Blank white noise; whispers on a sharp white wind. Cheap clothes from a white basket. Beggar kneeling on white blanket. Organ-grinder turning a bone white handle White angels flickering a brief existence. The white ends of cigarettes Flicked into White reflecting pools of white water. White skin flashing from sleazy bellies above white hipsters white scars traced all the way to the chest. White towers over white streets My vision White Tear refracted White I recede into white numbed conscious...

frank recall spikes at moments interrupts central european sundays between rye bread, history books and the sour taste of Catholicism. a green flood of palm trees and arcadian art schools bright skirts flashing in African sun, laughter and song, isiXhosa, djembe Transkei marijuana and the Indian Ocean. how we complicated our sapling consciousnesses with hallucinogens and existentialism in circles on the river in vigils at the beach hot fast cars over snaking cape roads jazz odes to heaven sub...

It begins with a shower of dust falling through a ray of white light. The distant white noise of a pigeon's wing flapping in an echo space. Six paralell troughs of darkness running through a concrete shed. The blackness laps up against the platforms and the old man's knuckles creak once, twice and are silent. Romek emerges from the train, collar up high, hair down around his jaw, that familiar gait. He moves slowly now, there are few other passengers around. They disperse, moving toward the s...

our africa sealed off and subsituted by wadding, my head insulated and a few degrees too warm. i tilt and subside into the bodiless abcess of the afternoon. Chorzow stultifying, blackened brick houses that steam beneath mine shafts. your litheness your elfin challenge now surely secured in safety boots at an immigrant job in the heart of the Empire. I rush unchecked toward the edge, fail at the last, sink onto my haunches and enter into the new cold war.

On re-reading Sweet Thursday by Steinbeck on a series of packed and juddering commuter bus trips, I came back into contact with a favourite character of mine. His name was Doc and he worked at Western Biological, a tumbledown laboratory wherein he set up aquariums and studied sea-life. He had women, no shortage in this regard, and beer and whiskey when he wanted it. To me as a young man, he was something of a heroic figure - on his own terms, self-reliant - complete. Something mountainous and...

One He said, ‘Dance for me’ and he said, You are too beautiful for the wind To pick at or the sun to burn,’ He said, ‘I’m a poor tattered thing, but not unkind To the sad dancer and the dancing dead.’ Sidney Keyes Four postures of death. 1.1 Pianissimo A piano plays mournfully in a dusty room. It is raining outside, irregular natural percussion, taptapping on the roof and windows. Candles burn high and bright, wax slides downward onto a wooden table. An old oil-painting rests, half-draped in ...

Muzzled black dogs in grassless yards, exhaust gases, broken windows and a scabbed yellow ladder that ascends to the very roof of Nowy Bytom. Crows in the naked poplars. Sharp beaked. Eyes shining like murderous opals. Branched trees like rows of emaciated dancers frozen in place by the sharp North wind. Graffiti like a matrix of inscrutable hieroglyphs - emanating malcontent and sullen withdrawal. Distorted breasts at the kiosk - they are squeezed up against the icy glass - a section of Cleo...

The city stands gaunt under the snowstorm, spires proudly aloft, monochrome in the white air. There is a dull rumble of footsteps on the street - heavy-set travellers lugging backpacks, head-to-toe befurred mariarchs, black garbed police, white ponies dragging overweight Brits in the chariots of new Europe. Beneath the streets lie the hidden spaces of the city, in which the Eastern soul of Poland is remembered. English is not spoken, is rejected with disdain by the students of literature, lan...

Today is a bright cold day in Katowice. An old man is singing old Slavic folk songs at the railway station and tall broad-faced girls in pointed boots and svelte figures move with purpose past the internet cafe window, through the snow and ice. In my line of vision, a row of old tenements, newly renovated, carved cherubim and devils over the window sills. Young men, bald, with fur lined hoods, talll, brawny. Those who are not working contruction in Ireland. More young men, long black metal ha...

There are times when the spidery lines of ranting form geometric splendour, trapping the detritus of emotion in crystaline lattices. I am the fat, hairy beast spider that stalks the gems. Those who dance monkeylike to the organgrinders tune, the unfulfilled thigh sweat of the aching heart. Hitch up your skirts and redouble your efforts. I stalk the gems. Equipped with mattocks and with twine, I would ascend the peaks. Watch them all spin in silence.