In the semi-darkness they perch vulture-like atop the black that never knew life. Their necks are craned for a better view of their intended.
Drool escapes their limp orifices and stains the clothing that does nothing to hide their naked ambition.
With a flap of featherless limbs, long since redundant, on a body unknown to flight, one shifts and is at my side.It's breath stale and reeking of death.
It's almost like it wishes to peck at my sanity whilst awaiting the day it can feast on a brain gone dead.
"Why doesn't it choose to pick the fat from my bones"?
It squawks and wails as if in pain when I make a move to leave.
Is that a tear in it's bloodshot eye as it notes my drink is non-alcoholic?
I wonder "Do I insult it's imposition with my uncaring ignorance"?
It almost manages a smile, but in a face that holds no teeth only affects the display of a hollow grimace.
Clutched in a gnarled, leathery talon the stick that brings the long awaited death to itself, the suffering somehow prolonged by it's certainty.
Is this a place or time?
Neither or both?









Fatallah wobbles last nights cheese-cake belly below a fringe of sequins and the ever ready bear drummers amplify Constantinople in the spray of a veteran fountain doing it's best to wet an Orlando bladder fully into kick-back mode.
The King Island camembert and cheap house-brand cheddar wrestle for attention on the squared-off oval of sterling-silver.
Between sharp cuts from a serrated would-be Wiltshire with chilli-speckled sheaths awaiting consumption, well crafted goblets of the latest in flash-moulded, non-etched, 30 to a dollar kind, shuddered at the thought of how tomorrow will be for a fifty-something Agatha doing her best to gratis her fill.

The holiday sun and pre-teens in orange and green foil-wrap have drawn out the smirks in full and between portrait 96 and a trio of landscapes the order of a special bouquet drifts along merrily.

"Lick my Pluto pup, and I'll pat my thanks on your plaited hair-piece like a jungle drummer warning of a white-man's poaching"

The razor-cut of sharp water drew breath as a lock opened and furnace heat melted company to mere memories.

The urge killed pretensions and scrawling along the thin blue was a silent voice always aware of tone, characterisation and an eventual climax, just as predicted on page 3 of that 5 page epic about a hotel where Diaphanous or some other form of contraception soured a spinster's delusions to the extent of venomous correspondence.

Celery waded with carrots and capsicum splashed wildly in the puddle of Italian dressing that bathed lunch in adventurous divergence.

Sit silent and hide behind the foliage pre-library and ponder taps and flapping thighs.

The sleeping partner took to flight about now and while the spindly biker tried to kick-start a wife and 3 kids, 3 kids with two mothers did Aladdin, on a big screen, with 1 o'clock promises to a jocular wet-spot on the horizon.

A proboscis rested on a lower lip dripping want and good times to a staid floral-robed dinosaur hiding behind 21 years as a paper-boy in an effort to shed 4 carats of promise and a life-time of expectation.

Publish and be damned. Then stand and taunt with your over-publicised, under-dressed novellas of hard-bodies, twilight beaches and bothersome 8 year-olds who have found being seen is just not sufficient to feed a syndrome locked in deficit, and that not being heard won't sling them a 140 for a top of the line yo-yo that plays itself so well it knows where to piss, sans training.
Take the coast-road through some bad tv and see if Quincy really knew his mild-mannered assistant doubled as a hoop for quoits on the Love Boat. Third quoit from the front, at the junction of if 6 was 8 in another time frame altogether he stood, hardly noticing the sweat-streak in mascara wanted dead or alive for 15 years of disco murder in the most industrialised nation on Earth.

There's no doubting the filthy smiles brought by the filthy lucre of no feelings and no fun all gassed up for a Belsen submission. So hold all showers and stay to the left all those intent on using astrology and other forms of star-gazing as guides to life-styles.

Under the charred remains of a cool ash the nodules gathered souls like ghost-towns take tumbleweeds for granted and a tuber-root proved that dead-wood can float.

When a knock-kneed gent shuffled aside at the slightest touch a puce shirt flared pink and a city's air flared the eyes to a red-raw strain.

"That bastard fly blazed a dark trail through my vision and dared to circle the Kong atop his brushed-wool arm-chair empire state".

Hot and bright gives way to evening and sweltering, and the Rock takes a break and grooves into rhythm with the blues so bad it could almost be cool enough for jazz.

"Chew down and pick teeth with a fracture of the tree, a splinter of trunk".

Did she raise the green jacket of a champion to expose a jiggling butt cleft by the latest in hugging, sliding, "I can feel myself dampening by the minute" lingerie intentionally or is that funnel in her lower back finding the going a little bit too tough?

Please turn down the dry
Please turn up the volume.
Take up the volume.
Take up the slack.
Who'd have them take a suppository of dominance?
A bath of soapy-suds sat grinning insanely at the prospect of complete control over anal canals and colons, with a nurse rubbered-up to a pre-talced love of the disastrous.

All the tough boys lined the walls above "unwanted" or "distrusted" and clenched fists about penis-envy and how much a life of crime might be worth in the hero stakes.

The handicappers had seen the work of possible starters and informed their criminal connections that a nobbling was required.

On all fours in shop-windows and under bar-towels stolen on a whim he wished white-collar tags "All the best" as the shifting weight of albatross to vultures of cartoon-purple wiped feet below dripping sexes on the best endeavours a man has to offer.

Burn like the sandal would if you were a loose pair of cotton panties about the ankles catching eyes on the breeze and numbering off lost fingers to misdirected hate.

A mother knows a sister's dilemma and the in-laws order 1 egg, tunneled and cavernous, for their edification and canonisation totally for the cause, of course.

Celebrate the girl-next-door's maturing to womanhood with a hard-on stiff and yearning.

Pop well-boiled cookies over nothing to nowhere and feel light years from death on the cooling embers of loneliness.

Intimate details rattled around a child's play-pen and the scream for a nipple to stick to drove home like the final nail in an already sealed, buried, exhumed for proof and re-interred, coffin resting snugly in the adopted's mausoleum of ad nauseum ad infinitum.

Tight jeans shifted over death and hardened eyes pulled grey-check apart from such close proximity that a crack in the footpath was heard to moan under the weight of a shifted stance.

"Stand still", the beat in a heart fluttering an attack now months old and occupying precious space on an inky rag.

When the sun don't shine organ man the monkey takes back all privileges for divestment amongst the hordes feasting on peanut-shells and off-key comparisons to an icon burning a sugar mountain down around ember ears.

"Share a gusset-secret back seat acrobat".
"Mother is only jealously matching snap-shots with the misappropriated beauties at her disposal".

The steel-city Masada fell with nary a whimper and Herods called on beasts from hell to deal with an interloper causing mannequins to smile tears the crocodile would have snapped in an instant.

Between the sounds of insects and the working of my 85-cent clock the silence doesn't stand a chance.

"Dance on you flickering fool to my incendiary device".
"Burn oxygen from my patch of breath".

Sleep looms but won't take me up to it's bosom. It fears my transgression and allows snippets only to filter back to wakefulness.

"What do you sip from your bottle that makes your smile so broad and your feet so hardy as to cope with burning concrete"?
"More of the same in the cold of a dead-night will stop the chills rising from an ice-block altar".

A wallowing wildebeast checked receipts for identity and placed a month's notice on a handful of cold hard plastic bound for blood-stream satisfaction and cerebral liberation.

Count the twists in the spine as hope shrivels on a stick over fires of eviction and long-held ramifications.

In a rush to hit the wall unseen, with not one but a dozen insane palms itching the death on her back, baying at invisible moons, she had lied and cried a million miles of phone calls, all Santa unanswered with charity denied.

"No free invites from this establishment I'm afraid"
"Try across the road, they do a wonderful line of heart-felt thanks"

A used car salesman paged another beer from the fridge as a customer strolled toward rust-bucket Ford, unaware of his secretaries secret lust for desk-tops and closed venetians. From the clippings clustered on the floor she'd been able to amass enough of nothing to engorge labia and harden nipples forever, then rolled over and played dead to a necrophiliacs urge to feel maggots eat out the eye of his cock.

The living-dead roll ceaselessly through eternity and take turns at raising faint hope on faint lines, in faint out of the way sanctuaries so as not to alarm any but the understanding.

"No comprende una diablo"
"Si. Espanol"

The insect Quixote and the salted Margarita swapped spit as a testament to the birth of chaos and the unheralded return of a well-to-do future.