First Nativity Play

What joy to watch the spell-bound wonderment of a first Nativity play! 

My mother's funeral

The day of my mother's funeral is whipped in rain.

A walk along the riverbank by the hotel we stay in and a rainbow lights the sullen sky.  My younger brother and his wife arrive and we set off in convoy.  Four cars; they lead.

We lose our way on the journey to the crematorium.  Steps retraced and we make it there on time.  The crematorium is unlocked, empty and cold as the wind swirls round outside.  The view across the hills is spartan bare.

The party assembles and we sit silent square in a side-room, chairs pinned against the four walls.  The funeral cortege arrives and we go through.

It's finished in a little over ten minutes.  No hymns, no readings, just an address by the Methodist minister who leads the service.  My younger brother has given him the wrong name for our long dead Uncle - beloved Malcolm, the apple of our mother's eye who died unknown in Singapore during the Second World War.

We file out heads bowed to the waiting wind.  Strangely, the service does my mother justice.

Cocktails

Dreams from the Apocalypse - Fly Free

The lines of traffic flow like blood through veins, trailing red light smears.  I watch them ... pass.

Arriving at the control point, captured.  We're lead into a glass-walled room, scared and trembling as the stern lady arrives with her clip-board.  She reads names, and the Zyclon-B prussic acid gas lies but a tender-embrace beyond.

Her attention diverted and I reach for the out-size metal safe-lock mechanism on the glass wall behind. Spinning and spinning a glass door reveal opens and I run out.

A long corridor.

Running in blind panic, terrified by the pursuer behind.  But proud. I'm broken free.

The dead-end reached.  A brittle wooden-wall and the pursuer closes fast behind now.  I feel her every breathe on the back of my neck, calling me back.  I smash through and tread a path between shattered glass-optic glinting kaleidoscopic shards and up to the ramp.

Black smoke pluming.  All this way just to die?  The black plumes give way to white-fleck steam clouds and it's out into cool night air where ....

The lines of traffic flow like blood through veins, trailing red light smears.  And I chase after them ... flying free!!!!!

This was a garden, once

Journey

Past sentient city rush
and the seemingly stained
concrete
tube
sewer tunnel
horse power
cold cough
day break

HOWL

and an old man
crawling
from the wreckage

push-powder
concave
breasted

run, run, run
and dissolving
shadow land
spectres

Pictures of a City