OF ALL TRADES, THERE WAS BUT ONE JACK
Each day was always different in that he started a new job every 24 hours and had done since his debut at a steelworkers in Humberside. It had become a reflex to be sacked or resign before night fell, even when a place and a post felt good. He was the first and last person to adapt to the world of maybe.
FAME IS
cancerous. Deep down, we don’t want it.
DEAR RIVERDALE COUNTRY SCHOOL (# 74,983)
Who and where are you and how did your Glenn Close sculpted pencil end up in my hand? The lead is anonymous, but as hardness goes, I’d put a fiver on you bleeding 2H. The scar on the paper says 5H. If you’d like the weapon back, please send a tree stump.
READING WHILE WRITING WHILE LISTENING (# 74,984)
is not easy. Have a go. I did. Here is my failure.
B. S. JOHNSON WHILE PETER KIRBY WHILE SIGUR ROS
PAPER WHILE TITANIUM WHILE VINYL
FAILURE WHILE TIPTOE WHILE EXPLORATION
Joyce wrote a wobble so rapid that his top lip shuddered for a full five seconds after the removal of his forefinger and its symbol roll.
Echo of a motorbike ridden by a mosquito with a sore throat and an ever-accelerating swallow until it rhythms out into a backwards slipping prayer for ice.
Storytelling must make effort to flatearth, with short economical lyrics, able to take us inside a mind with interior monologue to the pace of a string section implanted to a volume control that suddenly stops shy of a voice.
Pour one book out into a keyboard and let it settle to the beat of an Icelandic orchestra. The point is not to tell a story but to make reading a less obvious ride, something to massage and enthral and scare and cheer and awaken.
SHE CANNOT DROWN
Nor could she swim, yet Venice it was, some 7 times a year from the age of 60 on that seduced her. Decades from now, cardiologists would marvel at the joys of her helium heart. At the height of the 09 depression, she did more than most to levitate life. Fitting then, that she should be honoured out at sea with a statue that hung from the sky.
THE GRASS IS BROWNER
A common condition found in all human beings whereby we run to where the sun is rising in anticipation of betterment only to find worsement. If only we’d listened to the elders, or the horses. The place isn’t the point. Nor is the journey. It’s what we do with what happens that matters, so said a distant elder of mine many times upon a time.
WHERE WILL THE LAST GASP OF SNOW HIDE?
Under the chin of the lecture theatre way up Guy’s Hospital Tower? In the penguin pool at London Zoo? Or deep within the snowman who flies north for winter. If Climate Change really does what it says on the tin, then snow is the oil of tomorrow. Maybe we should give it its full name – Climate Exchange – then ice caps and tropics are free to swap homes at will.