Come to Life and Rampage!!!

Outside the library window, two statues stand, figures of the civil war, a bronzed embodiment of 400 years of history, where they fought for the right of Parliament, or the right of The King.

The sun has gone in and is no longer glinting off their patinated forms. One looks West, the other East, both poised for action. Like they could come to life and fight.

Oh how I wish they would.

The Riace Bronzes...

Riace Bronzes wikilink

...which I always think of when I look at these two chaps, are amongst the most culturally significant pieces of statuary ever found. The notorious Italian porno-comic Sukia featured them coming to life and, ahem, "seeing to" the eponymous heroine and her male friend on a trans-Atlantic liner voyage. I don't want these fellows to do that (too much), but it's easy to imagine them coming to life, in a time and culture alien to them, and reacting with fear and violence.

Watch a 400 year old sword plunge into the jugular of the abusive drinkers who congregate at their feet, scraping grimily off their calcifying cervical vertebrae, while the drummer boys beats them unmercifully with his lead stick.

They could pause to take in the forever green landscape, before espying bike thieves making their way about town with bolt-cutters they are too brazen to hide. Their Civil War justice is swift, and merited as they arrange for them to be hung drawn and quartered, dragged screaming into four wriggling bloody pieces by teams of cyclists, the modern day cavalry of our confused world.

"Draw them men! Quarter them so they might feel it, but not too fast!" they cry, facial hair stirred by the winter breeze. The smackheads who deal as children learn to read next to them, are forced to do cold turkey on the bear baiting post, tattoed necks enclosed in a spiked iron collar.

The sun sets, and now the moon lights their metallic forms with a cold glow. Now, they head for the ale-houses, taverns and hostelries, and lo! Shall the unworthy face their mighty come-uppance! The brain dead drinkers offer them out for a fight, and shot by musket are some, while others are piked through their orifices and hoisted 16 feet into the air to fly like flags, a warning for all!

Pike them well, my Civil War friends, pike them hard! And never stop acting as you do, a 17th Century cure for modern day social ills!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.12.13

The Civil War Drummer

Sitting in my local library, doubly caffeined with a large tea followed by a large coffee, I was looking for a source of inspiration.

And superimposed on a background of grey skies and lush green trees, I saw it. A bronzed statue of civil war soldiers. One is a blank faced drummer, the other a royalist officer wielding a broken sword, and wearing a fancy hat that from the rear looks like a giant fist is coming out his head. Almost as if he met the shapeshifting squelchy alien anal invaders in the classic Brian Yuzna film “Society”.

They must get very bored, used for little else other than a pissing post for the local drunks and a perch for birds. And then I wonder if they have a secret life…a secret mobile life, like Rosie and Jim, having adventures by moonlight after the library has home and the last street drinker has brought the last of their clear vomit up over the flagstones.

Not children’s adventures though. Adventures of, shall we say, a more adult nature.

I remember reading of the Italian titular porno-comic character Sukia, and how her and her gay friend once had “an experience” at the hands of the Riace Bronzes, the two Classical 5^th century Greek statues found in the 70s off the boot of Italy. Perhaps our civil war drummers do the same thing; in fact I wished they would. The local thugs could meet a bloody end on the end of his rapier, their blood spilt on the slime stained cobbles of our market square.

They could use the old bear baiting post to silently, metallically, torment the dross of the town. Death of a thousand drumstick-dipped-in-excrement punctures for bicycle thieves. Mouthy high heel violent women eaten by android bears after being forced to eat five kilos of chips. All conducted under a sympathetic moon and the un-natural orange streetlight glow.

But they also provide reward. They climb into the bedrooms of lonely kind people, and service their every desire on their birthdays, Cavalier genitals meeting those of the modern age, a Battle of Naseby storm of pleasure, the Civil Warriors silently putting smiles on the faces of the worthy, the purpose of the fist on his hat revealed only to the select few…

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 21/09/2013