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.