In the dark

Little black cat

Hit by a car

In the dark

Lying on the road

Quivering

No sound no blood

Still soft and warm

I hold up my hand to stop the bus

Standing in the road

Headlights

Scooping up the cat

Safe from the tarmac and trauma

Now on the pavement

Quivering

Then nothing

The traffic continues by 

Roar of engines and footfall

The little cat is gone

Just as the vet arrives.

Another stolen photo

A very short story: Corn man enters the building wearing his corn Nikes. Details as below. Can you guess their size?

Some religious experience required

Wanted: Help setting twisted souls straight again.

 

(Charity of the Temple of the Low Man*).

Enthusiastic but diplomatic individual required for well established team. No engineering experience necessary but  needs core competences in empathy, astrology, salted caramel toffee making, warmth without sweat and bifocal awareness to Level 5. You will not be alone but may be left that way from time to time. Needs to remain discreet. Great package for the correct person. Age not an issue and partial to full training will be provided. Clothing allowance paid. Experience in exorcism desirable. 

APPLY WITHIN.

*No hippies or lower/upper body piercings.

Welcome

Do you have a taste for the exotic and desire to do better? Here's a short film that's been commissioned by specialists in their field in order to encourage like minded international investors to come forward and by wholly legal means be relieved of their money. No serious risk is involved. Terms and conditions may apply. It depends.

Inspired by Nothing

Pigeons roasting on an hopeless fire

Jackdaws pecking at my toes

Your tight carrots hung up by a choir

And yolks dressed up like piccolos.

Everybody knows a turnkey and a living wage

Help to make the sneezing right

Tiny spots with their high indigo

Will find it hard to seize tonight.

So you know a stanza is on it's way

With lots of cloying poison cookies on a tray

Every mother-fuck preparing to cry 

To see if rainbows really do die.

So I'm strangling this single stage

For kinks from none to nearly two

Although I've been sued many times many ways

Mary Queen of Scots to you.

----------------------------------

"So now I can picture myself, inspired by nothing, in some perfect place. Wearing a headset and listening as I Skype call random members of the public. I listen without responding or baiting as they answer over complicated questions about trivial aspects of their lives. The truth and facts mean nothing, I will record whatever they may say but remain detatched and in a dream like state. In this way I will allow time to pass around and though me as I quietly await the beating wings at the window telling me of the arrival of the message I require, taped onto the leg of a slate blue carrier pigeon."

Modsiw

The night before

"Look, you can believe what you like, I still think that's OK in this country, but I'm telling you that Trump isn't going to win tomorrow. You see I've been fasting and praying now for about a week and last night an angel came to me in a vision and told me very clearly that Biden was going to defeat Trump by a huge landslide, incredible figures, huge numbers, pundits and all those corrupt media types will be dumbfounded and there will be trouble. The only condition for this to take place is that I have to make sure you go out and buy me a triple cheeseburger and a vanilla shake so that I might end my fast in a respectful and dignified manner and the honorable timeline of the USA can be restored. It seals the deal I made with God. Do you understand? You must do this, not just for me but for our great country and the rest of the free world!"

Wild Woods

Into the woods where the lights are wilder than any wildlife.

Fictitious Hippie Wedding

It's all a sham, there were no hippies, nothing new age or old age. Just bright colours that darted around the sky, filled the corners of the garden, poked people in the eye. We were drunk and happy on the thoughts of being drunk and happy, what a world of promise there was and most of it was simply down to never reading a newspaper. Charles Dickens and Daryl's chickens, famous storytellers and food producers. Everyone was safe because there was no sense of danger. The dream has ended now that  a wave of vegetarianism has swept the land and the control of the economy is out of control. The correct people could've intervened and fixed it all we didn't care about such things at the time. I was quite relieved when the practice of divination using human sacrifices came to an end, being a human and what not. 

Mirror

This is what happens in parallel worlds and when looking over shoulders and into those strange places where you maybe shouldn't look but you want to. Mysterious stuff.

Behind the chosen curve

Better late than never I suppose: After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.

A short walk across the greens

"Now we may be ready for anything but a round of golf is just too much (at any time of year). When we're low on leek and onion sourdough loaves, avocados or a ski trip it's a simple matter to dip into the trust fund. I don't know how the others manage, frankly I don't care. It's dog eat dog and I'm from a family of rather large dogs, high in the food chain and we do what we must do. Well my parents seem to do a lot of things and it all works out well generally (wags finger). I think the worst thing about this town is the parking, then the tourists and the locals. I've managed to avoid them all so far. It's hardly Outlander country either but they're all so intrigued with golfing history and to be honest it's a working class pastime. I'm bemused and as for the clothing choices... so if I sound like some know all stereotype it's because I choose my wine and words wisely. Not like the Americans, the Japanese and the Chinese. I'll be gone in a couple of terms, I'll flee the rain and the salt air. I'm imprisoned here for twenty weeks a year. You make your own connections don't you (that's not a question). There's always money to be made easily from a base in the West Indies, whatever the actual climate here. And we have a place there. Cassandra and I enjoy it. Yes I'd prefer to be in Antigua (very relaxing) but the correct education is important, so they say. "

Grim

Church of the poisoned mushroom: We entered the woodland passing the corpse of Red Riding Hood. We bowed, touched temples, paid respects. Somebody should have done the right thing but that wouldn't be us. You see we had "other" business. The scent of wolf was everywhere and the creatures of the woodland were sharing testimony and praying for acts of revenge. Of course no god in his right mind would listen to their drivel so it was down to us, the Grimm Brothers to get to the bottom.

She had a reputation but so does everybody, otherwise you must be invisible. Have you never been alive? And wolves, who gives a tinker's cuss if they prosper or die. Barking moon howlers. Turns out there's quite a few unburied bodies around here, nobody likes that. Messy. Makes the flesh creep, things become uncomfortable, you see red. In the end we chose to play down the trashy side of things, the scandal and the appetites. Well, it's a good little tale, a misadventure and better left to the imagination than told straight.

In the end everything dies but remains alive only as a story or a time line. The edges blur quickly between reality and fantasy and as for facts, well they matter even less. Those who saw it with their own eyes tend to be the least reliable, the ones who spin and exaggerate and put their markers down. It's about having skin in the game and we had none, we're just passing through, taking notes, smiling politely at the fat woman, the old man, the nervous children, the crone, the princess and the pedlar as they tell their version fruit,; robbery, murder, warts, sexual violence and all. Common babble but bankable enough.

Interviews and notation, asking the tough questions, getting the wrong answers but not caring. Swearing and saying thank you, avoiding the pay off and the reckoning and don't promise any credit. There's no royalties in it, even if you say you're the King of this dilapidated kingdom and all bow down. We won't care. We've to go back home, spin chairs in the office and work this up into something understandable and entertaining over coffee; your life, your experience, your pain maybe but our added fiction, hard graft and salesmanship make it travel and last.

Under the Sea

"Under the Sea from Above the Sea"

Careful use of contrived capitalization creates the perfect title for the imperfect image. It's not Google Earth, it's not some South Pacific atoll, it's not anywhere but it is somewhere, it's not the closeup of the skin of an blue turtle, it's a question but without an answer. It's all a fake. So is reality. The answer is of course "CONCRETE".

Bull Head

Bull Head by LEGO

Island of Dreams

For the time being: We're done with the English alphabet, 26 letters of predictable associations and meaning (but it's use will continue as I've no other way of expressing myself). It's all in the past now and unlikely to be revisited. We need another language with new symbols to teach us a better way to use all language. So here's a marker, a spiritual home, a tidal boundary, a pastel cartoon, a fixed border but one that moves as sure as the moon pulls. Ever changing, a watery sentry that limits your stay and your day and drowns any passing rats. A period of respectful silence may follow. Hold onto the dream.

Z

The illustrated alphabet Part 26: Z is for Z-CARS.

I grew up watching Z-Cars in black and white on a 405 line TV. It was peak time week night viewing for a few years in the 60s.  I have fond if rather blurry memories of it. To be honest there wasn't much else to watch at the time. Z-Cars was a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Lancashire. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978. At the time it was a unique grimy piece of TV drama dealing with both criminal and domestic plot lines in a working class area of north west England. Over time it lost it's edge and a number of flabby spin off shows followed on based around some of the police characters portrayed in the original series of shows. The show was also a spring board for a number of well know British actor's early careers. Nobody talks about it much these days, like Coronation Street, the Beatles or the 'Stones it belongs in some strange bygone age when Britain wasn't quite as fucked up as it is today, (actually it was but we couldn't really see that very clearly at the time, now it's painfully obvious).

This isn't really how I imagined the illustrated alphabet would end but it's OK, it had to end one way or another after the 26 letters we're stuck with had been used up with their randomly allocated words. It's done now.

THE END

Y

The illustrated alphabet Part 25: Y is for YAHOO.

Yahoo! A shout of triumph, warning or just plain exhilaration. Origins likely to be lost somewhere in the annals of wild west culture in the USA. Works well in a carton format, has some comedy value if applied with the right amount of expression. Another meaning is that it describes a course or oafish person. "He's a proper Yahoo!"  I don't know any now but I may have in the past. (I'm not aware of any famous dogs called "Yahoo" so the photo above really makes no sense, it just arrived there somehow.)

Some also say that Yahoo! is an American web services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Media. The original Yahoo! company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of early Internet  systems, email and the like in the 1990s but that's such a long time ago that nobody cares about it now.

X

The illustrated alphabet Part 24: X is for X-BOX.

X, pronounced eX. Not X-ray or Xylophone or Planet X but X box. Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. It represents a series of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, with three consoles released in the sixth, seventh, and eighth generations, respectively ... and so on. Billions of people own, operate and love these consoles. I'm not a gamer and don't play but you can't argue with the numbers and the popularity. I prefer analogue games mostly so that says something about me.

W

The illustrated alphabet Part 23: W is for WIKIPEDIA.

Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web. Where the factual and non-factual core of all pub quizzes, arguments, film and TV spoilers and homework and thesis solutions peacefully abide. They're quite keen to get sustainable funding for obvious reasons, you'd think some tech big boys would try to help out (what could possibly go wrong there?).

So if you want to find out where the W formation of palm trees is, if it still exists and it's cultural significance, then you could try Wikipedia but to do that you'd probably start with Google which would eventually take you to Wikipedia or maybe YouTube. It's not complicated really.