There was once a slice of white bread, with a little smattering of blue-green mould in one corner. He had been tossed in the bin with some eggshells, wrappers, and the contents of an ashtray, but fell through a slit in the cheap bin-liner when the man took the bin out of the domestic bin to put it in the rugged outdoor bin, where on an allocated day of the week it would be taken with the contents of the bins of the rest of the world, to go to a hole in the moon where some of it would break down and some of it would remain for millennia. It was here, in the outside world, that the little slice of white bread really learned how cruel the world could be. First the sun beat down and made him dry, but he discovered the shade provided by the shed before he was toast. He was giddy at the near miss, but concerned about the health implications this sunning might have had. Then it started to rain. He all too quickly learned that shade did not protect from the rain, and watched in horror as his body was disintegrated by the rain, and carried away from him, as his regression into white amorphous sludge went on under the rain’s jurisdiction.

Iranian prince
With a dark little drink
Sludge woman
Bearing knives
For eating and
Forks for
Eating her
Kippers and Guinness.

Incandescent green
Her fatted cheek boiling
Under the lights
And heavenly things
Cartilage
Weighing A tender stem

Grizz
Raise our arms in exultation
And together we can end
The pandemic vaginal dryness of the arid north
And the vaginal discharge of the swampy south

I can’t recreate my horror and disgust when the dead fish’s eye saw by virtue of a parasite
Looked squarely at me and called me a familiar name.

We visited the worm orphanages
At the end of the earth
The omniscient director sat
In her loft
On a pile of biscuits and rubble
Our benevolence only prodding
Her sleeping wrath

Water lapped at her feet but she carried on with expenses
One orphan face down in the deluge
But she carried on with expenses

He eats with alacrity but remains
Like a string bean entwined in his cot
Hyper extendable but stationary
Bruised,
Sores on his toes and on his eyes
Eyelashes coarse and long as a cow

The cot would malform into a serpentine narrowboat and cruise backk out of the door, a huddle of black flames on the deck
The devil in a deckchair

A spare wheelchair under the stairs
A freshly filled hole in the earth
A strange morality pervades

On the way there
The bus driver fingers a Braille map

An old lady in a rain jacket grizzling
For a rizzla
Dropped a dirty five pound note
On the floor
To pick it up her back would collapse
Shatter into the soil
Freshly filled molar

Shelf Spook

slips

down and

mangles

the brains of newborn

mantises

in the grasses

asleep.

Shelf Spook slips

down to feed

brains

of newborn mantises

in the grasses

asleep with his

own divine

parasite.

Shelf Spook slips down

off the shelf

& waters the brains

of the newborn mantises

in the grasses

asleep

with his

own corrosive

waters,

ensuring they sleep

in the grasses

evermore

we can remain hydrated for 1000 years

if advances in medical science bypass

the cat flap at some

stark skeletal juncture

on the scalextric.

beings dependent on the environment

will wither

murder notes

settling amongst the nettles

gathering fauna 

will sound

before achieving optimum

anorgasmic delinquency,

And we can all work together

for greater or for worse

to ensure that every household

has at least one packet of crackers

& one television

to see them through

the catacombs

of dejection.

The bindings were so taut

not even 20,000 years of evolution

could see them

unravel.  

Dab one another friend’s weeping reptilian sores

with lurid candy floss

pulled out of the seats of the sleeper

Real cool traders.

Everything’s existence is

silenced

in some way or other

through some set of constructs.

I saw one skeleton,

yay-high,

eating a tin of wire ravioli

under a tree

by a creak

in a church yard —  

and the beautiful thing is,

he was absolutely free.

TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORST
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SPORTS
TEAM SP[PORTS

Rough-edged like cancers
order in disarray
supermarket trollies
can’t-do attitude
surviving in
aggressively
degenerative
target-driven
environments
four bodies
two bodies
one body –
Onan

Four bodies
two bodies
one body
bacteria
germinating
acrimoniously
don’t underestimate
how destructive
a feeding fungus
can be

The earthworm gestates
the cloud replenishes
its dead tissue
the carcinogens retreat
into clinical waste facilities
on a supermarket gurney
one body
ceremoniously germinates
one body
submits.

Four bodies.
equipped with anonymity of a battery hen
I progressed my feelers to the floor –
shed them in compassion.
lost my friends to the highway,
to the forest floor, the ocean bed,
shed them.
anti-gravity apartheid
gravitational bylaws, taciturn.

flung my feelers to the
bloody forest floor.
a massacre. Twenty-five
stags of the night shot dead
during antler-coitus season.

saw a policeman in a juggernaut
chugging down phonemes.
Two bodies.
Saw my grandmother as a little girl, War Time.
One man, Onan.

Onan the cum-swapping librarian.
Tickle me about the gills with your
humblest radiator
make off with the produce
fuck ’em in the money pouch.

A massacre. Twenty-five
stags of the night out cold
during antler-coitus season.
what a way to run a
railway.

we touched mouthpieces and lifted off
into the stratosphere.
propelling our wounds into each other,
compacting them into one,
calculating the peace.

We were burnt-out into the highway
at odds with the forest –
since the soil itself was a germinating spore
we were
all about the money ‘
then. the beetle relinquished his
inextricable shell.

el hurst ’14

The frustrator is airborne
And will soon be circling
At the overhang
With bindings so taut,
Not even 20,000,000 years
Of evolution could see them
Undone.

With recertified folds of saurian flesh
Calculating in the odious computer
I laid my zoonotic mother to rest

The brown-nosing molecules dismissed
The intercity sleepers as
‘High-faluting advancements’
Decrying the developments in
Collected conveyance

She exuded an enchanting,
iridescent youthfulness
As she calculated in the womb
Of putrefaction

(Adjacent to the catacombs of dejection)

Neighbours at the delinquent funfair
Played the chord-generating machines
Riddled with the pubic bone syndrome.

A deluge of brilliant pulsating orbs
Fell from the ripe, tumescent clouds!

Motorhoming in my meat tin
Waiting for the forensic cycle to start
Covered half my face with my hand,
And the other –

The tramps were tearing their urethras agape
To let out the night’s collected waters
Behind the factory
Waiting for their subconsciouses
To go slithering off
Into another lifetime.

el hurst ’14

200 people
upfront
at the girls’ school.

They’re plant life.

Centuries of
rustic action
augmented –
flowering
eight feet of
cubic stupidity.

They
can be my
naked protectresses –

if they should be spared
the wheelie bin
as embryonic birds.

el hurst ’13/’14

Took Diana in her wheelchair
tubes and all
to the Christmas lunch
17.50 two courses, 19.50 three
nice decorations.

She ate her bedding
and the bugs in her matted hairs
took Diana in her wheelchair
to the Christmas lunch
tubes and all

plucked a pair of gherkins from her matted locks
and took off like a vulture to play in the woods.

el hurst eczemas 2013

the lino was beige the lino was sticky on an electric ring a deep fat-fryer swelled and foamed like a hellish sea the hundred-and-seventy degree oil lapped and licked at the edges and Baby Christophe dialled his play-phone and smoked his play-cigar and played with cigar-smoking figurines on the beige and sticky lino with his beads and tennis shoes and racket and pop-gun and Frey and Bentos pie as his mum

wheezed and used the once battery operated dildo from Gran Canaria that leaked battery acid into her dilapidated machinery but she carried on using it a when all was healed and yes, she was using it now in the next room whilst watching Morecambe and Wise on video and the oil lapped at the sides and ontothe hot ring and there were bright yellow flashes and smoke and Baby Christian played with his beads and bagpipe and armadillo and hamrack and his train on the beige and sticky lino with his compass and rectangle and the flashes got brighter and bigger and almost leapt away from the ring and hissed

and Baby Donald sat on the floor refilling his swollen pink army trucks and refilling his nappy with what had always been a reassuring presence throughout the torments and trials of childhood and his mum in the next room was employing the dildo that a year before had left her with battery acid burns inside and outside of her dilapidated machinery with fingers raw&stubby from nail-biting her white legs right up on the chair with her against all

odds as the flames of the fryer licked higher impressing one harsh black disc onto the ceiling and Baby Roger Makepiece shuffled about in circles and beat his fat ham-hands on the beige and dirty and sticky lino and the fryer now spitting hot oil and his mother in the next room with her legs right up with her on the chair against all odds was almost there and Baby Phil threw his rubber balls and one bounced along the top and bounced around a bit and knocked the fryer and ripples of frenzied oil sloshed over the rim and powerful charged and angry fireballs leapt and the napalm oil dripped down the dead washing machine and his mum in the next room legs right up on the chair with her against all odds revealing an arsehole like

the eye of an elephant in the sleepy Savannah sun and Baby Fergus climbed out of his walker and attempted to climb the drawers one at a time and chicken nuggets rolled down onto the floor the beige the sticky and dirty floor and he slid in the oil and the fryer was a bomb a fireball and he, Felix, careened and the fryer went with him and set him aflame and added and added and added to the big flames that licked him and leapt from his tiny frame and the flames fed on Baby Luciano till he was hotter than the sun and had lost his coordination his fingers had fused together and

how – he – screamed

and his soft baby bird hairs gone in an instant and Baby Roderick was unrecognisable lay on his back like a giant flaming beetle with skin blistering looking like something you could sink yer teeth into as his mum in the next room wiped her hands and the elephant’s eye blinked once for yes

and she thought she’d better check on Baby Jim.

el hurst 2012