westid

the first few nights in there are the worst. if you didn’t shove it up your ass before you got arrested, you’re not going to have much of it lying around for a while. they lift you clean out of the system and, as they all go on oblivious, time stops for you a little while. there’s an entire universe there inside your mind, you a master of it – a god in your own right, the ego and the id like partners in crime play hide and seek with one another, and then all the lights go off

i keep going to this place in my dreams … there are people there, some still with us and some not so much these days, some people who have nothing to do with you in real life but exist alongside you. curious as it was, it was as though suddenly i became part of the ensemble. computer switch co. ltd. a closed down telephone switch with obsolete computer screens and coin operated washing machines stacked up with wires coming in and out of a destroyed ceiling

i went to a rave with some of these people, it was like charles lane … and overgrown with trees, but it was much steeper and went deeper on still, through the parade with the lord mayor of london, sometimes on this council estate in the middle of nowhere; it’s not all fun and games though, sometimes it kicks off, sometimes it gets serious

these devices, controlled by tiny little circuit boards that you can barely see outside. they were all around me in the cell. they had a little on off switch that made them all stick to you and emit coded radio signals that broadcast your every move to other devices that were connected over whatsapp all the way through the rest of the prison

i was losing it big time. there were a load of people who looked like prisoners but they could walk up and down with power tools. and this lad ash, he comes in and takes a load of bolts out and replaces them. i don’t know if that really happened or not. of course it didn’t … yet i still feel as though i don’t know

i come to the end of my rope. i was stood on this shitty little ledge because i was on the bottom landing, the cell was really tall and this bluebottle was pissing me off flying around the food they got me at lunch time, which for some reason i can only surmise that i tried to dispose of it down the plug hole in the sink. mash potato and peas all blocking the plug up so that the pump makes this horrible gurgling noise. other people in nearby the cells, shouting and yelling at each other, banging on their windows and callin out animal noises

… can’t say i didn’t have an absolute laugh with the short-tempered impatience of my category B peers …

i missed the bluebottle and thought fuck it. and that’s when i hit the jackpot, i fell off the ledge with a rolled up newspaper in my hands that was for some reason stopping me from dropping it and grabbing onto something … i thought “fuck it, it’s just a radiator” [but it was actually a big fuck off ledge, a radiator, the sink, your fuckin back]

falling through clouds and worlds with islands floating along in the sky around me and above, as i fell down below, stephen road … i chinned myself on the windowsill and the radiator on the way down. that was definitely more than a radiator

some people came with their “covid dogs” [don’t even ask] and we ended up in this massive house setting up speakers with these people i’ve known for literally millennia .. but have never met before in my entire life .. and then we had this massive party

there was something on television in the background, and i remember some nurses looking at me and shining a torch in my face, hooking me up to these beeping machines like an electrocardiograph – trying to squeeze my arm til it pops out of the socket with their annoying as fuck blood pressure machines. i think it was a documentary about the cuban missile crisis

floating down the river. we just came alive. the whole galaxy had turned up for this one, and it was fuckin dank all around. floating down the river as i started to come around, must have been a couple of days. i could hear the ducks. in the water floating around, i’m in the ass-end of the entire jail C-1-21, but i could hear the ducks, in the water outside