Haikus 2

So what do you do?

How did people quell
the panic in workshop lunch
breaks before mobiles?

Probably live with mum

What motivates men
to shave their sideburns so high
above their ears?

The accent

“Eat shit and die”. I
misheard. She, a Brummie, asked
Andy to itch her.

I reckon <2%

The statistics on
fisting are hard to find. There’s
a Phd there.

Not a close friend

“Let’s fuck” she whispered.
“Right now!”. “No” said the stranger.
“I’m a pallbearer”.

Can I Funk with your percentage formula?

If Bootsy Collins
delivered Excel training,
I’d probably go.

Talking Bollocks

I’ve been treating Michael for almost three years now. His case is one of the more unusual in the literature, in fact he’s something of a special case. I believe he’s one of only six people in the UK to suffer from Orchitis Voxosis, or OV for short.

OV was only discovered as recently as 1987 by a Swiss Urologist who received a referral of a twelve year old boy complaining of ‘singing balls’. What he found was staggering, and hitherto unheard of. Only now, almost 30 years on, are we truly beginning to reveal the secrets of this strange and socially ostracising condition.

The problems start in utero, in the very early stages of embryonic development. In a nutshell, if you’ll excuse the metaphor, the testicles develop a kind of proto larynx. Shortly after conception, in the first trimester when the zygote is undergoing mitotic division, problems arise with cell differentiation.

As far as we know – and it appears to be linked to errors in the base coding of Tritiptonase Phorylose during mitochondrial axial regression – the glitch occurs as a result of cytoplasmic contiguity. This simply means that the cells that will become the gonads and those that will develop into the throat are so close together they’re practically the same.

In rare cases, we think around 1 in 900,000, normal mitosis is disrupted, and what we call regional cellular displacement, or RCD occurs. Basically, organs can develop in atypical regions of the body, including duplicates.

Most famously this is how Donald Trump ended up with two rectums. One in the usual place and one on his lower mandible, around where his lips should be. I happen to know his specialist very well, and he tells me that Mr Trump has to have his Gastroenterologist present whenever he visits his Dentist. It’s not pleasant. Put it this way, when Mr Trump has a birthday party and blows out his candles, nobody eats the cake.

The fact that a small voice box can develop in a testicle is amazing in itself, but the mechanism which causes the testicle to appear to talk, and even sing, is truly remarkable.

When someone with OV walks, the muscles in the leg squeeze the femoral artery which sends blood rushing up the the pelvis and through the proto larynx in the testicle. This causes a sort of guttural sound, sometimes more plosive or sibilant, like a whistle. In complex cases tiny integuments, or flaps, develop which mimic the bioarchitecure, and consequently the action of the lips and tongue. In these vanishingly rare cases – we’re talking 1 in 7 million here – rudimentary vocalisations may be audible, and sometimes, just through the normal operation of chance, they resemble discernable linguistic units. The water density of the testicle acts as a kind of amplifer, which means that they can be heard up to three metres away.

I treated a patient with this incredibly rare ‘talking’ form of the condition. His testicular vocalisations were almost always of two syllables. Common examples included ‘peach god’, ‘fish tease’ ‘don’t care’ and ‘bog boy’. He actually lost his job as a primary school teacher.

The saddest case of all was of a 21 year old schizophrenic man. One of his vocalisations was ‘end you’, which he did after years of – as he put it in a moving final letter – ‘being hounded to madness and despair by my balls’.

Pustaines

The name’s Jebediah Odediah Pustaine. The fourth. Yep, I was born into a long line of Pustaines. Doctor said I was nothin’ but a little streak the day I was born. When I came outta mamma, like a little baby ‘gator slippin’ into the bayou,  I opened up my scream bags and mamma said “yes sir, ‘aint no mistakin’ it. That there is a little Pustaine”.

Life was hard on the farm. The dust clung to you like a second skin. That dry, brown dust blew everywhere. I liked to pretend the dust was cocoa and we was little figures on hell’s own chocolate cake. Bone dry and hot as Mars, every summer the earth was lifeless and cracked, like a delirious mind on the brink of death by starvation.

We was poor. Hella poor. We was on skid row, you might say. Back then if someone were to talk about the skid’, you’d think ‘Pustaines’. But I resolved to get out of skid’, ‘mark my words’, I would tell anybody what cared to listen. ‘Mark ’em good. This Pustaine gonna wash right outta this dust bowl death hole’.

I remember one winter the horses got sick. Daddy went down to the stable with an axe. Them stallions kicked up hell, I reckon they can feel death, smell it in the air, sensitive as they are. They tuned in to some frequency we just can’t receive.

Folks cheated us. Snake oil sellers and no good junk pedalling carpet baggers always hung around our door. ‘They can smell a Pustaine a mile off’ mamma always said. Tried to fleece us, double deal, play dirty. ‘Why front? ‘ my daddy would shout. ‘You just a lyin’ sonnuva bitch, get outta here’.

We was different. Town folk didn’t pay us no heed, walked on the other side of the street. Didn’t have no time or no regard for us. If you ever come across a Pustaine, don’t tell no-one. They only judge you for it. Pustaines are private. My advice? Don’t be seen in public with a Pustaine.

Ultimate insult

The air crackled with the static of her quiet fury. Their relationship – once a primrose path through paradise – was now a briny, broiling ocean between their respective islands, through which the fighting fish of their mutual antipathy swam. This time he had gone too far. Utterly unforgivable.

“You fucking cancerous ARSEPIECE” she spat. He simpered. Sadly his expression, which he’d intended as a mollifying ‘I-know-I’m-a-shit” face, failed to land well. It looked smug. Infinitely smug. More than that, derisory. It lit the blue touch paper.

“You’re a flouncing fucking nothing, a pathetic tosspot peacock, a shitty little gilded git with the charisma of an Oncologist giving the bad news and the emotional intelligence of cum-crusted teenage boy who puts MICE in the microwave”.

“I’m sorry”. Trouble was, he wasn’t. Bigger trouble was, he wasn’t very good at feigning it.

“You’re just the…the worst. Half a fart, fifty forced farts in the mouth. You’re a wasabi-smeared tampon, Ian Brady shitting under the Christmas tree. Jesus Christ, your dad had some spastic spunk in his addled bollocks to make you!”.

She didn’t realise it, but she was advancing towards him now, clutching a novelty outsized pencil he’d bought her from the Keswick Pencil Museum. They had visited during a tour of the Lakes, to mark their two year anniversary. He found this briefly amusing, although his face really should have done more to dissemble. Considering the circumstances.

“You’re two Hitlers. GOD it makes me sick to think that I’ve spent seven years shackled to you. You’re a child’s shoe in a warzone. Sad, confusing and FUCKING USELESS!”

*  *  *  *

“Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“There’s been another one”.
“Another one? No! Shut up! With a fourteen incher?”
“Yep. Same M.O. and all. Through the neck. Bled out”.
“Fuck. But that’s seven people killed with a massive pencil in nine months“.
“Gary’s pulling them from the shop. Did you know the Museum’s on one of them tourist murder tours?”.
“Bonkers man, it’s just nuts”.

Satin Horn

Pam clenched her undercarriage as Jim furiously fracked her seam. He was drilling for liquid pleasure, and Pam’s minehead was about to blow.

“Good job, keep up the good work, excellent stuff” Pam enthused, breathily. Jim winced. Pam was talking too much and it was putting him off his stroke. And then, suddenly, in the rushed, tremulous voice of someone saying that they’re going to be sick moments before being sick, Jim yelped “gobble my nutnog”.

In a flash he traversed Pam’s poles like a mad, sex-enflamed Ranulph Fiennes. Going from south to north like this – a cheeky erotic gambit for any gentleman to spring – was known as the ‘dirty switchboard’; so named by Betty Sweetmeat, a retired telephonist who ran most of the subterranean frottage oubliettes beneath the titty bars of Soho. The same seedy jerk joints where Pam danced the podiums, for self-esteem reasons and cash.

Lips pursued, panting like a birthing women, Jim roared “excelsis” as he reconnected this particular sex call to 69 Ecstasy Avenue.

Five minutes later, after the cleanup and some impromptu tippie-toe basin washing, Pam said “thank you” through the blue effluvia of an apres-le-rut fag.

“You’re more than welcome” replied Jim.

“Cigarrette?” returned Pam.

“Thank you” said Jim.

“You’re more than welcome” replied Pam with a smile, acknowledging the rather feeble halfjoke of having just said to Jim what Jim had said to her back to Jim.

Over the following 48 hours Jim and Pam rutted a further 19 times, until chaffing, exhaustion and frankly boredom knocked it on the head.

Haikus

Shame

Through vinegar strokes
Bob saw a shape scuttle by.
The librarian.

Social mores

John met a dog’s gaze
in the park. Feeling awkward
he smiled. The tit.

Exit

I would like to die
surrounded by family.
And being gnoshed off.

Guffy Pig

Jemma’s guinea pig
farted. She stopped stroking it.
The moment had gone.

I hate Blacks

She balled the ‘racist’
out ’til she realised he
just preferred Millets.

Not good

He thought he was good.
“You eat muff like a kitten
licking pâté, John”.

Schporg

Schporg Manhattan was a champion fellow. That breed of raffishly suave geezer every chap wants to be, and every gal wants to see. Two twinkling goblin peepers, a shock of tangerine hair rarely seen outside of a Borneo jungle and a devil-may-care skip to his step, he was the epitome of the thoroughly modern bachelor boy.

Every Tuesday, Sunday, High Day and Holiday at 6am on the button he would thrust his pins down to the municipal park to pick a nice metre square patch of the lushest sward, upon which he would ‘dance in the day’, as he called it. Then, boogied out and grinning like a self medicating banana, he returned home to potter merrily in his inventing shed, working on his self-cleaning brogues one moment, switching to his patent leather patent teasmaid trumpet the next.

“Come to pater, my pretty little noisette” he intoned, affectionately, to his custard yellow canary,  Culloden. Popping a seed into the bird’s itty bitty beak, he whistled a jaunty trill, before popping his avian amigo back into it’s gilded gaol.

Then the morning routine. The immutable ante meridiem readying rituals. Kippers on toast, oily rag, a flick through the sausage wrappers and snitch sheets, ablutions, coffee and crap. The last two always in tandem.

A week later the poor old fish expired. The snitch sheets reported a bemusing incident involving an eel, a pair of surgical stockings and a tub of Bryl. It raised 843 eyebrows and set a World Record for the largest contemporaneous ‘tut’.

End.

Bad friend

He raised his head to drink her in. Widening eyes with plate like pupils sucking in the starlight streaming from her face. Such a satisfyingly symmetrical face electrified and dancing with the promise of the evening. Ears attuned to her throaty laugh, radars trained on mystifying interstellar signals. Nostrils flaired to huff in the ball-stirring scent of her sillage, commingled with freshly sweating skin, shampoo and – no doubt – chemical sex signals.

“God, I feel like I’ve just been gabbing on for ages. You haven’t said anything in about ten minutes!”. As she said this, half in jest and half in desperate need of reassurance, her lips wiggled in a nervous little moue. She took a measured sip of her foam-topped nut brown ale (his suggestion at her prompting), all the while meeting his eyes. This is flirty, inviting, sultry, she liminally thought. This is alarming he said to himself, in his head, almost mouthing it although she didn’t notice.

She followed up her invitation for him to play his part. “What are you thinking?”. He felt a pang of vexation. She had had such a beguiling flow about her just seconds before, but this abrupt appeal seemed forced. Contrived. Unfair, actually, an unwarranted intrusion into his bubble of passive pleasure.

“Your tits are singing to me”.

She looked startled. Like a cat experiencing a hoover for the first time. “What? Why did…singing? What do you mean?”

That old familiar friend, his self sabotage impulse, had just pulled up a chair at their table. A lazy, jealous friend. A bad friend, wanting nothing good for him, challenged by change, threatened by entropy, madly fighting for the safe, simple status quo. Seated between them, he was pouring poison into his ear and pissing into her drink.

“Your tits are singing to me. But they’re out of tune”.

“What are you…”

“They’re flat. Your tits are flat”. He almost smiled, contented that he’d finally been able to articulate the little niggle that had been irking him all evening. The grit in the oyster of his priapic appreciation of her. She was beautiful, lovely, self-assured and witty. But she had no bosoms.

“Fuck you” she said, quite calmly. Rising to stand, she just shook her head, slowly, as much in pity as disapproval. And then she was gone. He poured her half into his depleted pint. “Bonus” said his bad friend. “Kebab?”.