Favourite Poems and Prose.

Roadkill

“He fuc.kin’ ran over Kafka, mate, what you expect me to do, nothin’?”

Yeah, The Trial flattened like fuc.kin’ road-kill in the middle of Vauxhall Bridge Road. This bald cuntster in a silver BMW watched it fall out my back pocket; drove right over it tryin’ to beat the lights. But I am Lord of the Lights; I fu.ckin’ rule those lights. I just stood there in the traffic, eyes closed and I heard ‘em go red, yeah. Fuc.kin’ magic it was. And I had him. The fuc.ker was mine cos not even some bald cuntster in a BMW’s gonna jump the lights at this junction. One of the busiest intersections in London; five lanes of heavy duty traffic. I got buses, cars, taxis and the biggest fuc.kin’ trucks you can imagine in my hair all day, cos this here’s my patch.

“So Mr Ray, you don’t den…”

“Mr Ray? The fuc.k is he – ‘scuse my Swahili.”

“Okay, S-Sting… Sting then.”

“And I ain’t fuckin’ Sting neither, mate; cuntster with his pop fuc.kin’ reggae and his tantric knobbin’ – what you take me for? I told you, the name’s Stingray. Geddit right.”

“All right, Stingray. You’re not denying then that you…”

“I’m denyin’ everything, mate, till my brief gets here. I know my rights. Even the homeless have rights, yeah. ‘specially the fuc.kin’ homeless!”

Not that I consider myself homeless, mind. Yeah, I work on the streets but it ain’t my home. Yeah, I sell the Big Issue but I’m no fuc.kin’ loser like most of those saddos with their excuse-me-for-livin’ faces and their fuc.kin’ mutts; I got standards. No standin’ around outside some pus.sy tube station for me tryin’ to get trade. Junction between Vauxhall Bridge Road, Mill Bank and Grosvenor Road, that’s my patch. One of the busiest fuc.kin’ intersections in London. Lights go red and I got less than a minute to sell my wares. In and out the traffic I am, drunk on adrenalin, shovin’ the Big Issue in their faces. I don’t say a fuc.kin’ thing. Just march up and force them to look at me, what I’m sellin’. Shove it right in their fuc.kin’ windscreens. No shoutin’ Big Issue for me neither, too demeanin’ and anyway, what would be the fuc.kin’ point? Too much noise: engines revvin’, stereos blastin’ out.

When the lights go green, that’s when I breathe, have a fag, hang off the railings, metal quiverin’ in my hands, traffic rushin’ past me like my life. A life measured out in an endless fuc.kin’ sequence of coloured lights. Stop, get ready, go, get ready, stop, get ready, go… on and fuc.kin’ on, an endless fuc.kin’ game of cat’s cradle goin’ on inside my brain.

“The duty solicitor is on his way Mr errr… Stingray. You’re entitled to make a call – you want to let someone know you’re here?”

“I’m fuc.kin’ homeless mate, there’s no-one.”

He’s seen the wedding ring; put two and two together and come up with fuc.kin’ ten. I ain’t married, never have been. Ring’s just, you know, symbolic. Seventeen years me and Jan were together. Never married though; I couldn’t see the point. And then, well, we split up. Well, she left me… for fuc.kin’ God! Ha! When they told me, yeah, when it finally happened, it was like this fuc.kin’ great hole had opened up inside my stomach. Hole in my stomach the size of the fuc.kin’ airbag that would’ve saved her had there been one in that poxy Escort we were in at the time. Took her three months to die. Hospital was fuc.kin’ useless. Stable they said she was, so I sat by her bedside day in day out for three month, lyin’ through their fuc.kin’ teeth with my ‘yer-gonna-be-fine-Jan’s.’ Fuc.kin’ stable! Yeah, the ring’s symbolic. Had it made out the bits of metal they took out her chest from the BMW that jumped the light and ploughed into us.

If she could fuc.kin’ see me now though, eh! She don’t buy it of course, the spiel I tell everyone ‘bout me bein’ my own boss and all that. I’ll be tellin’ some cuntster in the pub how it is, ‘bout how I gave “my nine to five its P45,” how “I ain’t no wage-slave; I own me – the freehold’s in my name” and I’ll see her over by the bar, shakin’ her head. Jan could always see my bollocks comin’ a mile off. Nah, she don’t buy it cos… cos she’s the one who sees me in my room at night, legs dead on my feet, leverin’ off my shoes with a ruler cos o’the blisters. She’s the one who hears me barkin’ the fags and diesel fumes out my mouth, cough with a volcano inside it.

“S’like I said, he fuc.kin’ ran over Kafka, mate. What you expect me to do, nothin’?” My mouth is gnawin’ a bone while it talks.

Yeah, I fuc.kin’ had him. The fuc.ker was mine. I strode over, stood right in front of that silver BMW of his. Could feel the headlights warmin’ my thighs, see my reflection loiterin’ with intent on his windscreen. Had my shirt off and my Florence Nightingale tatt with her tits out givin’ him the finger from my chest. Fuc.kin’ magnificent, I looked! A fuc.kin’ 1!! Then he went and smeared me across his windscreen with his wipers didn’t he, the cuntster. So I smashed a copy of the Big Issue against the fuc.kin’ glass. His face stared up at me in a million fuc.kin’ pieces as I tongued his aerial and made to mount the bonnet. I could see his hand on the door handle, the other hoverin’ above a bank of switches. So I went round the driver’s door and flashed him my black and gold smile. Next thing the window opens and the air-conditioning’s exhalin’ in my fuc.kin’ face.

“What the hell did you do that for,” he said, hand playin’ with the fuc.kin’ goatee on his chin. “You’re going to pay for that even if you have to sell that shi.t magazine for the rest of your life!”

And so I did what any self-respectin’ bloke would do faced with a bald fuc.kin’ cuntster with a pus.sy on his chin, sittin’ in a flash BMW – I leant inside and bit his fuc.kin’ face off. It was like this newsflash rage came over me cos I totally fuc.kin’ lost it there for a minute; a real fuc.kin’ Care in the Community moment it was. Ha!

“So you broke the driver’s windscreen, is that correct?”

“Broke the fuc.kin’ windscreen?! I didn’t break his fuc.kin’ windscreen, mate! I just like went to talk to the bald cun… to the driver about replacin’ the book he’d run over. And bein’ the entrepreneur I am, I used the opportunity to try and sell him a Big Issue. You ask me there was a flaw in the fuc.kin’ glass or somethin’ cos all I did was place a copy on the windscreen and the thing just fuc.kin’ shattered. The rest was self-defence, mate cos after that he went A1 apeshi.t; a real fuc.kin’ Care in the Community moment it was. I’m tellin’ you that bloke wants sectionin’ cos he fuc.kin’ lost it, mate I’m tellin’ yer. Shouldn’t be allowed on the fuc.kin’ streets.”

Melissa Mann

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“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

“Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”

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