I trace the outline of Elena’s face, running my fingertip down her delicate nose and along her slim jaw line. She is young and the texture of her skin flawless, like a pebble on the beach made smooth by the sea. She has not a single line or a scar or blemish, except for the pretty freckles speckling her cheeks. She is the colour of coffee and cream. Her sleeping head with its auburn hair cascading like a waterfall on the pillow next to me; she is truly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I like watching Elena as she sleeps. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I lie listening to the soft rhythm of her breathing; attuning my own with hers, until I begin to drift off.

Last night I shaved her cunt.  She asked me to do this because she thought it would create intimacy. She sat on the bath and I kneeled between her spread thighs. I shaved her using shaving soap, warm water and a razor (I think she enjoyed the danger.) I patted her dry with a towel and then bought her to orgasm with my tongue.

Elena is a seer. She says she knows things I don’t. Sometimes I sit and listen to her prophesies and estimations. I am a maniac who is destined to drag someone over the cliff with him. I am schizoid; a different person from one day to the next. I contradict myself as various shards of my personality strive for dominance. Elena wonders whether I can remember what I have said or what I have done. Elena wonders who exactly I am. I am fragmented.  She asserts her belief that I must hear voices in the theatre of my mind, a Shakespearian performance in which I remain embroiled.

My name is Ricky Quinn. And, of course, Elena is right. I wonder who Ricky Quinn is, too. I wonder, also, where are the assassins with bullets forged from insurgence?

Elena and I live in a castle. A castle atop a hill that is perpetually shrouded in diaphanous folds of cloud the colour of graphite. From here Elena and I have the potential to command lightning strikes on the world below us. We live as gods in emancipation. From here in the eternal of our own choosing we could cast our nets in seas of time. We don’t have money; there is no need for money here. Money is the wage of slavery. We are given only to the pursuit of freedom and pleasure. We see no horizon from this point. The sea and land are sealed to the sky with a seamless stitch. And I can look at a single point of light in the distance, a star or a lighthouse or the glow of a bedroom window, and drawn like a moth I can travel there instantly.

I moulded Elena myself. Created her out of clay with my own hands and breathed life into her lungs. She is an elemental, a fantasy woman made flesh.  I know that she will never age beyond youth: her beauty, eternal, will never wither away like a dying flower. Elena’s beauty is manifest. To this I am enslaved, powerlessly drawn onto the jagged rocks by the song of the siren.

Actually, we live on the top floor of a tower block and I met Elena in a back-street bar. But what has reality got to do with anything?

It’s a reoccurring theme, an escape from the tedium of everyday existence.  You see, there will never be the revolution that I dreamed of. Right now in the schools and halls of academia they are engendering a nation of docile weaklings, fattened up for the kill, ready for whatever bombshell that’s going to drop. Ready for whatever shit they serve up on a plate. This is a generation budding into servile acceptance. Losing is ok. We must not dent anyone’s delicate sensibilities. It’s alright to be a zero – you’re still just as good as anyone else. Equality is an illusory concept, subtly intended to make people feel content with being toothless and immobilized.

This is a new generation to whom failure and loss and domination by unworthy powers is to be accepted easily and with a stultified heart. They have removed the desire for insurrection by ensuring individuals absorb into their psyches a homogenised world where excellence = mediocrity. Lower the standards and create a nation of educated morons. It soothes their sense of indolence. It removes the polarity between endeavour and lethargy. Even if there were a revolution, it wouldn’t even make headlines. Nobody would want to read it because the desire for rebellion diminishes in the flood of banal TV commercials. Blazing rhetoric becomes a mere abstraction that does not penetrate the ears of a Playstation generation too high on their own dopamine to wake up and smell the creeping cancer that threatens to choke the life out of them. Too anesthetised to realise the contempt in which they are held. It is as effective as if they’d been given an intravenous shot of morphine.

The government is corrupt. They already stopped everyone smoking. The next target is the pub. Then it will be your model aeroplane club, vintage typewriter enthusiasts, poetry collectives and coffee shops or Christ knows whatever else. What they fear is any kind of unity in the community. They fear groups being formed. Their real target is the beating heart of society. Their target is your heart. They’ll tear out your soul. They’ll form their own clubs for people to join. They won’t call it the Hitler Youth. They’ll call it the Young Conservatives or the Labour Confederate of Upstanding Citizens or something like that. The Green Metro-Sexual Coalition of Fucking Wet Do-Gooders.

But don’t hit back with assassinations.  Don’t hit back at all. Instead you will smile and nod and shake the visiting politician’s hand. You will graze dim-wittedly on the grass-lands they have provided for you. And as the tanks roll in just go back to your television and Coca-Cola. Go and eat your McDonalds and shut the fuck up you bunch of fucking zombies.

Accept and consume. Now there’s a party political slogan if ever I heard one.

Staring from the window, there is no release from the monotony of dull British streets, scarred with the contortions of so many desolate lives.

This is a world where starvation is a dish best served cold.

Beauty and freedom must prevail. It’s time we started hitting back. Some of these people need assassinating. They are as cold blooded as any Peter Sutcliffe, or as putrefying as any religious fascism; bludgeoning the populace into uniform homogeny.

Get rid of your radios, get rid of your televisions and take no fucking notice of them. They’re feeding you a crock of shit.

Poor Elena. She has me on a pedestal. She thinks I am something I am not. But if I mention this to her she says no, I only think she thinks that. I am an egomaniac.

“Now how can you say that?” I ask. “To someone you look up to and revere.”

“I may as well pack my stuff and get the fuck outta here,” she says. “You are mad.”

I do not respond. Elena is such a card.  One day I would, of course, make us both rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But for that she would have to stick around. I am her future investment. She has so little foresight. There is no getting out. Where’s she gonna go and live? On the moon?

On and on these little confabs go. On and on while somewhere in the underworld Orpheus searches for his bride, a tornado tears along the Floridian coastline, and the Titanic lies crumbling at the bottom of the ocean. All these things happen a million miles away from me.

I light a cigarette. Elena says, “You’re such a cunt” and walks out the room. I remain untouched, staring unconcernedly out the window. The clouds look grey and angry. I read the clouds like an old Gypsy reads tea-leaves. There is a storm brewing.

I hear the front door slam and Elena is gone.

I ask myself. Who is truly the mad one here?

U.V. Ray can be found lurking here:www.uvray.moonfruit.com