It isn’t what the hammer does but how he wields it and the trajectories he controls, and it’s something of a man’s anticipation knowing the final shape he has to make. It isn’t where the sheet is placed upon the block nor how it slides with careful hands, but how the final curves will always […]

All around, islands of girls waiting to be asked – cherry pinks, fern-greens, lilacs, offsetting lines of dark-suits, half-shy boys: one by one, couples swirling away, following each other into the sea of that crowded floor – everything suspended in the thinning air, the school dancing on its toes, Exhibition Swing pumped out by an […]

I’m sitting here on the city street waiting for contact, that moment when a pair of eyes tells me I’m it. Not the eyes of a shepherd reflecting the lovely landlines of unlit valleys where birds burn their wires; nor the lunatic eyes of lovers replaying the fingered foreplay to the final f___. Not the […]

The clean smell of the local next to him on the coast bus the smell of cheap perfumed soap applied in an inconvenient bathroom with trickling cold water in the early warm morning before the bake heat of the day before the trip to work in the tourist hotel/café/shop repetitious ritual on service on duty […]

At dinner his eyes run over me like gravy. Duck skin crackles under the silver embracing of forks; fragrant meat, soft as steam, slides off loose as silk in a heap.   My new mistress is kind but she likes to drink and talk too much in petite banalités: “organic ovenware – the newest in”. […]

During our landmark week in that panelled flat overlooking the Spanish Steps All You Need Is Love, flower sellers, carozzas fleecing Americans, we took turns to sleep on the sofa in the hall or in the bed above the room where Keats died. The old codger in his grey nylon tuxedo and brilliantine parting imparts […]

Her glove on the seat, (A little loss,) She smiles at him, The bus moves off.