Monday

I see you dressed in Casual Fabrics
Hoping for the first of spring
The moon
The dusk
Envelops you like a cloak of midnight.

As you fall into unknown pressures
Reminding yourself of who and what you were
You never wanted any of this emptiness
But you found
All the same
and as if by coincidence
Your own enveloping shame.

Tuesday

She appears in a ball of light
So easy it seems, so easy and so graceful
Her smile (more…)

One

Until these moments end you look surprised
that they are happening at all
that you could suddenly find yourself
in this situation
wondering why
you’re in a position
where you might wonder why.

Then when they’re done the feeling’s worse
your Enigin out of gasoline
your compass misaligned
so that true north is missing
and every movement that you make
feels misdirected

When they come again
they come like spies
underhanded and disguised
falling softly like a voice
or (more…)

In these situations my mind turns to thoughts of signage.

I will print posters for you, each one depicting you and I in attitudes of great Second World War romances.

I will purchase vinyl stickers graphically designed, in which your name and mine spiral into one another.

I will obtain for you consumer durables (a DVD player will alway prove my love to you) as a symbol of my love’s built in obsolescence.

I will leave you alone in the (more…)

Frank had lost most of his money in the great Enigin Scam of 2008. An unscrupulous entrepreneur had managed to convince several thousand people to invest several thousand pounds each in a project that he’d claimed would massively increase their popularity and general interest to the world through a previously unknown online methodology. Charles Enigin had basically set up Facebook accounts for each of his “clients"- for which normally free account he would charge them several grand as a “consultancy (more…)

Amazing what happens when you google your own name. Even more amazing, I suppose, that “google"has become a word that we use so commonly, in such a short space of time. And it’s nothing short of terrifying what happens when you type in the name of someone close to you into a search enigin.

On a spring Thursday, I saw my true love in the park. Auburn hair hung over her shoulders, wafting lightly in the April breeze. I (more…)

This is just some poetry I wrote last week. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we communicate - and sometimes how we don’t. I think the worst thing in the world is people refusing to talk to one another, and how the ability to share our thoughts and feelings through language is one of the things that really makes us human. It’s kind of an extended piece broken into three sections - I was inspired a bit by Lorca’s (more…)

I have thought about changing my name, I imagine a world where I wasn’t. I think of my favourite painters and consider stealing something that belongs to them: could I be Alexander Millar?

I journey back to the Russian steppe and hope that the answer somehow will be displayed in the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where they are all leaving Anatevka and trudging with all of their belongings to the new world….I try humming ’if I were (more…)

I had a red velvet chair, and a matching red velvet sofa, it wasn’t simply cheap furniture, it was free I try to remember where I got them, but all I recall is the position it occupied in my room overlooking the motorway.

My father called it the Roosevelt, or the Dan Ryan, or the Edens. This is how you can tell a carpet bagger, somebody who has moved to the city to make it, they use the numbers (more…)

What makes me smile every day is the sunshine outside, the colourful people always in a hurry. The trees that talk to me when the wind blows, the birds that live in them, the smell of freshly cut grass. The truth is that I love life, I enjoy it and I want to live every single second of it in full. Some people forget what they have, the concentrate their minds on the things that they don’t and don’t really (more…)

The plants in the yard are dying, slowly, its the end of the growing season, the cold fall water drips from bright green to old brown and a forgotten tomato rots on the vine./When I was twelve I dreamt of foreign holidays, bright stars and Luton Airport Parking. I was a strange child who was madly in love with Pablo Neruda./
The leaves on the trees are turning red, falling to the ground and collecting in piles. I search (more…)