part 7

[SEVEN? Ah, Seven! Seven And Seven Is... Up... The Seven Rays... The Magnificent Same... 7x7 by Hawkwind... Return of the Magnificent Aforementioned... Samurai (7-off)... Brides For Brothers Ditto... Goombay Tears... Deadly Sins and Brian's Finns... Year Itch, Angry Men, Beauties, Chances, Cities Of Gold, Days In May, Days Leave, Days To Noon, Different Ways, Faces of Dr Lao, Footsteps To Satan, Steps To Heaven, Golden Men, Hills Of Rome, Keys To Baldpate, Miles From Alkatraz, Sweethearts, Thieves and Thunders... Larry The Haddock's in this bit!]

HUBBA HUBBA, IS THAT A BIRTHDAY CARD?

Picture the scene, as the Glaswegian cosmonaut announces our chum's impending birthday, with the following prepared statement, to a group of blooting green reptiloids

This birthday note
From both of us
Brings wishes for all year...
May each day bring you
Happiness
Good health
And cheer!
This birthday note
Is being wrote
On a Tuesday afternoon...
And because of the sun,
The trees,
The ceiling,
Ye canny see the moon!
As Teddy just said
It could go to your head
Being twenty and out of your teens...
No more being called 'Kid'
No more being spat on by drunken labourers
No more being force-fed with greens!
This is your special day
So enjoy yourself
Don't sit in the fridge and complain...
May each day bring you
Happiness
Good health
And a crane!
Planets may explode and galaxies crumble,
Western civilisation may be swept away,
But once a year, the remains of a once-great empire
Will gather in an arena
And eat strontium cake on your birthday!
Worlds collide and are sucked into the void,
There is no escape from the jaws of a black hole,
Flames engulf the arctic wastes
And on your birthday, we all eat swiss roll!
Arthur the jolly postman, with typhoid and a limp,
Crawls out of retirement and puts on his best hat,
A cowboy with a sack of drawing-pins laughs heartily,
Happiness
Good cheer
And a bat!

Beyond the sea of blue mercury, there lives a rainbow.
Lions weep crocodile tears on the mossy bank,
The lane was flooded to a depth of nine inches.
On your birthday, you receive a plastic tank!
A cosmic force has arranged things so that, just once a year, you come into conjunction with your own birthday. Birthday greetings across the miles from all at Mason's Caff. And if you're ever round our way, try our essence of giraffe.

Held in memory's fond embrace
Are wettest thoughts of you today
And may life's sunshine burn your face
With rays of madness on your way!
A little birdy just flew in
And opened up his beak.
Squawk! he said, in chirpy tones,
Because he couldn't speak!
Your birthday is a time of glee,
A time to get bombed-out on heroin,
A time for jelly and tea.
The baby lambs are romping,
Because today's the day
When you will have a party
Which might end in an affray!

The sky opened and a light-orange cloud descended, Inky-Binky-Bonk the sailor, so everyone stopped work and celebrated your birthday. Happy shining mats and tepid Ryvita springs, beyond the true meaning of I NEED ANOTHER ALL-BRAN, fantasy beneath the stern face of the Jungfrau, from The Station Masters, Saucy Beavers Ltd., Harpendon Argyl. The true price of happiness is fifty-eight pence, plus two-point-five pence import tax, plus luxury goods VAT, plus five pence for some lard for the sandwiches, plus eight pence for St.Ival's flag day, plus one-pound-sixty-four harbour fees, plus fifty pounds bail, plus ten pee for a Bar Six.

Please don't use my staff
Everytime you have a bath.
Your toe-nails always scratch it
When you use it as a ratchet.
Can't you buy a chrome one,
Yes! Your very own one!
No, please don't insult me
'Cause I've got to go to the lav'try.
Oh, can't you stop your laughin'
Or I'll have to call you Marvin!
(Truly thou hast achieved the most high realms of Pathetic!... Ed.)

THERE WAS THIS BLOKE IN A PUB AND HE WENT UP TO THE BAR AND SAID...

Sign on the stones, the Windolene brooks no delay in tolerating feugal grabbimule to bits. Afore I don't maroon the Cocoanutleys, tile in asphyretic hulme. Light up a lurid lemur, passing underneath the skile. Break down yon barriers of monologues, as the ripe Ping trousers exude the colourful green. The lyre is illness by the killergram... "Don't lock Attilla over noble!"... Invest his paperchains and draughty decorations in the Seine. Don't shuck the peas! Don't truck the vane!

"Set back the martin, Pete!" said Jim, "I suppose you think you're ordinary! Let me say now that you're not! If you can't tilt Monmouthshire in coffee, then you're hardly worse than nought!"

Nought-Nought Nawit, relish the glow of a decent trellis in winter. Spinning quid-goats go gambling between a wire of Nought-Nought, I lay the batsmen gently end-to-end, it sways not brightly in the wind. Endlessly until half-past-three, I play Ovover Andover be like doughnewt. Eating invisible droplets of purple "Sayit", until the bus stops at the busstop of my heart, ROPE GOVERNOR!

Balite no robo-comforter, distress four mutely nitrate floats, at five-mile intervals, while battered cavies scrape their paint with eyes. Did they really need scones at the Battle of Mesa Creek? Thrall each globe as it counts the twice-round circlet... And tall marshmallow mountains slowly flow down into your stomach, discriminating heron knuckles in a coin of gloated Byrons all the way!

"Take the front end, Todd, we'll cart this word away! All feelings of remorse will be used as "grease-proof", Gillian's bringing the food!" (Phenomenon-a-fom-a-nonny-gon do lon Newhugh so hinder note frolane) I don't forget the simple pleasures I once felt in burning newts! Used frewts don't forget the burning pleasure, gained with another smother. You don't stand a chance within the walls of Space City.

The Silver Jubilee Exhibition, In Relation To The Third Janice Nichols Poem.

I sit, dear real live Queen,
Thinking
About Janice Nichols
In a bath
Of roses
And every British creature in the world
Raises its arms
Or paws
Or tentacles
Or branches
Or beak
In adoration.
Oh! twin deities,
Janice and Queen,
I will grow a unique lettuce
And call it by your names.
I will develop
An area of foreign land
That shall be
Forever Albion.
I will paint
Corgis on my wristwatch,
Such is the loyal keenness
Of your subjects!

The titter tilts like mind-spannering sideguiles, belatedly to more Rose E Lee. Di Symbolism is a friend to Sandra, mandrax root de flute, all out by Xmas-tyme. Jason & The Shrielles clouded the eardrums of the great, a ball of heavy four-four Shah-Hugnut. To Welwyn Dowd, the capital of callous column comments in a dose of weeks... and Marilyn the Yellow-belly Queen!

A river of craven curry sidles through the side of his mouth, before the spotlight stars him into Flayne at least. Your brain will fall out of our nose, Mrs Hellier, use this old Tharnet now, for effect, in the rolling of short lines. Trini Dopez can average two hundred and fifty F11 Starfighters, McKillroys in your tea... if you don't change your shirt, I'll have to faint and fall with grey abandon into cold disrepair! Straight shirt, kniveshurt, corrugated bought people... Corrugated bought people start right with FAUVEX Thigh Stripper!

Combustible your bones are not, the hydrophones can hear about the concrete water. Telling tranquiliser jokes in tactful tones, to terrorise the Mary Pop-Ins-Loat. Everyone has a dream, we all need an escape from reality... JEAN IS LIKE US! JEAN IS A REAL PERSON! JEAN LIKES SQUASHED SPIDERS AND DAVIS CARDS!

Your bitter butterflood plays plagiarists, in a cute cuticle of half his age... or less... The excess mutes emote the boats, to toast a quiet day on the river, spent sinking... sinking down into a wet sea of liquid and pulsating legumes, but the snorkel, forever dangling from the white pigs mouth, impaled the impaler. What is The King? The King is Elvis in a textbook on Butane Micraptils, overgrown. And Elvis sings his feart out, for the toad-map Oleo-do-neo pleoplastic drastic toll of truth. The bear who won't heave coal in the hole-down coda, is an elbow in the Espagnol... (Note: since the above was writing, the below is the crux of backstanding)... Jailer, bring me water and pen and paper, my foot is kinda dry... D'you wanna, Cheri, trifle with me? I can do it, if you pay the milkman.

All your goods and earthy wealth foods and your third-class passage to Estonia, is like cornflakes in the wind. Q.Cumber, like the rest of us, is shouting potato cruets. Speak, when the light of the moon polishes your rusting, chromed Swooper badge.

You make me, Phil Eel! Enigma, enigma, stick it up your stigma!... and bonsai your leprous Hoppity. With a white night on a larger charger, take the anarch', Beryl Ives, to the cauliclarch'. You can Prestatyn and drive, I'll take care of any loose aliens, you can ride the straws to the end of a black anti-rainbow. Can't change challenges less than laser lozenges, lazing longer in their loathsome lethargy. But all my friends remain in my museum, some are dead and some are just buried in the air.

Hey Carol! Is that Johnny's leggins you're wearing?... Did man create small clockwork walking ketchup bottles, without reason?... No! Run, before your wife shuts herself caving! Illuminate your hatch with big arrete, The Gaul Wasis! Phonetic is beautiful, we should all smash and obliterate and beat up, with pliant metal wrenches, our violent instincts. Awake, Walter! Go feed the Bay of Pigs! Refuse the spatback, Silica Jill, of a courting metal pole.

A SKETCH OF THE DRAINAGE SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE

Dear etc... Cocoa for the Free World! Cocoa for the Free World! Sigmund Freud didn't change history, Sigmund Freud just talked it out of a few things. Ectoplasm drift towards the the mirror-like reflexion on the meniscus of mercury Irish coffee. Used torpedoes! Used torpedoes!

As IT gets dark, there is an eternity drift and, for a few hours, nothing happens anywhere and the passing of thought makes the ticking of a clock seem sinuous and snake-like, like a snake. I wanna be symbolised. Two-tone peaches splutter in menstrual canals, Beano Devo. Perished glass lunky-rafts drooble and spidge in the abbly controse, squoff-botters higgetted with plate and glober. Scorchamatic emblo-womblers cratchitt and scratch-penny, like as if the labels were pound notes and the humour of the situation made extreme demands on Mee!

I was only standing in the precinct!
It wasn't my nuclear weapon!
I only had three quid on me,
Not even enough for some fags,
How was I meant to react?

You of all things, me of somethings, him of this and that, but everybody stole an extra turn on the roundabout of food. So you see, sound sensations, buying a record is a sound investment. (Ha ha! sound of guillotine in operation) Umba Wallah, Farquar Fataqua, factar factar fringe issom telefactar, sculpar sculpar micro-tenderiffica scholar tendron, scholar tendron... Excuse me, how much is a bottle of Life? Is Life a product? You've heard of Life on earth, but can you have Life on ice? Life with a twist of lemmon and a bermot chaser? Can you, indeed, get Life on the National Health? Should there be an annual Day of Life?

Like Gollum, we skulk in misty basement harbours, opening tins washed up all around us in the night. So you see the tangents of trifle? CDIA Gram... Look at me! Not a seam on my entire body! Nyerk splilled crabjacket tommy-apple, scratch-jacket of the green persuasion, old people with blood like string and skin like perished balloons and only the brain kept fresh.

Splash Tantrum is a name from some next-dimensional Hollywood, where words have lost their meaning and are kept as pets. Semaphore as it was after (ten points if you get that one). Everyone knows it was Marian Richardson who invented writing, just as Mary Baker invented the Drop Scone, an earlier version of Barnes-Wallis' famous Bouncing Bomb, dropped by malarial Mosquito bombers. I thought everybody knew that, but I know better now (but they don't).

How exceptionally bleeding lucky to be "Born To Be Alive", unlike those of us to be drip-fed starter motors, right from the word GOGOR! Please stuff this letter up your _N_S with a lighted match, on your birthday, to get the full effect of PAIN. Why not go for a holiday this year on The Spanish Inquisition? Goddamit, I can't think of any thing to say about squirrels, except, of course, the obvious stuff about them being brown and furry and living in squirrel-holes. Well squeeze me like a sense-organ! I once sniffed cocaine, but it was like committing Sinuscide (oh we do like to be beside the sinus!) SINUSES OF THE WORLD, AMELIORATE! Squash me with kitten bustin's, remainder me, remainder me! You remainder me of my mother when I was her age... are these poems inherently better or worse than Shakespeare's sonnets? If so, it's not hard to guess which...

SQUIT
ZELT
BIT
PONGO
SCROOD
MIFF
TROP
HELMO
SKREEDIL
FATMAT
BLAT
MAHARGO, crag mat valve, a dime-a-diagnostic, a screwed-in scrutiniser and a pectin peccadillo (an armadillo with a beak). Simper whining trailer, squashed butt mahasma Elorko-Thorko, rheumo-has-mantic, boon rog toyne hailer. Farmer Viol's victorious Spitfires did a vitriol (twenty pointer!) Time passes... passes what? Whatever time eats and drinks, I suppose!

Why does "Contentment" sound like a trade name for a type of bra? Glastonbury is, as you can imagine, a town in Somerset... Happy Scuba-day, Don't Go Near The Water, Yours Interminastically, The Usual. Your mind is like a window, James. Keep it clean and you will see for miles. Draw back the curtains of disbelief and avoid Sellotape. When Captain Lomas left our house for China, he left a book, to be opened the day before July. It was duly opened and, in sombre tones, Raymond read the biography of Sooty. Had the Captain a premonition of the revolution? Perhaps not...

LARRY THE HADDOCK

Larry Larry, Larry La-ree!
Smoking Park Drive down by the sea
Not knowing he was shortly to be... A HADDOCK!

Larry sat smoking a Park Drive, watching the sea... Larry had a deformed nose. At weekends, he would crawl on the beach and talk to the pebbles. Larry only had a deformed nose at weekends.

Larry often wondered why a fish with large breasts waggled a sea-cucumber at him. Dolphins would call Larry names (NAMES! NAMES!) Children would bury Larry in sand and stick a flag on his nose... Dogs would dig him up, gnaw at him and then bury him again. By the light of the moon, Larry would dig himself out and smoke a Park Drive. Larry would fall asleep and wake up with the tide. Hermit crabs would try to scrape out his head. Larry had a theory that hermit crabs were once part of the human brain. Larry could smoke Park Drives underwater. HE WASN'T SO STUPID!

Larry's grandmother made him wear Brylcreem. But he would secretly use paint-stripper, because he thought he was the re-incarnation of Sir Francis Drake. ANYWAY... Larry sat, watching the sea. (hali)But... something was happening to Larry's face... slowly but surely, Larry's nose was turning into a halibut, no sorry, a HADDOCK! GORDON H. BENNETT!

Little children pointed at Larry and said, "Merde Alors! Il fait beau grand respirateur, il deviens'addock, maman!"

Although she wore a box on her head, Larry knew that the woman standing before him was Queen Victoria, holding a mallet. "Your Highness, welcome to Pegwell Bay!" Queen Victoria asked Larry for a cigarette.

"Please," said Larry, "Take two, Your Majesty!" BUT THE HADDOCK GREW LARGER AND LARGER! Larry was turning into a haddock!

Larry sat bewildered on the beach, puffing on a Park Drive. "I didn't know that Queen Victoria smoked." HIS MOTHER WOULD GO SPARE IF SHE KNEW HER LITTLE LAD, LARRY, WAS TURNING INTO A HADDOCK!

Larry flapped about on the beach and watched the sea.

"I've run out of fags!" he whimpered. "I have become my nose which, in turn, has become a haddock," he mused. "Is the nose master to the haddock or the haddock master to the man?" he ruminated. "I am in a Catch 22 situation - I am a fish with no cigarettes."

Larry had been a fish for thirty-five minutes. He was enjoying the experience immensely (apart from running out of cigarettes). Larry had a go at swimming. HE SWAM TO EASTBOURNE.

Larry met a very attractive haddock called Clorrinda Smyth-Hollis (or Marie for short). YAHOO! They went dancing. They went ice skating. They bought candy floss. They wore funny hats and rolled up their scales and paddled on the promenade. They went humaning on the pier. They went to the pictures. The first film was about a killer-man, called "False Teeth!" (Just when you thought it was safe to get out of the aquarium!) There was also a romantic film about chainsaws. Larry and Clorrinda (or Marie for short) were becoming very good friends, until he told her the awful truth.

"Clorrinda (or Marie for short), I think I should tell you, I'm not really a haddock!"

LARRY SWAM BACK TO PEGWELL BAY, HEARTBROKEN. "Glum, no fags and shunned by the first fish I ever loved..." Larry sat in the sea and watched the beach. A sand eel popped up its head and said "HELLO!" Larry recognised the voice instantly... IT WAS HIS MOTHER!

But that was his last thought, because he was savagedly devoured by a large, greasy HERRING GULL... ALSO CALLED LARRY!

Thirty seconds to fade... So kid, it's fear and loathing from the Recess Monkeys on top of the sideboard, you know who they are... "signed, THE CLAW, Public Relations Officer." Another week, another half-assed acknowledgement... YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE