The maudlin losers danced around my pizza box grave that night I rose from the dead. Drinking their coloured liquids and poncing fags off that one walker. Nobody knew about the trick before I did it, but when I did, good golly, they fucking shat bricks like a machine heavy on the rag.

Before I played the spoons there was a man in a green dress who felt me up like a dog does a lamp post and there was nothing I could do about it but take his ten shillings and grease up the wound after his hurried departure to anywhere but by my putrid side.

And then began the torturous misanthropy of the middle years when I saw every living thing as some kind of hollow trick with nothing but a yabble and a matzo ball for a soul. Each night I walked the canal in search of that man with the powders who, for a nominal fee, would free me for just two candy floss minutes, while the girls in the panto rang the old man's bell as the flecked coats in the abattoir scorched hair off swine.

The 'lemon hulas' were a promiscuous band of pre-teens with a fixation on flik-flak watches. 'Flick-fack is water resistant,' they would sing to a carny tune while Jebodiah, the fire-eating coconut with ears for eyes, and teeth for toes, blew one out of his shell.

I stood with a glass to the bathroom wall. ‘The name is Hutchinson.’ He spelled it out for the operative. ‘I was promised delivery to the hotel by today.’ His voice cracked. After five minutes of silence he ran a bath. I listened for another ten. He didn’t seem to be masturbating.
I had come to the hotel to finish my novel. The follow-up to my runaway success widely acclaimed as a triumph. My agent had resorted to sending one word texts. Finished? Done? There? Completed? Ready? I had responded, No, Nope, Nah, Nein, Non.
The phone buzzed. A new message from ‘agent’, ‘Tosser’.

It yawned on me
That perhaps the
Resolution
Had passed me by
But
Before I could do anything
I fell asleep

The dogs left by the light of the silvery moon when Josh opened the warehouse door. The delivery truck sat replete with goods and Fat Johnny up front puffing on a blunt. The homies tracked round the truck, armed with pepper spray and a backpack of gaffer tape. Fat Johnny was down to get ripped. His cab fat with smoke, he accepted his fate and turned up the music loud.

The patisserie was open. The cakes were stuffed with the usual charms. But Jennifer was different. Something about her hair made her look new. I asked for my standard cake in that low register she liked. It was then that the bell rang. In walked Francis carrying a whale cake with an extended frangipane penis. ‘Oh my,’ I said.

Before the wand swung he felt a stirring in his bibble. The clock said nothing. Rocking in the chair before the TV screen, a bird flew in and gently flapped its wings to his eyes, caressing his sucky pockets. The sunshine streamed in a brazen fashion, all loud. Days like this were just the antidote.

John Aldo Falanthropo caught the train from Bermondsey to Dubrovnik amid much controversy. An agent was on his tail and a woman on his mind. It had been five minutes since his last sandwich and he was already planning his next meal. When he got there he would feast. It sounded like the place you would. Let’s feast, he thought, hungry.

Jonathon felt a buzz like a rickshaw ride up his bottom. He opened his eyes to discover a room with blood walls and a Matisse on the ceiling. His fingers had been cut off and stuck in a vase on the windowsill. There was a smell like his mother in the air.

The cold hearted biscuit felt a little left out on Rome day. Nobody had bought him a costume. Still, he beat his chest and launched forward into the day. It was sunny so he didn’t wear a coat, or a suit. As he walked the street, others pointed and stared. When he reached the bins, his friend, Gerald, winked and asked, ‘getting much?’

He said that it was clinical, the way that man with the branch beat her. He wrote that she had been asking for it with an outstretched palm. Nobody saw it. There was only her testimony. Nobody denied that it was true. There was no doubt in that. And so began the song. Whisky Jon started up his parp parp band, tapping out the beat on the floor and launched into a trumping version of ‘the whore’s drawers’. The bar was awash.

At my own little itty bitty titty bar there’s a girl who serves drinks out of her own cup. The customers, they’re never quenched. Except for one. He never looks. Sits in a booth on his own with a newspaper. One of the older girls brings him a shepherd’s pie and then salts and peppers his plate. He picks at it, rolls the mince around his cavities and smiles wildly at the always black barman. You could call it a party. Why don’t you join us? We want you in the room, gyrating to bounce, taking part and living.