Uncle Patrick
In a dirty, dingy dive, in a dire haze of old memories, I sit with Uncle Patrick, dead quiet as always, with his Campari and Soda to soothe his sad loneliness and thoughts of life in disorder. That’s all he ever mumbled about at our local in town, our kind of joint, sticky underfoot, tables
Antiquities
Pastel shades, gold and scarlet, splendid in the evening light. The room was largely decorative with plumes of grey and black and blue. They called it a masterpiece – the papers – and the writer, a collector of textiles and pottery, declared it a success. His wallpaper was a unique blend of colour depicting adventures
The Trader’s Bell
Maharaj and Co. General Suppliers, Established 1888. Large strips of scruffy Canadian pine cover the floor of the old warehouse. Sailors haul cargo from clippers, docked and resting after the tea run east. Accountants with clipboards (breaches pulled high, quills marking loosely) take stock, while dockhands scurry around in dusty rags, sweating. Can you almost
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
Brushed Steel
Gentle hands in hard gloves working brushed steel, sparks from a welder’s wheel ricocheting in an arc like fairy sparklers, embers smashing into visor green, becoming nothing, soot and residue collecting cutting white hot into steel, shaping scales on the pinecone, muscles tight under a heavy jacket flexing.
The Fairy
She arrived after lunch, on Sunday at around 2pm. Beautiful in white and brown, dancing and floating between aisles in a vortex of air on the slow train to London. Suspended, afloat, she made her way into the baggage area, across the seats, and through a valley of hard-back suitcases. And then, up into the
Little Bird
I watched you die, little bird, how you squirmed, the crazy cat plucking you gracefully from your aborted flight, crimson spurting, eyes rolling loosely as you slipped into limpness, fluid discharging from every orifice, your young opponent, licking chops and feathers wet, bloody whiskers white. For Kari Jeppesen
Christmas Carols
Trombone, Trumpet, Tenor Sax, and Flute. Tightly compressed sound moving through mist to ears all around. Some near, some far, and some by the Ferris wheel. Others sit in the beer garden, nibbling on mince pies and washing down gritty bits with pints of Old Growler. A steaming urn on a dustbin table, and the
Harvey
Tabloid revelations, the nation shocked, no surprise:- ‘Blair secret promise to Bush on Iraq Invasion’ On my table, a newspaper, a gin and tonic, and a tin of cashews. Deathly silence, all around, except for muffled whispers about lamb stew, marble cake, and household renovations. No background music, no crooners, no big band. The Prince
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
The East End
Stilettos and hard black shoes, clack-clack, they walk the Christmas pavement. City dwellers and workers rush to the tube and pubs for warmth and bitters and peanuts in chipped glasses on soft napkins, moist from frothy beer. Shitty, spitty pavements, fag ends and chewing gum circles. Cold whores in skimpy numbers trying to think straight,
From Zerbst
Across the Russian wastes, towards Leningrad and Moscow. Across the flats, the galloping horses thunder on, the supreme Empress, pressing with God-Speed from Riga, before the snow and fur and shiver, her dominion strengthened by a new country. slow famine, disease, but the land strong and rugged, people weak, dying.
Photo Albums
The pictures taught him respectability. One of a young Jewish girl with tattered stripes and the yellow ‘Judenstern’. Another of broken bones and ash cloud plumes above chimney stacks. That little boy was upset by the images and he tried to think of other things like runaway horses, iron hooves and the overgrown vegetation of
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
Swallows
In the café on Rue Lepic, I sip on a little green fairy, the Absinthe louche, a cloudy intoxicant storm, a dull release from the absolute, fennel and star anise, the grand wormwood punching in my mouth. And I write fondly about Paris and those little Cathedrals. The sound of the slow dripping water, essential
The Mirror
Her morning tea, a large pot of turmeric and aniseed, a slight diminution from the whiskey, important for digestion and tired liver inflammation. She thinks about the mirror in the classifieds. It could have been hers for a tenner, that round mahogany classic, deep set with a gold trim on a hard frame. Franklyn, the
Rachel Kadinsky
Soft fingers on rolled paper, red lips waiting. Please may I use your light? I flip the lid of my old brass Zippo from ’86 (the hinge sticking in the same old place), and I grind the wheel. A sooty flame whooshes up and bursts into life, a clichéd dance of orange and blue, the
Sticky Rice
A wonderful evening with my daughter, sticky rice and green tea; sweet and sour. We laugh and she tells me stories about new love and life. And I think about my mother, and my training of the sticks. It’s a long story, over three years, just like a degree. It started with Saul when I
Solstice
What brittle, keening wind is this that stings our ears and dulls the fingers? The coachman of the foulest season whose kiss lingers on bloodless, frigid lips. We’ll soon be warmed by your celestial caress that will cause to pivot the great, grand chart that is infinity and space and all things vast and misunderstood.
Christmas Day
His nine-year-old loved her nursery, and she loved climbing trees, and reading her books about history, flowers, and trains. And she loved her father, and he thought of her as he buffed his black Oxford brogues from Loakes in London. And he thought of her again when he ironed his shirt, how she smiled when
Elated No More
The elated cyclist smiled like a pony, after a lump of sugar. He had huge sunken eyes, and teeth like a white picket fence that protruded from a square hole beneath coarse whiskers, dry like Savannah brush. Elated, yes, that he jumped the lights on East, Making it across to the other side intense euphoria,
The Hosepipe
I needed petrol, 5 litres to get me there, and the rest for the process. A small price to pay, running on empty, the urine, already cold on my winter jeans, stinking on my frozen legs, a trembling fear. The hard stench of black tobacco fills my nostrils, my last few cigarettes, another dirty inhale,
Broken Homes
It’s not easy avoiding them, on a dark path, in the early morning. Try in vain, the lack of light, but it all ends in tears. Hidden shapes or curled up leaves? One cannot tell as you trudge to the garage, to get your bike for the early train to London, knowing that soon the
Inducing a Migraine
She serves the warmest smile, and pulls a perfect pint, her eyes like a goddess. Like Dionysus. Red wine in abundance, warm in texture and plentiful by the glass. In my mind, the most beautiful shapes are enhanced by the toxins racing through my bloodstream, the vividness of my childhood like the Creation, space and
Neptune’s Crown
My daughter called it Neptune’s crown. I guess it was. Once a shiny hubcap from a ‘76 Chevy, before it came off, and rolled into the river. Now little tiddlers swim through its stalks of aluminium, that rise up like masts on a forgotten wreck. It’s from a Chevy, I can tell from the shape
The Salty Dog
Turn up the dial and bump it up a notch, make it hot, that gorgeous blue gas. Let them dance erratically on a cushion of searing oil, those demon capers and pompous anchovies, salty dogs, mischievous sprites. Onion and garlic and dirty green chillies from Kenya, delicately sliced from top to tail, but don’t extract the
The Clocks
Under the fluorescence of the beer garden, oak gleams white compared to pine, tables with places where ashtrays once stood majestic, coasters with pictures of maidens, and empty glasses rimmed with rings of dry froth. A pint on my table, my scarf undone, and then I’m looking at you. You gently kiss your man and
The Night Watchman
The brothel was cold, but inviting and the numbness of her panting, surreal. Unhappiness and self-pity. And then asleep, her snoring pleasurable, gentle in the murky slumber. Foul smells emanate from under the kitchen door, no whisky on the night-table, and then the market fires go out. Written by Jack Brewis
Atop Craigendarroch
I stitched and capered a sinuous ascent through the ferns and treacherous granite traps sharp as you like Knavish roots and vines snatching all the way at my toecaps and reached the summit wheezing like a holed bandoneon The green and ochre scabbed shield chaffed by ancient ice delivering to me the stage upon which
My waitress Mary
Johnny Cash on the Jukebox, Walk the Line. In a truck stop with bloodshot eyes, all-night drivers, and builders in blue jeans with arms as thick as legs. Also travelling salesmen, in cheap suits with frozen faces. I wait for Mary. And on a menu, on a chalkboard, white chalk, blue chalk shadows, powder on
St Augustine’s
Marked cards and letters, filling the top drawer, in a gleaming butler’s desk. Two long years, correspondence, and poems and notes of love and want. He remembered the gate to her front door, through the garden, through the lavender, rosemary and basil, the scent immaculate, just like the scent in the top drawer, tainted letters
Her Boots
Her boots and her laces tethered, and her shawl, sloppy around weary shoulders. In the distance, a frozen lake, her absolution. Arctic crystals float by like twinkling droplets, cold on her eyelids settling. She thinks of the Sistine chapel and her sins, her history documented in a small scrapbook. She folds the shawl, removes the
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
The Evening Dress
Untouched, a beautiful size 12 pressed up hard against teeth in a cold vice gripping. Naked in isolation, she waits for a strand of cotton and a dub from a Jack Rabbit pelt, thumb and forefinger, wax on felt. Slow concentric movement across taut yarn, fraying on rough skin, the evening dress of Marabou and
The Orchid
On a Sunday, in the early evening, and I can hear this couple screaming endlessly in raged abuse. And I’m looking at them through the hedgerow, through blossoms in shades of purple and pink and blue. And his hands are around her throat, and her hands are in the air, and it’s a hard, hopeless
The Paisley Dress
Cold sores coming into flower, more than one, but less than four. A shiny pointy chin and white teeth beautiful. In a three-piece suit, he stands in that classic brown, with a comb in his pocket, and a mullet of hair, parted sideways. He smiles at his lover wearing a dress that looks like a
Layla
I found you in the newspaper on page 33, but sometimes, your sweet innocence annoys me like hell. But then I understand, how your life has become what it is, a worthless degree in a murky recession. You stayed over for three nights, and told me how your father drank in derelict rooms on the
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.
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
Your Last Orbit
Hold on a minute, did you just die, I can’t hear you anymore. Frantic, out of control, you buzzed your last while trying to escape the blinding light that tempts you to your doom. I listened to you while I wrote, how you battled on relentlessly, stopping only once to sit on a piece of
Volta
she’s charming software so exquisitely written each byte perfected mark you her plugins are tough to strip from my registry.
Seafood Special
He sneezes into the crook of his elbow, a childhood habit. 80-odd years and nothing changes. A strand of snotty mucus bridges the gap from his nose to his arm as he reaches for a napkin, still smeared with oily bits from the seafood special. Bloody boozy veins on a bulbous Merlot nose, face and head
Saturday Night
They wait on motorised chairs and plastic seats, with stalks of shiny steel that rise up above balding heads and greying hair, bags of saline, intravenous prick. In sombre states of lonely dementia, depression, and other severe ailments, they sit in rows – three deep, five across, care home attendants looking on. They wait for
Page 33
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.
Drill Bits
In a drunken state of deep despair, I think about Dr Kazinski at his practise in the East End. I think about his posters, torn and wrinkled, showing white picket-fence families eating carrots like rabbits, caring for teeth like all families should. That was a long time ago. Now in the absence of regular dental
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
The Priesthood
A dormitory and a single bed, two chairs and a corner window. Moments in solitude, time to reflect. In the distance, the low hills. Twenty-three weeks until the harvest and the priesthood, ploughing the fields, working the mill, the school of the soul. In between scriptures, he stacked bails and scrubbed floors in the old
The Hi-Hat Solo
Foot pedal and cymbals, the beat, and the girl on the hi-hat solo. The audience watch her deliver from the shadows. “Hello Mr Jackson, your table is ready.” Last minute folly, the table reserved from the back of a deadbeat bus, a late-night jazz-hall at the end of a downtown boulevard. The sound terrific, the
The Dead Letter
That summer morning was humid, bright, and busy. The girls were rushing around doing homework, digging out plimsolls, and searching for lunch boxes; raisins, cucumber, and tubs of yoghurt – packed lunches. It arrived in the morning post, bundled with bills, catalogues, and fast-food flyers. The postmark was antipodean, and the franking skew with surreal
Charlotte
I asked a girl on a train if I could take her picture. She said yes. It was a small portrait in black and white, with defined shadows and cropped edges. I took many. “Do you like to dance?” she asked. “Yes, but only 70’s disco.” “What about house music, it’s similar to disco?” And
Spark and Flint
I don’t put faulty Zippo’s in the post for maintenance or repairs. Once damaged, they are kept safe and stored in a small wooden box in my study. This reminds me of the trauma that each of them endured across the years; each bang and scrape and hurt. Like dropping them on isolated runways in
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.
Desideratum
A beautiful rose of England, an English rose sitting on a winter bench reading Brontë, water glistening across a soft summer face, braces in a gentle mouth smiling intently at the young briar-rose of England, an English briar. boys with rosy cheeks, trying to hide nervous smiles, young love delicate.
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 Artist
It was a private screening, no appointment needed. A final masterpiece. Like an artist’s art, it was modern with strokes of gaudy colour, thick applications, no planning or design. It was on a large canvas of magnolia, an ideal wash of matt, a clock against the border, framed complete with some brick exposed, wire from
Mice
I need something else, something other than the hum of silence that carries through my wide-awake bedroom. The heating thermostat clicks on, the temperature dropping to a bitter six below. Relief, some sound. And then my stomach churns after the refried beans at Pedro’s this evening, just before day became night. But mainly it’s that
Escort Services
Amplified sounds from a short-circuiting buzzer echo through a quiet hallway, a salvo of bursts ringing out into the darkness. She’s on time, and his primal craving of love and want races headlong towards the door, wine and song. Now she talks about the Freemasons as if she’s on the board of directors, a silent
Poor Hygiene
Fridge handle or front door, or maybe the button on the stereo. Poor hygiene and now the affliction of it. “Can you get some milk on your way back,” Frank asks shamelessly, both hands on the games console. Maybe it was on the Wii? Microscopic in egg form, they hide in every unseen corner, waiting
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
Fava Beans
Tonight’s soup with crusty bread, as on Saturday, but tonight with some Fava beans from Franks. A dirty window-box, overflowing from above, when I arrived. Poor Mrs Rodriguez, her hand trembling on a watering-can, immensely irritating, splashing on fresh trousers collected from the dry cleaner, a quick bite before the show, War Horse in a
Persephone
Otherworld child emerging restored to set a gentle lingering squeeze on leg or arm. And so it begins: The way you clear food from your teeth with your tongue The swagger in your hipsway The palm pressed to my chest Delicious smile betraying a distant diastema and the mascara clotted on your lashes The softness
Lorenzo’s Girl
I’m sitting at a pavement table outside Lorenzo’s and a bus drives past, a big red bendy one with dusty adverts down its side. It snakes down a busy road, Route 35 to Clapham, its occupants sweltering in a tight, airless cocoon. It’s another humid day in London, and I’m working on another cold pint
The Steaming Beast
Spring has sprung and new blossoms burst. Hungered by the lack of fuel, the compost heap beckons him from across the garden, angry steam rising up from its core of planned decay, a foundation for rebirth and a new life in mulch. He approaches the beast and tosses the heap; leaves, scraps of food, eggshells,
Triptych
three sons of Uusimaa washed upon a foreign shore. the first shrugged and grunted and planted himself fast and there toiled to build a house rooted in worldly wickedness but the beetles came and stripped him of flesh as he slept and he was no more the second scorned his brothers earthly failings and contrived
The Night Veld
Outside on a spread of lawn, behind the fishpond, dinner with Grandfather. Tender pepper thighs and a splash of water; a table of reminded wisdom. Pockets of cropped moonlight break like lamps on a wall. And then nature disappears, the last whispers in the night veld as the dogs’ snarl at snakes, tension and profanity,
Hyde Park
Children on scooters on hot concrete scootering. And bicycles with stabilisers squeak through a mass of mums and dads, eager to sit down before ice cream becomes a sludge. Black birds in regimental droves, with black beaks and shiny black tunics of feather wait for discarded crusts from toddlers in oversized hats and drooping nappies.
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,
Rafters
Taut line of thin manila, rope creaking on dusty rafters swinging. In your shame. On the record player, the crackle of stylus on vinyl dry, Nina Simone in a smoky jazz bar, patrons sipping on cognacs oblivious to your indignity, your shame, your cat alone, and a patch of urine dry, the stench at the
Another Journey
Two days in my bedroom with tins of super strength lager and Lucky Strike cigarettes from Rachel. A headache again, the alcohol surging to inspire. The haze. Warm sentiments of new friends and visions of cold places abound. Like Dachau. And then I see her waiting in the rain, waiting outside my window, cold and