misty

belly to sky, paws bent like waving
you know nothing of goodbyes
just cold darkness once warm,
the affection factory’s gates chained.


this number is no longer in use
the Yellow Pages lines your tray

and your whiskers down the phone

are distant, disinterested.

you’ll get fed but fed up, bring

lifeless bodies to the door

that isn’t our door, anymore

paw garden paths on your own
 thinking
but things were just getting good.

snow

7:14PM
It’s all so harmless when you start out, isn’t it? You’re on your own, walking home through the snow.

It’s still not dark, as if somewhere in this hellhole of a winter, you’ve forgotten that it does eventually get lighter. Or is that just the glow of the burning city, its deadline reflecting in your eyes? Even when it’s not snowing you think it’s snowing because you’ve looked at so much white, blowing like ghosts in the desert.

Legs on autopilot, it’s patience that will get you home. Walking, on and on, until you get there. If you don’t make it back by nine, it will be this wind that does it. You lean into it, and the crunching of snow quickens.

7:59PM
Tonight, the world is untouched by man-made things. Here you are, on your own, walking home through the snow. We skate on thin ice, we sail close to the wind; metaphors of humans at the edge of nature, humans fascinated by danger, risk, snowdrifts. No one here is really in danger. Nothing’s going to kill you unless you freeze to death in a blizzard, or don’t make it home by nine.

With the invention of cement, humans eliminated sound from their footsteps. We no longer make an impact on the world around us. On fresh snow, we leave traces, proof of our existence.


The church bells ring out, seconds fall around you like snowflakes. You’d think, if anything, the cold would freeze time in place, but tonight it’s doing the opposite. You’ve got to get a move on. You’ve been drawn in by the snow and the pretty metaphors. Get out of your head. Get out of your head and get a move on.

8:47PM
Behind every door is a pair of eyes, willing you not to make it. You feel them in every car that spits up cold dust, their searchlights asking questions: What are you doing here? Don’t you know?

Voices come to you on the wind: we’re thrill seekers, crunching through the snow towards a precipice of the law for our own excitement. You see lights on lights on lights, but no people. You’ve never felt your watch tick on your wrist like this before.

Excitement turns ice-cold. There remain thirteen unlucky minutes in which to get home. The wind whips another flurry of time into your face, forces it past your ears. You stumble, slip, regain your balance. You feel your blood rushing at the base of your throat. How is this journey taking so impossibly long?

9:05PM
Behind every door, there’s a pair of eyes, waiting for you. The corners of curtains shift: no one alive has seen this city after nine. The ghosts of snow have laid down for the night. You too, want nothing more than a warm bed and arms that will shield you. You’re on your own, walking home through the snow. But where even is home? Everything seemed so harmless when you started out. Now you carry the weight of an unknown burden on your shoulders. Time is a blizzard. Where are you?

9:20PM
You hear the roaring long before your eyes see anything. It builds and builds, and when you think it can build no longer, it builds further, like the bass from outside a club, turned up 200dB. This has to be it. You have strayed too far, not seen the cliff edge for the snow, and now you’re plummeting down it into an unknown world with faceless inhabitants. You feel your blood hot, your hands and feet numb. There is no beauty left in this world, just you, on your own, walking somewhere through the snow. You don’t even know why you’re walking. You just are. As far as you know, you always have been.

Untitled design(51).png

to bake an almanac

Pour the custard into a cleaned ice-cream maker, being careful not to spill any. Be sure to wash your hands afterwards. The floor is lava, the countertop is a glacier. Take a mug from the sink and inspect its lipstick mark. Kiss it, then wipe a damp cloth over your face. Spray kitchen cleaner into the bin. Do not scrub it out. Let it sit. It deserves to rest. You do not. You have rested much, and often, and long, and now you are lazy and slow. Flick your wet hands off onto the middle hob and let it spit at you. Spit back at it. Hold up a lighter and burn the fire. Throw ice on the floor. Test to see whether a pan really is a pan. Bang it on the glacier. Its clattering is the sound of ice ringing: step down inside the ice cave into cold’s belly and touch the clean blue. Take a knife and cut a mannequin out of the ice. Dance with the mannequin until its feet catch fire and its belly starts to melt. Mop its innards off the floor and drink them down with whisky. Start to spin around anti-clockwise. Don’t stop until I say so. You’re only dizzy because your brain is lazy and slow. Spinning is seeing. Now stop. Stop believing in names for things, stop calling a pan a pan, or ice ice. Open books and tear out pages and call things all the fantastic words on those pages. Call the floor a phonebooth. Place pennies on the tiles and ring your friends for long conversations. Let them know you’re phoning from a phonebooth. If it’s long distance, place more pennies on the tiles. Floor them with your new vocabulary: apples are soot, the fridge is a calendar. Cross off the days as you reach in to pour yourself a semicircle of socks. Pull them up around your case in case everything you know turns out to be false, which it just might. Write jump on a box with a feather, open it up and admire the sardines within. Whisk the curtains, mix in the wallflowers. Feed the biscuit some promiscuity. Eat the last of the penguins from the glory, but whatever you do, don’t forget the panpipes. If you do, this carefully-constructed ancestor may crash like fields of spark around you. Remember the ink that put you in this moonscape in the first trumpet. By now your chrysalis in the cleaned seaside will be ready to serve. Garnish with a longboat of hydrolysis and eat immediately with a silver statement.

Writing a Winter Sunset - published on Burning House Press

15:20 backlit wisps and railroad tracks in the sky. flashes of starlings’ wingtips. I look at the river too long, and now see it every time I blink.

15:24 the twittering of daybreak returns in earnest. the birds make sunday’s last stand.

15:30 a flock of black stars before the sun, they settle on the ghosts of trees.

15:32 visibly darker by the second. chattering birds swoop to aerial perches. I spot the crescent moon.

15:33 the horizon goes a dirty orange, over my head remains purest blue.

15:35 the sun loses intensity. I can now look at it through the branches, trees stark against golden glow.

(continues)

Screenshot 2020-12-05 at 21.47.15.png

Rockdown 2021 - published on Across the Margin

My backpack still has last year’s festival wristband attached to it. The first item I pack into it for this year’s edition is my plastic orb, deflated and still in its packaging. I’d procrastinated ordering the orb, and it only just arrived last week. That had caused me a minor panic: no orb equalled no festival. Next I pack the shirt I’d bought for this year’s Rockdown, featuring some of my favorite bands with 2021 tour dates down the back of it. Supporting your favorite bands and staying out of the heat of the sun with some official apparel: double-win.


There’s a long queue when we arrive at the festival’s gates, with the minimum six feet of space between groups of beer-swigging couples and excitedly talking families. As we approach the entrance my friends and I take our final breaths of outside air and the last swigs of unorbed beer. The guy next to us takes a deep pull on the last easy cigarette for the rest of the day, then slaps a series of nude-colored nicotine patches up his arms. 
 


“Got any glass in there, mate?”

I shake my head. 


The security guard puts a hand down inside my backpack, finds nothing that’s banned, and waves me through to a girl scanning tickets through a plastic screen.


 “Ankle, please.” She gestures to the waist-high ledge between us.

I put my foot up and she fastens a brightly-colored ribbon around it. Rockdown 2021 it reads, in purple embroidered letters. She pulls it tight and heat-seals it closed. A buzzer goes off and she pumps down on the antibacterial dispenser. She winces as she rubs her hands together, then waves me through, the smell of vodka rising in the air.


 “Next please! You — keep your distance!”

I step forward, holding my deflated orb, feeling like a child at the pool, bouncing impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for my dad to inflate my rubber ring.

“Pull the opening over your head.” The rough voice jerks me out of my holiday dream. I am not a child. I am an adult attending a festival during a global pandemic yet I am starting to feel more and more like a processed animal. I do as I am told, and the unseen voice affixes a tube to the side of the wrinkled clear plastic. The transparent orb starts crackling and swelling around me.

“Is the eye hole in the right place? I can’t see.”

“Lucky we caught that now,” the worker’s voice chuckles. “Turn around then, I’ll hold the orb still.”


I turn, and can see the rest of the queue stretching out behind me. 

“Down to your left,” the voice says, “that’s your fuel tank, so to speak. If you want anything to drink, it goes in there. To your right, that’s your food hatch.”

“Gotcha.” It’s warm inside the orb already. I remember my shirt.

“Can you put my shirt on for me?”

“Sure thing, hand over any mods you want me to put on.” I hand him the shirt and he stretches it over the orb. “Love that band. Saw them live in Amsterdam before…well, you know.”

“Ah, me too!” I say, remembering back to when we could bump shoulders with one another and spill beer on each others’ shoes. When we could link arms with strangers to sing encores. 

“You’ll be wanting a pair of these,” he says, sliding a box of headphones through the food hatch. It’s an airlock, so I wait until he’s closed his side in order to take them out. There’s enough free space inside the orb to put them in my ears.

“They’ll pick up whichever stage you’re nearest to. Tap them twice if you want a little break. Any questions?”

(continues)

why dreamers no longer dream – published in Fat Cat Magazine

She always loved those final stairs of the tube on nights when there was a gig in town. It had rained all day, and cars threw up spray as their headlights passed, making the streets shimmer. Ticket touts bought and sold at the top of their lungs, competing for attention from the crowd who arrived after hours of pre-drinking. Buskers laid guitar cases down and played as warm-up to the main acts at the Academy nearby: imagine all the people, sharing all the world. The street-sellers burnt incense down the road, and it floated into her face. This place had life.

“Scuse me love, don’t s’pose you can spare a bit of change?” A dishevelled man was in her face, holding out a dirt-streaked hand.
“I’m flat out of change, mate, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t have any food in yer bag yer not wanting?”
“Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway. God bless.” He turned and was gone into the melee.

(continued)

never good at goodbyes – published on Hypnopomp

On the final night, I stand in the queue for the toilets with a picture of myself in my mind: eight years old and crying as we leave Legoland. I blink it away as a door opens and bangs shut again. I clasp my beer in my teeth, praying I don’t drop it, trying not to breathe too deeply through my nose. Around me, there’s swings and bangs and loud voices. I lean my elbow into the plastic door and add to the chorus, gasping for clean air. My beer has survived the ordeal.

“Mainstage?” I ask, drying hands on dusty shorts.

(continued)

The Absurd Observed - lockdown edition

The path is dirt, dust and rocks, a single donkey wide. To my left, what could be the Adriatic laps the base of white cliffs. Grass tickles my ankles as I walk higher than the seagulls fly. 


I hear voices up ahead and instinctively look for somewhere to afford them their two-metre berth. It’s not easy. To my right, the cliff rises up again, its base hidden by gorse and nettles. I wedge myself into a tight gap in the plants, their fingers of pain reaching out for my bare legs. A man appears first, out of breath and sweating, wearing an explorer’s hat and leaning on a thick stick. Behind him, a younger man, also tapping a stick along the path. He pauses at the ledge to catch his breath and to admire the sea. What I imagine to be his mother catches up with him at this point, also breathing heavily. Not one of the three acknowledges my presence. The mother turns around, so the son can get the water from her bag. 

“Get my phone too,” she says.

Obedient son does as he is told, and I watch as the mother poses for a picture with the view. The gorse prickles on my ankles. 

“Take one of us together!” she shrieks.

 What’s next? A donkey coming along the path with a tent, double-bed and gas burners to cook on? Why not build a hotel up here while you’re at it? It’s fine, guys, I’m comfortable here. I don’t need to move. 

But they don’t. They move off again, with not so much a glance in my direction.

stay alert

Keep a glass of Coke by your bed. Watch the red lines click to 02:00, then 03:00. When it comes, it will come like a mosquito, whining close-by when you’re just about to drift off, making you thrash about, slapping your head. Your ears twitch like a cat’s. Thoughts are the precursor to dreams: when your mind drifts, it’s prone to drift off. Getting too comfortable could spell the end. As you get up, your feet crunch on the drinks cans that surround your bed. Your pupils shrink back from the light, you feel the seat sapping your warmth, you rest your face against the tiles. In the mirror, your eyes are a shepherd’s warning. You creep back to bed, lay your head on the slab of rock you dragged up the beach, pull the pebble-filled duvet over your protesting legs. It’s 05:01. Light is beginning to creep in from behind the curtains. You get up to fling them open and cast your eyes to the brightest point in the sky. In doing so, you step on a crushed can, cutting your foot open. This is good: pain is staying alert. You bandage the cut with a cloth soaked in salt water. When the sun has fully risen and your wound has stopped throbbing, you step into the bathroom. Yours is one of those showers with a built-in ice machine. You turn it up to maximum and stand under it in your pyjamas. The ice sticks to your clothes and the clothes stick to your legs. This is good: cold is staying alert. You get out and dry your feet, so as not to slip on the tiles. You walk to the fridge and with shaking hands, open a bag of fresh chilies. You take a single red finger and slice it up, seeds and all, then chew it down. The tingling starts in your lips, your tongue, your gums. Then the burning starts in your throat. This is good: burning is staying alert. Who needs to cook when you can sustain yourself on caffeine and capsaicin? Food makes you sleepy. You have hacked food, extracted the essentials for attention. Maybe, when this is all over, you’ll move to Silicon Valley. Start an app. You ponder that, as you sit still on the sofa all day, hands between your thighs, eyes and ears roaming the room. See all evil. Hear all evil. Fight all evil. Your hand slips from between your thighs and slaps you in the face for thinking. Stay alert, idiot. It’s watching. It’s waiting. Any sign of weakness will be punished. Your brain must be a white wall. You pick up a paint roller in your mind and start sanitising your insides. Your stomach rumbles. This is good: hunger is staying alert. Outside, the sun is starting to set. It is time to do battle with the force of night again. You walk over to the fridge, your mind already anticipating the taste of sugar and caffeine and ice cold fizz. As you pull open the door, the thing erupts from within and grasps you by the throat. You were not ready. Your mind slipped, and now, it is banging your head against the tiled floor. Pain is good, but this is not good: falling into a coma
is
not
staying…

birdsong

We pan for gold in souls,
stripping away the streets
to find songbirds sheltered beneath.

I met a man
with so little to his name
who gave more than he took,
I met a man
without a passport
who helped to heal the world,
I met a man
who slept in a tent
and wrote poetry.

Their words formed songs
and their songs formed smiles
and up stood Humanity
and shook its head in defiance,
as if to say:
I shall not be subdued.

And as clothes made way for feathers
and arms made way for wings
they took flight into cold city night
and the air was filled
with the sound of spring.

We pan for gold in souls,
stripping away the streets
to find songbirds sheltered beneath.

Down the Rabbit Hole

The queues for the showers were too long, so we took long luxurious baths in the lake, floating like rare white starfish. When you climb out you feel a warmth like your soul itself is ablaze. Or maybe that was the rum we’d put in the coffee. 

There’s yoga on when we get to the festival ground. The grass is the best it’s going to get, the dust not yet caking everything. By the water we conjure up magic little stories about the monster that lives in the lake. There’s a traffic light and a crossing in the middle of a field, and people queue up to cross the road when the light goes green. 

It’s cooking temperature in the tent before the music even starts. “Are you ready to make some noise, Down the Rabbit Hole?” Frank Carter’s voice drills over roaring guitars. By the middle of their first song, he’s at the heart of a circle pit, two metres from where I’ve been shoved to. By the middle of their second, he’s raised on the hands of the crowd, silhouetted against red light. “Can we all get a circle pit going all the way out the tent on that side and back in on the other? C’mon, if we can do it at Roskilde, we can do it here.” Cue stampede. Afterwards, we sit in the sun watching someone hand out fines for jaywalking on the crossing while our t-shirts dry out and our ears ring. 

We lay in the grass until a Scotsman woke us up, noisily, from the main stage. “My name’s fucking Lewis Capaldi,” he said to the crowd. “If you like rock and roll, you’re at the wrong gig, mate.” He sounds exactly like he does on his album, and the crowd wait around for Someone You Loved. We don’t. It’s off to watch Kamasi Washington and his squad on stage, each and every one of them a top-notch musician. The only thing better than one drummer is two drummers, bashing their kits into rhythms you feel in your heart, raising the levels of ecstasy, again and again, and when you think there’s no more climax room left, they raise it even further. 

Same tent a bit later on: it’s Thom Yorke, the man-machine. Released from Radiohead expectations, he’s a DJ, composer, pianist, singer, conductor and entertainer in one. I catch my breath when he takes to the piano for Dawn Chorus, his band off-stage, then it’s back to pounding drum machines and enormous mesmerising visuals.  

Sunday starts slowly, with a swim and rum-coffee. Beside the main stage, a couple lie in a hammock. I don’t blame them: Khruangbin is the perfect music for lying down. Their funk carries you along like on hands above a crowd, wavy and never still. 

Later on, Aurora burned herself up on stage, an enormous firework that rivalled Thom Yorke for creativity and sheer subwoofer power. Sunday night was lying-in-a-net night, high up above the heads of the crowd, where the world couldn’t get us and make us come down and have to start packing the tent up. We walk until we can’t walk any more, and then we lie down. Now, only the trip back to reality stands between me and real life. And when I go to sleep tonight it’s goodbye to all this, and it’ll be like a dream I’ve woken up from, half-remembered through sleepy eyes behind a desk. 

“How was it?” they’ll ask, and you’ll answer something like: “Oh man, it was sooo good,” but they’ll never know. They can’t know: they weren’t there. They didn’t join you on your trip Down the Rabbit Hole. And they won’t join you next year when you do it all again. 

untitled

it’s cold up there, in that room,
that’s what I remember. images of
flasks of tea, wishing it were rum,
fingers snipped off gloves.

for once I was a writer,
freezing and flowing,
high-up in a garret
in my room full of thought.

for once I lived a writer’s life,
penniless and alone
in my box by the sea.
I saw but did not see,

the arc of the gulls,
their cries like lost lambs in the sky,
or a whole beach breathing
like the man with paper bag lungs.

where the waters match the skies

The twinkling lights of Scarborough now hidden behind the hills, we’re guided solely by a thousand stars above and the torch on Brett’s paddleboard ahead. We’ve been paddling the kayaks for about twenty minutes, and now beach up on No Man’s Land. Right now, it’s a sandbank, but it’s so-called because it’s so frequently underwater that construction is forbidden. The sand is thick, and it swallows up your toes. We haul the kayaks over the sandbank and enter Bon Accord Lagoon. If you look closely when your hands touch the water, you can see tiny points of light darting from them, so small they could be the reflections of stars on the waves. Brett shines his torch over the surface, and suddenly it’s alive with a hundred bats flying low, hoping for dinner. The silhouettes of the see-saw paddles rise and fall, there’s the sound of blades entering still water and the occasional hollow thud of fiberglass. Besides that there’s nothing. The lagoon is flanked on three sides by mangroves, forming little sheltered bays that Brett directs us into.
“Now put your hands in the water,” he says, and as we do, there’s gasps as it lights up in tiny sparks. They emanate from fingers outwards, like sparklers, every move accompanied by underwater meteors. The stars above our heads are suddenly outnumbered by those beneath the surface.

“Now climb in,” comes Brett’s voice. “Swim far away from anyone else.”
And suddenly I’m a plasma ball, shooting photons from every part of my body, tiny glow-worms emanating from my skin, again and again and again, every time I move. It’s like I’m on some drug enabling me to see my energy overlap into that of Mother Nature. Superlatives don’t do the trick anymore: it’s magical, fantastical, outrageous – I can’t take my eyes off the starry movement of my own body. I am all-powerful, I am a creator, I am swimming through the depths of the universe, the constellations constantly shifting, dancing, evolving, lighting up, burning out and then being reborn through my movement.

I’m out of breath from exhilaration when I finally re-enter the kayak. I lean back, watching the stars, the slow-burn bioluminescence of the skies, and gently, gently start paddling back to No Man’s Land. Brett picks up sea urchins, a sea cucumber, points out lobster, shrimp and starfish lurking among the turtle grass, then shines his light on footlong fish with needlepoint noses that dart and jump ahead of us. Back at the surf shack, we pull the kayaks up the beach and Brett gives six of us a ride in the back of his pickup. We’re crouched down, clutching onto whatever we can, as he ferries us off the beach and back to civilisation. At the Crown Point junction, we jump ship, our feet still sandy, our minds still spinning, and with soca music from the island’s bar strip reaching our ears.


This piece won The Telegraph’s Just Back travel writing competition in April 2019.