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1st December - Christmas Haikus
Dad by the cold stove
serves the sponge another drink;
hot bite of brandy
--- Robin ---
A proud, red full stop -
the only punctuation
on this page of snow.
Melissa Hicks
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22nd June Guest - Ivy Shed
In the left hand corner of the garden it has been bound, trussed up tight. The roof is covered, no grey felt to be seen. The square for a window is empty, punched through by hungry branches.
They have crept up across the door and only a triangle of wood remains. Never fully closing, it waft and flaps in the wind like a strip of nearly loose flesh. Yet no thud is heard as it eases back. It is muffled by the mass of greedy leaves already inside.
Faye Carpenter
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18th June - Bare Branches
Winter was loved growing up, the snow that smothered grass,
and held the sound to it like a mother’s hug, stopping echoes
in the empty fields. Christmas, New Year’s, Long nights
with long drinks, (hot wine and cold vodka).
But Christmas is 1 day in 3 6 5, and New Year’s is
an evening. Moments interspersed by hours of cold.
There is nothing like the first steps taken through
crisp white paper.
The tangible crunch, satisfaction,
the second step, the third. Learning to walk again.
Snow angels, snowmen,
art made with clear brushes on empty canvases.
Snow steps melt and fade though, becomes all slush and hush and not anymore. The flurry, now water again, leaking from the eyes in the sole of your boot seep and chill your bones, they make you numb she made me numb with her cold…
My bones still ache.
It is hard
To feel the warmth in other seasons.
Early frost kills the spring flowers.
crisp snow becomes damp
and the first steps turn into trudges, trenches, drag marks
automatic and calculated to leave as little behind as possible.
Winter games form edges, snowballs hide rocks inside.
Compacted under feet, and sheets of ice form,
slips and cracks and damage done
where none was intended.
All the love in the world won’t fix a broken femur.
Winter was beautiful. Bitter, bare trees with white shadows
buried beneath snow which smothers and you forget to go outside where life is waiting to wake up.
The bears hide in caves, the swallows fly south and you are left alone in blank spaces, content to live inside, wrapped in scarves and cardigans. Self sustained.
But winter ends, abruptly one day, without warning, just as you’ve resigned yourself to ice and only white.
The spring then sprung about, brown bunnies hopping, tails twitching, new and fresh and the year ahead is free. The world is hopeful, seeds are planted, plans are hatched,
well… fertilised…
but spring is all air, all heady, all light.
She,
unlike winter,
doesn’t stick around too long,
always there, around but
never here.
Expectant days that never
really
go anywhere.
You feel as though you wait forever for spring to just
arrive
when suddenly it’s sprung right past again,
Spring which turns up through the year in days or afternoons with sunny breezes,
pollen in the air,
perfume in the evening.
The smell of coffee on their breath and earth on your hands.
Then
comes a heavy,
lonely
summer.
If we are seasons this is Me. I am summer, alone and uncomfortable. Summer sits and waits,
unexpectant,
slow and
dislocated.
Strange sights, filled with old habits. Holidays taken to escape.
‘Get away’s (or ‘leave me alone’s).
Isolated island beaches
where no one reaches me by email, text or facebook,
noses in books
further escape from my life,
sublimation in a character,
escape from the self,
fear and loathing, lazy, idle beaches,
sand in bad places, sunburn on faces. Eternal holiday.
But Summer ends and Autumn fills the air. That’s you, Autumnal leaves piled high as soft beds with reds and yellows, orange and umber. Ivy Dragon scales up castle walls bright in sunlight. Time to harvest. Time to feast. We can walk in warm rain, and still see sun. Grey skies over bright floors carpeted with the leavings of the year. Autumn leaves the window open at night to let the wind drift through with the tail of summer.
Long walks with held hands, bonfires and the smell of charcoal in your clothes, comfortable with the earth again. Rooted trees stand proud, not needing the coats and foppery. Bare and proud, free to bend in the breeze, touch branches, clap and clatter in harmony. The singing of the oak trees heavy in our ears at night in warm beds with my nose tucked against your neck, and your hands holding mine into your chest. The smell of the forest in your hair.
Autumn is the season we grow old and worn, the season at the end of the year. Winter may come again, forgetful nature buries autumn, but the branches are there, prepared in autumn days,
still clattering in the night against the wind.
Matthew West
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12th June - The Way We Sleep
I had never really been comfortable in a bed with someone else. It used to be that they would fall asleep on (or by) me and I would just lie there frozen; paralysed by the fear that I would wake them - knock them - hurt them. I would stay as still as possible, stuck in one position all night, pins and needles, numb legs and all. I would not move, but fall asleep in drips and drabs in early hours, then wake up early again.
When I ask other people, they say that they don’t have this problem, or at least have worked around it. I’ve got one friend that swears she has to be touching her boyfriends in some way to fall asleep. It isn’t always total enmeshment, spooning or tangled slinky sleeping. It can be a hand against his back, his wrist against her necks, or the tips of toes against heels. Any point of contact.
Another friend said that she has a separate duvet to her girlfriend. One is stuffed with togs while the other is thin sheet. They either cuddle through the cotton, or sleep on separate sides, but it’s the sharing of the square mattress that matters.
I know of other couples with other practices. Couples in separate beds, or separate rooms. Someone even told me that Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter have separate houses that are attached by a door. Physical space doesn’t mean emotional space. I spent a long time in a separate country from him and we were never closer.
But now I have the chance to figure out how to share a bed. These days we sleep spine to spine like a Rorschach inkblot on white sheets. We test the limits between his identity and mine. We share a bed, at night we share this strip of skin the sends the vibrations of his breath through me. I study how he sleeps and mirror him, adjusting my shallow breaths to his deep confidence in the darkness. I have learned to fall asleep next to him.
Matthew West
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15th May - Up, Up and Away
I heard The Truth from the fat, bald man in the grey T-shirt who sold balloons at the corner of the market square.
On the day that we first met him, he had agreed with my mother that the weather was certainly getting much better, and it felt like summer at last. He said that it would be no problem at all to keep me company while she had a look at the fresh fruit and veg stall. He told her she should snap up those Pink Ladies fast; they will all be gone by two.
He gave me a red balloon and told me my mother, with her way of always rushing around, reminded him of his friend in the clouds. His friend owned a house that was too big for her up there, and she was always rushing around, trying to keep it clean and tidy. But every time she left a room, it gathered dust and woodlice. Every time she fixed a window, a door lock rusted, broke and fell to the floor. The longer she spent re-painting the hallway walls, the tighter the strangle-hold of the ivy got around the oak tree in the garden out back. She worried and worried about what the next thing to do would be, and the next, and how she would ever have everything ready by the time her husband came home. I said clouds like a question, and I told him, he must mean Heaven. He told me, he meant clouds.
The next time, my mother wanted to get some sticks of rhubarb to make a crumble for the old school friends she had coming over for tea that afternoon, and the balloon I received was yellow. I found out that the heavier, darker clouds belonged to the fathers with the most secrets or regrets. The one passing over our heads just now, the fat, bald man said as the street was cast in shadow, was once a brilliant entrepreneur who had solved the population crisis up there by working out a way to convert children into televisions and fridges. New-borns could be turned very easily into 50W halogen bulbs. Sunlight bounced off the thick wedge of gold of the one pound coin my mother handed to the fat, bald man for my balloon.
The third time I heard The Truth, I had gotten very bored waiting for my mother to come out of the changing room at M&S, so I thought I’d go to the market and see if the fat, bald man was there. The third balloon he gave me was pink, but I told him I wanted a blue one, because pink balloons were for girls and I was a boy. The fat, bald man smiled and said that I would become a girl if a girl handed me a balloon and the girl would become a boy if I handed her mine. After we’d been standing together for a moment in silence, the fat, bald man drew my attention to the red colour of the late afternoon sky and said the sky had been that very colour when he first held on to too many balloons and discovered the city in the clouds. He had floated up right into the path of a funeral procession; the City Mayor’s coffin was being carried solemnly through streets and streets of mourners sobbing into their shaking hands. He’d been promising all kinds of reforms and schemes, when he was decapitated by a high-flying British Airways plane. Now a faction of well-dressed Alsatians had installed themselves as the new government and had made income tax absurdly high because they liked the texture of bank notes and took great pleasure in eating salads of them. When he landed back down on the ground, the fat, bald man said, he found an extra £20 note in his pocket.
The last thing I heard about the people in the clouds was that they had begun culling wild trains, because they had started steam-rolling conservationists out on country walks. The unemployed had come up with the idea of travelling from town to town and demanding payment for building Train Traps – strips of railway track that attract the trains, who then mount and run along them. The tracks lead the trains off sudden cliffs and into deep lakes. Some of the more docile trains can be lead into abandoned warehouses and domesticated. The men who built the traps called themselves Railers. He gave me an orange balloon that time, and my mother, the grocer, and his assistant, stood watching us from the fresh fruit and veg stall in the middle of the market square. He promised me a purple balloon next time and said that he would ask his friend Peter, who was a Railer, if I could come and watch him catch a train.
When I came to get my purple balloon with my mother, a man in a white shirt was holding one of the fat, bald man’s chubby wrists and guiding him away from the balloon stand. Another one was standing by the open back doors of a van. The fat, bald man was smiling and chatting to the man holding his wrist. The man holding his wrist was nodding with lips pressed together tightly. I asked my mother what was happening. She squeezed my hand and said the balloon man was in the wrong place, he wasn’t meant to be in the market square with us, he belonged somewhere else. I said oh that’s good; he likes it better in the clouds than down here. She said that I should try and forget all the strange things the balloon man had said to me.
But even now that I’m the age my mother was then, I still buy a balloon every Thursday and let it go. Up to the people that live in the clouds. That lived in the clouds in his mind.
Melissa Hicks
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17th April - One Shot After Another
“Alright, so if I get you right, what you’re saying is, one night stands are shots, relationships are drinks with mixers. You’ve got your blondes, brunettes and redheads, or Sambuca, Jäger, Tequila, then Lemonade, Coke and Redbull.”
“Yeah but the relationships as mixers are only the short term ones, the ones that will last for a month or two maybe but you’ll still be back in a little while for a refill.”
Jenny keeps putting the lipstick stained glasses into the dishwasher tray, “Right, right…” she holds one up to the light with a shade that was probably called something like ‘Desert Passion’ or ‘Strawberry Dreams’ and adds “I don’t know why we bother giving them straws.”
“I know, especially when we just have to pick them up off the floor. Speaking of I should probably do another round. Back in a bit?” I pick up the basket. Dumping two empty bottles in the bin on my way past, I head out into the mass. Moving swiftly through various writhing shapes, avoiding high heels while I stoop to pick up glasses. I’m keeping a tally in my head: Couple pushed up against a pillar, tongue down throat. One. Couple grinding on the dance floor, his hand down her pants. Two. Couple in a booth slobbering like pugs, three, but they don’t count, they were doing the same thing last time I came out. I reach the back room laden with alcoholic leavings (including bottles with gum stuck on the side). Picking up a pen, I draw two lines on my side of the tally taped to the wall. Jenny has a total of eleven, I have a meagre seven now.
As I begin to sift through the wreckage in the basket I continue. “With longer more serious relationships you’ve got to go with cocktails, Drinks you want to take your time with that’ll polish you off and comes in a cool glass or something you might get to keep when you leave.”
“Ah but what about cocktail shots like Slippery Nipples or Orgasms?”
“I think that’s just be more interesting kinds of one night stands, your threesomes, your bondage, maybe even your affairs."
“I’m not convinced.”
“Well if you don’t like drink metaphors, I spent an hour or so with a friend of mine coming up with cake ones once. Turns out she was once in a relationship that was a lot like a Jaffa cake. The point is there are only a certain number of types of couples in the world. Some you like better than others, some are stronger and ‘get you there’ quicker and some you want to drink again and again repeating your mistakes night after night.”
“So all relationships are like drunken mistakes?”
“Well no… some are soft drinks.”
“What about fruit juices?”
“Ha well there are the obvious gay jokes I could make.”
She laughed as she bent down to pull the steaming clean glasses out of the dishwasher. “Here, will you takes these out to the bar for me?”
“Sure, but only if you say you agree with me.”
“Alright, but I’m not sure your boyfriend would.”
Taking the heavy tray from her hands I laughed “No he probably wouldn’t.”
Matthew West
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10th March - Ocean Hearts
Let’s throw our hearts into the ocean.
I don’t care where they’re going to go
If we live without restriction
There’s nothing that we cannot know.
So let’s climb trees of cherry blossom,
Make castles out of sand and sea
Picnic on the highest mountain
Experience a world of free
So when our hearts wash gently landwards
We can leave them to sprout dreams
And travel to their new location
To make a life for you and me.
Charlie Edwards
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3rd March - Hooked
After the end, the final curtain, the big break, there were the usual tears and recriminations and all of that stuff. I hadn’t seen it coming. Everyday I came home from work and we would stay in and watch tv, chat shit, or go out to dinner, see a movie, maybe just walk, then bed at a sensible hour, sometimes a few bedroom gymnastics if I was lucky. The next morning I was up by 8 and off to work and the cycle repeated. I mean, sure we argued, but who doesn’t in a relationship.
I called in sick to work the day after she finally gave up. I said I’d be out for a week. I packed a bag, got the tent and my fishing tackle out of storage (wiped off the dust) and drove out a campsite I know in Kent by a lake. Along the way I stopped by a bait shop and picked up a quarter kilo of lugworms.
I left my mobile on the kitchen table.
It had been too long since I had been alone, I couldn’t remember the last time. I set up my line along the bank of the lake, the water rippling gently in the wind. The worms lurched happily in their box beside me as I took out my hook. Why did she end it? I had come to assume we’d be together forever, had resigned myself to it. I picked one of the struggling pink chords out and struck him through with the hook, the metal piercing his flesh, sinking her barbed point right through his core. I tore the skin of my thumb securing him, bright pain slicing. I’d have to dig out a plaster.
The hook flew, the worm sank and the float held the line in the water, bobbing here and there. The birds chirruped in the trees to each other. The world moved slowly underneath me, the sky, quickly above. I stood with my line and my hook, and waited in the stillness.
Matthew West
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