O gazes out from the roof of the world ...

By the cliffside cave mouth, O jim-lads a blind eye to the blaring sun and offers a patch pink white brown cheek to the hot, dry wind; bedraggled in hairy blond flowerpot boots, crunching broken white shell rocks, long-ago shipwrecked, abandoned and forgotten Robinson CrusOe pulls around the furry cloak of memory, pushes a heavy Beatle George mop-top fringe from his stone age cave face and gazes out from the roof of the world across the 1 Million Years BC red painted desert.

Gathering the old things against the blasts of time, O waits and hopes; and wonders when Raquel will be back. She’s off somewhere: wields a jaw-bone axe, sweats raw sex; bared canines, crouches feet apart in a wrestlers' stance; growls yellow blackdiamond wolfeyes, defies a blood red sun.

While out there in the distance, downstage from a cartoon cactus, so alone, so alone, makes moan the shaggy gameboy, Pilgrim; showbiz comeback Elvis drops to his knees, as an elvish bluebell nonchalant skater girl glides from teen dreams, gleams, grins, and breezes by on muted wheels. 

And the Nudie-suited desert playboy rises, flames red roses, smiles sparkles, kicks slick cubans, glamors and roars a starry Harley beside the charred remains of a cowboy campfire.

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High above Kojak’s who loves ya baby topcat dustbinned alleyway, clanking fire-escapes climb the walls on telescoping martian metal limbs to witness hands hold up, heads lean out from apartment windows, and flabby white Howards howl: ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ 

And far beneath, hands stuffed in the damp pockets of a borrowed brown raincoat, O leans into the wind and rain like a corpse-twitch matchstick smudge, steers himself between homeless heaps on pitiless cobbles, hears the voices of the dead blown over crowds of heartless shoppers: the crooked Sibyl in the bus shelter confides to a huddle of heads and hats, ‘I just feel so undervalued’; and across the street, contorted in agony in her own gethsemane, a washed-out blue-rinse lady offers frantic prayers to a sleek, slim phone in an unheld hand, ‘If they can just manage the pain … I don't want anything else ...'

And O’s brown eyes fill with tears; David gone, and no-one here to help him with the pain; only stretched pearl knuckles bound in cold metal links and the murmurous litanies of the cowled black-lace ladies: 'tread softly, tread softly', 'they're stepping on our hearts, stepping on our hearts, stepping on our hearts'; and lulled by censers' metal rattles, swoons of ghostly white perfumes, O bows down, reaches a hand to a cold wet side, pierced by a lance, as sacred blood runs down the outlaw tree, leafless endless dying on the ragged, purple steppes; and falling into dust and mad despair, an old man bowls down the wooden aisle: 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!'

And the monster Grendel of the northern sagas strides long-legged down from epic frozen fjords, and O knows the shiver of the bloody nail in the mannered hand of the modern European, as Hannah’s sister’s tortured lover sneers, 'If Jesus came back, he'd never stop throwing up …’

O and the Surrogate Life

By the huge window, surely crafted by giants, O sat down and wept (again); as high above the shambling row of black, brown and blue plastic bins, old arthritic sycamores stretch and groan beneath the burden of another sullen morning; cursed to loom, wearily watch and wait.

Looking up through thick, awe-ful branches, O witnesses black veins pistol into wriggled bloodshots across the weak eye of the sun; and higher up on trampoline twigs, warm squirrel bobbins leap hectic wobbles; and higher still, droop insect overseer seed-pods, flicker in camouflage like Bob Godfrey purple birds. 

O looks down at the beige, stain-resistant carpet and knows the gnawing ache: fake home, fake girlfriend on the phone (Wei ... Wei?). The surrogate life. Like the painted mountain roundabout plonked like Monopoly at the edge of the red-sand cowboy town. The ache of the old wound, when the wind turns and the birds pack their bags and go, leaving the children's peepo in the glass pavilion; and stranded on the edge of the end of summer barbecue, he confides despair to a pretty young woman ready for departure on an overseas adventure: 'I think I'm living someone else's life'. Drops her off somewhere, and then the desolate drive home through the blind and bitter midland streets.

And after all this time, should he still be on his knees, looking for his life? Well, no, really, he shouldn't. He tried that, didn't he? Over and over. And he's finally done. Come on. Who can keep on following the strictly routine steps, and never make his own and win the holiday?

And behind the wheel of Newton's silver cannonball, shot down unlucky lanes, he risks an abundant kerplunk on a desert highway. Or transformed for a real girl, putty in her hands, he conforms; infinitely pliable, piously safe and sagely witnessed on the musty plum carpet, improvises the sacred litanies of a slender Secondary Modern deputy head (pipe in pocket, footballer's legs), devout in incense-stained tweed jacket and leather elbows, itself a replay of hopelessly lost and confused, stumbling nightly homeward in a narrowing arc over the dim and dirty hillside streets of a brass band town. 

Solitary confined, pinched by parish priest's shoes, blows a whistle with no pea on the pitch or in the playground. He's lost in the groove again, caught in the loop again, by bobbling Rover in the cul de sac of a windy Welsh beach and a white balloon stretched across the mute horror of an open-mouthed scream.

'But why try to live a life that isn't real?' cries the white-face clown, backwards slumped in the wings on a classroom chair like the broke-backed wooden articulate toy, who wants to be a real boy. Oh, the tired and tearful charade, the snugly concealed facsimile. 

And after rolling thundrous over roof-tops of plummeting terraces, past smokeless mill chimneys and wide-eyed innocent moorland farms ('he's not Jesus, he's just a fella'), O pitches up on a hard, red plastic seat cradling a beer in a bleak Blackpool snug, only for hope to be smothered, as plush purple cloaks the confessional white-face Renaldo, his renegade truck kicking up dust on lost highways. Or painted pigeon nodding like Punch, trumpet in hand with Clara and the vagabond poets, ramshackles through the troubadour revue, like the over-blown balloons and cheap plastic poppers of the Page Three stunners' box of delights you'll never get to open.

Only the time traveller's spinning discs and the flickering silver screen in the dusty library share confidential whispers of the ancient ways across the polar waste, where the banshee blizzard punches your face and the concealed razor opens your cheek. 

Follow the sleek seals lithe slither and rascally scurry over ice-caps write the way back to the sad southern lowlands, to the back of the door where you hung up your hat. Home to your unsatisfactory woman, home to your fake furry queen.

Good night ladies; good night sweet ladies; good night, Weena, Weena good night.