When your last hoarse heartbeat rang hollowly through this room, I urged you like a filly to stables kept warm for your eventual homecoming. I’ve watched you for a generation, the kiss dragging your bones slowly out to sea, the amniotic embrace around your fabulous slackening muscles. And when I sang you to sleep, darling, [...]
Categories: main
Tagged: poetry
Sawyer looks at the clock. Nine AM. He should be sleeping right now, but he’s not tired. Maybe the tea, he thinks. Checks email, surfs for a while, still not tired. Only then does he remember the book sitting on the floor beside his bed, also on the floor. Drawing up the curtains, it seems [...]
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Tagged: fiction
Sawyer yawns, then yawns again. Night shift over, he’s looking for something to do, something to calm him down after the nothing that always happens as night ticks into day. He’s looking into the classrooms as he passes, lost in thought, when he sees someone he doesn’t quite know, someone who is at the same [...]
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Tagged: fiction
I am one of the ones left behind. It sounds great, doesn’t it? I get this whole planet to myself, pretty much. Well, me and the million other specially-picked “volunteers” who get to repopulate this grand old ball of clay. You see, UNFTL decided a while ago that while it was quite fun to go [...]
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Tagged: fiction
There have not been clouds over Manhattan since your marching bands left for the smaller numbers, and you opened that alleyway and those hilltops to the unskilled musicians of your recollection. They remain in your city like the smell of curry on thread-counted fabric, or a worn-out welcome. Their music is cigarette smoke: their tunelessness [...]
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Tagged: poetry
I always pictured you designing hubcaps somewhere, you with your fascination with odd numbers and plastic. You are flicking a pen from finer to thumb, daydreaming of the collector’s garage walls, of those roundabout men who understand that cars aren’t merely pistons and direct injection, but more a symbol in seven spokes. I imagine this [...]
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Tagged: book of joys, poetry
For Kevin We were nestled in bucket seats, summer I think, when you asked me about a friend – we’ll call him pseudonym. You were trying to discover gnosis, and how to get from here to there. It made me think for a few minutes, till I asked if you were half a man: and [...]
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Tagged: book of joys, poetry
“She plays the mandolin like she’s removing her own appendix!” – that much the mother remembers. The tea goes cold before she finds afresh Earl Grey. Sun coming up, it’s afternoon. She’s no longer married: no children. Did she commute to Kingston? “She plays viola like there’s budgee on her elbow,” – that much the [...]
Categories: main
Tagged: book of joys, poetry