SHOUT

A watchful neighbour might attest,

he is not one to shout

A watchful neighbour might

be hard of hearing

The whisper when it comes

bubbles on the lips, dribbles off the vest

detonates

before it has a chance to form,

evolve into a

SHOUT

A maroon snail backfiring

at the traffic stop

A splash

A mollusc sewn with the bends

An atheist grown secular

as a dung beetle at a donkey convention

An ass courting elephant ears

The shout that is stifled at the straw poll,

the bellow that rattles around the waterhole

The roar that is the exquisite fruit

of assembly lines given over to rust

between 3 and 4 AM.

once again for emphasis | the only book you'll never need

"I was hungry for words, the anarchist typography of dub..." - ib

The first paragraph had no legs. It fell out my mouth sideways on a stutter, a wad of phlegm gathering in the crotch of a paraplegic with a tic.
     The black dog was busy licking its balls. Under my bed. The sofa. I got up and kicked it two thirds unconscious.
     A thin stream of snot issued from its snout.
     It was only about two inches tall, the cunt, a ball of wool with broken kirby grips for limbs. Much like the rest of us, it was destined for a bad end. I nudged it onto the fringe of the rug and coughed again for emphasis.
     "See you, you little shite," I snarled. The ghost of Hector Nicol eating up the consonants, my teeth not in yet, an old woman's shawl at the shoulders.
     A truck out front dropped its gate and with it several lengths of scaffolding.
     Someone howled. The scream of a child forced out of forty-year-old lungs. It looked like it might turn out to be a fine day after all.
      "Heh." I went.
      The clock winced where I left it wound up on its shelf. I ground the heel of my good foot on that soft part of the mutt. A tiny watermelon sprang a leak.
     The first paragraph of the morning is often wasted on the cheap seats. A premature ejaculation.
     If you have never lived in Paisley, you will not appreciate the irony.
     The middle class on its uppers, scribblers in Edinburgh in the main, do their best to disguise it as writer's block. One off the wrist.
     The small minded will often try to collect it in a handkerchief before disposing of it politely.
     Well. What they dismiss as wank we bottle as an aperitif.
     Where there is muck there is brass, and where there is brass there are monkeys smashing cymbals. Anarchy around the corner.
     I am nothing if not a kindly old soul. I like to think of myself as genteel in my dotage.
     If you are shrewd you might forgive my shortcomings.
     Just like Alan Ladd I need a box to step up on to reach a measure of myself. A splash of colour in those freckles diving between a sweetheart's breasts.
     The mutt stirred. Writhed.
     I shook one toe at it.
     Its head snuck back beneath its paw. Its hindquarters shivered. The tail, tragic, bruised - a choirboy wizard's busted wand - entirely gave up the ghost.
     Gingerly, I picked it up. Popped its backbone between two fingers.

mickey's monkey

""Shoot," I said." - ib

I was hungry for words, the anarchist typography of dub, but my stomach had other ideas.
     I was waiting for one or other's finger to drop on the letters "h-e-a-v-E", but even those few I still held out for were visibly asleep on the mouse. On the run from the burden of correspondence.
     Heavy, heavy manners.
     One bone after another. Jawbones. Trombones. Hambones. Eventually connecting with the bird-cage nesting cerebellum.
     Left and right hemisphere, hindbrain.
     That lowest part of the brainstem responsible for the art of breathing; the ebb and flow of digestive juices.
     Heavy manners.
     Hangovers. Alcohol. Narcotics. The humming bewilderment of sinsemilla, without seed.
     The entire world seeming for one second to inhale and sit on it, the news not even wholly bad, it is as if our collective bent is on convalescence between one foul atrocity and the next.
     There is a war going on, it is not the war we were taught we were waging, we are out of cigarettes but not yet out of skins.

See my baby jive

"...we lived on the same page. We shared a certain olfactory bent." - ib

The man hovering in the doorway resembled Henry Chinaski in a suit borrowed from the C.I.A.. An invisible pork pie hat.
     The rain spat into empty flowerpots on the balcony behind him.
     The boys bickered down the hall.
     I don't mean several rude acquaintances deep in a game of cards. I mean my boys. The five-year-old and the teenage delinquent Waffen-SS tank commander rumbling in their turret.
     The Chinaski character pretended not to hear.
     He held onto the demeanour of someone who sets store by tact. A civil servant, for instance, moonlighting for the Agency.
     In less than a month or so all residue of it would have evaporated. Leaving in its place a caustic observance of protocol merely, a standing on ritual chewed up, masticated, coaxed into a line delivered out the side of one's mouth.
     He held out a laminated badge. Pinned to the pocket under his jacket lapel.
     "Good morning, sir."
     Ipsos MORI, the blue and green square announced. G-Man.
     "Shoot," I said. 

the indiscrete art of ass puppetry

"A Stephen Hawking voice said Take it. Share it." - 15.08.2016 18:12

The lemur's keeper read my mail while I sat hatching a plan. Where we diverged geographically, we lived on the same page. We shared a certain olfactory bent. The lemur. Me. His keeper. 

     An obligation, an irascible itch. An able filcher's predilection for ass puppetry.

om

▼ LUNAR LEMUR: OM LATTE from "The Indiscrete Art Of Ass Puppetry" Trinket Trance 2016

silky arachnids | stickbots are go

"One by one, his audience, if that is what they amounted to... stole away." - ib 

The black dog was busy licking its balls. Under my bed. The sofa. I got up and kicked it two thirds unconscious.
     A thin stream of snot issued from its snout.
     A truck out front dropped its gate and with it several lengths of scaffolding.
     The driver hopped drunkly on one foot and howled. It looked like it might turn out to be a fine day after all.
      I snapped the waistband of my undershorts over the cold barrel of a snub nose .38. So the label read. If it still held just one in the chamber I might have emptied it into the mutt. As it happened I was loaded with the flu. A couple of Paracetamol ought to do that trick my night nurse refused to turn. The bitch would not put out.
      Even pumped full of steroids she could not fix a limp.
      The Russians were in no hurry to accept her defection. No one else got in line.
      Just like Alan Ladd she needed a box to step on to reach a measure of her shortcomings. Four feet eleven in socks and only a rose in black and white.
      A blush. Well. A suspicion of colour in those freckles diving between her breasts.
      The mutt stirred. I shook one toe at it.
      Its head snuck back beneath its paw. Its hindquarters shivered. The tail, tragic, debilitated - a boy wizard's splintered wand - entirely gave up the ghost.

scribe

"I have grown tired of confederacies I strive to sculpt by rote. I have grown secular as a dung beetle." - ib

After a long, sleepless night the sky was the sweetest of blues, candyfloss, dusted with sugar from a tuppenny wrap.
    An unused toilet roll stretched loosely about the heavens.
    While he waited for the kettle to boil he read several lines from a newly published anthology of poems. Penned by an old acquaintance.
    The imagery was crystalline. The thrust of it not remotely obfuscated as he had led himself to expect. A change of tack. He found himself reflecting on familiar patterns. Terrains. Cellular structures.
    He thought he recognised in it something of his own. A trick of the light.
    Though it was far from cold where he sat near the window, he slammed shut the jacket of the book as if escaping a draft, and moved his fingers to the buttons on his cardigan.
    His hands shook. A marionette's on a trembling wire. This acquaintance was old, but in years a virtual youth still. The issue of a younger island. A Caribbean jewel once the playground of tricorn hats.
     Hushed admonitions thundered overhead. Accordions wheezed. His feet jostled to move him to throw up in the kitchen sink.
     He went out to the veranda instead and sat with his morning coffee.
     He had long fallen out of love with burning flakes of tobacco, but the craving still arose from time to time like a fluttering in his throat.
     The woman was at her habitual spot in the window across the street. Her neighbour sat on the stoop just above the concrete stairs. One ear cocked. Listening to children squabbling on their way to school.
     He raised his cup and in the act of it broke wind. None too cacaphonous, but loud nonetheless.
     His fart had an elegant mellifluousness to it, he felt, trumpeting on the accent, faintly whistling as it tailed.
     Reverberating through close to break as waves against brick walls.
     The scribe was unbowed. He had committed many wrongs in his life, certainly, but always he resisted that old testament notion of original sin.
     One by one, his audience, if that is what they amounted to, calmly shuffled to their feet and stole away.

zip gun method stuns riot police dunkin' donuts

Dearest vegan,

     Pit bulls and pinheads, bullfrogs and spiny fins,
     brothers and sisters.
     Well. Well. Fuck the punctuation. That bucket sunk in the ground. Fishing for tadpoles, where a more emphatic pause jostles to be received.   
     Rejoice. The abject demolition of the lung, the pin pulled on a nebulizer.
     Better just to dance after the bandages come off than raggedly recite a weather forecast in reverse.
     1976. #7. A dragon. The fire snake asleep at the hearth.
     The summer has not delivered. The promise of a mistrial. The master wind blows ill, a lot of hot air in the bullhorn.
     A Honda backfiring at the traffic stop.
     I have not taken up a cigarette in more than sixteen weeks. What is the point ? Better to give up finally than give in to last requests.
     We are smoked. The bacon fat curls the edges of a knocked off Qur'an. A prop. A counterfeit. 114 units of varying lengths, distressed like orphaned pigs' tails.
     I have not done much writing. I walked a good deal. Then I came down with a virus. A cold. Man flu, a nurse uncharitably quipped. They were all out of nuns. The best of them got eaten up by airstrikes. Dispensing alms to unbelievers, hogtied under hospital beds. 
     The faint rash of a sun tan came to nothing in the end.     
     I have grown tired of confederate effigies I strive to sculpt by rote. I have grown secular as a dung beetle.
     A schizophrenic tried to put me straight and failed to proscribe my meandering. My gums continue to bleed in the bathroom sink of a morning. The teeth themselves remain mostly intact.
     Aside from this, I am quite well, thank you.

doctor benway makes work for idle hands

"It was just that I felt out of step with prevailing weather patterns." - ib

I resolved to divest myself of corpse hair from head to toe. To more accurately calibrate the distance between bruise and wall, the Velcro bracelet of eczema and smooth plaster.
     I did not make the first phase of it, the shaving of the skull.
     I did not make it.
     There was no ritual cleansing of the body. There was no rolling away the stone.
     I stepped out the bath without treading water. I could not bare to hear the sudden rush of it.
     The razor lay where I placed it next to the soap, a pubic curl embedded in the amber translucent heart of it like a fossil or a negligent surgeon's stitch.
     Something happens between January and April. Resolutions wither on the vine, just as yellowed fats asphyxiate the vein, the artery, dislodged like the best of intentions.
     My quit date came and went. The cigarette glued to my lip, the ceramic perimeter of a inexpertly mended ashtray.
     How do you like my emotion tree ? she asked.
     It looks like it needs a Valium, doll.
     I never learned to keep my mouth shut. Even as I forgot to breathe.
     Through the narrowest of tunnels.
     I listened to the radio. The channel murmuring thick invective as I slumbered on the sofa in a rudely sewn together pile. Too sick in my bones to move beyond a twitch.
     A young woman in India had been doused in acid. A suicide bomber in burning dungarees had just detonated his vest in a children's playground in Pakistan.
     I chewed on curdled sours. Spat them back out like Robert Mugabe breaking bread with indigenous insurgent admirers. I fled to the window and watched two dogs squaring up to fight.
     A bitch in a Pomeranian furred parka. A witless terrier.
     The needle grazed fifty while my eyes were resting. My pelvis fell like it was floored.
     My mind had scrambled back in the trunk years earlier but it had a habit of sneaking out to write once in a while when no one was looking.

     There were twelve cunts gathered round the table.
     I pulled up a chair and made it a baker's dozen.
     No-one was going to invite us any time soon to sit down as a jury. You could tell from the errant tufts of hair, the furtive glances, the chewed on hangnails, that we were likely more accustomed to being molested in the dock.
     One of us sported an alarming contusion where practicing Sannyasi daub paint upon their brow.
     He was frigid and unflinching under polite interrogation. He gave no indication as to whether he was tripping out his socks or simply mad.
     He rolled the pen across the table when prompted a little too fast.
     He failed to pass his disability assessment.
     A voice rolled upright and wrestled for clarity.
     Sanders savages Clinton in Washington. Milwaukee pokes its tongue into the corner of green sedimentary blown glass. Garry Shandling dies. There is no encore, no part two.
     The surgeon knits one, purls one just like granny. The barber calmly snips.
     The fat man upstairs is depressed but has been prescribed no pills to alleviate his condition. They throw him out of hospital after just a fortnight.
     Those two weeks are nothing short of a holiday for all concerned.
     The fat man relishes the free dinners served at regular intervals. And, because the ward is all but unoccupied, he enjoys a monopoly on the flat screen television.
      How do I know this ? The fat man tells me so.
      I take in a young Jack Russell to see how far I would get walking the dog. I listen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer just to punish myself and find myself implausibly wanting more. The puppy pisses on my carpet. I do not warm to the neighbourly practice of wrestling its turds into plastic bags to dispose of them discreetly. It escapes and I labour after it in the dark, attempting to lure it away from the genitals of other dogs with rawhide chews purchased from the crappy lime lit corner shop.
     Stop me if you've fucking heard this one before.
     The circus tent is straining under all that political correctness. The global village has been commandeered by terrorists, geriatrics in a national lottery to sock the patsy in the jaw. The barbershops are overrun by skinheads. Merle Haggard is back in the saloon.
     Don't stop me now. I'm having such a good time, I'm having a ball.

president gas

"The point is, you can never be too greedy." - Donald John Trump

The needle grazed fifty while my eyes were resting. My pelvis felt like it was shattered.

     My mind had scrambled back in the trunk years earlier but it had a habit of sneaking out to write once in a while when no one was looking.
      It was not that I felt old. Or more beleaguered than the next inebriated wretch.
      It was just that I felt out of step with prevailing weather patterns.
      The world was fucked. The fat man padding restlessly back and forth upstairs until my brain felt like it might erupt out my nose in a Pharaoh's sneeze.
      America seemed hell bent on electing an imbecile to office, and while I never once fancied to venture far from my island home - to holiday in extremis - the mosques were piling up in rows while the beach huts winced and paddled out into the sea. Just to escape the crowds.
      The niqab had all but eclipsed the ubiquitous little black dress in all the smartest periodicals.
      Going postal was the fashion.
      Strapping on the explosives vest. Posing for Instagram with the pin between thumb and forefinger. YouTube.
      In our schools, the lockers bristled not with sticks of incense but clips and magazines.
      The ones getting stoned had been accused of adultery.
      The KKK shared column inches with the PKK. The ballots were not rigged, they were governed by market stalls peddling trumpery. Tiny hands fluttered like blades at work on a rabbit. Palming coins, shuffling cups.
      I took in a young Jack Russell to see how far I would get walking the dog. I listened to Emerson, Lake & Palmer just to punish myself and found myself implausibly wanting more. The puppy pissed on my carpet. I did not warm to the neighbourly practice of wrestling its turds into plastic bags to dispose of them discreetly. It escaped and I laboured after it in the dark, attempting to lure it away from the genitals of other dogs with rawhide chews purchased from the corner shop.
      It is not that the Donald is some kind of magician.
      The sleight of hand is pure deception.
      The circus tent is straining under all that political correctness. The global village has been commandeered by suicide bombers, geriatrics in a national lottery to sock the patsy in the jaw. The barbershops are overrun by skinheads. Merle Haggard is back in the saloon.
      They might as well share a joint and fuck each other in the ass on stage like people used to do back when Cassius Clay welched on Uncle Sam.
      Obama. Merkel.
      The baby boomers are having none of it.
      They are too close to retirement to countenance their Miami burning down like Aleppo. Beirut. Old Baghdad.
       The Jack Russell packed her bags after just three nights.
       Millie. She was a sweet little thing. Like Michael Jackson's pet rat.
       A week after she had gone I could not get the smell of shit out from under my nails. My balls. It followed me around like a migrant in cheap cologne.

nurse with wound

"Selfishness is the unwillingness to give up your soul for the rehabilitation of your future." - Michael Bassey Johnson

There were twelve cunts gathered round the table.
     I pulled up a chair and made it a baker's dozen.
     No-one was going to invite us any time soon to sit down as a jury. You could tell from the errant tufts of hair, the furtive glances, the chewed on hangnails, that we were likely more accustomed to being molested in the dock.
     One of us sported an alarming contusion where practicing Sannyasi daub paint upon their brow.
     He was frigid and unflinching under polite interrogation. He gave no indication as to whether he was tripping out his socks or simply mad.
     He rolled the pen across the table when prompted a little too fast.
     There was a hint of agitation in his delivery. A touch of the disorderly.
     A pregnant woman in her forties did her best to pacify us with lure of charitable inclusion while fellating a Subway sandwich.
     "I'm Mabel," she said. Pausing to let this new enormity percolate on down. "Have any of you's done unpaid work before ?"
     A boy with acne raised his hand.
     "Ah did," he volunteered. "But then I got ill."
     "What happened ?"
     " Mania," he said. "I was diagnosed with mania."
     Mabel blinked. "Nae bother."
     Fair play to her. She was not about to let drop. Ball, breakfast or brat.
     She went on briskly to describe the proactive role voluntary work had to play as part of the recovery process. Most of us knew the script.
     It's a side effect of being subject to repeat examination. In court. Detention.
     The dugout at half-time.
     You eventually learn to give a little of what's expected.
     Mabel fed us from the line. Pointed at the spot.
     Two or three of the clever ones converted a free kick down the wing and finished with a well rehearsed set piece. Some dribbled inside the box. The more blatantly injured - the most cunning, maybe - never set foot off the bench.
     I wondered when Mabel got fucked last.
     More recently than me. It was not the reason I was here, but it was part of the conundrum.
     Over time the various medications turn a body flaccid. The tissues hang like an overcoat left out in the rain.
     It runs deeper than appearance.
     I glanced around the table. Most of us looked like we'd never been laid at all. You could almost smell the underlying arrest. The frustration. We resembled a bunch of deviants getting ready to rehearse a walk in the park.
     Even those of us with bread crumbs still in our beards had lost their hard-on for pretending to feed the ducks.
     And the women all nursed menopausal chiselings.
     We just did not tick the boxes.
     Initiation into the "Young Persons Befriending Services" quite frankly seemed absurd. Two tickets for a Sunday matinee. "Accidents & Disasters", while initially more promising, smacked of malingering. On closer inspection.
     "Do any of you's have a bus pass ?"
     Two or three woke up just long enough to delve unnecessarily in anorak pockets.
     It was not clear whether Mabel's experiment in largesse might prove prejudicial to our financial interests.
     Most of the vacancies offered no remuneration for travel expenses. Lunches.
     By the time Mabel signed off, interest in the accompanying PowerPoint presentation had waned to a degree where A&E nurses wheel out little square trolleys and doctors administer atrial fibrillation.
     "All right," sang one of our patrons. "All right." 
      There was an inevitable smattering of applause. All the red crosses had been laundered and folded away. Our facilitators all nursed wounds.
     "Next week is DVD week, so you're all invited to bring in something you feel might benefit the group."
     Thirteen pairs of eyes mildly blinked in unison. Crutches were palmed.
     The boy with acne lit up like Linda Blair on a crucifix.
     "La plume de ma tante," he rasped.
     His face a rosy stepped on welt. The quarter inch of tongue a turd smothered in Peri Peri sauce.
     "Well," one hausfrau standing near the door smiled. "That's not entirely appropriate.
     "Frozen? Have any of you's seen "Frozen" ? I kid you not, it's a fabulous film."
      A tiny shiver waltzed through us, erupting zits and spasms.
      She had recently had her hair done. It hung like sculpted ice cream scallops. Defrosting curl by curl.
     ""Frozen", it is, then. And don't forget to tell your chums."

high plains drifter | in fear of the cloud

I am not good at networking. I am ambivalent as to the advantage of submitting to a higher rule of thumb.
     By higher, I mean the cloud. Tethered to terms and conditions.
     Some notional island autonomy closely monitored by government agencies. 
     This space on the bleachers is far from perfect. It sometimes lacks a discernible pulse.
     It is, nonetheless, where I lurk.
     Anyone too modest to expose themselves through commentary is perfectly at liberty to send me a private message.

grrravitational waves

"Everybody in the world eaten up by waves blames the [WASP] child for their ills." - ib

When the fat man upstairs starts to singing
where the ceiling bends lachrymose
hornets conspire to swell up his tongue
a confederacy of aculeates
gathered near to blindness sharpening
when the flatworm upstairs starts to singing

The fat man upstairs is depressed. Stricken by a hissing in his ear which entrenches itself all the more acutely when they take away his father. Deposit him in a care home.
     The fat man's dad has grown demented. The fat man can not cope. Merely the act of wiping an old man's arse so disgusts him it eventually drives him to small acts of cruelty.
     Still. Even so, a government cheque goes some way in mitigating the relentless erosion of living alone.
     The fat man upstairs is depressed but has been prescribed no pills to alleviate his condition. They throw him out of hospital after just a fortnight.
     Those two weeks are nothing short of a holiday for all concerned.
     The fat man relishes the free dinners served at regular intervals. And, because the ward is all but unoccupied, he enjoys a monopoly on the flat screen television.
      How do I know this ? The fat man tells me so.
      After the kitchen ceiling begins to let in water. Bulging alarmingly and spoiling those perishables laid out on the counter.
      Some bread. A little pile of chicken. An uncovered glass of Saturday night's wine.
      I drag myself upstairs and stab at the doorbell. He pins me to his doorstep with a mop. His shag pile carpets reek of damp. He has no money to call out a plumber.
      I say he is fat. I am less than charitable. While his jowls blow soft as a woman's shift on the communal green, he has lost a deal in weight. After they stopped his benefits. He is quite exact about those pounds shed. He almost died. On the street outside the butcher's.
      His physician barely recognises him.
      On and on he confides at length. He had spoken to no-one more garrulous than mental health professionals in weeks.
      I am not unsympathetic. It is just that his washing machine is in the throes of emptying its bowels. There is a blockage under his sink. It is his sister's fault. She is probably praying on her knees this minute as the flood unfolds. She is not one to visit. He can seldom reach her on the phone.
     Despite the bucket, the baby blue basin I leave downstairs to gather up the worst of the leak, I confess I vex impatient. Don't worry, he tells me, if it gets any worse it will cost me nothing to fetch out a plumber myself. After all. I am a tenant, right ? He expounds upon the privations of ownership, the power of attorney. They may have to tear down the ceiling to get at the pipes.
     Turquoise irises laced with amber piss swim in circles. Round and round like a floundering fish.
     I remember when the fat man snuck off to be observed quite fondly.
     He has this disturbing habit of rising between four and five in the morning. Every morning. The floorboards wince. The ceiling trembles. He adjusts the volume on his TV set to its ritual blare.
     The muezzin in his minaret.
     It is pointless trying to combat the assault by nesting a pillow over one's head. Escaping one room for another. The sound-proofing is not good. My neighbour makes it less than tolerable.
     After ten or twenty minutes the fat man begins to croon.
     My bladder forces me up off the sofa. The fat man chases me overhead and dives like a ferret into the u-bend. The sound of his pissing drowns mine out.
     The fat man is my doppelgänger. My fragile, disfigured, fleshy twin.
     He is the last stop on the subway. That failing Goering shadow in pastel cardigan and gaberdine pants.
     If I am not careful, we might knit at the hip like two black holes colliding. On the landing between the stairs where neuroses come unstitched. Like Howard Hughes I scarify myself at the spectre of contagion.
     The fat man is a cul-de-sac in surgical procedure. A botched operation.
     The worm-ridden step on the evolutionary ladder.
     He stays up late into the night on the anniversary of his mother's death. He toasts the curtains where they shiver, wipes the mildew from one eye. Far from impervious to the vagaries of do-it-yourself, he makes tiny coffins out of date boxes. Where Mr. Kipling ices individual cakes.
     Where are the swimming pools ? scream disgruntled migrants. Had you not invited us, we would not have come. The colours run unevenly in all this rain. The edelweiss has dropsy. You promised us so much more than this. Where are the balustrades ? The window boxes ? The errant fatwa tumbling off the beard of a goat dressed out for Eid ul-Adha.

the return of el niño

"He ain't dead. He's just asleep." - r. zimmerman

In the last days between December and January I placed an order for a Chinese timepiece. To see in the new year.
     I lost a week waiting for that watch. The courier's knock at the door, the gnawing of the letterbox on bubble wrap. It was a good thing I had no way of knowing the time precisely.
     Shooting stars winked and went. IFK, not J. Aladdin Sane. Librarians made a deal of androgyny. Men in suits puckered their lips and swooned.
     I counted the days by Dope City Free Press.
     Nathan on the west coast campaigning.
     I lost my appetite for hard liquor. Cigarettes, to a lesser extent. I idled through one stretch into the next billowing vast clouds of milk tea laced with jasmine. The Nicotine down to 0.6 of a gramme, or something along those lines. You do the math. The weather was neither ferociously cold nor especially clement. Entire causeways were swallowed up by the rain a few miles to the south and east.
     I reside these days in a tenement perched half way up a steep incline. Untouched by drowning hands.
     The river rushes past and does its thing. I am a hermit through Monday to Friday, a father on the weekend. When the wristwatch finally arrived it was missing that piece of its winding mechanism designed to negotiate the change in time zone; a tiny stud detached in one corner of a rudely opened envelope. The Chinese are like that. Deft with their hands but inscrutable.
     They build things cleverly only for them to fail or fall apart.
     Customs officials rip and prod and joke among themselves while calculating taxes.
     One gasps at the attention to detail even as the wheels come off.
     My younger son is no longer the infant but no less curious for it.
     He constructs things out of brightly coloured Lego bricks more durable than watches. Elaborate conceits on spider legs held together by sheer force of will.
     He eats like a bird. Cereals mostly. Nuggets of chicken smothered in ketchup. Where other children resemble Buddha, he looks like a fasting monk.
     Catsup may have etymological origins in the late 17th century, I gather. The Cantonese dialect. Stir the most ordinary of waters and one uncovers odd half secrets. Filaments. Conducting wires and threads in a soup of shared DNA.
     A Portuguese peasant floats his tomato. A Chinaman aboard a junk spears it.
     You may read of El Niño. A warm front pushing up from Peru and Ecuador. Donald Trump failed to proscribe it. Like King Cnut he could not turn the tide.
     Everybody in the world eaten up by waves blames the Christ child for their ills. Before he got nailed as our Saviour. Come Easter, they have forgotten about all that unseasonal heavy rain. They are all too busy carving out a slice on the bid to rebuild the dam. It is a shame Miles Davis is no longer around to riff on it. Don Van Vliet too. Together they might have blown away that misconception.
     January, it seems to me, is a good month to lie low. I still wish from time to time that I was back on the 22nd floor. Tossing my bags down the hall. Well. You can wish in one hand and piss in the other, as they say. On the back of the mildest of drafts, I go where I am bidden.