Tea-time

Tea has – and always will

be – spelt with an 'L'.

Why, you ask me,

quite rightfully?

The reasons are dead simple:

because it can serve as

a handy looking-glass,

because it may also be a well

with which you may your thirst quell,

but 'tis also a book by the fire

or a meal when times are a-dire,

'tis a long-lost child,

a brat you can't chide,

'tis a feisty woman on your knees,

a pouty Gill who says: “Pretty please?”

'tis a radiant Sunday afternoon

or a masked haiku by the moon;

tea is a deer throttled by a hound,

tea is midnight's fog on Edin's Mound,

tea is the books you'll never read,

tea is the crumbs and the birds you feed,

tea is a plane's fastened seatbelt –

that's why it can't but be spelt

on Earth, in Heaven and in Hell,

with anything but an 'L'.

I left a copy of this piece sellotaped on a concrete pillar in the Looking-Glass Bookshop in Edinburgh (fine place which I strongly recommend for the quality of the books, the warm welcome, the ready-for-anything spirit and the taste of tea I had there). There may be differences in the punctuation (same for the dating of the writing...my memory doesn't work wonders) and I originally left the title to be added by any potential reader, but it is essentially the same.

The fight

"Why bother? We have enough

Cans to last us a siege

And water to have us laugh

At the very face of the liege!

There is no darkness we fear

There is no man that can us bend.

As long as we live we will leer

As long as we breathe there is no end.

They will see, those barbarians,

What it takes to be a man,

And to feel every human sentiment,

What it takes to shoot a man,

What it is to have delicacy and nuance,

What you earn by curbing your essence.

What they are, as they stand behind our walls,

Is beastly, coarse, and unlikely to make us fall."

Double dash

Like a dash of spilt dark tea

Over the bright tabled glazing

I run my lucid dreams over and over

Until they seem dry and exhausted

And then the real story begins

"Know no fear."

She awoke with a start,

They were all there, still

Stilled. They would, eventually

Remain here and rot.

Mouth agape and contorted hands.

Wounds ope on the innards,

Discreetly yet unashamedly.

"Know no fear."

She breathed in and out,

And resolutely gripped

The broken handle of her jagged knife.

 

To the line

Journeying to the line

Unembarrassed by desire

Or hatred, or vindictiveness,

Or gain, or fear, or shame,

we went on, seeking not adventure

Nor meaning to obey orders

Or do our abscond duty

Nor driven by the will to conquer,

We were there as chance willed,

By some fluke of fate,

Owing to a long and serpentine

Chain of events no one governed

We went on because we thought

Liberty was a woman.

Fragment #22

Things need to come to an end

-- however ugly it may be --

for as things now stand,

my life goes by horribly.

The Tattoo

Covering her entire back

The intent artist is putting

The finishing touch to his masterpiece

Never had tattoo been so revealingly beautiful.

The girl had been thinking and designing

Her tattoo for the best part of ten years.

It had taken him a full week to catch her intention

And another to train his wrist to the perfect movement.

Now is the time to prove his mettle.

And the girl had fever breaking after the first three hours,

And they have to do it in one sitting,

No other option, nothing else matters.

It is obviously painful. And the level of detail is boring into her skin.

In about an hour, this girl will have,

Etched onto her back, into her soul,

The greatest overcast one ever saw,

Down to the smallest, darkest billow.

The music rang

The music rang deep into her mind

Made every inch of her skin quiver

The tip of her teats were so hard

Eyes closed, swaying to the sheer vibrations from the speakers

As if she were thrown away

And riveted to the spot

Fractalled into infinity

Like a raindrop

On a corrugated iron roof.

After the fury

The bird hopped from crack to crack

Past the commotion, the rush,

The rot, the stench,

Under that steel arch,

Looked at the towering giants

Belching thunderous bellows

And was gone, in an instant,

Into the soaring, unaffected air.

Food would be gotten

After the fury had died down.

The relevant fall

They all saw him fall to his death down twenty floors

They all thought at once of what they did that day

So that they could remember it all and tell the neighbours

Their own sadder version of the story of that fateful day

They saw a guy fall to his death down twenty floors.