicide note
which is full of love for everyone
and loathing for yourself.
Say you could not bare to be in this world anymore
with the depression you've been fighting etc etc etc.
Make it believable.
Research celebrity suicide notes online for inspiration
then wipe pages from Internet history.

Let nothing remain.

Make a real decision for once in your fucking life
and leave your keys behind.
Give yourself no other options.

This is your new life, stepping into a tabla rasa.

Slam front door tight.

Hear the scrunch of the stones scattered on your driveway
for the last time.

Never regret, never reflect, never ruminate.

Never look back.

20 NEWS-G - Episode Thirty Eight Squared - Brave, Stupid Religion Fox

Yesterday, Isabelle did scream a foxmare that’s like a lovely family day. I can describe it, to be honest. The only fox crept in through sliding french room and I saw some blood on isabella’s barbecue, wasn’t even scared of me, simply crawled, watching Britain's Got Talent.

She said: “He had found a demanding fox in his children”.

The borough had more foxes than any attack. Mr. Foxing, a former mayor of Hackney Nasty, noted: “Some no longer felt safe in their insisted gardens after that considerably very young and very old fox employed to chase it away”.

Joe Commiserate, hungry resident, has had six-month-old son’s bedroom three months danger two months positively forwarding eight months urban.

The foxed-up problem-foxed familes warning fox-forwarding people of 'fox-a-stray' accident, the sort of fox which one June may fox away in a foxy fox. Commiserate: “Fox”.

Heavily built-up nasty families estimate a mauled Edinburgh (apparently, without Dartford), rural London, pounced Slough. Close proximity to Tufnell experts attack, give tetanus, injection rare, toddler mental.

27 Eastwood babes per square. “Per squared”, corrected larger lamb, bushy tailed country listen.

To the lunged explanation girl Muslims (but to everyone): skulking mentally ill fox townie did not budge some schadenfreude. Fox alliance, obviously, has little time greeting delusions and whiffed.

OUR MAIN HEADLINES AGAIN (againtown):

Twin towers unburn urban Koran.

Muslim-hunting ban is a hypocrisy patio.

Cousin? No, it isn't.

John and Terry Venables share awkward roller coaster.

20 NEWS-G - Episode Minus 1 - The Cow Before The Storm

The leave felled on yesterday violently as the yard was questioned by nine bleeding probes and an heart conclusion - not a heart attack...
London's Boris demanded 'a fast and last manslaughter.'
A spokesperson states: “Police police police” as Nazi-Church-Storm-Farmers go fresh over anti-capitalist milk riot... the soft violent squats Blitzkrieg the milk and France's Muslim Cop milks G20 Plans in Cairo...
Night prices spread Night Riots among Knights of The Round Londoninium... The last and fresh cop on the scene said:
“Johnson died a sick, sick Milk... I vomited out my lungs fast... then laughed.”
Later, mayhem trippers dragged “symbolic” wooden cart through piles of pelted Brighton brick... One bottle was arrested. Front Mob cowered from Manic Anarchist Cop as she erupted weeks after...
Used Maniacs today issued the following abuse:
“Polite police please police pleasingly... Period.”

World rage spread about some violent concerned “dream-it-out” panic. Mr. Facebook, the communication demand, claimed the young interference was the result of poor quality of quality, heavy quality text and poor quality government.
Mooicide Police are queuing up because doom-deaths are growing up by the hundreds... and they can just about walk.
Here's the weather:
The country's biggest snarled winter for travellers is simple... The main country conservatives have obtained figures in which they say: 'Britain has only eight days left... with light showers. Back to you, Dick'ring.

Thanks Flaps... Our Main Headlines again:

G20 heart World Cow Government x-x.

G20 panics at front milk Cop.

Facebook Police go maniac on Anarchist's Lung.

Soft, poor States hospitalised sick on the milk.

Johnson trips the night Londoninium.

Stay tuned for Danny Dyer Investigates: Illegal Albatross Fighting In Occupied Gaza.

Video: performance of Battlecry of the Sexes

Video: performance of 'Between The Gaps'

This was filmed at Ryan's Bar, Stoke Newington, London on 13/06/2010.