‘There are no words to this song, Hey lolly lolly lo, You make them up as you go, Hey lolly lolly lo.’*     Step 1. Have a brilliant idea (preferably while drunk, in love, infuriated, or all of the above) and scrawl a two-sentence outline on a napkin.   Step 2 . Earn the disapproval of the waiter for destroying the table linen.   Step 3. Purloin the napkin (they don’t care anymore anyway) and forget how you managed to get home.   Step 4. Take some Alka-Seltzer when you wak

Dolphins, we are told, only let one side of their brain sleep at a time – what with the whole mammals drowning thing. This presents an ideal metaphor for poor-quality sleep which leaves you feeling as if you never slept. To sleep thus is ‘dolphining’. (That’s what I claim, anyway). It’s a depressingly useful word. I’m in no danger of drowning in my bed, yet I dolphin constantly.   I have questions. 1) How does one determine that a sleeping dolphin is partitioning its brain? W

Heavy-winged night sits on my shoulder. The weight of night comes down like a soft paw, in velvet finality. An atlas moth spreads its powdery wings, channelling the moonlight into fractal droplets of incalculable weight.   What rebellion were we guilty of, to be so burdened? What Titanic fault?   Probably nothing. This is just the way of things. Earlier iterations must give way to later. Titans to Olympians. Moths, too, are more ancient than butterflies. I had always imagined

‘She gouged out his eye with a butter knife?’   ‘A plastic one.’   Jeannie sipped on her tea. ‘Were there no metal ones to hand?’ She replaced her cup in her saucer with a small chink.   ‘Perhaps she enjoyed the challenge.’   ‘Hm. Care for a white chocolate almond? They’re very good.’   ‘Oh, thank you, yes…So did you finish the backyard renovations? I heard you were doing some mosaics.’   ‘Yes, they’re done. All concreted over. Couldn’t leave that sort of stuff lying arou

The heavy-duty tarpaulin I kept from a Jeep at a wreckers has turned into one of my most prized possessions. Heavy to carry on my nightly climb up into the mountains, but worth it. Bramble thickets are the best places to hide out in. I have several and use them in turn, so my movements won’t become too predictable. The tarpaulin makes things much more comfortable.   They said I was mad, coming up here, a tiny thing like me. What am I going to do? How do I expect to protect my

‘You got yourself a right lemon there.’ He stood squinting at the aging Ford Focus in the driveway. ‘Look at that! Barely legal.’ He kicked at the front left.   ‘It seems OK, Dad. A few dings and bings, not a big deal. I checked the history.’   ‘Hmph.’ He makes a sound like a badger clearing its throat.   ‘Shall I take you for a spin?’ Mel Waves invitingly towards the passenger seat.   ‘Nah, might never make it out.’ He laughs in Superior Masculinity, and pats a corpulence of

My name means spring, and my name day is in March. It all makes sense in the northern hemisphere. My partner celebrates it on Sept 1 st , assigning an antipodean valence with cheerful disregard for tradition. Whatever the date, it always falls on pressure washing season.

‘How’re mum and baby doing today? All well?’ The midwife pats the covers and leans over the silent, close-wrapped bundle. ‘Oh, what a face!’   The mother laughs. ‘I know, right? I feel judged.’   ‘Those are eyes that know this world.’   The baby stares back at the midwife as if it’s about to announce her grades in maths. A big, black sombre gaze through lowered lids.   Nine months. One year. Eighteen months. The gaze lands on carers and playmates.   Five, ten, thirteen. ‘An o

‘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