Bellamy's Crew

These are men of feckless irresponsibility who scorned those that had 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, who now writhed in agony spitting with fury, screaming and calling them vagabonds, dirty squatters and feckless good for nothings.

Bellamy lead his by no means despondent crew a merry circle around this trap, avoiding the chains, neatly sidestepping the walls, spitting the poison as these fervid cogs, rabid mouths shouted pickeys, thieves and lazy fuckwits.

Bellamy lived with zest and laziness.

“Why if he had wanted us to work he would not have created this wine”

And after glugging on the bottle:

"With a skinful of this would your rush out to commit economics?”

The crew readily assented.

Fear and hunger were not always far but work never an issue, as purveyors of rare services and a particular range of expertise they were often called upon. In a world ruled by psychotic dogs, devoured by ruthless vultures and shat upon by diarrhoeic cows, Bellamy and his crew dine delicately with the vultures, avoid the cow shit and nimbly remove the bone from the rabid dog, before kindly sharing 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 sin and tempered by 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, 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, an imploded landscape Bellamy and his crew joyfully tread.

They too spinning in orbits nonetheless, chaotically yet perhaps with a greater beauty than this post-industrial realm’s well-worn groove, where fear and hunger stalk the land, destroying all in its wake.

Every encounter with a native people a metaphorical and sometimes literal genocide.

The removal of any means for autonomous living, the erasure of original languages, the bludgeoning of cosmologies, as entire ways of seeing the world become pureed into venomous mush.

Bellamy with a face half satyr and half enlightened prophet, 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 has even escaped his lips.

A rare smile cracks his weathered visage and he stares back gleaming, emboldened by the crew who are shouting themselves hoarse with fervent glee.