Archive for the Holes in time category

First day, last day, every day

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 […]

Cannot locate signal

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 […]

Melodrama in nineteen syllables


Many happy non-returns

I’m woken by weak morning sun and even weaker mourning tea - are you still drinking green? - accompanied by a slice of mouldy, putrid birthday cake that oozes and spews rancid cream. Freshly knifed, but rotting from the inside out because it was left to gather dust for months in preparation for this tender moment.
I […]

Footprints end

Stopped in my tracks by words, by a fanfare of blasts and horns and cries and the faintest of whispers. Syllables must, sentences must not. Out, damned spot. Out, damned semi-colon.
I remember walking through an alley somewhere off the North Pole. I’m sure it was the North Pole. There is a road that leads there, in […]

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 […]

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 […]

Of tunnel visions

This white wall.
I stare down this runway, psyching myself up. Concentrate. Think. One thing at a time. No more than one. There’s no rush. Yet there is, because I have been here long enough.
This film was a disaster that became a blockbuster and has now become the most tedious epic ever to grace the silver screen. I […]