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"My words: in the form of a story"

I may not be able to write poetry that well but I write pretty good prose and I wrote this just now and if you don't like it Filmbuff then sod off:

He looked down at the nametag pinned to his green-white striped uniform. It said Hello my name is John Froster except his name was only in black, not the golden words of managerial status but the evanescent black of a transient hire-and-fire worker – Excuse me – with no real worth – hey – the sum of his life so far – HEY – he looked up at the raised voice. An irate man with a shopping basket full of meaningless provisions stood angrily before him, his face contorted in spasms of rage and reddening at the lack of “service with a smile” that the adverts had promised. Froster picked up the packet of toilet roll and listened to the reassuring bleep of the machine in front of him. Vaseline bleep carrots bleep milk bleep cheese bleep baked beans bleep top-shelf magazine and he hit the off button with his foot. The lack of bleep rang out like a sonic boom sledgehammer and the angry man moved into his vision and asked if there was a problem; the vein on his head had begun to recede as a funereal pallor set in, no, no problem at all I’ll just call over the manager – you don’t have to do that – no it’s no problem at all – the angry man had now turned ghostly white and looked on the verge of fainting – MISTER KINGS how much is HUSTLER – Kings walked over already reddening at the embarrassment as he felt the gaze of every man, woman and child on his face – four pounds ninety-nine pence and when you’ve finished this shift come to my office – the ghost white man tried to pay Forster as quickly as was humanly possible but a fumbled attempt to release the buckle on his wallet and they all were staring at him and the buckle wouldn’t unfasten and the magazine was in front of him and they were all looking at it and at him and he was stood there unable to loosen the buckle on his wallet and a woman shook her head at him and THE BUCKLE WOULD NOT UNDO and others joined her: a cacophony of tuts and shakes and disparaging whispers and he dropped it an ran for the door. Froster smiled as the next customer moved towards him. Pervert.

Kings paced his office in the perpetual solemnity of a jumped-up dropout whose glasses looked serious enough to meet managerial assessment criterion A. He looked at Froster seated before him and began pacing again, covering every square inch of the 6 by 6 converted disabled toilet cubicle that had become his office. He stopped mid-pace – You know this really isn’t good enough Froster and I know he didn’t complain but what you did was quite unacceptable – So you’re firing me – no we don’t say that; we are reassessing the sum worth of your – Kings struggled to remember the words from the training manual – factor production costs – Kings said it with the smug satisfaction of a man regurgitating impressively meaningless phrases without realising they are meaningless – So you’re firing me – Froster was persistent but Kings continued unabated – no, we have reached the decision that your aggregate – he really couldn’t remember this one and so looked about desperately on the notice board for a suitably polysyllabic replacement and failed miserably – shelf stacking was sadly lacking – Froster got up and walked out – where do you think you’re Kings’ disembodied voice rang out down the aisles. Kings shut the office door, looking angrily at the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor (a remnant from its cubicle days) and wondered how many games of solitaire would elapse before he could go home.

Froster opened his arms as he walked down the aisle leading to the exit and due to the wonders of feng-shui aligned shelf spacing he was able to scythe a satisfying number of products off the shelves on to the floor before storming out of the automatic doors and the bright sun of mid-afternoon shone down on him. He slowed to a walking pace and let the adrenaline die down. He wasn’t happy. The job had been the first step towards rebuilding his life and now all that work had been undone by a self-important manager and his chain of thought was interrupted by the sight of the angry/pale man sat behind the wheel of his car with his head bowed on the steering wheel and their eyes met in a flash lightning explosion of mutual apathy that manifested itself in the livid red rage of reciprocated responsibility for the other’s fate and the car engine started and Forster began to run as the mad angry man in the red Ford Passat accelerated towards him. And the audible crash caused even the partially deaf Kings (undisclosed on his management application forms but the selectors knew it and planned to use it against him when he demanded a pay-rise; it was why he had been given the job) to look up from his solitaire. A concertinaed Ford Passat lay in a crumpled heap on the redbrick wall of the supermarket and Froster looked on partly in shock and partly in relief as his assailant slumped forward unconscious on the crumpled bonnet as Froster ran away, not caring where just anywhere but there with the blood still fresh on the windscreen and the still active wipers pathetically colliding with the formerly angry man’s head as lay it dormant on the bonnet as the assembled entourage of women and children lamented his death with wails, moans and the sad shaking of heads in a sudden awareness of their own mortality and the wipers clicked against his head in a vain effort to keep the lack of rain from the shattered windscreen until a small child read an elegy from Keats, then the entourage dispersed and the windscreen wipers gave up their frustrated attempt to dignify the situation.

Froster ran to the church where he had sought salvation many times before but always found the same bolted doors and always heard the same scuttling away of feet as he asked someone to open the doors for him. Today the doors were open and the congregation entering and he sensed his chance and ran and the doors slammed shut and yet he still ran to them hoping to pull them open before they were bolted AND THE BOLT SLAMMED SHUT and he tugged frantically, pleading, begging, weeping to be granted absolution and the feet scuttled away and he slumped to the marbled step not knowing what to do or where to go and acutely aware of his own guilt in the events that had transpired, no, conspired against him, as they always did. They plotted and schemed and conspired against him and against his chances of happiness and continually knocked him down and set him back and kept him in the same hellish state of disrepair, unable to think, breathe or sleep because of the insufferable burden of guilt that weighed down his fledgling conscience and dominated his life and they added to it and built it up and waited till the tension became so much he would snap AND THE DOORS SLAMMED SHUT and he only wanted absolution and so he ran back to the scene of the accident but all that remained were the fragments of shattered headlight that littered the yellow-paved path except they were just the remnants of a smashed bottle from a fight between two drunks and the events that had taken place there had been washed away under the industrial-strength pressure hosing of the Cleaning Company incorporated – we clean anything as good as new or your money back – and in the salt-water blast all debris and markings were erased but nothing was cleansed and the ingrained dirt of the stain in his memory remained and persisted there, festering and stagnating and adding to the intolerable burden of guilt in his head and he ran away from the scene as a disgruntled Kings emerged from the supermarket having lost his job after being exposed for incorrectly filling in his application form; he had only asked for a pay-rise in line with inflation.

Froster ran back to his house and she was there standing in the doorway waiting for him and she had come back without telling him and he cried tears of salvation because she had returned. The door was double-locked and he fumbled with his keys, as hands still shook from the disappointment of realising that his dreams had invaded his reality. Again. And she was still not there and his heart ached and yearned for her to be there but she had gone and it had been nearly two years now and all his letters remained unanswered and she had gone. The silence left by her departure deafened him every time he tried to sleep: the mellifluous whispers and slow sighs and soft, soft, soft softness of her voice as she spoke to him in a language he didn’t understand and didn’t need to as the contours of her voice lapped around him and held him tightly, comforting and healing, toosc voo ponsay nigh jamais euh lieu, votre coo de foudre nay jamais a ma coeur, the sounds ebbed and flowed and enveloped hims and he saw her and heard her in his mind Tout ce que vous pensez n’ai jamias eu lieu, votre coup de foudre n’est jamais a ma Coeur and he sobbed to himself and wished she was there as he sat on his bed alone and he re-read her last letter for the ten-thousandth time and her bitter words made him wince once again and he begged for forgiveness and he prayed again and still no-one knocked at the door and she was gone. AND SHE WAS GONE. gone. She was gone.

Froster sat alone on his mattress in the darkened room and shot himself once through the head.
The singing of children in the streets echoed off the grime on the angel white walls and down the road Kings ordered a coffee and.

Excellent stuff. I really, really like that style.

thanks... now I feel even worse at french than I did before... And I have a french oral test in ... three days time...

:D

Thanks very much for reading and liking it..

In hindsight I think I would have omitted the phonetic French bit because it looks a bit silly but I was trying to get across the sound, which is very soft and sibilant-y especially the first three words that are allided in spoken French to make a toos sound. The french is actually wrong; the second bit should have been n'etait jamais not n'est jamais but it was late and I was tired. And the whole thing means "Everything you think never took place, your love at first sight was never in my heart" which is a bad rendition of a line of poetry I read somewhere once. But the main point is that she uses the formal vous rather than tu, which shows that she did not love him as much as he thought.

makes you think. And that is the characteristic of all great forms of art. To make you think.

Well. This is the same as Goatboy's in a way. By that I do not mean it's similiar in structure or content, just that it's also hard to find words to reply.

Just so you know I've read it. It's excellent, but too hard to reply to.

I may not be able to write poetry that well but I write pretty good prose and I wrote this just now and if you don't like it Filmbuff then sod off:

He looked down at the nametag pinned to his green-white striped uniform. It said Hello my name is John Froster except his name was only in black, not the golden words of managerial status but the evanescent black of a transient hire-and-fire worker – Excuse me – with no real worth – hey – the sum of his life so far – HEY – he looked up at the raised voice. An irate man with a shopping basket full of meaningless provisions stood angrily before him, his face contorted in spasms of rage and reddening at the lack of “service with a smile” that the adverts had promised. Froster picked up the packet of toilet roll and listened to the reassuring bleep of the machine in front of him. Vaseline bleep carrots bleep milk bleep cheese bleep baked beans bleep top-shelf magazine and he hit the off button with his foot. The lack of bleep rang out like a sonic boom sledgehammer and the angry man moved into his vision and asked if there was a problem; the vein on his head had begun to recede as a funereal pallor set in, no, no problem at all I’ll just call over the manager – you don’t have to do that – no it’s no problem at all – the angry man had now turned ghostly white and looked on the verge of fainting – MISTER KINGS how much is HUSTLER – Kings walked over already reddening at the embarrassment as he felt the gaze of every man, woman and child on his face – four pounds ninety-nine pence and when you’ve finished this shift come to my office – the ghost white man tried to pay Forster as quickly as was humanly possible but a fumbled attempt to release the buckle on his wallet and they all were staring at him and the buckle wouldn’t unfasten and the magazine was in front of him and they were all looking at it and at him and he was stood there unable to loosen the buckle on his wallet and a woman shook her head at him and THE BUCKLE WOULD NOT UNDO and others joined her: a cacophony of tuts and shakes and disparaging whispers and he dropped it an ran for the door. Froster smiled as the next customer moved towards him. Pervert.

Kings paced his office in the perpetual solemnity of a jumped-up dropout whose glasses looked serious enough to meet managerial assessment criterion A. He looked at Froster seated before him and began pacing again, covering every square inch of the 6 by 6 converted disabled toilet cubicle that had become his office. He stopped mid-pace – You know this really isn’t good enough Froster and I know he didn’t complain but what you did was quite unacceptable – So you’re firing me – no we don’t say that; we are reassessing the sum worth of your – Kings struggled to remember the words from the training manual – factor production costs – Kings said it with the smug satisfaction of a man regurgitating impressively meaningless phrases without realising they are meaningless – So you’re firing me – Froster was persistent but Kings continued unabated – no, we have reached the decision that your aggregate – he really couldn’t remember this one and so looked about desperately on the notice board for a suitably polysyllabic replacement and failed miserably – shelf stacking was sadly lacking – Froster got up and walked out – where do you think you’re Kings’ disembodied voice rang out down the aisles. Kings shut the office door, looking angrily at the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor (a remnant from its cubicle days) and wondered how many games of solitaire would elapse before he could go home.

Froster opened his arms as he walked down the aisle leading to the exit and due to the wonders of feng-shui aligned shelf spacing he was able to scythe a satisfying number of products off the shelves on to the floor before storming out of the automatic doors and the bright sun of mid-afternoon shone down on him. He slowed to a walking pace and let the adrenaline die down. He wasn’t happy. The job had been the first step towards rebuilding his life and now all that work had been undone by a self-important manager and his chain of thought was interrupted by the sight of the angry/pale man sat behind the wheel of his car with his head bowed on the steering wheel and their eyes met in a flash lightning explosion of mutual apathy that manifested itself in the livid red rage of reciprocated responsibility for the other’s fate and the car engine started and Forster began to run as the mad angry man in the red Ford Passat accelerated towards him. And the audible crash caused even the partially deaf Kings (undisclosed on his management application forms but the selectors knew it and planned to use it against him when he demanded a pay-rise; it was why he had been given the job) to look up from his solitaire. A concertinaed Ford Passat lay in a crumpled heap on the redbrick wall of the supermarket and Froster looked on partly in shock and partly in relief as his assailant slumped forward unconscious on the crumpled bonnet as Froster ran away, not caring where just anywhere but there with the blood still fresh on the windscreen and the still active wipers pathetically colliding with the formerly angry man’s head as lay it dormant on the bonnet as the assembled entourage of women and children lamented his death with wails, moans and the sad shaking of heads in a sudden awareness of their own mortality and the wipers clicked against his head in a vain effort to keep the lack of rain from the shattered windscreen until a small child read an elegy from Keats, then the entourage dispersed and the windscreen wipers gave up their frustrated attempt to dignify the situation.

Froster ran to the church where he had sought salvation many times before but always found the same bolted doors and always heard the same scuttling away of feet as he asked someone to open the doors for him. Today the doors were open and the congregation entering and he sensed his chance and ran and the doors slammed shut and yet he still ran to them hoping to pull them open before they were bolted AND THE BOLT SLAMMED SHUT and he tugged frantically, pleading, begging, weeping to be granted absolution and the feet scuttled away and he slumped to the marbled step not knowing what to do or where to go and acutely aware of his own guilt in the events that had transpired, no, conspired against him, as they always did. They plotted and schemed and conspired against him and against his chances of happiness and continually knocked him down and set him back and kept him in the same hellish state of disrepair, unable to think, breathe or sleep because of the insufferable burden of guilt that weighed down his fledgling conscience and dominated his life and they added to it and built it up and waited till the tension became so much he would snap AND THE DOORS SLAMMED SHUT and he only wanted absolution and so he ran back to the scene of the accident but all that remained were the fragments of shattered headlight that littered the yellow-paved path except they were just the remnants of a smashed bottle from a fight between two drunks and the events that had taken place there had been washed away under the industrial-strength pressure hosing of the Cleaning Company incorporated – we clean anything as good as new or your money back – and in the salt-water blast all debris and markings were erased but nothing was cleansed and the ingrained dirt of the stain in his memory remained and persisted there, festering and stagnating and adding to the intolerable burden of guilt in his head and he ran away from the scene as a disgruntled Kings emerged from the supermarket having lost his job after being exposed for incorrectly filling in his application form; he had only asked for a pay-rise in line with inflation.

Froster ran back to his house and she was there standing in the doorway waiting for him and she had come back without telling him and he cried tears of salvation because she had returned. The door was double-locked and he fumbled with his keys, as hands still shook from the disappointment of realising that his dreams had invaded his reality. Again. And she was still not there and his heart ached and yearned for her to be there but she had gone and it had been nearly two years now and all his letters remained unanswered and she had gone. The silence left by her departure deafened him every time he tried to sleep: the mellifluous whispers and slow sighs and soft, soft, soft softness of her voice as she spoke to him in a language he didn’t understand and didn’t need to as the contours of her voice lapped around him and held him tightly, comforting and healing, toosc voo ponsay nigh jamais euh lieu, votre coo de foudre nay jamais a ma coeur, the sounds ebbed and flowed and enveloped hims and he saw her and heard her in his mind Tout ce que vous pensez n’ai jamias eu lieu, votre coup de foudre n’est jamais a ma Coeur and he sobbed to himself and wished she was there as he sat on his bed alone and he re-read her last letter for the ten-thousandth time and her bitter words made him wince once again and he begged for forgiveness and he prayed again and still no-one knocked at the door and she was gone. AND SHE WAS GONE. gone. She was gone.

Froster sat alone on his mattress in the darkened room and shot himself once through the head.
The singing of children in the streets echoed off the grime on the angel white walls and down the road Kings ordered a coffee and.