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 fueled 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.