After erasing all the voicemails and texts from his mobile as an impromptu safety measure, Johnny Sandovar gazed at his pallid reflection in the window glass. Through it he saw darkness devouring the sky. He was alone now, still nervous but perversely relieved that hopefully it was all over and that the choices he'd made were good ones. But then a long black car with no headlights shining came into his vision and hissed to a halt outside the entrance to his building below. The passenger door opened and a man’s prosthetic legs swung into view.

A Catholic who went to church to give thanks after being rescued from a jammed lift was killed when a stone altar fell on him.

I went down to the Word Dealer and bought myself a whole paragraph. Well, in times like these you've got to compensate how and where you can, right? I felt in need and ready to get ‘literally’ out of it. As soon as I left Quixotic Clive's dingy pad in the Caledonian Road I hurried into the nearest piss-reeking dark alley, unfolded the precious scrap of paper and tore off the first two lines. God, my fingers were shaking! I swallowed the sentences whole, one after the other and leaned back against the clammy bricks of the wall behind me and waited for the verbal rush. The blue neon sign above the kebab shop over the road had a tubular letter blacked-out from its title. I could hear the sporadic, wasp-like drone of fractured electricity from where I stood. My new stubble started to itch furiously and I now regretted designing it, so I took my gloves off to scratch it. I stared at the palms of my hands, watching phrases form and undulate on the skin, panting slightly under my breath as my heart started its familiar 130 bpm flexing of blood-rich power. I thought of all the music that I really needed to hear in the first flush of verbosity when I got home. But with ghastly irony and appallingly bad timing, the fucking Bee Gees entered my head with their song “Words”. Oh, this was a true bummer. That ludicrously overdone vibrato, the wispy, pussy voices of grown men and the images of their big teeth, grotesque facial hair and horrifically tight white flared trousers sent me into a state of near panic. “LEAVE NOW!” I screamed at the Gibb brothers. They shrugged in fraternal unison in an ego-bruised way and sloped off to go and annoy John Travolta somewhere. Opposite me was a graffiti’d wall covered in the sprayed vanities of vandalistic no-hopers and Banksy wannabes, but the swarming stream of consonants in my new consciousness denied me further focus and interest.

Clive hadn't got any Baudelaire tonight unfortunately. As compensation he offered me some Kundera, but I said:

"No, been there, done that".

"OK man, that’s cool. I've got some Will Self if you're up for it, yeah? "

"Oh, please! Are you gonna sell me a Thesaurus to go with that?"

I opted for a wrap of good old William Burroughs. He hasn't let me down yet. It's a good hit, as long as you stay away from handguns and a compliant spouse with an apple on her head. Way back, when I was an ersatz hippie living in Brighton in the early '70's, we used to scrunch up whole sentences from Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda and add them to our evening meal of rice, miso and vegetables. You'd spend the next two days hunched and groaning in the outside toilet locked in torment with verbal diarrhoea and a vivid imagination.

Sentences of linguistic adventure and flexibility started to swarm inside my skull. I felt fragile as if I was an eggshell or an onion made of glass and I needed to get home. Fast. I lurched like a hyphen out on to the street ahead of me and quickly hailed the first cab I saw and begged the driver, in words of one syllable, not to talk but to just drive me to Plaistow. Nouns, verbs and decadent adjectives licked seductively at my pulpy, veined forebrain. By now my punctuation was going out of the window: Syntax? Fuck thax! I paid the cabbie, ran up the steps of my block of flats, jumped over the derelict person that sat there grinning at their own vomit, avoided using the toilet that used to be an elevator and arrived breathless at my door. I scrambled my swipe card out of my pocket, slid the plastic down through the sinister slit and entered the sanctuary of my smoke-stale, transitory home. I slumped paralysed against the stained Formica-topped kitchen bar in my fifth floor flat and tore off another sentence from the crumbled, inky paper and swallowed it quickly just to keep up the momentum of the locutional high. A semi-colon lodged in my throat and I turned and spat it into the grime-freckled sink. I mentally replayed the side effects of the recurring affliction that had prompted me to slink out and score in the first place and I discovered that I was now laughing uncontrollably. Writer's block? Oh, that IS funny! That is just SO ENTERTAININGI It's comical, amusing, humorous, light-hearted, jocular, witty, mirthful, hilarious, droll, diverting, side-splitting, wacky, and rib-tickling. In fact I laughed so hard I fell over and brutally smacked my head into the stereo. From my hospital bed the next morning I saw a small item on daytime TV about an East London author rushed to A&E suffering from minor injuries to his forehead and a suspected written word overdose. Sadly, the Times Literary Supplement declined to run the story.

Elephant kills clown dressed as a peanut.