Ghost Busting

I’m unpublishing two of my self-published e-books. The novella Like Clocking Fuckwork

and the short story, and first part and introduction to would have been series, Poison Flour: A Fish goes for a Swim and ends up Drowning

will no longer be available anywhere. The reason for this is that, let’s be honest, I don’t have it in me to do nearly enough promotion and right now I’m feeling like they might, in fact, be shit to begin with anyway. I’m probably also shutting down my author account on Goodreads, because it’s doing absolutely nothing for me, creatively, socially or promotionally.

I’m keeping my two poetry books out there

    

because … why not, and if I ever start harbouring illusions about it again I might eventually serialize the novella on Medium. We’ll see.

As you were.

Running with Scissors

Running through the streets of the inner city concrete jungle hill, he suddenly found himself imagining the place some three or four centuries earlier; turning at the corner of Leafy Forest Street and Spring Leap Drive, it wasn’t difficult.

It struck him how little things had changed even though everything was different.

Closing his eyes for a second or two, he pictured himself leaping over stones and fallen branches, hunted by woodland robbers with feathers in their caps, and bows and arrows ready, the village’s collected taxes dangling in a leather pouch from his hand, rather than from his former friends, and their locked and loaded semiautomatics, with the taped up stash of drugs they were willing to kill him for.

***

Originally published on Medium.

Photo from Pixabay.

Narratives

You not hearing it
doesn’t mean a soundtrack
isn’t playing
in the background as I
enter this bus

You don’t know

And so what if I
only got on because I
overslept and
didn’t have time for
my usual
walk to work

You don’t know about me

You don’t know the things I can do
in my head as I
sip this coffee

How could you?

You don’t even hear the songs that are playing

***

This poem was originally published on Medium.

Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash

On Past and Present Futures

In defense of a generation on path to be lost

“We were making the future, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.”

This sentiment is expressed by Graham, the sleeper, in H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes, a story about a man from Victorian London who falls asleep and wakes up two centuries later. Now, correct me, someone older, if need be, but this could be said about pretty much anyone up until quite recently, couldn’t it?

Every generation born since the start of the industrial revolution up until around the early 1980’s has made a bigger impact on the world than anyone before yet never really stopped to consider the future they were making. They took for granted that the future simply always would be bigger and better than the present, by default and design. But then things changed, and people born since the start of the 1980’s and onwards are perfectly and painfully aware that our every choice and move is shaping the future, and not just for ourselves but for our children and all of humanity.

No, we millennials do not take the future for granted because our future never quite came, did it? We have seen our future gradually vanish in front of our eyes, all while trying to carve out and rescue a piece of it. All of you older people know what I’m talking about if you stop to think about it. After all, you raised us. Remember? The future you had us think we were growing up into, as children? The wall had fallen, capitalism had gloriously conquered and all the wars of the past century were over; from then on it was going to be nothing but ever more freedom and equality for everybody and if we could all just survive the millennium bug we would get to grow up as individuals and realize our potential and shit. That was supposed to be our future and it was supposed to be happening now.

Thus, we millennials know that the future doesn’t simply happen but needs to be nourished and protected lest it might slip away, and this is gradually becoming an ever greater source of frustration as a result of the fact that we, as of yet, still hold very little real power in the world. The bulk of all genuine positions of power continues to be occupied by baby boomers and generation x’ers who still operate on the assumption that the future simply always will be bigger and better no matter what we do to it.

So, older generations, before you write us millennials off as selfish and shallow, stop to think about that for a minute or two. We are carrying the weight of the world and the future of all of humanity on our shoulders coupled with a sense of not being able to do anything about it. Can you really blame us for reverting our attention to things that we can in fact control?

We are the first modern generation with a future to lose.

***

This post was originally published on Medium.

I am now on Medium

I will from now on also be publishing on Medium, so feel free to come and check me out over there and connect if you have already found your way there as well.

My first Medium post is an oldie but goodie from here on my WordPress page, but expect new material there soon.

Why Widen? Or how I learned to fear the horizon.

Seafare well
in the
Safety
of your
Well.

Oh Captain, my Captain,
may I say
you look
Mightily Majestic
with your Boots
not fitting
in that Bucket,
and you know
what they say
about men
with big feet…

john hurts

thing is though
you sometimes feel
an inescapable cold
and blankets won’t help
cause it’s
radiating outwards
from the
suffering of your soul

An old jigsaw

They sat one evening on the riverbank
shielding themselves from the wind in each other’s arms.
He was breathing in the fresh air
and she was shivering.

She said ‘as we’re sitting here life is passing us by just like the water’.
He said ‘you and me here in this moment is life’.

He said ‘if we had planned ahead we wouldn’t be sitting here like this right now’.
She said ‘if we had planned ahead we would have already been home’.

And then they both said ‘I love you’.

***

This poem was originally published in 2015 and is the title piece of An Old Jigsaw, my first collection of poetry and flash fiction.

Language Barrier Reef

One of the things I love most
about being abroad is being surrounded
by people speaking foreign languages;
languages I don’t understand.
Every conversation seems intriguing.
There’s an endless array
of possibilities
for what is being talked about.
People seem so very interesting
when you don’t understand
what they are actually saying…

Utility

What’s a life worth
that’s of no use
to anyone?

How about
a life
that has been
worn out?

If
our souls have no value
then
why
are you trying so hard
to
buy them?

Oh,
hold on,
I think you’re confusing
worthless
with
priceless
or
rather
cynically
expecting us to.

Fuck you.

***

This poem was originally published in 2015 and was included in An Old Jigsaw, my first book of poetry and micro fiction.