Men of feckless irresponsibility who scorned those with a home, preferring the flat horizons of seas than the cramped walls and cubicles of sedentary living.
They neatly sidestepped whole generations that had been bound in chains, poisoned and trapped, and now writhed in agony spitting with fury, screaming and calling them vagabonds, dirty reprobates and good-for-nothings.
Bellamy lead his by no means despondent crew in a merry circle around this trap, nimbly slipping the chains, vaulting the walls and spitting the poison. The machine cogs raged silently, only their mouths shouted delinquents, thieves and lazy scum.
Bellamy caroused, a life lived with zest and laziness.
“Why if he had wanted us to work he would not have created this wine”
He would extend the bottle and wink:
“With a skinful of this, would you rush out to commit economics?” The crew readily assented, despite fear and hunger never being far at hand. Work never an issue, being purveyors of rare services and a particular range of desirable expertise.
Sought after in a world ruled by psychotic jackals, devoured by ruthless vultures and shat upon by all those above, Bellamy and his crew dine delicately with the vultures, neatly sidestep the shit storms and nimbly remove the bone from the rabid jackals, never forgetting to kindly share it along with other miscreants found along their way. Believing, to a man, that you couldn’t be truly happy if surrounded by other people’s misery and wretchedness.
“How can you happy if those around you are not?” Bellamy would earnestly intone.
Mangled cosmic beauties refusing the well-worn yoke that had so effectively ensnared many of their kind. They looked through you and to each other, face to face bound by an unwavering solidarity forged in the most wretched of sin and tempered in the fiery furnace of shared miseries.
Easy to be friends in good times.
Everyone loves you when the wallet is buff.
Simple mantras oft repeated, as these were no longer the young ragamuffins of old but ones who, in their new work, had discovered if not peace at least an ordered chaos that enabled further transgressions and delinquent pleasures.
Virtues and graces, these little niceties that once marked the boundaries of our civilizations.
The fevered craziness of our hurried system, that sucks ups, digests and regurgitates ever-increasing portions of our world, once safely stripped of any original beauty and shorn of the singularities that gave it meaning and potential. Amongst such homogenous wastes and imploded landscape did Bellamy and his crew joyfully tread. They were too spinning in orbits nonetheless, chaotically yet perhaps with a greater beauty than this post-industrial realm’s well-worn groove, where misery and hunger stalk the land, destroying all in its wake. Every encounter with a native people, a metaphorical and sometimes literal genocide. Any and all means for autonomous living brutally stripped away, original languages viciously shorn, the bludgeoning of entire cosmologies, as all the ways of seeing the world become puréed into venomous mush. With a face half satyr and half enlightened prophet, Bellamy remarks to the crew:
“This will be a good deed lads and most likely the last one we do!”
Yanez, his wiry frame gesticulating wildly, a reminder of his more indulgent heroin days, intones: “Bellamy, to a man we, would lay our lives down for you” The rest of the crew rumbles in assent.
“Whose ship?” bellows Bellamy only to be drowned in waves of “Our ship..our ship our ship” before the phrase even escapes his lips. A rare smile cracks his weathered visage. He stares back gleaming at the frenzied crew, as they shout themselves hoarse with fervent glee. Keen eyed observers may even spy a wet glimmer in the corner of one eye.
