Perched on a bough in a black alder tree, trench rot soaking his booted feet, armpits and groin and tunic unkempt, teeming, a pale airman watched two strangers beneath. They were stood in shirt and tie, pinstripe beneath mackintosh and tucked into black rubber boots, ankle-deep in the river he knew to be the Quaggy, … Continue reading A Pale Airman.
At Penn Beacon market last weekend, I bought a dozen National Geographic magazines (dated some four decades ago, but for one with a beautiful African savanna on the cover, that was from April 1982; the paper of which was considerably thinner) from a man who, as well as cheap collections of periodicals – such as … Continue reading The Dream Job.
My piece 'Photocopy of a Snapshot in the Mirror Frame' (and two other prose/poetry pieces) are featured in this edition of the excellent Free Verse Revolution magazine. This piece, as with all my work to some or no small extent, is based on both a true story and a real photocopy of a snapshot in … Continue reading ‘Photocopy of a Snapshot in the Mirror Frame’ [published at Free Verse Revolution]
The back lane, this new-year dawn, is littered, bleakly - tumbled bins, spent bottles, knuckled tabs, sodden boxes; hound shites, plastic wraps, a quilted headboard, yellowed hand towel; wrapping-paper tumbleweeds troubling parked cars; a bloody gown of herring gull (gutting something); and the last, the very last, or the first, Christmas tree, skulking and skittling … Continue reading The Wronged Tree.
The smeared sights, the bright lights – Felling, Hebburn, Pelaw - rushed the windscreen and nearly disappeared into the rear view. Dave passed the patchwork allotment in Jarrow. Sad flags, a surprising number – a Jack, a George, a rainbow, an A in a circle – hung there over wet sheds and plots from plum … Continue reading Looker.
He wore his clown face – brimming with big boned and jumbled features – and smiled. But his bug-blue eyes, when you looked into them, held only reflections of sad and shaded river pools in some other autumn, and beneath the surface shadows and shapes shifted and were unseen again as the beds eddied. In … Continue reading Again, back
