Living Next Door To Leonard Cohen
Once upon a time..................
I had a neighbour called Nellie Cohen. She was fat, filthy, friskie and free with her favours. Oft to be found quaffing clear cool ale, in her local hostelry, 'The Dram And Bluie'.
Little did her law abiding, curtain twitching, neighbours realise that, Nellie was a secret agent for the KGT.
Late was the hour as Nellie passed into oblivion and sought the temporal convergences of mind over matters not a lot. If only she could experience the dipping swoops, of her fruzzled daymare, plunging ever diagonally across her mind's eye, blurred by J. Daniels and S. Cane in unequal measures.
Riding high on a mix of illegal subs and legal medication, Nellie tossed ideas around in her head, but failed to catch even one.
"Bugger," the muse wasn't rising and Nellie desperately needed a rise. Subs won't last forever. Neither will a brain full of uncaught ideas. Help was at the top of her nearly-most-wanted list. Getting herself to a Nunnery was easy. Too easy. A coward's way in, a psychic’s way out.
'Abandon rope all who enter', was the starkest of darkest directives, to all who contemplated suicide as non-paying souls. So dark was the stark directive, that met her unsteady gaze at the gnarled side door, that she couldn’t read it. But in the nick of time her eyes fell upon 'Push,' the button, so she did.
"Bugger off," intoned a deep baritone, betraying a lifetime of practice. "It's me, you t'wozack," screamed Nellie. "I got me to a ‘nunnery’ to escape what ails me." The gnarling door opened.....
"I'm washin' me smalls," boomed the bone-jarring drum of a man's voice. "Sod that," squealed Nellie. "I'm in deep ploops and you're one of only three men, what can save me."
"Oh for pity's sake," bounced the words around the cloisters, getting ever deeper as they did the circuit, "will mad, demented, pitiful women, ever leave me in peace?"
"Never!!" came the cry from a million disembodied voices. "Bloody 'ell," stuttered the less than previously proud, manhood-in-sound.
"Get out of me way," cracked Nellie's voice as she bludgeoned her way through his resonances. (The secret dream of many a woman) "We've got things to do and a brain to catch."
"Train?"
"No!! you great lump of metaphoricals and similitudes, a Brain, mine!"
Bats , common to this nunnery, realised that their belfry was under serious attack and gathered into a classic V formation. No-one knew why. In fact the same people who didn't know, also took ages to wonder why L. Cohen esq., idled his time away in a ‘nunnery’. But we know why, don't we, dear reader.
Medieval miscreants, missing mammarian manipulations, spent many a happy hour and florin in ‘nunneries’ of yore. Wild Willy Shakespeare used up most of his 'advances' and vitality in those dens of ill-repute and misnomer. He'd scribble away with his right hand on cheapest velum, while busying his left hand with quill and pot, if you catch my drift. But our auntie-heroine was incapable of catching her own ideas, let alone my drift.
Not being the most absorbent sheet on the roll, Nellie missed a lot of what went passed her. Nunnery, belfry, bats, and achingly-pleading voices were a dead giveaway to the likes of thee and me, but for Nellie, grasping the nettle required the skill of an opposable thumb, a skill she had yet to master.
Desperate to inveigle herself into the clutches of this one of three men who could save her, she threw herself at his cassock and clung on with the tenacity of a baby's chuck-up. "Unhand me!" bellowed the smalls' washer, and with a flick of his wrist, laid her on a topiaried box, of exquisite dimensions. Hundreds of years old, yet still small, perfectly formed, proud and erect in its bed of fresh mulch.
"At least let me share a party-wall with you?" she pleaded, eyeing his solitary cell, close by. At least his single cell was larger than her poor-collection.
"Bugger," he whispered in a voice that would melt lips, "she's got me in me vitals. On one condition, Nellie, do you hear me!"
"What?" she asked, having lost the thread already amongst her poor-collection.
"Never, ever, tell anyone,” he pleaded, “that I have to sing for me supper in a downtown 'nunnery’. It's bad for me image."
Yes, you're right dear reader, too many pleaders in here.
“Me?……. tell anyone your secret? tish, pish and other words I don’t know,” she sighed with relief. At last, what ailed her could be ministered to in the ‘nunnery,’ by the careful removal of a party wall. She hadn’t so much caught an idea, but rather had one stomp a crushing great size 8 onto her poor-collection.
“Will I have to come round?” she asked with a slow drawl, lazy eye and dead leg (from the topiaried box incidentals) “and smack you with a well-proportioned cleft-stick, to keep you up through the longer, darker, starker mornings?”
“Probably,” he muttered. He was tired and his hands were red raw from fumbling through his smalls in such a confined space. “I’ll speak to you later after I’ve got these to hang right,” and he clamped a clothes peg tightly onto a pair of now red boxer shorts. (Non-topiary) Did I mention he was hanging them on a washing line?
All of a sudden, the gnarled door slowly flew open. (You try being fast when you’ve been gnarled!) A giant of a man filled the doorframe. Dressed in only a black tuxedo, white dress shirt, pink silk bow-tie, white spats, and patent leather black slippers, he thundered at the quivering pair, “where’s me smalls cohen?”
“Bugger!….,” whispered Cohen, in a voice that wouldn’t melt lips, for at least two minutes, “it’s King George the Third and he’s after getting his smalls back.” He wasn’t really George the Third, but he thought he was, and so did Leonard. (Very odd, but who are we to mock the rambling ruminations of those who live only a party-wall away? Just ask Nellie)
But Nellie took one look at this giant and decided that party-walls could wait. She wasn’t going to be living next door to Leonard Cohen, from now on she’d be called Nellie King.
The End. Yes...the bloody end.......I'm off to a local hostelry......
oh, by the way, don't bother....it's 1054 words. You should be drinking, not counting.
I added a smiley in case the nurse hasn't changed your flower vase water today. Sorry. But that's all there was in the gift shop.
is LSD a steriod?
. [Oh, sorry, that's right. This is a drug-free zone. Not advocating or promoting usage. Just recalling. Innocent recalling. Perfectly innocent recalling 
; sorta 
