The end of all things (incomplete mx)
By poetjude
- 1614 reads
Police Helicopters circled ahead aggressively, buzzing angrily as
they scorch the ground, searching each corner of Fitrovia with the
relentless gaze of the blue searchlights that swivel at right-angles,
glaring. It's a jungle down here. The artists and poets and musicians
scrabbling around desperately in this post-modernist Armageddon,
artificially wild in the cold concrete architecture that's woven
together in complexity with iron girders. They're lost. I looked into
their eyes, as I might look into a mate's coffin, afraid of what I
would find, but then finding nothing. Cold bruised hands, an anatomical
shell, all life, all meaning and love dead now. I can run you know, the
will of my spirit pushing the tar-burnt diesel engine of my lungs
wheezily. I fled with the artists from the Fitzroy Tavern, down
Windmill Street, leaping blindly through the wet lashed pilgrims
catching the stores for some electric gadgetry. When the copters had
locked off me (and it wasn't hard to shake them off in such a crowd) I
paused and turned and viewed the twilight vista; the American Church a
damp husk crouching next to the filthy entrance to the station; the
glass-clad matchstick of the telecom tower, snapped off just above the
now disused satellite dishes. As I stood, there at the end of all
things and it seemed like the whole cosmos was crumbling about my head,
the warmth of neoteric narcotics enshrouded my excited neuro-tissue,
with the calming tendrils of chemical comfort.
Back in the flat Benjy was sleeping, the sweat droplets of DTs still
licking his troubled brow. I didn't have any beer left to give him, so
unlocked the wine cabinet and left a bottle of merlot on the low
formica table by his side, to keep his demons at bay when he awoke.
Even I can't work myself out on days like that. I'm a champion of
capitalism and Christ, too talented for poverty, too moral to sell out
and join the corporate troops. I write for a small webzine, e-zine,
virtual conversation call it what you will depending on your age.
"Alphabyte" started her life as abctales, in the front end of the
dotcom era, and that's how I get heard, one lonely anguished voice
screaming across the eternal halls of virtuality. I'm too eccentric at
times, whizzing too far from the elliptical orbit the mediasphere makes
around city culture. My writing pays but not enough to feed Benjy and
I, so I dealt stan, the latest designer drug and my own personal
paradise.
Stan is the shining sun of young veins in these, the last days of the
world, that feeling you have when you wake up knowing that something is
very very good , but not remembering what it is. Stan is the taste of
the long summer holidays off school, the freedom of endless days, the
knowledge of being precious and loved, yet so good it could kill, kill
you with an overload of passion. So I was running from the Babylon that
night when they busted the tavern where I had been peddling my wares,
500 Euros a gram, top banana.
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