I like that phrase. Not mine, incidentally. “Waterlogged words” is the strap-line for the frequently updated feast of poetry and prose placed online by literary magazine amphibi.us, and today they published something by me. Here it is. Many thanks to chief amphibian Shannon Peil for his indulgence of my sentences. Today, as further proof that […]
YOU know and you KNOW when all you can THINK is that you should do something ELSE but when you start to think what else and you can’t think of ANYTHING else because you’re too old to know BETTER and too old to know any DIFFERENT too BRAIN-dead and too MIND-set and too BODY-set to […]
This time of night, the paving stones sing to no one and to everyone. They chant their drunken choruses and nonsense rhymes. I wish I was with them, into and without their sweaty torsos, singing meaningless groans and inebriate anthems to the upper floors and the distorted heavens, scudding fast and loose without purpose. Come […]
Sleep. Snort. Fuck. Not a description of my average day, sadly. Only the first of those three really applies to me, in truth. And as I certainly don’t get enough sleep, you can imagine what my record for the other two must be like. But I digress. This is SLEEP. SNORT. FUCK. And today’s sleepily […]
I wake with spiders spinning their slithering webs across my eyes, and taste them hatching their eggs on my lazy, lolling tongue. There’s a rolling, salty, dirty ocean dragging my limbs down into its oily depths. I murmur questions and wait for answers. Do you still keep keep your plants in an open-air cupboard? Do […]
If you are a mangled organ, pierced, then this is how you dance. Twist over, unravel and bleed through my shirt. I have worn red for such a special occasion (I remembered to put on clean underwear, too). I have sixty thousand miles of vessels to spread among the populace in the hope that they […]
Stand to attention. Show no emotion. Salute. Give the state your best blank-eyed stare. Kneel when ordered. Rise when ordered. Turn when ordered. Kill when commanded. Expire when expedient. Place your possessions in their metal safe. Turn into a number in a sea of similarity, of upturned faces, of regulation uniforms, of beatific smile upon […]
We pray to the west shore. This being — your god, we don’t know his name — this being eats through the sand and gets between your toes. He wraps himself in skin foil, in body-bags and debris. He does not accept prayers before sunrise, no matter how earnest or pleading they might be. He looks […]
She whispers to his naked form. Standing over him, pressing her worn and wrinkled heel into his forehead, pushing too hard against his skin and flimsy bone. Her mind is fuzzed by the guttural wrench of the voice she stole on an autumn afternoon, ripped from the throat of some singing, snorting drunkard in exchange […]
For those of you keeping track of my various activities across the internet — which I appreciate is a rapidly declining number, thanks to the incarceration of most of my devoted stalkers for their own safety and mental health — you may be interested to know that Writers’ Bloc, the site I notionally ‘edited’ and […]
No longer shall I shield myself from the plain and sometimes harsh truth. Instead, I am going to celebrate it and shout it from the rooftops. Ladies and gentlemen (but not children), prepare yourself for a revelation. I am a bitter, cynical and utterly hateful misanthrope. ENJOY! (Ugh.)
So. End. Start. Whichever. Ricochet. Start again. Empty-minded. Come here empty-handed. Choose at random. Clean slate. Wipe-clean surface. It worked out. It didn’t quite work. Write up the experiment. Describe what happened. Describe what we expected to happen. Aim and outcome. Aim and fire. Cause and effect. Now cease and desist. What did I discover? What […]
She jokes — nervously, via an exhalation of faint, scattershot giggles — about her paranoia that she might leave a smudged imprint of lipstick on the rim of the wine glass. Human remains that would enable him, with the aid of forensic science, to track her down wherever she chose to hide, whether it was […]
Consider this an abridged omnibus edition. Or consider me lazy. Whichever you prefer. In summary, however, this means that I have failed in my grand but possibly foolhardy intentions to produce 31 pieces of writing during the month of May, and won’t even be satisfying my OCD nature by going back to try and fill […]