Ready for Nothing

All of a sudden, he is looking at it, there in the kitchen.
Peering down at the spoon pressing the teabag against the side of the cup,
Squash, squash…squash,
Squeezing, squeezing, watching the colour deepen.
A thousand worries held at bay.
Doom, death, depression all at once
Banging their little fists,
Behind a thick wall of glass.
And here, now…
So very, very little actually going on.


If you spot me in a café somewhere at a table for one, looking busy behind a laptop or at a phone, eyes hidden behind a bluish glare, come carefully forward not too directly and catch me by surprise. Turn suddenly, ask my name, for the time or perhaps to borrow the folded newspaper on my table. Just watch how I become the exact someone you think I am right before your eyes. And while I wait for you, I’ll keep on sitting there as the no one I am with nothing at all to say until you make me speak.

End of the Present

I no longer yearn for the present but for that blissful continuity at the heart of myself. The moment by moment attention to a recollected now, a non-opportunity newly dressed, has only ever served to estrange me from my own seamlessness, and hold me hostage in squeezed, split experience.  The present, like every other myth, must go.

Boy on Bedside

All of a sudden after days of pre-thought, he was on the corner of her bed, looking at her as she neared her end. She was now so very, very old, emaciated to a point of being difficult to look at, at least at first, lying at what seemed to him like an uncomfortable angle but which for her, in this state, was comfortable. A light blanket covered most of her body except for one of her feet, and he looked from there up to her face, and back to her foot, both ends telling a different story. There was nothing to say. There was nothing for either of them to say. Indeed, the saying of things, conversation as it is known, was, there and then, undone. And as they looked at each other, they looked equally at the helpless, plastic words that sat on the bedclothes like pooling beads from string, doing nothing, going nowhere, tapping up against each other. He, younger by sixty years, in the thick of his wretched optimism, felt that he’d been lovingly put in his place, there by her bedside. She, who’d never seemed to care to know all that much of anything, whose eyes were grey glass, drifting…drifting…was making space now, a home for a visiting authority that came but twice a life.