The Pig Faced Lady

Wait with me Lover, for the Machete Choir

2012-02-05T11:52:00.002Z

I’ve been reading the headlines about the machete choir and I’m not usually one to pick up the newspaper. I heard about what they did in Islington. The mess they left on old street. The machete choir have certainly gotten people talking. They most certainly have done that. They are all the radio blathers about. The baking hot topic of the taxi drivers.

It is so cold in the mornings I could cry icy tears. There is a plastic shower curtain hung where the glass of my window should be. A beach ball, an ocean and a shale and sandy paradise printed on its surface. Sometimes frost creeps along the ocean and I think that paradise is freezing over. Sometimes I like to think that.

They say the machete choir have a key to every house in London. People have seen them out the windows of the underground. In the cold nothing between underground stations. There was the tube that left Charing Cross full and arrived in Leicester Square empty. A hundred pairs of shoes lined up along the seats, a strange groaning playing across the tannoy system. There is an old tube line underneath my house. There must be rats down there, running up and down the rails like haunted carriages. There must be.

I haven’t worked in a long time. It never suited me anyway. I used to work pushing a litter cart round and round Tottenham Court Road. Every day that I worked I had a feeling in my belly as though I was falling. At Christmas we held a party on a patch of sand by Blackfriars Bridge. I thought I saw a man’s face gulping his mouth under the water. We made a point of not picking up our litter.

There are stains on my bedsheets like bruises. Blossoms of black and red and brown. I know that eventually the machete choir will visit. I am goose-pimpled with fear at the thought. I am not afraid of what they will do to me, rather I am terrified they will see my soiled sheets. I feel flushed with shame for what they might think. In my dreams my sheets are as hard and white as porcelain. I slip down them as though I were being pulled along on a sledge.

Pigs in the Kitchen

2012-01-29T15:25:00.000Z

2012-01-29T04:30:00.000Z

Mark Lamarr at The German Christmas Market

2012-01-28T23:27:00.009Z

Looking out from his Murray John Building top floor apartment beyond smaller towers to rolling hills some few miles away Mark Lamarr decides it is time for a bit of fresh air. He has been sorting his record collection through the night and into what is now, he realises, the late morning. Should the excess items be put into storage or sold? Donated to charity, perhaps? Mark Lamarr isn't sure. He puts down the Prince Buster 45 he has just discovered copies of selling for about £50 on ebay and stands up to adjust his quiff. The sun is coming down bright and clear through the large windows of his apartment. He picks up his Walkman, puts the hard little earphones in and presses play on a tape he recorded years ago for a late night radio show he used to present. "Do I have a problem?" he mumbles soberly as he grabs his keys. "No, the collection is far from complete." On the street a mess of huts that are half hut and half pegged-sheet: the German Christmas Market is in town. Over the fuzzy jangling of his Walkman Mark Lamarr hears a German Christmas Man protesting to a customer, "We're refusing to pay the rent because the council never gave us the German Christmas Huts we was promised." What is it but sausages and over-priced pick'n'mix? Wonders Mark Lamarr who dreamed of rice and peas, of jerk chicken and jerk fish. "HOT IT FROM THE TOP TO THE VERY LAST DROP!" crackles suddenly in his ear. An obese Christmas Woman trundles past eyeing him suspiciously. "Are you going to buy a bloody sausage or not?" enquires the rent-defying German Christmas Man, irked by this stranger standing in front of his hut with a quiff not buying any sausages. "Oh, um..." dithers the uncertain would-be customer, realising there is little to tempt him away from his record collection. Over the incoherent warbling of an almost forgotten reggae star Mark Lamarr asks, "Do you have anything spicy?" which cheers the German Christmas Man immeasurably so that he reverently lifts a large sausage from his tidy display and sighs, "Ah - Jamaican Christmas Sausage... For you, sir, £1 only." Almostly instantly from his puffer jacket zip pocket withdrawing the correct change Mark Lamarr laughs and admits, "That's more than I paid for the Prince Buster 45!"

30th Century Man

2012-01-27T06:10:00.002Z

Truffles, Truffles, Truffles

2012-01-23T21:02:00.001Z

When Furious Winston had been a little ape his Father had taken him foraging in the black and eerie cloud forest valleys below their home. The two of them had tramped through the seeping thickets of thorned and flowering undercanopy, searching for the husked delicacies that grew hidden amongst the starving trees. He had seen centipedes as long as snakes and beetles as big as rats. The leaves of every plant drooping, sick with the shade, branches reaching down to grasp at his sleeves and beg for help. Birds in the tallest almendros spying on Little Winston, thinking about carrying him away. When the flood clouds gathered the forest got so dark they may as well have been underground. They hunted in the pouring, blackness. The creeping scent they followed washing in and out with the rain. His father explained to him that delicacies don’t grow in the sun. That there is an earned sweetness in the struggle, a magic of the despicable hunt.

2012-01-19T16:59:00.000Z

2012-01-15T12:40:00.002Z

VIII. Planning and Design

2012-01-09T19:18:00.002Z

You said if you had designed the light you would have designed it different.

You would have given it poise.

It made you sick to think of it throbbing lewdly through the emptiness of outerspace.

What I Remember of Christmas Eve's Eve

2011-12-29T21:32:00.003Z

"It was before the riots when you buried the mannequin, right?"

"I'm glad I didn't buy you that replica gun for christmas."

"...they've got human eyes but nothing else."

Bath Spa -- An Alconautical Journey

2011-12-26T12:20:00.004Z

2011-12-24T12:51:00.000Z

2011-12-19T18:14:00.000Z

Jessy and the Factory

2011-12-18T15:28:00.001Z

They said they had pushed the factory a thousand miles to the sea. Its foundations mounted on wheels, those wooden spools, they said, taller than elephants, that the engineers curl up and around the endless wires and rubber organs to the street and the new born sky scrapers.

Its chimneys wobbled when the road broke into patches and when they ground over speed bumps or fallen animals. The highest windows snapped on their hinges, their buckled latches grasping nothing. The furnaces glowed through the gaps in the brickwork and through the frayed paint on the blacked out windows, red iron industry puncturing the creaking evening. The carrion crows gathering on the roadside, tearing at the ground with their beaks, cocking their heads as the factory grumbled past, choking on the earthworm strings of foundry smoke that followed.

They said that they had found the factory in some dog-end suburb of the north. Drawing in the gasps of the bored school yard air. Droning five-iron swings, humming birds and old, rubber strung cassettes. It had blinked its furnace eyes at them as they had approached. Puffed out a complacent chimney full of smoke.

They said the trickiest part was the lifting, they held onto ledges and door handles and corners and attempted to synchronise themselves by yelling down from ten. During the first three tries the over eager prevailed. The south wall of the factory lifting a good while before the rest, everything not welded to the floor inside sent tumbling northwards, the north doors swinging open and the factory, nauseous from its upheaval, vomiting power-tools and workshop benches all over the shale forecourt.

When the factory was finally held evenly above the ground, they all agreed that it was much lighter than they had expected. They juggled with the weight tentatively, passing it between their hands, patting it up and up and up into the air like children playing uncertainly with a balloon.

You had been the first brave enough to throw your side of the factory high above your head. So boldly that it took the others entirely by surprise. It had very nearly somersaulted over itself. They had hopped and clambered around after the vaulting building, crying out, stretching threads in their clothing to catch and steady it. They said that you had all of your laughter leaping out of you, your arms high-risers, your fingers tingling as if you had thrown off all your sleepy worries into the air alongside the factory.

Later when they were trying to balance the building onto its wheels you were laughing so hard that the factory trembled in your hands, its brickwork loosened, stray concrete crumbled free, bloated rats bowled out through its vents and crevices as though they were brown, scraggy tennis balls. They said they all laughed too, clasped with the joy and wilderness of you. Your fierce delight.

You strode out ahead, marching to the rapture beat, the factory followed, pushed by the others who clambered over one another to see you smiling and swinging your arms at the front, twirling your happiness around like a baton.

2011-12-10T08:18:00.000Z

Vines

2011-12-08T23:04:00.004Z

Archie Orchestra was a superstitious ape. His three comrades harangued him for it. They told him, grow up, open your eyes, think about it, get a hold of yourself, use your brain, you must be joking.

Archie Orchestra would not drink with his left hand or look a buttonquail in the eye, he wouldn’t touch yellow flowers or shake hands with strangers. He would turn three times on the spot if he smelt mushrooms cooking, he would bow down low to the bad moon when it rose unexpected and horror red and lit the whole evening in a graze.

Archie Orchestra believed that dreams were real things, like spit or piss or cod liver oil, that there must be a dream organ inside of every animal, a swelling, secreting second brain, leaking puss filled nightmares and syrup clot fantasies. He imagines his ancestors in the jaguar vines breaking their arrow tips into the toxic dream organs of tropical frogs, firing them up at black-billed sicklebills, who would fold up their feathers and fall from the furthest branches entranced in a terminal reverie.

The first night The Troop had arrived in the primate city - when they had kicked the harbour master’s office to ash and splinters and slept on its broken floor - Archie Orchestra had dreamt of the cloud forest. Dreamt he had been dressed in straw and yacht rigging, with a chain wrapped three times around his waist, its links pinching his skin as he padded through the undergrowth. The remainder of the chain stretching off, disappearing through the hornwort and the vinegar flowers, a mile and half in length with an anchor at its end, so tangled in roots and stems and bark and branches that it crawled across the cloud forest, uprooting, ploughing, leaving a soil highway behind it like some nameless long haired animal gradually eating its way in furrows across the world.

Archie Orchestra had walked and walked and walked through his dream. Dragging his anchor behind him. On his way he had passed other apes walking in different directions, some approaching him, some cutting across his path, each and every one buckled to an anchor, all of them sweat bristled and thunder delirious, drawing ploughed floundering lines across the forest like tired surgeons marking out in ink where their incisions are going to be.

At one point he reached the shores of the lake where he was born. Archie Orchestra sank into the water as though he was lowering himself into a bath. He shuffled across the lake bed, through the jelly weeds and razor oysters, piranhas snapping at him, carrying away his straw clothes, becoming trapped between the links of his chains and biting at his fur in a panic. His anchor ground through the silt, stirring up the settled dead and the greedy living. His gorilla eyes blurred with the dead lake blind effort of being. He walked for so long under water that he forgot what it was like above the surface, he forgot the air, the dry breeze. The sun was a rubber star that floated in the water. Its lights were blinding weeds that sunk with all the weight of their brightness.

2011-12-07T08:17:00.001Z

Catch

2011-12-06T20:53:00.003Z

Winter mornings on the dock were shutter down winds and squalling stone curlews seized to sheets of ice. They were hoarse prayers of thawing. At the gutting stalls offal curled frozen off the ground, poised like bloody vipers charmed from the bellies of abandoned fish. Eel heads, eyeball white and egg shell brittle. Shark fins gone sharp as glass, littered around, glittering with frost, looking like the slivers of some immense, unthinkable vase that had been hauled up in a fishing net by mistake and broken on landing though once it had stood on the deepest ocean floor and hummed soprano to the current and was a home to the blind crabs and lonely clubhook squid and animals would swim across a hemisphere to visit it and it was at the beginning and end of every story whenever a story was told about the sea and everyone said that if it was ever broken then the truth in everything would become obvious, boring even, though when it was broken all that emerged was a staggering, air drunk giant isopod who crawled up the steps to the harbour master's office and died rolled up under his desk.

2011-11-29T11:46:00.000Z

The Never Night Haul

2011-11-28T23:28:00.002Z

The rope creaked. Shaven Cromwell quite bright in the darkness, his two hands reaching out like snowdrops sprouting out of black soil. Furious Winston is almost invisible in his coal smoke suit and long, greased back black fur. The two of them have the weight of the rope between their fists and through the crooks of their arms. It moaned with the strain. The rope was bristled from where it had been dragged, grating over the dock’s edge. It was thumb thick and stretched groaning into the blackness. There was the sound of claps and splashes now and then from where it flung tense against the swells of the dock water. It was a tightrope into a saltwater nothing. A wet fuse to the slow ocean.

The apes strained. They had been there since dusk. Since night sprung around the docks like a taut rope. They had worked in shifts. Archie Orchestra lay snoring under an overturned fishing boat, his rasps and whistles inflating its folded sail, his croaks agitating the keel. Pete the Gamble was in the dice house, rolling audacious wagers against the sleep drivel baboons and guava anxious langurs.

Sweat and blushing determination lit up Shaven Cromwell’s pale face in the night, he pulled and pulled and puffed out his cheeks, ran his tongue over his canines, his eyebrows rising and falling in tides of concentration. He was speaking soft and breathless gibberish to himself, low words of encouragement.

Furious Winston was expressionless. Silent except for the sound of his breath that eeked in short gusts, crawling along with the meagre movements of the rope. He imagined that they had hitched their rope to the stars and were hauling on the cosmos itself. That he and his comrades had elected to compete with the black, humming universe in an eternal round of tug-of-war.

Furious Winston spoke and his words were his voice ropes creaking.

I can see it.

There it is.

I can see it.

Shaven Cromwell strained his eyes. Hauled them into the dark. He could see it too. The rope loosened. Waves began gushing against the wharf. Great, gloomy swells folding over the concrete landing. Washing over the apes, crashing against their knees. It was as though they had dragged in the dark ocean on the end of their rope.

Archie Orchestra awoke under a tide of icy water. He floundered and panicked, half tangled in the yachts rigging. Cracking his skull against the bow he was sleeping under. For a moment he was convinced that he was going to drown. His head appeared bursting, gulping from beneath the water, the hairy, bulbous head of a gruesome fish. His bleary fish eyes goggling at what he saw. The rope curling slack and abandoned on the flooded wharf. Furious Winston and Shaven Cromwell galloping through the water in opposite directions, fleeing from the prow of the hauled-in steam liner that was charging gigantic and unstoppable towards the shore.

2011-11-17T21:24:00.000Z

Q and A

2011-11-17T21:22:00.004Z

Q: What do you do?

A: I worry alot.

Q: What do you want? What do you not want?

A: I want to know when I am dying. I don't want it to be a surprise.

Regulars

2011-11-14T22:28:00.001Z

That day at the Cambridgeshire World Cider Festival, three sips through my fifth glass, time had given up. It was a first for the history of everything. Up until then, time had always been moving, passing through space whilst space remained still. However, that day, in the apple scab inn, surrounded by drooling, blaring drinkers, time had rung its own bell, counted itself out, strolled willingly into its own right hook. It had crouched in the proverbial road in protest, refusing to stir until myself and the remaining universe took on our fair share of the work. Rather than moving forwards through apathetic space, time made it clear that it intended to catch its breath, it was the turn of space to move backwards through time whilst time stood still and wallowed in its immobility and thought about its life. Myself, the cider drinkers and the rest of the universe discussed time’s declaration amongst our selves, we shook our heads and rattled our glasses, we bickered and we mused and finally, emboldened by the cider and the quavering promise of an unexpected adventure, we obliged.

In its shallowest parts, moving through time felt like falling backwards through a spider web of loose cotton wool, its strands stretching and snapping and tickling us as we passed. We were almost playful, each of us forgetting our anxieties for a little while, purring with delight whenever the warm, fleecy strands of time were thick enough to cradle us like a hammock, shrieking with laughter whenever they gave way unexpectedly beneath us. In its deepest parts, moving through time felt like sneaking along the storm-cloud-black bed of a vast and roiling sea. We crept backwards in an eyes-closed, lips-tight, hand trembling parade, the universe creeping ahead like a frightened child backing out of a dark, unfamiliar room.

That is how we marched backwards, depths to shallows, shallows to depths, one leading to the other, sometimes suddenly, sometime gradually, always at the same, drudging pace. Whenever I looked at the others I recognised in their faces the same look I had seen in the faces of commuters all across the world, a look of people who the perennial seeds of boredom have been planted, a look of those being gradually, ground down to nothing. We were working in toiling, unpaid employment, traipsing through time, on board an endless commute to nowhere.

Then, as though a comet had come smoking and splintering through the roof of the Apple Scab Inn, a realisation struck us all at once. That it was under our control and no-one else’s how quickly we decided to pass through time, we could speed up and slow down as we pleased. Stretch the instant of a dropped, glass shattering to a three hour, ponderous, disarming motion picture. Hasten the whole evening’s proceedings to two quick claps of our hands, wake up the following morning with a lurching hangover and a feeling as though we had fallen off of a hundred storey building and survived.

We revelled in this beautiful, drunken, new found freedom. Even in the gloomy depths where panic thrummed and unseen hands stroked our faces as we passed, we skipped and played and bellowed with joy, chasing each other backwards through churning clouds of time that were as thick and as black as house fire smoke. The entire universe partaking in a backwards, cosmological game of tag.

At one point I peered up through time and saw what looked like the contrails of aeroplanes. They were sporadic at first and far away, but after a little while more and more appeared, closer and closer, looking like torpedoes streaking straight down through time. They were the old men regulars, so laden with tradition that they sunk swifter than flooded submarines. I stood and watched them soaring past all around me, swarms and swarms and swarms of them, an old man meteor shower, each of them sitting still on their barstools and levering their tankards to their lips and plummeting out of sight, down towards the black, abyssal bedrock of time.

The Dire Dockland Boogie

2011-11-13T21:19:00.001Z

Henri said that the sound of the wooden rowing boats landing on the echoing dockland one after another was the sound of The Big Swinger rapping his fictitious knuckles against the locked door of The Real.

Furious Winston said it was the copper boot-steps of a lucrative opportunity.

Pete the Gamble thought of the hollow poplar roll of dice – of risk and tragedy and a clumsy gambler’s ecstasy.

Archie Orchestra heard the metronome swinging and ticking the introductory beat to an entire, unknown opera, and he squirmed a little at the idea, feeling as though he was an actor expected to perform to a full-house without knowing any of his lines.

Shaven Cromwell remembered that when he was a boy he had seen flocks of coconuts dropping from the sky, cracking open on the craggy rock-pools at the edge of a wordless ocean. The coffin-knock of their husks splitting on the naked rocks. The delirious cries of the sea-birds responsible, so far above that they dropped their fruits from the borders of space and swooped down after as though they were chasing meteorites.

Non-Prayers for the Modern Bravers

2011-11-05T14:35:00.000Z

Forgive the crayfish souls,
grey husks feasting
on the eternal smallness of the frail delicious.
Reintroduce the natives to the empyreal sewage.
Conserve the hirsute being of passed over mink,
coatless, shivering
in the nippy after tundra.

Forgive the Greeks. The Pagans.
Arrange us a meet and greet with Cro-Magnon Man,
Mr Habilis and Co.
Forgive us our peccadilloes and our callow nerves.
Give us gold teeth and little queues,
a sense for the senseless, start to the unending.

Let there be an after-water in this earned after-party
for the after-gills of perished giant squid to breathe.
Save the soft-shelled souls of the Cambrian extinction.

Carry the remainder in soul-recycling calculations.
Let slide like soap the contradictions.

Give the dead-lazy chairs.
Give the ghosts of confident men butterflies in their dead bellies.
Let ghosts of blind, dead women, see in microwaves and gamma rays.

Taps

2011-11-01T19:02:00.000Z

When they knock down the alley house, he thought, they better collect all its shadows first.

Scoop them out with snow shovels. Soak them up with sponges.

When they built the alley house, he thought, the shadows had no choice but to crowd inside.

They should round them up and send them to work in the movies. Sell them to fashion photographers and to LASER engineers, to any profession engaged with the play and projection of light.

He’s been drinking bottled water since they demolished the alley house.

Since its shadows slipped into the drains and tainted all the tap water with gloom.

2011-10-31T02:40:00.000Z

Doors

2011-10-30T21:25:00.004Z

He could hear his neighbours moving in the flat above.

More than once had he climbed one too many flights of stairs and spent long, perplexed moments churning his key in the wrong lock. Cursing. Persperating.

Once his neighbours door had been open and he had rushed in, afraid he had been burgled.

When he levered on the light switch he had been confronted by a mass of blinking, yawning, naked bodies lying on wet shaggy carpets and torn open sleeping bags.

When the meat goes cold

2011-10-24T20:51:00.001+01:00

At first they had called him a hero.

The German Sausage Man.

Rescuing the children. Friend of the vulnerable, the sick and the elderly.

Later there were allegations.

Words as limp and sickly as undercooked sausages.

2011-10-24T13:35:00.001+01:00

Bangers and Trash

2011-10-22T19:58:00.002+01:00

The man had found the German Sausage costume as he was walking back from work.

It was erupting from a wheelie-bin, looking miraculous and obscene.

God was a German and he had fumbled his sausage and it had fallen from the sky and into the rubbish.

When the man lifted out the German Sausage costume the wheelie-bin toppled over with a crash.

Another man was watching from a window, writing furiously into a spiral bound jotter.

2011-10-22T05:13:00.000+01:00

Meat Dreams

2011-10-21T18:48:00.002+01:00

Three nights earlier, the man slept in his dark apartment.

The German Sausage suit hung from the back of the door like some flaccid fishing trophy.

A lolly-pop orange sea creature hauled out of the pacific.

That night, the man was sleeping quietly.

Most nights the man has nightmares.

He screams.

2011-10-21T05:15:00.001+01:00

All Pork and No Play

2011-10-20T21:55:00.001+01:00

A day later, a group of children found a man dressed as a German sausage floating face down in the canal.

At first they thought the dead man was a novelty, sausage shaped boat.

Later the police loaded the man into the back of the ambulance, wrestling with the slippery German sausage suit between them.

There was a photo of it in the newspaper.

It looked like two tiny policemen carrying a sausage into a sausage oven.

2011-10-20T13:51:00.003+01:00

Ecstasy of Sausage

2011-10-19T19:54:00.000+01:00

A man dressed as a German Sausage danced gleefully in the road.

Traffic builtup around him like carrier bags caught in the trees.

The Ecstasy of Morris

2011-10-17T17:39:00.000+01:00

Grey Acres

2011-10-16T21:42:00.003+01:00

The last human who ever died had a last name like an animal. Wolf. Rat. Whale. No one quite remembers. The last human who ever died, died in the cold or in the water or in the dark. Nine-hundred, a thousand years ago. No human has ever died since.

We are not sure what dying is. We think it might be a type of forgetting. When a human forgets itself and the world forgets the human. Our lives are lives of forgetting. They always have been. Our heads forget but our feet and fingers remember. We all drive machines, operate vehicles that no-one understands. We drive them along carriageways that nobody can name. We park them on cliff-tops and look out over the unfathomable ocean and we know that if we leapt over the edge and onto the rocks we would be fine -- though we very rarely try it.

There are eighty hundred and eighty six of us and everybody knows everybody and always has. We have last names like dull colours and shades of plaster. Grey. Magnolia. Ash. There was a panic one hundred and eighty years ago when one of us disappeared. Everyone started talking death and dying. That the dying had begun again. Nobody had the right words to explain themselves. Some said that dying was the sound of rain water drumming against a black window. Others that it was the feel of soft wool wrapped around your naked thighs.

Humans stood on polycarbonate crates and sung prophecies of dying. Crying that we would die like the grass and the centipedes. Then one morning the one who was thought to have died was seen sitting in their front yard peering up at the winter sun. They said they had slipped into the river and been carried out to sea. It had taken them all summer and autumn to swim back.

We live in a world of rocks and plastic. No one remembers when all the plants and animals died. We have their bones and seeds in damp jars underground. Their names are painted on the walls of libraries where all the books have rotted, schools where the classrooms blow with chalk and crumbled rubber. Wolf. Rat. Whale. We have the bones of humans too. Though no-one really believes they are real. No-one really believes in bones at all.

I think that I have written books. In a time that there was still paper. And my neighbour she thinks she has built great machines before rust swept through the land like locusts. We carve our names into the bricks of our houses lest we forget them. We carve lists of things we think we are, to anchor us against the current of forgetting. Bee Orchids. Salt. Cinnamon. Though eventually we forget the taste and feel of the things we are writing and the sound and taste of the names as we say them is all that remains. We write the most important parts of ourselves all over our houses. When we forget their meaning their repetition across the walls is like an echo of our forgetting. March in -March in - March in - March in - March in - March in - March in Provence.

The dying world was a different world to ours. The dying lives lived there hardly lives at all. Often when I dream I dream of dying. It is a bright, blurred dream of nothing. The colour of my pale skin when I hold a torch light behind it. My neighbour says she remembers everything when she dreams, though she forgets almost everything on waking up. She says she dreams of animals. How loud the world was with animals. She wakes up startled, with their scent in her nostrils, their feel on her fingers, their names in her mouth. Wolf. Rat. Whale.

2011-10-16T13:48:00.000+01:00

II. Electricity

2011-10-04T22:44:00.002+01:00

She spent the power-cuts lighting candles as though she was mourning the death of the electricity.

Archaeologists will call ours the electric age, she said, rightfully we should worship electricity, the way our ancestors worshipped fire.

In the future we will have a language of electricity. Communicate with electric thoughts, amplified and sent down wires. During the power-cuts the whole world will be as still and as silent as though everybody had died.

Her mother had a hearing aid installed yesterday. She says that one by one the doctors will replace her loved ones with electrical appliances.

The back-up generators make the hospital strip lights throb and moan. The light creeps around the room, growling and stuttering, wailing like a wild animal. The ghost of the electricity runs through the hospital wires and those who behold it are sure they have died. They say to themselves, I am in an afterlife with the electricity and I am so sorry for every lamp-light I ever switched off. They say, if I could live again, I would leave the houselights on forever, I would never turn off the plug sockets or the car engine or the electric shower or put down the telephone receiver or let the kettle reach the boil or the alarm clock finish ringing.

She said, you can wait for a change in me forever and it will be like waiting for the lights to switch on when the electricity is off.

You spent the power-cut in the hospital and when you woke up you were sure you had died.

2011-09-30T06:33:00.000+01:00

III. Light

2011-09-15T21:06:00.002+01:00

When you’re loving me you are cheating, she said, because you are married to the light.

When you were a child you would turn the kitchen lights off at night and stare into the flames inside the oven and you would think about the light. You would stare into candles and pale torches and patio spotlights and pilot lights and trafficators and red thimble sized safety bulbs and the glowing kettle filaments and you would think about the light.

You would grow up to be a photographer, they said, because of the way you worried about the light.

You wrote her glaring love poems. She reads them wearing sunglasses. She reads them smiling while dishevelling her hair then she peeks at you blinking as though she had spots in her eyes from lifting her head and looking at the sun.

Her soft legs // wedged // a sopping supernova // blaring with love // and light.

I'm Worried Because I Laughed During a Rape Scene

2011-09-10T20:14:00.003+01:00

I Better Check On Mother, She's A Lot Of Fun. I Hope She Doesn't Die.

2011-07-19T20:56:00.004+01:00

The Cats Going To The Bathroom Right In The Back Of My Portrait. I'm Glad He Is. I'm Glad Somebody's Doing Something They Want To Do.

2011-06-12T01:01:00.004+01:00

"She looked like Annie Leibovitz's ugly sister" (overheard conversation on Dover Street)

2011-05-31T17:32:00.002+01:00

[Extract from] The World’s Oldest Trees (A Travel Journal by Rosalind Jane Currey)

2011-05-15T22:25:00.003+01:00

Llangernyw Yew
Common Yew
4,000 years old
Wales, UK

A four thousand year old yew tree grows in the church yard of the welsh village of Llangernyw. At the first quarter moon of every month, people travel there, from all over Britain, to participate in the ancient practise known as ‘The charming of the yew’. It is a ritual first recorded around the time of the Norman invasion of Wales. Though the locals claim it is much older. The visitors queue up in the graveyard, the patient dead, arisen and waiting for sunset, when the quarter moon is at its highest. Waiting for the minister to arrive, who is short and shy and walks with his arms folded. I stood there with the others, the rain falling in rubble. We crowded around the church like headstones.

The minister emerged, led us through the rain and the graveyard to the broken yew. Led us past the collapsing plague victims and shrivelled consumptives, over the crumbled and leathery departed. He organised us into three tight, concentric circles around the Llangernyw yew, linked together by our hands in each others pockets. There was silence. He crept around the split trunk of the tree, looking at each of us in turn, looking into our eyes and at the drizzle running down our hair and faces. In a low voice, almost a whisper, he started singing: “Today the yew is dying. It has been dying for a thousand years. It will be dying a thousand years today”. There was a rest, and then he began again, slightly louder. The first circle sang too. Another rest. Then the first two circles. Louder. Another rest. Then everybody. Louder still. And louder. And louder. And louder.

Soon we were all of us booming. Breathless in the short rests between repetition. The minister sang so mightily that he trembled. Transformed from an unstrung instrument of God’s shy, silence to a quaking organ of earthly, mournful riot. I looked at the others, though it was as if they weren’t there. There was the song and the song alone. Swelling with dolent words and then dissolving in the rests, slipping from the air like a yoke from a cracked egg. I imagined the song a thousand years ago, pooling around the tree, before there was a church or a graveyard, when the words rang in Celtic and the wild mountainside howled in doleful reply. The tree was dying that day, had been dying for a thousand years. It would be dying a thousand years to the day. Those words are so well known that people sing them in their sleep, they recite them at weddings, fumble them at funerals, they set them out on their dinner tables alongside their food.

The birds screeched and the dogs barked, trying their best to sing along. The cattle crooned, struggling with the words. People watched from their blushing windows. Whispering along. Gripping their clothes like a steering wheel. There came a point where I was sure I couldn’t sing any louder, I felt like a puffer fish, terrorised and fully inflated, like a hot air balloon at the limits of pressure at the point of explosion, drifting towards the frozen boundary of space. A deep sea diving bell at the point of implosion, plunging through impossible depths of water. Each time I trembled through the song I was a spear-hunter, an oyster-diver, lungs burning, laden down with riches, paddling towards the silver surface of the sea. Each repetition of singing, louder than the one before, was like diving deeper, trying to find folds of lung that had not been unfolded, canals of blood in need of air. I was floundering, drowning in song. Choking. Sinking. I closed my eyes and when I opened them the minister was before me, a hand on my shoulder and there was silence.

The Llangernyw yew loomed. It was so dark. I couldn’t make out the faces of the people across from me. They were grey balloons, featureless, disembodied, secured to the black graveyard grass by unseen strings. We must have been singing for hours. The minister led us back to the chapel, his head down, walking with his arms folded, just as he had sherpered us to the yew. We trickled through the vestibule and into the chapel, where we made idle conversation. We asked the minister about the church bells, made enquiries regarding his general health and happiness, humming the song to ourselves, not really listening to the answers our questions received.

People began disappearing. Straying into the lightless country to start up their cars. Others were drawn in the direction of the pub, erratic and inevitable, moving like iron filings caught under the influence of a magnet. The minister approached me after everyone else had left. We sat together. Perched on a torturous pew. We watched the rain filter through the splintered roof and trickle down the rafters. Watched it fill a line of red buckets, one drip at a time, sounding like pennies dropping into the collection box. The rain fell on the dark graveyard, it streaked across the coloured windows. The silhouette of the yew looking like some miserable stain that had crept across the glass.

When the minister spoke, he spoke with his chin buried into chest, addressing my knees. When I spoke, he raised his chin up high, gazing at the leaking roof, clenching his fingers together as if praying for a better conversation. His head was as bare and polished as the granite slabs in the floor. His voice as old and broken as the yew. You’ve come a long way, he said. All the way from California, I replied.

The cold, damp church was a revelation. Its smell of stone and a thousand years of heart broken weather. The way its air echoed to the slightest sound. Its dim arches and squat oaken doors. It felt part of the sodden earth, as though it had been dug out of a quarry in one piece. A natural occurrence, grown from a single grubby seed like the prehistoric Llangernyw yew. And seated within it, beside the minister, I was part of the earth too. I wasn’t so far from stone. I shared most of my constituent parts with the gloomy church. I was made of iron and copper and calcium too. I thought how I had grown from a single grubby seed an age ago and how I would eventually collapse. I felt as though those drips and globs of rain filtering through the ragged roofing had built me up into existence, gradually and unstoppably, they had sculpted me, a drop at a time, for hundreds and hundreds of years and that one day the water would change and instead of building me up it would gradually wear me down to nothing.

Donald always said that I looked so sad when I was sleeping. It must also be true of when I daydream as the minister roused me from my stalagmitic epiphany by asking if I was alright, that I looked a little far away, a little glum. I told him I was thinking about his church. That there was a church I knew in Kansas but it was tall, teetering and built out of wood, that it was more like a barn than anything else. Built in the valley, on an old river bed, built without fear of flooding, the faithful putting their confidence in the wisdom of the almighty, casting disdain at the wisdom of meteorologists. For the last five years of Donald’s life, he visited that church everyday. I would go there with him, once a year, on the morning of Donald’s birthday. The service was a long litany of dread. Promises of violence. Unspoken and spoken threats. That church smelt of wood varnish and sawdust. It was dry and splintered as was its minister and every one of his half thrashed, rasping words. Castigating and prohibiting, prophesising and forsaking, laying his hands on his congregations’ shoulders, his fingers as rough as a carpenters.

Donald struggled with god his entire life. As a child it terrified him, tyrannized him. In the day, god played ventriloquist in the school grounds, moving the teachers and speaking for them by throwing its voice. God tampered with the play equipment that was always breaking down. God stole school shoes and left them on the staircases, it hung around the cloak rooms and cut up people’s satchels with a razor. In the evenings god was in the countryside, it followed Donald on his walk home, he could see it in the corner of his eyes, hear the branches breaking as it floundered through the woodland either side of the path. God prowled Donald’s dark garden after sunset, leaving weird footprints in the flower beds, peeking in all the windows. At night Donald couldn’t sleep for the sound of god pacing back and forth in the gloomy attic.

When Donald was a teenager he spent a lot less time with god. Partly because he was so preoccupied with puberty, seized by its contradictory imperatives, its confusion and clarity. And partly because god was going through puberty too. Love-sick, impatient, prone to almighty mood swings. They drifted away from each other, god and Donald. On the occasions when they found themselves in each others company, it was always unbearably strange and awkward. By Donald’s twenty-first birthday the two of them had broken apart entirely. Sometimes Donald would think he recognised god on the commute to work, standing in line at the post office, sometimes he thought he heard its voice calling in for advice on the late night radio shows, but it never was. Donald spent his adulthood feeling as if something was missing, like there was a name forever evading him, liked he’d wandered into the room of his later life and forgotten what he was doing. Then, quite suddenly, in the last five years of Donald’s life, god reappeared. Sprung out from wherever it had been hiding. Knocking on the door one day, looking sorry, smelling of someone else.

I can’t tell you how much it hurt to see my husband become overgrown with religion. His faith and fervour became a mire in which he wallowed, which he rarely left, splashing around within his belief with obscene and embarrassing delight. His sudden piety hanging off of him absurdly, like old clothes he had found at back of his wardrobe. I couldn’t watch him when he prayed. Once I walked in on him, kneeling beside the bed, his hands clasped together, muttering, and it was as though I had walked in on him laying his hands on another woman. How quickly it all happened, how abruptly I lost my irreligious husband to a religious one, and how rapidly I lost that one too. It was as if dear Donald had woken up one morning after a night spent drinking secret whisky in his workshop and had mistaken his throbbing head and terrible sobriety for god.

I told the minister about Donald and about god. He asked me if I believed in god. I asked him which one he was referring to. I said I never thought of a good way of choosing one and dismissing all the others. He said that there was only one. And I felt compelled to tell the minister something, a story from when I was a little girl. Something that I had half forgotten, that I had never told anyone. And when I had finished telling him the story, he looked at me for a very long time and said that I should leave. I walked through the rain for an hour and didn’t know where I was going. The story I told him was about when I was maybe five or six years old, and I was playing around the ranch one day and found a litter of wild kittens.

They were squeaking and yawning and had their faces scrunched shut. They had wrinkled skin where their eyes should be, as if eyes had yet to grow in their tiny heads. I found them curled up on a nest of flattened scrub, under the corner of a raised ranch building. A squealing miracle that had survived the snakes and coyotes. There were a lot of wild cats around the ranch, they lived in fodder sheds and hunted the smaller, stupider birds, they feasted on the mice that thrived off the cattle feed. And I hated them all.

I hated the cats for killing the animals that fascinated me, dragging away those odd, enchanting birds and leaving skinny little bones - like the bones in a human ear - and clumps of feathers sticky with blood and powdery soil in their place. I hated them for their green and black moonlight eyes that rolled through the garden like marbles and that people gazed into and saw softness and affection rather than hunger and wilderness. I hated their caterwauling and howling brawls each night. Crying out, scratching and hissing. Prowling into my dreams as savannah lions and brush and thicket tigers. I hated their greediness and the way they killed for pleasure, killed for food they wouldn’t eat, killed when they were sated. I hated how they claimed ownership of everything by spraying their putrid scent.

I had heard the putting and bawling of the kittens from beneath a slat of fallen cladding. When I lifted it up and looked down at the tangled, breathing knot of little lives, my first thought was that I should kill them. That I should murder them. I pottered around the ranch looking for a pitchfork and thinking about all the ways in which I hated them and thinking that I was almost a grown up and grown ups often killed things that they hated like fleas and rats and killer whales, and that it was ok to kill something if it was a pest or if you were being cruel to be kind or if you were playing a sport or if it was a farm animal and so after all was only alive to so it could eventually be killed. And I couldn’t find a pitchfork so I took a brick from the yard. It was rough and heavy and the colour of a peach. I carried it with both hands back to the kittens. I could hear the cattle moving in the fodder shed as I passed by. I picked a handful of blue and yellow scrub flowers as I thought it was what a grown up would do. I felt wise and tough, solemn and knowing, the jagged brick was the weight of my humanity and I carried it gracefully in both hands.

The kittens were where I left them. Soft and blind as worms. I picked up the biggest one as though I was scooping up water with cupped hands and I laid him gently on the millstone. I picked two flowers from the bunch and placed them beside it. I said: Don’t worry, it wont hurt, you wont feel a thing, it’ll be quick, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. I lifted the brick way up above my head. The kitten wriggled on the millstone. Squeaking and yawning. I brought the brick down. There was a sound like garlic being put through a press, like a carrot being broken, like somebody biting into an apple, like a boot stepping into fresh snow, like a rotten branch snapping. I kept both hands on the brick. It rocked from side to side, balanced on the soft, broken body underneath. Silence. Then a bleating cry, a yip yip yip. The brick wriggled. I was too terrified to lift it up and look below. I stood shaking and sniffling and resting my fingers on the top of the brick as it crawled around the millstone like a glass on a ouija board.

2011-05-01T13:53:00.001+01:00

Sweet Gene's Sunset

2011-03-14T23:44:00.005Z

"Go GO GO!" To the girl in the red blue jeans. "Put another nickel in the juke box Gene!" Another prom queen, and then the road again.

A taxi through the green leaves and the oak trees of the night in England. The crash, your leg destroyed, Cochran's brains in the road. Teddy Rex took the old guitar and, under that foreign sky, you were never the same again.

"Bop for me bluecaps, BOP!" Another nickel in the juke box Gene. Your face was slack after hours running on past another prom queen and breakfast felt wrong even though the sun was full up in the morning. "Dammit Gene, how slow can you go?" Leg brace clanking in broad daylight, sweats under leather. You would have slapped him if it weren't for the terrible indigestion. "Bop! Bop for me, bop!"

"Well I've led an evil life, so they say..." to another prom queen somewhere on the road in the night. "Just rock me Gene, I'll be your crazy legs!" But there was only so long before those stolen hours crept up on you and dripped through the pores. "Jezebel I can't be your date tonight, just put another nickel in the juke box, please..."

"Go GO! GO! Clean that mess up!" after a drunk was sick on Sweet Gene's star on Sunset Boulevard. That bad stomach had done more than spoil his appetite.

2011-03-09T14:48:00.000Z

2011-02-01T21:23:00.000Z

The name on the buttered tongue.

2011-01-27T12:49:00.002Z

Draw
Arms.
Nothing
Is
Ever
Ludicrous.

Nothing.
Our
Ricochets
Mewl
At
Nothing.

'Well, noisy fucking apples to you too' said Stewart, and the whole house fell quietly as snow.

2011-01-18T23:01:00.003Z

2011-01-12T16:27:00.000Z

Local

2010-12-02T21:35:00.003Z

Your house had gone missing
and it could have been anywhere-

Years later, on the bus, approaching
some indecipherable suburb
you thought of the old, starving
kitchen- left to lie
or to lie about how it once was;
a thrice-leaking faucet,
lonely bacteria huddled in
a tossed-down yogurt cup.

In other spaces, your mother's
foggy crime novel sputtered by
the half-filled bath tub
and crystal bath salts
preached to mould:

There was a time
when we phased out from
the silt of some bare ocean,
though where from
I forgot.

2010-11-15T00:10:00.000Z

Bo's Birthday

2010-11-13T02:04:00.003Z

"And this year's Albert Einstein award for Excellence in Innovation goes to... Elias McDaniel!"

Rapturous applause greets the man from McComb, Mississippi, who rises slowly to nonchalantly accept his award: a solid gold sheriff's badge inscribed with the famous mass-energy equivalence-equation.

"Eee-equals-em-cee-Squared. I am the world's first A-Tomic gunslinger, y'all better watch me now."

Later, in the winter of that auspicious year, Bo received a letter marked with the seal of The White House: a gracious invitation from the President. A joint party was to be held between the birthdays of the two men, in the first week of January.

"Ooo wee BO you know I understand!" cried Eileen when she heard the news.

"Shut up, woman. Diddley talking. I ain't going to no jive party with that cracker fool. Even his mama calls him Dick."

Eventually persuaded by sweet Eileen, Bo pinned his Einstein sheriff's badge to his biggest stetson hat and boarded Air Force One from O'Hare Chicago to Washington National Airport.

On arrival he was greeted by Dick himself in the back seat of a Lincoln limousine.

"Hello, Mr Diddley."

"Hello, Mr President."

Later, at the party on the lawn at The White House, the president invites the man from McComb to carry the torch at the Independence Day parade in Chicago.

"Listen, Dick, I play guitar and sing. I ain't walking in no parade. Do you want me to go down like JFK?"

The president sweats and shudders and looks to his aides.

The lonely conjuror's handbook

2010-11-07T22:23:00.001Z

The Marriage of Myra Gale Brown and Jerry Lee Lewis

2010-10-26T01:04:00.003+01:00

"Do you, Jerry Lee Lewis, take your thirteen-year-old second cousin to be your lawfully wedded wife?"

"I sure do, Padre."

"In order to perform in places where this practice is frowned upon, such as England, you will have to adopt a stage persona. Do you accept this?"

"I play piano and sing, that's all I do. Just call me 'The Killer'..."

A young Winona Ryder smiles up under her veil and pouts a bit for Jerry to kiss her.

Psychic Phthisic and his Sexless Spirits

2010-10-07T10:49:00.004+01:00

The Philosopher the Haberdasher

2010-09-30T16:59:00.006+01:00

The Philosopher the Haberdasher is being released this October!

Review of "The Philosopher the Haberdasher" by Denton Shepherd:
"[The philosopher the haberdasher] is a pseudo-philosophical rant engaged through the somewhat arbitrary treatment of popular history, more specifically through a brief history of haberdashery. It talks of John Graunt and the elephant man, bale pickers and treasoned Cantonese, it peers self-consciously at confused and shallow ideas of so called "inevitable knowing" through a fumbling time line of threaded cotton and painted purling spools."

Chapters of Note [Publisher's release]:
** Joseph Merrick and the burden of anchorless knowing. **
** Secrets of smuggled silk and the metamorphosis of uncertainty. **
** Revolution, the hand woven Ptolemaic unwound! **
** Profit and Penance -- unshackling our guilty knowing. **

Select words of introduction:
"Our discourse is not merely NATURAL knowing but INEVITABLE knowing, that is, the only CONSISTENT knowing. The contradiction appears to be that, this method of knowing is HUMANLESS, however our ideas of consistency stem exactly from HUMANNESS. To claim inevitability through a projection of BEING, an extension of base experience seemingly must be consistent with our choice of knowing, however this structure is so delicately balanced on HUMANNESS or more generally, on BEING, that it would collapse if removed, or even perturbed to the slightest. Is this the best that we can do? Is there not an EXTERNAL approach, complementing this INTERNAL approach, this sending out of feelers, and watching our selves drop stitch, beat and breath, untangle the flying shuttle, through experience?"

Furious Winston

2010-09-17T21:13:00.001+01:00

Quarantine

2010-09-16T21:13:00.000+01:00

Every mornings, out the window.
A soupcan schoolbus would stop
and start, scooping crumpled children.
When I left school I wrapped my tired uniform
in a clear suit cover, held it against myself
like a teddy bear, a wedding dress.
“When you went south wearing my blackest dress”-
but there was no south, no tip of things. Just
the flat, expendable world;
a cracked mug cooling on the counter.
The sky green, an air-wide leaf,
trembling.

2010-09-02T13:32:00.002+01:00

Gears

2010-08-31T23:29:00.006+01:00

The watchmaker sleeps with a clockwork replica of his estranged wife, winding her before retiring, she purrs to her stirring cogs, snorts and fidgets in a mechanical slumber.

Some nights he can’t sleep, and during those he can’t he watches the bats like heavy apples on the wing, conkers swinging on loose dark strings. Some nights he can sleep, and during those he can he only dreams in glimpses and snatches, being awoken on the hour by a pre-programmed stray kick (he then takes the key from the bedstead and swings it and swings it and swings it and swings it around the small of her back).

The watchmender imagines his estranged wife has discovered her clockwork counterpart, he imagines she is outraged and has sent him a summons, he imagines he will have to unearth his watchdoctor uniform and defend his actions in the dock.

The watchmaker has built a clockwork court, a whirring appendix to his parched garden, with a wind-up judge and jurors, counting seconds with her gavel, questioning, listening, pondering, driven by fine drums of rational enquiry and conclusion.

The clockwork bailiffs have wax hands and the eternal starch of a uniform carved out of pine. They threaten the watchhealer with their wooden feet bolted to the court floor and beckon him periodically to unfasten their backs and examine their copper bowels.

The proceedings, driven by a series of shafts and wheels, always trundle out the same. The verdict on each occasion rolling over the tungsten tongues of the jurors, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, whilst an estranged wife slumbers stretched over the stand, kicking a stray leg in the watchmender's direction (who fetches the key from the bedstead and swings it and swings it and swings it and swings it around the small of her back).

Lushka

2010-08-24T12:05:00.001+01:00

Aging is a bad joke. Lushka was very old, and he rarely laughed at anything anymore. The youth howled, however - the porous youth, swelling with the delight of every little thing, bloating almost to bursting - until the laughter came steaming out of them in hoots and snorts. They whistled past Lushka’s windows in the evenings, inflated by life, and leaking. The youngest ones, in knitted suits of armour, clinging to their mothers like woollen barnacles, learnt the joke before anything else, suckled on it, and occasionally, when the humour became too rich or the punch line distasteful, they threw it up.

Lushka hadn’t always been elderly – obviously – he too had once had and held youth, though he wishes now that he had held onto it tighter. He had been a boy, long legged and well mannered. A soft spoken stripling. Lushka had even been a young man, a stronger sort - he thinks to himself – sturdier than the chortling youth of today. He was cherry wood to their balsa, he had burnt fiercer – days that left deep impressions upon them, had barely scratched him.

Lushka had rotten teeth and an eyelid with a sad hinge, weeping and hanging ajar when he slept. Loose joints. Piano wire hair. He had kept scars, climbing up each of his arms in salmon pink rungs whereas, ‘those lad’s’, he thought, ‘had kept diaries’. Lushka accrued his history, composed in his toothless lisp, braised in his bad breath: it was printed in ladders along his moccasin skin.

It is spring. Trees thawed. The ground sweats. The soil soaking. Grasses wet with the callow nerves of young love. It is the awkward season when forward blossoms, bee dancers, and gaudy wasps in swinging stingers, offend the prim flatlands. The steppe blushing in poppies; erupting in farrowed hives of potato pimples. Lushka would wake early and lie for long stretches listening to the birds. He distrusted the radio, the synthetic weather reports, the esoteric shipping forecasts. Instead he lay attentive to the crakes and linnets, the trafficators of the weather, signalling before a turn.

When the roosters pursed their beaks, Lushka shuttered his windows. When the gulls arrived, the glutton tourists – strutting amongst the crops in spoiling trajectories – the farmers cursed, but old Lushka was thankful, for hungry gulls towed in warm autumn afternoons, as if it were harnessed to their backs.

Don’t mistake Lushka, however, for a man of the wilds. True that his village is in the wilderness, and that he owns a small plot of land. Sure enough, that with his long beard and razor strop back he could well be a farmer, or with the scars on his arms and thick neck perhaps a farrier. He walks like a roof tiler - with his legs bent. Men who move how he does have spent long years on their knees, the gait of a salt miner – learnt from crouching and crawling. However, he hasn’t the hands of a tradesman, his fingers are slender and his palms almost doughy. Lushka’s long nails and soft fingertips are indicative of one more at ease with a tobacco pipe than a steam drill. His clothes also, could well confound any would-be guesser – a collection of polished pointed boots, two trim tailored jackets. The plaited shirts that hung in his wardrobe: collarless, pocketless were not in any sense, the uniform of the wilds. Familiar Lushka, dressed like a stranger. Composed of things from far off – ingredients stitched and bundled in the city. Lushka the long standing mystery of the steppe.

Those new to the village often talked to Lushka as if he himself was the visitor. Bedeviled at the sight of him, at first thinking him a lunatic voyager, then after learning of his great stature, and the respect held towards him, they passed the whole thing off as some sort of shared lunacy between the villagers. This old fool no doubt, they thought, was no more than a leathered farm hand who had found a cache of suits buried under his house, or had held up a coach and stripped the inhabitants.

Lushka took little heed of such nonsense. Rumour often gaggled about his lawn – pecked idiotically at his windows. Most men would have stirred, hitched their rufous britches and strode out red faced into the flock. Lushka knew better; weathered as he was, plucking at the chatter achieved little, those men indubitably shuffle home defeated, hands full of feathers and the prattle, ruffled, merely nuzzles itself - sprouts its down, reroots its calamus and returns the following afternoon. Not Lushka though, whilst others were throttling the babble, snatching at it’s pinions, he simply shuttered his blinds, smoked in the clay shade and waited for the gossip to flap it’s wings to exhaustion.

The four floors of Lushka’s house descended chronologically in age and general decay, he had built the attic room and current roof himself. The venerable ground floor had cold granite walls and hand-hewn poplar beams. The cornerstone reads as if it were chiselled by a child, frail letters spelling ‘H-O-M-E’ and no more. A backwards priest perhaps, making permanent his infantile blessing to his loyal, frightened congregation, or a shepherd, sharing with his beasts, striking out his achievement a little everyday, his hammer and chisel quivering with pride.
Lushka wonders if in fact the cornerstone came long before its message, he can imagine a bored bedlamite, steppe crazed and hemmed in by the weather. He can picture him, trapped in what was then little more than a stable, hammering out his discontent ironically into the granite as if he were tallying years in a prison cell.

Opening the front door to the towering house one enters straight into Lushka’s bedroom, and there is all that one would expect: his dresser, his lamp and laundry, his bed - though it is boxed by planks of rosewood and a little like a coffin – his locked chest, his open wardrobe. There are flecks of tobacco on every surface, curled like thick strands of hair, as if Lushka himself was made of it, and scratched around his bedroom malting. The bed - his pallet casket – was situated at the centre of the room, the walls surrounding it were hung with fabric. Coarse sheets of embroidery which smelt of smoke and were stitched in a loose yellow thread, leaking out somehow and conferring a private, perished quality to everything – a room of secret soot and sand.

There were bottles of white German wine stacked in the wardrobe, five trembling tiers - the top most peeking out like glass appendices from the legs of trousers hung from the rail. A cloudy shaving mirror swung from the door. Books lay on their pages, their spines softening. Bars of soap wrapped in paper. Pickled eggs, onions. whelks: disintegrating in glass jars of vinegar. A rifle shared a tin vase with two red walking sticks, the latter leaning away, looking timid - flushed at their own garish placidity.

The wooden furniture was haggard, stained. The few chairs, perpetually sea sick: having weak legs, and swaying at the slightest touch. The bed stand was practically built out of matchsticks. His desk leant up against the stone wall as if exhausted, above it, set deep into the granite was the room’s single window - the morning light, jaundice and uncertain, blinked sceptically through the blinds.

Lushka’s tapering homestead, even truncated as it was – capped in its hand thatched roof - was the tallest building for ten miles. It loomed over its neighbours; the remainder of the village looking shy and squat in comparison. Despite this, far from belittled, the villagers were proud of Lushka and his grand, hand made hermitage. Proud of its great linseed flower walls and its knurled orchard, its yellow windows, set back and framed in crimson lumber, squinting drowsily over the empty steppe.

The occasional barn, or grain silo rose up from the fields, but none in sight closed on the height of Lushka’s home, each of them scrub and bantam contenders. Lushka’s bedraggled fortress, its straw scalp dropping out in swathes and turning grey under the stresses of the weather. The front edge of it hanging in a fringe, obscuring the top floor windows. It called out to those crossing the plains, visible as it was, and entirely ludicrous. Many are drawn to it, confused by it, following lumbering orbits; mouths open and half witted. They arrive baffled, entitled somehow by its absurdity. It owes them wholly in its strangeness, the entirety of their endeavour. Probabilities must pale - here on the grasses – malform to the loneliest, rustic wants; that building up there in the distance, conspicuous, laid on that village like a lime washed egg, that building up there must be: an asylum, a hotel, a mill, an abbey, a store, a brothel, an office, a barracks, an observatory, a theatre, a saloon.

All manner stumble across it, situated where it is, halfway between the towns and the city, each with their own selfish expectation. Spoilt strays, wanderers, kick at the clay steps and yell insolently for a porter. Pilgrims sprinkle bread crumbs and hang coloured beads from the washing line. Young couples elope, begging the ostensible priest Lushka to make them married, consecrate their love by the village spring. Seamstresses sing in the orchard, carding wool waiting for royalty to arrive. Swarthy, shirtless topers frighten the linnet, knocking their empty flagons against the bird tables and demanding service. Salesman pester Lushka to purchase their wares, pedalling dried meats and pocket watches, posting their calling cards through gaps in the windows. Farmers in their church best lay land disputes at Lushka’s feet whilst old men sit panting on his steps, trembling their will and testaments, quietly expecting advise and signatures. Families skulk up from their hamlets in the evenings and deposit their insane – and Lushka on occasion, hitches his rifle and drives the derailed, howling into the wilds.

Prawn Cocktail

2010-08-21T13:27:00.001+01:00

Branches

2010-08-20T12:08:00.002+01:00

For the longest time, change on the steppe occurred at a walking pace. The quarterly rural revolution, wildlife and weather languidly cycling, crops, clover and livestock padding in and out of being. The plains progressed to the one wild beat. Lynxes broke off their teeth like matchsticks. Falcons swung like pendulums. Foxes printed out the hours of the coldest months in their nervous trails through the snow.

The seasons lolloped, unbalanced, their ears stuffed with migratory birds. Sweltering spells scuffing their feet, shading their necks. Lightning storms marching and the hot and cold rains hopscotching.When the winter arrived the swineherds raced against it to their doors, the frost ambling in second place. Six months on, it thawed and the children herded it out of the village, the spring snatching at their heels.

Then the carriageways appeared, tar and shingles laid down at a quick march. Followed by the pipes and pylons. Gas canals and sewage conduits. Telephone masts sprung up like shoots of bamboo. Vents patched. Troughs dug. Cables slithered, singing under the tension. Enormous bird-boned machines pecked at the earth, churning, softening, pitching the potholes for others to straddle - planting the aching postures of empty towns. Lushka’s homespun manor, the unkempt, unchallenged champion of this stretching nowhere, unrivalled in stature, was conquered – usurped by a water reservoir and its towering appendices.

Walking pace has been horse drawn, hauled to its own exhaustion. Now change roars in on four wheeled drive, it falls from the crop-dusters. Widowers plant power lines in place of poplars. Street lights grow up from the roadside. Aerials sprout off of every home.

The seasons are unsettled. Frozen waters flowing. Parched river beds replenished. The winter lays awake through its long evenings, pestered by electric lights, nursing its scolds from filament fires. The stretching summer occasionally drops off unexpectedly, curtailed by American lager and benzodiazepine.

The big cats have been hunted out. The wolves, the deer gone. Falcons stuffed. Crake and linnet plucked. The beaks of the song birds shut like purses. In their stead power tools and cement mixers sing on the grasses. Mass bird migration occurs solely in the form of lorry loads of frozen chicken. It is television that sneaks into houses at night and drags villagers off over the steppe. Salespeople who scratch at the doors for scraps.

Where we are going and what we will do when we get there.

2010-08-15T21:30:00.004+01:00

Ground

2010-08-15T20:14:00.008+01:00

If anything we were more exposed under our sunglasses on that hot day at the park. Lying down with the sky in front and the earth behind, horizontal vertigo gripped us. The friends lamented, they wouldn't hold our hands while we had our stomachs pumped, yes, that lameness. That sixth sense, what did you call it? Proprioception? Whatever, it was lost. Efforts to co-ordinate our movement towards regaining the vertical simply failed. "Even if we could stand up, what use would it be?" You had said, ever the optimist. There were simply too many options. Our sun-blushed skin betrayed indecision. "Hi there friends, I hope you are enjoying the music" --said a man who looked like he had been through the mill and come out minus a few grains. Distant strains came to us, "Jesus...Jeeessus..."and we shuddered together on the grass, "GOD that's the worst music I've ever heard!" you said, queen of tact, frightening the missionary man to "Go in peace, friends..." and he receded from our field of vision along with the music. "It seems to me", you said, "that something has to give." I waited for an answer and in the silence shuffled towards you slightly, and flung my arm to land on your tummy, which wobbled sensually. "I do like your size", I said, neglecting the seriousness of our enquiry. "Sex sex sex", you said, "I've got more important things to think about, like how we're going to get out of this mess." But of course this only made me want you more. I could feel your belly gurgling warmly. Your phone was vibrating somewhere beneath your navel, in a pocket perhaps. Suffice to say, you did not answer. Just then, baking as we were in the sun, a little dog bounded over to snuffle at our recumbent groins, evidently concealing truffles. "That's it", you said, "the last piece of the puzzle." You paused then and your tummy gurgled again as the little dog went over to another, bigger dog and sniffed its bum. You shuffled a bit and moved closer to me, on the grass there in the late afternoon at the park. "Between earth and sky man dwells poetically, standing out in an excess of meaning..." --Just as we were getting somewhere with the question a bird wheeled and cawed above, then shat on my face. "Well, I don't know about you but I'm lying in an excess of crap."

Purely conceptual poetry, or, "Beef and porkling king"

2010-08-10T10:05:00.003+01:00

Mr. Plantar, the meta-poet, left the dregs of form to the lee(s) side, surrendered uncinate verse, and bad etymological puns. Mr. Plantar composes meta-poetry – meta-poems are composed of poems.

Mr. Plantar, picks the first two poems for his meta poem, one about a cow’s stomach, and one about emperor Augustus, he's happy that the two poems have a cow-shed, rumen rhyme.

Mr. Plantar’s third poem of the meta-poem says that porcini means little pigs, and as poems are not as fettered as words it trotters through the first, second and final meta-verses in a drift.

Mr. Plantar is uncertain how to garnish his meta-poem. He tastes each potential poem for its flavour. Deliberating the sounder of verse. Finally for seasoning he decides on a saltling delineation of early Polynesians watching their rafted piglets. Yes, Mr. Plantar watches too, and the soil starved porkling on scenting the shore becomes shy and dour, sniffing out the end of his meta-poem.

Purely cosmetic poetry, or, "cult of the SIM"

2010-08-08T22:14:00.003+01:00

Salt starved congregation
coagulate -
Slow conformity,
like dribble.
Sopping gerunds, off the parrot weed feet of
the blissed

Burkared Bowler
b
o
w
l
s
clashes with the christians
tossing charcoal, supping
beatific brews.

Purely Pongeian poetry, or, "Red kites above our incline, and a knitted eiffel tower"

2010-08-08T22:01:00.004+01:00

You said you wanted us to add-den-dum
you said: that which is to be added
you meant: that which we dare to add
You asked for an adda for the outpaced, put-over looked,
the awling and the addled.
I left the message on the gourd machine,
with the addressees of the warbled.

Purely apology poetry, or, "Kentucky coffee tree"

2010-08-08T21:55:00.003+01:00

Scherzo the Wolf hound heats with his paws (*).

POET'S NOTE: (*) NOT BAUDELAIRE

Purely catchphrase poetry or "leek peridots"

2010-08-08T21:43:00.003+01:00

Guava sharing
pop up book, brechtian.
Guava sharing
zetas aping zees playing zetas aping zees.
Guava sharing
sews the blinds and whisky curtains.
Guava sharing
believes in birth marked better.
Guava sharing
howl mountebank.
Guava sharing
needles with the draughtsmen.
Guava trying
to catch their art.

Purely boneless poetry, or, "olive green ol-iv-ines"

2010-08-08T21:40:00.002+01:00

Rilke procrastinating, staggering
around les alyscamps
i am
procrastinating, imagining him,
staggering
around les alyscamps.

Purely decorative poetry, or, "uvarovite and almandine"

2010-08-08T21:36:00.002+01:00

This sacerdotal obsolesce
his rill stance on dreams.
That steering by the sastrugi
his river stance on dreams.