for emelié

I put your name on the door
Though I knew you weren't coming

I stood before strangers
And I prayed you weren't coming

I talked and they laughed
Because they knew you weren't coming

I knelt and I begged
But I knew you weren't coming

Things I wanted to say but didn't fit in the poem which doesn't say what I wanted anyway:
I did the whole show to an empty door waiting for you to come in.
I have no hope but grace, it's all I hold on to, it's all I can face.
I ate dinner and couldn't taste it.
I miss you like nothing else.

Whilst Crossing the Street

I take a left I've taken a hundred times and see a police van blocking the road, the officer outside his car waving traffic the other way. Two fire trucks scream the night down with wailing sirens, splashing the buildings in blue light. A red car, splayed across both lanes, reflects these flashes in its crumpled steel frame, windows shattered, side-door bent and twisted out of shape. An ambulance crew work, bathed by the strobes, pulling a corpse from the crushed, buckled steel, laying him down on the floor and wrapping him up like a portion of fish and chips. Directly opposite this, forty urbanites sit in a Gourmet Burger Restaurant, chewing on undigested red meat, munching and chomping on thick slabs of bloodied minced beef. They are the unaffected, the disaffected, tragedy a joke they forgot to laugh at. They stare at the death that surrounds them, and, as if watching television, they glaze over, immuned by the glass pane they look through. This is what living in the city is, a sickness that seeps through the concrete, that pours from the high rises, that spreads in the apathy of the contagious, every avoided gaze and cold-shouldered walk-on deepening the rot. And it is no way to live.

Birthday Girl

At work tonight a woman turned 90. That is quite an innings. Her family celebrated by throwing her a surprise party... Now, surely, at that age, the last thing you need is a surprise. 'SURPRISE!!' [thud] 'Err, mum?' It wouldn't be cool. Unless of course... and, well, I don't really want to say this... but maybe a few of them are trying to... hurry along the natural process, if catch my meaning, to speed up the circle of life. I mean if you make it to 90, you're gonna want to hang around until the hundred, if only for the telegram, and ten years is a long time to wait.

Pseudonym

Michaela... that's a name for when your parents were really hoping for a boy. I mean, it's Michael, with an 'a'! Although it's not really an 'a', more like an 'ahhhhhhhhh crap'.

Short and Sweet

Being small, I've always had a distaste for the phrase 'fun size'. For a kid, the last thing a third of a Mars bar is is fun. A fun size Mars bar would be from here to the moon. That would be fun sized. A mars bar so long that by the time you'd finished eating it all your friends had aged irreparably, and you'd become living proof of the theory of relativity, and got to star in a movie about it, called Small, and you became some sort of anti-tom hanks and got to kiss Camerion Diaz lots. That would be the correct measurement of fun. So you've got to feel sorry for whoever it was that came up with this yardstick: three inches, yep, that's the size of my fun.

Get Ready

boy: Can I ask you something?
girl: Sure.
boy: How long did it take you to get dressed this morning?
girl: Why?
boy: Just interested. Was it longer than usual?
girl: Maybe. You?
boy: Longer. Was it worth it?
girl: Maybe.
boy: I'll take a maybe.

A Dentist By Any Other Name

So at the end of my last visit to the tooth-thief she suggested I make an appointment with the Hygenist. Now, when there's a white coat involved, I find it best to agree, so I booked myself in, and today walked into the Hygenist's clinic to find... my dentist! Honestly! They have a license to print money. So well, she did her hygenical thing, and as I was counting out more of my ever-depleting cash on to the reception desk, I noticed an advert for 'a special breath improvement clinic'. Not only that, but it's by appointment only! Appointment only! Oh that would be bleak, if at the end of my next check up, she leant over and said, 'by the way...'

i is nothing without e

I'm getting the bus after a show I've done, nothing special there, yapping on the phone like some buy-sell wastrel when I walk into this beautiful blonde girl. Thunk. And I freeze because I know I know her from somewhere and that somewhere I know is eluding me. But I'm still yapping on the phone this whole time so we exchange glances and not much else until she gets off. Mere days later I'm on the tube travelling down to a show, and she slips in at Kings Cross dressed to the nines. Hi, she says, I'm Helen, she says, wasn't it you on that bus last week? Well, surely, I'm done here, a doublechance meet and greet... But no, this is Chapeeko, she says and introduces me to what appears to be her boyfriend/partner/lover/whoever. I smile at him weakly. Chapeeko? What is he, a budgie? I pull out my book, but she's only just got started. She wants to tell me where I know her from. I don't want to listen, but I have to listen, cos she's already started to tell, and she tells me of a summer's day, a picnic, where we all met, Chapeeko included, and I realise... well fuck, e. was there too. Turns out, for me, it was one of the happiest days e. and I spent together. One of the happiest days full stop. Well that's just swell. But maybe there's meaning behind this chance meeting, cos all I can think is what the hell have I done. And just as I have been lost these past months without her, for all my loose talk, you know what? Thinking of her settles me now. Sometimes it is enough just to know what you have lost, to really, really know; that can make all the difference.
And you can start to find your way home.

For joel

There is not much more depressing to me than that corporate mentality that seeks to squeeze every last drop of money possible from people and their vices. The kind of mind that one day looked around a nightclub and thought, now what aren't we charging for... and saw the toilet. I mean it's bleak, bleak that someone would think standing next to a sink with a paper towel a job worthy of a human life. And bleaker still that this darkened mind didn't stop there, but decided to charge this unfortunate soul for the privilege of doing it, for being a toilet butler. What's going on? It's a shit job! Literally! These guys have to pay to spend a whole night in the toilet! When that happens to me, I get pissed off that I paid for the curry! And they don't even get dinner! No wonder they charge so much when, like strippers, they have to pay a house fee to suffer indignity. So, with this in mind, sure, I can understand why they charge me a pound a go just to wash my hands. But even so, it's pretty pricey. To be honest, for one golden nugget, I expect some five star service, from start to finish. In fact, at that price, I don't even want to get my hands dirty, if you get my meaning. So Joel, my advice? You can do better.

Slate

Whenever I sign off my emails I always say, 'love john.'
It is not a goodbye, more of a request.

Like Ships in the Night

'You are never going to guess who lives next door,' said my flatmate.
'I think I might,' was my reply.

One hour earlier, as I got off the bus and walked back in the fuzzy rain I saw him; thick-lensed, black rimmed glasses, thin, wiry hair, slicked down by rain or spit, limping down the street with his left foot dragging; Arther Beale. For a long time I did not, could not, believe it was him, so out of context here in little Crouch end. But there he was, walking home with three bags of cat litter in blue plastic bags. I'm not sure his name is Arthur Beale by the way, it could be something else, I'm guessing you see, Arthur Beale's is the name of the little sailing shop he inhabits at the bottom of Covent Garden, and perhaps he's not quite old enough to have established it in 1896, but I like to think of him as Arthur nonetheless. And it's sweet to see him returning to this flat next door, a hard day spent at the counter, keeping the business going come rain or shine, that little store so out of step with the ups and downs of the modern era, still happy to sell shiny brass bells and swap arcane knot know-how. But what I do not, cannot, understand about the whole matter is how and why my flatmate and I discovered this on the same day. Why was it this day my flatmate left at that time to stroll into town? Why was it I caught that bus, going that route and walked that way home? We have not seen Arthur since, perhaps he just moved in, perhaps he just moved out, perhaps he's just shy, but those questions have been bothering me since. Maybe it was a one-off, but I think of him often.

Manners

The deaf are very polite.
They don't talk whilst eating.

Puppy Love

Dogs get off far too easily. Sit. Stay. Roll Over. Play dead. Come on, even I could do that. It's hardly stretching the limits of canine capacity is it? Let's lay down a challenge, what about Recite? Postulate? Sauté? There are too few puppies poised to pontificate, hardly a fido that knows his Dido (geez, the Queen of Carthage, not the singer), and instead of all that running around chasing sticks, when did you last hear an owner shout 'C'mon Rover! Reflect!' All I'm asking for is a little personal development here, to separate the doggies from the moggies, the klutzes from the muttzes. One day we may need a dog that can do more than just sniff.

I would for the trees

This is a dull story. I know this because in the last week I have told it to two girls, both of whom told me how dull it was. I'd tell it to more, but I've no more to bore. You'll have to hear it instead: I recently bought Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky, a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. But! And here's the catch, I had thought, assumed even, it was called Notes From The Underground. For years I had thought that. Imagine the shock then when I see the The is missing! Gone! Worse than gone, it was never there to begin with. Now this is big! A true plank-in-the-eye missing moment, like realising your six year old child hasn't been home from school for a while, at least not since scouts. And it was all very profound and said many meaningful things about the distracted and preoccupied way I live my life, until I went into a bookstore yesterday and saw a Dostoevsky called... Notes From The Underground. Hmm. Turns out it was just my translation and the title more often than not contains the The. So I bored you and those two nice girls for nothing.

Dearly Departed

What's the use of being a dead man?
Hundreds of mourners,
And you can't even eat the cake.