PILGRIMS

I lost the number to my spiritual adviser

We were standing outside the cinema

Traffic bearing down

In the freezing wind

I took your small head in my hands and kissed it,

“how erotic”

I invited you

To sit sideways on my sofa

The finest elizabethan sofa in this swampy precinct

You said I’ve got a hot ear

I said I drink too much beer

Your ginger hair trailled along the carpet

It’s nothing when you stand in cow manure these days 

To flick it off

But now the drums are rolling

and I’m sliding into the jungle swamp

Leaves in our hairs

and stuffed in our mouths

She’s pulling on my tongue, saying,

Do you know what deathy look like?

It ‘s a creaking cart

and has a five sided face

There was nuffin she could do

to save him now

He was turning haggard

in front of her eyes

And now I’ve got hodgkinson’s disease

and this chick is

driving my banana crazy

I’m in my walking frame

and she keeps grabbing her crutch saying 

“not enuff  likwid mate”

“there’s no juice” I say

I clatter out to the nearest phonebox

and she throws me against the wall

“I want the welts on your back”

You don’t like it do you

The way the pilgrims built their

harsh lifestyle

gouged out of swamps

with their hideous demons

dragging their

scribbly scrabbly children

to mouths of graves

and the good father Proctor

We are pilgrims aren’t we

Whenever I would see you

on the street

You would say such rot

PLINTH  &   Other stories 

new collection of short stories 

to be released March 6th 2015