2018

THE
BREAKTHROUGH
CLUB
MU*271
created by ALIEN PIXELS
for MERCURIUS UNLIMITED

FEATURING:
ANEES AHMAD
JAN ALFVÉN
JENNY PSOPHIA ELLEST
MARC LIVINGSTONE

Produced by JASON PILLEY for GREEN LIGHT GO PRODUCTIONS.

Pictures stolen from “MAN, MYTH & MAGIC” magazine.
 INTRODUCTION
Kick down a dusty door that’s not been opened in years.
Climb a fence, snag your shirt on barbed-wire and rip it, fuck it.
Sneak through burnt-out factories. Sneak through cobwebbed closed-down madhouses, the inmates
are all gone but the cocks they drew on the forbidding grey walls remain, persist.
Up midnight scaffolding around churches, up ladders onto shop roofs, down prised-open manholes
into darkness.
Follow rusted train-tracks along looming echo tunnels, reach a cold abandoned train-station with
chained-shut doors and mouldy adverts everywhere.
Dance through the spacious embryos of austere office-blocks-to-be.
Find hiding-places in museums, libraries, galleries, get locked in overnight.
And wherever you go, here they are: The Breakthrough Club.
The poets: leaving behind what they’d like you to find.
The troublemakers: pinning fake Health & Safety notices to walls, “Be Safe But Not Too Safe!”
The musicians: loud nights in graveyards tapping ghost frequencies, giving those bones something to
dream about.
The magicians: with their frying-pan-sizzled brains, their “Reality seen from the outside” moments.
The artists: jamming busy pavements handing out headfuck flyers for nonexistent nightclubs, “HIGH
MAGIC! FREE! ENTRY!”
The witches: they need you to know what an angel laughing in eight dimensions sounds like.
The explorers: leaving decapitated Barbie heads everywhere, presents in the cracks in the walls.
The visionaries: they took bullets for you and made sure you never knew.
The Psyche Mob: hiding the Holy Grail for someone else to find.
The Mind Gang: chalking rhymes onto pavements, we want our streets paved with poetry.
The Breakthrough Club: armed with hexes, glamours, fetishes and spoof “LOST” posters, turning
every lamppost into a glowing totem-pole.
The Breakthrough Club: “You gazed into a few abysses in your time, eh, kid.”
The Breakthrough Club: they can even brag about their failures.
The Breakthrough Club: somewhere there’s a little explosion nobody notices. Sing along if you
don’t know the words!
The Breakthrough Club: acid swim!! Anees Ahmad reaches deep into an absurd magician’s top-hat
and pulls out “Pacifist Club”…

“And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?”
– Ronald Reagan, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, 1987
 Born and bred in Glasgow, Anees Ahmad began his creative endeavours as part of the
hip-hop trio Futurology. Since moving to London in 2014 he has become an active
member of the spoken word poetry community, which includes running the monthly
poetry/discussion event Extra Second London (originally in a subterranean nightclub in
Dalston, more recently in a chapel in Bethnal Green), all the while jealously gazing
northwards as Futurology move on to bigger and better things without him.
Pacifist Club

The first rule of pacifist club is that you have to talk about it all the time

All the time and everywhere you go

On walls that drip the dregs of names that pain the lips too much to let them pass

To piss-stained pub toilets where you should have watched where the fuck you were going

Hear it echo across shell-shocked ghost towns where ‘we used to make things here’

And now they rifle out recruitment forms, armed with a plastic poppy and a smile

Across the remains of what used to be a school, or maybe a home or a hospital,

Scenes that defy all metaphor because I couldn’t find one that wouldn’t lessen the impact

Sometimes poetry doesn’t cut it

But you need to talk about it all the time, because you will be up against it

Up against 4 billion years of fight-or-flight-to-fight-again

Up against language that evolved not of design but of necessity,

And so holds holes that anyone who’s ever felt any kind of emotion knows all too well

You’re up against men who would pen poems to catalogue the ills of the world before their own feelings

Men who would extol virtue in quiet basements on Tuesday nights, just to tiptoe round a huddled mass

Careful not to make eye contact as I scan my ticket home

You’re up against men who learned of consent from Han Solo and James Bond,

Taught that asking permission was a sign of weakness

So you need to talk about it all the time, because you will be up against it

Up against the fact that a tweet could launch an avalanche before the fact checkers are out of bed,

That freedom of choice isn’t always a choice of freedoms, that free speech makes cheap talk

That culture is not your friend, and that roots will only hold you in place

You need to talk about it all the time, because you WILL be up against it,

And when I say ‘you’ I do mean you, because you’re probably up against me and I’m probably up against you,

Because do-gooders don’t do good compromise

So if the first rule of pacifist club is to talk, the second should be to listen

And I promise I’ll try

Georgina Raffalovich has perfected the art of invisibility,
although to be honest she sometimes wishes she hadn’t.
 SEAFRONT HAIKU
Arcades, gamblers, drunks
Drown out the sound of the sea.
I sit and I write.
 Jenny Psophia Ellest is the author and/or editor of nineteen poetry
booklets, including “The Wrong Jenny,” “Epocsodielak,” “Spies 4 Life,”
“A Very Colourful Snake!” and “Oh-Girl,” all published by Astropol.
She finds that the older she gets, the more often she is horrified.
 THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE QUOTES
“Victory is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

“Are you ready to…” – Rian Hughes

“Cowards everywhere try to pass off their cowardice as morality, but morality wields a sword.”
– Jimmy Grauerholz

“I am the passenger… And I write and I write…” – Iggy Pop (misheard)

“Marriage is finding someone who’ll watch you wither.” – Joan Collins

“But it won’t count anyway because the linesman has his flag up.” – Martin Tyler

“Psychology precedes and determines ideology.” – H. E. Bites

“MY LIFE IS OPERA.” – Vince Eager

“The smartest people tend to know the least. Intelligence is living with question-marks.” – Cilla Black

“Who tightroped through a typhoon? Me! Who risked everything

just for the sake of risking everything? Me!” – Me

“…the…” – Anees Ahmad

“It’s one Abyss after another these days.” – Tommy Cooper (Ipsissimus 10°=1□)

“I miss Mxyzptlk.” – Lois Lane

“These twats aren’t even trying!” – Overheard at “Free Hugz” poetry-night

“No!” – Jordan Peterson

“The most dangerous place in the world is a mother’s imagination.” – My brother

“Pubs are where young people go to get turned into old people.” – Joanna Johannot

“Cheese!” – MP David Amess MP

“It’s hard to make friends in Hell.” – Satan

“Happy birthday to this future president.” – Hillary Clinton

“Buy my book!” – Joel Oily Auterson

“I’ve got no right to be sane!!” – You, dribbling

“We’re dreaming all the time. It’s not that we dream when we sleep, rather that we become aware
of our dreams when we sleep.” – Carl Jung

“Ah fuck I thought the barcode was a fucking piano!” – Tom Corbett
 AUTOBIO
Lady Delay,
Dampener,
Egg-wisdom (how to break)
Going nowhere needlessly.
 Marc Livingstone: some people have been known to incorrectly identify him as a
rapper or stand up comedian, but he is not cool or funny enough for either of these
things so he calls himself a spoken word artist instead. His style is simultaneously
avant garde and yet unpretentious. He is interested in exploring the unresolved
tensions that obtain between satire and sincerity.
How I got into spoken word

Following the success of my Hip Hop group the Stupid Idiots, I was invited to play at the spoken word tent
at Belladrum, a festival in the Highlands of Scotland. Deacon Blue and Texas were headlining that year and
I was so excited by the prospect of seeing my favourite bands that I forgot to pack a sleeping bag. That
first night in the tent was one of the most miserable experiences of my life.

As the cold Highland night descended, I put on all the clothes I had and put as much of my legs in my
rucksack as would fit, then placed bits of the Guardian all over my body for added insulation. It was only
the Friday Guardian and oh how I wished for the Saturday edition with its superfluous supplements –
family, travel, sport – all things I had no interest in and usually chucked immediately in the recycling. In
spite of all this, I was still absolutely freezing.

Every so often I would drift off to sleep, and dream that there was a duvet at the bottom of the tent, only
to wake up as my nocturnal movements dislodged one of the bits of newspaper and exposed me again to
the freezing cold, waking me up and revealing the duvet at the bottom of the tent to be no more than a
cruel mirage.

Eventually the sun came up and I was able to get to sleep for a few hours. I managed to find a stall that
sold sleeping bags, so once I had that sorted I went around the festival to see some of the acts – Newton
Faulkner, Frank Turner and the guy from Idlewild.

The misery of the previous evening was just starting to fade when my girlfriend at the time phoned me to
have a go at me for not getting her a guesty for the festival. We’d already had an argument about this a
few days ago but she’d decided that she was still annoyed about it so to make sure I didn’t get to enjoy
the festival she wanted to start another argument with me over the phone. I told her to fuck off and
hung up - obviously. Nothing was going to ruin my enjoyment of Newton Faulkner’s set that day.

I got a bit drunk and then went to the prose tent where I was going to be performing later that night. They
were having a debate about the future of the music industry, which was marginally interesting, but it was
taking place in a seated and covered venue so that was the main thing.

When it was my time to perform, I put my laptop with all the beats on it on top of the amp at the sound
desk. When I tried to make music come out of it, nothing happened. The magnets in the amp must have
done something to it. As a result, I had to perform my rhymes acapella. And that’s how I became a
spoken word artist.

(One of the other poets booked me for a gig in Glasgow off the back of that one, and I got paid £50 for it –
the most I’ve ever been paid for a performance! The next day I used the £50 note to buy a graphic novel
from Forbidden Planet, it was an attractive young woman who served me, and she was impressed that I
had a £50 note. I was like “Yeah I got paid that for doing poetry” and she didn’t seem that impressed any
more.)

After the performance I trudged back to my tent in the dark and rain, safe in the knowledge that I had a
sleeping bag and a restful night’s sleep ahead of me. After a restful night’s sleep, I awoke to the noise of
heavy rain and the sorry task of dismantling my tent in the downpour and making my way to the coach.
The coach was late and I missed my train back to Glasgow. Luckily I had most of my booze left and my
Doris Lessing book, so I just got drunk under a tree at the side of the road and read my book. People were
taking photos of me as they drove past. Eventually one of the passing cars gave me a lift back to Inverness.
Jan Alfvén: out of work physicist, author of
Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection in a Stressed
X-point Collapse, with a life-long passion of the
strange and surreal, and penchant for transmundane
poetry.
Jason Pilley has written twelve novels and if
you’re not a character in them, you’re trash.
 A PORTRAIT OF JENNY
Up on the roof of a 14-storey block of flats, crowbarred door gaping in shock. The whole town fits
in the palm of her hand.
Or slipping through eerie pre-dawn brutalist orange-haze car-park. Or down on her knees scraping
her knees crawling through the jagged gap in an “Adventure Island” wall, creeping under the
complacent CCTV, past out-of-season dormant rollercoasters and cloaked dodgems. Or in enormous
depots surrounded by half-built, half-broken train-carriages.
Sitting on a red cushion she thought to bring along, sitting on concrete watching Jan Alfvén finish
his piece: “Mind your seconds.” Jenny claps, everyone claps, whoops, cheers, Jan A. sits back down
among them. It’s Jenny’s turn, Jenny’s up last. Then they’ll get the fuck out of here!
She stands, she’s wearing green jeans but not in a completely ridiculous way. Both her shoes are
size-5 black boots but of different makes. She wears a fey white shirt and a shimmering orgone-
powered jacket, it keeps changing colour and you can get internet on it.
The others applaud as she walks to the stage, it’s not really a stage. She has short dark hair, growing
back from when she shaved her head a month ago and penned “Undercover Hippy” onto a T-shirt, it
was briefly amusing.
She stands in front of the others, they sit/sprawl staring up at her. Normally she gets nervous before
performing, even if it’s just a few friends and there’s no real risk, still feels like there’s a risk. She’s
competing against the universe’s tendency to fuck-up; she’s duelling with her fallible memory, what
if she freezes mid-poem, all the words just gone, like she’s seen happen to some poets and like has
happened to her while rehearsing but never when performing for real, she knows it could and
that awareness turns her manipura chakra unpleasantly sticky, vishuddha chakra constricts and
makes her keep needing to cough. Today though she’s reading from her book so there really is no
risk, Jenny feels fine.
Her book: heavy hardback, big like some fucking old tome, “A Book Of Bomb-Threats.” There are
pages full of variant designs for her future tombstone, potential epitaphs: “Summoned Into
Uselessness.” “Tried, Failed.” “Better To Slide Down Your Own Snake Than Climb Up Someone
Else’s Ladder.” There are pages filled with jungle-scribbled words, lines of “Seed God Logic” and
“Our Angels Are Real Angels,” semi-legible “My Home In A K-Hole,” several doodly paragraphs
of “Polar I Sing,” notes for future epic “Sotheby’s Auction Of Hendrix’s Brain.” Godpolitics
manifesto: “Vote For Yrself, Chumps.” A fictionalised account of the Marsh Chapel Experiment…
Jenny “Feel free” mumbles “to heckle me.” Looking down at her ardent audience: “I’ve decided I’m
incorporating a striptease into my set… but I haven’t decided which one of you is going to do it yet.
Do you want a poem that’s a bit fuhfuhfuhfuhfuh or one that tastes like lettuce?” They call words at
her, she ignores them. She holds the book in both hands, subtly draws those hands apart causing
her book to fall open to a random page, Jenny reads: