The Hosepipe
five litres. enough to get me there, and enough left for after. the piss has already gone cold on my jeans, stinking, my legs shaking, and I tell myself it’s the winter doing it. black tobacco, the hard stench of it up my nose, the last few cigarettes, throat already raw. I crumple the packet.
The Whale
they threw money at you once, from the iced-up bow of the Mary Jane, some drunk tourist boat full of assholes with cameras, snapping away at your big, beautiful bulk sliding through the water like a blue dream on a good day when the bottle’s half-full. cameras clicking, oohs and fucking aahs, love pouring out
Inducing a Migraine
there she is behind the marked oak bar, that Irish angel with the black hair falling like midnight rain, serving up the warmest smile you ever saw, pulling a perfect pint, slow and creamy, her eyes shining like Dionysus himself in drag, pouring out the madness. red wine flowing free now, warm in the throat,
The Trader’s Bell
Maharaj and Co. General Suppliers, Established 1888. the floor, beat-to-shit planks of Canadian pine, scarred and grey as a coin worn smooth by too many hands, been there since the clippers came in heavy with tea from the east. sailors with arms like dock ropes drag crates, sweat cutting channels through the grime on their
Your Last Orbit
did you just die there in the night? I can’t hear those wild wings anymore, that frantic beating gone silent like a jazz riff cut short in some dim basement club. you were drunk on pure panic, bashing your tiny skull against the cheap IKEA lamp I got last week, that blinding circle of false
Uncle Patrick
the bar hasn’t changed, neon bleeding red down the walls, smoke hanging in the air like it’s got nowhere better to be, and I’m on the stool next to the one nobody’s sitting on, where Uncle Patrick used to park himself with a Campari glowing in his fist like something he’d cut out of himself.
Rachel Kadinsky
haze, red lips parted just enough to promise trouble, and me with my battered brass Zippo from ’86, hinge still catching like it remembered every heartbreak, grinding the wheel slow till the sooty flame whooshed up wild, orange-blue dancing the old cliche dance, kerosene stinging sweet right in the veins. she sucked hard on that
The Salty Dog
crank the burner till the flame goes that sick blue, and throw in those greasy little capers, let them jump around like drunk bastards on a hot tin roof, anchovies too, those smug salty pricks strutting like they own the pot. slice the onions thin, onions crying their cheap tears, garlic stinking up the room
Little Cathedrals
Gare de Lyon, that stupendous station, spits you out into Le Train Bleu, all that gold-plated nonsense from the old days hanging there like a drunk’s memories, chandeliers dripping light on the suckers below, paintings of green fields nobody ever worked because they were too busy screwing the maid. I’ve got a table in the
The Bank Loan
this fucking heat won’t quit, sweat pooling in every crease of this rotten carcass, another nightmare, third one this week, crawling out of the sheets like a rat with its throat cut. I can’t even remember what the dream was, just that high-pitched whine in my skull when I snapped awake, nothing else breaking the
Sitting with Diego
the morning’s got its claws in me, a hangover squatting on my brain like a fat whore who won’t leave. there’s still a little whiskey going in the blood, warm and evil, sloshing around the empty tank of me, burning sweet. we talk the usual shit about love, life, and the happiness that fucked off
Hyde Park
Hyde Park on a Sunday when the sun’s got its boot on your neck. kids on plastic scooters scraping the hot concrete like they’re trying to file the day down to nothing. bicycles with training wheels squeaking through the legs of mums and dads who just want a bench before the ice cream turns to
Takeaway Food
lovers paint hearts into the frost on windscreens, their breath fogging the glass like cheap sex in a doorway. rain comes down soft and useless on rows of scooters hunched in the alley, seats glazed with ice, waiting for some fool to chip it off with a credit card that’s already maxed out. frozen cars,
Charlotte
there I was, rattling along through the grey English drizzle, the underground train clicking under my feet, when I spotted her across the aisle — dark hair falling wild, eyes like midnight streets — and I leaned over, heart going that crazy beat, and asked if I could take her photo, just a quick one
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.
The Mainstay
I’m sunk deep in this old armchair, the one with the springs poking through like bad memories, and the room’s half-lit, half-dead, snow still spitting at the window. the clock’s oak pendulum swings back and forth, steady as a slow heartbeat, counting me out. I’m just letting go, sliding down easy into the booze and
The Fence
it was a big bastard of a project the first time I saw the house, the kind of dumb hope you buy when you still believe in forever. the front fence — cast iron, 1940s, rising off its brick columns like it owned the street. proud. solid. untouched by the rot that had taken everything
Little Bird
For Kari… I sat on the broken porch steps with a warm beer going flat between my knees, watching that mangy cat take the sparrow out of the air like it was nothing. the bird came down still flapping, one wing bent wrong, blood already at its beak. the cat pinned it gentle, almost tender,
Volta
she’s charming software so exquisitely written each byte perfected mark you her plugins are tough to strip from my registry.
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
The Camel
Christmas again, Jesus, another one. London’s East End. her heels stab the wet pavement like they’re trying to kill it, clack-clack, clack-clack, some secretary’s last fuck-you to the day. everybody running for the Underground or the pub, same difference — heat, noise, cheap beer that tastes like rust and lament. peanuts in cloudy glasses, napkins
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
The Orchid
it was Sunday, the early evening sliding down slow and gold over the rooftops, the whole suburb holding its breath like it already knew, and there I was in my small garden, listening to them, that couple going at each other, screams with no floor to them, rage coming up out of the throat the
Doctor Klitsov
there I was, sprawled in the dim light of my room, bottle half-empty on the floor, the drink going hot through me, and I thought of Doctor Klitsov in the East End, his little practice with the cracked linoleum and the waiting room that smelled of old magazines and fear. I saw those posters on
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
Jupiter Outside My Window
2:45 in the goddamn morning, sitting with an empty coffee mug and the crumbs of a biscuit packet scattered like dead soldiers across Shayne and Martin’s kitchen table. three of the bastards, maybe four — I lost count somewhere between the second refill and the third — and now my mouth tastes like the bottom