‘Rare or medium rare?’ ‘Well done, please.’ ‘You’ll have to get that from a different barbecue, mate. This isn’t a crematorium.’ ‘Don’t be so mean, Dan. If Scot wants it well done, he’s getting it well done.’ ‘I’m joking. Anyway, the man’s got a gift for incineration.’ Scot laughs and shrugs, visibly annoyed. His plan of feeding Dan shoe-leather next time they reciprocated the invite scrolls like ticker-tape behind his eyes. ‘He was a dragon in a previous life,’ intones Scot’

Absence, obscene, obsolete, absolute. ‘Paint the space that is not’, they said. ‘Express the vase of flowers through the absence of vase’. Like calculating the motion of orbiting stars. I drew the space that is not, and the eye of chocolate cosmos stared out like black punctures in the space-time continuum, collapsing beneath the weight of the denial of their existence. Are the strokes of my brush now obsolete, now that images bloom from keystrokes? Who am I kidding, they

Two days until my wedding. I cannot move from this house. The locks are bigger than my head, the windows high out of reach, so high they look out above the winter sky which crawls along the ground outside. Snowflakes fall in the room and they do not melt on my hand when I catch them. When the light fades the locks churn and turn, the door opens, the shadows gather into the form that is the Beast. My heart is frozen, else I would dissolve in fear. One day before my wedding

We don’t know where we are. Something was chasing. Is chasing, but in all this white it will be chasing forever. Cold without end. Immobility creeps in at the fingertips, crawls out of the eyes. Ice crystals branch out from pulmonary arteries. Numbness is a force that radiates from us. All is still, even the endless whirling flakes, in their ceaseless quest, static. The Inferno’s ninth circle is a frozen lake. Oh, we know. Traitors gnawing on each other’s heads - of no co

‘Leopard ate his face!’ the cry currently going round when right-wing supporters get shafted by systems they helped to implement. ‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.’ But why leopards? I guess that’s not the point, but the naturalist portion of the brain can’t help considering that the face is one of the least tasty parts of a body. It’s simply not in a leopard’s nature to eat your face. Not for sta

‘Oh day and night but this is wondrous strange Then as a stranger bid it welcome’ Thoughts that once only visited Make themselves comfortable Couch-surfing in my brain Like aches that used to heal But now are constant That squeezing in the chest The one you thought Was just another deadline Stays and makes its rhythm Like the slow-lapping waves of a quiet shore aspirations crunching underfoot A somatic embodiment of guests I never knew I hosted: Emotional phroggers Leaving

‘I found it very moving.’ ‘I’m surprised you managed to get to the end. Seven hours long? Did you take breaks in between?’ ‘Not that much.’ ‘I get antsy if a film goes over fifty minutes. Star yelling “Edits! Ever heard of edits?” at the screen.’ ‘Aaah. Yes.’ ‘So was it in Hungarian? Or was it just made in Hungary?’ He opens his mouth to answer but is interrupted by a sharp yelp from the dog. They start and turn to look at her. She is spinning round anxiously, as

Incongruities beckon In the shape sorter of life, nothing matches up If only we were Fat, dumb, and oh so happy: Bliss in ignorance To say ‘I was wrong’ Too hard for officialdom Saving face the key Spinning lies like silk Teasing half-truths cherry-picked Talking from their arse We watch dark figures Flickering on the cave wall Shadows in the gloom Mismatched shapes pile up Corpses in a sandy grave Squares to hexagons

‘I’m going to lose it if you do that.’ A mild yet oddly menacing threat. The calculated aggression of weaponised volatility, of anticipatory justification. Or is it? Setting the limits of tolerance is a sensible deterrent strategy, but with vague threats like ‘lose it’, retaliation is potentially unlimited. ‘Let slip the dogs of war’ and who knows what they’ll get up to? A small typo makes it potentially even worse. ‘I’m going to love it.’ Rephrased: ‘in…’ Hang on, we’re back

Twitching paws and muffled woofs: are they running through grey grass, or does their world explode in technicolour during the night? It might seem silly to think they could imagine wavelengths their eyes are not designed to sense, but I’m not designed to fly, yet manage well enough. The point of dreams isn’t realism. Perhaps estate agents suffer nightly torments of affordable social housing, or lawyers sweat at the terror of a populace suddenly keen on reading all the Ts and

Due to no particular choice of my own, my carbohydrate intake has been pretty limited for the last few years. Carbohydrate is quite the addiction-magnet but like anything else, you get used to its absence. However, Easter is a challenge. The lure of spiced buns beats the song of sirens any day, in fact I frequently wish someone would tie me to a mast when I walk past the bun aisle in the supermarket to save me the energy on self-control. Who ever thought of letting dough get

‘I’ll book it in tentatively.’ ‘There’s no point beating around the bush. There no other time. Either we do it then or we don’t do it at all.’ She turns aside and mutters: ‘Maybe we won’t’. ‘What?’ ‘Nothing. So you’re OK with the ocean view room?’ ‘Uh huh. No point going to the seaside and looking out onto a car park.’ ‘No point getting married and having the sex life of a fossil but some people still do it.’ ‘What?’ ‘I said a cark park would be awful, dear. W

I don’t have time to Assemble a decent verse Open the jarred paste

Impasto thinking an overlapping chaos brain swamped in paint splats

Misread calendar Deadline closer than I thought Face like mushroom pate

‘Yes, I’ll just get the paper from the office, one moment… Wait a minute, what’s this?’ A corner of the room has mushroomed into a lump of blankets and pillows which are draped into a defensive tent over furniture. Henry lifts an edge of a quit and peers underneath. ‘Hello?’ ‘Go away. We’re busy.’ A small and very cross voice responds. ‘We?’ ‘We’re in a meeting. It’s private.’ ‘Tilly…’ He lifts the corner a little higher. The bottom of the bureau has been emptie

First Park Run in years Instils the rosy glow of A ripe tomato

Wind up the tomato, we have 20 minutes. What will you say, in your allotted time? Tick tick tick tick. Equivalencies of time to money, ‘spending’ time, ‘wasting’ time, apparently were not always made. I hear the concept was accentuated with the rise of Calvinist ethics of work equating to goodness – and the obverse of leisure equating to sin. Hard to imagine a ‘time’ where time is not measured. The carriage clock came around in the 1700s, bringing the blissfully diverse chr

8 – us, the children and the dog 7 – years since we were OK 6 - rooms to sleep and play 5 – dust-boxed school records 4 – fibs, fiddles...

‘November.’ She glowers at the wall chart. ‘There are too many gaps in the to-do list from January.’ ‘You haven’t done too badly. We...