Bags of wool fill up Geoffrey’s music, gone to the backyard of all the devils’ farts. Still, what sweet odes. Too Baroque for the ascetic monk. Jazz balls on a Franciscan passion play – how they dance, Mother! She were a fine lady, Marie Antoinette. So says Bob, a small Persian boy dancing on a rug. 

‘What are ye doing,’ says I to Bob. 

He falls into depression, and into a small ball on the carpet where he mews softly. I looked out the window and felt the wind rising and sinking like the Bay of Biscay. All the bâteaux flying on, flying on. I knew the colours were playing within me – mostly primary. A large great yellow bruised across my soul. It played C#, tunes of delighted toes. So time passed like slow unkempt couches being scratched by bearded and demented cats. My skeleton says nothing, despite threatening it on pain of breath. Is this present or past? It wends its way merrily and harshly, or not at all. Pourtant, it goes by will, and tears of long dead fathers. Umbrellas, defend my honour against hailstorms of cheese-mad license. Yorrick, away with the strumming jelly whore. Acidic rain eats concrete like an old man’s cynicism. So instead let us drink the midday sherry. Let us liberate Oliver from Fagan’s oily sausage. And though Theodosius killed Zeus and was the last west-east emperor, still we sing proudly as we cling to the sodomised ganglion of hope. 

I stand in the living room, my ankles are sexual but of what class I know not. Time was that the weatherman with his Victorian verities ought to have known. But he was a prophet who made a loss. He blotted his ledger by hoarding the Christmas charcoal. Thunder thrust, he jabbered spittle at the shadows of myrmidons.

Hail baroque minister of the exchequer! Turn these coins to dreams and feed them to man’s soul poverty. With a flex of the arm I summon Proust and Apollinaire and then dismiss them for their utter failure. Such slender slitherings. But lady love, with her proud face, and high standing moral unicorn, commands me otherwise, ooh. Oh proud thing! I would love, my love, but the devil take it, I am going straight to the fat strumpet. Her dirty fingernails await my thronging, thrubbing, thrasonic, thickness. You are the postscript of divinity, the shoelace of idealism, the barnacle of wish. But you have no touch in the limbic, in the storm of fire and creation. What are the frontal lobes to this? They cannot stop the primitive drums raging in the crucible of the earth. Fire and brimstone forced itself into the jam pastries. 

Oh sorry dear reader, I didn’t see you there. Well you’re hardly paying attention anyway. Stop picking your nose! And sit up straight. And put some clothes on for heaven sake, this is a respectable short story. Not some cheap coffee-stained two paged hackery resting on the underpants shelf. Undressing frilly lineage leads to horrors of the deep. So don’t rail against me! What? I beg your pardon? Don’t take that tone with me, reader, or I’ll finish it right now. I don’t much care for your attitude. No, you may not laugh. Laughing is quite out of the question. Fascist, you say? Yes, that’s right. I order you to do whatever you like.

You are afraid? Of course, true free will is truly frightening. And to bring the inner out the artist needs hyper-will, that of drunk clowns fornicating with balloons on the rocks. All your quotidian parabolas prove useless. So what if there’s laundry to do and the baby needs pancakes! That’s all nonsense – electrical madness. Between the sublime and stubbed toes, are holy artichokes of god moments. Moments, nothing more. Time, like an old goat, nods with faraway eyes at all happenings. Plucking the harpsichord’s ripe fruit is only to feed plumbers. 

I have swayed the gentle, soft blue waves, where no piano tossed storm could shake my belief. What sublimity! Yet where was the gemütlichkeit when broccoli was ninety-nine centimes? Where was Weimar Classicism when Derrida put the beetroot on special? The Delphic prophets, high on vapours, intoned in D major clarity the wish-thought to liberate all manner of deep farts. But it was only so the gods could sport. We may wipe clean our conscience bowels, but there be a price to pay.

But calm, dear reader, we talk of all these high flown tea leaves as if they were the only thing. Don’t forget there’s always a wolf with its eyes on your door. It will knock, and wake Duncan et al. Suddenly at a turn, it’s devouring the wife. And you feel as if your world has been unmooned. The Dark Ape comes out because there’s such smiley-faced knavery in the world. We are to be beneficed to death by the ground nutmeg of feminist plainsong. The cult of compassion has poisoned the fig. Transitive genders transformed each other while the troglodyte barks. A flange of offence baboons patrol the borders. Masculine and feminine varlets, highly strung, are picking knits with multi-cultural chopsticks. The rectitude of all this is suspect. West wind and east wind are trying to avoid political bladders. By so doing, they saturate. The purple lipstick of hypocrisy molested the green hair of loopy and so to pillow outrage. Cultural banditry raped and pillaged the hero-myth villages, the history kings and the wisdom wombats. Social justice frogs told the fish they were their spokesmen and mouth-waggled it wax to the newspaper flies. No matter, by the click of a gangrenous mouse, they are all gone.

Between my subjunctive and indicative writing arms, a series of hazard lights have appeared. Un-grammar has vomited tomes of lexical effluvia into lazy lobes. Punctuation has shot itself – emphatically. Abbreviation is as busy as an altar boy on an island conclave of unquenchable priests. Syntax has taken to drink and is groping the lamppost. Spelling is Hercules shooting arrows at the sun. And Clarification sits like a fat Göering-esque pigeon, smiling as its guts give way. Brain says that it all measures zero on the squareness device. 

But I feed the Dark Ape within myself broken pensèes and miso soup (two on the dipole-dipole politics exchange). Now what happened was this, mediaeval reeds sounded in perfect atheism (The midgets were homosexual with six fingers). Then, they took the racist wasabi, got burnt in the social media carburettor, then were tortured in the Sanhedrin of web woe. Weeping into their burnt rice bowls and equilateral triangles made of equity bananas, they arranged themselves in a display of ethical power. But man has lost his sense of indecency. Eggshell walkers became paper houses for the rain. They waxed on about the crucified jew and his virginal mother. Look, they said, how he rejected the devil, though he had the devil in him. I asked the Pharisees for the time. They told me it was past tense, three-quarter time, monophonic on a pentatonic scale. The crucified jew must have died on an ant hill, if the ape of artificial intelligence will become the Sistine Chapel of cosmological masturbation. I feel the tabors and lutes of the Dionysian with my one-handed eyes, which is a noise to the headmistress who wove the moral web, then herself got devoured by the seven legged central-bank-woke-broke-snowflake-spider. She was armed only with a teaspoon of homespun. But music forgives the sins of the Ape. The Ape is funny. For instance, there is a little known period between late renaissance and early baroque called ‘The Saxon’s Bum,’ full of capers, knaves, pranks and farts. Innocent fun, but then prohibited. In abolition of the ‘Bum,’ knavery lacked a theme. Stored up to its negative potential it became a monster. Without the badinage of the ‘Bum,’ man defecates on man and nations. 

Man is myth. And not one about the wit of Irish cats or Teutonic Knights. Nor, of Foucault’s thin-legged-poodle-brained frenchmen. Churchill’s cigar may manifest a flutter. But global fraternity is pigeon poo. And monetarist theory, a midnight sigh. Modern mysticism is like cutting off a perfectly working leg and smiling as you throw it into a volcano, while technology’s right arm is jerking off in the silicon underpant of algorithmia. Love is solid like a custard tart. And though there’s always the gambol down the hills of Arcadia, the Ivy-clad idyll and Dionysian rustic revel. Yet our youth, twittering in the cities, merely masturbate their dreams into a bucket of deep fried. They despise the Persian boy and try and bully him out of his morphean wonder. He only has dreams now, regulation and surfaces have stolen all else. He regards the world with broken chestnut eyes. If this is the beginning, what the hell be the end? And though the platonic pederasts may rescue the boy from idealised danger, it is only so in order that they may melt in the twinkling of gratefulness. There is a beyond.

So, it’s no good consoling him. For this is, after all, your doing.

Now all’s a purple glimmer, as a poet gobbled. And in this largo twilight is the moment to rest our weary heads. Ever is there a stone in the shoe. But muddling through, muddling through. That’s why the rubbish bins are discourteous to the sergeant-major. And why moustaches are compulsory among vegan devils. Nevertheless, what is the future? you ask. Well, according to the latest bee venom, if the Persian boy can still cry for happiness and if the city dwellers can see the stars and feel the ground slip from their feet, if moonlight can penetrate the federal reserve, if vague memories of the Palaeolithic shine in bellies, if a good book slaps the constable, if there be the implicit among strangers and gestalt in the world, if we truly wonder and aren’t looking in the mirror, if the classical sphere music beats inside the politician, if trees don’t need to be square and if it is not about what you have but how you do, then mankind can awake with purpose.