Stupid Country Song

There’s a street sign that points one way
But I’ll know I’ll go the other
And the sun scrapes like a demon
But she wants to be a mother
And there’s a sho left on the bitumen
Left by some forgetful child
Who will walk around on the crooked earth
Dreamin’ for a while
Until those shadows stretch long
Draggin’ the day behind it like a stupid country song

Now the daylight is long gone
And the night time ain’t so nice
And if your told you so’s had come a day earlier
Well, then they could have been advice
But I hold on to her photo still
Like it could some how still lift me
Like the heat from her eyes burning
They could some how still shift me
But again I find myself nodding and singing along
Humming the tune to some stupid country song

 There’s this clairvoyant on Montague street
Who only speaks of the past and its delights
And she points out what you coulda done
To make those things right
She claps her hands
And produces a puff of smoke
“Don’t worry about that,” she says
“I do it for a joke.”
Then she puts some old dusty record on
And starts to do the tango to a stupid country song

 She looks around and asks me
“Do you want a drink?”
And I say that it’s kind of how I got here,
“So it’s better if I don’t, I think”
I leave through the back door
I head around the corner
And find the place the dead go
To escape the funeral mourners
There’s no security, the line’s not that long
And they’re all groovin’ to a stupid country song

 They’re headbanging to Johnny Cash
They’re moshing to Kristofferson
I look over at one corpse, ask her
“Do you come here often?”
She leans over, whispers in my ear
Of the crooked earth and the worth
Of not worrying ‘bout the future
And not checking street names first
“Child, you knew the answer all along,
It was all tangled up in this stupid country song.”

 I caught a train outta there
And moved a little further down the line
Past those faces I once knew
Who were tryin’ to pin me for a crime
It doesn’t bother me, I know the way
But not the street names
I’m seeing through the darkness
The half light, the flames
And up in the clouds is God’s face
Singing a stupid country song
And I spread my wings, raise my voice
And start to sing along
I drink the poison, dance the sunrise
And start to sing along
I burnt my ropes, forgot the key
And start to sing along
I find a highway, walk away
And start to sing along
To the rhythmic sound
Of that stupid country song

fragment – in the early morning light

It was in the early morning light, with the sun barely reaching past the bookcase into the lounge.  It was a dull grey light of the predawn variety when Jacob walked through the lounge and into the kitchen.  The tiles were cold on his bare feet, the air chilly around his knees.  He found a clean glass in the cupboard above the bread and turned the tap.  The water was freezing but calming.  He shouldn’t have actually finished the bottle of wine last night.  There was not a single breath of wind this early.  The song of a few birds singing in the park down the street came through the kitchen window.

At least he didn’t have to be at work in a few hours. 

He ignored the calendar with the date marked with a flower drawn in pink and purple ink.  She’d done that ages ago and he’d spent the last three weeks turning the other way from the kitchen.  He had considered leaving the calendar turned to April until June, but his inner obsessive compulsive took the better of him.  Now that the twenty third had arrived he was hoping he could go all day without hearing the date spoken or seeing it actually written.  He turned the other way, picked a few nuts from the bowl on the bench and chewed on them as he walked back to the warmth of his bed.

The light now peeked into the lounge and lit a piece of paper under the couch.  It caught his eye as he walked past.  For a moment he paused, he thought about the warmth of his bed and took another step; he’d pick it up later.  He should clean the whole house.  Later.  When he had slept some more.  But he turned, bent down, cursing his inner obsessive compulsive again and wanting the warmth of his bed.  It was the phone bill he’d thrown around in late April as soon as he stepped inside the house, still raging from the white sedan that cut him off on the freeway but mostly from having been fired in such a public way.  And with no way to pay the phone bill.  Unwillingly, he checked the due date, praying it wasn’t today.  Two weeks ago.  He picked up the phone – there was nothing.  No dial tone.  Just silence.  He’d been cut off.  But for how long?  When did this happen?  Maybe she’d been trying to call him all week!

They Called Him Fred

They called him Fred, though his real name was King Babel the second.  Only one person knew this, the Gypsy waitress, who, after sampling some over ripe Chai and feeling giddy with the after effects of Indian incense, heard him speak to her.  She was restocking the cake cabinet when it happened, when the fish spoke to her.  It wasn’t the first time a fish had spoken to her.  After a particularly hard day gardening in the mysterious purple herb garden in late spring she had heard her fish, the one with the real name of Prince Ethaniel but who she called Samson, spoke to her.  Prince Ethaniel wasn’t a particularly smart fish, and actually thought he was a dog.  He had been for a while now guarding his bowl with the fierceness of a rotweiler, only being spooked when the Gypsy waitress came to feed him.  Being slightly dim witted, even for a fish, and of royal blood, Ethaniel was hesitant to eat the food without his royal taste testers chewing on it first.  He forgot about this however a few seconds later and gobbled up the falling flakes, then growled and barked, and patrolled his bowl for the rest of the night.

King Babel was a smarter fish.  It was he who had lead the revolution in Russia in late 1917 and it was he who had ordered the execution of both the Czar and the Tsar and both their families.  He was, in the early days, at all of Lenin’s rallys in a bowl held by Trotsky.  But Stalin’s propaganda machine had seen the removal of all accounts of his involvement.  For the better, as it turned out, when he relocated to New York and wrote some songs later attributed to Rogers and Hart.  Had any evidence of his previous vocation survived, McCarthy would have strung him up for sure.

The Gypsy woman was not aware of this, though she had told some co-workers that she’d heard music coming from the bowl.  They thought she was nuts, of course, because it was a plastic piano at the bottom of the bowl.  What she heard was more intricate, as Babel had figured out which rocks were the precise shape for particular notes and aligned them at the bottom of his bowl.  Some might claim perfect pitch is wasted on a fish, but not Babel.  He was working on an opera to pass the days.

On this particular afternoon, with the café empty, she heard him tapping out the pattern of a blues song, confessing to his crimes from the ‘40s when, disenchanted with Tin Pan Alley, he ran a bootlegging business from the basement of a pet shop.  The irony wasn’t lost on him.  On the fateful evening of December 6, Capone’s men had tracked him down.  He knew they were closing in.  It was he who had tipped Ness off about the tax evasion.  There was revenge in the air.  But when Capone’s men burst into the pet shop, tommy guns at the ready, a young fish who Babel had kidnapped from the royal court, hypnotised and trained to guard the booze attacked.  He had been trained well and tore them limb from limb before a round was even fired.  Babel watched in awe with two distinct thoughts – why hadn’t he found a dedicated fish earlier to deal with Stalin, and that he was getting out of the crime game.  His heart just wasn’t in it any more.  That night, after the two fish ate the rarely found delicacy gangster and chips, they parted company. 

The Gypsy woman listened on in awe, slightly suspicious that the melody had been lifted from a Cat Stevens or perhaps a Joe Satriani tune, but captured by the sorrowful tale of the fish who so innocently swam around his small bowl.  She had two distinct thoughts.  Firstly, she would have to get a bigger bowl.  He was certainly deserving of that.  And secondly, she now knew what to do with the bodies of those customers in the back fridge, those ones who tried to skip off without paying.

Guacametamorphosis

After a turbulent sleep that produced erratic and frightful dreams, Gregor Masma woke to find he’d been turned into a gigantic unripe avocado.  As he shook the blanket off himself, his hands glided down the hard rough casing that was now his flesh.  Alarmed, he cried out, making a somewhat muffled noise and then rolling out of bed and over to the standing mirror in the corner.  He looked down at his shapely purple figure.  This is not good, he thought to himself, not good at all.  For one thing, he was far too hard to spread on toast.  And for another, he now had a strange fear of Mexican restaurants.
Gregor’s mind wandered to the previous night.  Had there been something he’d done that might have brought this on?  He hadn’t drunk anything particularly odd.  He hadn’t jilted a witch, to the best of his knowledge, though there were some who described Frida as such.  He laughed, then caught sight of his reflection and was again panic stricken. 
A call came from the other part of the house.  He pushed himself up against the door as his housemate knocked.  “It’s the phone, Gregor.  Sophia.”
He looked around the room, thinking perhaps he could hide under the blanket but realised that his newly developed figure would still show.  “I can’t talk now,” he stammered.  “Tell her I’ll call her back.  Later.  Much later.”
“Ok,” came the reply.
“And I won’t be able to come today.  To the picnic.  I’m feeling, ah, unwell.  Very unwell.”  He coughed for good measure.
“Do you want me to get you anything?” asked Josef.
“No, no, I’ll be fine.”  Gregor pressed harder against the door harder, he could smell the oil paints from Josef’s painting smock.  He had to be close.  After a moment he relented, figuring Josef had returned to the canvasses in the living room, and fell back onto the bed.  The important thing, he thought, might be to ensure I don’t ripen and rot.
The door opened.  “No,” Gregor screamed.
Josef stood in the doorway, speechless for a moment before announcing, “I wanted to show you this, my new painting.”
Gregor couldn’t hide anymore.  He was strangely captured by the colours in his housemate’s latest artwork.  Despite his hygiene problems, particularly in the kitchen, Josef was developing into quite the painter.
“Uh,” Josef said, sheepishly, “would you pose for one of my still lifes?”
“This is serious,” Gregor shouted, throwing a shoe at Josef.  “I’m a avocado.  And an unripe one at that!”
“I’m sorry,” Josef said, obviously still thinking about it.  “Do you feel ill?”
“I feel fine,” Gregor said, “I’m not in any pain at all.  Though I do feel unripe.  Oh, what am I going to do?”
“We should see if it’s just the flesh.  You might be ok inside.”
“How do we do that?”
“Make a little cut?”
“But I might brown and then rot.  You are not thinking!”
“I don’t need abuse from a vegetable, Gregor!”
“I’m a person, Josef.  Or maybe a fruit.  Definitely not a vegetable.”
“Do you think you have a big seed inside?”
“Oh, I don’t know.  Maybe.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
Another shoe flew towards Josef but he moved out of the way in time.
“Ok, I won’t cut you.  I promise.  Just lay down and I’ll make some enquiries.”
“Be subtle,” Gregor called after him.  “I don’t want to be some novelty display.”
Gregor rested on the bed, running his hand along the rough surface that was almost like his shell.  Suddenly, he realised he still hadn’t eaten.  He waddled into the kitchen, littered with the dishes of the big dinner party Josef cooked up three nights ago.  Gregor was sure insects were nesting in the large saucepan already.  He looked through the cupboard but his mobility had been severely compromised with the morning’s development.  The small bowl of fruit on the counter, left there from Josef’s still life of last week, were the only things within reach that didn’t need preparation.  Gregor picked up an apple and began to slice it, eating it slowly with great difficulty.  While slicing off the third portion Gregor dropped the knife.  As the blade fell it sliced his hard outer skin.  The pale green insides made Gregor feel queasy.  He made his way back into the bedroom and rested his head on the pillow.  The soft insides began to brown as he slept.  It spread quicker than expected.  The sides of the cut had weakened the shell.  It was when a cockroach managed to crawl into the wound that Gregor’s breathing became really shallow.  Then it stopped completely.
Josef managed to catch the deteriorating fruit on canvas in the afternoon, proud at his still life with a touch of Monet influence, before slicing the avocado into sections suitable for storing in the refrigerator.

[apologies to Franz Kafka]

please send money

Please send some money.  I was mugged last week outside my hostel.  As I called for help an elderly man looked out of the apartment building across the road and told me to keep it down, then threw pairs of old shoes at me.  I didn’t have enough money to pay for another night in the hostel but I managed to survive for the rest of the week by selling the shoes at the market for loaves of bread.  But now the shoes are gone and the remaining loaf has gone mouldy.

Other than the mugging and running out of shoes to sell, I have been travelling well.  I rode the subway last Tuesday and got talking to a Portuguese man who thought I was Saint Sebastian.  As I tried to get of at Rue de Phlique he held me down and told me he wasn’t going to let me go until I blessed him or gave him directions to my pot of gold.  He had a wild look in his eyes and a sharpened toothbrush, so I blessed him and was able to get off at the next stop.  As I walked back to Rue de Phlique a wild eyed policeman stopped me and asked me where the nearest national landmark was and where he could buy some plutonium.  I told him I had no idea about the plutonium but I could help him with the landmark.  I pulled out my map with all the tourist features marked on it and he promptly arrested me on suspicion of being a terrorist.  I told him he was mistaken and he told me he wasn’t buying any of it; I clearly had the information that would benefit a terrorist cell. 

Later, while I was sitting in a cell I had to share with a Tony award winning actor who thought he was a pigeon.  I asked him if he was method acting like all those great actors we used to watch but he just pecked at the ground and said “coo, coo.”  He was in for terrorism related charges too.

I managed to escape when a drunk musician drove his piano into the police station while singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg.  The policemen opened bottles of wine and joined in with him while me and the pigeon crept away into the night.

Now I am holed up in the ear of a national monument, feeding mouldy bread to an actor.  If you could send some money my way I plan to hope on a train and get out to the country.  There’s a tavern just three hours away that I’ve heard do brilliant French toast, but the Russian way, and will put me up in a room if I work the bar for a few nights.  The fresh air might do me some good, and the actor can fly around for a few hours.  He’s getting a bit stuffy here and is drawing attention from the sightseers on the ground.

Regards,

N. 

some haiku

Your shoulders are cold
I’m talking to keep you warm –
I forgot my coat 

The band play loud jazz
You in the corner, grey dress
How I wish I danced!

I hear a violin
Shadows part in symphonic
Daze; are you nearby?

Band names

She sat patiently at the kitchen table. She checked the clock again, the one hanging over the refrigerator, then reminded herself it wouldn’t tell her; he was already late. No amount of ticking from the kitchen would make her feel he was getting any closer. Was it really just last week they were so happily making music together, so happily singing Norah Jones and Beth Orton songs together? It was then that he had played one of his songs t her and she’d added a little flourish on the piano. He went ecstatic when he heard that, she remembered, smiling, though really it was just a little riff on the fourth and third and an inverted chord. It didn’t matter now. Did she really agree to playing on stage with him at an open mic night? She made herself another cup of tea and sat at the table.
“Hey,” he said, waltzing through the door and kissing her on the cheek. “Do you want to practice the songs one more time before we go?”
“You forgot we were meant to go out tonight.”
“To the open mic night?” She shook her head. The tea was cold. He saw the theatre tickets on the table.
“Oh, babe. Look, I’m sorry.”
“It was Alison’s opening night.” She hid the emotion well.
“We can go tomorrow. Right?”
“It’s sold out for the rest of the week.” She heard the clock.
“We’ve got the nine o’clock spot tonight.” She looked at the tea again, shaking her head. She knew he still hadn’t seen the bags packed near the door. “I’m not playing.”
“But we make such a great team, such a great band,” he urged. “Beautiful, beautiful music together.”
She pulled her hand out from his and stood up. Her breath was quickening, overtaking the clock. “No,” she said, her voice higher than normal. “Not any more.” He saw the bags then looked back at her. “Not anymore.” She put her brown hand bag over her shoulder and stepped towards the bags. He reached for her hand.
“But we still have to come up with a band name,” he said weakly.
She shook her head, involuntarily now, her knuckles white as she gripped the bags. One in each hand. “Bye,” she said, looking at him one more time, biting her lip as she stepped through the door.

misc fragments

and she steps out on to the verandah, looking around and at nothing
  in particular, unconsciously dragging her red shoe
  along the concrete as she straightens her hair along
  her cheek, glowing from the heat of the mid-summer air
then she turns to go back inside, pushing against the ball
  of her foot and her calf, sleek, arcing gracefully
  as she springs through the doorway
my insomniac late morning body a little lighter for seeing her
  a little weary for knowing how she loves
  another man.

———————————————————————-

and i’ll go out  again tonight, pull on the guise again
and i’ll write you another letter you’ll never read
  about how i liken it to a balloon
and confess what was in that kiss on your cheek
  when i left you standing on your parents’ porch
  when your boyfriend was out
about your intuition that makes you move on so quickly
then i’ll sign it as an apology and pray for sleep that never comes.

The First Short Story Of Adrian Goya

It was a little before eight when Adrian Goya woke that morning. There was the sound of his neighbours going to work, the sound of the other neighbour’s kid crying. A car rattling down the side street – three times a week – and then it was all just a little bit quieter. He climbed out of bed and walked into the bathroom.
If his shirt from yesterday didn’t have that mysterious purple stain on it, he would have been on time. He made a cup of coffee, absently putting the box of matches in his coat pocket after lighting the stove. Raspberry jam on toast. Then threw it out and drank the coffee at his front window while watching the cyclist climb the hill. His stomach didn’t deal well with solids in the morning – two times a week. He brushed his teeth and made a note to buy more mouthwash on his way home before he walked down stairs and onto the street.
If it hadn’t been for his broken shoelace, he would have been on time. He walked down the main street, cursed the traffic and crossed before he got to the lights. This way he would miss the children coagulating outside the school. This way he would walk through the park, pass the two brothers with fluoro shoes who jog – four times a week – and pass the two Italian gentleman who play chess near the park gate every morning. If he hadn’t had to buy a pointless train timetable from the tobacconist just to break the twenty into coins, he would have been on time. With his uncomfortable shoes reminding him why he bought different ones six months ago, and a timetable in his hand for a place the opposite way down the line from where he had to go, Adrian Goya resigned himself to being late and sat on the bench. He looked up, towards the café. He ordered a pastry and a coffee and sat near the window, keeping an eye on the clock above the platform. He put the receipt for the coffee absently in his coat pocket, not knowing why he would keep it, and pulled out the matches he didn’t recall putting there. He drank his coffee slowly and watched the crowd of people gathering on the platform. It seemed odd, he thought, that these people inhabit the very same space I do, only minutes after me, every day of the week, but I never see them.
He watched the crowd on the other side of the platform, on the train heading south, looking through his pointless train timetable to see where they could be going, and smiled as he saw the two fluoro brothers helping the Italian gentleman on the train. The train pulled away. When the blonde in the grey suit approached him, her extinguished cigarette between her long, white manicured nails, and asked him for a light he handed her the box. Her hair fell around her face as she lit her cigarette. She ordered a coffee and sat on the table next to him, watching the people walk past the window on the platform. When the waiter brought over her coffee she turned and caught Adrian looking at her. Adrian smiled at her.
“I’m early,” she shrugged, smiling as she shook a sugar into her coffee and stubbed out the last of the cigarette.

random poetic musings

As I drove you home this evening,
between the way the light struck your face
and the way you bit your lip,
I realised I could look at you for the longest time 

You turned your dark eyes away
to look search for the night’s first star
as mine lingered on your pale skin
I realised you would never be mine 

 

—————————

 

The light reflects off the car across the road,
through the cafe window, and over the toddler’s
head as he bangs his biscuit on the table,
to the waitress, blinding her as she 
tries to take my order.