#oz hardwick

[eunoiareview]

An Unnecessary Penance

I broke my fingers to stop them writing and broke my promises to keep myself from drowning. Every night I run a marathon in my sleep and every morning thieves are selling my gold medals on eBay. I’d buy them back but my fingers hurt too much. I’m told I should take more or less medication and that everything’s more or less my fault, including minor mishaps by the boating lake and everything that…

[eunoiareview]

The Narrative I

All the suspicious messages arrive at once, their shifty eyes taking in all aspects of subjectivity. I is the confessional self, a construct of experience roped to tropes of lack and longing, belonging in terse verse but all at sea in the luxury lounge of a sinking ship. At the same time, I looks out for number one, to the extent that it’s virtually indistinguishable from number 1 when it comes…

[eunoiareview]

The Invitation

Strays circle like iron filings round a magnet, drawn to the dance that’s stamped in their DNA. Even chance has its laws, bad luck has its Highway Code, and accidents occur in accordance with strict etiquette. So, when that first dog leaves the pack to tap politely on the window, a tissue-wrapped gift nestled lightly in its paw and its tongue pink as strawberry ice cream, there’s form to follow…

[eunoiareview]

Metempsychosis for Beginners

Dim lights stroke cellophane roses into temporal photosynthesis. Luminescence becomes chemical energy, becomes self-absorbed, and divides into powder and past lives. I built a bicycle from scrapyard fragments and a fire from songs I heard on pirate radio, then torched my own bed and rode to the Big City I remembered from pantomimes. My mind was the kingdom, the power cut and the oft-repeated…

[eunoiareview]

Prolonged Release

You swallow the cap that says prolonged release, wait for anything to happen, hope it’s before your mother comes home. Your throat’s dry, and it’s already autumn, with the bustle of apples, pumpkins and burning skies, but there’s a blur of fox at the edge of your vision, a twig-crack in your stiffening wrists as you settle to type your version of the story so far. If you’d read the enclosed…

[eunoiareview]

A New Theory of Railway Timetables

The curl of the world is a bookmark in the wind, a pause between pages, a shift between folios of stillness and storms. Sweet are the seasons, seasoned with long black memories and stained with gold leaves. The coil of words is booked on the 8.25 Geneva-Paris Express, winding through a million landscapes per second squared, paging doctors in unrelated disciplines who theorise in shifts at the…

[ukdamo]

Today's poem:

Worker's Playtime, by Oz Hardwick.

[ukdamo]

I  Austerity: The Musical

Oz Hardwick

Warnings on the wireless hobble the morning, shackling it into a lopsided gait that twists the day ahead of itself. There are hulks in the estuary like rotten teeth, a murmur of dogs and whistles from the far-off marsh, and an endless play of Dickensian tropes spilled across the cobwebbed breakfast table. Lunatics and whores are paraded for entertainment, and the hungry and homeless are given songs and a few rudimentary dance moves. I missed the details, but the reports said something about ice, something about Russian planes. There’s what sounds like breaking glass, a rattle of chains in the kitchen, so I turn up the wireless, sing along: In this life one thing counts.