BIROCO.COM ~ Hoxton

Hoxton

JUNE 28 03

Sunny Saturday afternoon. Just a bath to have now, then something to eat, left-over potato curry, then out to hit the pubs of Hoxton. Hogan has been told by someone that Hoxton is kicking. Skill is away on a trailer-trash holiday in a caravan parked at a château in France with three guys from work. He's taken Hogan's poker chips with him.

'Do they know how to play poker?' I asked before he went.

'Not yet.'

So, Hoxton. The splendid Hoxton Hall is where myself and some others put on a rather sexually explicit 'performance art' show last year.

Rachel laid an egg on stage after a beautiful dance naked behind ostrich-feather fans. She catches my eye and signals readiness, I step towards the stage with a large nest and place it for her to squat down into. It was then I noticed a little blood seepage mostly hidden from the audience. It was going to be a period egg.

Out it plops and flops around in the twig basket nest. I'm to take it into the audience and invite someone to eat it. On stepping out this cunt I know in the front row – Turkish poet Hakan – opens out his arms to receive it and I say to myself cunt you are you can cunting have it. It rolls up his shirt as he falls back in a drunken stupor rolling out the red carpet to his chin as if to say Fuck you baby! Like the evening was staged for him, the audience walked away. Some stooges you don't need to pay.

Fantastic ostrich dance. I saw it once before, again at Hoxton Hall, watching from the back, a last act just as we were leaving. She seemed to be getting tremendous applause on announcement of her name, people had seen this one before. We loitered by the door to watch. That time the guy who was given the egg ate it. I was mesmerised by her. I must have said to myself that I'd like to meet her and scratched a mental sigil in a haze.

So within a month due to a friend getting her to do her act at a performance show he was organising, I was back in the same hall practising getting the nest in the right position. She looked great even in slacks. I thought to myself, there's a little bit of magic working out here, simply greet it for the pleasure it brings for now, the future is a desert wiping over traces already. Sometimes I give myself this kind of advice, like Marcus Aurelius.