The Facility.

Chapter One:

This town is halfway to Hell, a mass of tenement gravestones and crematoria where the only thing going up in smoke is crack pipes and the livers of the populace.

Now that I have you, and while you try to recoil in disdain from a life, you think you're better than, I'll run a little anecdote by you. Because lurking somewhere under the cheap cider and Special Brew, the stock of auditionees awaiting their 15 minutes on Jeremy Kyle, having applied by omission from the demonic pursuit of capital, are real people, real lambs to the slaughter... if you hang about, I'll show you what I mean.

We Fade To Grey... it's stuck with me like a lazy poltergeist from my childhood, farting it's mist of apathy through my lungs and staining my entire life. From the tinny mono of mum's car to the battery farm of a Job Centre Plus? Plus what? I always wonder, Plus Degradation, humiliation... backstage at Jezza's Coliseum! It all streaks past me, lights becoming tubes of meaningless drudgery, the anonymous foam seat like a motorbike's, streaking the uniform biscuit paint, toned down officialdom, all crafted to set a soul in flux, inducing a state of constant unease, a perpetual come down. They whiz by me in a frenzied pulse of apathy, as I, entropy, remain still. Chaos itself amid the injustice of upwardly mobile Laissez Faire.

The pace slows in everyday life, but most of the world is still indistinguishable from the parade of destitution that is this town. I drink, smoke and toke, sometimes I get laid, other times I laugh, feel as though I could cry... it all slides off the petrified bubble within, that bubble is my soul, translucent vacuum scrutinised nothingness. Scoured out by a zeitgeist, louder and crueller than the poltergeist - who's always been as fiery as a damp match! An era where my life was mapped out for me before conception = dole queue in crisis, production line in boom, pension, then death. Ravaged by carrion decades before worms gorged on your corpse.

Somehow I'm on a park bench, a couple of "mates/fellow war wounded" flock at either side of me, mammalian pigeons. I'm pickled by now, the race doused in treacle brine that is cider... later, the grease of barely formed chicken will add to the concoction that a toilet is begging for, one way or another! The rush ends, as it does, every morning, my puffy eyes, aching head and heart, leering back at me from a mirror, asking a question through the oppressed static: "what is free?"