Five-thirty: the floor staff; the flawed show. The plate-spinners and patient players of the waiting game are lined up like a curtain call rehearsal. Resplendent in regulation black, they provide an ironic, coloured counterpoint to Black’s crew, on the other side of the pass. The family, the front-of-house, – waiters, runners, waitresses, busboys – look rested and bright-eyed: even the one or two who rode out the lunchtime slam are still _presentable_, still fit for public consumption. Not so...

those few, golden years when you thought heidegger would save your life. you stayed up at night, all ideas and hope – and still couldn’t write. you took photographs of all your fucking boring friends, who went to art-house cinemas and smoked cigars and tried to speak french. flushed with last night success, you slept drunk in last night’s dress, plotting dreadful poetry that doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t make sense. the moon climbs sad steps up the sky; you don’t know what it is you want – and if...

Allie Park. Crowds part. Empires sway. Rooms stop – and then start again, and shape themselves to fit. She has always had this conspicuity. It’s not beauty – no, not quite. It’s not the reverse. But she has this ability to _stop_ things – conversations, traffic, hearts – and it is difficult to know what to do with it, so she just carries it around. Other people have their stuff to haul about: their rings and their tats and their scars, which say marriage, masculinity, love, loss, fighting, fu...

At Saint Sepulchre’s the bells say, ‘When will you pay me?’ but Dice, feeling twice the price, sticks simply to his sidewalk sidle, scorns the sheepish Shoreditch shrug-off, and thinks about time and money, and money and time, and how nicely they are tied up in the rhyme. Eleven o’clock. Eleven: yeah, that’s good, thinks Dice. That’s a good deal. Double down. Can’t lose. But let’s not take that train of thought. No: let’s follow Dice as he hies and hoofs, wends and winds and weaves his way, w...

Wednesday morning was, by turns, peculiar and painful. The first event, clearly, was that Allie woke up and got up, although this didn’t become apparent until much later. I lay still and kept hidden, swathed in many windings of duvet and down, thinking: I’m fucked if I’m going out there. It got worse, though: she opened the curtains and I fought back with a sideswipe of horror and nearly got hot tea all over myself. The mug went round a full two revolutions on its base, while I watched, stric...

This morning is like any other morning. This is morning and there is mourning and there is Black in his blacks and fifteen floors stare, unflinching, back. Fifteen stone of flaws, fifteen stone floors up, Fraser Black weighs up whether or not to jump: his grace-fall. Relentless gravity. Last night, someone rose up between Black and home: some kid, some alleyway-artist, shadowed and sallow and done up blacker than Black. ‘The bag, chief.’ ‘What? This bag?’ ‘You fucking _deaf_, chief? The _bag_...

this is the truth: a cat walks on the piano, an elephant in the room. we spend too much time - thinking the same thing – in silence. this planet shift, this orbit slip: you come around and nothing happens twice. we sit and stare (‘yeah, how are you?’) and smoke cigarettes, as though we’ve never met. it took me years to coincide, to stand outside, arms stretched as you fell. you picked yourself up, brushed off the dust, gathered your thoughts – and then you disappeared. something you said – ‘t...

this is the truth: a cat walks on the piano, an elephant in the room. we spend too much time - thinking the same thing – in silence. this planet shift, this orbit slip: you come around and nothing happens twice. we sit and stare (‘yeah, how are you?’) and smoke cigarettes, as though we’ve never met. it took me years me years to coincide, to stand outside, arms stretched as you fell. you picked yourself up, brushed off the dust, gathered your thoughts – and then you disappeared. something you ...

I’d expected the kind of clear, crystalline coldness that made itself known when I got outside, and I was quite grateful for it. Perhaps it would sharpen me up. You know the routine by now: collar up, fag in mouth, hands in pockets. I got down to the towpath and took stock of the river; it swelled darkly, dotted here and there with streetlight. I considered it briefly as a theme or a motif: a river ran through all this; on the other side was the university; to get anywhere I had to walk along...

if we go outside, it should be to paint the stars. a study in scarlet. my sunset starlet. if anyone sees, we should fit right into place. this could be our little swansong, starlit. taking up the back row, kissing in the cheap seats. butterfly fragile. funny how we should meet. take me to a drive-in. kiss me in the back seat. turn up the radio to tune the the soundtrack out.