Summer 1987 in the sticks
Pulled the blanket from my Ford Cortina
And lay quiet.

Nothing

But breeze and birdsong
And crickets
We gathered up at dusk

Had dinner late
You had to go
I remember

I remember

Strung out for a couple of days
On Ketamine
And vodka

Can’t sleep
Pull up the chair
To an open window

4:17 pm
A shaking hand flicks
Ash from the window to a blue sky

And panic strikes
Like a parents hand
Across your face

Can’t bear this room
The feeling is mutual
So I walk

Past the hedgerow, the ditch
Find a spot in the long grass
I’m not sure when they found me

But it was summer then
And it’s autumn now
Your party’s were the best

Weren’t they?

Mulberry Street

It was a rainy night in Manhattan on the night of the third. The neon lights that headed pizzerias and clam houses reflected there electric blues and whites back onto the puddled streets of Little Italy. The war of 73’ was about to get underway.
Crazy Joe had done a stiff eight year stint in Attica for racketeering and a weapons charge. He left the prison gates in ’72 in a pinstripe suit and a trilby, later on the boss looked up from his meatballs to see Joey, hat tipped to one side, ‘I have returned and now I want what’s mine’. He renounced gun slinging for about a year saying nobody earns a nickel in a street war. But the intensity of the Brooklyn streets got too much for him. He left his tenement building in a long coat and hat and strolled into the clubhouse of his lifelong deadly foe, shot the bartender in the foot, emptied the till, took off his hat in his fingertip and thumb and winked ‘Tell ‘em it was Crazy Joe’. After this they tried to strangle his brother after they lured him to a club in Harlem but a patrol officer disturbed them and saved his life. When the news filtered through to Joey about his brother he was out the door before the messenger could finish speaking, in a big coat with a Tommy gun and a 44 magnum. They never did pin the murder of those three Colombo soldiers to anybody, but I was looking after my mother when she took ill that same night, I’d just shut the door behind me and was about to walk to the car, the streets were empty. Then out of nowhere three shots rang out and a woman screamed and I couldn’t find the car key on the ring for scrambling quick enough. Just as I’d found the right key all went silent except for the slow tapping of Italian leather brogues getting louder. I looked up to see Crazy Joe, those broad shoulders like a bulls, walking coolly on his way back to Brooklyn. Joey would later get shot to death outside Umberto’s clam house in the war that followed, but I’ll never forget him as he walked through the rain and tipped his hat at me as the sirens grew louder in the background.

(Drawing by Tony Blythe)

Skiddaw, April.

Interfaced pyramids sprinkled heavy with breadcrumb scree. Look down and the earth is slow. I and I. De Botton said wherever you go; you always take yourself with you. This ok as I forgive you. Stop running. Halfway descending I find the buzzard on a level playing field. Below my nose he scythes through oxygen. A birds eye view of a birds eye view. But I can’t live here I can only come here, and so we march on, myself and I.
Like tadpoles
Riding the great ridge
of a whales back
before it shrugs us off
and we carry on living
further down.
In others words,
yes, it’s a great photo
you took
while I was pissing
behind a rock.

The Living Room

He thought about the time he walked along a pebble beach in winter. Finding and then holding aloft the salt driftwood, tethered by the rapture of a thousand sea waves there was something trustworthy in its bitter texture. The grain roughed by the inaugural transition of flotsam from sea storm to shore and semi-dry land. He thought about the old man who, sitting at the harbour where he watched the ghost of his younger self go out to sea, told him about the great mystery of wood. Which was, he remembered, not that it burned, but that it floated. In this world we have created, forged through individuals and communities, what kind of a man is a man who relates only to journeyed wood. He sits now in the living room in a window of time where the children and his wife are out. Of course the whirlpool of memory and desire and loss are drawn up carefully in this time; for a good person will only let it drown the individual, leaving those who really matter safe and sound on dry land. Only minutes now till the key rattles in the lock and the pitter- patter of feet save him from the living room.

It normally starts

With a pair of eyes
across a table
or somebody’s shy
friend
at a party

and then ends like this

no note
no epic drama
or slammed doors
just me
on the road