Beachcombing

Reduced to soundbites and Twitter feed, the language of public discourse is squeezed until all meaning has dripped out. These prose poems express the mess of hope, fear, memory, longing and, above all, uncertainty that’s left behind when the desiccated three-word slogan has been tossed away.

Beachcombing

It almost takes an hour to claw through the thick memories of beach huts and souvenir ashtrays, but when we finally reach the sea it’s the same as it always was. Back then, though – and I’m talking about a time of peace and prosperity, when old men smoked pipes and sailed around the world in homemade boats, and everybody’s grandmother wore hairnets – there had been mines beneath the sand, primed and eager to steal the dreams of small boys and donkeys. The sea, though, was the sea, its moods as neat as a schoolroom wallchart, its colours as uncomplicated as powder paints in bright boxes. And although it stretched beyond the blur of white-sailed boats, licking at the edges of America, Australia, Japan, and countries whose names have changed over time, the sea showed us where we were, its limits underlined by striped ribbons the colour of mint rock. The ribbons, like all ribbons, are now wound in grandmothers’ boxes, and the old men never came home. Memories surge like the threat of a fret and I stoop to scoop up dogwhelks, cowries, wentletraps, and limpets.

Communique

The government spokesman speaks of doors: of the individual’s right to own doors, of children’s need to access doors, of a society in which all receive doors within four weeks of referral. Over the past eighteen months, there have been heated debates, the occasional protest march, a handful of arrests; but little has changed or, if anything, more and more people crowd through the same worn doors. The news shifts to a story of an international appeal, a call for doors across Europe and beyond, then a scheme to preserve coastal doors to maintain stocks of cormorants and grey seals. It’s more than fifty years since the first successful heart transplant, and tomorrow will see the year’s last super-moon, but the doors between are locked, their keys lost.

An Hour from Miami

The gun beneath the seat is a small alligator, still slick from the egg, curious in its grotesque beauty, impossible not to think about, even with my eyes fixed on the road ahead. It needs to be nourished, and it needs to be handed a sense of purpose if it’s going to make its way in the swamp; it needs somewhere to call home, and maybe a family of its own one day. It smells of oil, like a tanker spill off the Florida Keys, or a slow leak in a bayou boat that will leave tourists stranded as the night creeps in, its hooded eyes barely visible above the darkening ripples. It’s warm as fear when it huddles to a dying fire. The gun beneath the seat is wired and hungry, and it can’t sleep for fear of high-end luggage and catwalk shoes. There is just one bullet, but that’s enough.

The Urban Time Machine

There’s a booth in the bar where the same couple have sat for at least forty years, beer mats resting on their halves of mild. They’ve seen it all, from the horse with the long face to Captain Ahab with his whale steaks wrapped in day-old papers reporting Chernobyl, Live Aid, Princess Di, and the Berlin Wall. They don’t recall what the horse said and they ended up feeding the whale meat to their cat. They don’t remember much of the news, either, after all this time, and very little of it made any material difference to their lives. They have always looked more to the future – the horoscopes and weather forecasts – so that, by the time the bar was demolished to make way for luxury apartments offering stylish urban living opportunities, they had, as Deutsch (1991) proposed, entered a parallel universe through a quantum superposition of states whereby they both do and do not exist. The booth retains its early 70s wallpaper and smoking is still permitted. Globally, the whale population is faring better than most people predicted, and if that horse comes in again, they’ll be ready with a smart answer.

Practical Cosmology for the Home

When the news came that scientists – each bald as an egg with thick-rimmed glasses – had divided cause from effect, I knew it was time to pack my bags and leave. So, I folded my bags as flat as leaves and left them in a packing case labelled Happy Birthday. I leafed through all the birthday cards which had been delivered to the wrong address since delivery services were privatised. I dressed in baggy leaves. Close to my ear, an egg vibrated at low C, humming dinosaurs back from the dead, and I dropped it into a box of leaves, curious but unconcerned over potential outcomes. When I looked through the letter box, sheep and goats – each bald as an egg with thick-rimmed glasses – jostled for attention, each bearing bags of leftover birthday cards and innovative plans for recycling using the power of music and wishful thinking. By dispensing with causality, they assured me, all things are possible, and the leaf-gold dinosaurs – each bald as an egg with thick-rimmed glasses – swore that it was the truth. We left together without considering why.