Surrealism hangs over London like urinating birds.
Soho at night sleeps in a coffin in a burning video-shop where small wooden birds are continually peeling back the facial skin of sleeping female editors.
Soho is a blue dragon that sucks the penises of Public Schoolboys who are double-sided mirrors that detectives look through at a line-up of transvestites whose breasts jangle as bags of pound coins from which a sludge oozes onto the dinner plates of people eating in Restaurants.
Oxford Street is heaving with bodies like moist sugar that attracts swarms of killer bees who appear like the eyes of Hindus that dance over the buses and Taxi cabs driven by the screeching clitoris of bored German secretaries.
In Oxford Street, as the January sales start the shop windows dummies are rolling on the floor to the sound of road drills as flying green jaws dart along the rows of cameras in the pockets of women’s clothing leaving a trail of fluorescent green saliva lighter than air, floating behind them. A three-piece suit becomes a family of Indian Elephants who pick the pockets of polite women who lie on the shop counter copulating with their leather purses that become potbellied pigs dressed in silver uniforms as twenty-pound notes stream out of their mouths and become stacks of evening newspapers left in the doorways where the homeless are sleeping who dream of the mother city as their last and only friend.
Trafalgar Square is split in two by the hands of hairy Archbishop wears dog collar, garters and tiaras whose fleas sit on top of the National Gallery swallowed by a policeman without any trousers drawing portraits as they fly away like a flock of pigeons.
Let me explain about the lack of slum housing for the poor who wander childless selling matches to the lions in Trafalgar square who consume the glory of the unknown soldier who sleeps like dry straw in the mouths of a Prime Minister who whistles a Mozart tune as he attends a service in Westminster Abby where dead poets hang from the ceiling during Karaoke sessions.
Fleet Street opens up along an unknown earth fault from where butterflies are swarming with petitions. Fleet Street is invaded by millions of porcelain Bulldogs who float down from the sky who are smashed like snow under the feet of Watusi tribesmen who chase the No 15 bus up Ludgate Hill where a giant Winston Churchill is seen sitting on the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral. An earth fault along Fleet Street opens up again and a lost river in the form of a monster made of mineral water climbs out. Subterranean lights are glowing as civil servants the pride of the civil service becomes a church clock whose hands are made of black dung beetles that pour from the back streets where visibility is nil because of thick smoke pouring out of the mouths of bartenders dancing with female chimpanzees to Matt Monroe songs. The Pearly King and Queen walk down Fleet Street as The Evening Standard newspaper sellers booths as Christians lost in the vacuum of their own expectations sit counting toothpicks as their ears ooze the millennium’s nuclear waste that is drunk by sewer rats whose bodies glow like X-Rays as a time machine gets stuck to the tie of a civil servant out buying a C.D.
Hyde Park is filled by crashing hot air balloons made from washing up liquid
.The horses of death gallop in the subterranean caves underneath Harrods; their neighing becomes Irish dancing children whose wooden torsos are collected by the guardian angels of the city with the green eyes and fiery gold teeth. Victorian vampires dressed as old women promenade by the pool where the wedding dresses of Queens float amongst the pondweed and the reeds of the Serpentine. A pitched battle between mounted police and demonstrators takes place above the Serpentine in a surreal mist as The Beatles troop across the flower beds where sitar players pick their toenails as igloos float through the sky and melt and rain down onto the black swans who hide under the gallows that is reopened at Tyburn as press photographers amass to cover a hanging.
Piccadilly Circus is a massacre; hundreds of bleeding Eros’s after a naked orgy pierced by arrows are dying. The refuse collectors in the early morning rain are dumping the bodies into their trucks. Sheets of music shower down from a window that closes suddenly producing a bright flash of light across the streets where the homeless gather singing Salvation Army songs they learn from dreams. A filmmaker turns the camera on himself as he describes how a whirlwind lifts a limousine onto the roofs and snaps where it turns into jelly.
I’m not always conscious of my solid parts. I walk after dreams through Charing Cross Station where trains leap out of the river and land like sturgeons on the stamp collectors stall. With a pair of scissors, I cut the station in two and a flock of black witches fly up into the sky where men watching clocks are floating. Lots wife is brought back and is left as a pillar of salt on a station platform as a herd of donkeys are chanting Hara Krishna’s in the underground.
At the Palace gates, the demon of Eden’s hand is a promise to lie through the eyes of guardsmen in the crystal weight of sky that being brim-full of the thoughts of a Bond Street tailor whose hands are orange jelly that float into the throne room where, in each corner a huge gargoyle with skin of mud howls like a violated orang-utan at the intrusion of a lion carrying a silver platter whose eyes glow with the heat of volcanoes.
Along the Embankment, a demon transposed as a ballerina in a white tutu dances on the high tide to invisible music in the evening mist as a false sunset crashes into the river and swims out to sea dragging a police launch from where a lovesick gorilla recites Alfred Lord Tennyson poems
The lasted exhibition of paintings from the Tate Gallery become objects that a poltergeist flings into the river where art-loving squirrels fish them out and hang them up from the branches of spit covered trees that are thinking of the naked schoolgirls who do their homework in The London Dungeon in kegs of London fog that have been maturing for the London Philharmonic orchestra who will play Pepys’s Diary set to music at midnight as the Albert Hall is set ablaze to the music of John Cage whose effigy is tied to a parking meter where Sherlock Holmes is perched like a green parrot on the live wires of a security camera that watches the great train robbers selling Rolex watches to an old German war criminal who drags a dead crocodile through Wembley Football stadium leaving trails of green dragon breath from a night in Chinatown.
1998
