Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run

Into his belly, past the teeth and gums

To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone.

Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan

As he by subtle increment becomes

Uncomfortable in his own skeleton

And catapults up from his seat to pace

The room, thus to assuage his restlessness

While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk

Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk

At the delay, this possible to guess

Through study of his well-upholstered face

Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue.

“Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz

I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares,

Circling an endless rug between the chairs

As, barely knowing where or who he is

He wades in a dissociative fog

Alone, the lights on but nobody home,

Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid

The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat

Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that,

Some little tramp on crackling celluloid

Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome,

All colour fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den

In antique garb now waddles through the gloom

Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk,

Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk

While in the upper corners of the room

Are gruff, gesticulating little men

In similar attire, homunculi

Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace

The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call

Their taunts, where dirty grey light seems to fall

As from some higher mathematic space

Or proletarian eternity

Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow

Seizes them both. Perspective is askew,

The jeering imps made large as, by degree,

Den and his colleague rise towards them. He

Has the sensation as he passes through

Of fusing with the drab planks from below,

Emerging on their far side in insane

Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor

To nightmare. He discovers that his skin,

Now naked, is that on a manikin

Grown from this attic of the charnel poor

With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain,

Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum

Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled,

As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he

In floor, is seized by the fraternity

Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled

Up to inebriate Elysium:

“The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch

Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut,

Enjoy that good night out without the wife

Pursue an after-hours afterlife

And want for nothing save a head to butt

Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.”

Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell

Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy

The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate,

Its touted goodness decades out of date,

Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye

Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele

Of smouldering reprobates who swirl and curse

About him as he struggles there beneath

Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat

Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat

While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth,

Though some of his confederates are worse.

There’s one whose features crawl about his face,

Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be.

Another, a raw-knuckled harridan

With smile as threatening as any man

Sways to an air that falls conspicuously

Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space,

Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives

To find its source, soon managing to spot

The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums,

Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs

Disconsolately, yet perk up as what

Appears to be their ringleader arrives

To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who

With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes

Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view

Him, if but briefly, noticing that two

Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs,

One memorably fair though lacking hue

And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out

But draws the mob’s attention with his cry

That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown,

Jesting as they attempt to tread him down,

His careful lyric ear affronted by

Their hateful voices everywhere about.

“He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg,

Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.”

Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit,

Is held down by the leering female brute

Who’s carving her initials on his arm

Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg

Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet,

Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout

As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire,

Resurfacing to hear the bard enquire

If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about,

Told in reply that he’s just down the street,

At which the children leave. The cackling throng

Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways.

They kick Den harder as the band begin,

They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin

And as the joyous, tumbling music plays

These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song:

“Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we,

Up here near fifty year now, man and boy!

Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale,

So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail!

Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy

Our pie-eyed paralysed posterity!”

And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some

Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes,

Target for every last ethereal thug.

Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug.

Not even memory of his name remains

Nor life prior to this warped delirium

Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal

Competes now with the music’s weave and wail

As the two writhe in what appears to be

A pissed-up paradise or purgatory

Where bygone barbarisms still prevail

And the perpetually present poor are real,

Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass

Before distraction having the semblance

Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums,

Frog-marching there before him as he comes

A mangled man whose babyish countenance

Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass;

Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime

And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?”