A night to regret

I'm sucking the ice cubes of my lemonade dry in Bertolli's, Charlotte Street. In sixty minutes I should be on stage, so time to leave Sophia and Helen, two girls of greatness, and journey on. The gig is at a small restaurant in west west London, and time is already tight as I slip on my jacket, grab my case and head for the door. Where I stop. I face sheets of rain, so thick I can't see the other side of the street, raindrops ricocheting off the floor like bullets. As I stand and loiter the receptionist returns to her desk, looks at my dry clothing, looks at the rain and drops her jaw. 'How did you...?' I look at her and click. 'I decided to avoid the raindrops, getting wet is such an inconvenience,' I reply and she is speechless. I linger for a minute and await the end of the rainfall, passing the time with small talk. Fifteen such minutes later it's sparse enough to step out in, I head for Oxford Circus, change onto the Bakerloo line and soon I've boarded a train for Pinner at Baker Street. As I roll towards my destination lightning flashes across the sky and thunder rumbles, I flip the pages of my book dismissively. Twenty minutes later I flee the tube and swipe my oyster. Out of the station - down the hill - follow the road round are my instructions. Down the hill I go, follow the road I do, find the restaurant I don't. It starts to rain. Thick heavy drops splattering my jacket, swamping my jeans, lacquering my increasingly feminine hair to my head. This is getting me nowhere so I swim into a newsagents to seek guidance. A grey-haired burnt-skinned Sri Lankan man stares his sunken eyes at me.

me: 'Do you know where the restaurant Friends is please?'
he: 'Restaurant? You want to eat?'
me: 'Kind of. Do you know where it is?'
he: 'Yes, restaurant two doors down.'
me: 'Right, I saw that one, but I'm looking for Friends restaurant?'
he: 'Yes, it's friend's restaurant, very good, they feed you well.'
me: 'No, not your friend's, the Friends restaurant.'
he: 'This is only restaurant two doors down.'
me: 'Forget it.'

Back into the rain I retrace steps, spiraling in, trying all avenues, I pass an old woman and ask her for directions. She looks at me like I'm about to attack her. What does she think I'm going to do? Drip on her? Abandoned, unaided and awash I eventually find the high street, the alleged location, I walk up and down. And down and up. After passing the place four times I notice the postage-stamp sized sign swinging from a first floor window grudgingly giving the hint. I fall in.

-

One hundred and twenty minutes later I lay all magic'd out back on the tube platform watching for my ride home. Red wine and blood stains my shirt, an unfortunate slip with an apple corer the cause of a nice deep gash on top of my little finger. I wait for the train to arrive. The train arrives. As the doors beep shut I turn the last page of my novel and start the next one. At Wembley Park the train is delayed for three minutes, on the opposite platform a Jubilee line train pulls in. I hatch a clever plan. I switch lines two stops earlier than intended and add an additional thirty minutes and ten stops to my journey. Piss it. More time, more changes. Much later, as I walk up from Embankment, I pass a woman in not the best of ways, tears run down her mascara stained cheeks, she staggers on diagonals, perhaps even a touch drunk. I'm halfway up the stairs before I have second thoughts and return to make sure she's ok. I catch up with her and touch her arm gently, she looks at me from under long black hair and a smile flashes all over her face. 'Hey, are you ok?' I ask. She sniffs and nods and I walk her to the tube. I missed my train anyway. Back to the station and I have a few minutes before my train leaves. I unwrap the plaster I have covered my finger in and see the wound has set badly, it's now bruised and swollen and throbbing. I rewrap and read my book.

Words that Rhyme

in texas
alexis
perplexes
her exes

she vexes
desexes
then flexes
and hexes

Grace

In the finest restaurant in all the world, in the finest kitchen in all the world, sits the finest crab in all the- ok you get it. Anyway, he is sulking, and his name is oliver (small o). Oliver-Small-O is The Last Crab Standing. Alone he waits, a marked crustacean, for soon the finest chef in all the yada yada shall be sharpening his blades and cracking some shell. For tonight dines the King Of Malundra, the Richest Man in all the Land. A Man with a hankerin' for some crab-crunchering, there's only one dish on the menu tonight, and it sure will be special. But lo! look as our oliver stills and weeps, spills a tear salted tear from stalks and taints the freshwater with soft despair. For oliver is a father-to-be, and expectant she waits, about to give birth but so cruelly aparted. Long he remembers, if only he'd known, the day of the shadow, the shadow boat-shaped:

And oft he recalls what he knew not await
As he lay and eyed up his fate on that bait.
But now all he does is to spit and to curse,
To rue and reflect and regret his outburst.

For though as we speak the Prince does get hungry,
A stalk meets the eye of the chef Monsieur Mungry.

And fortune favours poor oliver's side, for just then a bolt from the sky just so happens to gift the small-o with powers of telepathy. He wiggles his stalks and communicates the following: PLEASE DON'T COOK ME MONSIEUR STOP I HAVE A FAMILY TO TAKE OF AND A YOUNG WIFE ABOUT TO GIVE BIRTH AS WE SPEAK STOP SO PLEASE STOP. This puzzles Chef Mungry who concedes he may have been a little rash.

And for the first time in his god-forsaken piteous life, a life lived in rags and filth, a life of pain inflicted, love rejected, blood shunning blood and rage deflected, a life spent fighting the ghosts of that failed marraige that boy who ran nose bleeding from those drunken blunted rages of an abusive father who never was around anyway and gambled away the family's food, goddamnit, for all that, our Chef, our goddamn Chef, like the behatted messiah that he is, reaches into that cold and broken water and lifts oliver out, i said lifts him out, by the shell, by the back of that cold and broken shell he lifts him out, and sets his feet upon the rock.

Swim little crabby friend! I say swim for your life
'fore I come chopping and wielding my knife!
I wish I had some more suitable words
but words i have not, so flee from the birds.

And with that he turns his back on our crab and returns to his kitchen where outside the prince is very ticked off.

Splosh goes oliver, back to the blue,
To never forget the chef saved his poo.

Suburbitude

I lay on the grass and look at the leaves. Ah sunny sunny day. My friends and I have eaten out, and here we fall, sprawled amongst the urban dust and earthen crust. It's summer in the city, and without cares we watch tight tops and trousers cropped flop-flip by. The stifling air locks in the conversation, voices pour forth with the warm fizzy lager, glasses clink, too tired to think, their burnt out red faces store sun shades on frazzled hair. Amongst this all I recline and decline, I lay back in the park and watch day turn to dark. I greet the breeze and coolness with a concillatory sigh and let the thick air settle on me, cloaking me with calm. I close my eyes and try to press my face against warm flesh, if I concentrate hard enough I can cool myself off on her burning skin. We are one and apart, dazed and unscathed, yet I keep a card up my sleeve. Hope for better times is around the corner, hidden, slipped away like a snail in a shell. Tell no one. Later I strut through the tube line, my hair flows around me like Catherine Zeta-Jones and I couldn't be more worth it. I am the Contemporary Magician, I dazzle them with my Magic, I blow them away close-up, I astound them from onstage, they laugh, they cry, I soar and never die. Exit through the glass doors and I'm out on the street, a filtered beat slips my feet as the filtered light falls on the filtered street. As I trip home I swear repeatedly at the young prick manning the ticket barriers when he tries to make me swipe my oyster card, causing me to miss my train. I storm past, brushing him from my path, I tell him of his worthlessness, I say go fuck yourself, repeatedly, I board the train and laugh at his weakness. I am the untouchable, dwelling amongst the city-sickers, glowing with self-delusion; burning out. With the rest of us I lose myself, in essence.

A knock at the door

-[i open it]-

i say- hello.
he says- is your father in?
i say- no.
he says- please give him this, i promised i would give him this.
i say- ok.
he says- i will not be alive for much longer.
i say- oh.
he says- i am a sick man, i have had a stroke and in a month or two the lord will take me. i may not come back and collect the book. if i don't, please, tell your father to post it to my daughter.

-[he hands me a small brown envelope]-

he says- this is her address.
i say- thank you.
he says- you can read the book as well if you like.

aParted

I never want to see her again
unless it's tomorrow

Personality Crash

things are not going well. i can't sleep. i wake each night. i drop to my bed exhausted, my room is a mess, my sheets stink, my stomach burns and i can't sleep. i am drowning in fatigue and i hurt. the more i hurt the more i can't sleep. i have a fuzz in my head, a buzzing of noise that fills my skull with static. i say motherfucker a lot more than i used to. i burn inside. i have irrational fixations, i am obsessing, regressing, i place hope in a woman. i'm in more trouble than i thought. at tipping point, dipping point, poised to go either way, blossom or bottom. i never used to say motherfucker. and there is that noise again, i am a tv on static, fsshshh it goes and i can't turn it off, please someone find the fucking remote.

There are two problems with mobile phones:

1) In any place, at any time, anyone can call you

2) But no one does

it takes me forty minutes to get dressed. i deliberate each choice, i break into cold sweats, i deplete the frail energy i am conserved with dressing and redressing. i'm gripped by the fear of the wrong top. fsshshh. i believe my choice of clothing, the styling of my hair, these will make the difference, these will win her over, win her back. shit. csshshh. what am i doing? what the motherfucker am i doing? i'm sorry i'm not myself. whoever i am has popped out for a while, i will let you know when he returns. in the meantime- fzsschcsshhhh...

Hell-o

Ok, let's put it out there: How can God, the God I believe in through and within all doubts, a God of love, of all good things, the origin of peace and hope, how can that God consign his creations to eternal damnation? For turning away, for choosing the wide path, for refusing, they are forgotten, left to eternal suffering. As in forever. FOR-EVER!! Un-never-ending pain and anguish and wailing and torment and weeping and gnashing of teeth? And as the absence of God is evil, so the suffering shall be eternally unbearable and hopeless and black. How can this be? Can a truly loving God knit together a soul, a human being of unlimited worth just for eternal damnation? Surely non-existence is way more preferable than this? It worries me, it really really worries me, it is the central struggle of my faith. My gut instinct tells me it is beyond understanding, that I am like an ant imagining the ocean, and I trust and believe that God is good, and know and treasure that God is love. So I shall defer to the Higher Power. But I don't know, I really don't... Answers on a postcard.

Losing Sheep

I have exhausted all options on my eternal search for sleep and am reduced to the cliches. In a bid to find some shut-eye I've started counting those little fluffy clouds with legs. One by one I watch these small balls of cotton wool toddle up to fences and jump over, a pursuit of the tedious. It's not working. My imagination is a kitten on catnip and sheep just aren't that interesting. I get bored after the first few thousand, my mind wanders, one thing leads to another and I get carried away, to speed the whole thing up I'll start sending them over in batches, ten, twenty, one thousand, two thousand. To make matters worse, the sheep get all excited by the commotion and arrange themselves in formations; tall columns of sheep balancing on each others' shoulders, house-high pyramids of sheep precariously teetering on one motorbike-riding little fuzzy fella, lines upon lines of line dancing sheep all can-canning over the stile, you name it, over the rickety little fence in my head the sheep have done it. And then finally I'll be about to nod off and one sheep will just refuse to jump:

John: one thousand and fifty-seven, one thousand and fifty-eight, one thousand and fifty-niiii... fifty-niii... ahem. hello? mr sheep?
Sheep: [silence]
John: would you err.. would you jump over the fence... please?
Sheep: [looks the other way]
John: Mr Sheepy? Please? Jump over the fence?
Sheep: No!
John: What? Why not?
Sheep: I don't want to.
John: But I can't sleep until you jump, you have to, I'm counting on you, c'mon you're holding up the line!
Sheep: I'm not going to. You're mean.
John: Mean? How am I mean? Just shut up and jump!
Sheep: Stop eating us.
John: What?
Sheep: You keep eating us. Stop eating us and I'll jump.
John: Fine fine, I won't eat any more sheep.
Sheep: Promise?
John: Yeh yeh yeh, just jump already.
Sheep: Well ok.
[Sheep jumps fence. Sheep gives loud bleat as sheep lands on
hitherto unseen sheep trap hole thing on other side of fence
which gives way and said sheep plunges towards doom]
John: ha ha! imagine that!

i scare women's clothing

'She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
if I just turned and ran
And it wears me out
It wears me out
If I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted' -- thom yorke

Each morning I wake and roll into the emptiness, my hand reaching for a soft waist and a crumpled t-shirt that fails to materialise, I slip my arms around the invisible and clutch nothing but cloth. Each daylight she fails to dawn, and like yesterday, today and tomorrow continue. Until now... that is; the times have changed. The past five nights I have woken at 4am, wrenched out of my sleep by a butterfly of shadows, my eyes flipping open to find the silence of the empty space my only compadre. In the blue light of the dark I have lain there, passing a slow thirty minutes, weighing the pros and cons of taking a piss. And in this pause each night I wait for who or what has awoken me, for the cause and effect of the shift in the balance that has disturbed my dormancy. For good or for ill, I feel a presence hovering over my bed, holding a note, a handwritten scribble of love or betrayal just out of reach. And here I am failing to communicate, failing to make sense, failing to gain clue. Desperately I want meaning, I want patterns, I want excuses, whatever is required to avoid adding up the symptoms and depressing the equals key. Insomnia is one thing, broken sleep another, both another step down the line that ends swinging from a socket. And all I can hold onto is her. And she is all I can't let go. Her gestures are poetry, the flecks of her eyes form rhymes and couplets; I lay betrayed by my idolatory. I shall mourn her still longer, a gut twisting smoke that swirls and curls and fails to clear, that clouds and licks the stained glass of a fractious heart. Something is very wrong here. Tonight I shall set an alarm to wake and discover. If I am to lose sleep, let it be on my terms.

for gemma, with love and thanks for the paper

Dating

It is nine thousand one hundred and thirty days since I was last born, twenty five years and I feel not a day over forty. Here is a fact of interest about me: twenty five years ago I was born at one minute to midnight, missing June 10th by a mere sixty seconds. Here is another: I am one year older to the day than her royal fineness Natalie Portman, which, if and when we meet, shall be my opening gambit. Sixty seconds and it could have all been so different, a sliver of a lifetime, the time it takes to boil a third of an egg; who knows where I'd be if I'd just held on? It would have blown my chances with Natalie for a start. And now I'm left, high and dry, beached like a whale on the quarter shore of a century. Twenty five man, it's just a downward slope to eternity from here isn't it? I mean really, my youth is over, P45's and Scrabble are all that await. Perhaps I should grow a beard? I have rather lush facial hair growth you know, but sadly it goes ginger in the sun. Not so good. Still I know that for every day I lose to the great eggtimer in the sky, I shall gain an eternity on the Other Side, and there I shall sit, gazing into the mirrors of foreverness, a reflected world of infinite ongoing, stretching off as far as the eye could see to imagine. Monotonous, I wish it was.

Fatal attraction

After watching one too many remakes of japanese horror films and/or episodes of Buffy, I find myself wondering what it is about dank dark corridors that so attracts small nursery-rhyme-singing girls.

Are you kidding me?

'and I must be an acrobat
to talk this and act like that' -- U2

Hypocrisy is one of the many afflictions I always expected to avoid. It's so easy to spot in others, so therefore in yourself, the soul you spend most time with, it should stick out like a sore thumb. But then I've never really noticed a visible difference in thumbs of varying tenderness, so perhaps it should come as no suprise that I only realise once it is too late. It is a little like the assumption I always carried of my own innate goodness, I found it quite a shock when, on occasion, I turned out to be a little morally unsound. And sure, these darker times, these spiralling twists of dislocated actions, have always been quite deeply disturbing, but there is also an element that is so surreal as to render the whole thing oddly unaffecting. It's strange what the mind can and cannot cope with, and many are the moments of shutdown, reboot and restart; control, alt and delete. All you can do is wear your heart long-sleeved and admit the times of mass miss taking. And I hope I do this, so if there are those out there bearing me a grudge of interminable bitterness- I'm sorry, I didn't mean it/wasn't thinking/am stupid... give me a call, we'll go for cake.

Angels keep falling on my shed

Too much free time is bad for the soul, and I'm getting edgy about the future. I look not forward to a life of worklessness, worth-and-mirthlessness, too much time spent waiting around for life to happen. My definition of unemployment is sitting around in your underpants at four in the afternoon, eating cereal and reading three week old tv listings. To the outside untrained eye, my life of a magician/actor/writer can be pretty indistiguishable from this.

We are just dust in the machine my friends, so let's clog it up. We wake, we bake, we kick and scrape, in the particles of the sweat of our hands we hold tiny galaxies as we gaze at the moon and the stars above. Time is like sand that pours through our fingers like lemmings from a cliff, each second falling just one more reason to abandon hope all ye who enter here. All we have is the leaves from the trees, the ten or twelve hours we wake up with, nothing else, nothing more, just the breeze on our faces. Let us make the most of our inhalations and spend them not in our underpants, whether they be good or not. I for one shall play in the sun.

Strolling Magic

The BabyMow 2000!

(c) All rights Reserved

Ever wanted to mow your lawn and walk your baby? Only have enough time in the day to do one? Well not anymore! Now you can do it all at once with the all new BabyMow 2000*! Be the envy of your friends as you enjoy freshly cut lawns and deep paternal bonds. Make a living on the side mowing your neighbour's grass while talking to your child. You and your loved one will never have felt so close, and the baby will enjoy it as well! Ha ha ha. Includes double strength safety harness to avoid messy accidents.

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