anecdotal provocateur! flick fast-forward don’t look back choose first element second …aah!….fire then water (white spines of vertical lawns) ravenous cells straight into the thing hold this matter of particles

A luminous plastic skeleton anticipates Halloween Aaaaaaaagh! Shots will be a quid; cocktails less than three though I’ll shine after soaking up the rays from this stale electric sun I’m dangling from. En pointe in air, I have a double-jointed sideways sway; in fact, I’m almost dancing. This man swats unseen wasps. No, he’s playing…

Risk Eyelashes in the rain. Wondering if an accent’s northern. Cheesy radio play! Inside, a coin, tossed, comes up tails and heads. Uh? Weight hauled high. Contract done, around Halloween. I just know. Not long into early dark, symmetry of hellos. Under a brolly, I grow taller.

The Telling They had even bought the tar to tar the woman over and set fire to her but this was prevented’. ( male reaction to Shaker preacher Mary Ann Girling as reported in ‘England’s Lost England’ by Philip Hoare.) Better to assume the starry mantle of the woman clothed with the sun, to sign…

The Promised Land for SR (apologies to Bruce Springsteen) We’ve all felt like that, itching for something to start, listening to a dream-song on the radio before a working day, wanting to explode, tear the whole damn world apart drive all night down a howling freeway, chasing the mirage until it settles like snow. They…

By drowning 1. Can you hear that? He held the phone to the weather, I could hear a live broadcast of Spanish rain, could only imagine being marooned in that restaurant for two hours; sandals, by the end of the week, falling apart. 2. Enough. That mobile: its future. Well, the rain passed, heat resumed….

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones Your novella: You gave me a copy in the square near the Trevi Fountain. You made the back of my neck go tight. G- Spots. Some women, apparently, don’t have one. You didn’t believe in the existence of anything you couldn’t see. You’ve got to give if…

A living statue looks out of her son’s bedroom window I do dryad-face; spindly: stilt walk, freeze, like in the Barcelona square: enticed folk to take photos with a dip, body sway, then saw them off with a fingernail jive. Nearly twenty, he stays in the small room where the PSP works better; shuns the…

Metamorphoses: Midland Mainline First, I’m a novel by Michael Morpurgo barely held in the shaking hands of the woman in the waiting-room on Platform 2, then I’m one of two inked stars on the back of the neck of a bloke who’s running down the steps onto the same platform who asked attendants at the…