I don't know if anyone passing through this place has read this month's Gabriel Ricard saga - the 'Man in The Long, Black Coat' sequence. It's not the kind of stuff that I could write - narrative black parody/satire territory - but I found it fascinating, engrossing, entertaining...what I'm saying is, what more can I say? Anyway, as a kind of tribute, I decided to produce a parallel episode, based on a one-line idea inspired by the aforementioned work, which spontaneously expanded into a miasma of contused confusion. As I said, it's not really my territory, so expect disappointment, and the worst you will suffer is the realisation that you should have known better...

Short, sweet and ultimately toxic.

The stench...attracts repulsives 
a flock of seagulls mewing
like new-wave out-of-time travellers.
Rats, maggots, developers
plus several indigenous species
of scavenger that nice girls like me 
would only identify with in 
their weirdest nightmares, or maybe at work.
The interactive audience was never
flung this far from civilisation.
I'm watching, fixated, as lumps of flesh
and amorphous sections of viscera
disappear from the scene
as fast as a diet in a cake shop.
Her body is frozen mid-pose, limp
as a bizkit, eyes shot, waiting to roll
but gripped in a swell of vice
that makes black and blue
seem like the new, virginal white.
Or maybe cream...like she really cares
anyway, and that scrambled-egg stare 
is giving me the runs. You know,
she looks like the angel from hell
or maybe the virago from heaven?
I don't know - though I guess
what I'm saying is, she could have been
any one of us - well, any one of you.
Where I come from, that spread of persona
wouldn't make it past script selection.
Understand, there's an image to promote
or so it says here, which is why
they dress me up in this
disgustingly transparent excuse
for a heroin chic party dress
trailing two generations of deviant-garde
fantasy material slipped between
the sheets of a Sunday Times
magazine that's about to be emptied
into some grief-stricken clerical sect
mumbling rhetorical catechisms
over my dead body. Damn right.
It's holy grail season for the girl 
in the short white undergarment.
Holy shit - is that indecently derivative,
or have I just been here before?
 
Meantime, I'm praying that
several thousand years of
pagan worship doesn't mark me out
as the next sacrifice for a prey
for whom this sacred strip of landfill
is as good as a second coming.
And me dolled up and doled out
as the white trash of black arts.
But, to be blunt, that's not the point.
How could anyone, outside 
the medical profession, be so 
clinically inhumane to another human being?
Well, I guess it's a matter of perspective. 
Or perception. Or something else
beginning with p that doesn't
sound too clichéd or heretically incorrect.
Like paedophilia, or psychopathy.
I pshrink from the thought.
More important - to me that is -
my salvation rears it's ugly child...
I know I could never, ever perpetrate
an action so violent, or perverted
or even vaguely improper towards any
of my hypothetical brothers or sisters.
Although there was that one time...
but then I'm not here to argue
the rights or wrongs of fictional incest.
My attributed passivity is fact
and I'll continue to believe that
until finally, at some point in this
misconceived allegorical masterfarce
I snap, and split some bastard's head
for soliciting the same from me.
Or her head, physical parameters permitting
which, of course, they don't - a crying shame
because I'm nothing if not versatile.
 
Whatever, this is not the time
to cry over reconstituted soya extract.
So - what in heaven's synonym
am I doing in this nature-forsaken place?
Apart from wiping yesterday's memories
of indulgence from my high-principled
knee-length mock-leather boots,
and searching desperately for a patch
of moral high ground in which to bury
my rapidly flagging intrepidity.
I need a reason, a soupçon of motivation
with croutons and the full panoply
of condiments before I can stomach
another character assassination.
 
[to be discontinued]

I am currently uncomfortably introspective.

I am listening to Troy - Sinead O'Connor - The Lion and The Cobra.

Some people, when they feel depressed, self-medicate - they savour the retail experience until their plastic expires in a cataclysmic display of spontaneous combustion. Me? It's the sound scenario - impulsive expeditions to the four corners of the auditory quadraverse. This latest excursion delivered up 'classic tracks'...Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden, Freak on a Leash - KoRn, Schism - Tool, and the crowning gory of gories, 21st Century Schizoid Man - King Crimson. "I am deliriously happy", she whispered inscrutably.
So, am I really depressed? Is that like sniffing and claiming to be suffereing from 'the flu', or voting every four years and representing myself as a political activist? There's obviously a yawning chasm between a diagnosis of clinical depression and merely 'feeling depressed'. Ok - the former invariably involves loss of all self-esteem, complete emotional detachment, debilitating indifference regarding appearace, health, motivation and behaviour - essentially an inability to function as a 'normal' human being. Hmm - sounds familiar, but then I function, and I detest the term 'clinical', so I guess I'll just grimace and bear it (and bare it) - wait for the inevitable manic episode to convince me that I'm actually a perfectly well-balanced sociopath with asymmetrical bipolar tendencies. Depression - no, way too bland (scary)...it's either an intricately contrived complex of multifarious personality disorders precariously poised on the brink of spectacular breakdown, or...what? I don't think about that stuff - it's too clinical. I shrink from shrinks, but produce regular contractions to negate the effects of an inexorably expanding world.

I am currently tearful, but alive.

I am listening to Alive Alone - Exit Planet Dust - Chemical Brothers.

It's Friday night, and I've had a week to remember, but only by comparison to the extended diarrhoea episode or the 'I am the root of all evil' self-flagellation scenario. Whatever, I've decided to ditch the review and get totally wasted. At present I'm enduring the 'things moving around under their own volition' routine, having survived the 'examination' phase - scrutinizing each of my words in depth before allowing them to pass into the vocalisation process. What I really anticipate with belated breath and spine-tapping terror is the prospect of the 'endless internal conversation'. For all you Rice Krispie veterans out there (crack, snafu and pot), you will know there are various ways in which this can be executed, although my personal preference is the 'take each personality as it comes' approach - yeah, that's just cos I'm lazy...3 hour fugue state total ellipsis...back to the futile - tabular eraser, a row too far, the hard cell. Tomorrow is today, and yesterday just another nine-character psychosis...

I am currently depixilated - unable to see the big picture, probably because the ornate nature of the frame delivers the ultimate Rorschach experience.

I am listening to Slither - Velvet Revolver (ideal for those occasions on which you need a slash but can't move).

I rarely dream. My last, before this early morning, was short and sweaty. I was wandering through a housing estate, horrified at the amount of broken glass scattered throughout the walkways. I gathered up every piece, knocked at the nearest door and asked for three black refuse sacks in which to wrap the shards before depositing them in a communal wheeled bin. The occupant punched me firmly in the gut, and proceeded to roll me backwards and forwards across the glittering passageway. My next recollection was being transported on a blue-pile carpet, attached to a rainbow stretching out across the urban landscape, which delivered me directly to an intensive care unit. I watched in utter fascination as nurses carefully extracted a hundred thousand slivers of glass from my arms, legs and torso. Blood loss and scarring would normally(?) be major concerns for someone whose skin had been virtually shredded, but instead I had found myself wondering whether the glass would be collected by Environmental Services, ground down and recycled...pictured myself sandpapering the wounds away, and felt an intense surge of relief and release. I woke, and my flesh was pissing perspiration, although I had felt blissfully unperturbed throughout the dream.

This morning's was infinitely more conventional. I dreamt that I failed to wake, in that I was caught in a demented loop of waking from successive dreams only to discover that each phase of sleeping & waking was merely a dream within a dream. If you've ever experienced that particular scenario, you will know how disturbing it can be on emergence into supposed consciousness. How often, or rather, how rarely are we really 'awake'? I'm sure Ashok would have an answer, if not 'the' answer, to that one...

I am currently between moods.

I am listening to ergonomics advisors mumbling something about work/study hours lost to online communities, interspersed with fusillades of 'Duality' - Slipknot.

A dedication to those people whom, for reasons beyond my limited social awareness, I have inadvertently alienated. I guess I would apologise, if only I could navigate these silent straits. All I can say is - I don't have the heart to generate gratuitous offence, malice or resentment. Given a heart, I would probably smother you all in love. I have the inclination, but lack the equipment...ergo, the 'whatever' philosophy.

I guess this should, above all things, deliver me weeping and writhing into a pit of despond...but as I don't know what I'm missing, it's business as usual - updating my back-catalogue of simulated highs and virtual lows: presciption v proscription.

I am currently depressurised

I have been listening to System of a Down - chop suey

I have recently been working on obliterating negative assumptions - besides those I make about myself

Well...this was meant to be a tongue-up-nose response to a cross-threaded exchange regarding the virtues of William Butler Yeats (with reference both to poetry and appelation), the merits of the 'emo' culture void, and the posting of poetry linked by virtual non-existence. Probably not received in the manner intended by those struggling with de-incarnation of the erstwhile DMV. May Shannon Vasquez and Leanne Hanson never be satisfied with 'resting in peace' :> I guess a poetry community devoid of poetry was destined to descend into pseudo-anarchy and untenable chaos?

Woe, Woe, Stephan (aka No Second Troy - apologies to Maud Gonne)

Why should I spurn him, that he filed my words
With patent glee, or that he would in jest
Have taunted innocent girls to court the nerds,
Or thrown the virgin forums to the quest,
Had they but colours worthy of the cause?
What could have made him pious with a brain
That megalomania forged from flaming wars
With reason like a twisted brow, a bane
That is not so remote on a page like this,
Being wise and deified and so dot com?
Why, where could he have gone, taking so the piss?
Was there no other site for him to bomb?

I thought it tastefully playful, but perhaps in the circumstances...

I think - therefore I think some more, and soon I am immersed in thoughts, wondering how it feels not to think - thinking aloud that thinking should not be allowed. Whatever, I now have virginradioxtreme on screamer, and I am free to be enslaved by the sound of thoughts that are not my own. I am breathing...now I have to learn to type, automatically, remotely. "Drift in space" means something to me now.

I am currently listening to: Where Do I Begin- Chemical Brothers/Beth Orton - virginradioxtreme, in association with screamer streaming the excruciating

My current mood can best be described as contused