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Pagan Paul Jan 2019
.
Jerrica had found Lost.
The treasure buried above ground.
The memory foam with dementia.
The quill with no nib …
she thought about feather pens.
Catching herself from falling
the swoon had caught her cold.
This **** ****** sword
was proving to be elusive
and now she was under sustained attack.
From a personal fetish.
It just wouldn't leave her alone,
creeping into her mind unbidden.
She needed to scratch an itch,
if only she knew what that itch was.

Trolls are magickally bound to their bridge.
Leaving it is usually fatal.
But Gyb had bones to gnaw,
and once he had his teeth employed
his mind was a captive onlooker.
A crazy plan formed in his head,
possibly avoiding the brain.
He took mud and formed a figure,
then some of his hair clippings
moulded into the head.
Then he took a leap of disbelief!
He looked into the river and … Click!
Snapped his fingers and fixed the image.
He cut it out of the meniscus
and attached it to the doll familiar.

“Did Achilles have damp ankles
or was he well heeled?”
Morfine had asked Choklut.
“Neither. He was the one who sneezed
and opened the Fête of the Suitors”.
“No. I think he was called Telemarketing,
he sneezed and they drew the tombola raffle”.
“Wasn't there a Goddess involved as well?”.
“Um … Yes, maybe the Goddess of Tissues?”.
“Snivel? No, she is more tears than snot.
I think its the one who turned her husband
into a swan, and made him ****** her handmaiden”.
“Oooo Nasty!”
“No, Nasty fell in love with his own profile,
and called things off with his nymph,
the reverberations can still be heard today”.
There was a brief pause … then,
“What are we doing Choklut?
We found a magickal sword and …
talking of which, where is it?”.
“I don't know. You had it last”.
Just then a serving girl gave them a note.
It said. Tomatoes, Peppers, Onions, Eggs …
“Not that side you dyk” she said.
Morfine turned the note over and read.
“Quick, no time to lose.
Someone saw the sword in the river.
We have to get to stanza 8
before it goes over the waterfall!”.
“Oh” said Choklut “I've never seen a stanza belly flop”.

It was true.
Contrary to the laws of physics.
Kelm saw the sword floating down river.
It looked like any other sword.
So he let it be, dismissed it.
He couldn't swim anyway.
He mused on the irony of that.
Nobody learnt to swim and yet drowning
was an undignified death for a barbarian.
If he could swim
he could find the fishes hiding places.

Jerrica had also been musing.
With a Poet.
That was during the last 3 stanza's.
But now …
she saw a sword floating in the river.
Something didn't quite fit.
Something was not in the right place.
She placed the Poet back in her breast pocket.
'If only he wasn't just 4 inches high' she thought
'he is rather handsome and intelligent'.
Bingo! She had it. But she didn't want it.
Armydiseases Principle of Liquid Dispersement!
It states!
Introduce a solid object into a body of liquid,
then the corresponding volume of liquid is dispersed
back to the nearest solid.
So, right now there is a very small flood
in the shape of a very small sword
ravishing the local area.
She decided, quite rightly as it turns out,
that she was feeding herself a red herring.

Slim stood on the bridge
staring at the churning water below.
How did it happen?
A stanza all of his own,
ruined by the intrusion of morons.
“Morfine and Choklut” he bellowed
“I'm going to eviscerate you”.
The wind carried a few of the words away,
but that was the gist of it.
“Hello” a voice said.
Slim had an accident, and jumped out of his skin.
And plunged into the cold water.
A strong arm pulled him out,
and he was face to face with a troll.
“My name is Gyb. I hate Morf Chok also”.
Nothing had prepared Slim for meeting a troll.
Not even the etti-queue-etti lessons at school.
'Would you care for afternoon tea?'
seemed rather inappropriate.
Gyb broke the awkward silence.
“Look! Sword floating”.
Slim didn't look.
Convinced the troll would eat him.
Thats their way. Distract and devour.
But he couldn't help it, he snuck a look.
And the sword slid on by gently bobbing,
tiny little runes glinting in the sun.

For its part the sword was serenity itself.
Chilled out to the max.
Resting on the water. Relaxing and reclining.
Life was good for the sword.
It had just passed a boy fishing,
poking his rod down a fish hole.
It had passed a young woman,
who looked confused and flustered.
It slid under a stone bridge.
A troll with a doll,
and a man with questionable odour.
And then he heard the roaring.
He sent out his senses,
no mean feat for a sword,
and 'felt' its surroundings.
Its image eye caught sight of the future.
It was an effing great waterfall.
And the future was the way he was heading.
For now.

Narrative Interlude

At this point in the story the author, Pagan Paul, is compelled
to inform the reader/listener of a complaint received
from Messrs Morfine and Choklut.
The substance of which amounts to the following:
That the said author is willfully under using their talent
as supporting cast and denying them access to many stanza's.
Furthermore they are threatening to expose the authors
'irregularities' in his relationship with Princess (name redacted).
The author, Pagan Paul, responds thus:
I should like to remind Messrs Morfine and Choklut
that, with astroke of my quill, I can eradicate them.
Drop them from the story all together.
And with reference to Princess (name redacted) -
'Its my Poem and I'll irregularit if I want to'.
Dear reader/listener prepare yourself for stanza 9.
It has a waterfall in it.
Maybe Morfine and Choklut will appear, maybe not.
They are the ones over a barrel.


Minutes after the sword floated by
something else caught her eye.
To boys on a barrel, in the water.
Boys barreling along or a barrel buoying along?
Choklut noticed her by the bank.
'funny place to have a cash machine' he thought.
Doing his best to impress and look brave.
Morfine waved and nearly fell off.
Suddenly the barrel lid opened
and Slim poked his head out like a tortoise.
“What the …?” said Choklut.
“Just repaying a debt boys” he said.
“But you owe us nothing” Morfine replied.
“Oh but I do” snarled Slim
“I owe you one times intrusion into your own stanza”.
He ducked back inside, and slammed the lid.
“Of all the fatherless ...”
“I blame the author” said Choklut.
“Yeah well, he is the one who's gonna be sorry,
we've just muscled in on stanza 8,
and relegated that waterfall to stanza 9” Morfine chimed.
“Morfine. Morfine! I hear the waterfall coming”.
“No! Not now. He has to leave it until 9 now,
we are about to cross the finish line on 8”.
The waterfall loomed.

Actually the waterfall knew nothing of weaving.
It just stayed where it was, pouring.
Spectacular, it was a very pretty waterfall.
It must be. It attracted tourists.
And it had fun!
It loved watching detritus tumble,
teeter on the brink. And fall.
Especially tourists.
It was over 300 paces high,
less than 40 paces wide,
its descent magnificent liquid ballet,
sparkling droplets shining like jewels,
forever transcending light refraction,
and plunging, plunging, plunging,
into a gorgeous azure puddle.
About ankle deep.



© Pagan Paul (17/01/19)
.
3rd poem in my Strange World collection.

Part 3 out soon :)
.
Charlie Miles Mar 2011
When I was eighteen I worked for a company called GLENCOM. You probably haven't heard of them, you're not supposed to.
They're the invisible middleman.
What happens is, when a company wants to set up a call centre but doesn't have the space or the manpower to do it themselves, they call Glencom.
Glencom then puts together a team of people in Swindon,
teaches them the bare minimum about the product they need to sell and sticks them around a table with headphones on,
completely cut off from the people around them being force-fed phone numbers for eight straight hours a day.

They do this for dozens of companies. And there are dozens of companies just like it.
Producing nothing, just doing other peoples ***** work.
The jobs they don't want to do themselves.
Like Telemarketing. Cold-Calling.
You know when you've just got into the bath,
or you're sitting down to dinner and the phone rings and you think
'I don't want to answer that but it might be important'
and when you answer it it's someone you've never met desperately trying to sell you something you don't want?
And no matter what you say they don't seem to listen, or care,
they just keep reading standard procedure from a script until you can't take it any more and you just hang up?
Chances are, that person is a Glencom specialist telephone agent.

I loved that job, I really did.
You probably think I'm crazy for it, it's the kind of job that middle class kids do for a little extra cash while they're at university,
until they get sick of the soul-crushing routine of getting yelled at and hung up on, yelled at and hung up on and they stop showing up after six weeks.
Year after year, cold-calling is rated in the top ten things people hate about the modern world.
I was part of the problem.
And I loved it.

You see, when you get one of these phone calls, you don't realise that it's a real person on the other end of the phone.
Of course, you do know that it must be a person, that's common sense.
It's just not in your nature to think of that disembodied voice as having a face and a mind
and a favourite food .
and a family
and a history
and a home that they go to every night at seven thirty.
They're a spirit.
One-dimensional.
So you don't treat them like a real person,
and that's OK, really it is, we're used to it.
As far as you're concerned, whoever you're talking to is just a faceless corporation,
so you yell, and you swear,
way more than you would if you were face to face with someone, say, at your bank or in a shop.
Every little thing that has ****** you off that day gets unloaded onto that person because,
for those five minutes,
with your bath getting cold,
or your dinner getting overcooked and blackened,
they are everything that's wrong with society.

So by the time you finally slam the receiver down, and return to whatever it was you were doing,
you're face red, out of breath, can't remember the last time you were that angry
they've ruined your evening.
You swear you're going to complain,
but you know that if you do that you'll just get caught up in their red tape and rhetoric all over again.
There's nothing to do but let it go.
So you do, and with it, something strange happens.
All that anger and tension that you've been carrying around all day just leaves your body slowly.

The traffic that morning;
your workload at the office;
that cold you just cant shake;
the barista who got your coffee order wrong, but your were running late so didn't have time to complain and get a new one;

All those little things that you can't control,
it doesn't seem worth worrying about them now.
You think of how angry you were at that little voice coming out of the telephone speaker and you feel sort of proud,
like it makes up for bending over and taking **** from your Boss all those years.
from your bank all those years
from the gas and electric companies
and your phone company and internet service provider all those years
from your politicians all those years
all that doesn't sting so much any more.

Because you just stuck it to the man.
You stood up to the big corporations and you got the upper hand.
You start to see the funny side,
you'll tell everyone at work about this.

That's the thing about telemarketers: They're one of those little annoyances that people love so much,
like the weather or queue-jumpers.
Something we all hate, but can all relate to,
a lynch-pin of small-talk,
that inoffensive comedian you like so much was talking about it on tv the other night.

But this time you get a chance to stri ke back.
It's not like getting a parking ticket,
or stubbing your toe,
you get to yell at this inconvenience, tell it exactly how you feel without any fear of repercussions.

Without you realising it, that telemarketer has just done you a valuable service.
You've just saved yourself an hour in front of a punch-bag,
or a session with your therapist or *****.
Without knowing it you are in a better mood than you've been all week,
so you don't smack your kids when they spill paint on the carpet.
And you don't yell at your wife when she forgot to pay the electric bill.
You float on a cloud of air until bed time, and probably make love to your partner for the first time in weeks.
You sleep a healthy eight hours and wake up to breakfast  and coffee and drive to work feeling like you did when you first started there,
when you could still see a bright future ahead of you.
All thanks to that soulless,
faceless,
nameless
disembodied voice on the other end of the phone.
All thanks to me.

I worked out that in any given day,
I got yelled at or told to ******* or otherwise unnecessarily lashed out at maybe thirty out of every hundred calls.
That was thirty families who were going to have a nice dinner,
without the usual arguments for once.
Maybe a few times a week I could prevent an abusive husband from having that one whiskey too many and bashing his wife from room to room.
If you believe in a butterfly flapping it's wings in Tokyo, and all that,
then maybe I, without ever leaving my desk, could stop a ****** from happening, perhaps once a year.
I was making a difference and all I had to do was let my computer dial a random phone number and to introduce myself as
'whoever calling from wherever to let you know about a valuable promotion...'

When I realised all this I decided I would work harder to up my productivity.
A hundred and fifty calls a day,
two hundred.

And I had to provoke more anger.
Subtly of course, I would try to be more obnoxious and inept.
I got peoples names wrong;
I talked over people.
Soon I was getting fifty hang-ups a day.
So I, like a good employee, constantly tried to better myself.
I sniggered at peoples names;
I requested needlessly extensive and intrusive personal information;
asked to speak to 'the man of the house'.
I was getting balled out with every other call.
Seventy, eighty, ninety times a day.
Every time I was called a nuisance I gave myself a pat on the back.
Every time someone said they wanted to speak with my supervisor, I just said they weren't in and then rewarded myself with a cookie at break time.
I got more competitive with myself.
I considered it a personal gift when I got someone with an Indian name,
or a speech impediment.
Gay couples were a Godsend.
I corrected peoples grammar;
I cursed;
I slurred;
I made thinly veiled ****** references.

I was thorn in the side of everyone just trying to enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon.
I was the itch that no-one could reach.
I invited venom, longed for hatred.
Because if it was aimed at me, it may as well have been aimed at the moon.
I was a necessary evil.
I was the common enemy of the whole country.  
I can't say how many relationships I must have saved,
how many lives I touched.
Suicides prevented? You never know.
I was making the world a better place, one botched customer service attempt at a time.
I was saving people without them even knowing my name.
The anonymous benefactor,
the masked hero.
I was Zorro, I was Batman.
And I loved it.
I thrived on it.
I had found something I was good at.
I could have stayed there, soaking up insults, absorbing peoples troubles, lightening their burdens, forever.

Until three months ago when my manager saw my sales reports.
He, of course, didn't understand why we were really there.
He thought it was about money, about generating figures for whatever company we were hired by that month.
He threw buzz-words and management speak at me.
Improving Revenue.
Optimising Productivity.
Promoting Synergy.
Utilising Opportunity.
Sentence fragments that wouldn't make sense if he meant them.
Nonsensical ramblings littered with capital letters.
By Glencom's standards, rather than my own, I was the worst specialist telephone agent that he had ever seen.
I didn't bother trying to explain.
He wouldn't have understood,
I wanted something real.
Glencom could have been the first call centre to truly,
what's the phrase he would have used? Attain it's Potential.
We could have been pioneers in the business world, providing a service that the public really needs.
But there was no point, he had listened to recordings of my calls and had no choice but to fire me on the spot.

That job was the only thing I had loved for a long, long time. T
he only thing that gave me purpose,
my reason for getting out of bed,
for putting on trousers and shoes.
It was all I had and I lost it,
blacklisted by the employment agency that placed me there.
For a while I tried calling people at random from the phone book but it didn't work out.
You have no idea how much it costs to make a hundred phone calls a day on a pay as you go mobile.
Ten pence a minute
times by sixty minutes an hour
times by eight hours a day  
minus a half hour for lunch equals more than jobseeker's allowance is willing to provide.
I switched to contract but these days everyone has phone number recognition,
so everyone can see that you're calling from a personal phone rather than a business one.

Eventually I started getting phone calls from the phone company explaining that I'd be cut off
and fined if I was using a personal phone for random telemarketing without a license.

The operator was clear, polite and ultimately very helpful.

******' Amateur.
Ben Jones Feb 2015
Finding something on the road
And serving it for dinner
Buying dresses far too small
And thinking you look thinner
Solar powered submarines
Broken ribs or ruptured spleens
Driving cars and drinking beers
Lightbulb licking, bad ideas

Knowing where you shouldn't be
And being there despite
Going out in thunderstorms
To fly your iron kite
Sharing needles with a shark
Going to Mansfield after dark
Setting fire to someone's ears
Telemarketing, bad ideas

Not deploying gaffer-tape
When doing D.I.Y.
Believing the implausible
While branding truth a lie
Replying to Nigerian Princes
**** bleach and ******* rinses
Tabloid papers touting fears
Voting UKIP, bad ideas

Impersonating ******
Before nineteen forty-five
Catching a train on Sunday
And assuming you'll arrive
Turning lights on with your nose
Eating food that moves or glows
Listening to Britney Spears
Marmite Pringles, bad ideas

**
I once sold a hair straightener to a woman going through keemo

I once sold a a weight loss supplement to a girl struggling with anoerexia.

I once sold female libido enhancers to a forty year old man.

Sold a car to a Parapalegic

Sold a telephone to a deff woman.

I once sold a child an imaginary friend.
And a Vaccuum for their sandbox.

I once sold a soul to a telemarketing company.

They paid me in biweekly installments.
And they got a hell of a deal.
Late night coffee shop buzzed on caffeine,
in tune with the buzz of electric appliances,
acutely aware of the young child sound asleep
on the arm sleeve of the man's coat
wrapped around him in ways that
his mother's arms are not,
her arms holding papers
like a poker hand,
the intonation of her Spanish by phone
easily understood as a night at the office,
telemarketing, swaying the buyer,
as Mr. Sleepyhead, opens bright eyes
wobblyturns to me to
feel out the audience.
August Feb 2013
Got a new job,
           Telemarketing
                     Ring...Ring...

"Hello,
         I was wondering
                  If you were interested
                                     In purchasing
                                                **Some quietus today?"
© Amara Pendergraft 2013
shireliiy Oct 2015
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gray ivan May 2019
Time always ticking
A trip triple tricking
The thinker’s talent telling
Told trust in their wits
A tad foretold in tableaux
Tot tot tin buckets in tams
Take out and talkative
Go tick tick tick tick
Trick the topography
Turn up the top town
To take a tent
Try truly hard
But tend to be tardy
Tagline and cosine
And untwine and the
capital of Lichtenstein?
And whatever else you can find
To taint the trees with
telemarketing
Watch the tardigrades
Trek through lichen and tailwater
Taradiddle my fiddle and
Trick the ticking time
Just for funnn
Larry Sep 2020
Things we know-  our Collective deeds.
Eyes recording daily-feeds
that are amplified in broadcast rich/
Telemarketing schemes...
dots connecting dreams.

All that is perceived
must also account for that which
becomes from what is unable
to be easily seen:
describing what's around us
(purely speculatory: benzene)

Advancing this rigorous-reign:
like thee All-Star, "Dream-Team".
Lucky as the stars above teem
when difficulties careen & then stream
emptying-out--  over what's disagreed about/ or that's disavowed.
Stormy-night seen.

— The End —