Stars of the Colour blue

I met a shooting star in the smoky halls of soaking red-hot saloon.

She said rather burn bright for just one night than live a thousand in the dark.

Said I this place is full of girls just like you, lying in dark alleyways bleeding from their hearts.

All they see are the bricks of their broken homes and the rusted steel of cell block bars.

This life ain’t shit but a series of fucks until you have none left to give.

And she shuffled the deck and I cut the cards and poured us another shot of rye.

She threw that bitch to the back of her throat and said, “Fuck you man watch me scorch the sky.”    

The Adventures of Tina and Troy

 This is Tina. On the 9th of December we have been married for 10 years. Tina rages against the dying of the light; this is my favourite thing about her, she has the courage of an exceptionally courageous tiger.

This is mostly why we've been on so many adventures and probably why having been accidentally kidnapped by Austrian drunkards in Barcelona is a genuine excuse for being late to your child's Christening that one time.

She wasn't fazed by the terrifyingly ramshackle crocodile farm we went to in Malawi, the Goat sitting next to her on the bus we caught in Zambia or playing scrabble in that bar in Cyprus definitely a hang out for mercenaries, hired killers and gun runners all of whom were terrible cheats.

But the most courageous thing she ever did was say yes to marrying me especially after she got to know me first. I love Tina and it's safe to say that over the years we have been in love.

Its a rare thing to find someone who likes you and endeavours to make you a better person by becoming a better person themselves and even rarer who accepts the things about you that will never change.

Ten years is not a lot of time and adventures are not just good times and delicious cocktails there is always work to be done difficult work, the type of work that takes the courage to commit to your decisions good or bad.

And with Tina I never have to doubt, even in a hundred years and after a thousand drunk Austrian kidnappings, a day will come when she stops loving me because its too difficult and this gives me courage to do the same.  

Love's blade

I hurt myself today, stuck a needle under my skin.

There is an empty bed, where my heart used to be, with crushed linen and a glass with a lipstick edge and the ash of a smoked cigarette on the side table.

She paints the streets with her dreams now I’m no longer in them. With dark blues and reds and I couldn’t stop her because it would be too unkind to take her away from herself and make her ordinary.

The rain fell on my face today, cut me deeper than a blade. I felt my heart exposed, my flesh just melt away, as I watched her move further into the night and brighter in all her brilliance.

There is no one else to blame because in my mind I know she’s too beautiful to inspire such futility.

Rocket Ship Shoes

Some saw a dirty piece of paper. I saw a story unwritten.

A story of a girl with rocket ships on her feet and her eyes full of deep blue sky. I saw a boy, who gave her rocket fuel, grow like a tree rooted in her soul. I saw the love they shared the days they chased and the cold hard nights they spent in each other’s arms. 

It was the note he passed her behind the teachers back and the poem he wrote that made her laugh and cringe at the same time.

 

The slip he earned when he passed his licence, she was there to celebrate and they drove like maniacs till the tarmac burned bright in those endless summers.

The acceptance letter that meant they could go to the same collage and the diplomas they got when they left.

A page from the book they signed when they made the vows in front of friends and family.

It was the napkin she cried into that day her rockets crashed. The day she found out love was a rusty blade in a dark alley all fucked up on drugs waiting to carve out her man’s heart for seemingly no reason at all.

The paper-work at the mortuary, the bill from the funeral parlour, the positive pregnancy test that would have otherwise made her happy, the court ordered eviction notice.

The photo she showed their daughter of a father who died in a blood red alley.

It was there at the bottom of her bag; the invoice for the plastic ring he bought when he fell on his knees to beg for her hand in the rain, with flowers he stole from the reception of a nearby hotel because she told him she needed more so he became more.

And she cried and crushed it close to her heart till she could no longer hold on because even though he’d been there her whole life and even though no one else could ever love her like that, she had to let go.       

Concrete

This is what happens to our concrete roses. After the lights are out and the stage furniture is pushed aside ready for the next act.

When the bulldozers are done with the broken petal dreams he dared to show us. When the gun smoke clears and the unashamed fade into the shadows.

We lament.

Because our hearts are broken but deep down we know this place is of steel and bone and sharp edges, a flower could have never survived not even one that pushed its way through the cracks in the street.

This is what happens when the young perish at the hands of heartless men, our memories remain but the dream dies forever.         

The Running of the Fools

One day Dave started running. He began in his home town and before he knew it he’d covered the whole county, he crossed boarders and ran up mountains and over lakes and streams, through forests and deserts and beyond the oceans.

He saw many beautiful things, all that nature and man had to offer, so much culture and art and great feats of engineering and he marvelled at the strength and complexity of the human spirit.

Eventually it occurred to him; he never quite knew why he was running. So he began to search the reason within himself. At the point of his deepest contemplation he realised that he was not alone.

There were others such as himself, thousands, so many that often he was being carried along by the crowd. These were the best and the brightest, educators and doctors, great men of religion and science, politicians, industrialists and entrepreneurs, all running in the same direction.

So he called out loud to them and asked; what are we running from?

‘Terrorism,’ screamed one.

‘Religious persecution,’ came another.

‘Disease,’ said a third.

‘Racism,’ cried some.

‘Sexism,’ another group.

‘Climate change,’

As such a great cacophony of fear filled the air, and arguments broke out on who’s was worse, each person producing stats and facts that hurt Dave’s brain.

And when all had had their say Dave realised something; it was evident they were all correct, they all made valid points, but the things they were talking about could not be outdone in a race, no matter how fast they ran these things would always be there in close pursuit.

Eventually it came to him, they were running from the people these atrocious things affected most. The poor and the afflicted. People whose crops had failed because of drought or floods, refugees from wars that had lost their homes, victims of persecution from some of the very people he was running with.

In despair he began question himself, Why him? Why could he run? Is it because he had top of the line sneakers, a fancy watch and a phone that told him where to go? 

There were no answers.

Running became fatiguing, his feet began to blister, sweat burnt his eyes and the realisation weighed heavily on him threatening to crush his soul. 

All he had to do was stop, turn around and face his own humanity, but instead he kept on running and so did they all.  

Strobe Light Hand Signals

I saw her dance, hands over her head; she never looked more of an angel. We’d all agreed to meet here at this run down warehouse at the edge of town because there was nowhere else to be.

The DJ turned the table like a pro but he was just some kid who’d spent to much time growing up alone while his parents threw money at him to compensate.

She swayed, such as a charmed snake, to the music and my heart thumped against my chest. So I asked to own one of those dances and she said sure, her friend had given the night up because someone else was wearing the same apparels and she didn’t want to be alone.

We danced more than once and drank cheap cider in the cigarette smoke cause back then everyone smoked and no one gave a shit.

The sun came up on a holy day before we’d had a chance, so I stole her to a quiet place and read poetry on her skin, she laughed, I knew then the magic had done its work.

Later that day our souls did meet in the middle of the town and with one effervescent kiss it was as if there was no one else around. 

The Brexit Vote

After the shock has dissipated people will realise these things:

There is no real advantage to leaving Europe, sovereignty in a connected world is only a word and that even the democracy we claim to live by is deeply flawed.

My vision for the future is one where people don't walk around with their hands in their pockets.

One of great realisation, that money and the lines on a map are simply lies told to us to hold us back and give us someone else to blame for the world’s problems, to make us feel better about the little we have.

It’s a world where we reach out to each other because we see each other not as citizens of divided countries but as a Human nation.

And why should we not be so ambitious? After all we tamed the oceans and the skies and even put a man on the moon. Yet we fail to conquer the beast inside of us all, the fear someone else will take what is ours.

And in its purest form this is what we see now by voting to leave Europe. The mistaken belief that you are special or privileged simply because of the happy accident that is the geographical area in which you were born.

This is a step back from a path that could deliver true glory for our species, a failure that our generation is now responsible for and that history will remember us by.

My hope is for a future where people reach out to each other, out of Love and compassion and live lives that are outwardly focused, on that day we will call ourselves civilised.

Then the Wild Cherries

I saw her reflection on a glass table, as I cut white stripes with a razor sharp credit card. She was a falling petal making way for the wild cherries and she moved among the young and the beautiful like she belonged.  

I handed her the rolled up ten I got on the island and said my name so she wouldn’t forget. She looked at me and I was rebuilt from the root. And when she spoke it felt good to be a man because I was her man.

She said she wanted good times and bad mistakes, I said she came to the right party.

In the strange mist of dancing smokers we got high. A dreamer’s high fuelled by drugs and music and I imagined we were in Love, even wished it would never end. But I was wishing on a falling petal and she would hit the ground and break both our reckless souls with her momentary brilliance.       

Spring

It wasn't the smoothest ride but they were the happiest they’d ever been. 

The type of happy that’s tangible, real, a pronounced state of being. 

The tires crackled under the bright sunlight and the engine hummed along the coast. 

Spring had sprung with the undeniable beauty of rebirth. 

They had found love, the type of love that lasted a lifetime, here in this blossoming place and they would stop only to make love in the sand like it was their very first time.

Here and now nothing mattered; the dead-end jobs, the disappointments, the pain, the insecurities, drifted away in this place. They were free.   

There’s a pool where I grew up

There’s a pool where I grew up. No one knows how deep it is, the waters are so black you can’t see the bottom and the mud is so thick anything lost in it would never be found.

The kids there live in this pool their feet sinking in the mud, and they laugh and joke because they’re together and play silly games. But the mud, it keeps them in there, holding them down, and everything is in the mud. The neglecting parents, the poor education, the angry policemen, the corrupt officials, drugs, alcohol, promises, the potential employer who has no faith in them because they grew up in this mud. They’re all there holding them down, part of the mire.

And the kids they can see the good things all around them, they can see the fields of wildflowers that offer freedom, they look to the stars, try as they may they can never reach them.

Somehow this is their fault; this is their choice to be here, but they were born in this mud, they were born in this skin, they were born in this dark water.

And what do you think happens when one of these kids wades ashore, to join the civilised. There is no pat on the back, no “Well done,” because he’s still covered in mud, if anything “they” would do all in their power to push him back into those waters and hope he disappears never to be seen again.

There is a pool where I grew up and there are thousands of us yet still those are the loneliest waters you’ll ever find.   

Twenty very good reasons not to regret missing out on a ski trip.

Ski season has come to a close and the office adventure types are water-cooler-bragging about the Alps for another year. Tails of  how fresh the air is on top of Mount Smug, how the splendid views could make your eyes bleed and how exhilarating charging along fresh powdered slopes is if you’d only be richer, smarter and better looking enough to give it a try.

Of course the reality of the situation is quite different here are a few very good reasons why you should never regret missing out on a ski trip:

1)      Expensive and impractical equipment: Just the socks can set you back more than £15 and offsetting the cost your skis by saving on your daily commute is not an option.

2)      Travel and snow don’t mix: Anyone who’s spent a night on an airport floor will agree.

3)      Airport security: Somewhat especially disagreeable in winter, bound to be suspicious of your huge backpack, questionable footwear and excessive underwear.

4)      Budget airline luggage limits: Superbly inadequate for the requirements of a week below freezing.  

5)      Overbooked Hotels: Cranky staff, bad breakfast buffets and rooms that smell like heat rub, Chlamydia and shame, masquerading as pine freshness.

6)      Queues: They start at the airport and wind their way up the mountain, even the ski lift is just another queue, might as well be waiting in line for a bus in Bermondsey at fraction of the cost and effort.

7)      Ski lifts: Fearsome contraptions used for dangling unfortunates over frozen lakes to extract confessions of witchcraft in the middle-ages adapted for use in the modern era. Every now and then the operators hit the stop button and take bets on who will throw up first as you sway haplessly in the wind.

8)      Snow boots: The ridiculous, mind boggling, blister inducing footwear, hatefully designed specifically to take an agonising toll on morale.

9)      Ski school: No treat if you hated school first time around. Plus there is a real danger of losing your girl to the long haired, spandex wearing instructor possibly named Sven while flailing about like Gene Kelly on ecstasy in a pathetic attempt to remain up right.

10)  Sparkling Views: Generally shrouded in a thick mist and about three tones of falling snow.

11)   The decent: One wrong turn and you’re careering, face first, down a black run. An error likely to end abruptly, painfully and inside a tree, leaving you to rue the day your parents failed in the proper and sensible use of a prophylactic.

12)   True humiliation: There is no enjoyment in failing at something every six-year-old German can do.

13)   Germans like skiing.

14)   A chance of hospitalisation: Where the only people who speak the same language as you are the ones directly responsible for putting you there in the first place. Hopefully you have the same travel insurance as Beth Tweddle… What? Too soon?

15)   Whiskey based cocktails: Don’t taste the same in sub-zero temperatures and Peach schnapps is for teenaged girls and homeless people.

16)   Sub-zero temperatures.

17)  Avalanches: Nature’s terrorist attack, you’re always just one girlie scream away for a grizzly end.

18)  Nothing sexy about a ski holiday: A combination of huge underwear, shrinking body parts and extensive bruising ultimately sends the wrong signals.

19)   Fondue: Overrated, eat melted cheese for three days in a row and it becomes abundantly incandescent why the people who invented it also came up with the concept of commercially viable assisted suicide. Nothing good can come of Cheese, lighter fluid and third degree burns.

20)  Coach travel: On some of the most dangerous roads known to man covered in ice and snow. Why not blind fold the driver while you’re at it.  

The Good Man

The best kiss he ever had was a punch to the face, because mama never loved him and papa didn’t care and Jesus Christ came and went and he was still too much of a sinner.

What he saw on the streets were bankers mugging old ladies and Preachers doing the same but in the name of made up gods, Politicians spreading fear as if it were peace and doctors handing out useless drugs.

It was easy to see why he had to be, in all the deception, angry and discontent he’d seen the other end of a nightstick, Polar bears were melting, Pandas wouldn’t fuck and dolphins drowned in pools of human waste.

So he went to war and lost every battle with out so much as a shot. The amorphous “They” that make it happen buried him in red tape and garbled nonsense slandered between the printed sheets. It was then the man found the death of principles and morality just a distant concept.

There was no freedom, no love, no greater power fighting for good, just the thinly plastered follies of good men and bad gods.

The insignificance of Carl Beaumont

It was a day of such insignificance it could have been any other when Carl Beaumont, a magazine editor of some repute, decided to take his own life.

He started with a healthy breakfast before dropping off his daughter at school, picking up his dry cleaning, a bottle of his favourite scotch and returning to his apartment in a sensibly affluent area of a city of such insignificance it could have been any other.

The revolver was clean but he meticulously wiped and oiled it down, perhaps to pass the time, while sipping a last glass of whisky. He checked and printed a copy of his Will and signed up to donate his organs on-line, pleasantly surprised to find the human body extensively recyclable.

Carl filled the bathtub with cold water and added a bag of ice to bring the temperature down, in this way he hoped to slow decomposition until his corpse was discovered. 

He slipped in wincing as the frost bit, “as cold as the grave,” he thought and laughed out loud.

The barrel of the gun tasted like fish oil between his teeth. When did he resign himself to such an existence? He’d wasted time on words no one would remember, a product of useless facts and pretty pictures that would have contributed more as the tree cut down to make the paper it was printed on.  

His legacy a footnote on a masthead no one ever read, dozens would line up to take his place, a significant number possibly named Carl. They would cut and paste him and no one would be the alarmed.

This was aggravating, the relentless toil of never ending labour always falling short of true satisfaction, and a sense of slow decent into bottomless lunacy in the few moments of free time he hoped to savour. Anger consumed his energies, gutted his passions and left him an empty husk. Anger is laborious.

And Carl was tired; tired of ex-wives and settlements, paying mortgages to thieving bankers, of breathing in exhaust fumes, watching the poles melt, of children caring more for their phones than parents, and waiting desperately for war to bring peace.

He was tired of the poor and hungry, of the rich and greedy, terrorist killings, drones and bombings, of moral and ethical ambiguity, not knowing who to believe in, what to believe in, and of questioning the very fabric of right thinking society.      

But most of all this man was tired of failing to change the hellish progression of humanity while watching his destiny driven by elements he could never begin to regulate.

Yes most of all he was tired of living a life of such insignificance it could have been any other.

All his life’s work, his achievements, ambitions and dreams were but a single twinkle in the eye of a horse beaten half to death for working too hard, caring too much and generally being a credit to its kind.

He envied the dead; at least they gave their atoms back to the universe to be reconfigured into something useful.  “Rather a short life than a pointless one,” thought Carl Beaumont and pulled the trigger.          

November Girl

If her feet touched the ground she was still floating.

Her black hair battering the edges of her sculpted face, dark waves against marble in the wind.

I said hello, she told me she was trying to stop smoking and that green was her favourite colour.  

She asked me who I was and I said I would be her flower; I would be her sunshine and her happiness; I was no one until I saw her.

I told her I met an angel and she laughed, I smiled, found joy in her happiness.

I told her the streets were hard and she said she was cold so I gave her myself to keep warm but she refused to return the favour.

The sadness it brought me went unchallenged, unresolved. And on clear November nights I howl at the moon because I see her face and star-lit clips in her liquid black hair and I feel the cold she left me in.