Archive for June, 2007

Cloud chasers

Life unfolds on this roundabout. The driver is unsure of his exit, so as he explores the myriad options available to him, cursing under his breath and becoming increasingly dizzied by his own confusion, I turn inwards to the grass island at our centre. A man in an unnecessarily thick winter overcoat sits slumped […]

Clearing

Whisper in my shell-like. Just close enough to hear, yet not close enough to feel breath. Then tell me. Tell me all and everything, even if it’s nothing. One after another after more and more still. Reel them off, unthinking. Open the encyclopaedia you have always kept on that dusty shelf at the top of […]

Solstice

She tells me that today is the longest day. Tells me too as if it is a conspiratorial secret, as if it would make me want to leap up and embrace her, kiss the child-like grin that places ripples of echoes of grins further up on her rounded cheeks. Wreathed in smiles. Please don’t stop […]

Random acts of stationery #19


Nothing here but clinker

Picking through debris. Sifting detritus. Sieving and shaking the coal from the clinker, and then I’m back. An inward child sat cross-legged in the middle of the high-walled back yard. Regressing and regretting. Embracing the past for fear it might reach out and strangle if I don’t take its hands in mine.
“Did I do well?” I […]

Walking the ghost

I saw a ghost today. Just your average commonplace, mundane, workaday, run of the mill ghost, walking through a throng of shoppers in the hazily polluted urban sunlight of a summer’s afternoon.

[I swear I would know that face anywhere.]
I don’t know where and how you are supposed to see such apparitions. Films, literature and those long-held myths […]

Packed, wrapped and folded

Listen. I need to tell you this before I’m too wordless and powerless to go on, because I’m fading fast. Literally fading. Gone before dawn, I’m told. So. Listening? Are you? Don’t close your ears for even the blink of an eye.

You will no doubt have seen the cardboard box in the hallway. It was the […]

Random acts of stationery #18


Random acts of stationery #17


Web two point oh Christ almighty

Wanted: Social Affairs Manager to take day-to-day responsibility for maintenance and upkeep of my Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and Flickr accounts, ensuring that all are regularly updated with frequent and, above all, scintillating new content to make the subject appear greater than the sum of his rather uninspiring parts. Experience desirable. Salary negotiable. Benefits negligible. […]