Category Archives: Bella Basura

Recording of Artificial Shakespeare

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Late last year I wrote a short comedy play for radio called Artificial Shakespeare. The play looks at a dystopian near-future where AI voice actors have taken all the speaking parts in a radio drama series.

In July I had the priviledge of having my Artificial Shakespeare recorded at The City Lit College in Holborn, directed by David Gooderson, sound by Erfan and performed by members of the City Lit Radio Theatre Company: Brigitte Boylan, Ruth Cowan, Anita Donley, Rebecca Fry, Monica Higuera, Nic Humberstone, Neil Marathe, Stephen Parkin, Jeremy Peckham and Jean Dark. This is that recording.

Incidentally, an AI created the image here, under prompting from me.

Limerance

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Limerance
Limerance 2025

Late half moon rising

Climbs the horizon

Dark in the early hours

Like a cold ragged sun

Cracked and fissured

Through still bare trees

Hangs like a lantern

A light in another’s window

A beacon of shared insomnia

Slips slowly through a lattice of branches

The movement of its own orbit

Marking these sleepless hours

As degrees on the ecliptic

Until it slips away

Into a blanket of cloud cover

And a dull day

shuffles in on rain

A New Poem

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I think that in the title of this new poem I have invented a new collective noun.

A Comfort of Aunties
Gaunts House 2012

A Comfort of Aunties

There will always be those

White haired ladies,

Angry in a lilac cardigan.

They are the ones to watch,

Bitter, twisted, politically astute.

They are rebellion, protest,

Resistance in your face.

They are just stop oil, XR,

Pagan vegan anarchist hunt sabs.

They are the battles of Newbury, and Twyford Down,

Greenham Common, CND, Bob Dylan

Me too Black Lives Matter

Martin Luther King.

Reclaim the City

Reclaim the Streets

Reclaim the night

Another world is possible

Because there will always be those

White haired ladies,

Angry in a lilac cardigan.

Throwback Tuesday Payback

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Lost and alone, I relentlessly haunt my own back catalogue, visiting and re-visiting the failures of my past. This piece – The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture – was first printed in the pamphlet Necro-Tourist from 1999.

The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture

Coyacan suburb, on the edge of Mexico City, was about the most unMexican place I’d seen in Mexico. In contrast to the crowded tumbledown streets, alleyways and markets I’d seen around Alameda Park and Zocalo, streaming with people, Coyacan was all lawns and driveways, villas set back behind flourishing palm trees, hardly any traffic here, hardly any people. It felt spacious and wealthy and paranoid. Like the British Ex-Pat barrios of the Spanish Costas, Coyacan had the same sense of furtively concealed lifelessness about it. Like photographs of Beverley Hills, or TV.

The Metro journey from the station in central Mexico City, across crowded town and through her endless undulating outskirts had taken almost an hour.  The Metro finally coughed us up right deep in the centre of shiney, Americano chain-store shopping mall. Here the incurable cyst of corporate-branded consumerism bubbled forth its phosphorescent plate-glass pus, depositing in the wake of its rancid slipstream, inter-continental brand names, sportswear, fast food, Wendys and Fucking McDonalds. All over again, just like anywhere. O Hell.

From here we consulted our guide book and scuttled our way through the network of dull closed-curtain unpromising Coyacan suburb. We were looking for The Blue House, home to the Frieda Kahlo Museum, housing the largest collection of her works in the world.

Magically, we found the Blue House. We also found the Blue House was closed for the next eighteen months for essential repairs. As we consulted our guide book again, without much hope for other interesting places in Coyacan, it began to spit rain. After some serious trawling in the culture section, the guide book threw us the Trotsky Connection…MORE

Extract from Necrotourist – originally a limited printing of a hard-copy A5 folded stapled photocopied pamphlet produced in 2001.

(This is Not a) Love Song

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A Valentines day reposting, a short piece from my 2017 pamphlet – Clutches of Love. Introduction by Katya Lubarr. Image: thanks to el Senor Don Challissimo.

By Dave Challis March 2017

Probably Inappropriately

When you done your tantric kundalini kali-spell on me I was lost enveloped in psychic love-haze, I was drawn, rising, filling, swelling emotions that confused me and had in the past lead to casually fucking someone.
Probably Inappropriately.

Warning bells went off somewhere in the distance and I felt us reflex, in unison, pull back, but stayed long hours, hung in giddy uneasy equilibrium, in circular psychedelic emanations, trident penetrates the sky.

Still. Still. Still.
Waiting, while unseen proto-cosmic arousals reverberate the air,
threatening to immanently unfold sudden into cataclysmic karmic collisions climaxing.
Still. Still. Still.

So we lay down on the bed, fully-clothed in the dull downpour afternoon. Clasped in yogic breathing intensely staring deep into soul-eyes we sank down dipped below the surface entwined long time waiting. Did you call?
Probably Inappropriately.

Bella Basura 2017

Those Things That Come in Threes

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The photo on Leah’s post threw me. It really did, it bamboozled me and discombobulated and confused me. It was a vertical photo, almost certainly taken with a phone.  A straight forward portrait orientation of a man, his head and shoulders in profile, he is unsmiling. It feels as if the man is posing, deliberately turning his face from the camera, purposely pretending he’s not being photographed. I got a palpable sense that the man was prevaricating, in profile, in portrait, or it was uncanny valley photoshopped.

But that wasn’t what shook me.

Visible behind the man is a muddy woodland path, leading off into distant damp water-logged winter crop fields, it is obviously somewhere South Eastern England. The man is wearing a dark beanie hat, it looks old. His coat is weathered. His face unshaven and blanched in the cold air. The lobes of his ears, poking out from under the hat, are ruddy with chill, both his eyes and his nose look runny.

The caption reads “Simon at the Beech Woods”.

But its not Simon, not the Simon I know, and that Simon doesn’t know Leah anyway.

It’s not Simon, it most certainly is Dan. Dan, Dan my ex-, Dan TEFL Dan, Dan in Japan, Dan.

But Leah doesn’t know Dan, in any case he’s in Japan, so why would he appear on Leah’s feed.

That was number one, the first of those things that come in threes.

I can’t decide if it’s good things or bad things that come in threes. I can’t decide if seeing Dan pretending to be Simon on Leah’s post is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just confusing. Do confusing things also come in threes?

The second thing was the Recidivist Philosopher Podcast. That’s the name of the series, I didn’t make it up, I don’t really know what it means, I don’t even know why I even went there, but I did.

The presenter was quite stunning, the moment I saw him I couldn’t look away. He had long curly blond hair, his eyes a blinding shade of blue, vibrant against his pale eyelashes and eyebrows. His mouth was wide, his soft pink lips could barely close over his big white perfect teeth.

But that wasn’t why I couldn’t look away.

He introduced every episode with “Greetings! I am the Recidivist Philosopher! This is my podcast. My name is Dirk”. But he wasn’t Dirk, I don’t even know anyone called Dirk. It was Simon, the Simon that wasn’t at the Beech Woods, the Simon who doesn’t know Leah, although he may know Dan in Japan.

It’s so confusing, because although it definitely was Simon, and he spoke with the same unbridled enthusiasm about all the same things he always spoke endlessly about – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Schiller and the rest – he didn’t speak in his normal louche Cumbrian drawl at all.

This Simon had a painfully cut-glass Home Counties accent, it was so posh it was a bit unbearable to listen to. It was so posh, super posh, like fake posh, it sounded how Jacob Rees Mogg looks, which is gruesome posh.

And although he certainly was Simon, in the podcast he wore his hair long and looked 20 years younger than he actually was, as if he’d made these podcasts when he was still young, before podcasts even existed. I hope Simon’s not dabbling in time travel.

It is so confusing, I can’t get my head around it. Especially since, the third thing of those things that come in threes hasn’t happened yet, so I’ve no way of knowing what to make of it all. I can’t for the life of me imagine what the third thing will be, or if I will even recognise it when it happens.

What are those things that come in threes?

Her Feet, Her Blessed Feet

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Another late night insomnia driven delve into the unpublished, and possibly unpublishable stories stacked in boxes under my bed. I now present the latest installment of my Slush Pile Bonanza. This piece was written in 2016, and although I performed it a few times, it never felt quite finished. Having said that, I notice it has a word count of 666 words, so at some point I must have worked pretty hard on it to achieve such a deliberate number .

Her Feet, Her Blessed Feet

The fact is I can smell her feet from here, a hundred full paces away, I swear I can still smell her feet. And she’s up there, oblivious, waiting for me, outside the cinema. She’s schmoozing and cruising, hob-nobbing with the other celebrities on the red carpet. In tailored red-sex dress and Jimmy Choos she is a papparazzi wet dream, but she is waving only to me, directly to me.

Pathologically photogenic, especially in the pyrotechnics of a media storm, she is majestic! I should be up there beside her but I’m dawdling by a magazine kiosk watching, because I am enveloped in billows of her foot odour, even by this Newsstand, I can still smell her feet.

I’m cooling my heels and curling my toes, and I’m thinking and I’m thinking, should I turn and run? but how could I? Look! Look at her! Beautiful, flawless, intelligent, witty, sometimes wild, mostly amusing. A movie-star girl-next-door goddess-lover.

If only she’d wash her putrid feet once in a while.

This is our first date actually, I’m her guest at a launch party for a blockbuster film she stars in. Although I call it our first date, I’ve been working closely with her for six weeks now, but she approached me and quite assertively insisted it was me that accompany her here alone tonight. Just the two of us, at a movie star gala bash where she’s the resident princess of the show and I am her Podiatrist. Actually I’m on overtime this evening, I’m being paid double-time, just to be here.

Officially my brief is to assist her in breaking in a new pair of “catwalk shoes”. We’ve been working with moleskin and surgical spirit immersions all week. I hoped the spirit would harden the cushions of her sole and so reduce chances of blisters. I had also hoped the alcohol spirit would kill off fungi and dampen her aura-like reek. Futile. Tonight she smells like a passed out wino, one that forgot to wash her feet.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Or I’m over-sensitive, being her clinical chiropodist, personal pedicurist, Reflexology Master and Consultant on Cobblers, her feet are my professional responsibility, it says so on my contract.

Although I do wonder about the legal situation with my work contract if I do decide to sleep with her. Do I still have to do her feet, or can I delegate?

She’s waving right at me now, unmistakably, I have to go to her, for the sake of my career I have to join her in the locker room stench of her bloody red carpet. Am I just a Pet Podiatrist?

Shit! This is our first date. To me, this feels like the first day of my life.

And aside from the foot odour, I am so in love with her. I so want, I so want…

Then again, I daren’t imagine what it’d be like if we did get intimate. What would I do if, while cosily settling down curled up with coffee on her Zen-White sex-sofa, she nonchalantly kicked off her Manolo Blahnik’s? Oh Lord! What if she then peeled off her sheer black tights?

I can’t! you know! Nylon panty-hose is a breeding ground for obscure and rancid bacterias, everyone knows that. Why do women do this thing with the panty-hose tights?

It isn’t only destructive of natural fauna, it isn’t only physically damaging to the whole lower regions of the female body, it also constricts the base chakra and engorges the meridians with stagnant Chi. Sex would be a psychic impossibility.

Oh! But here she comes, beaming out to me, over the heads of the flashbulbs popping, her angelic face haloed in the gold of her blonde curls, cherub-like. And her smile, hold me while I swoon, like an all-encompassing sun-rising heart-leap, that very very nearly cleanses away my retching knowledge of her corn-encrusted feet stinking.

I so want, I so want, but I really don’t know if I can stand her feet, her blessed feet….

June 2016 Word count 666

One More Cup of Coffee For The Road

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Self-portrait 2017. photo by Bella Basura.
Self-portrait 2017. photo by Bella Basura.

It seemed never to be quiet, at that time. We were on the move for sure, from cafe to cafe to bar to hostal to cafe around and around, radios playing loud in every place. Noise and radios, chatter and clatter and noise and songs on the radio. For some reason we had gotten superstitious about Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World”. It was on the radio a lot at that time, and everytime it came on we fell into a weird ritual heralding departure. First we had to listen in silence to the song all the way through. When it was over we would immediately stand and leave. That song was our cue to get back on the move. Once we were back out on the street we were guided by whatever we found out there. Most times we found nothing much and so bought a newspaper and sat in a park. But if we saw a red car we went to the next bar, if we saw a telephone box we had to look for a hostal. If we saw a junkie, we scored, if we saw a copper, we fled the town. And so it was that we found ourselves in Andalucia, by the side of the road, hitching down to Morrocco, we told ourselves. That was the plan, I think.

We got picked up by an inter-continental mega-truck just outside Cordoba, and we pounded the freeway like kings, high in the cab of this mighty ride. The road rose and fell for dozens upon dozens of miles through foothills and moorlands until after a few hours the road reared up and topped out at a roadside bar, and that’s where the trucker left us. Lorry drivers and travellers and holiday makers meandered in the wide carpark. I guess it was some vista viewing point across the mountain range. We sat in the bar drinking tap water until Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World” came on the radio.

That’s how we hooked up with a man in a red Mondeo, shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket hanging inside the passenger door. He was clearly a business man or travelling salesman, he seemed grateful for our company. In fact he spoke incessantly, speaking over the sound of the car radio, except when a good song came on, then he would listen and do drums on the steering wheel. As I zoned him out, gazing at the grassy hillsides and wild mountains, I wondered what we were doing, where it would end, this compulsive running to the sea. And that is when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” on the radio, although it would be many years more before I was able to name it. The road curved down around a peak, sweeping in down flowing loops, the huge rocky scree pebbled slopes of the mountain looming above us as the road bottomed out into the wide green-carpet of river basin. Bob Dylan and EmmyLou Harris sang on “One more cup of coffee for the road, One more cup of coffee before I go, To the valley below”. It was a message, an omen. We were tumbling down into the valley below, we were running free now, onto the sea, and the straits, to Morrocco.

Inevitably, as we approached Malaga Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World” came on the radio. We listened in silence all the way through the song, and then we asked Shirt-Guy to drop us off anywhere here. We landed by the big circular wall of La Malagueta. We watched the red Mondeo weave off into the early evening traffic and superstitiously headed for the next bar.