The Bearpit
Place
Sunken Bristol roundabout and civic omphalos of drunques, outreach and judicial proximity. The city descends into it both geographically and morally.
See also:
Sonnet 65
The street obeys a gravitation law,
sucking the used up wasted dead souls down
to Tartarus beneath the roundabout,
where bones by beggar’s Cerberus are gnawed,
and hipster psychopomps dressed up as clowns
do katabasis among dead-eyed louts.
Here, Orpheus with broken guitar croaks
and his Eurydice lies comatose
upon a mattress, cold and urine-soaked.
If you would converse with these palsied ghosts,
fill new dug ell square pitkin with White Ace.
They’ll slurp it up and, gibbering, smoke crack,
and you can stare at each collapsing face,
and write about it later on your Mac.
Appears in
From the books (4 passages)
At the very bottom of the miasma, the Bearpit. Knots of short men and women with prison pallor congregated here, mainly because of the proximity of the Magistrates’ Courts. Drinquers, junquies, craque-fumeurs. Wearing cotton/polyester mix stretch stuff, hoods up. Brand new very cheap trainers. There was here an amount of Quristian outreach with soup. Up steps and along pavement. More drunques. Stokes Croft, Spike Island, King Square, Jamaica Street: charity…
The next assizes were to be held at the Magistrates Court, conveniently located just up the road from the Bearpit, with Messrs Justices Shallow and Silent presiding. Mr Justice Shallow had by the quaffing of a great quantity of port rendered his complexion exceedingly florid, and had by the generous application of schoolroom chalk rendered his chin surpassing blue. Mr Justice Shallow having by the identical methods achieved a comparable…
…for the most part sat upon the bench in their blue-chinned pomp at the Magistrates Court hard by the Bearpit. It so happened that upon the bench, between Justices Shallow and Silent sitting thereupon in their blue-chinned pomp, was to be found Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet, withal his pomp went more after a grey-feathered perching fashion. And it so happened that there was arraigned before these judging gentlemen a female, advanced…
…of their own lives to attach themselves to this new and febrile movement. By the time it reached the Bearpit, the throng was over a thousand strong, and a bottleneck formed, with many overflowing the roundabout and halting the scanty traffic of the late hour, while others pressed down the steps and through the underpass into the Pit itself, where several dozen beggars and diverse other loungers and flâneurs added…