Meet the Mi-No, very distant relatives of our good friends the Mi-Go. More fungoid than crustacean, they wear their chitinous skeletons on the inside, like us meat folks (only our skeletons are not chitinous, more’s the pity). They live in a galaxy so distant from ours that even the Mi-Go have difficulties reaching it, a fact they regret deeply, for they dearly love their several times removed cousins. This here lot have just dropped in for a long visit, having just invented a truly clever transport system that will allow them (and the Mi-Go, of course), to consort on regular basis. The Mi-No have heard of our riotous groovy parties and poetry reading soirées and they are very keen to attend, being as they are, ever so fond of riotousness and poetry and other such lofty matters. The conveyance device operates, Mrs Mi-No tells me, on a system of randomly integrated singularities with a dash of exclusion zones. (It’s all Greek to me but I’m prepared to take her word for it, lest my head explodes with excessive information.) A clever, delightful people, these Mi-No. We all are utterly and hysterically chuffed, we are. The more the merrier is our motto.

Now, this one, I could claim I have no idea where she comes from but I’d be lying. But I won’t bore you with her genesis either. And I do like the textures, if I say so myself. She’s very well behaved, too, for a Gothette. She just sits by the window and sulks elegantly. I’ve seen worse!

This here furry lass is a bee of a different colour. She not only makes honey, she makes bubbles, look you! And in her spare time, she looks after orphaned wee worms, or gusanitos, as we call them. Her current charge takes the honey for granted, as one tends to do, but he’s most impressed by the bubbles. As am I.

Insect Queen. Here’s a little something to mark the autumn equinox and the start of that lovely, sensuous “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”: a pithy message from one of our Generic Queens. Mind you pay heed to her words, people; insects may not be the cuddliest of animals but without them we’d be all completely buggered. Have some respect!

Update 19/09/17 And here be a little something for myself, cobbled together out of an old Sonny Reader primitive drawing tool doodle and two characters stolen from the ineffable, peerless, semi-divine Hello Cthulhu comic strip. It makes me smile, what can I say, m’lud…

Tadpole&Teddy. When the little mafioso Worm of a few illustrations back showed up at a political gathering in a bowler hat he started a trend. Lately every other small creature that creeps, crawls, wiggles, wriggles, swings, sways and sashays in the Far Borders is sporting one. Panamas and Porkpies, Tops and Trilbies, Bowlers, Boaters, Borsalinos, Fedoras, Pamelas, Cloches, Bonnets and Bergí¨res, you name it, there goes a tiny organism wearing a classic headpiece -in many cases far too big for its bijou frame, but there’s fashion for you: inevitable, insidious and often ridiculous but always good for a laugh. I mean, if you’ve never seen a ladybird in a Cordobés or a jumping spider in a Ten-Gallon … well then, you haven’t half lived, that’s what I think. Minuto, the Deeply Red Teddy, thinks this fashion caper is all an evil plot. A malevolent conspiracy concocted and instigated by the Market Forceps to give the differently-sized a bad name. And we all know how the story goes from this point on, do we not? Once you’ve acquired a bad reputation it soon becomes abominable and therefore it’s easier to start screeching about mortal threats to Our Wonderful Way of Life and therefore talking sanctions and suggesting no-flight zones and proposing jackass boots on the ground and even hinting at nukular missages. Minuto is nobody’s fool.

Just like pushy mothers, heartless bastards are not the sole preserve of our universe. You would not believe the con-fauna that pulullates all over the Middle Grids! As poor Liolí  the BearBat can tell you, much to his chagrin. Last night a couple of itinerant mountebanks accosted him on his way back home from the George & Orange, where we had gathered to watch the season finale of Dimension of Miracles, a spiffing space soap very laxly based on Robert Sheckley’s masterpiece, on the landlord’s brand new ultra–photonic radical-definition holobox. He was, as we all were by the time our host chucked us out, well in his cups and in a jovial, fluffy, indiscriminating mood. Which unfortunate set of circumstances the two said charlatans took advantage of and in less time that is taking me to write this, they had persuaded Liolí  that a onesie was “the” thing to own, wear and show himself in at social gatherings. And there you have it, dear reader. Now, I’m not making a case for abstemiousness, by any stretch of the imagination, but if you’re walking home, late at night and half cut, make sure you don’t do it alone. Ask Selina, the double-decker amphisbaena to walk with you. She’s immune to both high-proof alcohol and cant, hence she can spot mercenary bullshit before it turns the corner. She’ll be happy to see you safely home -as long as you let her prattle merrily on about the agonies and the ecstasies of twofold duality, with its attendant internecine contradictions, cognitive dissonances and the ensuing inner racket.

And here be a couple of ungainly creatures: Mr & Mrs Ugly, at your service. Too ugly for words, granted, but nicer monsters you won’t find this side of the Van Allen Belt, if I say so myself. I’ve attended their literary salons and poetry reading soirees many a time and I’ve always come out ethically uplifted, spiritually well fed and utterly & blissfully drunk. So there.

Fitter, tougher & scarier than Weetabix! And possibly cheaper in the long run. Coming soon to a conflict zone near you -which could very well be your back garden, if ExxonMobil decides it has fracking possibilities. Or you can get them @ Amazon, no doubt, should you want to join in the fun and start your own little sordid war on some crack-brained meretricious grounds. Or no grounds at all. It seems to work nicely for most American presidents. And for Tony Blair, of course.

I was missing the Deep Ones, and the Deep Ones were missing me, so we got together with the Shoggies and a few kegs of Leng’s Moonshine Candy and we got a modest knees-up. We all ended up prodigiously drunk, naturally (damned Plateau pocheens…) and a tad sentimental, as you can see. Here’s to beautiful R’lyeh, then! Hic…

The Expendables. Blessed are the meek for they will be obliterated in many and varied ways, all utterly barbaric. Thus they’ll be spared the agony of seeing their loved ones being brutally raped, arbitrarily executed, casually incinerated, droned, whitephosphored, shot in the back, guantanamoed, waterboarded and ritually humiliated. And their homes razed to sheer rubble and their land poisoned for decades to come and their olive trees uprooted for the hell of it. And, to add insult to injury, blamed for their plight. So, they ought to be grateful for small mercies and shut the fuck up and stop bitching. So say the Masters of the Universe and if they say so, why, then it must be right and true and woe betide who dares say boo to them, innit?

Funny old thing. At a time when there is other, juicier, more rant-inducing news around (like the ongoooooooing saga of “The-Russians-Are-All-Evil-Liars-And-We-The-Good-Guys-Must-Bash-Them-Or-Better-Still-Kill-Them-All” piffle, for instance), the one that sticks in my mind, not to mention my craw, is that one about the £1.5bn open bribe to the Paisleyites. I just can’t get over it/can’t stop salivation in ire about it. And neither can a large sector of the population of the DeepDeepDeep, apparently. ‘s good to know one’s not alone. 🙂

This one comes with a po’m. Or kitchen sink rant, if you prefer. Yes, sorry about that. My Muse is a bully wot cannot be denied and I fucking wish she’d retire and go live in Sicily, or somewhere far enough from me, or run away with a nice boy Muse, or just run away and get eaten by a passing Shantak Bird, or something. But she won’t, worse luck. So I’m stuck with her and you lot with my poetry, Bumba have mercy on us all … Or perhaps not. Perhaps indifferent poetry is also a valid tool and I should be grateful that She’s still around and willing. Who knows… (Who cares…)