An open letter to Sadiq Khan.

Sadiq,

There is a Dick Whittington fairy-tale element to your election today.

After years of 'Money conquers all' elitism in London we finally have a mayor who has the ability to work for and with the people who count - not the people who count their money. Please please stay true, fight the demons who will tempt you down a corrupt path.

The streets of London are not paved in gold but in concrete and york-stone and sweat. They are trodden by ordinary people making this city work for each other for ordinary wages. It is the ordinary people who take pride in London, it is their only home, unlike the wealthy who lost sight of the value of home when they chose money as their god.

It is a community.

The wealthy look down from their (gated) citadels in scorn.

We could do with a champion.

Go on........

Pro-Zac is not the answer to London's depression.

I'm apparently reliably informed by Zac Goldsmith that Sadiq Khan is a terrorist sympathiser. Thank Allah for that. we can now rest easy in the knowledge that we will not be targeted by terrorists other than tory terrorists.

It is also good to know that I will no longer be bombarded by pro-Zac supporters telling me what a splendid chap he is.

Zac can go back to his day job as multi-millionaire elitist now.

Even Cameron is celebrating Goldsmiths loss in this election... Goldsmith is apparently too rich to toe the party line and probably thinks Cameron infra-dig.

Memory. I Remember very little of this.

Memory

I wrote this 40 years ago. It hasn't improved in time.

Memory will go.  That is what life is about, the future relies on the past and the past relies on memory and as memory diminishes so the future becomes less…less what, I’ve forgotten.

How I got to Judy’s house I cannot remember. I was 18 and fucked on amphetamines dope and alcohol and looking for a bed. I turned up with a bottle of scotch and a hold all.
She had a terraced house, a husband in prison, a young daughter and a drawer full of drugs. Oh! Yeah she had rats in an aquarium. We drank the whiskey, tried many sorts of her dope and some of her liquid LSD and laughed a lot and laughed a lot more and then she showed me the stairs to my room before showing me her bed: she said you can go up there or stay down here…I was 18, fucked on amphetamines, dope, alcohol, LSD, the pheromones of a middle aged woman and the scent of fear from caged rats. I chose her bed. Less steps to climb. We eventually sublet my room.

We sublet my room to a fat single mother whose baby I often mistook for a pig whilst melting into the soft furnishings on paranoid trips.

For a lot of that time I did not know whether I was toothpaste or cornice moldings or both.

Judy had admirers who would come round and cook her crap meals without knowing that we were shagging in the downstairs loo and laughing and then laughing about that. 35 years later I can I don’t blame her.

She had a Mini clubman, green, British racing green. Fuck... I had to go. The husband was coming out of prison. I could not (would not) fight. We went for a picnic on cleeve hill as some sort of goodbye thing. The child Rosie was with us as we lay under the elephant trees and talked of what might be or might have been. The beech trees were monstrous with bark like grannies elbows and she told me she loved me through a gap in her teeth. I was closer to her daughter’s age than hers.

I went into the woods for a piss, as I stood micturating against a tree I sensed something and ducked; a sock full of nuts bolts nails and screws clouted into the tree just where my head should have been. I managed to wrestle the weapon from Judy’s grasp and force her to the ground. Needless to say she was loud.

Subdued she seemed pleased to miss. I asked her what she had intended and she told me that she wanted to kill me and then write obscenities over my body… She opened her bag, it was full of lipsticks… I cannot remember how this ended. It is true but I cannot remember… I’m alive so she didn’t kill me.

She said she didn’t want me to leave her.

Her husband had been imprisoned for stealing among other things underwear from washing lines. When he was arrested he was wearing it. He had curly blonde hair and a heroin habit. It was 1973 and David Bowie said everything was possible. But I didn’t think a ménage a trios with a middle aged mum and a cross dressing junkie was anything like probable let alone possible.

I may be wrong.

Rusty McGlint on American politics..

Rusty writes from Lizard Bend. Idaho:

Tristan, scuse the french but it is fucking hard being a parent.

Me and Babs have bought this Lesbian Gay Transgender thing hook line and sinker but when it comes to getting little Duke into a dress he says he ain't no girl no matter what we says and when we says that he ain't got no say in the matter he points his AK at us and tells us to turn off that goddamned K.D.Lang rekkid and look at his dick.

His brother Duane is sick of the fighting cos he reckons it messes up his concentration on his embroidery he is doing for his latest frock and can we turn K.D.Lang up and why ain't he got no front bottom.

Babs reckons we should bully Duke into being hetero and Duane into being gay but I say that ain't how the liberals want it. The liberals want us to do contrary to what we want to do and if we do that it makes us liberal.

Babs says that that nice Mr Trump don't want us to do nothing but stay in the trailer and teach the twins to shoot Mexicans.

I said. Babs you is a Mexican.

She said. So shoot me.

How we laughed at that Tristan.

Ginsberg's cougher

I am one of Ginsberg's coughers
I sing in my dreams, sleeping
alongside the woman, who,
dreaming of the truth,
never remembers on waking.

Facebook.

The village pump long run dry
village stocks
ducking stool
plastic sword of damocles
imaginary friends

Imaginary enemies

Insincere like box
soap box
joke box
juke box
poke box

Dunbar's number run amok
ego massage
ship of fools
virtual Achilles heel
bridgeless trolls

Fairground hall of mirrors
tunnel of imagined love
misdirected darts
in a goldfishes back
bearded lady bearded

Non stick glue
abrasive grease
kittens
photoshop photorealism
paedophile paradise

Tomorrows lunch
yesterdays dinner
Fifi's cat
ugly babies ugly babies
ugly babies
pictures in the attic of ugly babies

Sober barflies, drunk vicars, honest liars and lying politicians.

Oh. and me me me me me me.

I will come to call you friend.

Unwelcome guest
pleura squatting
rattling marbles

marbles filched from the attic

Chestcat
of second infancy
breathe deep

I will come to call you friend.