Untimely #7 – Ambergris My Gander

...nose to steamed porthole, the smell of pennies, a mouth of copper. Blood, for he bites the lip senseless out of habit. Boredom. Its salty tang frightens and refreshes him. Backing slightly from the blackened glass he touches two fingers to his lip. It’s only small – snakebite, a puncture either side of the fleshy center. He wipes the condensation from the glass. Black night. He cannot tell the water from the sky. Inside a greenish haze from dimlit lamps and a smell of socks. Old socks like wet bread and mushrooms and the underside of rocks. He runs his fingers across his lips and tries to see in the window but it is only a ghost that looks back at him. No sign of the blood that trickles to the corner of his mouth like when the old and infirm – dried like paper, like elephants, like biltong, like cement – forget to drink, forget to lick their lips or dab the corners of their mouths with handkerchiefs and work the saliva into a paste. He has seen amber rivers of tobacco juice flowing down the creases of weathered faces on the ship; salted and cured by the spray and wind, they’ll outlast the pharaohs, he’ll warrant. Men who look like strands of rope, with yellow nails and teeth and eyes and hairy ears the better to balance with. Men who cannot now return to shore without the blinding drunk to give that list they’ve come to know so well. He can feel the blood drying like paint and wonders whether he can pick it off or if he should just leave it, wash it in the morning. Remembers waking as a child with the hot blood coursing down his neck and throat, his pillow soaked, and how it caked below his eyes and in his fingernails. Mother screaming what’s he done, what’s he done! Holding his head back until it stopped, the salty snotty drip drip down his throat that made him gag, then dabbing at his cheeks with a moistened cloth. Now he could feel it dry and the taste fading and he pressed his head once more against the coolness of the glass, feeling his breath fog the window and wondering if she missed him like he missed her.

Untimely #7 - The Programme

WWI – Whaler Women’s Institute

Programme of Events to be Forthcoming

Thursday 1^st April

Wood Carving – Learn how to whittle your very own kitchen utensils, a sturdy brassiere, party hats, or a brand new crack pipe, all from nature’s favourite building material. (Wood).

Friday 3^rd April

Self Defence Class – Concerned about big, strapping men invading the privacy of your inner rooms? We’ll teach you how to handle yourself, and others, together with the latest techniques in restraint, so that there’ll never be another “one that got away”.

Monday 4^th April

Gang Lingo – Like all mothers, do you worry about paying over the odds for hard drugs? Learn to keep that budget under control and obtain top product every time, with this very practical course from our own Nurse, Maggie Magnusson.

Thursday 5^th April

Plaster Casting – Want to wrap some stuff round something and keep its image forever? Want to make something smooth, strong and cool, something reliable that never has too much to drink, something really dependable? Then thank the Lord for Plaster Casting! Bring along your own mould, (how about a wooden leg, cats paw or a severed human penis), and we’ll teach you the rest!

Fun times await you.

Please, sign up below.

All courses come at a minimal price to cover costs of materials and the provision of break-time liquor.

Untimely #7 - Nantucket

Circle-jerks. The Grampus toss of the sea. The creak and shrike of fear without end. Cotted below decks, tin-canned and man-coddled, down in the fulsome black, they like to imagine us alone in Nantucket.

alone in Nantucket

waiting, grey, on the hissing strand

streaked and stained in the salt dunes

counting the days in crusted corset straps

alone

as the sea. Tumbling spume. Because our bodies are the fucking waves to them

as the whale. Dick deep in blubber, howling at the void

alone as the sea as the whale as

Much worse as better. With their rum legs and their best, fucking hat. With some vast Spermaceti bubbling in the vats and the gulls and the gannets and the gulls all of a reeling at the flayed skin. The shanty clink of the victory shift. Blubber banked. On with conquest. At these times they like to imagine us at one in Nantucket.

at one in Nantucket

a coven of pins and purses

dripping our candle fingered titties with lamp oil

do-do-doing dildo-do-do saucery, firing our cunts with silver

at one

as the sea. Tumbling, filthy, foaming, frothy, frotting spume. Because our fucking bodies are the waves to them

as the whale. Howling at the blubber. Blubbing. Dick deep in the void

at one as the sea as the whale as

Their life of bellows and rot and hot, wet waste. The instruments of natural philosophy, of heroic increments. The needle and the horizon. Hooks and harpoons to stitch the drift. Endless frittering card games. The brine swill of mutiny sluicing the bunks.

At one alone.

No wonder they get it so wrong.

Untimely Stimulus #7

"Whaling separated sexes; and in this isolated place, as isolated as any ship, and yet bleaker in mid-winter, whaling 'widows' had recourse to opium to cope with the loneliness. Others used plaster dildos known as 'he's-at-homes'."

Philip Hoare 'Leviathan (or, The Whale)"

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