Just write the next line

It was falling with a hell of a racket, as if someone had pushed it downstairs.

His eyes felt bruised, egg-timer grains of the day clinging to his lashes.

His skin was marked by acne and a hundred different rashes.

The darkness brought the thunder and eyeball-frying flashes.

Crap, I swore I'd never do another bad poem.

Too late to regret, his muse crept with the shadows and a certain nonchalance settled with the dust.

Suddenly the whole house shook to its foundations and John's modifier was left dangling.

Helvigo Jenkins

Twisting in the risible wind, his pained gaze grazed against the now shattered panes of temperance.

"Bollocks to this" he thought. "I'm off down the pub for a swift half and a slice of pie."

julie
There is this tall blonde and long legs
with a wink in her eye!

It's a shame that she isn't winking at John, but the bulldozer of a man in front of her.

Unfortunately, John fails to spot the bulldozer, and casts wildly through his imagination for a tried and tested pick-up line.

The tall blonde, sick of the bulldozers pushy ways connects with Johns' sensitivity and his danglig modifier.

Inspired, he whipped out his harmonica and played a soul melting blues riff as his modifier swung to the beat.

The music was so sweet and melodic that even the birdsongs stopped singing to listen to it.

But the blonde just kept on talking and her gaze didn't shift the way of his harmonica, his dangling modifier or even his face.

'An' I sez tuh him, I sez, you ain't talkin' to no Marilyn, mistuh - but he sez: "I kin see that, but don't the peroxide sting yore thighs?"' she said.

One could not mistake her accent: she came from Liverpool.

'Mersey me, are you ferry pleased to see me, or is your modifier just fed up with dangling?' she breathed.

'Are you talking to me?, she growled.

Maybe it was the sudden change in the tone of her voice that did it, or perhaps not; John could never be sure when he thought about it afterwards, but whatever it was, suddenly he had made up his mind; he knew what to do.

'Your eyes' he cried 'are like twin burnished hub caps, you hair, the smoke of burning tyres'

Luckily he stopped short of anything concerning lips and pedals.

He suddenly became aware of something pushing at his elbow, although he could see nothing, and he thought, 'I wonder if this is someone dressed in a prototype of the invisibility cloak I read about on the Guardian website this lunchtime.'

And yet this prototype must have been at an early stage of development or it may have been too tight as he could see the outline of her body.

And anyway - you couldn't always believe what you read in the newspaper - especially the Guardian - he was more of a Daily Mail man himself; he turned to face whatever it was

He started in horror, a shape changer; excruciating similes made manifest; no wonder he had difficulty identifying its form.

He could see the shapes altering and wondered if he had overdone his lunchtime drinking.

If he had just been able to get the next line, he wouldn't have drunk so much.

And then it came to him: 'You're the girl from the Shake n'Vac advert, aren't you?'

Geezee, finally you've shaken me out, now you must deal with my rath or at the least - buy me another drink.

He bought a double whiskey, two shots of rum and a milk stout; he gave her the milk stout.

She preferred the whiskey though.

He stared, transfixed by her milk mustache, as an old memory bubbled up from deep within him.

julie
she remembered the kiss from the shaving cream.

She was a tennis skirted, shaving cream and strawberries sort of gal with high maitenance pretensions, chocolate coloured hair and frisbee wrists.

John wondered just where the plot had been lost, he couldn't find it anywhere, at least not yet.

He thought that it might Google it and see where it had got to.

but just as he turned on the computer, his past caught up with him, and the thing he'd been dreading for years finally happened.

The thing the he'd been dreading, the certainty that the end was nigh. And there it was in black and white: THE END.

He decided to risk the maddness and so it was, that later, with an eerie sense of Deja Vu...

John looked up from his desk just as darkness was beginning to fall.

'Why is that darkness always falling?' he sighed, as he picked it up and put it back on the shelf...

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It was her fate to be left on the shelf.

Poor old Eve - tomorrow was always going to be special... Christmas, a New Year, a wedding.

Could John finally be the one? Mr. Right at last! Well, thought Eve while smiling beguilingly, at least it's a stab at a plot.

Of course, that was what had happened to the plot: someone had murdered it!

You are forgetting literary license. Anything can happen in those first magic moments. John and Eve can both multitask.

´Moffat!´screamed the ghostly voice of the murdered plot.
'Where are yooouu...'and the final vowel turned into the whisltle of the wicked wind that blew away Eve's last hope of happiness!

but no!... wait...what was that scratching feebly at the door?

Could be a stray plot. But just in time Eve cranks the beguiling smile up a notch. One of her most beguiling (she hopes) but is John beguiled? Hard to tell. He’s been through a lot lately. There's the divorce of course but also the argument with next-door about the wheelie bin not to mention the altercation with the Albanian taxi-driver. He isn’t in the best of moods and may take a lot of beguiling. Oh-oh, thinks Eve, that's more than one line. I've overdone it again.

"But never mind!" She thinks, slightly hysterical by now; "divorce, Albanians, wheelie bins, taxi drivers - they are all woter under the bridge; what counts is love" and with that she turns to him and tries the smile again

And with some success this time if the tremor in John's lower lip is anything to go by.

Unfortunately the tremor is trumped in more senses than one by the earthquake in John's underpants.

This could be a major upheaval in my life, thinks John, who can never resist a good metaphor.

The simile on Eve's face is like a ray of lice in the darkness which has yet again fallen off the shelf.

Indeed it is, but John finds it strangely attractive.

Besides, after his recent faux-pas vis-a-vis the commotion in his nether-garments, he can't afford to be fussy.

The beam of her grin illuminates detail on dusty clauses in John's personal indemnity for household accidents and his irascible attitude to the law of Tort.

Eve is starting to think she might be better off at home with a Woody Allen movie.

As if in the nick of time, John made his mind up, and he held out his arms,"Eve - could you...would you?" His voice died away and he looked at her, waiting for an answer

'Take the money and run,' she says.

he looks wildly around "what the fuck are you on about?"

Suddenly there is a loud crashing noise from outside and John, tearing his gaze from Eve's obvious charms, makes an amble-shamble to the window - trying to hide his excitement by keeping his back to Eve.
It's one of the Albanian who has knocked over a pile of rubbish while attempting to ignite John's wheelie bin.

'I say, old chap', sniggered the Albanian, eyeing Johns nether regions lustfully, 'is that a cucumber in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?'

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John suddenly remembers a scene from Spinal Tap and decides to laugh furiously.

The Albanian, however, was a great fan of Mae West (he hadn't seen Spinal Tap) and, moreover, had just finished his 'How to write the Best Purple Prose' course. He turned evasively to Eve...

but then he remembers the wheelie bin is in peril and instead reaches for the small gun he always keeps concealed in his underpants

Eve, or more correctly Eva Sively, smirks at this purpleness.

Deep Purple being but one of her hidden passions.

...but not the only one! She was also a closet Albaniaphile...

The result of a holiday in Corfu where she met a charming young Albanian fisherman.

Oh, the way her knees had melted when Enver Hotxed had said, Ti fliske shqip!, the million dollars she'd won from the orthopaedic surgeon had funded her lifestyle ever since.

The Albanian (whose handle was, fortuitously, Fatlum), eyed her synovial joints with interest, before sliding surreptitiously to her ventral region. 'I wonder,' he mused idly, 'if her surgeon would stretch to enhancement?'...

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But, alas, stretching surgeons was not something he wanted to do just now so he decided to figuratively squash that though into the hot bin, shoot the cross dressing Albanian in the foot and scarper into hyper space

'Hold this for a sec luv.' said Fatlum slipping her his Ipod.

Eve grasped Fatlum's pod in her hot, sweaty paw, and...

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scanned his most recent plays, dismayed to see it consisted mostly of Kylie Minogue and Right Said Fred.

Meanwhile John, who thought he was on a sure thing, just looks bewildered.

He is, in fact, cut to the quick; his love life, and more importantly, his waste disposal opportunities, are both in danger of extinction; only one thing can save the day....will he be able to pull it off though?

He reached for where Eve had stuck in to the wall and found, despite having soaked it in nail polish remover, he still couldn't pull it off.

Just then, the wheelie-bin exploded with a tremendous roar, raining rancid rubbish and ill-considered alliterations onto John's unprotected lirerary pretensions.

Helvigo Jenkins

'I must stop to ponder the meaning of all this,' thought John as he stopped to ponder the meaning of all this.

'If I ponder yonder, the girl may yet grow blonder,' he thought, fishing in his pocket for his khakis.

But do I want blonder or that she grows fonder - for perhaps she may wander while I stand and wonder.

It occurred to him that he'd lost the plot again, and speedily wandered off to search for it, scrabbling amongst foul-smelling fish fingers and bilious bones.

He knew that course would come in handy one day...

After what seemed like hours spent groping in the dark, John's exclaimation of "Eurika!" meant only one thing to Eve.

Eve finds herself conflicted. There is something embarassing about watching John scrabble through the wheelie bin....but at the same time she finds it rather touching.

She almost felt as though she were intruding on a most personal scene and felt her face immdeiately redden in the cool backness of the room; the Albinian picking up on it almost immediately began swinging his great torch about the room, causing the green in her eyes to dance mischievously.

Whilst her green waltzed gaily around the room, the Albanian flashed his monstrous torch with hideous abandon, causing Eve...

to make comparisons with a Fellini film or perhaps Ron Jeremy.

At which point, John reappeared, sporting a slightly foetid Star Spangled Codpiece, 'Found it' he chortled.

"The plot??!!" Eve and the Albanian both gasphed...

'No, that's somewhere in the wreckage of my life, but these' he leered 'have served me well'

'May I sniff them, please?' begged Eve with a tear in her eye.

...in the absence of any other illicit substance, sniffing a foetid codpiece was positively alluring...

emboldened by this response to his underwear John lunges at the Albanian's torch...

the rancid smell burned away the starting of the mustache from the curled corners of her pink lips (not to mention every hair from inside her nostrils!) but...ahhh...the memories of those orchids strewn about that land mine infested white sand beach were sweet.

It was the 'boom' when you picked them that had lingered in his mind and now, with the wheelie bin in bits, it was the 'boom' that had him captivated...

It was the word 'captivated' that jogged his memory now....Fak....could it be...yes it was....Fak the Albino Albanian from the detention camp...or as they all knew him back then, White Night Irene!

Strange how no one in the room quivered at the thought of a wavy-line flash back sequence; a faint air of burned hair accompanied the melifluous orchestral sweep to.....

a new 'fro? Man, that hydrogen-pyroxide solution had always burned his eyes....but speaking of burning sensations - where was Eve - had her wooden leg kept her from nimbly dodging the flashback sequence wave-line???

..an unfortunate consequence of the blonding process, but non the less striking, as was her stacatto timbre of duende across the non-existent storyline...

And so the triangle struggled to take shape there in the obliterated mess of the wheelie bin, crackling on and off like a shorted out neon light, perhaps a last ditch, feeble gag reflex of an attempt at stitching a storyline to this quickly unraveling tapestry.

Suddenly, without warning, totally out of the blue, the unthinkable happened.

...they were all struck dumb!

In the suddenly of the moment Eve screamed out, "Please John, blank your mind, don't even think...." but even as the dim of the moment increased and her voice trailed off she knew it was too late; the albanian wheezed to himself as he placed the blue back in the canvas bag....

..but the blue, being a particularly capricious indigo, inked it's way onto a pamphleteer's tract, thus...the non-story spread .....

just before Fatlum launched himself into the aria from Carmen in a surprising falsetto....

"Ah perfido!" he cried with amazing grace, his falsetto failing him furiously (he, too, had taken the course)...

I don't belong here thinks John, but I can't leave now, something might happen.

'...ooo, boiled eggs' said Fatlum in an unexpected pastoral squirm of the tale....

as suddenly, in rushed Gorbachev waving her knees like a possessed aubergine until John lost count of the back-combed albatross gods of Penge. Poor old Gorbachev and her aching, throbbing mantelpiece.

'Boiled eggs?' cried Eve, flummoxed, 'are they something to do with the lost plot?' she hastily scurried off, her greens flashing furiously, to find out...

...if Gorbachev had the answers hidden in an ancient elephant's foot umbrella stand or was it merely an olfactory confusion between peroxide and sulphur?

'I say!'squealed Mikhail Sergeyevich, from the deranged depths of the East End, 'that beta-bloke has awoke!' and he scurried off, forthwith, to the eel 'n' pie shop to sing lustily for his supper.

'You know,' said Eve, hoping she doesn't sound posh, 'there is something quite mysterious about the fiction process. It helps us make sense of reality.'

" I still don't get why all these Russians have suddenly appeared though" she added, shivering slightly; "I hope it doesn't change things too much".

"But then a change is as good as a hoary old saying, so I shouldn't put all those eggs and aubergines in one basket unless I planning on making a Russian salad," she continued, as the Russians gathered round her basket, winking conspiratorially.

It was a shame that the Hoover chose that moment to strike, sucking up all superfluous characters and plot elements, leaving only...

...the sweet aroma of a sub-plot...seeping in from the knowing wink and side-ways glance of the latecomer...Rocky Ledge!

‘Does anybody fancy a chicken biryani?,’ said John clearly smitten with Eve’s intellect, ‘ there’s an Indian round the corner.’

He's being chased by a hungry cowboy.

'Take no notice of skunk,' says Eve,'he will lead us off the scent.'

Sure enough, skulking around the corner John spotted the Indian, bow and arrow clutched in one sweaty paw and a flaming vindaloo in the other.

'Vive l'ambiguity!' he cried...

from the shadows the albanians hand emerged, clutching a old leather bag containing a salve that he quickly spread on the Indian's flaming vindaloo; thus allowing him his first real relief of the spring and making an ali that would serve all greatly in the paragraphs to come.

Alright for them, thinks John, I don't even know which tense I'm in.

Eve-hiking an eyebrow-ventures that owing to John's nervous twitch, his misguided tenseness seems to be more present than past and offers her own home remedy...

... a lake of homeopathic water containing the secrets of the ancients and a well dispersed aspirin. It will all be explained in the future tense, passive voice and indicative mood by Eve Hiking and her Eyebrow Ventures.

The aspirin (as big as a compact car tire and about the same weight) has John perplexed but he nibbles away at it while watching all three of Eve's heads nodding in unison; noting that the purple of the Indians skin clashes with her blue hair....another one of those damned '60's flash backs...it will pass just as soon as Mr. Leary releases the Albanian's inner lizard.

And if it doesn't, John thinks, Man, he'll just have to keep on crinting.

Meanwhile, darkness having now fallen, John was getting desperate because the copy had to be with the editor tomorrow and he was sure to question the length of his sentences, so he ripped the sheet of paper from his old typewriter, screwed it up and threw it on the floor to join the rest of the crumpled pages lying there.

Helvigo Jenkins

More commas, that's what I need, thinks John, or perhaps a semi-colon or two.

John slapped his forehead so hard the force nearly rocked him out of his old typing chair, "My old nemisis, Punctuation! How could I be so daft as to turn my one blind eye - why even now he could feel it creeping out from beneath the divan as his knee jerked instinctively, imagining it's sharp talons sinking into his calf (much like those of so many pompus publishers and their toady proof readers!)

As his chair typed merrily away, oblivious, John decided his only recourse, given the fact that he was allergic to toads, was frenetic fornication...

...with his social secretary. During the act he ignored her facial hair, an oversight he would later come to regret when she made off with his razor and deposited it at the crime scene.

It didn't take the ol' bill long to put in an appearance. Armed with DNA hirsute evidence and CCTV footage, they courageously raided at dawn and shouted bravely ''Ello, ello' what 'ave we got 'ere then?', before slapping the cuffs on and herding John unceremoniously into the paddy wagon...

new julie
also at the crime scene,was my
lost wheelie bin with roller skates on
who took it? Bit fishy for him to take of.

In the van, meanwhile, the police are busy flinging the book at John; "you're being taken in for questioning on suspicion of being in possession of shaky grammar and punctuation, not to mention rogue waste disposal solutions; anything you say may be taken down and used as evidence, except those skanky underpants. I'm not touching those"

Underpants he exclaimed, underpants and he began to laugh hysterically. He'd just remembered squishing his hand written copy notes inside his grits when all the silliness started. He whipped them off, and laughing and spitting and gagging began to eat his skanky, silk groin cloth without sauce or hyperbole

Meanwhile, Eve was learning to dance the Rama-Buta in a vain attempt to win back the affections of her lost love. She thought fondly of her favourite pronoun, I, and her second favourite, he. It was all the grammar she needed.

'I love he' Eve thought, 'He love I.' Perhaps there was something more required, after all.

But who needs grammar if you can dance good? Man, I'd rather eat bananas, at least they have no bones.

And the maximum darkness falls; man, this is getting as repetitious as a prog-rock wig-out jam.

With a tear in her eye, Eve retrieved her lucky merkin from the jam and licked it thoughtfully. I must cut back on the adverbs, she told herself sternly.

....and with the slamming of the cell door, John bolted straight up; peeling his face off the keyboard as the drool dripped down from the corner of his mouth, "Whaaa...did, did I miss anything...did I write anything???"

Poor Eve. If she cuts back on the adverbs she may well get published but then John will hate her.

Eve seems to be sitting in the lap of luxury, until his wife enters the room - Eve stares blankly, thinking if ever there was a good situation to interject an adverb, she must surely be face to face with it.

One after one, by the star-dogged moon, too quick for groan or sigh, she trotted out twelve adverb sounds, and made an adverb pie.

John sighed, slumped in his chair,
Eve, Eve, must you rhyme
it’s the last thing I expected dear
just here, just at this time
you must be feeling the pain
as the works are gummed up, they’re shot
there’s nothing more to gain
from this hopeless little plot
there’s no neat little ball
for it to be rolled up into
no tidy ending as the closing credits fall
that fairy tale, dear Eve, has flew
please, take the wooden stake
before it mounts a new stand,
or paragraph, or chapter, or remake,
and drive it deep, deep as you can!

John decided, after much soul-searching and deep reflection, not to give up his day job...

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....I must say....I must say...was repeated over many times until finally John, in a partial subconscious stupor reaches for Eves hand, mumbling, "you must remember to turn off the telly and lay waste to these awful info-mercials..." before swirling away into 2 percent oblivion.

'Don't be such an old fuddy-duddy John,' said Eve, 'infomercials are all part of the internet experience.'

...the door to the bedroom swung back on it's hinges so hard that the picture of milk came loose from all but one of it's nails, as Fak, who'd been trying to sleep off his southern comfort on the couch walked in, his deflated ego slumped in his hand...