Oil on Canvas
My fingers touch dry strokes, from a brush, on a canvas from last year. So delicately you worked that piece. The landscape, brilliant greens and soft browns, ochre fused with other blends from a palette. Beautiful depth and life, on taut cotton, on pine. My fingers move gently over trees and hedgerows, and I imagine
Black Bits
I’m sitting at a bar with the bar counter blues. For some, anyway. Like last night for example, when the girl with the flower in her hair didn’t tell the girl with the floral shirt about the black bits between her teeth until the guy that looked like Buddy Holly (black rimmed glasses, hair messy
The Line Dance
Clothes pegs, in a line, on a line. Little dancing people, moving to and fro, backwards, and forwards, this way and that. Elegant and charming, graceful in silk shawls from a spider, a hundred dew-drop diamonds on every inch of the soft woven stitch, an intricate design from Arachne’s weave. They dance in a cool
Volta
she’s charming software so exquisitely written each byte perfected mark you her plugins are tough to strip from my registry.
Easter Lilies
I toss a small cube of sugar into the mix and watch it bubble up through the vodka and champagne. And you smile and we talk about art and life and flower shops with dusty books. And while the red sauce simmers, a little chink-chink, crystal glasses with swans, the Cabernet a fine choice, champagne
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Women seeking men, hard font on dirty paper, the Classifieds. Wanted:– Good looking, well-built male to make gorgeous blonde, 29, happy again. Tina, Mandi, Brandi or Cindy, all looking for someone, or something, to make any sense out of everything. A lonely existence with microwave meals from Tesco, and TV magazines from the Sunday paper.
The Drought
Perverse, powerless, swelling in your barns, fruit and produce, blight and mildew. And on the land, the cattle fall. Frustration, sworn to soil and dust, the sand beneath you burning, the seasonal rain, nowhere and deserting, there is no cure. the rose vineyard, totally devastated, by ruin and madness.
University Braille
Technical diagrams raised a millimetre high. White glossy paper, shining in the glow of an underground train. Her eyes burn and squint erratically, her soft hands gliding smoothly across pages, caressing hydrocarbons and other compounds in a textbook. Butane, methane, propane. Ethanol and methanol, fine black detail on white paper shining. Written by Jack Brewis
Fava Beans
Tonight’s soup with crusty bread, as on Saturday, but tonight with Fava beans from Franks. A dirty window-box overflowing from above when I arrived, poor Mrs Rodriguez, her hand trembling on the watering-can, immensely irritating, splashing on fresh trousers collected from the dry cleaner, a quick bite before the show, War Horse in a West
The Snuff Box
He dressed eccentrically at the most, with striped trousers and a top hat bowler. And a long coat and gaudy shirt. His eyeglasses would swing on a chain, and his cane would hang from a limp arm, almost like that famous painter. The good doctor, his old-fashioned kindness until the end, the liquor consuming him,
The Yellow Digger
Train-track engineering and planned maintenance, hard graft, and that cunting yellow digger wakes them up at 7am. With dirty little teeth, it smashes away at virgin concrete clean, looking for pipes that engineers need to find to do their jobs, to deliver food and money to their families, while alcoholics need more sleep to try and
The Honey Jar
He tormented the natives almost every day, to the point that they refused to bring his tea and biscuits. Sometimes he would hide it under his hand, sometimes up his sleeve, how it tickled, how it crawled. And sometimes he would hide it in the empty teapot, the kitchen staff already jumpy at the thought
The Funeral
Thinking back thirty years to that hazy day, a cool breeze moving cherry blossom petals, pink confetti swirling. A plume of blue grey rises up from a spent wick, only a small dying ember remaining, the celebration of the departed now complete. Columns of light pass through stained glass, a thick illuminating hue across an
Columbus
A calm expanse, the body, broken and still, floating on an immense surface, vast and mighty. No alliance between man and ocean. the Sunday papers, trying to cross the channel, makeshift dinghy.