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 …’
