Statuesque

Green copper is municipal.
Like great hulking metal radiators
Caked with paint but furnace hot.
the smell of chlorine and lukewarm footbaths.
Doors too heavy to yield to a child's most insistent shove.
Preformed concrete and plastic carpet which will skin your knees.
Yesterday's future is tomorrow's investment opportunity.

Caged

Raindrops cling for a while, pooling on vertical glass
defying gravity.
Then running, jagged mad patterns
leaving a wake of spidery trails.

I will walk in the fields.
Stalks of dead corn,
ghosts of a harvest
broken corpses of a summer past.

A patchwork square
divided by hawthorn
ploughed into horizontal submission
revolution suppressed by chemical.

Up and down
a sodden, rutted parade ground.
West to east.
East to west.

Pendulum

Time is the thief of attention
Blurring the detail, the diamond shimmer of dew on the grass
Smudging the edges, dulling the shine.
Colours fade in the pull of the tide.

I wrote it.

Nothing special this - I just haven't written for a bit and wrote this to demonstrate something about adapting stories for different audiences. I wondered if I could give it some attention later and flesh it out and that and it might be better than it is so putting here to remember.

There was nothing for Mr H. Dumpty to do. He was a fat man. An egg shaped man. Not a pretty young thing. A fat old egg shaped man. He’d had a job once. A job he’d enjoyed. They closed the factory down. Knocked it to the ground.

He wanted to do something but everywhere he went he got told. ‘No jobs here mate’ So he drunk. Cider, vodka, whatever he could get his hands on.

One day they was a parade. A royal parade. At last! Something to do.

Mr Dumpty got up early and went to get a good view. He climbed up on a wall and sat there, waiting for the parade. Of course, he’d brought his vodka with him.

He waited and waited, until finally the king’s parade was passing. The crowds waved and cheered and Mr Dumpty waved and cheered as well. He waved for all his life was worth. He waved, desperate to be seen, desperate not to be a nobody, desperate to be a somebody for a moment, desperate for the king to see him, just for a split second, to be gazed on by royalty, to be watched by someone who mattered, he waved and he waved and he waved so much that….

He fell. Crack. Head, pavement. Skull split like a delicate eggshell.

There was a commotion in the parade. The king had seen him fall. He ordered his men to the scene.

But it was too late. They couldn’t revive him. No matter what they tried.

Tis the season for self pity
and bodies in the snow
For bullet wounds
and barbed tongues.
Tis the season to be sorry
Plummeting to earth
Through black and white clouds
To die in checkerboard fields
Peace and goodwill to all men.

"If someone said that Mogwai are the stars I would not object. If the stars had a sound it would sound like this."

The sun is behind the people. They become silhouettes. Details emerge on the fringes of their physicality. A shadow with a halo, a face turned like a Victorian cameo portrait.

I'm at the centre of a machine. Many rhythms. The striding, the shuffling, the look, back and forth. Estuary birds on a concrete shore.

What we all want is to glide, through the light. We want existence to blur. We want to feel so much that it blanks us out, wipes us clean.

We want the trip switch. The blown fuse. The sound of static. The hush of the sea. Do you understand what I'm saying sir?

Who would want to find yourself when you can get lost.

A forest of light.
An empty village.
A wasteland of broken asphalt.
The lines of traffic and the steady metronome of the wiper blades in synchronization.

A childhood taste, a wireframe drawing in green blinking LED, the churn of the sea building like a pendulum in reverse.

This is sanity. A big load of trashy old noise.

All is behind gauze.

Everything thing frozen as if on the point of collapse or explosion. Suddenly the taut metal will buckle upwards with a whiplash crack. The bricks will come loose, one by one, faster and faster, a droplet to a flood The trees will bend to a hurricane force.

A child shyly smiles. The pine forest stretches for eternity. The sun rises forever. There is so much darkness beyond the sky.

God is streaming in numbers. Unknowable, unseeing and uncaring.

I can't feel anything and i don't want to either.

The flock scatters at the sound of breaking glass

I am defunct hardware.
Scratched disks
Clicking and trying to write over
what I cannot understand.
I am not compatible
with what you want to do
Drop me from a great height
into a cavernous metal skip.
Listen to the crunch and shatter
as I spill my innards,
rare earth metal,
scraped from exotic lands,
buried in a mundane mound.
The once and future king
picked over by flocks of gulls

I am a fragment of memory
I am the path once travelled
I am archaic connections
I am the picture behind a blank screen
The words under the stuck keys.