January 2011
25 posts
the road we travel
the road is hazy. straight, thick, dark and silent. cursed’s the word; it is cursed.
orange eyes sit on pedestals raised from the earth by chrome monuments. they are waiting quietly and you think it sad that they wait so solemnly, but the world is waiting for something and you can hear your own breathing fleeting from your lungs and marrying before your eyes and you’re looking for road signs...
2 tags
the sound of silence
there is nothing more complex or haunting or fantastic than the music of silence, the subtle timbres of nothing at all (or so we tell ourselves when we talk about nothing, hunched over in green folding chairs by stank riverbeds, fishing for fishes amongst the sludge)
and looking back through old photo albums of mine (of different faces and beautiful smiles that I never even stopped to...
2 tags
the damned
detective muir paces in front of the gray table you’re sat behind. your seat ebbs as if it has a pulse or something each time his thick death boots graze the concrete pattern dashed into the earth, and while there’s no breeze in hell the document in his hand and the legs of your chair still seem to sway. you can’t feel your own pulse though. it got left behind.
muir’s talking to you now, talking...
finale
isn’t it dirty? Frank says. he lights a cigarette and you’re obliged to agree.
Frank grunts ‘cause you’re mumbling but that doesn’t mean shit. what does shit mean in the city anyway you think.
you get up from your desk and look out the window. not much of a view. no green, just follies, gray follies, lots of them lolling like toadstools, and your reflection’s there too. your forehead’s marked...
3 tags
+/-, headingdownnorth
headingdownnorth:
a man cannot live on angst alone no matter how convenient or sexy he might think it to be. in order to plumb the depths you have to know the most formidable heights, even if they seem relatively shallow or uninspiring. i’m no scientist but if i recall correctly (and i think i do) every element on the periodic table has at least one proton, one positive charge. even if you’re a...
2 tags
the wiles and times of the faceless gentleman
slumped deep into his ancient seat (the waves too scared to touch his feet) betwixt the streams of hoods and dreams i see a faceless gentleman.
he doesn’t say much (not much to say) he’d still be sitting there anyway watching me and watching you cause the faceless gentleman he sees you too!
he sits there grinning under that dark black hat and you kinda’ like him because of that ...
2 tags
the faceless gentleman
dear diary,
so these past few weeks I’ve not leaked a single word onto a sheet of paper and I know it’s like I’m pulling some kind of silence or something though I assure you I’m not. I’m not like that, it’s not like that. it’s not like that at all.
I’ve had ideas and I’ve had dreams, and thoughts and exchanges have occurred – several exchanges even - and I’ve seen this and done that and...
2 tags
going fishing in a stream of consciousness
Idling out of the back-seat window in a slippery haze as we drive to the river, cold and black and smells like shit, I start thinking about fishing and I see nothing in it.
Nothing but tangled old rods and blue waterproof jackets. Nothing but ripples which flit away like puffs of smoke (I can’t visualise butterflies.) Nothing but rotten soup cans stacked in the back, stinking out the world...
2 tags
the day of the restaurant fire
the day the witty tabloids smelt the sweet and sour sauces from three blocks away was the day of the restaurant fire. the day the restaurant – the three tiered tower – burnt to the ground into the bowels of the Earth. it left no prisoners or casualties or fallen or such but a body count; a body count all the same.
there was no knell or alarm or siren - ‘cause they left too late - but there was...
2 tags
to the prisoner, the civilian
they caught you with bloody hands and tears had dampened your sleeves. there was no body left behind – no cadaver, no corpse, no crime committed - but you cry and you cry and the world cries too ‘cause while they never found a body they found you alright, caught you in the act on CCTV through cables and radars, satellite dishes covered in blood - as transparent as your crime - but this means...
3 tags
the grey corridor
you’re walking through an alley of trees that lost their beige long long ago. you see this girl and you think “it’s Eleanor Rigby” but you shrug it off and keep on walking, just that little bit faster now ‘cause it’s raining again. a quaint little puddle collects on the side like a homeless man and you see Father MacKenzie staring back at you with an empty cap tied down in the mud but you shrug it...
2 tags
woo 100 followers!
yesssssssss! thank you followers and non-followers! pretty stoked!
5 tags
girl in brown coat chews gum at street's end
you’re thinking that this could be a movie and I can see it on your cheeks, the thoughts dripping off them into a pool of proof as you grind that gum like a king of hard-knocks or a ball-busting cop with a taste for blood. you’ve got a .45 in your jacket and a blade between your lips, and nothing to see here shadowsyour brow like a prison tattoo as you kick up the pavements in playground furore,...
2 tags
in a homeware store at night
under the table in the empty homeware store: why are you here? why are you here? they keep asking you tenaciously and you keep fighting to answer (I imagine) but all you can think of are those damned thick laced boots of hell walking through the isles like death, each footstep a sandstorm (when you’re trapped under a table in a homeware store at least) and it’s silent. a clock on the wall ticks...
2 tags
internal dissonance
you were sitting by the bar on the black bar stool when the woman sat down wearing red. she didn’t speak, just lit a cigarette and sat there posing like a vase of roses in Vogue magazine. an empty vase but you smelt roses. she smoked for a while then hammered it dead into the tray bludgeoning it finely like a trained killer (she’d done this before but you didn’t notice) and she lent towards you...
2 tags
at night
the world’s still alive at night.
the trees keep dreaming, the music keeps playing, and our hearts keep beating and calling each other in cheap hotels and cafés and parlours and restaurants and bars,
and life, with the rhythm that it has, goes on as it always did, even when it seems to be that little bit darker
cause the lights of the city mean a helluva lot more than what Ra does ...
1 tag
the ballad of the clown bank robbers
three men with guns just gunned into the bank with a “hands in the air no one here needs to die!” and they told all the clients to fall and to lie “just get down stay still and don’t talk or ask why”
they marched to the desks and demanded for money they were wearing clown masks some one thought it was funny and a clown shot him dead and that was just that like...
1 tag
quiet night of quiet stars
sure, the leaves are still rustling and the trees still sway like a man with a sax, but that’s jazz for you, and that dog’s still barking down the way, barking like mad, as if it’s on fire, and
who knows, maybe it is on fire, and maybe the whole world’s on fire, and maybe it’ll all be gone by the morning, who knows,
but I guess he’ll never know, cause oh boy, that boy sleeps so...
2 tags
a cadre of snakes (battlefield culture part 2)
(First part can be found here! http://joe-vaughan.tumblr.com/post/1216178386/battlefieldculture1)
so a few years ago, in our battlefield culture, the children watched on as their comrades kept killing and dying and dying. they dyed the streets red (the streets of the city) its alleyways littered with bodies of soldiers, of boys and girls “too young to die.”
the greens of the parks were ...
“the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn whom it touches”
– E.E. Cummings, from “XIX”, from Viva (via liquidnight)
3 tags
a picture of the city and a very slender tomb the...
It was pretty dark inside the apartment. Pretty dark indeed, and it was pretty dark outside the apartment too. The whirring of the city’s inwards – tyres screeching, muscles screeching, cogs screeching, screaming, turning while lives turned and worlds turned too - hung in the background like stars in the sky, dangling like cheap fairytale lanterns. But this is no fairy tale, no piece of fiction -...
1 tag
at the end of the night at four five eight
I watched the night as it died away and I watched it too as its ashes flickered back to life in shards of hues and sparks of red as light returned to a darker place but the main thing I watched that night was the clock a digital clock nothing more than that
and I watched it for a while and I think it watched me and what I thought numbers once might well have been something more...
“[There’s a sharp knife stabbed into the soft part of my head, where the memories...”
– Hunting Knife (short story), by Haruki Murakami (via the-final-sentence)
1 tag
a clumsy cadence
I said I’d stop but I did it again and I’ll probably do it again and again
and I’ll say to myself “the new year starts to- day!” but I’ll say that tomorrow a- gain anyway…
oh what a clumsy cadence this has been for the year that just went by I mean
or still goes by perhaps I should say because the future doesn’t start to- day (or so I keep telling...
December 2010
40 posts
5 tags
01:17 (an excuse to stay awake on new year's day)
it’s one seventeen as the crow flies and one one eleven as the paper will read (in a few hours time) and I’m skimming anthologies of o’hara and bukowski for secrets and (hidden) treasure buried jewels and gold caskets and signposts really for where to go next (cause I feel kinda lost without a bustling calendar r.i.p)
and I say skimming but I don’t mean speed or haste or flurry ...
2 tags
2011/happy new year
12 months ago this was a pretty different town and in 12 months time it’ll be a pretty different town too but not 12 months after that cause apparently that’s when the world ends
though I don’t believe a word of it.
happy new year all. happy new year in- deed.
Hope it’s a good one, everyone! Thanks for following me and supporting me over these past few months too, means so much!
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