Toy Town They had nailed him to the wall, palms first his plastic feet cracked under hammers, just out of reach, still wearing combat pants with a crew cut and a scar on his cheek. A day later he was joined by a bearded one in khaki, also pinned the way of the cross. Naturally, […]
Recent Posts
The Future Perfect Tense
They will never have been so beautiful as they are here by the pool taking selfies on a stick in their wedding clothes together, white tulle misting over blue water, morning suit as faint as distant smoke as the candy stripe golf cart edges into shot. Years later they will have asked who’s the man […]
All Fall Down
i.m. Jo Cox M.P. for Batley and Spen Over the Kazakh steppes an Englishman drops from space in a frilly white jellyfish landing with a powder puff. “The smell of Earth is so strong,” he reminds us before he’s carried to safety like a baby, woozy with ozone and wonder. In Yorkshire, Hate stalks the […]
Relax, I now have control of The President
I entered via his red silk tie at the weekend. Access through other orifices will now be denied. After the Intervention and a light sleep he fed sparrows some cake in the Rose Garden. His recovery is progressing better than expected. The copy of The Bell Jar that he placed by his bed he discovered […]
The Myth of the Myth of Sisyphus
The lad reads Camus like Sisyphus, every Penguin page so inclined that the meaning might roll back with a groan into cerebral rubble. He says truth’s just a bigger boulder, harder to shoulder, shape or throw, gathering speed but no moss… (moss) which older men should mould as a felten hat to cool their brains […]
Cargo
A boy slips through a break in the chain link down to the creek where the silt unfolds, recumbent, slick-skinned, more than ready for its thick veined estuary to come home. He picks across the flats with his school bag trailing herring gulls and something eggy. He’s collecting the pocks, flecks and shards from this […]
8th November, 2016
Something made us smaller today, pushed under scudding bulletins. TV polls predict a humbling. You can already see the landslide burying light behind the eyes that sell us flat whites and pastries. You can nose out the rot of hope in burger bars and betting shops where we snack down on fat and luck. Even […]
The Rainbow Factory
The facts are important: earlier today jihadi bombers fast-tracked themselves to paradise in Brussels airport. TV kept showing a man, his leg blown off propped on an elbow blinking at his watch like his flight was unaccountably delayed. New York at Ground Zero: the day is sunny with medium wind chill, the pollen count high […]
The personal effects of Don Estanislao
When they are gone they leave chairs in attitudes of conversation while the words shuffle off to another room. Only his silhouette stays, etched over decades in light upon velvet, a still life with El Pais, toothpicks and toffees lost between cushions. The shutters are worn out with looking beyond the far fields that dissolve […]
Freefall
She takes him up to the 32nd floor in London’s hard money district to celebrate the big day at a restaurant significantly closer to Heaven. The protuberances of high finance poke through cloud, chrome-ribbed: the cigarette lighter, the vibrator, the Ladyshave, the vast dictaphone, all the naff caboodle of an 80’s playboy or some gargantuan […]
Mark Fiddes 