LEYTON: DEATH TO THE GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS

LEYTON: DEATH TO THE GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS
A desultory step down from that linear conduit ,the Lea Bridge Road, veering away from its straightness onto the labyrinthine terrain vague of the marshes, little tracks hidden under briars weave and spiral into the nexus of a lost London.

"I give you the end of the golden string
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.
William Blake Jerusalem

Leyton. Softly you smother me. What lies beneath that sweet patina, the swirling yellow and grey mists of your residues. To reassemble you would be a sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. You lurk behind me now, holding something back, always. And yet there, in the torn and tattered veneers, the peeling hoardings and crumbling stucco I sense an elegiac emblem, a marker. I am pulled into the fray, tugged into a channel I cannot fathom. Wherever the locus of your broken heart lies, splintered and in pieces, I shall come to it now.

Lea Bridge, just your name conjures up so many repressed desires, the abandonment of reason on the marshes, violent rituals, face ground down in the dirt on muddy football pitches, the brutal and unforgiving sex of confusion and scarring. The dreams of another epoch, the heady scent of hawthorn blossom beneath the pylons.
I conjure up scenes, erotically charged and complicated , a tableaux of curious, senseless topographies. Under the shadow of the power station, a biting scratching kind of fuck, tearing into the scorched ground by the breakers yard, Genet and Lovecraft become my companions.

Along the railway sidings on Lammas Road. Acid house year zero. This became the darkside , the Black e zone, factories left empty from the recession in knots of burnt out blocks. The Intercity firm, " congratulations you have just met the ICF" :warehouse party mayhem, protection rackets, thugs with machetes, corruption and ultraviolence on a grand scale. WHAT IS THIS HORROR ZONE?
Unit 13 , next to that grisly meat packing factory, internal organs melting in fear and paranoia. A Synthetic Circus party, all these ketamine entities in Halloween garb standing shivering as a woman lies haemorrhaging under an awning of relentless drilling gabba. Within a year a gruesome repeat, another pointless death. He watched her frothing at the mouth, eyes rolling back into her head, bastards selling bad gear, and sound systems too scared to stop.
Lammas, the old pagan festival of Lugnasadh ,funeral feast of the God of light, a time of sacrifice, judgement and reckoning..
Where did it all go wrong ? Mousetraps in back pockets to spring the pickpockets, wraps of Ajax to poison the thieves, men hanging around toilets to rape K'd up women and all that with security firms standing by watching, making a fucking killing. A shattered dream. Once there was this perverse hope that these desolate stretches would rise again, the Phoenix of East London rising from the ashes. In the halcyon days of the late 80's it all seemed possible, but then something started to claw it back, this malevolent twitching beneath the flyovers and electricity cables. A brooding cruelty, you couldn't have hoped to get away with it.
A cross quarter fire festival, bonfires to add strength to the powers of the waning sun. Staffa Road, industrial estate becomes inferno as Britart burns, the tokens of Cool Britannia and New Labour hypocrisy razed to the ground in 600 degree flashover. Bataille's accursed share, proposed Olympic site as sacrificial zone.
The Dungeons. Dank, claustrophobic vaults reach out beneath the Lea Bridge Road, a shadow world sealed, gruesome chambers harbouring guilt and shame .Deranged Hell's Angels wanting a cut of the drug money suddenly leaching into the marshes, all these fucking firms, criminal gangs, they were in there straight away. The Greyhound, that was just a front, a sham pub, a veneer of respectibilty, the Dungeons was where it was really going on. Some Merlin automoton serving Red Stripe, moving so slow, and those other bastards trying to put the fear in with tales of torture, electrocuted genitalia, a screaming, paranoid darkness. Headfuck and Uglyfunk are there, five rooms five soundsystems, Crossbones room, Sick n twisted Vs pitchless room, Darkside, The Lurker, Face Hoover, Rave Enforcer, Necro and Anoianoid, the iconography of horror, 80's slasher movies resurrected in this god forsaken territory. Ketamine casualties lurch zombified through the wastelands with no fears of noise abatement orders. Red stripe goes up, R and B crews move in, a shooting outside and in this, it's final incarnation ,the Dungeons becomes the last outpost of Murder Mile.