The Black Hole Terminus

A loosely-formed mendicant order of vagrants and junkies hovers and twitches as fidgety and deformed as pigeons, edging the verge of an inevitable event horizon with an unknowable fear flashed across darting eyes, red and drippy. Soaked in urine and caked in dirt, these people are the dark matter of the populace. There, but not there, you see. Sheltered under red-brick colonnades, porticos encrusted in stolid greeny-white shit, lying in the bus shelter, mired in the entropy of a week’s worth of sodden news. Trace the dark flow backwards to Victoria station, the black hole terminus. Swirling under a thick and soupy sky. It is the gravitational well, pulling all towards it, struggling to suck in Westminster cathedral, that Byzantine time-warp error, where our mendicants hold on for dear life. Its esplanade is a horrific orgy of ecstatic visions and demonic possession, speaking in tongues, hideous cackling, limping limbs or simply lopped-off, flea-bitten mongrels lying lewdly on sleeping bags, methadone, picking, scratching and shivering. Mock-religiosity, pious prostration. Jerusalem for the damned.