Even the never-ending swish and rumble of the road outside is at least dulled. My mind is suddenly awake with the questions I haven’t asked myself for a fortnight or so. (Not) sleeping on my right side, because I don’t want to look to my left. And I’m big enough, old enough and ugly enough to admit […]
Don’t be shy. You know you don’t want to be. Come forward. Say what you’re thinking. Feel what you’re saying. Think who you’re touching. Be inside and out. Listen. I’m listening. It makes a change.
I know who you are. No, of course I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your name. This puzzles me. That puzzles me. I’m tired of puzzling myself. You puzzle me. That’s good. I need mental stimulation. Crave it. Mental input. Avoid premature brain death. I need touch stimulation. Crave it. Touch input. […]
I’m trying to leave myself a trail of breadcrumbs so I can hopefully find my way back from wherever I am now. I’m not entirely sure. If this exists.
Finding myself surrounded by index cards containing intricate data, pockmarked for posterity, scratchings of meaningless figures totalling a sum I can’t even compute, and endless screeds of information doused in the moisture from both loving and unloving sighs, I begin the task of burning the evidence they reveal. One hundred and twenty index cards every […]
But a sword can cut off your face, whereas words can only be tattooed onto it. A sword can be plunged into a stone for a nascent king to remove. Words can be written on the stone to warn the king that what he is doing is impossible to mere flesh, and therefore he should […]
In a bid to resuscitate my pathetic, dwindling creativity — or rather, repeatedly kick its body in the stomach as it lies on the floor, pleading for mercy — I am attempting to discover whether, via the miracle of sleek ‘n’ sexy mobile technology, I can write something eloquent and profound whilst ‘on fhe move’, […]
Synchronise watches. Just nod if you’re synchronised. Okay. Good. So. I think we could be there by midnight, if we leave now. I really want to be there by midnight. Midnight, there or thereabouts. Depending on where we end up. Yes, I like draining my last drink dry come the witching hour, then falling into […]
Stop right there. Stop whilst I can feel the creeping tendrils of new life in my fingers, the working week’s first surging and rippling in my whitened knuckles. I stop myself. I always do, always. I have to stop myself. I cannot be any other way. If I exist for only one reason, it is […]
Are you still with me? You’re still with me, right? I’ll be keeping you in mind — always in mind — as I take your gift and all the pieces of the person it contains. Grateful, that’s me. Grateful, for always and for everything. I’ll pull the anonymous package from the toothless but black-brushed jaws […]
I just went to see if the pair of cooing, lovesick pigeons who have been renting space on my balcony were up with the lark. As I am. When did I start envying birds that so many consider to be little more than troublesome vermin, riddled with disease and pestilence? I just went to see […]
Don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing. I know precisely what I’m doing. I am grabbing the moment, seizing it with both hands, twisting and strangling it until it lies limp, cold and unmoving in my arms. These few words are the deliberate, conscious act of taking an inward breath, whilst I hold […]
Okay. So you wake up. You wake up, you yawn, you scratch yourself. You peel sleep crystals from the corners of your eyes. You check that your body is generally intact, as you left it the night before, before it was tossed this way and that in dreamtime or nightmare hours. You run your fingers […]
I went looking for the cracked, faded and distant voice that I knew lurked somewhere in the jagged landscape, hidden unheard between distorted peaks and hushed valleys. I held the sleek, electronic seashell to my ear, and behind the tempestuous waves I could hear the faint promise of a silent sea of sound, stretching as […]