I give you permission to be grumpy on your birthday. Quibbles, Tussles… escalating to full-scale plate-smashing Rows are allowed. Hypochondria, Melancholia, Cattiness, Swipes, Barbs, Pollution Anxiety — all shall be smiled upon. Not literally. There will be a window at noon for a forty-five minute Tirade on Money Worries. Longer, if necessary. Don’t hold back.
we’re outside The Apple Pie, sheltering. A jackdaw hops on a table nearby, twitching its hooded head, chit-chattering urgent news. Fixing us with beaded eyes, its charcoal plumage paints the rain-rod day. You message Steve, his house still full of Kath. Step-dad or Lydia? Who’s come to stay? Someone’s there, we hope, to ease the
Take a walk with me down to the stream. It’s a cold, clear day. Frost underfoot. Tonight there will be stars: approaching home, we’ll crane our necks to count them, while billions of years whoosh past and next-door’s cat creeps over the shed. For now, it’s the stream we’re seeing through: billions of drops absolved
I was considerably perplexed for a long timeas to how they ensured each can contained a uniform amount. And what was the measurement?Gigglebytes? Guffaws? Microsnorts? I assumed there was a warehouse or depotin HaHa-on-the-Hill or Chucklington or some peripheral spot: HowlMart! orLarfs-R-Us! in dayglo on the side, but worried about the clowns who manned itbeing
Beyond strange, to find myself in this roomful of ghosts! Or whatever’s left when the person’s gone. Where was I when they all slipped out? In life we shared so much, meals, beds, and life was great, Thanks! It really was. Now I don’t know my hosts, Let alone my fellow-guests… But here’s Someone looking
They Oz you up, your Mandyias. They may not mean to, but they do. They give you vast and trunkless legs A sunken shattered visage too. But they were Ozzed up in their turn By Mandyias upon the sand Who half the time had wrinkled lips And half in sneering cold command. Oz hands on
He left pawprints in the corridors. Attendants followed at a distance, collecting his droppings and listening for pronouncements. When they saw his tongue lolling, they knew he was thirsty, pressing forward with a pail. Some nights, hectored by matters of the state, they would hear him roar in his chambers, beat his paws against the
On a winter’s day, we took a trip to Wrabness. I was forcibly struck by Wrabness’s drabness. An empty street, as if everyone was ill. The air was preternaturally still. There was a single closed and shuttered shop. No birds sang. It wasn’t Adlestrop. Down at the estuary, the water was slate-grey, the sand and
Strange how the wind in certain placesbecomes your mindand your mind the sea.Shifting with degrees of perspicacity. Strange how the pines in certain placesbecome the fretand the fret the breeze.Tidal. Sputtering with incivilities. Strange how your bones in certain placesbecome the stones that make freeto stand. Or fall.Or to mutiny.
So as to not leave any marks on the freshly emulsioned walls by leaning the metal stepladder against them, and to save me the groan of starting next morning by heaving it up off the floorboards and lugging it into position, I stand it upright, dead centre of the empty lounge overnight, clothe the rungs
After the disappointment of the confit de canard and the ‘no shows’ of those I’d planned to see a face looms up right at the death, whale-like with shy pinprick eyes and then all in a rush just as the taxis arrive I’m being told memory is vivid even though his House had been Queen’s
Still clear, their first steps, the fields we camped in, the rained-on holiday lets… less so the white-lined blur of car journeys – their songs, games, laughter, arguments… their silences that gave way to sleep, the engine’s drone. Miles rolled into hours, years. Between the land and the sea we
Klimt’s trees stand frozen and clear, sleepily austere in their ghostly dawn-gaunt aura. Ranks of indigo, turquoise, sapphire glittering, like figures on a paper screen – floating, flat, no trace of shadow. At first, the trees rise thin and cold, but they pulse with such weird, blue profusion, responding to an awed, watchful eye, that
I am floating on heather again. A fleece unshorn for fifty years slips off me, rolls down the hill. Its tumbleweed won’t stop till the village where Gary and Bill wait for me and Emmy unlocks the corrugated hall and Stahl repairs his Morris outside Nancy’s shop. It’s early May. The bleating fields and the
Om – OMG! The cosmos sings! A few can hear its soft wild background murmur, its love song from the wild frontier. Then wonder shades to worry, as Earth, distressed, gets warmer. We share forebodings with our friends. We start to say we’re sorry, we say we’ll make amends. Diehards
What’s day to a miner? Shovels and picks. Ten fathoms deep the mind plays tricks. Like: I’m lying in bed with the sun flooding in. I’m married to a bright young thing in a yellow dress. She sings to me. I pull her close. My hands are clean. My hands aren’t clean. We dream the
Who were they kidding? Themselves for their sins? Or the man with a tripod calling say cheese to these old fashioned guests with their fixed wooden grins in the coffin shaped shadows of pollarded trees? Sometimes they seem no further away than the lift of a veil or the drop of a hat or the
Listen, and you’ll hear the tick of the poem’s stuttering heart; its breathless gush. But notice how it becomes sullen now, dragging its feet; refusing to play, until something catches its eye — a swift, perhaps, dividing the sky, its belly and beak skimming the surface of a river. It longs to tell you how
Coming back from the doctor, you have little to say. Treading the sorrowful stones of the Galgenstraat, our view across the Ij impeded by a new apartment block on the site of the fearful gibbet where Rembrandt van Rijn observed Elsje Christiaen tied to its arms, she was barely sixteen and you complain of the
I rode a bike at speed with letters and cheques, tickets and fines, the dying art of pen. I carried the word of commerce and law, money and verse. A mad dash thick with smog, deadly with car. I rode at metal and juggernaut bus, the copper with a truncheon, prodding. Then a rest on