I like this post an awful lot.

The Honest Ink.

A twenty minute way to fall in love.

What do you fall for first?  Sometimes the most absurd things flag someone up and with him it was his hands. Long fingers. Still fingers. Mine twitter and pick at my lips, fly up into my hair whilst I’m staring out of the bus window. I take my rings on and off, put them inside each other, usually drop them on the floor, (then the undignified scrabbling to find them, sometimes difficult when drunk or flustered), then remind myself not to fiddle with them and that lasts for ten minutes before I start all over again.

I move too much to be elegant.

When he gets on the bus I make a concerted effort; a head-bound voice that says sit still, my girl. I become too conscious of myself and my legs then feel too big for my body and my ears tickle. He sits half-sideways in the seat, so sometimes we play a push-me-pull-you game of glances. His hair is parted on the side, so that leans one way and his wonky smile leans the other. He sits on the right, I sit on the left and like all the other regulars on the bus, we know where we are. I am disappointed on the odd days that he is not there; that is how the feeling snuck up on me.

 

And I think about all those mawkish moments in books and films where eyes catch across a crowded room or fingers meet as each player reaches for a drink and how suitable music is always playing and how these scenes must have happened somewhere, at some point, to get into someone’s mind.

 

I get off the bus on the stop before him and one day as I passed him, with Victorian mimicry, I dropped my glove right beside him. He moved to retrieve it, I moved to retrieve it and in the middle our heads collided and recoiled. Both of us apologised, and I blushed and he sheepishly smiled and handed me the troublesome glove.

 

I sit for a minute at the bus stop, waiting for my pink cheeks to fade and inwardly cursing my two accounts of clumsiness. Why him, why did I drop it next to him, what perverse corner of my brain let it slip from the grip of my hand?

 

I’m left with a bruise. I’m left wondering whether to catch a different bus to avoid the fact that we might now have to greet each other. At least I still have both of my gloves.

Say “cheese”.

 

 

Mellis Cheesemonger.

conversation/next year, Proust.

“maybe when we get into our 30s we’ll all lose this urge to stop writing frantically about our youth slipping away. Or maybe the urge will get worse”

“but arrested development is our generation’s AIDS”

“so why were there no public-service-adverts about it then?”

“it’s the elephant in the room; someone needs to bring it out into the open. We can wear wee badges…”

“will Bono help?”

“not sure it’s big enough in Africa. Haven’t heard any little starving kids discussing old TV shows.”

“who will star in our tasteful black and white adverts?”

“JD from Scrubs”.

Revive.

 

she says; “I’ll know when I’m better because I’ll stop second-guessing everything that I feel”

Stolen Poem.

Between the Penny Dropping and the Penny Landing by Roddy Lumsden.

The things we want most we will never have.

We learned this when we overheard the song
of a slant moon which wraps the land below,
which courts significance in every corner,
spreads the blueshift, ekes the silver rose

and finds the coin, mid-fall, which will decide
the night for us: the half-chance sounding lower
than a cat step or a spinning leaf or raindrops
meeting on a skylight. Moonlight hones

the bidden street. While the penny spins,
pale beams catch on a lost key in a nest,
roll over roofs and drop into the alley,
and we are shadows in that alley. Only

when I used up all my nos did I say yes.

Kammerer.

Where infatuation beds down at my feet

And raises its children.

Fear or flattery

Makes no difference.

 

I will not gratify, I will instead feed. I will tie up your needs and mine

In a mess of a cat’s cradle, in the noose of a hammock.

 

Imagine the gas coating the inside of my face; my nostrils

the cool stone feeling of the oven floor,

My work of art explains it away,

The blanket of vocabulary.

 

My mother carried me to the city to protect me from you,

I just threw bread from the window and waited until you came.

 

I am the king of making you feel

That we are in the midst of endless private conversations.

I hold us all together.

 

Rubbing the bawdy belly of the streets,

Their values are my gravy.

 

You were always there through this,

Rubbing the velvet the wrong way.

I just wanted to make sure that you were as lovelorn as an old sheet.

 

Through the window open,

You were not caught creeping in

Only scrawling out and even then I slept the whole time.

 

I was going to escape, deaf-mute, to Paris,

But instead we went walking and in the queer, resting storm-eye moment

You leaned over again to me and I was aghast at

The age of you, the size of you, a childhood shadow monster. No wonder

The panic; no wonder the sick desperation

The taste of my own rank saliva;

My Boy Scout blade still surprisingly sharp.

I bound your arms to your side with your belt,

Filled your pocket with rocks

 

Watched you sink through the sheets of the river.

 

So I stood, shaking in an apartment doorway

Palm laid out with the bloodied cigarette packet,

Awaiting instructions on how to secret a knife,

Noting the vague reactions of my friends.

 

The darkness of the movie theatre was the best accomplice.

The museum

Asked too much of me.

 

And my prosecutors, my mother, did not believe me,

The confession before the crime.

I showed them the glasses buried in the park,

The dirt beneath my eager nails. And I smiled

Over the privilege of loss and the

Sanctity of a conclusion.  Cloaked in

My good family name, with my mother telling

Exemplary tales of your predatory nature.

The newspapers resisted the subtleties of our relationship,

The games, the plays, the fear.

My first degree plea, my second degree deduction

Two years of quieting my own dear smell.

 

You were what set me apart,

You and my vocabulary;

I’m your home and their way ahead, youthful exhibitionism

Set to words that made their fame.

“I didn’t know it was an animal that would bite” (- Augustine)

You were the one that I pushed into battle before me,

Made you front-line and siren,

Us, with our matching shoes and fringes

 

Later I wailed when I had none of the action and

 

When I found my voice

It startled you like a midnight earthquake,

The bed-posts shaking

 

You squawked from your bed//

I blocked you out with hammer and nails

And heavy boards until

 

Our indulgent call-and-response became

Two calls

 

and no response.

 

 

You said,

‘whatever it takes to get you back on your feet’;

This wasn’t what I meant.

 

 

Do you remember when we watched that boy in the park,

Pulling the fluffy petals off the roses,

Whilst his parents shrieked

And he laughed and we laughed

As he threw the petals in the air?

You made me drink some milk because I couldn’t eat that day.

 

Do you remember

 

the second but last time I saw you

So much

Spite in your eyes that night,

My hands clenched under the table. What was there

To be thankful for?

 

I wonder what it would be like to see you again now,

How I would be unable to walk past and pretend I hadn’t seen you.

 

But I can’t imagine you with your long hair,

But I can’t imagine you with a ring on that finger.

 

She said that

You never ask after me;

 

You’d shake if you knew I was still telling it, but

If it wasn’t such a good story

It wouldn’t matter so much now.

 

I am

now front-line

But lazy and unsure, and

Desperate for a disguise.

 

I heart Charlie Brown.

Two minute story 2/Ethan.

His girlfriend was seven months pregnant and sat amongst the group of friends sipping an orange juice and looking slightly enviously at the wine that they were drinking. They are discussing baby names. She knows which ones she like, but she won’t tell anyone, not even her husband, because she’s worried that someone will make one of those comments about how they had a syphilitic uncle called that name. In her head she talks to her womb and the baby with in it and calls it by name, sometimes female, sometimes male. When she returns her attention to the group, the names suggested have become increasingly silly, and seem to centre around her husband choosing the titles of guitarists he idolised in his latter teenage years.

 

There is a lull and the other sounds of the pub swell and fill it. He is looking at his friends one by one and says; “you know, it would make this whole process easier if one of you lot just died and I could name the child after you”.