HUSHED SECRETS OF A CITY

THE APPLE DUMPLING STREETS

In the apple-dumpling streets in the Brussel-sprout winter, neon flashing umbrellas reflect thunderstruck window-shoppers, with cling film clothing sticking to skin, and smudged, soggy poems spilling flat into the street, with the green melon taxis that pick up and go, near the horseradish banks with potato mash cash, bouncing the rain off the Rocky Mountain buses, painted red in a raging, pre-staged storm. The rain is a ballet-burlesque for wet rushing wanderers, with night-cap-faces, tank top breasts and summer shirts, with fat sunned shorts. It’s cinematic wet, in sad sheltered arcades, where money rolls down drains, and into an abyss, where time is consumed, with throw away cans and cartons of pleasure. It’s a theatre of rain, where the players are us, in the lamplit traffic lights, where cars are boats, in the flip-flopping flooding, on the fish-boating street. It’s the booming dash of a blockbuster sky where the ticket sales smile, and puddles sign autographs. It’s the world of parking-lot philosophers, breadcrumb chiropodists, Eton economists, in straight Royal flushes. It’s an impeachment of rain, a conspiracy of drenched-ness, deregulated decency, in the shower curtain subway, where buskers sail off on their own chords. Where the hot dog stand is a statement of policy, where slippery Joe, masseurs the manikins, in the Netflix night on Amazon Prime. It’s a Twitter democracy, a Facebook video, brazen on Instagram, barred out of Tumblr and sitting pretty on Medium. You sip cappuccino with your French yellow parrot and wait for the weather to pass.

PAPRIKA STREET

This Beef Stroganoff sunset, boneless and overcooked with cars parked like cushioned mushrooms in sour creamed streets, where couples walk the garlic clove night and alleyways along Paprika Street, their half-fat Parsley chopped conversations echoing in the wild rice, non-stick evening.
Half-cut poets with rhymed couplets in their hair make love to Iambic goddesses in cheap rented boudoirs of the Salty Pepper and Mustard night.
The flat-pack cars with instruction manual bonnets, built for the self-made-man with tartan sauce wallets, park in secret on Paprika Street.
Trading their way through crypto-currency lovers with bitcoin exchange rates, they gamble on love in the pale brown creamy night.
The gambling banditos of Warmonger Street invading the privacy of all who come near, weaponise anything that’s good for their ego. They trade in threats and armed intervention and never pay their bills on Paprika Street.
Food Banks and Tax Havens sit side by side, there’s something for everyone on Paprika Street, but no one gets the irony as they build homeless shelters for all the fallen investors.
Now the Brandy Sauce morning on Hangover Street, where humans are counters in somebodies’ game, is stretching its roads and drinking black coffee and hoping that all looks normal.
The work weary world with its left-over wages arrives on a tray and are served to their bosses. They live for their phones, the sounds on their Spotify, the fashions and brands and loans for the poor.
The Stroganoff is cold, the sunset is sleeping and the cats prowl alone., in a world that’s boneless and overcooked. 

Meandering Down the Stream of Consciousness.

Walking along the streams of consciousness, through buttressed leaves in kick crumble rouge, past sloping off boats tugging at their moorings, past gates to huge houses, slipways slipping into the Thames to feed u bend swans fresh baked breadlets, past bent backed hedges with tangle-hair dreams and lean over fences and trees that reach up to the giant’s nest and the blow-bubble clouds with tingle-drop raindrops that fall on caught out blouses and coiffured hairscapes, while dogs chase the illusions of rabbits that spill from a cast off top hat, jammed in the hedgerow, awaiting the applause of a Drury Lane matinee, while taxies cut corners to pick up cut-out commuters from their brief-cased compartments and deliver them quickly to lap-top lovers with micro-soft thighs, and dropdown menus, before evening news and dinner for two on a punt down near Windsor, while couples tell lies that neither believes as a matter of ritual, and just to fill in time till the call of the duvet and feather-down pillows in the lover time night with its dreams of long winding rivers, with trees that look like people and ducks that talk Norman and swans that sell cakes to passer-by joggers in trainers and leggings that bounce on the leaves where rabbits lure dogs, with the illusion of food, and magicians lose hats, in a spell under the stars, and back by the streams where consciousness rushes, before walking by the banks of the Thames flowing home to its mansion of the sea, with its fish-maid servants and butler whales and ships that just seem to pass in the night.

The Tale of Joey Quantum

My entry into Quantum Shorts in 2015. They tagged it as engaging with WAVE-PARTICLE DUALITY SUPERPOSITION on their website!

Joey Quantum came on like a waveform but posed as a particle when the press was present. He’d do his double slit trick but ended up in some parallel dimension after a comedy of errors brought him to his knees. Soon after, disappearing into dark matter, a legend grew up around him. Joey reappeared from his double dip disappearance some months later and got featured in Natural Geodesic, deciphering esoteric mistletoe sculptures in outer Mongolia.

It was there I got to know him, sun-baked in some oasis thinking it was a mirage. Joey had calmed down a lot, he’d been through a lot of scenes and dimensions and knew how to handle relationships. Joey met this violinist in some bordello on the border and all the way along on a Sampan in Shandong, she was playing along to the radio and Joey heard his name….it was hard to recall the curves of her melody, but Joey described her as pure space, ever more mysterious the closer you got.

The world of men seemed obsessed with the acquisition of collected atoms, possessions, territories. They clashed like Titans, blasted apart atomic structures, and rejoiced in war. Joey knew too much to fall for this illusion, what the Hindus call Maya. A chance mutation in his genetic structure had opened his mind to endless possibilities and viewpoints, all happening at once. Joey wanted to help his fellow men but how would he explain!

The papers had it in for him, they defined him in a headline, they demonised him by association, they exposed his sex life, trashed his words of wisdom, cut up his letters to read as something else, but Joey was a kind of illusionist, escaping their hold and challenging their grip on reality. He defied all their predictions, confounded their plots with his spontaneity and led them on a chase. One day, they would wake up with a strange notion that the world wasn’t quite all it seemed. They were like laboratory rats kept in darkness, soon their eyelids would lift to a new reality. This would be his strategy!

I wanted to get Joey’s story down on paper, I had a deadline and an impatient editor, but nothing made sense. It would take a whole new language, a fluidity of concepts and an inter-sensory medium to even get close to getting a handle on Joey Quantum! I wasn’t up for the job, a limp pen in a dark ink but I did get close to the violinist. Joey made love to her on some whole other level but we just did the physical. The three of us were like chords on her violin, she’d run her bow across us, and the air would vibrate with a calming knowledge. I learnt from Joey that love was a communion of waves and atoms operating on different wavelengths. Love wasn’t about possession but about letting go of concepts. Nothing was separate. I couldn’t quite grasp it all, but I had opened myself to learning.

It came on the news, one day after sundown, they had Joey down as an alien, surrounded him in the mountains, aimed their guns towards him. Joey was non-violent, and I knew he could handle himself. How many Joeys did they see through their sights? Joey was everywhere and nowhere, their bullets unpredictable in their trajectory. The Military put it down to oxygen-deficiency, high up in the mountains. They made excuses in the press. They never did get Joey Quantum. I still see him from time to time. He was an enigma they couldn’t fathom but they had begun to ask questions and that was a start!

We both continued to hang out with the violinist on different levels. Jealousy played no part. Love was a form of communication, a method of learning, a search for meaning, a transcendence of reality. Joey taught me well. I’m glad I met Joey Quantum! His is quite a tale! 

Catalytic Lovers

Some of us are logged in, or timed-out or in sleep mode, we are fat databases with wild emotions, accusative or encouraging, sparking on our chemical base, neural connective tissues with social issues in this virtual reality, we call life.
We are sponge fish or catfish running for the train that’s always late with underpaid staff and QR codes that open the brain to other realities, realities that cut loose from multiple choice classrooms where there is only one right answer.
We take the world seriously, at face value, without question. Work is always punishing, the sea always beautiful and blue, but never a flood zone, an inundation with lost advanced civilizations awaiting discovery beneath. We know so little — yes, we who think we know it all…
Do you remember that time; lost in love, our bodies warm, a world out there, oblivious to our intimacy, minding its own business, while all our fancy logic melted down along our quivering thighs? What reality did we just tap in?
The news bulletins, hot on the hour, attitude influencers distributing the depression of worldwide stories to human receptors. I tip my cap and walk away upon the wild unvarnished hills. The news here is organised in ice floe valleys with rippling streams and the alliteration of a honey-warm breeze…

We are catalytic particles, sparking and cackling with electrons, elliptical in shape, going round in circles while our thoughts abound in parallel universes…
Mason street is dull, the rain drums on sun-parasols, the barman brings beer and baguettes to the bourgeoise of the town; we walk in, our clothes screaming for spin dryers; our daylight love making glowing on our skin — but will they notice, speculate on social media, report us to the dull and everyday guardians of prim and proper? We are catalytic lovers, sparking and cracking, elliptical in positions, alliterative in our breathless sighs, heaving with the stuff of life.

The barman takes our clothes, puts them in the spin dryer, we fail to look embarrassed and drink our cocktails with finesse — we are both logged in to each other and run our cursors through each other’s hair — the bar staff look on and smile —
they have yet to exist…! 

A Résumé for Lydia

Lydia kept the lid on it all, she slid down the banister of all her wanton thoughts, feeling like a door mat in a B movie. The quantum mechanics of new wave politics left her cold in its wave / particle duality. She didn’t like the man who hid in her loft on a Sunday, his eyes were unholy, and he only spoke in sinewaves. She didn’t like the way the rain fell on Badger Street or the way the sun shone on All Saints Day; she didn’t like the spokesman for some un-named government who appeared on TV when a lie had been told. She kept an annotated scrapbook of unholy lies with Zen illustrations etched in edible inks and lay in her underwear ripping up to do lists and longing for intimacy with no strings attached.

The trains on the hill would gurgle and pant with its tank wagons, box wagons and gondola cars towing rare planets brought back from space that the authorities wanted to own for their pride. The tower blocks phallic leered over her town with its corner street curry houses and take away pizzas and the rumble of bubble cars, Skoda’s and bicycles and Hiawatha police who patrolled all the markets and those mean dark alleys.

Lydia was a busker who faked all her singing, she played the guitar with broken tied strings and filled up her hat with stockbroker cheques and she kissed anyone who asked, while photographing their shoes and then tied up their laces to a dream they’d never dreamed. She would trip over gossip and cut out the juicy bits for a collage on the wall of the Town Hall.

Her lovers were meat heads with mountains of man buns with minions that carried their craven head thoughts to chambers of commerce for an afternoon lark. And she loved them with indifference and they back at her, too — all in aid of charity.

Lydia was lovable with an insect collection and skirts of pure space. The world was an artwork by artists that can’t paint and expressed by a poet who was allergic to words. She had sex on a Friday and sometimes on Sunday and believed in a someone who turned out to be no-one but was handsome and cool and came round on a Wednesday.

I met Lydia in an autograph shop, she messaged on Tic Tok, and asked me to write her a short résumé. I wrote it on-line, she said she’d pay me in kind, and I guess this is all I could say!

Life on Street View

Life on Street View was a buzz. We rode that mouse town to town, looking up forgotten women and forgotten pals that got mixed up in our dreams, decades before when we were the hell raisers. The no-care youth of the world, oozing with ideas; crapping ourselves with creativity; dreaming of new eras; moving on the goalposts of what was possible; dreaming big but dreaming small; far from the smell of making money, free of the watchers and corporate control-freaks, where love was the currency and ideas were the street map. The world was one country with interlinking cultures, the soul was our passport, and passion was our engine. We were the architects of alternatives, we believed in other ways. We slept in damp alleys crying with sterility and dreamed with the archimage of how we could change everything that was wrong for this planet; and the music was unbelievable and cut to the chase and the poetry broke all of its rules and the books undid all the forced learning and we spoke with the heart and we spoke from our passion and we moved like greased lightning and painted the streets with rainbows of diversity and believed in each other and believed we could do better and we chased the old world into a corner of history. In the darkness of oppression, a candle is lit and it only takes a movement of the head to see above your horizons.

FISH PIE ALLEY

In Fish Pie Alley where sullen shoppers swim, time has no power to reign, hand in pocket, the world of clocks — those stay-at-home time machines — grow bored. Even rain, so used to gravity, are puppy dogs toying with loops and jumps. Cashless shops with no joy of tills, slumped in restless arcades. I walk defrosted in the neon glare through the ghosts of the belly dancing hoards, and tip my cap, my bevelled hat, to their skill with human form. I tread unswept memories of a time when time was time, a time of joy and doubt and wondering if I could have done better. We are chemical constructs that spark and light and then are heard no more, who chanced their birth here in the walkways of Fish Pie Alley. Here Salvador Dali spoke of reality and how he slurred his paintings, life is just weird impressionism on a moving canvass of glow-worm paint. Now the rain is almost wet, and gravities lost its touch and the sullen shoppers with Pop Art faces are the peers of bygone time. I float along, an Umbrella man, in time-stalled Fish Pie Alley. 

THE GOLDEN STREET WIZARD

Your name is Saxon Picasso, your food is the love of a painted lady, polyphonic, vamping, colourful and semi-surreal. You wear a top hat with white rabbits, for brains, and a suit of autumn leaves. You play for the symphonium sky and Brazilian braziers and bras. You mix with particles at the patriarchal parties where the Mona Lisa steps out of the painting and swings with the syncopated swingers. You laugh at the deconstructed starlight, the textural cacophony coated in coffee with water-winged wellingtons in the Aspidistra leathery foliage of late-afternoon lethargy. You are lost in the lilt and tilt of the cadence of time and kiss the lovers of your lost and found, basement bar imagination where romance is incense. All the world’s an umbrella and the truth is a patter of raindrops, a dichotomy of perception. You are free as the wind, dictators are haunted by you, they envy your lack of compliance. You are simple and transcendent, written off and written about, there are medieval streets in your maiden voyage beard, where street musicians hum in the hung-over night, sleepless in a stealth of a politics no one can name. You are everything we are not, and you hold your sax like a golden street-wizard. 

JAZZ TOWN

This is Jazz Town. The melody of the rain, Trumpets of improvised images rain down. Maple Leaf or make believe, could reality be this absurd! The spontaneity of raindrops, pin tail, head-face, or heel cap; the two-faced guitars rap in harmony. Lovers bathe in Malay Specials, pineapples, bananas, and the grapes of wrath; pipers’ pipe in the Tartan highlands, absurdist politicians walk the catwalk with Pablo Picasso painted policies. Play cat and mouse in their heatwave cat suits. The whole dumb-downtown ringing with unspoken melody, the scale of deception expressed in a trombone solo, the harmony of the intuitive revolution, the freedom of the hard pressed, the world was born out of jesters, all meaning is transient. This is jazz, cool jazz, rocking the rafters; break free of the clichés. This is the creative revolution where words and melody override their instruments. Break free of the TV, watch the news in a language you can't speak, ditch the fashion brands, be an individual, we are revolutions of spirit, creative souls, exits and entrances, they are all the same, we are all one, embrace the harmony, melody, and the rhythm of the rain. This is Jazz Town. 

Anaïs

Anaïs sits for the photo, hides her face in the hat, the world is a French film played backwards in slow motion, her coffee is cold, and her lovers fail her. She has partitioned her mind for realism and surrealism and she’s not sure which is which.
There’s snow on the mountains of the wild Pyrenees, there’s a war in the east that nobody can win, the soldiers are puppets of casino politics and the gas meter’s empty, and the candles are lit.
She sits with her lovers, both real and imagined, they massage her brow and kiss by her navel, and they read her letters from her lovers of the past until her juices are flowing and there’s apples and bananas and her memories are strawberries that mix with her shadow on the walls of her mind.
Now she bathes in her realism and soaks in surrealism and dresses in assonance with essence of synecdoche. She’s metaphor and cliché, colloquial and fashionable and the clocks play roulette with the money on her gas meter, and she sleeps with the bailiffs and fakes all her payments. Her poverty is a madness, and her riches are beauty, she’s the Marchioness of loneliness with the loot of the wilderness hidden in boots.
I came by with a letter written by no one and watched while she opened it knowing it was nothing, compelled by her skin I kissed down her neck and the sun kissed the moon, and the world was eclipsed, and all of the dinosaurs came back as the world rocked n rolled.
We married in the spring and parachuted in France, and it came on the news that the aliens were real and the war in the east came to an end, and everyone was excited to see what they’d bring. And they took off with our leaders with their lies spilling out of their brains like apple juice and elderberry and we made love in the monastery of our own imagination and the trees were our family and the wind knew our names.

Anaïs spoke good French and was paid for her acting and the film was a cut up with trimmed juxtapositions and we dreamed it big, and we dreamed it small and we all hide behind partitions of what others think we are, in a world where nothing is right and nothing ever — is wrong. 

POETRY IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS!

Poetry is not what it seems,     
It refuses to wear a tie.
It doesn’t have a day,
(Even when personified).
It doesn’t care for rhyme,
Prefers to remain stress-free,
and its syllables are private!

Poetry is not the military,
It doesn’t have to stand in line,
Salute preconceived ideas,
March on the orders of General Opinion,
Be confined to the barracks of books.
Poetry has a problem with meaning.
It can send out multiple messages,
With one cute metaphor,
Embrace paradox, be exploratory,

And hesitate before fixed ideas.
Poetry is your wild card,
It thrives on its poverty, to
Create a world out of nothing.
It can challenge ‘reality’,
with a flagon of Salvador Dali,

It can laugh in the face of ‘rules’,
and forge paths unknown to pens.
Poetry is the primordial soup,
Formless, opaque, hydrogenous,
With the promise of light,
stars and the uniqueness of its own universe.

Poetry is ‘Dark Matter’,
Continuing to confound the scientific mind,
Measurable by intuition,
and insight thinking.
Poetry can be all things, and nothing,
and everything in between.

There is nothing it can’t do,
And nothing it can’t be.
You can mould your own version,
and train it as a pet,
Feed it and water it with your very own concepts,
Discipline it, walk it on a lead.

Poetry is vapour refusing to be kettled,
forming huge travelling clouds,
giving life through its rain.

DON’T MESS WITH POETRY -

It’s not what it seems!! 

RISTRETTO

I met her for Ristretto, she was freshly ground, a barista, espresso, half milk, half water, with oat milk eyes, I came up on her antennae after radio silence. I’d been barred out of Nero’s for racing two wheeled chariots when she caught my eye. She’d married into poetry with sonnets at her disposal, looking for double meanings. “How come you don’t use clichés” she said, I shrugged, “I find them difficult, they always come out wrong”. I was doing radio, we talked about microphones and how it was hard to balance the impedance, “The whole world is ‘on mic’” she said. I said, “that’s just your paranoia” and we walked down by the river talking about the evolution of spiders out of prehistoric crabs. There were power boats boasting of speed and white-water rafting. We were on the same wavelength and ordered a fresh Americano. “What do you make of the world”, she said. “The world is like coffee, it comes in different styles, you can mix up the ingredients and call it different names but it’s always just coffee underneath”. She was like a skimmed milk Caramelatte, with a shot of syrup and whipped cream, and we pulled out of the story quickly before they took the chairs away and asked us to leave!

Botticelli Italiano

Botticelli Italiano served small air tubes of Tortellini. The Rigatoni rain belted down on the tight torsos of Italian male sculptures. The wild spaghetti haired women, like walk-in frescos with deep, rich hues and intricate shadings. They could have been painted by Giovanni Bellini. They ordered sheet pasta or Ditalini with Minestrone.
They spilled out of the Da Vinci code like rumours of Mary Magdalene in sittings for the Last Supper. Isadora Frank and Erica Jong zipless on a boat in Venice discuss their fear of flying. Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel orders Lasagne, with ricotta cheese.
The wine flows freely in the fountains, Lambrusco Bianco e Rosso, where wood nymphs bathe. This could be the new Renaissance, the turning point of alchemy, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton and the flamboyant and influential Paracelsus.
Lavinia Fontana, female artist of the Renaissance, painting Mars and Venus on the veranda, the aroma of Ravioli, its ruffled texture, stuffed with cheese and vegetables.
Latin lovers in Jumbo shells, Marinara, Alfredo, basil, garlic, olive oil, nuts, and cheese.

The world is a pasta dish painted by Hieronymus Bosch, with tincture of Philosopher’s Stone.
Lovers fall in and out of love, the war between paprika and oregano, one night stands with a marble torso, mixed pasta sauce on linen canvas. The world and its waitress service.

SNACKBAR MORNING

In the snack bar streets, you can get a cup of tea and toast, the blank minds of morning are still half dreaming. You can see right across to the railway arches, the slow sleepy trains shunting in the low pay sidings, even politics is a little dozy in the light of daylight robbery.
I stir my cold coffee as the world wakes up with slow creeping traffic in a hurry to get to nowhere workplaces where the crack-whip managers have pens behind their ears.
Where is the world going, but round in circles, circling in space, cars on the ring road, morning to night, the circling of a salary back to the treasury, the milk round, the circus arena of days and years.
I stir a second coffee and look around me...
We live in a forgotten novel in a second-hand world, with notes to ourselves in the margins of time. Time is a trumpet, blending and blurring the notes, we no longer know what the game is.
We live for the coffee, the games on our devices, the music in the Cow and Bell on Saturday night, the snuggles and warm embraces, the headers, and kicks of soccer on TV and the sad wages from the sin of work we hardly enjoy.
I put the world in my portfolio, hedge my bets for a windfall, crank up my laptop.
Quinton street is full of rain, the drains are busy labelling raindrops, the letter boxes are hungry for letters, the cars are punished with parking tickets, the wheels are being clamped, coffee has replaced petrol and the pumps are full of price tags.
The world is not ‘as seen on TV’.
It’s just a stirring of the coffee, the clinking of a teaspoon in some cheap station Row café… 

NOT A CLUEDO

It wasn’t that I meant to say anything, I didn’t, believe me, but I left my camera bag on the grass. There are people who see clues everywhere, I’m one of them, I guess. The universe is some kind of soft pedal Cluedo — there is always a mystery to solve. The world was made by Waddington’s you’d think it was a game. I’m the innocent shuffler of the dice.
Some berate me because I got a double six, and yes, I let Miss Scarlett seduce me, and no, I didn’t walk away with her bag. We live in a world of blame, and I’m big enough to take it all and let the world go free. Choose your cards freely, I’m not one to look over your shoulder.
My thoughts are Financial Instruments, I trade them like derivatives, watch them on the FTSE 100 Index. The more I think, the higher the capital Gains. It’s all a game of Monopoly, a Scrabble for words and clues.
Professor Plum had a theory, he said all literature is made of anagrams and that’s how to arrive at the truth. This was the fruit of his labour, and lately I’m leaning towards it. Colonel Mustard was busy with his tank, he blew a hole in all those theories and put the blame on Mrs Peacock.
The truth is I was with Mrs Peacock, the tale’s not pretty but her husband got mad. He said “No dice son, jealousy’s the game” but I pointed out his affair with Miss Scarlet — and oh yes, he went bright red, I filmed them on the veranda, and it made the 9' O'clock news. Mrs Peacock was with the Reverend Green, they were going at it religiously, some say they sent a plate round for collection, I threw in a few derivatives.

It all got a bit messy, we were all saints and angels, until someone mentioned sex and war. These things are there to try us, but we’re all part saint and devil, two sides of one coin, derived from an anagram in a novel.
We are all born to contradictions, it’s how we navigate our way, some toss a double six, others get by with 3, it’s all to do with relativity, the space time continuum.
Miss Scarlett just sent a text, I can’t believe what she just said, I’ll be around to see her later, if Professor Plum doesn’t get there first.

MUSHROOM HEAD UMBRELLA BINS

Mushroom head umbrella bins stalk the painted rain leak streets. With dripping autumn pallet paints, paint-pot Impressionists paint the oily smudge of truth. For these are pastel plasticine days where nothing is as it seems. We live our lives in art-worlds where creators create our worlds in damp-lit garrets, from the nimble nudes of nowhere street to the batik Bauhaus beat of Belle Époque. All the world is silent now, we are toys put back in boxes; all we know of life are scents, sensations, and impressions. We are corner street coincidences, silk-gown synchronicities, constructs deconstructed, or biomorphic brocades with built-in brushwork. The cityscapes of greenhouse gas, the Cinématographe of the riot squad, the cladding foam of city planners, the crony Classicism of designer politics, the pointless ephemera of a rambling media, the Hieroglyphs of a higher hierarchy, the font shaped geometrics of nouveau feminism - the world is an artwork of colour and shape, surreal and yet real, an impression and expression with its saints and rogues, overdressed and nude, or personified with the alliteration of a walking in the rain umbrella bin imagination.

The Jam Pancake Rain

Walking in the Jam-Pancake rain, brass horned and flagged, snow-foot and hat, taking the tram to Timbuktu, learning from liars and cobblestone criers, the tryers and fryers, fisheries and farm shops, lamplight lovers in lollipop shops. I think of you, all of you, with iron wrought lives and tubular temperaments, riffing on the wind, stepped up, stepped down, a sidewalk band that nobody adheres to, you flicker past fountains, bookmarked with bookshops with Toblerone telephones in tumbleweed bags, checking on the kids, cheating on the spouse. Yea, these are sleeping bag streets, home to the homeless, charity tin towns, hot with hot chocolate, mint or Choc-Chip, howling with hiker boots, fresh off the hills, I wonder where you’ll drink tonight…in Kit Kat cafes or Dormouse Bodega bars. Embrace the Expressionism, wear one boot reversed, the world is your palette, mix paints for cut-up conformism, you were born to be unique, blow DNA trumpets in Paper Mache alleys, for you are the jazz, improvised on avenues, brave and adventurous, take the world by the horns and just be who you are…

I Don’t Want to Talk to Anyone

I don’t want to tell you anything, it’s none of your damn business, so I won’t, so there. That whisky in my hand is there for decoration, the only reason it goes down is, so my wrist doesn’t ache. Everyone’s a little tipsy — the world is a careless card game, someone’s sitting on some of the cards. I don’t even care if you’re hungry, go eat, I never get to the point in one sitting anyway. I’m with Shakespeare, I do soliloquies, talking to anyone else is plain stupid. Yeah, that’s the blues you hear, don’t knock it, it came out of house music in the 90’s! The world is one big lie — I know, I started the rumour. I wasn’t gonna sit here and do nothing, I’m an inventor, I make things up, the whole world is fiction — the whisky tells me so. I know, you think I’ve got an attitude problem — well I don’t do problems — I’m who I am, and that pretty much changes day to day — why get stuck in a rut? I don’t know why you are here — maybe you are hanging out for some juicy confession, some drama, suspense or maybe some human comedy. I tell you right now, I’m not here to please, write your own damn stuff, writers aren’t waiters “What would you like with your wine Sir / Madam — hot sex, murder with a little mystery — would you like it 50 Shades Grey or with peppers?”. This ‘market’ stuff — stuff the market, appal the editor, send them into liquidation — genre no longer matters! I don’t write for the market, I write to kiss imagined lovers in the dark — ok, the whisky bottle is empty now, but I have a great imagination — I can fake drunkenness! You want ‘plots’ — well look what happened to Guy Fawkes — and we still have a government centuries afterwards! Fake the plot — the world is a fiction! Ok, I got a little carried away, I know, I’m a ‘Happy Gilmour’, whacking the words like golf balls and still missing the hole! Turn up the blues, I like the way that guy bends the strings, bend your lives so the strings ring, wring the last decibel out of your lives. We were born to have orgasms — that’s all we came here for — the rest is just beautiful packing! Ok, I know, you don’t like me now, I refuse to blog my meals and conform. It’s ok, I understand. We know where we stand. I’m off to the office, I’m an accountant — unaccountably so! I can make it all add up!

I Don't Want to Tell you Anything on YouTube - voce guitar and bass by Trev Teasdel https://youtu.be/5LrH4HF8S5E?si=qvDK2njpwViPJJQm

LILYPAD STATION

Lilypad station, Claude Monet brushing up his French in the coffee lounge. Steam nymphs rising to arched glass roofs. The thunderous rolling stock of post industrious lives, trembling in the cavities of a scheduled and unscheduled world. The clock-face time lord with Rene Magritte pipe, looking stern at the run-rabbit platform. The mobile lives of brief-cased minds, wizards of business by proxy Chattanooga their deals on wheels — all the world is on the phone, it’s how they live “I’m telling you darling, she slept with your husband — I don’t wanna hurt you but...” “Hey, can you send a taxi, the train’s running late. Yes, he was arrested for flashing in the buffet car. No, I wasn’t involved” I’ve heard it all and more, the drifting mists of human episodes and drama, we’re three act plays in a cosmic drama fest. Self-important with opinions to die for, chugging down the rails like a runaway ghost train, ghost town after ghost town, someone to meet, someone to get away from, the call of business, meeting a lover in a soft bedded bower. Lilypad station, 5.30 prompt, I sit with a sandwich watching it all. It’s a time lapse movie, a run-around rat race, soft colours in a pastel sky. Monet sits beside me, I pass him his brushes, “I get the impression you are an observer in all this?” he says. “I am — and you?” The clown in the corner is doing impressions for the kids. It’s night now and all the world is under canvas.

...

YouTube version with Trev on voice, bass, guitar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-TIOphnDag

They Call Me Merlot

They call me Merlot, what’s in a name, I’m like good wine, happy in the headlines of a wine press, Burgundy or Bordeaux, Moon balls, some kind of hybrid, thick skinned and supple, I walk the apricot streets, orange neon and the blue light of Belvedere — the lantern lights of Vodka. Street sellers in the craft ale rain, drink me and you’ll be on your back. I’m the wild austerity of good manners, born in the alley of ‘give--no-fucks’, I’m uptown and downtown, in the bootleg bars of a fast-food night,

I’m Ricotta, Romano, Parmesan and Parmigiano Reggiano, I’m hot Pepperoni, walking the coffee cup night, Hot dog and doughnut, the scent of Belladonna, alone with a thousand ancestors, I am the whole history of this town, my soul houses the demolished, I am each and every story ever told, I’m the rolling cobbles, the trembling tram lines, the nervous news-maid at the paper stand, the horn of every impatient automobile, the screeching tyres, the insecure security guard longing for a good Samaritan. I hotel with the Phantom of the Opera confessing to imposter syndrome, I sleep with the Moon on my head and dream of serendipity and jump through the scat-singing orgasms of off duty office blocks. I walk with the homeless, the handcuffed buskers, the petrified paupers in this zero-hour town, the shuttered shut down shops, the joking job centres, the soaking, soggy social realisms, the upturned apple carts of the apple-pie tarts, the crumbling pastry of the social order, the current bun politics with only crumbs for tea. Yes, they call me Merlot, I call your tune…

Crypto Currency Nightmare

In the crypto-currency nightmare, where the pitied classes live in giant carved out onions. Where furnaces are tapped for the steel plinths of malleable propaganda. Where the bone-dry pubs rattle empty glasses. Where the fracking caves of secret sins hide the lies of the universe in clay jars. Where the March Hares of politics run rabid in the twisted labyrinths of the subconscious. Where the cockadoodle morning juggles with the dustbin of common thought.

On David Street, we see pyjama wearing citizens, dozing through the day with iPad Euphoniums monitoring every snore. On the corner, Little Jack Horner, and the protesters from hell. With prehistoric banners, they lack the power to be innovative! With rule-book lives. legal-fee minds, programmed and conditioned, they sit in cafes by the river, dreaming of winning the Lottery.

Just then, one of them had an idea — but then again there were tasks to be done, situations to be ironed out, bills to be ignored and distractions to be followed like a frolicking cream cake on legs. The idea withdrew; went back to bed and kept one eye open for an escape route….

THE CITY BY NIGHT

The City by Night, Lockwood Ferry, the smooching smog on Lover’s Lodge. Beer spill alley where crooks go straight, the bell-shaped lights, the eloping bridge with its drunken bride, the towering blocks with eye-lashed windows, winking at the twinkling stars. The beat cop’s banjo with missing strings, the scat singing fisher boats, in monkey-jumping coats, the mellow thieves with make-believe wallets, the wanton ladies with pebble-dashed dreams, thugs with tugs that toe the line, the bent accountant that couldn’t count, the cocktail pub too shy to open, the Theatre Royal where the audience acted, the scripts were lost, and the plots escaped. The City by night, in the love making lofts, midnight callers with hourglass medals, trumpets with a trombone sound, piano-roll drums, piccolo bass, a carnival of teapots with a whisky top-up, the iPhone payphone with a cash-back courtesan, the sleeping shops with come-alive dummies, flirting with drunks on the crisp packet pavement — the City by night, hold tight…...

The Parallel Gallery of the Jazz Tate.

It was jazz as usual, breakfast was improvised, we headed off in a Trumpet solo to Trombone town, played in the basement of an upright bass, the sound was raspy, edgy, rough, smooth, pretty, soulful, warm, dark, light, and harsh, an abstract art with Pork Pie hats, with Cubist counter melodies; a xylophone palette of neo-plasticism and orphism. Guillaume Apollinaire playing Fauvism in Cb minor, free associations of Piccolo plasticine. Plato, ideal and always on form, The Philosopher Kings and The Demiurge, Charlie Parkering in the dark cave of Atlantis, with splash-paint portraits of a Sonny Rollins Paper Mache Rag. John Coltrane with Jackson Pollock, drip-paint, expressionism on orgasmic shapes, the Sax solo of the Hyena Stomp, Frank Stella fresh from the Tate, monochromatic fields of clean-edged colour, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, giant stepping on ‘a Night in Tunisia’, the gypsy jazz of red-bra women, the legacy of unlikely legs, splendid Bourbon, blended bourbon, Johnny Walker’s chromatic symbolism. This was the one-time world where nothing existed, the primal move, the egg-shell moment. Hail the multi-instrumental universe, the abstract cosmos, the expanding jazz quartet, the Big Banging bluesy Bill Broonzy. This is the Parallel gallery of the Jazz Tate. Bow to the holy trio of Art Critic, Jazz Critic, and the Holy Laddered Tights!

‘In the beginning’,

Right at the start,

(As it came to be),

it was always just...

(duhdoodop)

always just...

(badumcha)

always just…

(bideedoodop, skadeedaht)

Jazz onomatopoeia as Usual!

.....

The Parallel Gallery of Jazz Tate (Jazz as Usual) on YouTube with Trev on voice and several bass tracks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GehicNQvafY

POWER CHORD PRIMATES

I was born to be wild, a wild thing running free, a bowler-hatted Steppenwolf on the steep Steppes of Santa-Anyplace. I rode a six-string saxophone with a left field pickup truck, swinging in the trees and looking to get lucky. A power-chord primate with intuitive ignition, I radioed my intentions intensely. I was Lay Lady Lay in a layby near Las Lascivious fretting over her laid-back arpeggios.

Nothing makes sense in a wild town, you have to invent all your own meanings and feed them back down, town to town. I wasn’t born to be understood, I peeled the fruit of life on the run. Outside Sacramento we were Monkey Magnifico, our amps ran off with the lost chord of the planet and the audience were torn between ovation and disgust. Well, that’s rock n roll for ya!!

...........

Trev on guitars and vocals - version of Power Chord Primate on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMCRdA4WHk4

Teleporter Auberge

Paula Passcode pulled into the Teleporter Auberge, her scanned particles beaming in the mirror and her laser sharp eyes saw more than she desired.
There were deadlines upon deadlines, boxes to tick, protocols to abide by codes to be honoured but even the most advanced atomic clock couldn’t afford her more time. In the end – either it would work, or it wouldn’t. There were no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’.
A deep uncertainty underpinned her demeanour as she made her way down to the Blackjack Quantum Casino. In the corner, chewing the fat and debating the universe was God and Albert E=mc2. Albert looked pensive when he saw Paula with the dice and God was keeping his cards close to his chest in regard to his ‘mysterious ways’.
Hours and hours of planning hadn’t worked, the best she could come up with were probabilities; she would leave it all to chance and let the universe decide, as she toyed with the predictive text on her quantum calculator. The Universe had its own laws, and it wasn’t giving them up easily. Somehow, she always did better by following her gut feelings!
Albert, meanwhile, longed to get back to the ‘Real World’ and he knew just where it was, a European style pub, lit by bright lasers and spinning like a CD in play-mode. “It’s still the only place you can get a pint of ‘Real Ale’ on this planet” said Albert, paraphrasing Groucho Marx and slumping in the chair.
Nobody could be certain of what the ‘Real World’ was anymore, the more the experts looked into it, the more surreal it seemed to appear. These were exciting times of boundaries being broken, unexpected expectations, paradigms putting on their coats in readiness for new explanations.
Suddenly there was a huge rumble in the Real-World Pub, Albert’s ale sloshed out of its glass and the paintings jumped off the wall. “It happens every time that women throws the dice, the real world will never be the same again” he lamented.
“Come come, Albert” said the landlord “You kicked off the game, it has to take its course, win or lose”. Albert sighed, “Yes, I guess you’re right”. The Landlord re-started the pub lasers and poured another drink and Albert picked a violin off the wall and began to play. “I haven’t played since I was a lad, it’s as if I’m there again, and I was not as good a student as you’d expect!”
Paula sat on the floor watching him, the year was 1855, they were in his childhood town. “I pulled off the Pass code” she told him “I added a ‘Time- Rollback’ app to the atomic clock. I wanted you to be the first to experience it, that’s why I brought you here”. I have called the app ‘The Teleporter Auberge’ as that’s where I took the plunge, threw the dice, and followed my instincts!
Albert entangled her in a big hug - “The dice paid off for you – you went out on a limb and won!” “Yes, music has always been the key for me.” said Paula. “It was hearing the Beatles, all those years ago, or should I say forward, singing ‘You say Yes, I say No, you say stop and I say go, go, go’, it was that song - ‘Hello, Goodbye’ - that sparked it all off for me. It was hard then for a woman to work her way up in the sciences, but you know, there are only two possibilities, yes or no, and I said yes, ‘Go go go’!”

“The beauty of this app” continued Paula, “is that we can be in two places at once! Here in the past and in present simultaneously or even the future. You don’t have to leave your own time-zone. Great for research and foreshadowing future developments.” “Be careful what you do with time.” said Albert “incremental changes can have huge and lasting effects!” Paula threw the dice and suddenly they were back in the Real-World Pub. The landlord had prepared a celebration buffet and the guests had started to socialise. “It’s been a great day for innovation” said the landlord, standing before the crowd, but as they all raised their glasses, Paula screamed “It’s him!” “Who?” they shouted, “the author, he’s been watching us all the time, interfering!”.
Just as the author was about to edit their words and hone the plot, the characters all turned into waves and waved goodbye, leaving by all the wrong exits, causing the author some deep uncertainty! Storytelling wasn’t as easy as it used to be!

ARNOLD SHAKESPEARE

ARNOLD SHAKESPEARE was not a poet by any stretch of the imagination. He was the laziest bastard you ever came across. He dreamed the world into reality and found a sofa to lay on. He scrolled the internet like an insect looking for a way to get inside the window and dunked his metaphors in his beer. On a good day he read Zola and phoned his agent who was a big cheese in Gorgonzola. He had mice eating out of his hand and holes where his brains should be. His agent was illiterate but boy could he sell things and loved that Arnold didn't take himself seriously. The world was a novel where the characters ran around saying any random shit and occupying chapters they weren't meant to be in but Arnold only dipped into it to eat, sleep and have the odd sexual encounter. Life was a free-verse in an anthology of sonnets and he cut out the stress and played with his syllables. "You gotta do a book" said his agent, swaying hilter-kilter and spilling his wine over his wife's breasts. Arnold wasn't much fussed. Artistic categories were like coat hangers and he preferred just to throw his coat on the floor and books were warehouses where words got damp and merged into a paper mache of surreal sensuality. He wrote when the moon was banana shaped or when the sun held political summits that flamed an international crisis. Arnold, if he ever did anything, forged a new spontaneous digital writers path, scrawling his mish-mash in comment boxes, tax forms, forums and Facebook. The world of books and publishers and agents were the stuff of a fossilised capitalism where money played poker with industrialism. This was a new age where new paths were forged even if you had no idea what the idea was. History would tell you what path you were on after the event. Arnold was an explorer without much clue of what he was exploring. His name was Shakespeare and he could mess with language with the best of them. It wasn't until Astrid WordPress, critic and publisher of a world class conglomerate, walked in, that sense prevailed. Arnold stood frigid, stripped of his attitudes as he watched inanimate objects have erections without the requisite equipment. Astrid was a stunner but with the brain of an Atlantean god. She knew just how to handle Arnold Shakespeare. Much of it is secret but Arnold Shakespeare was elected Poet Laureate of Gorgonzola with his plays and stories and poems displayed and ringing out of huge solar panels strewn throughout the glassy domains of the developed world. Arnold was a comedy of errors all on his own and barred out of Stratford for misquoting his namesake but he had no need to look back. Arnold and Astrid became platonic friends and imagined sex with each other for many long years.. 

INKBLOT STREET

I was born on Inkblot Street, I had to read the signs to survive. They said I had the brain of a Parker pen and the personality of an august fly. I am my revelations, now there's nothing I can do. I wrote my way in and out of school and am certified in nonsense.
I am a self-taught psychologist and I pronounce myself sane. In a world of self-indulgent madness, it was me that split the atom when they said my personality was split. My inkblot formed a mushroom, I radiate calligraphy in the cloud.
I am the genius on Inkblot Street, I own my own well-known inkwells. My cars run on the nib action and insert their own ink cartridges at night.
This world is not what it seems, we are just symbols on a blank screen, we are alphabets lost in space. We are words and shapes and squiggles and we make an awful lot of noise.
They say we came here on a meteorite, through an ink-stained sky, partying on rum and black, we left our craters on the earth. We are living the hangover, proof of the lost and found, disorientated with distain and nausea with the midnight sweats.
You can read into me what you like, but you know, I know my own mind. I'm the original ink spill, the night sky is my very own work, the rest are merely copycats, conspiracies to fool! I am the fountain pen of all words, my inkblot's written in stone!

Yes, I was born on inkblot street - all my interpreters went mad!

PINTER TOWN

Absurd town, built on Pinteresque dialogue and Dada Cut-up, Photomontage, Readymade Assemblage office blocks and houses. A homage to offbeat literary and art movements. I look out the window, a raging agnostic rain, without prayer or poetry, imposes its wetness on a drystone Hominid world without umbrella.
I distract myself from a cold coffee complaining at the indignity of being placed inside a teacup. No amount of sugar will appease it. The art of protest is surprise, anything else, and the state will be prepared. Predictable, low brow, mundane. Protest is an art form —or should be — it embraces the absurd, the cubist surrealism of platonic Picasso-ism.
T.S. Elliot with his wastelands and preludes walks by with his literary accolades in the sawdust streets. A war built on high treason wages in Montgomery Street with trumpet missile launchers sending out explosive jazz riffs for the sake of the unified absurd state of this well imagined world.
The editorial lynch-mob of the tabloids, in their comic strip worlds, shuffle the truth in back street card games, missing the ace and queen of hearts. Their readers lost in the debt mountains of cobblestone consumerism.
I am all the money that has ever been created and refuse to be owned or exchanged. The world is run by snake charmers and bugle blowers — they shall not inherit the earth.
Here comes boxing Baudelaire — his decadent themes of sex, death, lesbianism, metamorphosis, depression, urban corruption, lost innocence and alcohol won him fame and controversy.
This world, this town is premised on soccer hooliganism, the championship of own goals, the net investment of a flying fuck, the penalty police of a punctured football.
I rise to the occasion, or so I imagine, in the machismo ballrooms of a patriarchal pleasure dome, awaiting the matriarchy.
Rain turns to snow; snow turns to slush and the town is framed in its canvass world. This is the art of the world turned upside down, inside out, it’s all available on Ticket Master, as seen on Twitter, as blocked and unfriended on Facebook.

A PACK OF CARDS

The day has been like a pack of playing cards, full of jackasses and a 52 card pick up and even the beer was on loan. Some days you're just an extra in your lover’s bedroom, you just hold her while he signs his name on the wall. It's better than TV and you don't need a licence. I'm no stunt man, you won't catch me making a scene. The wild wind is only interesting because it's wild - put it in a cage and it winds down.

Jealousy's a loser’s game, I go with the flow, and role with it, no one owns anyone, it's all a game of bluff. I took her up the ridge for a beer "How come you don't get jealous" she said "You don't try hard enough" I said. She laughed "I'll up my game" she replied. I poured a full pint over her head and rolled her on the lawn.

It was clear we weren't welcome, the landlord had us thrown in the cell for the night - the service was lousy, but the room was cheap. We paid our bail and left. Some people come to life for the education, for a good career, lots of money and a random shag. I came here by mistake; I had a lousy hand and took second best.

You know they educate you all wrong, I fucked up on English and they sentenced me to failure. They hadn't got the wit to realise what a man like me would do with failure. I don't waste opportunities, No Sir, failure is a coin and I flipped it and came up heads.

Martha was with another joker, but I just played my hand - nothing would make me jealous, I was ahead of the game. The world is made of putty, I just mould it to suit my needs. I never once expected the expected - life is never that simple. I loved Martha simply because she was free.

The only game in town is a pack of cards - that's all I came to say!

CATERPILLAR BRIDGE

Sundown, Saturday, we met on caterpillar bridge by some trick or treat of quantum spooky action. This fella was a double of myself and shared much of my genetic structure, but this was a different world and we had led different lives. We could have been the twins in ‘A Comedy of Errors’ but in the Off-Earth quadrant. How we came to meet up and what it was all about, even the author couldn’t say at this point! The author dunked a biscuit in his morning coffee and looked out of the window for inspiration. Finally, the resident twin spoke, “We meet at last; I’ve been tracking you for some time, we share some entangled particles”. I stood silent, looking in the river at a giant fish. “Oh, don’t mind the fish, they are vegetarian” I was glad about that! “I summoned you here for a reason” he said thumbing through a manuscript that looked hard to decipher. “And I think you should see what YOU are really about — none of us are alone, every one of us works for the GRID (that’s the universe to you) in various locations, without knowing it. The are many ‘Yous’. Think of it as a bank of interconnected computers worldwide on your planet, each sharing information but programmed for different tasks”. I was beginning to get the picture. This world here is programmed on the basis of ‘personification’, you’ll know the term from your poetry classes, whereby inanimate objects have human like qualities, except that here, inanimate objects are alive and active in the same way as humans.”. It was a lot to take in, and I was half expecting Alice to walk by chasing a white rabbit! “Everything you see, and touch is alive and so you have to show respect.”. I could see this would take some getting used and I tried to walk more softly across the caterpillar bridge. “It might seem that you are walking about in an imaginative poem but it’s not as farfetched as you’d imagine!”. I looked around at this strange world, the way I behaved towards things would have to change — it felt like I was back in school especially when he said “Nothing Is Solid & Everything Is Energy — you and I and all the things you see! There are no physical voids. It’s not apparent on Earth but here you can observe objects as energy”. “But how did I get here?” I asked, “You were already here and everywhere else that you are in the universe, simultaneously — it’s both a trick and a treat that you became aware of it today!”. I looked at the screen, my coffee was finished, and I suddenly realised I am the author and all of the characters I employ, all at once, despite great differences. We are more than just quantumly entangled! I put on my hat and took off my lantern and mask and walked into town, I’d had enough spooky action for one day!

 SALAMANDER

I asked the world if it was a flat bed beach of rolled cheddar cheese, vintage, buttery sweet, sharp and salty. The world was sandwiched between replying and not replying.
The world is still in its salad days, carefree and spinning like a top through dark matter. It's all about the cucumber.
I feel like rolled oats on the Salamander beach, amphibious, polyamorist and honeyed in a hot sun stoneware breakfast bowl.
The world had nothing to say, no mouth to say it with, no thoughts to think it with, no ears to listen with - how am I supposed to communicate with it.
I guess I imagined the world, or perhaps this concept was just a lie spread like buttery cheese in the table top tabloids, floating in Black pepper.
Are we only what we've read, what we've been told - I like to make my own mind up.
The world is a milk butter toffee sweet that sticks to your shoes when walking on flat bed cheddar cheese. It dresses like a realist but is psychedelic beneath its rags. It speaks in raindrops and thunder and is snowed under with the human race.
I asked the world for confirmation and it smiled like a cheese sandwich. At the mention of marmite it ran a mile and jumped in the coleslaw sea with its seaweed underwear and octopus intelligence.
I asked if poetry ignores most people, it said I should eat more cheese and fall in love three times a day. Most people ignore poetry because it can't be eaten, or made love to or declines to add shareholder value to anything at all. The world and poetry are the same - a flat bed beach made of cheddar cheese with no thoughts of itself.

This is not poetry - just my weird looking time sheet. Poets should go on strike! 

LEAHA

Where does the story begin, do stories have a beginning or have they always existed - or do we just uncover and discover them, or are they illusions, mirages on the deserts of life.

We start in the middle, Leaha is toying with her lovers, she is playful and taunting, it seems she's playing a game, a game without rules or direction, it's hard to see, the light is dim and there are shadows on the wall.

Someone is writing poetry, there are pinned metaphors on symbolic floors - she's sure no one will understand, poets live in meta-reality, self referential and barricade themselves in with soft allusions.

We sit in the storytelling café where stories tell themselves, and in their own time and their own way. Abandon all expectation is the only rule they embrace - if you find structure - it's never deliberate.

There's rain coming down at obtuse angles, it's mathematical, algebraic, in 5/4 time, Leaha watches her lovers, now at pyramidical angles to each other and gasping.

Time is on a lunch break, it visits the local streets, the meat hook butchers, the howling lying paper shop, the Aquarian astrology laboratory, the alternative breadcrumb shop, the Coffee for Kissing Lovers stop off, the beer in an eggcup bar. Time will visit all of these and comeback drunk and wasted and ready to play the game.

Someone thought they could see the story on Thursday, but the lovers laughed and pull the sheets at oblique angles. It didn't matter, we just like the idea that there might be a story running parallel in the background - but who really cares.

No one knew if the story had a beginning - but they wanted to know where the lovers came from, what made them tick, who were they and why did the story chose them. I'm sorry, there is no information on that, the research went nowhere - sometimes things just are.

People are afraid to love, sometimes it's a trap, feelings can be fleeting, needs can be multiple, for others it's a safe haven, a necessity, some want more choices for love, different timescales, different rules or none rules. Others want no change. It's just the way it is, love is just like a story - it can be structured or free. All that's required is that we are good to each other.

Love is not like a war - no one has to win or lose - it's just what helps us get through and makes us feel that we count, love waves no flags for some economically bankrupt country, employs no missiles to prove it's existence on this planet - it's there, just like a story, peeping between the narrative of an everyday scenario.

Leaha disbanded her lovers - she'd had enough for the day, the lovers thanked her for her close attention and time climbed back inside the clock.