Of slumming hipsters and of slurring drunks,
of raving seers, visionaries, tortured monks,
of bulimic girls with temperamental cats,
and ranting flagellants in tin foil hats,
of student anarchists and Trotskyites,
of knuckle-dragging apes with dogs that bite,
of Greenpeace Maoists smoking GM skunk;
of all the witless wank this square mile’s wunk:
sing, St Lycergus! Sing, Terpsichore!
They’ve snorted all the ket, and now want more.
This dawn I took my way down Picton Street,
which bore the mark of canine, smeared by feet
of party-goers from the night before,
all wearing wings of angel, monkey’s paw.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped her, crying
“That cheese you’re growing in your attic’s frying.
Oh keep far hence the helicopter and the snout,
or with their infra-red they’ll sniff it out”.
I saw Laudanum’s lover, clucking hen,
shivering outside the apothecary’s den,
and shouting “Open like the fuckin’ door!
If you’ve not got gear, you must at least have draw!”
Alas, those chemists took her for a nark
and barred the gate, and sent her to Montpelier Park.
I tarried not, but hastened to Stokes Croft,
where Banksy’s imitators spray, like dogs, aloft
epigrams of Gramsci, turgid agitprop,
the granular piss of Marx, and Lenin’s plop.
Passed I the People’s Rep eponymous
where Comrade Chalkley’s china gathers dust,
and bent my steps past the Jamaica Bell
and Compass House, that reeking five-barred Hell
where Jaundice squats upon each yellow brow
and Reason in a flood of White Ace drowns.
In King Square Park, a mummery engaged
the very rude mechanicals upon that stage:
mime, gesture, jostling, plosive epithet,
empty cans of Special Brew, and empty threats.
I lingered not, but straightway took my leave
for I had heard that knavish local thieves
were congregating for a set of games
said to involve accumulating shame.
Montpelier’s biggest idiots were there,
Easton had sent of arseholes several pairs,
Even St Werburghs sent its wankers up,
hoping to win the Fucktards Annual Cup.
I scrupled not this spectacle to miss –
To see fuckwittery then die is bliss
(I view it as the husband mantis must
reposing in his wife’s embrace his trust).
The contests were in certain disciplines
recondite, lewd, and fortified with gin,
points being awarded upon diverse grounds.
For farts which would through history resound,
or those of epic length and brimstone smell,
midwife to Faustian images of Hell,
five points was fixed unless you bribed the judge
with packages of nice warm legal fudge.
For farts in inappropriate contexts
state banquets, treaty talks, or during sex,
for farts which caused ambassador’s recall
made matrons blush or vicars be appalled,
for farts which brought down Presidents or Kings
caused Marxism and other nasty things,
a special fifty points the generous prize,
which could be doubled with judicious lies.
Some rules analogous were then applied,
dishonoured thrice before the ink had dried,
pertaining to some other disciplines:
swearing at kids, not putting out the bins.
For merely wanking on the Downs at night,
five points sufficed which seemed perfectly right.
For wankers of the more egregious type,
who left their DNA upon loo seats unwiped,
discarded needles by the children’s swings,
wankers who wanked on other people’s things,
a special fifty points rewarded this.
Similar systems worked for shit and piss.
And, once the points had all been totted up,
some businessmen sponsored a plastic cup
which, with attending aldermen in hats,
would be bestowed on Bristol’s biggest twat.
To give a valediction speech, they’d hired
the Massage Club’s old madam, lately fired,
a nun of the Eglise de la Bouteille –
a priesthood in the Bearpit night and day,
all martyrs to fermented apple juice
which makes them mad and turns their faces puce.
The Idiot Olympics First Event
involved spitting. It clearly wasn’t meant
to reconcile the sober citizen
to the indifference, approaching Zen,
with which the athletes hawked their mucus up
into their spittoons and their training cups.
These were accompanied by criminals
who, trained in barking iridescent balls,
did pimp the skills of their expectorants
with raucous huckstering and profane bants.
JJ, Kingsdown’s most irritating twerp,
whose ashtray rasp and lewd dyspeptic burp
shatters the sanctity of pubs and bars
and cracks the windscreens of the hipsters’ cars,
did for dishonour with S.K. contend,
who can’t to any decency pretend:
a connoisseur of Nabokovian tropes,
the Star and Garter’s octopus, who gropes
all living forms within his febrile clutch:
dog in his kennel, rabbit in his hutch,
the trout, the minnow, all the common fish,
the very microbes on the petri dish,
the hippopotamus his victim too,
even the monkeys in the Clifton zoo.
JJ had practised. His phlegmatic drool
slid down the gutters and formed slimy pools,
where hipsters in pyjama bottoms swam
amongst the trolleys and the broken prams.
S.K. on natural talent did rely,
claiming, although it’s widely thought he lied,
that his superior spitting technique
would trump JJ’s crude salivating leak.
The champions now enter in the lists.
Ranters are silenced, wankers rest their wrists.
A silence brief, for presently is heard
a gargle like the flushing of a turd,
as JJ fetches up from tortured lung
that which resembleth pulmonary dung.
S.K. like Satan’s houri, writhes and twerks.
Which of the two’s the most egregious berk?
The referee’s Our Lady of the Stews
so fresh and eke so stale from all the booze.
Fast in her paw, the cider now she grips –
tin – apple-core pictures, and those of pips.
She drinks, she sways, she vomits, drops the can.
Thus cast the die, thus proclaimed is the bann.
So falleth it according to the witch.
The can clatters into the nearest ditch,
and in its clattering doth signify,
not “Vae victis”, or meretricious pie
(“Fatum dixit”’s perhaps appropriate):
but just, “You idiots. Get on with it”.
Straightaway JJ, with audible ‘spelunk!’
coughed up a privy slug with his bronchial spunk.
He let it then accumulate between
his coiled tongue, and a particle his spleen
had volunteered for reasons undisclosed;
took one great breath, inhaléd through his nose,
and spat a veritable asteroid,
a thing almost of beauty in being void
of compensating qualities; a thing
of which no operatic bass or tenor sings.
Mucus it was, with exoskeleton
of protozoans baked in gelatine,
Cruise missile, domesday bug, JJ’s V2,
over bus, building, and then bridge it flew,
soon disappearing beyond Ashton Court.
Some ectoplasmic strands of slime were thought
to have become entangled in the trees
which pepper Durdham Downs just by Henleaze.
Titan of bogie! Hercules of snot!
Who could match JJ’s pulmonary grot?
SK stepped dauntless, twerking, to the plate
and started coughing. But it was his fate
to have been brought up far too middle class
to suffer from extremity to pass
that venerable afflatus yclept “spit”.
With drooping head, he mumbled low, “I quit”.
They mocked his inhibition then, the mob,
and cried, “Who is this mealy-mouthed old snob,
this junior-portion-loving hypocrite
who’s signed the register, but will not spit?”
There yet remained within SK some spunk
(left by some chap with spandex on his trunk).
And so he faced down his detractors’ jeers,
much as the brahmin disdains dalit leers.
“There is another discipline,” quoth he
“in which my natural excellence will be
acknowledged by exponents of the art,
nicer than spitting, less od’rous than the fart:
I’ve mastered the seduction of young nymphs.
No pick-up artist, no Old Market pimp
no pandar’s circuit, nor practiced deceit
of lewd old hippy with a thing for feet
can match th’obscenity with which I twerk.
This is my whole purpose, my whole life’s work.
This is what I was put on earth to do:
to writhe my hips as though I need a poo;
and thuswise lure the tractable naive,
the Stokes Croft sophomore, the Picton Eve.
I realise that it must seem quite absurd,
that looking like I’m squeezing out a turd
(I’m really straining gravy through my ring)
is what endears me to the dear young things.”
He stopped then. All this discussion of poo
had made him feel like going to the loo.
The brute collective gut digested this.
A voice was heard to say, “He takes the piss,
he’s not the only Octopus in town.”
A new athlete now strode forth with a frown.
“Mince!” snarled S.K., “the Canteen Octopus!
Your nemesis am I. It endeth thus.”
Mince, vaunting coxcomb with Mohican grey,
drawled sneeringly, “your twerking just looks gay.
You are no octopus, but just a squid
of whom the Star & Garter wanted rid.
I learnt such grooming at my guru’s knees
as would beguile a hippy chick. I please
and flatter first with specious chakra bang
and muffle reason with the gongs I clang.
The ground being laid, my siege engines advance
and I invite her to the sacred dance.
There’s scope at this point for a twerk or two,
but there is so much else that one can do.
Get down by heart some sexy Hindu stuff
– Tantra and Kundalini; all that guff.
Be nude, be lewd, but be not bloody rude.
Scent and low candles yes, but nothing crude.
Give in to your most bestial desires,
presented as pure love Krishna admires.
That is the secret of carnal success.”
They now produce, arrayed in watercress,
the Frome’s resident nymph, who frolics in
dank ponds and puddles and communal bins.
This damsel by her preference shall judge
which octopus’s sacred hippy fudge,
if twerker, or if bogus Buddhist creep,
will melt her crack-whore heart and make her weep.
S.K. tries first. He twerks and writhes and squats,
contorts himself as though he’s got the trots.
It naught avails. For dubstep leaves nymphs cold,
and twerking looks grotesque when done so old.
Emboldened by his rival’s limp failure
Mince summons up such blandishments and lures
as would placate an Erinye or witch.
Suitable then for some St Andrews bitch:
organic, vegan, dodgy yoga class.
Although less vegan, more Chicken Madras,
this nymph looks not unfavourably on Mince,
considers that she has not done it since
that orgy in Stoke Gifford last weekend
(that fisting felt like it would never end).
Mince jars notes from his protesting guitar,
nymph’s eased of the impediment of bra.
Mince mentions now his special massages.
Nymph lubricates both of her passages
What it is like to be, now S.K. knows,
the husband in a cuckold video.
He wrings his hands, he cringes, and he whines,
he looks upon his rival, and repines.
“I feel as empty as when watching porn,”
he moans. But then, quite suddenly, it dawns:
“I actually rather like it, now I think.
It titillates to watch one’s faithless twink
submitting to an old hippy baboon.
The tantric tosh of this whey-faced poltroon
illuminates to me my future role.
Cuckoldry is henceforth my single goal.
I’ll be exposed to ribaldry and shame,
and do myself as loser now proclaim.”
He by this parting shot himself denied
– the paradigm of Parthian suicide –
and took himself back home to Brislington.
Mince got the laurel wreath when he had gone,
a hollow victory for a hedonist
whose tactile harassment had sorely missed
the poignant subtlety of dental plaque.
The next award would be for smoking crack:
five points per rock, extra for gibberish.
To watch these athletes was my dearest wish,
as they baked cocaine with bicarbonate
and smoked it all at a tremendous rate.
We gathered in the park by Mina Road.
An orchestra of druids, wearing woad,
blew fanfares as the athletes stumbled in
with cans of cider they’d retrieved from bins.
A sight it was to gladden jaded hearts
to see those criminals from distant parts:
Hartcliffe and Knowle, Filton and Southmead,
come expiate their criminal misdeeds,
pay debts which to society they owed,
and ease their consciences of heavy loads,
by thus competitively smoking rock,
and all for free, so no need to suck cock.
The athletes limbered up: they spat, they swore,
drank Munters Blinding Cider, then drank more.
Some ran a yard or two, fell over quick,
clutched bellies, and were copiously sick.
The game officials called for order then,
and corralled all the athletes in a pen.
With pomp condign they brought the plastic bags
containing certain quaint and wholesome mags
– Health & Efficiency, and Tasteful Nude –
nothing that crossed the line into the lewd.
And anyway, the pages inside were
sliced out: no wrinkled balls, no labia,
no mottled flesh or fur or cellulite;
only square cavities filled up with white
or possibly more like magnolia
pebbles of crack.
But woe! A mangy cur,
a junky d.j. from St Pauls called Gedge,
burst from a nearby rhododendron hedge,
scooped up all of the nudist magazines,
a fortiori all the crack between
the covers. Then away forthwith he ran
and climbed into a waiting Transit van,
which promptly vanished down the motorway.
Woe, woe, thrice woe! Alas! Alackaday!
The athletes wept, their clothes they tore and ripped.
It was a bitter chalice now they sipped.
They whinged and swore, and execrated Gedge.
Some climbed a building and stood on the ledge.
It naught availed, their maundering lament.
It earned no sympathy, nor made a dent
in frozen Charity’s cold carapace.
Nor did the thief again dare show his face,
until that evening in the Crofter’s Rights
when he spun vinyl Ragga and some quite
unpleasant grime, and cheesy R&B,
which made my ears bleed and me need a wee.
Having aborted the crack smoking match,
the organisers said that they had hatched
a special sort of game for lunatics.
They christened it “elect’ral politics”.
This was of all the games the most perverse,
involving lie and graft and smear and curse,
whispering campaigns and cloaked deceit,
back-stabbing, fake smiles, trampling under feet.
There were for this contest three hypocrites,
practised at blandishment, and good at it.
The first, an architect with ego huge,
blessed with the soubriquet Pantalon-Rouge,
owned hipster bars in which he sometimes drank
and entertained lizards from merchant banks.
The fav’rite, a conniving parvenu
sponsored by Socialists Against the Jews,
was made of lint they’d scraped up from a crease,
and published to the world as Marvin Rees.
The third name in the ring was Paul the Clown,
a fifth form Trot from some provincial town,
who chalked on Broadmead in his childish hand
some slogans which he did not understand.
Like others of his ilk he always rode
a bicycle for clowns, with which he towed
an outdoor kitchen selling hipster drinks.
The saddle of his bike had carved, for kinks,
a hole through which a dildo, as he biked,
buggered him senseless, which he must have liked.
A special scaffold had been lately built
with platform for oration, noose for guilt;
a Tyburn overlooking Ashley Down,
where cackling tricoteuses in threadbare gowns
knitted acrylic onesies, beanie hats,
and tie-dye waistcoats for their nervous cats.
Pantalon-Rouge in Maserati parks
attended by a swarm of oligarchs.
With architect’s disdain he eyes the stage.
What Hawksmoor in what prelapsarian age
would fain erect this gimcrack pile of sticks?
The big fish rues his life among the hicks;
nobly resigns himself, and mounts the stair,
tossing his lion’s mane of silver hair.
A trumpet fan fare brassily resounds.
Leftist lickspittles with their motley hounds
form about Rees a cordon sanitaire.
Jokes about Jews are dusted down and aired.
Wincing, Rees shrugs off the embarrassment.
Such imposition’s easy to resent:
posh anti-semite socialists sent down
from London patronise anyone brown.
Thoughts such as these, unbidden, stir his rage
as solemnly he mounts the creaking stage.
The febrile atmosphere is now disturbed
by parping klaxons as Paul’s bike is kerbed.
Jugglers, mime artists, wizards in their robes!
Now babies cry, frightened are coulrophobes.
Paul mounts the stage somewhat less solemnly
than the preceding clay-foot Ptolemy.
That cultural shallows be so deeply plumbed
by hippie orchestras of bongo drums!
We gave the world Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope,
and kept percussionists who don’t use soap.
So now upon the hustings side by side
the politicians cringe, dissemble, hide.
Rees shakes of Pantalon the cold fish hand,
accepts his gift of melted krugerrands.
Paul invites them both to smell the flower
which from his lapel luminously glowers.
Rouge does, and unbecomingly is soaked.
“Smell it again,” says Paul, “this time no joke.”
“I smelt it once,” says Rouge, starting to cough,
“once is enough, now kindly please fuck off.”
What passes for debate largely consists
in clown berating architect with lists
of specious criticisms void of sense,
and cutting off poor Rouge in mid-sentence.
The crowd by turns is irritable, bored.
Reece tries to intervene, but is ignored.
On rambles Paul, and on. It never ends.
No Cato’s call for Carthage’s delend,
no grammar-mangling, droning Trotskyite
with point of order, monochrome and trite,
no balding, beige committee martinet,
no pointless gerrymander for a bet,
no fag-end afternoon of yelping dog,
nor sour eternity of stifling fog,
No bitter wormwood, and no acid gall
induced self-harm effectively as Paul.
We yawned, we wept, we offered up a prayer.
At length we sighed, and gave into despair.
Just when it seemed that only suicide
could halt or merely just delay the slide
into the slough of Paul’s inanity
(which made appeal to Pauline vanity),
commissioners announced the plebiscite.
We made pretence of caring, but our plight
had rendered us indifferent. Who’d weep,
when herded by these demagogues, like sheep?
John’s ballot box is Janet’s abattoir.
Pencil your X, and then bleat out your “bah!”
To vote with ovine and not human voice
seems apt when asked to exercise a choice
between two reptiles and a lunatic.
I glanced at Rees, and saw his forked tongue flick
out at a fly feasting on dung of dog:
“An omen in the form of coiled log,”
I shrieked, like Bristol’s own Laocoon,
“vote not for either serpent!” whereupon
my neighbours said, “Snakes or the idiot:
a choice unedifying, but all we’ve got.”
Unwilling to let the matters this way rest,
I said, determined that I’d do my best,
“Turkeys who vote for Christmas have, than you,
of their own benefit more of a clue.”
My words availed me not, sad to relate.
Some entered voting booths to masturbate.
The rest, eschewing solitary sex,
determined that they’d scratch their sacred X
by serpent of dishonourable renown,
not by some witless pettifogging clown.
Nor, for all his infernal monologue,
his burp of silverback and howl of dog,
found I within myself the wherewithal
to vote for that surrender monkey, Paul.
The ballot closed. At once, toasts were imbibed,
and ballot officers discreetly bribed
by friends of Rouge with ingots from the bank.
I saw some Labour Party members wank
with copies of Mein Kampf rolled into tubes
and grease from Marvin’s speeches used as lube.
The tension really got to Paul the Clown,
who jiggled on his saddle up and down,
transfixed upon the dildo poking through,
while gulping down all his chai latte too.
You wondered how the officers could cope
with all that cash stuffed in brown envelopes.
Suffice to say, as soon as they were paid,
the new Porsche showroom did a roaring trade.
At length, the chief returning officer,
all Rolex watch, gold teeth, opossum fur,
snorting the purest powder to be found
between Montpelier and High Kingsdown,
looked up from guzzling overflowing trough
invited silence with a hacking cough.
“Thy will be done, electorate,” he said,
“although adjusted as determinéd
by such emoluments lately bestowed,
of gold, of silver, and of cash a load.”
He wiped the gravy dripping from his lip,
from crystal flute of Cliquot slurped a sip,
and with majestic dignity announced,
“the easy winner, who by far has trounced
his rivals in this cheapening charade,
this whited sepulchre, this cracked façade,
is neither clown nor smirking architect;
the pawn instead of narrow Marxist sect,
the slaves of dogma which can only yield
the false utopia and killing field,
In short, good people, Marvin Rees has won.
Now liquidate the kulaks, rape the nuns,
sign with the Nazis non-aggression pacts,
erase the hist’ry and re-write the facts.”
A hush as of a multitude appalled:
to hear a shovel baldly ‘shovel’ called.
Remorse, that cuckoo in the mental nest,
that Banquo’s ghost, that uninvited guest!
Bristolian hedonists in search of fun
now smote their brows and cried, “what have we done?”
They looked beseechingly at Mr Rouge,
who chortled, “après moi vient la déluge.”
Rees now exerted his authority.
“I’ve thought this through,” he said, “and it strikes me,
the principle of panem et circenses is
the best solution to this febrile fizz.
There yet remain some games of this and that
before anointing Bristol’s biggest twat.”
Some wag yelled then, “Let’s give to Rees his due.
The biggest twat in Bristol, Rees, is you.”
Marvin magnanimously laughed this off.
“As your deliverance from Clifton toffs,
by my authority I now declare
a drinking game, for all who boldly dare:
for priests of the Eglise de la Bouteille,
and jaundiced hepatists with skin gone grey,
for purple colonels in the golf club snug
and strung out cokeheads breakfasting on Krug,
for White Ace connoisseurs, for pungent blokes,
for Bearpit bladderwracks and chronic soaks:
fame is the spur the Buckfast gargler craves
who amputation and cirrhosis braves.
What dauntless champion will now step up
and gargle Smirnoff for a specious cup?”
There was, Bristol being what it is, no lack
of pleasure-addled dipsomaniacs.
As soon as Rees concluded had his speech,
then, like a tide encroaching on a beach,
a swarm of alcoholics infinite
attacked the booze. No piety or wit
does justice to their crazed voracity,
thousand yard stares, and sheer tenacity.
They drank the Stella and they drank the wine,
tequila, gin, and even turpentine.
They drank the ruby and the tawny port,
and then formaldehyde without a thought.
They swallowed vermouth and eke real ale,
and craft beers hipsters sip while nibbling kale,
and tramp juice glugged while gnawing deep-fried rat
and stuff that makes you vomit blood-flecked fat.
There was left no intoxicant to drink,
no meths forgotten under kitchen sink,
no shoe polish, no stuff for cleaning drains,
nor hellish brimstone for removing stains.
All things must end though, bacchanalia too.
Heads ache, guts heave, eyelids with grunge are glued.
Lo! Penitent who toilet stall infests,
that seat for arseholes where your head now rests
hosted the haemorrhoids of Gilgamesh,
participant in quite an epic sesh.
Therefore haste thee, by vomiting atone.
Confess it down the porcelain telephone.
They had as yet a winner to declare,
a dipsomaniac beyond compare.
The judges strode onto the Champs de Mars
where bodies lay in gutters outside bars,
hoping that way to pick some hero out:
some barroom sophist paralysed by gout,
some addled bag of guts cursed yet with speech
and prompted inexplicably to preach,
some ignoramus with an old routine,
croaked like a bull-frog in a slum latrine.
Of all the athletes who that day took part,
incontinent, reeking of toxic fart,
thou, JJ, were on Turbo Island found,
dragged from that Tophet and, furtively, crowned.
Conversation’s Shiva, kryptonite to wit,
thou tube with both ends always squirting shit,
who’d fain protest thy coronation now?
Half Boer, all boor, the biggest bore in town,
more boring even than that twat the Clown.
Oft have I heard at night that gravel roar,
that fog-horned emptiness with acrid core,
pollute what scanty good’s in Picton Street.
I’ve heard that roar, and swiftly did retreat,
for who’d petrification rashly risk
by list’ning to that vocal basilisk?
Being proud – though you may call it vanity –
I chose to husband my own sanity.
There comes a time in boring middle age
when mindless kidult starts to act the sage
to sneer at folly, to disdain excess,
to realise more and more is always less.
Sadder and wiser, burdened with insight,
I homeward took my way from urban blight,
and tepid-footed it through Asphodel
where hipsters skilled in irony do well
and navigated certain lowly streets
where sawn-off hopes and shattering defeats
were etched into the lines of every face
and gargoyles wallowed in their own disgrace.
Bristol’s a Hades of an English town,
the Frome its Styx which, lurking underground,
encircles several times with beige distaste
the outer desolation, inner waste.
I’ve seen the ghosts of the departed here
panhandling coins for heroin and beer,
self-propitiating with pressed apple juice
therewith endowed with speech, the tongue set loose.
I’ve seen, or heard, or mostly just endured
and find myself increasingly inured
to, raving prophets with transfixing eyes,
and mouths in which poor murdered language dies.
I’ve shuffled down those frankly nasty streets,
the stuff of Channel 4 and viral tweets,
seen food wrappings and filth, and lots of gore
when Cerberus took on the Minotaur.
I’ve seen it all and then foresworn the rest:
centaurs, chimerae, products of incest,
the barking worms and mewing fleas,
serpents which walk on legs, anomalies
of territorial fish and wingless fowl,
a hippogriff with an external bowel.
And this is but halfway down Ashley Road,
where boxes full of psychedelic toads
endure, with just the odd protesting croak,
being licked by shamen selling dodgy coke.
I reached my home at last, and shut the door,
took up my pen in my avenging claw.
This peevish jeremiad soon emerged,
half comedy, and half a tragic dirge:
a satire on this topsy-turvy place
where vice is honoured and virtue disgraced.
From: Miscellany
Published in: Bristol 24/7