The Girl of Silver Green

Bitten nails brush the hair from her face.

He can’t stop staring at her eyes, they dip at the end like she’s about to fall asleep and dream in silver green. 

So he smiles at her and she smiles back.

A reach through the gap between the isle of the place where people die young but still live long lives.

He tells her his name and she makes poetry with it. Poetry for them to live by.

And he teaches her how to fall in love.

How to dream fiercely.

It's in the language. Scream at the trees just to watch the leaves fall.

Toned and Summer Kissed

Skies was 9 hours away by train, but it was chance to wake up somewhere else and be a different person. Loy had my back those days when we were barely men as we watched the emptiness of the dry savanna roll by from the carriage window. We drank bad coffee to help recover from the cheap booze up in the diner cabin that ended just before dawn.

Mostly we hung out with a group of locals who didn’t do much, but they were good guys, gave us a place to stay and showed us around. That's how I met her.

They pretended to know her to get a laugh when she rejected me. It was on a bus back to Montrose one afternoon. She was impressed with my confidence and we talked almost all the way; oblivious to their intentions. 

I invited her to a party we’d planned and she turned up with a friend, by the end of the week we were hand-in-hand staring hopelessly in the depths of each other, intoxicated, toned and kissed by the summer.

Time has a way of drawing the curtain behind you; Loy and I went back home to become the people we are and I remember the skins we inhabited. The details of the good times and the acceptance we felt. But I can never remember her face.

Time has a way of making the past into stories we tell to the strangers we used to dream of becoming and its mists close in on the people we once were so we can never go back.

To Live Well

To those who would die as all must do, fear not the interminable void.

Live with thrust and parry. Seek the unwritten roads in lands with languages you don’t understand.
Dangle from the sides of mountains, welcome uncharted terrain and brace against the storms of well earned mistakes.

Find love, make love and be loved Because every rainbow ends in the same place: a coldly lit room surrounded by those held dearest lying that you will definitely make it, or the welcome steel of a violent and abrupt release.

London Skate Project

Morgan Tsvangirai: a tribute

Dear Zimbabweans

Tomorrow a man will wake up, eat his first meal of the day, kiss his wife and drive to the cemetery where he is employed as a grave digger.

At no point will he understand the importance of his work, for tomorrow he digs a grave for man of character.

And the mud on the gravediggers hands will be history, the history of a Zimbabwean son who dared to stand up against tyranny, who suffered the indignities of prison and torture for what he believed.

Many will say he failed in his futile pursuits but more will talk of his dedication and unrelenting labours towards the cause.

His vision a bright new Zimbabwe cut short all too soon.

That grave will be for Morgan Tsvangirai, a leader and a friend of the Zimbabwean people.

May his vision endure now that his body cannot.

Wasted Petals

She was there in the debris of what could have been. A moth on fire on the back of her

jacket, smoky eyes peering over the fur collar to dazzle with those cherry pop lips against

sun tinted skin and legs in cut-offs like sabres.

I watched her jukebox from one empty glass to the next but she never remembered my

name no matter how loud I said it.

The youth we shared, back then, was a currency all too quickly wasted on bad drugs and

worse people. She couldn’t help herself.

There were roses in the gutter, too many like her, and tulips on the side of young

tombstones. I knew the beauty would take her, so I watched and grew petals while

I waited.    

Glitter Blue Lipstick

An understanding came over him in the smoky twilight; here in this slug motel on edge of town. In this place of drugs, booze and heedless sexual encounters he sat at the edge of the bed, hands in hair contemplating a great truth.

Two paths lay before him; one to happiness the other to Love. Because they could never be the same, not when Love could be so dangerous and could inspire such lunacy. 

Not when Love could be the red dress lying on stained carpet next to a broken martini glass marked with last night’s glitter blue lipstick.

That type of love took its chances, burnt brightest and died young, hurt you in the most satisfying ways and walked away with what little dignity you had left.

And this is where she found him from beneath the fallen sheets of their reckless bed. Wrapping her arms around his naked torso she placed her head on his back to listen to him breath and ease what troubles he’d found.

This was the answer he was looking for, so he chose love, the path more treacherous, but the only one worth dying on.

The House of Beautiful Things

There would be no water, not even in a house built on such deep foundations. So she walked away and bred her light on new sands. And like all great adventurers the sadness she felt was soon eclipsed by the wonders she encountered.

Trees grew in once brutal soil, here she found comfort, joy, freedom, the freedom to find the lost person she could barely remember trapped in that house of such deep foundations.

Here spirits of wild beings and other broken souls floated gently on warm currents of ethereal tones and she embraced them and slow danced to their music.

Before long she was singing too, about a reckless man who had no right to hold her heart in his rough hands and the front door she slammed in his face.

He only told her she was beautiful when he made her cry and she grew weary of being beautiful.

How To Fall

Let’s talk about love, said her that December they spent on the Island. He understood immediately and wanted to reply;
the human heart has the capacity to love millions, in a universe of infinite possibilities and outcomes there can be no such thing as just one perfect soulmate.

Suddenly he saw in her eyes something many thought impossible. It was as if they never left that place where they first met; dancing to the slow music, barefoot on the silver sands of the moon lit bay.

He realised from the first moment he saw her face and she smiled at him he had fallen, and loved her since. 

In that moment he needed to say I love you and I will always love you because that was the only truth to ever matter but he saw in her eyes she already knew. 

The next day they found

We all knew the extent of Walter’s issue. He drank too much on his own, never had a bottle he couldn’t empty or bother to share.

It made him weak and this was not the type of neighbourhood to show weakness in. Not back then, now they got those fancy coffee shops and apartments no one can afford, back then packs ran the street, Wolves of men looking for breakable things.

He drove a brown Toyota pickup truck everywhere, crashed it more than once. It had a dent on the left bumper, one of the fenders was almost obliterated and he had this long rusted gash on the other side where he hit a gate post and kept going. That thing was as battered as him.

He passed out in it one time, in front of my house on Jamaica avenue, I took the twenty from his wallet and hit him in the head with it...because fuck him he was an asshole too that's why. He was so drunk he never even flinched.

A week later my cousin tried to sell me Walt’s tape deck radio. I told him I didn’t want it cause he left the bracket behind and it wouldn’t work, he sold it to some guy for parts.

He didn't know this; Walter, he was always looking for the dark bus out of here, the one to the next place that runs on the hope for something better. And when he finally caught it, it was from multiple organ failure most likely caused by tainted booze. I know where he got it from too.

There was a still up in the township next to our neighbourhood selling home-brew by the litre but you had to bring your own Jug. And the guy selling it would soon as take your shoes as your cash for payment. It was cheap but it got you fucked up.

Walter parked up by the rail tracks and sat down on a nearby storm drain to watch the sunset while he drank. I guess he just blacked out, slipped away.

The Climb

When there is nothing left to say that hasn't already been spoken.
When there is no vista that hasn't already been shown.
No words than the thousand already written.
Nor steps than the two thousand already taken.
The end has arrived
and it will be beautiful.

How The Street Found Us

We all used to smoke, the kids don’t know that. It made us feel like cowboys and we listened to the Rolling Stones when they were cool. 

Back then we were drinking too much cheap brandy, burning weed in tight rolls and wearing too many colours, but life was short and you only ran once.

And no one wrote stories about sober old men, no, our heroes lived short flights through burning crimson skies and died in lead thunderstorms.

Our mamas would call our names but we’d get as much of the streetlights as we could before we had to eat.

And the laughter it carried our souls into the African setting sun through the dust and the smoke of every hard day. Back then we counted these moments like currency and paid for every second of our short lives.

   

The Cold Distant Hope

The poet on the balcony puts the freshly lit cigarette into his mouth and drags deeply. On days like this he begs for cancer.

He remembers a young man with hope on his lily, white-washed brain, he would be one of the free, those who take on the world and win. But now look at this, living in the flat where he was born, with a failed marriage and kids who don’t even call.

He knows better now. He’s in the greater percentage of unfortunates for whom life is just the misery between getting smacked in the arse by a doctor and dying surrounded by strangers you once called family.  Fuck it he could improve the situation right now by just climbing over this rail. 

He never does, like most he prefers to die slow, so he goes back to get his fill of shitty TV, food from plastic containers, and discounted booze. And the ass-hole on the screen makes a joke and the poet laughs cause that’s what’s expected and he laughs until he cries because the whole world is fucking empty.  

The Beast That Was

We didn’t let him in but he was amidst us before the whiskey lost its bright red glow.

The type of man that saw the inside of a leather room and wrote stories on his skin.

He order venom, the bartender obliged, and paid with silver coin.

We talked like strangers until the bottle got our tongues then the beasts came out.   

He was here to take his cut of the sweet hell we found in the distance.

Gold dust and honey that melted on the naked bodies of the iniquitous.

No one was about to hand it over not without their last breathes

And when the smoke cleared

Amongst the broken glass and sunlit bullet holed corpses

The stranger made away with what we cared for most. 

A Short Story About a Girl on a Train

In a train without destination, on a day such as any, I saw her. A calm centre of swirling rush hour madness; she clung to her man, illuminated by the buzzing florescent lights.

I caught a glimpse in her eyes of something truly remarkable. It had set sail across oceans and reached out to the heavens and it came to me; men had died for this, thousands would go their whole lives without even coming close.

The train rolled through the dark city that couldn’t give a fuck and never knew the thing to save it was in her eyes, because she was in Love. The type of love that broke down, opened you up and spread like rivers of colour.

And the hearts she touched would forever be changed on that day, because they shared her joy. A joy looked upon by the envy of angels.

Living on Sandy Soil

She left the home she abode, longer than her memory, And crossed the bridges burnt by others to get to the place she needed. There she found great hardships and difficulties to overcome. There she planted her home in sandy soil And carved a life from the tree that grew. It was there she found the peace and joy she once thought only others knew.

Of The Colourless Dreams We Shared

We found hell in a beautiful place.Where the sun shines through sparkling dust. 

It made him pull the teeth from his face, I understood; that’s where the need grows and the spider lives.

As long as there was gold to be poured into our brains, setting pleasure alight in every nerve ending we owned, a million mad soldiers could march up our spines.

In the crystal darkness of a one roomed flat we lost our way searching for the first time the juju gave us colourless daydreams.

We lay in that cold wet place of such hazy agony and I knew he wouldn’t make it. I put my head on his chest to listen for his heart to stop beating and howled for his lost soul.  

I have a message for you

We as a generation will be judged by future generations, its up to us what history will say.

There is a potential for greatness but if we don't fulfill that potential we will be know as the generation who played Pokemon for two weeks one summer.

Worse yet we are letting down our children and yes every child is our child as species.

You may be religious or Atheist, rich or poor, you may be Jedi; our differences make no difference in the face of one fundamental truth.

You may or may not believe in climate change or equality for all, but You must believe in the future.

You must believe that we as a generation have a responsibility to leave this World a better place than we found it.

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.