I had a dream that me and my twin sister were in a car crash. We both died, but we carried on being alive inside cuddly toys. We were for sale in a toy shop and a little boy came in with his mum and she told him he could pick any two toys, and even though me and my sister were far apart from each other on the shelves, we were the two he chose.
He carried us home, one under each arm, put us in his bedroom and when he went downstairs and closed the door behind him it was like when we had to share a bedroom at Christmas because Grandma had come to stay. We would stay up late talking, and on Christmas Eve, even though we were tired and wanted to sleep, we’d stay up until midnight, waiting for the moment Christmas arrived. And so in the little boy’s room me and my sister just hung out. She said ‘remember when we were little and had baths together and you used to drink the bathwater.’ She said ‘I bet all our primary school teachers are dead by now’ and I thought about Mrs Cooper and Mr Thompson and realised she was probably right. We talked about people we worked with when we both had summer jobs at Safeway. We talked about how we watched every episode of Big Brother 2 and were pleased when Kate Lawler won. She reminded me she always beat me at paper, scissors, stone. I reminded her I was faster than her at front crawl.
Neither of us mentioned that we were both dead now and had become cuddly toys, but it didn’t really matter, because we were together, just me and my sister, and that’s the way we liked it best. The little boy came back into his room and gave us a cuddle. I was Eeyore. Karen was a dog called Patch.
‘Manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) is a name given to a type of stock character in films.
Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the phrase after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, describes the MPDG as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” MPDGs are usually static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (often brooding or depressed) leading male protagonist. A good example of this can be found in the movie Garden State, written and directed by Zach Braff, with Natalie Portman playing the role of the MPDG.‘ – Wikipedia
When you’re in love
Everything is a message
From the sun beaming brilliant and bronze in the sky
To the wind through a cornfield
A woodpigeon’s cry
The world seems exotic, so complex and new
All the bands on the radio sing just for you
When you’re insane
Everything is a message
From the fluorescent runes that dissolve at your touch
To the backwards Latin whispers
Rising out of your crotch
Amor et melle et felle est fecundissmismus
The world seems exotic, so complex and new
All the bands on the radio sing orders to assassinate Delia Smith just for you
Manic Pixie Dream Girl
For so long I’ve felt you approaching
Like the low thrum of a zeppelin fleet
Shadows rolling over the city of my heart
To a stark snare drumbeat
Magical Schizoid Munchkin Chick
You are the ripples in my water glass
The blips on my motion sensor
My seismograph’s spazzing needle
And as the printout settles in slow, pleated cascades on the floor
I know you’re coming
You’re coming
You’re coming
Floridly Psychotic Faery Queen
So horridly erotic! Where the hell have you been?
Paranoid Delusional Frenetic Elf Strumpet
O Ludicrous Hyperkinetic Gelfling Crumpet!
After we’ve kissed, I’ll just ask you to hold me
And I know you exist… cos the microwave told me
See troubles we had then were just teething pains
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains
Let’s have slow hugs and highwire fucks
Chase butterflies off viaducts
Then plug our bums with jelly tots
And ride on roofs of fire trucks
To burning buildings where
We’ll make out while the flames lick higher, sucks
For all those people trapped inside
Life’s tough
So let’s just try our luck
Till my fingers stink like sprats in brine
And your breath pongs of Cheetos
Let’s tie the knot in Vegas
Amongst brothels, bars and freakshows
With a bridal veil of tinfoil
And a skinful of Mojitos
We got peckers made of marzipan…
But you don’t have to eat those
O I know your looks have faded
And my gut’s a little flabby
And your knives are rubber-bladed
Just in case you’re feeling stabby
So you keep the windows shaded
And a close eye on the tabby
When the aliens invaded
He was singing in Punjabi
Go wild baby!
Hump that marrow!
You can be the devil’s child
And I’ll be Mia Farrow
Cos giving birth to you my dear
Would be such sweet sweet sorrow
Look! I can see her head!
Oooh! That’s gonna hurt tomorrow!
I’ll freestyle like a gabba star
While we smile in the abattoir
Snog to blood-drenched bleats and yelps
You don’t have to be mad to wank here –
But it helps!
And we won’t agree on everything
I mean
We can’t both be Jesus, now can we?
But I forgive you
O I love your blokish gobbing
Though I watch you through my fingers
And your choked, staccato sobbing
While receiving cunnilingus
I need ice to rest my knob in
But the fire inside still lingers
These sweet feelings aren’t like bees,
Please see, they won’t die if they sting us
What’s crazier than love
In all this shit and piss and pain?
Where magic’s just another
Drab disorder of the brain
I know we shouldn’t even start
I know one day you’ll break my hand
Accidentally
Sort of
And what do I need both eyes for anyway?
You can’t judge depth just by looking
They say truth’s beauty. Absurd! So screw sanity!
We’ll go down like the Hindenburg – o the humanity!
Waking life was always crappy
So I s’pose I must be dreaming
My friends ask me if I’m happy
But I can’t hear for all the screaming
Want me to blend in? Hand me the blender!
Let’s all go on a normality bender!
Okay, okay, me first.
Here’s my impression of a normal person:
Yeah, it’s been chaos round ours, as per.
Washing machine broke down again.
Ford Galaxy broke down again.
Gloria broke down again.
Third time in a month.
Third time in a fortnight.
Third time since Pilates.
Flooded the utility room.
Leaked oil all over the pea shingle.
Pissed the ethnic rug.
Called out the plumber,
The mechanic,
The brain mender,
You know what was wrong?
Little washer,
Valve
Wedding ring
Only that big.
Costs about 50p.
Costs about 50p.
Cost about three grand and a week in Kefalonia.
Hate to think how much we’ve spent on repairs
A hundred?
Thousand?
15 years of grim-faced stoicism?
Gets to the stage where you think, is it worth it?
Is it worth it?
Is it worth it?
If adventure’s changing channels,
Lazy nights on the settee,
And they say I’m fucking crazy –
I say crazy’s fucking me
If a brand new set of flannels’
Your idea of being free
Then I may be fucking crazy
Maybe crazy’s fucking me
O sweet crazy, you amaze me
I’d forgotten how to see
And of course I’m fucking crazy
Because crazy’s fucking me
Grind the mountains down to gravel,
Burn the woods and boil the sea
Cos it’s true, I’m fucking crazy,
Yeah, but crazy’s fucking me
“The original Gauntlet was released with no ending. The hundred or so levels were randomised and looped for as long as play lasted. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.”
– Gamasutra.com
1. Elf
Elf, my heartiest congratulations on reaching level 130! What unbelievable progress you’ve made. What a glittering career. I bet you look back on the previous 129 indistinguishable levels and find it hard to believe how far you’ve come. Have you considered writing a book about your travels? I know a publishing house that would be very interested in your rousing tales of walking through a series of identical rooms. Why, I imagine it will be the sleeper hit of next summer. As soon as your adventure is over, why don’t I set up a meeting? I’ll invite a couple of television executives as well, perhaps Sam Mendes, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. You’ll forgive them if they chant “Elf! Elf! Elf!” when you enter the restaurant. We’re all dying to meet you, Elf! In fact, I believe the people of Britain are planning some sort of standing ovation for you when you finally reach the edge of the dungeon. Assuming of course, that there is an edge to the dungeon, which there isn’t.
2. Warrior
Don’t listen to me, Warrior. Please, continue to let your naive sense of purpose pilot you like a crummy, pixelated ghost ship through a grey sea of nothingness. No one can doubt that your trajectory is immaculate, Warrior, unblemished by reality, much like a man falling off a roof, or a dead body crushed against a blaring car-horn. I have no doubt that you will ‘hold the course’, Warrior. In fact, I have just put the finishing touches on a mural that illustrates your many adventures. The green daubs around your head represents the System that you cannot see yet so cowardly protect.
3. Wizard
Wizard, as an ironist, you alone receive some sense of subjective freedom. Your outré dress sense deprives your surroundings of a finite degree of cognitive reality. In this manner, the dungeon can never truly hold you. Perhaps you expect us to be greatful for this mockery. Perhaps you would like us to bake some sort of special cake in your honour. How privileged you are, Wizard, and yet your surreal brand of comedy is just as reductive as the boilerplate ethics it attempts to negate. Deep down you have never truly questioned the rules. I will wager that you have never had an original thought. In fact, Wizard, you are incapable of fantasy. Your only escape will be from your own bloodstream, and even then your raft will never reach the rim of the ocean.
4. Valkyrie
They say that the show is never over until the fat lady sings (and you, Valkyrie, are unmistakably that fat lady), however, this particular rendition of Götterdämmerung is undergoing a series of dramatic rewrites at the behest of your controversial composer, a clownish horror of a man, who is composing a series of new librettos by headbutting a photocopier, an acknowledged unusual choice of collaborator (and one who many feel has outstayed its welcome at the Vienna Volksoper) the photocopier continues to be associated with the opera house due primarily to its prolific output, with you and your fellow singers receiving new pages every day, and although the sheets are all identical, featuring instructions on how to milk dogs, you and your ensemble remain greatful for the work, spending every minute of your waking day trying to bring the text to life, pushing Wagnerian harmony further and further with extreme chromaticism and generous use of dissonance, the production stretching out over days, weeks, years, until eventually the baritone is shot dead by the Slovene conductor Hugo Franck, and the renowned tenor Marco Casolini dies of malnutrition. Indeed, it looks unlikely that you will be winning the Nilsson Prize any time soon. One might even start to form the opinion that the entire production is a sham and a valuable mezze-soprano’s talents would be better suited elsewhere, for example, face-down at the bottom of a swimming pool. Sure enough, spend long enough at the grindstone and all the walls start to look like exits, and Valkyrie, nobody can walk through that door like you can.
Teach yourself to worry about nothing
not to dread new emails in your inbox
what kind of letters the postman will bring
bills dropping on the porch floor like breezeblocks
Picture your name engraved on a tombstone
etched by the day you were born, today’s date.
Take ten minutes extra for lunch, go home
and don’t apologise for being late
Take a siesta, go to the garden
plant sunflowers, water them once a week
get out a deckchair, read the Guardian
and if you decide you want a quick sleep
sprawl yourself across your brand new hammock
ignore the outside world, let it run amok.
It’s hard to imagine being stress free
not to worry how things will be next year
or what people are saying about me
I go outside with a bottle of beer
because lunchtime is now siesta time
having a barbecue is not skiving,
eat sausages, rice salad, pour some wine
instead of being stressed, you’re paragliding
through the air, waving at people below.
Whenever you feel you’re being hassled
go to the garden and no-one will know
you’re on your own on a bouncy castle
Life can be confusing, but here’s a hunch
to enjoy your life, first enjoy your lunch.
…Drive Your Man Wild In The Bedroom
- Set fire to his pillows
- Put laxatives in his tea
- Repeat everything he says in a sarcastic, high-pitched voice
- Cry; then, when he asks you what’s wrong, laugh
- Slam a book shut on his testicles
- Eat only sand (but not too much sand)
- For every calorie you consume, cut off a limb
- Instead of butter or oil, why not try cooking using a low-fat alternative, such as newspaper?
- Release a crocodile into your home; run away from the crocodile
- Bulimia
…Get Your Finances In Order
- Consolidate all your debts into one easy-to-manage suicide attempt
- Keep a record of all your incomings and outgoings in a home accounts book; at the end of the year, sell the book
- Spend less on luxuries like shampoo and trousers
- Get a higher-paid job and a better mortgage and try to find suitcases full of money just lying in the street
- Stop paying tax
The past is another country
A crap one, like Belgium
Rife with brown-trousered tedium
Where no one sees disasters coming
Where the phones are big as bricks
Where men sleepwalk down aisles with their future ex-wives
Where the only telly is repeats
But don’t slag it off
Cos I was born on those streets
Where my gawky demeanour and penchant for munching
Made my peers jeer ‘Oi speccy! Oi sumo! Oi bumchin!
I heard that the bruise on your tricep needs punching
Now don’t you go dream of amounting to something!
I told you last Tuesday – or hasn’t it sunk in?’
These lads who led lives of fags, football and spunking
Who sat their exams and got straight As – in flunking
While girls deft as surgeons sat squeezing their blackheads
All strung out on burgeoning hormones like crackheads
They used boys like me for their sarcasm practice
I vied for one girl who seemed gentle and kindly
An angel, she’d surely have never maligned me
She’d never go ‘dickhead’ or ‘wanker’ behind me…
Oh the rolled eyes and wrinkle-nosed dry gagging gesture
She did to her friends when I tried to impress her,
As if she’d been licked by some rough-tongued molester
Like Caliban came from his cave to caress her
Or swarms of black locusts had tried to undress her
‘Get back to your books and Nintendo, professor!’
And so I jawed shut
Like a vault
Or a clam
Like a Transformer morphing back into a van
Fast forward
To now
And my ego’s intact
I’ve seen a girl naked
(seen several, in fact)
I keep my achievements impressively stacked
And when I’m a twat, well – it’s part of my act
And one day, I end up in a scene from my dreams
I’m up on a stage and the crowd’s mostly teens
And so mustering all my newfound self-esteem
I think: Right – time to show these kids just what ‘cool’ means
I thought they’d like me
I thought they’d admire me
I thought they’d be inspired
Aspire to be like me like I was some guy off the telly
I thought they might at least smile politely
Oh in my head, how they’d applaud
They laughed and howled and cheered
But in real life I got ignored
Cos they thought I was weird
The youngsters sat there looking bored
They made me feel a crooked fraud
Till something deep inside me roared:
I will not take this anymore-d
Okay, I’m not ‘down with the kids’
So I say
Down with the kids!
Drown ‘em like a sack of philistine kittens!
The kid gloves are off
It’s on
With the man-mittens
I don’t wanna be cool
I wanna be a curmudgeon
I’ll speak at your school
With its fresh dreams to bludgeon
‘The Oxford English Dictionary defines “teenager” as
Buhhhhh! Uhhhh!
Aged 13 to 17
You young minds who sit before me today
Are rubbish
You download your rubbish opinions like ringtones
Scoop rubbish maize snacks into bum-fluff edged gobs
A putrefied mackerel smell wafts from your pissy bits
You lurch between fury, indifference and sobs
Your clichéd McHeartbreak, your shrill swine-faced hissy fits,
Your feelings are rubbish
Glum zit-witted yobs
And even if one of you does become an astronaut
The infinite vacuum will press its thumb against your tiny visor
And not let go till you’re a joyless atheist
You still think death is other people
Children
Huge, freakish, ungainly children
You need to think about death more
I remember that I’m going to die
At least five times before breakfast
Which I take at 2pm
In my underpants
Playing Super Mario Sunshine on my Gamecube
While you’re stuck in a classroom that smells of pencils
And what do I have for my breakfast?
Whatever I like!
Pork pies in gravy
And Poppets
And booze
I can eat what I want!
I can drink when I choose!
Oh I think I’ll consume this huge vat of cheap wine
So I’m rat-arsed in time for the 3 O’Clock News.’
So fuck the kids
Well, don’t fuck the kids
But down with the kids!
Get off my lawn!
You’ve never heard of Teletext?
You don’t even know you’re born!
With your wi-mo i-hood my-isode nanos
And ability to hear through the ears in your knees!
No wait
I’m thinking of crickets
Yes…
Crickets
Their chirruping wing strokes as teens sit in judgement
And gag after quip after joke I make tanks
Grip my mic, but I know where they’d like me to stick it
Their faces as hard as a concrete abutment
Their afternoons measured in texting and wanks
So go on, don’t love me! I don’t need your approval!
I’d sooner fork out for a bollock removal
And if you should come crawling back on your knees
Bearing blog hits and Friend Requests begging me: ‘Please!
Without you the whole world is greyer and colder!
Look! Jenny has Tippexed your name on her folder!’
I’ll shake my head slow in the warm changing breeze
‘No,’ I’ll say, smiling. ‘Not till you’re older.’
I’m 29 and I spend too much time
Ranking the threats that face human-kind.
It’s my hobby.
Currently I’d put ‘War with the Machines’
at about eight, behind;
1. Superbug (natural)
2. Collapse of the food chain;
3. Rise in sea level;
4. Nuclear war;
5. Superbug (man-made)
6. Meteor strike
and
7. Spontaneous massive release of methane
or ‘earth fart’
Eight. Six if you remove ‘meteor strike’ – a
Wildcard, I accept- and Earth Fart, which really
only got on the list because it’s easily the funniest
and if I was god I would take that into account
War with the Machines is definitely in the top ten
It’s serious. The only thing stopping it from happening
Right now is people like us, and the fact that none of the
technology has been invented.
We’re the same, John; you and I.
We’ve both been at war
since before we were born
we’ve been getting ready our whole lives
I punch the fax machine for no reason
I jiggle my perfectly functioning mouse testily
I drum my fist on the microwave; I let it know
Goddammit, and feel good to be alive and fighting
I make a point of being unnecessarily hard on my phone.
I shake the shit out of it for the slightest failing. I wake
every dawn with the karma of an outnumbered
colonist, and go over my escape routes until lunchtime
Sometimes I see someone shouting at a photocopier
and dare to hope that- with help- they could win the
argument so I stand with them and put my arm around
them because this war is not just about fighting
I once saw a man trying to herd a slow moving
Hatchback down a street with punches and kicks
and shouts. I cheered him on. I respected him.
Fighting cars is toughest. They’re totally implacable.
If you made a list of all the cars that an average
person could defeat in a fair fight it would have
no cars on it. They might not be the smartest
machine, but they’re strong and well disciplined
And they are patient. My father’s Volkswagen knows
When you’re sitting in the seat, and bleeps from the
time you turn the key, to the time you put your belt on
I have seen my father suffer ten risky miles of bleep
before breaking and accepting his fate. My father is strong.
They say that the wise don’t argue with idiots, because
from a distance you can’t tell the difference. And as the
Seatbelt clicks into place again I don’t know if we can win
this war either.
Every day George Alagiah practices saying the same line.
The Queen is Dead.
The Queen is Dead.
The Queen is Dead.
He says it into the bathroom mirror when shaving,
he sings it in the shower
enunciates every word when driving to work,
“We have some breaking news.
The Queen is Dead.”
He rehearses scenarios:
‘Her Majesty died peacefully in her sleep in the early hours of this morning’
‘Her Majesty was hit with a bullet through her forehead’
‘Her Majesty was killed in a car crash in Paris.’
George Alagiah’s wife has not been on holiday for years,
her suggestions of a fortnight in France are always ignored,
brochures of Tuscany are thrown in the bin
there is no chance of staying with her brother in Whitby for a few days.
George knows the value of full attendance.
He does not want to give anyone else the chance to say the words,
not Huw Edwards, Fiona Bruce
Sophie Rayworth.
Whenever they see each other in the BBC canteen
they just glare, do not say a word.
They all know what the other is thinking,
they want to be the one to break the news.
‘If you are just tuning in, the Queen is dead.’
George Alagiah has a bag packed especially
he keeps it by the front door.
In it is a black tie, a comb,
a notebook with a carefully worded eulogy.
Every time he goes to bed
he knows his sleep could be disturbed
by the phone ringing
and it will be his producer saying
“George,
something terrible has happened.
We need you.”
Last week I walked through Maidenhead suburbs,
the houses huddled together in twos
like anoraked couples perched on a bench
on some Autumn day at the end of a pier.
Past kids playing scrappy 20 a side;
lads leaned on Bangra-blaring Golf GTIs;
Toyota Corollas with rear-view signs
on suckers: Dad’s Taxi, Baby on Board
and If you can read this I’ve lost my trailer.
Good old boys checking their type pressure,
mums with their offspring in car seats like shopping,
recycling bins, well kept front gardens
neat as parade grounds, quiet as Valium
and a blue door that made me think of a Lido
I saw once before we were together,
before the life we made swelled in your belly -
cut into the rock, jutting out to sea.
That for a week I went to at sunset
to gobble my chips and imagine it crammed
full of tan lined, knobbly British bodies
and wonder why my new romantic life
at mic stands felt perpetually out of season.
Yet last week in Maidenhead (of all places)
I felt strangely at ease with normality;
there was a time I’d walk through here scolding
tutting, talking in quotes and references;
too clever for nice weather and caravans;
too clever, too smart to be taken in.
Who’d want 2.4 children I’d say
in visor and asymmetrical fringe.
Or what dickehead works nine to five
whilst eating spaghetti hoops straight from the tin.
Disgusted at people who had settled,
shaking my dust till my fingers bleed.
Shaking my dust till it got up my nose
and I’d cough and sneeze for weeks on end
Maybe it’s because I drive a Mondeo
and have started wearing trousers that fit
that I’ve realised that we do not die
with our affectations, if anything we live.
Life is not about being repeatedly hit
in the face or being applauded
or getting a laugh it’s not about never staying
in the same place or being rewarded.
You can’t just be what other people aren’t.
You can’t plot your life like a misery memoir
or wait to hang smiles on the whims of strangers
or put out to tender your dictionary entry.
Luke Wright. Proper Noun. Performance poetry
Wunderkind, genius, destined for greatness.
Luke Wright. Proper Twat. Moonish-faced wordsmith
Self-assured cockend. Ruins William Blake seminars.
Ambition used to hunt me like a zombie
til I’d throw it bits of my poems like flesh;
I’d stare at my inbox hitting refresh;
I’d get places early and just catch my breath.
But now, I think of those ruddy-cheeked weavers
in lopsided seventeenth century towns
who when they’d earned enough money that week
declared a Saint’s Day and went down the pub.
Centuries from the boy on his blackberry
at broadcasting house writing poems to go;
crying and wanking on fringe theatre stages;
twanging his id like a diddely-bo.
Motorways from a boy in a visor
trying to make it all mean something more;
wistfully staring at an swimming pool:
the lido is a metaphor for for for …
But last week I walked through Maidenhead suburbs
And though I knew I wouldn’t find an ending
I realised that I’ve learnt something new:
that sometimes it’s ok just to blend in.
Always open, always closed.
T. VAN KANNEL, at the opening of the world’s first three-winged Wooden Revolving Door, Rector’s Restaurant, Manhattan, 1899.
~
People tried to spin the door in both directions.
GILBERT GASSON, double bassist, following the nightclub fire that killed 492 people at The Cocoanut Grove, Boston, Massachusetts. The revolving door jammed, trapping hundreds of people.
It’s anything-can-happen day.
DARRYL HOSS, captain of Boston College Football Team, commenting on their surprise defeat to rivals Holy Cross. They had made plans to celebrate their victory at The Cocoanut Grove but, following the 55-12 defeat, cancelled the reservation.
Both from November 29, 1942, Boston Herald.
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