Untimely #22 - Winning

- Yello Rita. You’ve news of a real bug-eyed ding-dong taking shape on the red carpet. Do tell Sugar Tits.

- Thank you, Don. Reports are coming in of a gen-u-ine Tom and Jerry fracas brewskiing between Mr Sheen and Mr Waits following recent artistic differences. Rumour has it that both sides are ultimately willing to settle this feud in a “Rock-Paper-Scissors” style showdown. Our reporter, Goodison Hotcock, is on the scene.

The boulevard pink with dawn hush. Willows of light sloping over the edges of buildings. The road spidered with cracks pocked and ashy from years of traffic already bleeding under the new sun. On either side lines of plane trees cast a cullis of shadows. Then the distant rumble of something the trudge of a hundred footsteps a guttering clarion the yips and yam-yams of beasts. At the western end of the boulevard a single panther stalks over the crest of the hill a single white panther on its back an alabaster women red-eyed and naked a banner in her hands snickering in the morning heat: “Deviance is the metaphor for sanity.”

Ask her what it means. What it all means. What does it mean? What in hell can it mean? Mean? Meaning is for pussycats. Meaning is for the neuron obsessed payday plastics – the breakfasting herd, man. Meaning is losing and we are not about losing.

A hive mind of albino porn stars ebony prostitutes mulatto strippers bleached Geisha. More banners. Our skin is heroic. Welcome to existence, intra-terrestrials. Mortality, what? Overdosing is über-winning. I am a magic. I am Charlie Sheen. I float above them all using my amazing powers of telekinesis. Look at you down there – flaccid, dull-eyed normality tots. I’ve got lips like a portal to HELLA-ville. You lose – suit-wigs. I’m firing on Goddess time and you gum gum GUM. Kiss it. The end. Period. The E.N.D.

Scuffing the east ridge of the boulevard long shadows leaking from two silhouettes in the early sun a slow piratical puppet show with the horizon as their stage. The first, white dry hair straggling from beneath a black wide-brimmed hat face sinking in lost kindness like a gold-rush corpse, plays a reedy march mournful on a makeshift whistle fashioned from the quill of a raven’s tail-feather. Behind him the protégé now master - gimlet eyes grinching chimplike under a pork pie hat. His left fingers clack together two grey stones. His right fingers grip the cone of a megaphone to the pug of his lips.

I’m what you get when you let cats and dogs mate -

A flurry of fur-balls and loveliest hate.

Born in a jailhouse, bred on the run

My teat was the desert, my rattle a gun.

I’m what you get when you stud goats and monkeys -

A circus of brawlers, drunkards and junkies.

The whole scene as some unreadable tract of writhing hieroglyphs pitted alien and seething, or else a palimpsest tapestry of shifting surfaces and frayed threads, or still an image scorched and blind in a tryst of time and light its burnt and shrivelling forms curled under the white-hot shadow of its own existence.

- Thanks Goodison. Please keep us updated. Don, back to you.