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Brannigan
Plain clothes in the stairwell there to catch more than porn cinema punters or payers for pleasure Brannigan of Irish extraction moustache from Leone even plays guitars some furore bad east London psychobilly band whores are all Eastern European down in the basement they’re cutting up some informer where is Brannigan again a woman worth killing for a man with spaghetti westerns on the brain no shame in Italian taste suits and shoes from Milan don’t cross him please Brannigan is a stylish policeman in the death it’s all marching money more art meaning the way one fille de joie from Lithuania speaks course he likes her hate she had him take her pimp out even watched him do it then Laima became her own free agent in the police station some youth is giving off fearsome lip not obviously realizing who or what gives quick askance are you for real mate takes an easy jab to the fat face as an early warning don’t mess with Brannigan Jesus doesn’t listen comes at him not fast enough and across the table this youth goes 1-2-3 crash bash bosh cries call the police you’re breakin’ my neck the sun always goes down like this is the police boy thing is this boy can’t yet maybe never see that Brannigan half-disguised is his keeper stupid parents no school bad blood and crack hide fatally average age of death round here is 23 a challenge to the weak teacherly act of reading surely taking this a-b-c nevertheless kids like this must be raised by the honest people of the earth meanwhile back outside near Compton Street strippers male here purple lip-sticked fraternize the clip shop punters horny from lack of humanity spittle and innuendo I don’t like paying the punters always say over the top the stingy bastards that pink exterior pub with the open front has gangs leering for summat Brannigan lights a cigar tilts his sunglasses who’s dealing this hot mid-afternoon the Albanians surprise crack meth and assorted pills tell ‘em we’ll leave ‘em alone soon they give us the name who cut the Thai guy up with the longest stockinged legs poor gorgeous bitch died on the way to hospital wasn’t pretty baby ‘less that kinda phenomenon gets you hot which in my case surely does not I promise
Moira
‘One hell of a woman’ – Jim Thompson
Let me tell that tragi-comic tale once more the fast-talking shower of queers no words just desires and drives wasn’t Moira the queen of them gangsters worser she was they said especially in that King-sized bed of hers through the long bleak Seventies she kept a feral house of strays had no qualm with seeing a few slip away if necessary wasn’t she meant to have popped old Grisly Irish Raymond with her very own hands they say she finished him with a claw hammer bashed his ugly brains out all over the bar table the commotion spilling the gang’s collection of beer into the interstitial space of O’Hara’s exposed frontal lobes looked like a Pollock or worser a Freud Francis Bacon laughed in the Coach and Horses after in between gin Martini pints this bunch of neo-Action Painters making startling order out of supposed chaos in Soho even if to the untrained a mess nothing boring anyhows ain’t that right gangsters are sure vivid Moira loved it lapped it up the minutes and the bloody seconds of evil excitement their trembling fear her power her pleasure getting her sexy long stockinged legs over the prettier Eton Harries that chunky long leopard skin coat as a signature no years in domestic hell or the clink for her myriad extortion or murder cases taken out well before they got anywhere near somewhere like court crooked cops death’s sister suppose you could file her under sociopath going way beyond the individual with her set of intersubjective cronies a whole Middlesex mini universe of cut-throat this and that hard against the loftier values sown into the fabric of post-War life iconoclast then though not sure she or hers stand for anything or if there was an underlying project of any kind other than greed and mayhem from the very get-go probably kicked-off with that Clacton-On-Sea heist which went badly wrong and they had to finish the bravely resistant postmistress who had already seen too much now we have all seen way too much but these days there can be no going back flashing her bristols was Moira do you ever wonder she asked where the bodies go the liquid slap of the head as they died one last oh soundful so sorrowful sigh that incongruous stare without any care not even looking over her shoulder I tryin’ hard shoot elsewhere suggested the countryside anyhows I’d been thinking more about the souls after death like out somewhere in the sticks nah fool boy, she said, not there where then her bristols all pricked up now like she was gettin’ extra-excited in her deep V you were lost you could well see she had plenty of what it took really don’tknows where why does it matter nowhere maybe she laughs where’s that baby that hot red lipstick made her lips Satanic nowhere did exist I had been there years before I remembered dark place more sweaty than rock n’ roll fever music deeper and scarier she was biting the quiver on her lower lip now wanna be lovers she asked Moira I said yea sure worst decision ever woman means you no harm her other boyos had said a soft spot there not to be believed could show you the snuff video tapes if I was allowed to keep ‘em lucky to be still alive only cos I kept my mouth shut pusface plus eyes past is no window only a painting you gotta interpret or last night’s performance you gotta forget I was never very good at sleeping soundly or at understanding pure malice weak me eh so off you go East London mate out towards Plaistow so as to read the concrete prose biblical there you can read the graffiti smells like piss at least it’s real at least it is real like evil carnal learn your life lesson then move on if you possibly can then again maybe trouble never wants to move on maybe you cannot highlight the survivor bit won’t let yourself remember Gisèle that woman what happened her hate has its reasons also Laima from Lithuania not Vilnius but Kaunas the smaller second city some faces you cannot ever forget disappeared one night by Moira and by her men we all knew the worst kind of slowly delayed end that one gave me running nightmares pregnant remains on a bonfire what could we do didn’t find out until after of course ‘wise intervened
Read Larry Clark
the windmills of
Oklahoma look
in every direction. Kerouac
Some called it a devastating portrait of an American tragedy appropriately this first
photography book came bound in black we might rather refer to it as a statement of life
surprising beautiful cruel yes thanatological cos existence as Plato said of philosophy is a
preparation for death Jello Biafra called his band after all the dead ex-Irish president
Kennedys made recurring revolutionary music out of The Munsters theme tune chords here
on one Clark page there is a picture of a young man in his later teens fondling a gun with the
words death is more perfect accompanied with a caption dead 1970but if Larry Clark’s Tulsa
is a tragedy and it unequivocally is then it is also a romance after all this is the very group of
teens Clark hung with as a feral teenager in Oklahoma who let’s face it were sexy as hell wild
as the jungle free as a dream like we all want to be all the time or at least most of the time we
fall in love with them as we see them rise high and then fall low oh so low 1963 1968 1971
the latter year the year I was born nude starts with obscene sex and ends with a baby in a
coffin box maybe baby this is romance in Oklahoma and today this Saturday April morning
2020 I read that America is the new epicentre of Covid 19 it takes me back to one of the
captions that mark the Tulsa photos Accidental Gunshot Wound a bearded man who is prone
on the bed his trousers pulled down awkwardly to reveal his bloodied thigh this poor bastard
he resembles a dishevelled ugly Jesus portrait on one of the earlier shabby grey room walls he
has crucified himself and soon no doubt his time will be up famous for ten minutes then
whoosh as not every supposed messiah can just resurrect by clicking their fingers on the
sabbath maan meanwhile his pretty Spector big-haired girlfriend faces away from him
crying hysterically with her head in her hands she knows the end so do we this is us today in
2020s this raw dirty photography in all its ruthless realism is also a generalised indictment of a
system a humanity that would allow this to happen remember everytime punk you’re gonna
get the same
If Max Was King
The path on the coast which leads to the Abbaye is prohibited to cyclists interdit aux velos is the public announcement on one of those annoying stark signs loved by the French citizenry or at least most of them is it because of the danger of collision or experience of litigious conflict on the narrow ascending gravel tracks which overlook the bay of ostentatious yachts no can remember when there was last even the smallest amount of rain here the hot gravel makes a kind of light dusty smoke when the wheels of my racing green bike trailer pull along and little Max can stay put in there with his teddies his Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak which only half scares him half makes him want to be a King this is a text that is most underestimated for its political message even if I have to get down and walk the sharp stones make me daydream of puncture proof tyres as I’ve had so many punctures recently it may be a tarot sign for a broken heart or maybe the opposite as if I’m some kind of invincible lover from out on the water here or there a mussel or shellfish catcher with their buckets and wellington boots mostly middle-aged masculine Ile de Ré voices some with upper arm marine tattoos or their first girlfriend’s names Melodie Anne-Laure Fannie some scratched out try to keep relatively open minds or wider erotic antimonagamous relationship options still open to address the obstinately closed world of their prey the track is steep one wonders at other nonobvious reasons for the prohibition of bikes spiritual ones whatever that might mean these days now that god is dead so they say although let’s be honest who knows when it comes to measuring the supernatural realities my daughter finds and photographs two ladybirds mating although they were trying their upmost to keep it a private affair and titles it the most beautiful event in nature knowing full well she is foregrounding a sexual encounter smiling to herself inwardly at the Abbaye the temperature goes past twenty degrees and it is still only mid-May the ruin is twelfth-century Cistercian who still followed the rule of Benedict and the geckos green and grey and longish lithe bodies which rule its stony back walls are prehistory my oldest son finds a baby starling fallen from its high nest and cowering in a corner he gently rubs its furry black-grey shiny plumage and it regains some courage to seek flight again but the odds are now stacked against it Dad that self-same oldest son reports honestly and with a tone of real sadness as he can get quite sentimental like that and sentiment isn't to be discouraged in boys especially right now still if Max my youngest son still in the buggy reading intently was King I can tell you all for nothing those Wild Things well they’d have to get in line once and for all and he would never abide the continuing
hegemony of patriarchy as above all he adores his one and only