Rapid Response

The sight of leaves piled up inside the kitchen door They’re a thing, I suppose, possibly something you Could hang some recollection off but If you’re of a slightly different cast of mind today You’d say they’re leaves.   Lots of them, a Fucking nuisance, to be frank, but you’ve Got to keep the door open, always, not To make some trite point but because The fans don’t work if you don’t That’s how extractors work, they Pull air in, up, and though, and out And if you shut the door the air Well, I don’t rightly now, gets sucked out of the room, maybe, all the words you mutter to yourself as you step from stove to bench to fridge, pulled up and out into the sky, which is dark, but not because there’ s any point to any of this. It’s dark because it’s November And it’s nine in the evening and Here you are, searing off another Steak, someone else’s evening as The air is sucked through the door And up, ...

Elsewhere, hard to say where. A last couple of words, hurried, murmured, easily lost to quick winds. Not the bravura goodbye, the statement, the arms thrown wide. More a brief, tight moment, a closed world, two people in it for a fraction of a moment Into what. She’s dissolved into the distance, part of the flex of the crowd in a matter of moments and he feels old phrases coming back to him, just part remembered parts. He once said something to her about how it was only a matter of time. The Universe would do something something something. He can’t remember the rest. Probably something trite. It was always something trite. It had dawned on him as he aged that he wasn’t an original thinker. He’d even said, startled “you haven’t changed” You haven’t changed? YOU HAVEN’T CHANGED? A dry mouth. Disbelief at the hackneyed phrase, but it’s always the truisms that come back to you in the pinch. Like “in the pinch”. Amazing. She’d once said that someone had said to her “there’s...

Drizzle. A depressingly English way to start a story. The intermittent drip of water onto the corrugated plastic roof of a conservatory which should have been fixed properly when you had the money and is now, like so much else, a sequence of short term repairs, which would be a reasonable title for an autobiography but probably not a terribly good one. Autobiographies need either puns or inspiring one word titles. Inspiring abstract nouns. If your autobiography starts with an apology then you’re already on the back foot. Or, at the very least, you’ve planted the idea in your reader’s mind that you are, somehow, a loser. No-one really gets self-deprecation any more. It used to be charming, didn’t it? That’s what I used to think. We’ve become, I don’t know, Americanised,I suppose, though that seems unfair. Rather, we’ve responded to a perception of America, celebrating the loud and thrusting. The phallic path to success, being the biggest dick in the room. None of this is ne...