Category: Fiction (page 5 of 50)

Of course, there’s no point writing oneself into a corner or being labelled a one trick poet. So I’ve started writing fiction. Actually, I’ve always written prose. Poetry is for – oops.

23 June 2009 / 0 Comments

the night i met beck

at home nightclub they searched my cigarettes for drugs lucky they didn’t check my brain coz i was high on life man on the inside we climbed these stairs to the chill-out lounge & i was sitting with my sister at this coke-stained table when what do you know but along comes beck looking sheepish in a wolf-whistling kind of way do yah mind if ah join ye he says in this british accent you’re beck i said no ah’m not ah’m from leeds says beck ah that explains it i say humouring him you’re undercover tonight yeah i get it no worries man no need to explain your secret’s safe with us no really ah am from leeds beck says okay then i say have you heard of the wedding present? they’re a great band from leeds nowt sure he says maybe a little before your time eh beck? now listen beck says you guys are really great & excellent to talk to but nought’s enough ah’m going back to join mah mates also from leeds eh beck i taunted him that’s obvious see you later then i had to laugh he must have been on the disco biscuits coz he was back in a flash hi beck i said fancy a red bull thanks eh you guys are really great beck says hey no problems i say i really love your early work that version of rock me amadeus couldn’t have come from leeds you know mtv made me want to smoke crack too beck until i saw you tonight & realised that due to this establishment’s strict drugs policy you’ve probably taken yours already okay beck says finally you’re right i am beck & this has all been an elaborate joke for the benefit of my friends no don’t look they still think it’s a joke you know i said you almost convinced me with that leeds accent but now you’ve admitted who you really are i thank you for your honesty to tell you the truth he says i’m so smashed i thought you were sting so i belted him one no ah’m not ah’m from leeds i said & mah name’s david oh right sure sting says beck & ah’m the fooking police!

(first published in Going Down Swinging 2001)

14 June 2009 / 4 Comments

Unrequited Love Letter

Dear You,

I’ve been meaning to write for ages. So many times I started off, barely reaching the end of my ‘salutation’ before giving up: “Dear Yo-” and so on. I wore the delete key thin with my maniacal backspacing, back-treading; I resorted to a global ‘find-and-replace’ to get rid of the last traces of you but still no luck.

I forwarded all of my emails to a really obscure (though free) Russian account I had set up, I think it was:

ibelongtoyou@yourenotevenawareofthefact.ru

I even set myself a really difficult password prompt – what is your favourite number? I looked away while I banged the numbers in, just to be sure I’d never, ever remember it. Then I logged out, cleared my cache, underwent hypnotism and hung upside down for a few days, just to be sure no trace of a clue remained as to how to access the account, or you.

Not that you cared. If you ever even thought of me, I’m sure the only thing you would have thought was: why go to such ridiculous extremes when the contents of the emails themselves are burned on the back of your earlobes anyway, causing them to redden every time you think of me, which isn’t often – but often enough to fuck me up for good?

But all of this is probably yawn-inducing for you. Fair enough. It’s the story of my life, after all – not yours. From the moment we met I knew you would never feel about me the way I wanted you to. You would never reply to my emails, my texts and poems filled with cryptic messages for you to decipher.

I started attending spoken word events miles from my home just to have an opportunity to read those awful poems to an uncomprehending audience, and also I guess in the vain hope that you too had developed a taste for poetry performed in semi-rural venues.

That bit was wrong, at least, though I did get a good response from one of the venue’s owners, who immediately offered me a job on the late shift. I need someone like you to help me close up, he said. All you have to do is read out some of your poems at about 1am. Once the place is empty, you can help me clean up. Let’s face it, at $10 an hour, I was never going to get a better offer. Not from you, anyway.

You said you didn’t understand poetry. I’ve heard that cop-out so many times before. What’s not to understand? I love you, like I said in each and every one of those poems, and devastating as it was to see their effect on the late-night clientele of the sad-sack mountain tavern, that was nothing when compared with your brutal lack of recognition.

It was like I wasn’t even there screaming the words at you, like the poem itself was just hanging in the air, or else piped from a set of invisible speakers just above street level, that day you ran for the tram rather than stand and talk with me.

Do I have AIDS? What would you care! You and your homophobic friends, who needs you anyway! Because you know what? In my mind I do things to you that you might think were illegal, and you’d probably be right, if we were living in Saudi Arabia.

The things I do to you in my mind make those poems I screamed at you like I was throwing daggers at the back of your head sound like a fumbling teen romance. And the funny thing is that in my mind you’re begging for it. You can’t get enough of me. You’re the innocent one, shocked by my advances, devastated by my eventual rejection.

In desperation, you enrol in a CAE creative writing workshop, just to find the right words to throw back at me. But of course, in this scenario, I’ve stacked the class with bitter bush poets, and they tear your pathetic verses to pieces.

You respond by storming out of the class, hoping to catch the last train to a semi-rural tavern where you know of a small performance poetry reading, the open section of which you might just be lucky enough to catch.

I remain, of course, two thousand steps ahead of you, having contrived to cause the metropolitan transit authority’s service level to deteriorate so badly that no trains are running at all, anywhere. It’s all right, though. Just as you despair of ever getting home, I come along in my dream car and offer you a lift. You’re so happy to see me that you accept my proposition immediately.

Now that I have you where I want you, it almost seems unnecessary to write this letter after all. I mean, where once you dismissed me as a clinging and pathological no-hoper, now you’re all ears. You’re offering constructive and thoughtful feedback, and shyly showing me your delicate (though childish) haiku. It’s cute, it’s endearing.

You’re devouring the canon, immersed in erotic poetry. I’m spoon-feeding you Sappho, you’re swallowing the Aeniad whole. We come up for air once every week or so to attend a poetry reading, randomly selected from the thousands of events that seem to have been organised just so we could ignore them.

Just so we could say that we were attending and then cancel at the last minute, without telling anybody.

Does this sound familiar? In a sense it is. It’s the sound of what you could have had. It’s the sound of your right hand snapping off as a result of excessive self-stimulation. It’s the sound of a keyboard tapping away in an empty internet cafe. It’s the sound of all the poems you never wrote, the words you never emoted.

It’s the sound of an unrequited love letter being delivered to a house you left long ago, without so much as a forwarding address. Now I’m slipping through the mail slot to land on the floor of a hallway littered with newspapers and pizza delivery menus. It’s kind of peaceful. I think I might just stay here for a while.

Or maybe just forever.

Yours, etc.

11 May 2009 / 4 Comments

Clint Bo Dean: “Live in the Bahamas”

This Tribesco-only import (whose brief half-life might be summed up by the word ‘whatevs’) sounds a little bit like Davey Dreamnation’s Live At Budokan, only worse.

While words alone cannot convey the Clint Bo Dean Experience, a brief history is necessary. Born on the back of a postage stamp somewhere south of vaudeville, Bo Dean was an enigmatic noodle who rose steadily through the Glad Rap and Hand Core scenes, building a reputation as an eccentric and wayward xylophonist.

Two summers spent entertaining guests on P&O cruise ships in the early 1980s had no discernible effect on Bo Dean’s playing abilities, and it was at this time that he began to move away from his xylophone roots, experimenting with (and soon mastering) both the bush bass and the lagaphone.

His subsequent dismissal from his cruise ship contract left Bo Dean a ruined man, both creatively and spiritually. He began to experiment with cough mixture and developed an all-too-familiar fondness for nenish tarts.

None of this goes any way towards explaining the genesis of Bo Dean’s first breakthrough single, the unspeakably bad Private Poet, which was apparently penned during this creative nadir on the back of a clinker, and which will go down in history as ‘deleted’.

Clint Bo Dean’s debut album, Never Go Ashtray, suffered a similar fate, only in reverse. It was deleted and then released in 2010 before being deleted a second time, just to be sure.

That album’s track listing alone broke several Tribesco council ordnances, including an obscure 1823 zoning by-law banning the recording of chipmunk, cricket and grasshopper noises in situ. After being hauled before a magistrate on trumped up charges of lese majeste, Bo Dean was sentenced to a period in which he must remain incognito, ergo sum and obiter dicta notwithstanding (Cf.).

Clint Bo Dean spent the next fifteen years in cotton wool, shielding himself (and his two fans) from the humiliating spectacle of public irrelevancy. That Bo Dean maintained his silence in private speaks volumes about the truth of rumours that he had a straightforward case of Laryngitis. Which brings us to 2025.

Live in the Bahamas is a strange kind of ‘live’ album, resembling more closely the soundtrack to a live instrumental album composed not so much of songs but rather chipmunk squeaks and pule-laden sound effect collages, separated by bizarre soundless interludes and random mobile phone keypad noises.

Actually, there’s no way of knowing whether Bo Dean even appears on this album at all, or whether he has instead ‘phoned in’ his contribution from Uranus. The truth does not really matter in this case, however, as Live in the Bahamas did not even reach the pre-release stage.

It was in fact pre-deleted the moment Bo Dean (or whoevs) pressed ‘play’, on that otherwise ordinary day in 2025. Thankfully, we won’t have to wince at the memory of hearing it ever again.

14 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Stung: “Desert Boot Nose”

stung

DNRC096 | 3xLP | 2024 | DELETED

Electrical pulse sensation Stung learnt a lot in his days touring the German and Austrian satellite circuits supporting luminaries like Mead and Kentucky Barbie. Those days had been a kind of ‘apprenticeship’ for him, be it one which only confirmed his rising status in troubadour circles. But he never knew what hit him the day he got hit in the face with a copy of his second album, the essentially timeless masterpiece Desert Boot Nose.

The Kiwi Sting impersonator known to the world as Stung had released what was supposed to be his masterpiece album—I speak naturally of his debut, the recklessly hideous Dream of the Blue Pipe Cleaners—in 2003, back in the very early days of DNRC Records, when an ‘anything goes’ spirit prevailed.

The fallout from that album’s release, and DNRC Records’ subsequent deletion of it, was an emotional and creative nadir for the troubled pop antecedent from Dunedin. Rumours inevitably began flying around about the validity of rumours that he was not actually a Sting impersonator – that he was, in fact, a freelance composer who had written some of the world’s most intriguing and complex car commercial theme songs.

The fact that Stung had attempted to fake his own death on a commercial airliner in protest at this slur on his name, employing an elaborate hoax involving his seeing eye llama and a Vicks inhaler, did not really help matters. That he then entered a period of self-imposed exile, re-learning the arts of various woodwind instruments, only made things even worse. Hideously worse.

It wasn’t until more than twenty years later, in 2024, that Stung finally overcame his creastive differences and returned to Tribesco Studios to record his second DNRC Records LP. A year later he would reprise his on-again, off-again affair with Davey Dreamnation, acting as vocal coach and second flautist on the faux-valedictory E.P., The Sounds of Silence. Though no DNRC Records release of this EP yet exists, we can easily guess at its contents from the evidence offered on the ridiculously grandiose and totally unnecessarily long Desert Boot Nose.

The news, though there is lots of it, is not good. Desert Boot Nose is, essentially, a fitness workout concept album. As unfortunate as it is to relate, opening track ‘Chucky’ begins with the sound of boiling water, and hissing steam. After about two minutes of this toejam Stung’s melodious voice comes over the PA, with some kind of announcement.

Perhaps it’s just as well that you will never get to hear the announcement itself, for when the synthesized saxophone (played, it is alleged, by Eyna, who had opened for him on tour in Bavaria) kicks in, and the beats start up like Robots On Chipmunk, you will be beyond language.

You will also find yourself inside a car commercial dressed up as a fitness workout concept album, as title track and lead single ‘Desert Boot Nose’ coaxes you out of your cynical reverie and convinces you, instead, to purchase the latest model Daviumobile. It’s marvellously effective but from here on in, the ride is all downhill.

The addition of snippets from ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ on the otherwise radio-friendly ‘C3PO Dance’, though seemingly a good idea at the time, should have stayed just that. Apart from the obligatory but kind of cute exercise instructions and eighteen compulsory advertorial interludes that allow the listener to be carried away on bed of flautist wonder, it’s all desert boot, but no nose.

In fact, by the time your turgid listening ordeal is over, you’ll be wishing you’d never heard of Stung, or his desert boots, let alone the absent nose. It’s a gut-wrenching experience to fall, finally, into a small coma of relief at the conclusion of the final ‘routine’, a rhyme jam filled with so many IT in-jokes it makes R2D2 look like a sock-puppet.

And there, one would think, the story should end. Alas, this is not quite true; for there is a happy ending to come, and it comes in a shape familiar to us all. According to several sources, late one Friday night, after an emotional and intense eight day recording session in the Camp Davey studios, Stung’s triple album was finally ‘in the can’, as studio technicians used to say in the music industry.

A riotous party ensued. Assembled at this party were no less than thirty DNRC Records artists, including Mead, Eyna, Davey Dreamnation and Scaramouche the Llama, Stung himself of course, along with some of the older, lesser luminaries of the Tribesco scene, including assorted members of Cried, The Sea Pigeons, Footpath, Cliches, Hoodie Over Heels, Captain Sans Tenielle and (unbelievably) the Guide Ponies.

When Stung and his band of assorted hangers-on finally left the studio at around 2am on Sunday morning, they left Dreamnation and Scaramouche there, and retired to the Camp Davey Compound, where celebrations continued for several more days. It wasn’t until the following Sunday that anybody realised someone had simply deleted any record of Desert Boot Nose from DNRC Records.

And though this very thing had happened so many times before, not one person has yet said a word about how or why anyone let Dreamnation and that stupid llama anywhere near the mixing desk unsupervised, let alone at night, and just before the ‘release’ of another DNRC album, too. The rest of us are left to ponder what might have been, and whether it’s just as well that it didn’t. Happen, that is.

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