a one hundred and twenty third poem...'sonnet'

Molly was arse over

Tit in love, so she

Asked for guidance

From up above – a city pigeon

Promptly shat on her head,

Ending all thoughts of romance and 

Faint primrose beds.

a one hundred and twenty second poem...'tiny tears'

We are the dying

And the damned:

Here, alone on

This wind-blasted

Beach, we are but one

Grain of vanishing sand from

A child's bucket with a

Leak, where the

Tide inside fills bloating

Eyes and spills

Over the lip into

An ocean of

Tiny tears.

a one hundred and twenty first poem...'burial'

Stalked by rain clouds

Low and mean across the

Blasted moor, four fingers

Deep in pockets full of

Moss and earth, underneath

His nails a lifetime’s worth of

Dirt, below his feet a

Sinking morass of sodden peat -

The wind dies, then the deathless

Silence is complete.

a one hundred and eighth story...'smell a rat'

It came as an immense shock to Titch when a water rat crawled up the toilet flume in his apartment and bit him on the ass.  And could Titch later explain why he had teeth marks in his ass to the doctor, and why he might need a Tetanus jab?  Could he ever!  Titch told the doctor he and his girlfriend had been fooling around with an empty can of sardines.  The doctor asked about the teeth marks.  Titch said it was his girlfriend's finger-nails.  What an over-elaborate lie! Thought the doctor and prescribed Titch anti-inflammatory cream, as well as pills against rat bite fever.  ‘Your girlfriend must have needles for nails’, was the doctor’s parting remark. 

But about ten days later Titch was back at the doctor’s surgery complaining of sore joints and a red rash on his feet.  ‘Have you been taking your medication?’, asked the doctor.  Titch said yes he had – the anti-inflammatory cream.  The doctor asked about the pills.  ‘No’, said Titch, ‘it says on the label they are for rat bite fever’.  ‘I see’, said the doctor, ‘do you think I made a wrong diagnosis?’  Titch said he didn’t know.  ‘How is your girlfriend?’ the doctor continued.  Titch said she was fine. The doctor asked why she hadn’t accompanied Titch in the first instance.  Titch replied she worked nights at the local fish factory.  ‘Ok’, said the doctor feigning satisfaction, and told Titch to take his pills as well, and come back in a week’s time.

A week later Titch returned to visit the doctor.  By the wonders of modern medicine his joints were no longer sore, and his rash had all but disappeared. 

‘How’s your ass?’ asked the doctor.  ‘Fine, I think’, replied Titch. ‘Good’ said the doctor.  ‘I took the medication, pills and all’, replied Titch.  ‘Good’ said the doctor, playing with his desk tidy.  And then he fixed his gaze on Titch.  ‘Your ass’, said the doctor, ‘It ever talk on your behalf?’  Titch looked down at the carpeted surgery floor.  ‘Your ass got teeth and a tongue? Vocal chords?’, the doctor kept on, his beady eyes shining with delight at his tease, knowing these were leading questions.  ‘I ain’t a ventriloquist, if that’s what you mean?’, said Titch defensively and the doctor smiled at this surprisingly witty riposte.  But he hadn’t had his fun just yet.  Rubbing his manicured hands together the doctor told Titch he was probably in need of another subscription.  Titch was looking shiftily at the doctor now, like a cornered rabbit, or indeed, a cornered rat thought the doctor and snorted a quick laugh.

There had been a spate of rat attacks in the last three months in the city, and the doctor had already seen at least five cases similar to that of Titch.  But Titch had been the first, though not the last in the doctor’s thirty seven year career, to pretend something else did it, or something else really happened.

About ten minutes later Titch left the doctor’s surgery sucking on a sherbet lemon, nursing his battered pride, and carrying with him a bottle of the doctor’s finest Scotch.  The doctor’s prescription, folded into Titch's back pocket, simply read: ‘Truth Serum.  Take daily after visiting the rest rooms’.              

a one hundred and twentieth poem...'another day'

The common smelled nice this evening, and there was the sound of an old carrion crow throatily calling in the gathering dusk.  The last busker gone from the noiseless bandstand, as well as two lovers arm in hand, and the sky was high, cadet-grey and tangerine, new leaves on early summer trees, phosphorescent green: A natural sense of calm falling gently as a blanket, only the fat Jets overhead occasionally barraging the silence with yawning roars.  Later, from my balcony door, rare peace of mind, the stillness allowing thoughts too big to share with someone else space to unwind, years of pent up tension paroled for a time into quiet nothingness, weightless and free, save the idle scratchings, cross-hatchings of pen on paper, momentarily forgetting the future, leaving the rubble of the past to be searched through another day. 

Travel Light

Listen, goes the start of a book by a famous author. Not ‘listen to me’ or ‘listen to this’, just plain listen. The book is not necessarily meant to be read aloud, although it would do well if put to that test, so it seems to be a general exhortation to be quiet for once, and pay attention. On reflection, the author does well to get away with this; shouting about it isn’t usually enough to get people to take note. Neither is simply repeating oneself, or just increasing your declarations.

Anyone who’s been alive and awake recently will have noticed that the means, if not the good reasons to get others to listen to you, have proliferated to reach colossal levels. This doesn’t mean that anyone is paying any more attention than they were before, as the helpful birds in another wonderful novel frequently reminded us. That’s what this story is about, but you’ll be the judge of that.

 ‘Just changed the beer in the slug traps. And I tied back the runner beans.’

So went Nicolas’s updates to his daughter as he re-entered the wooden house from the garden. ‘Now, let’s have soup for lunch. There’s literally nothing so nice after a morning in the garden.’

He stomped about the kitchen, clots of earth falling from the tread of his boots. He pulled down a tin from a cupboard and poured the contents into a pan. ‘Oops,’ he said as some soup splashed onto his jumper. ‘Never mind, dirty anyway.’

Nicolas’s daughter Evelyn didn’t respond to any of his snippets. She was an elective mute; she didn’t have anything to say in response to her father. She hadn’t for seven years.

Nicolas was the opposite of an elective mute. He was an elective rambler.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll do the washing up,’ he said. ‘I need your help outside – to put your foot on the ladder for me.’

Evelyn used to be the talkative one. It was her twin sister who was the elective mute. At least, as far as everyone knew, she was mute. Evelyn seemed to be able to speak for her, so presumably Maria spoke to Evelyn from time to time. Unless you have faith in extrasensory perception or telepathy, that is.

Nicolas was old enough to be Evelyn’s grandfather, having married a woman half his age. He had now retired on the life insurance pay-out and spent his time in the garden, or, in winter and at night, painting and pushing tiny figurines for sprawling, complex war games on a board like a Thunderbirds set that covered the landing. He tirelessly shifted around battalions of infantry and cavalrymen, enacting tactics and a military strategy, as a chess enthusiast might play through the games of the greats, exploring the permutations of every position. His most recent wheeze was the construction of a fortress built into his bedroom door, providing yet more stages for his little humans and monsters. Their wooden house on the levels sometimes flooded, which was why the most important things were kept upstairs.

Evelyn kept all her books upstairs. Her father bought them for her to fulfil his duties: he had never sent her into a classroom, claiming that she was home-schooled. Periodically, someone visited from the local authority to check that Evelyn was indeed learning something. She performed exceptionally on the tests the man brought round. He had been piqued by her muteness at one time, and had social services come and perform an assessment. Evelyn filled out a questionnaire that reassured them, and they went away. Truth was, she learned all the normal expected general knowledge of a young adult from the encyclopaedia. Nicolas didn’t teach Evelyn anything academic, beyond the history of military manoeuvres from countless wars, which influenced the never-ending conflict that he played out on the landing. More helpfully, he taught he a great deal about growing fruit and vegetables and tending for flowers. Evelyn followed him around the garden, her faithful memory recording every technique and observation.

As a matter of fact, Evelyn was a girl of many talents: not only an elective mute, but one of the few people on this planet equipped with a wholly photographic memory.

There was no detail of Evelyn’s life that she could not recall, save events before the age of around four. Every moment, every word read and heard, every image seen was printed in ineffaceable ink on her brain. She started writing it all down one day, a kind of inch-perfect memoir of a life perfectly remembered, if not an examined existence. Evelyn gave the first twenty pages of repetitive, painfully meticulous prose to her father one evening. She quit the whole project when she saw he had dozed off after three pages. Now all she could do was record it all on her memory, every inane and banal, plus every profound, utterance of her father.

Prior to Evelyn’s disappearance, he had increasingly been asking her to record the day. Nicolas had his daughter write down everything that had happened and everything that he had said, in a perverse volte-face on her attempt at a memoir. He had bought a spiral bound blue book for the purpose, putting a large label on the front saying ‘My Life’. Nicolas never explained why he wanted this done; of course, Evelyn never asked. Sometimes Nicolas would go on for hours, blithely ignoring Evelyn’s wilting eyelids as he expounded on some detail of earthing up potatoes or, indeed, a long-forgotten battle. This was reaching an obsessive level, with eight books filled, when the floods returned.

It was spring, and record rainfall overloaded aquifers, canals and rivers. The ground floor of the house was under a foot of water. Evelyn and Nicolas were confined to the first floor, where a routine was established where he played out combats real and imagined while she read the encyclopaedias again. After a meal from a can, cooked on a portable gas stove, Nicolas got the blue book out and handed it to Evelyn. She wrote and wrote, barely thinking about it. But her dad felt that it was important, so what was she to do? At least, that was her interpretation. It may have been that Nicolas didn’t think it was important, but it was a compulsion. It wasn’t about conversation, either. This was no single father trying to engage elective mute daughter tale; this much was obvious because he continued the obsessive recording of his day, his life, after she’d gone.

It happened as soon as the flood water had retreated. Nicolas was weeding the vegetable patch, commentating all the while. Every so often he looked up, taking in the sight of his daughter but not really taking her in – Nicolas often saw her as something in the background, white noise in his blaring brain. Then he looked up to see she wasn’t listening and indelibly documenting any more, because she wasn’t there.

When she left, Nicolas didn’t call the police. He didn’t call his sister, perhaps because he was pathologically selfish, and didn’t care, perhaps because he was oh so used to his family becoming lost to him, or perhaps because he couldn’t ever hear her anyway, so he didn’t really notice. 

Evelyn had just slipped out of Nicolas’s life, as though he’d just put down a book and lost his page.

Nicolas adapted in his own way. He went on writing in the blue books at the end of the day, after pronouncing his thoughts to no-one. The problem for him was he forgot many of the day’s statements, so entries for each day shrunk considerably. This vexed Nicolas, so he took a rare trip into town and bought a Dictaphone. It was far less convenient for him to keep tugging it out of his pocket and hitting record when he had an update to make, but it improved his accuracy. He took it around the garden with him, and to the landing with its hills and plains, clicking down the button and bringing it to his mouth with increasing instinctiveness. Nicolas played back the tape every evening.

All his recording was Nicolas’s attempt to live in the present, or so he thought to start with. With Evelyn gone, this became more difficult. Her disappearance inevitably reminded him of the loss of his wife and his other daughter, Evelyn’s twin. It was a loss at sea, no less. Nicolas had made the choice; he swam for Evelyn, since she was the furthest out, and he hoped his wife would manage alone. By the time he was back out in the water, it was too late.

At the funeral, a sparse and weirdly emotionless affair, Evelyn was approached by an aunt who was visiting from the US of A, as the aunt called it. She was the kind of person fond of saying things like, ‘There are times when you just need life to come up and slap you on the ass!’ To Evelyn, she said, ‘You girl, you’ve got it rough. But your daddy…’ She whistled through her teeth. ‘You’ll have to look after my brother for me.’

From then on, Evelyn became the elective mute, until she went away. She was fifteen when she left Nicolas weeding the garden. She had been eight when her twin sister and her mother died.

To live is to lose. That’s the refrain that Nicolas recorded most commonly on his Dictaphone. Evelyn had never heard him say this; he came up with it after she had gone. He had thought that marrying a much younger woman, as his sister had always referred to her, would have meant an end to the losses. And yet, he had found, to live is to lose. He realised that he was fated to be lost in memories, and resigned to it.

Evelyn, for her part, intended to return. She loved her father, found his uncompromising aspect, when it came to gardening and war games anyway, inspiring. She left to cure herself. Evelyn felt no need to cure herself of her muteness, which she saw as a lifestyle choice, typical, maybe, of a fifteen year old. She was seeking a cure for her photographic memory.

The cargo of near-endless memories was incredible to bear. Evelyn stood atop an inverted pyramid of recollections, since year-by-year, she added a wider layer of memories. It was always organised so perfectly; she couldn’t help doing so. Evelyn went to therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and all the other talkers and listeners. She saw a neurologist who gave her electric shocks followed by psychotropic drugs. Afterwards, she was in a stupor that distracted her for a time, but didn’t stop her uncanny retrieval of every detail of her life, and her continual building of the upended pyramid.

It would be a valuable resource, if it were worth anything.

So Evelyn returned, still afflicted, to the flood-tainted house, her father and his blue books. She walked in the front door and saw the inside transformed by a dazzling collage. Every wall, cupboard, cabinet, wooden beam and even on the pictures and mirrors were pages from the blue books. Some pages featured her own writing, but the majority were in her father’s hand. The walls were covered in a description of his every moment, his every reflection on little element of his days.

Evelyn let her eyes travel over the papers. She saw innumerable comments on gardening, the movements of birds, hedgehogs and other fauna, and even more interminable commentary on his battles and skirmishes. Her eyes flicked onwards in embarrassment at an entry about an episode of masturbation over some images of civil war widows.

Nicolas began talking only a few moments after he saw her, reserving judgement and saying nothing about her disappearance and return. ‘I’m looking for patterns. I wanted to see it all at once, so I put the pages up, but they ended up spilling over into all the rooms, upstairs too.

‘I realised I kept writing the same thing. To live is to lose.’

Evelyn stared at Nicolas, her eyes matured by her time with the doctors, yet dewy like an overtired child. She spoke to him for the first time in eight years.

‘Dad, what was the point in it all?’

If he was surprised, Nicolas didn’t show it. He shrugged and looked away.

‘Maybe there isn’t a point,’ he said sadly. ‘But it’s a life, isn’t it? This is all I have and represent.’

To live is to lose, thought Nicolas, but here is a gift of memories preserved, at least.

‘Without this, I don’t remember it all.’

‘I’ve been trying to learn how to forget,’ Evelyn admitted.

‘There’s so little in a life,’ said Nicolas. ‘So little, that every detail earns remembering. My dear child, when it’s gone, it’s gone. Don’t travel light. Please, my darling, do everything you can to remember it all. For me, I have to write it down… I was trying to show you how much that mattered. For you, you have the greatest of gifts. Keep it all, horde the memories like most people horde money. They are all that will keep you going. Don’t try to travel light.

‘All this,’ Nicolas indicated his eccentric wallpapering, ‘has been only just enough for me.’

Evelyn smiled gently then, and Nicolas smiled back.

a one hundred and seventh story...'robertby'

Robert B. Robertby was a proud man: it seemed he had good reason.  Robert B. Robertby owned an estate in the country of 50 hectares with deer park.  And had a swanky apartment in the city with décor from Sotheby’s – the apartment over-looked Berkeley square.  Furthermore, his wife, Jacqueline, was a patrician beauty, would have been French royalty had the French not decided on a revolution two hundred years previous. Further still, Robert B. Robertby was the richest of his social clique, since he and Jacqueline had decided, ‘quite sensibly’ as they were quick to tell, not to have children.  ‘I don’t need anyone to send down the mine to earn me a living, I own the mine’, Robertby would joke.  The joke was lost on some, laughed at with false bonhomie by some others. 

Much of the source of Robertby’s pride came from his humble beginnings.  He used to blague that he had been ‘born in a cardboard box’, which was rum; nevertheless, he did grow up in a drab terrace house in Folkestone – today known only as home of the Channel Tunnel.  Robertby was ‘Bob’ back then to the street urchin kids, dressed meekly in their scanty post-war attire, that he would play football with on desolate cobbled streets, and run wheel-barrow races, pretend at blind man’s bluff, and so on.  ‘Bob’s’ father was a cobbler and his mother was a nurse.  ‘My father would regularly put the boot in’, Robertby quipped, before explaining that this made him a man before time – the time when most other men were still boys.

After school every day, the young ‘Bob’ would work.  He turned has hand at anything, anything except of course shoe-making and nursing.  ‘I realised from a young age that to follow in one’s parents footsteps was to risk making the same  mistakes’, Robertby often remarked to new acquaintances he assumed keen to hear his self-made story.  So, ‘Bob’ had a paper-round for a while, worked on the rapidly decaying Folkestone docks, ran the door at an amateur boxing club, pulled pints  in the local ale house, and later, had spells as a bank clerk, and as an assistant to a town lawyer.  These last two, Robertby cited as the moments ‘my mind turned to the business of success’, and success he got, whether by miserliness, or deception.  ‘Tax?’, Robertby would later quip to friends he guessed had off-shore bank accounts, ‘Tax is but a three letter word!’

It was as soon as money began to fill up Robertby’s pockets that he began to become self-conscious about being referred to as ‘Bob’, or ‘young Bob’, and so he dropped anyone who did so.  His parents were spared, they had always called him ‘Robert’, but not a single one of his former street-urchin friends, most of whom now were in the kinds of jobs ‘Bob’ had held when he was still at school.  ‘Bob? Who was I a protest singer?’, Robertby guffawed, unaware that the Bob he was referring to was christened Robert. 

The ‘B’, by the way, in Robertby’s name stood for Broadhurst, a stout, working-class English name, or so he thought – his descendants were in fact among the first American settlers and had since become Anglo-American notables.

Anyhow, Robert Robertby (he started using the B. after his first million) set out on the yeller-brick-road to riches in agricultural stocks and shares.  Agriculture in the 50s and 60s was experiencing major change and mechanisation, as all the technologies that had before been directed at killing, maiming and generally ruining the planet and the lives of many of its two-legged inhabitants, now were diverted to the industrial murder of many of the planet’s four legged-inhabitants, as well as towards corrupting natural soils everywhere in the name of progress.

Robertby was certainly one to buy into the idea of progress without even a millisecond of thought.  After all, had someone with his meagre background not done so, life would have ended in the midst and in debt.  And pretty soon he was making unimaginable sums of money by comparison with his parents insider trading on various pieces of farm machinery from automatic asparagus harvesters, to tractors, to laboratory refined pesticides.

When Robertby reached the tender age of 23 he owned a 5 bedroom house with 3 acres, an Aston Martin, a succession of girlfriends and an ego that was growing somewhat exponentially.  And things kept on getting better for Robert Robertby, and so he believed.  At 26 he had his first million, and a new middle name, at 30 he was a millionaire several times over, and had begun to move in London circles, even met the Beatles!  ‘Money, that’s what I want’, Robertby told Paul McCartney in the Starr Club one evening, and McCartney, naturally with eyebrows raised, said ‘we’ve just recorded a song about it’.  John sang it.  George wanted more of it.  Ringo played drums.

Jacqueline Chercheurdor met Robert B. Robertby at a weekend party for the rich and famous, stupid and richly famous, and rich and stupidly famous on Carnaby Street in July 1967.  She was won over by Robertby’s brazen charm, and by then, deep, deep pockets.  Robertby was now involved in the burgeoning film industry, as a financier, and had a tough renown.  ‘Jacqueline thought I had balls of brass’, Robertby would recall, ‘until she discovered that they were the same material as my wrist-watch, and my chain’.  Gold.

Jacqueline and Robertby married a year on from their first meeting, the ceremony held at Robertby’s recently acquired apartment over-looking Berkley square.  Robertby’s parents came, and nearly died of embarrassment – Robertby’s mother fainted in the faux-Egyptian toilet and had to be revived by Mick Jagger, at which point, she fainted again. And gradually over the succeeding years, Robertby’s apartment was filled by Jacqueline with Ming Dynasty bric-a-bric, and so forth.

But, the gravy train has to run out of track somewhere, sometime.  And it was an incident on Robert B. Robertby’s aforementioned 50 hectare country estate that began the decline and fall.  One afternoon, Robertby, by now at the peak of his wealth, invited none other than Michele Ferrero and family around for afternoon tea.  ‘We won’t be having any of those damned chocolates mind you!’, Robertby had confided in a friend, and in fairness Robertby’s girth suggested he didn’t need another cocoa and sugar based confection for the remainder of his life.

So the Ferreros arrived, then with a mere 11.3 billion dollars to their name, and while the adults talked in the Regency conservatory, the house-keeper took the Ferrero children to go see the deers in the deer park.  The house-keeper and children had been gone for nearly four and half hours before either the Robertbys or the Ferreros realised the house-keeper and Ferrero children had not returned – dusk was beginning to fall, and a lot of expensive champagne had been consumed (although no chocolates).  Groggily, Robert B. Robertby issued a search party, while the adults resumed their social time, apparently unconcerned.  

At 9pm the butler, a tall, erect and serious septuagenarian, who secretly despised Robertby, walked slowly into the Regency conservatory and asked with extreme decorum whether he could step outside with Robertby for a moment, please sir.

Outside in the marble festooned hallway the butler broke the news to Robertby that a Red deer stag had mauled to death both Ferrero children and Robertby’s house-keeper (whose name Robertby kept forgetting) in her attempts to save them both.  The recent and sudden rise in air temperature, as spring had turned very rapidly to summer, had bought about a disastrous change in the behaviour of the adult male stag, and caused its levels of testosterone to go haywire.  Robertby’s reaction? ‘Bloody children’.

What he had not counted on was that Michel Ferrero was standing in the doorway at that very instant …

… The rest, as they say, is history.  Robert B. Robertby ended up back in Folkestone, and died even more destitute than his parents, wifeless, friendless, and childless, when ironically to have spawned a rich son, as his parents had done, might have saved him.

Indeed, you can find Robert B. Robertby’s tombstone in the graveyard at Holy Trinity Benefice, Folkestone.  On the grey stone is inscribed his epitaph.  A more imaginative soul might have come up with something wry and witty, such as ‘the only human known to have actually succumbed to death by chocolate’, or ‘killed by the sperm of a Cervus elaphus’, or ‘here lies Robert B. Robertby, born a Bob, raised a Robert, had an answer to everyone including Shakespeare, and yet died again a Bob.’  However, as you will see for yourself, if you brush away the poison ivy, and ignore the yellow BMX sticker some heartless teen has stuck there, Robert B. Robertby’s gravestone simply says ‘deceased’ – there are no jokes in death.  And under the sod, the intrepid among you will find a once filthy rich sod, now simply a filthy sod, with not a single penny in his eye sockets.