Book Excerpts
The Gift of Despair
“He fumbled again for his notebook. He remembered when it was new, when he had looked at it and said: “One day you will be dog-eared and dimpled, filled with substance and inconsequence, like an obese cadaver on a mortuary slab”. He noticed some words scratched into the back page from an inkless pen:
I am the hypocrite of a thousand petals
The hole of my life is the empty
eyeball grimace of a skull
I am a ragged flower
A hybrid of deadly nightshade
Of foxglove phantasies
Of morning glory
Of unfantastic gloriousness
I dwell in the suburbs of hell
A Flock of Birds flew past the Window
A flock of birds flew past the window like momentary reflections of some sunlight on a lake. A donkey brayed in the distance. The muffled chatter of grape-pickers rose up from the vineyard like early morning mist. Anticipation dangled from the trees and something smiled. As soon as she walked into the room he knew that she was ovulating. There was no scent in the air — no visible evidence of fecundity — nothing significant in the eyes or facial expression. It filtered through the ether like a message from another world — one to which he belonged and where he longed to be. The body language, though a little awkward, was what one would expect from a woman meeting a man for the first time; though he listened to everything: her fruitly womb, her slightly broken heart, the notes of music played behind her velvet words (where legato met staccato in sonata form and where no coda had, as yet, been written on the stave). She shook his hand and sat down in the chair which plainly hadn’t been designed for sitting but merely looking good. Just like her, he thought. As soon as her eyes locked with his, the bottom of her tightly guarded world began to slide away. Something unfamiliar (though not unknown) had spread like brightly-coloured ink on blotting paper through her head. She thought “The tide is coming in” but had no knowledge how those words had come into her mind. A suggestive roll of thunder beckoned urgely from the hills. “That’s where we now belong”, he thought, “and where we soon will be”…
.
.
© Alan Morrison, 2013
Pain. A word with no anagrams
“Pain. A word with no anagrams. Indivisible. Unchangeable. Period. It begins with pain. It ends with pain — interspersed with windows casting shafts of strange-coloured light. Mindless, morphinic, mendacious illuminism. Even the end of the tunnel is just another window.”
These were the words he scribbled in his tattered notebook in the halflight, as the sun fell below the horizon.
- ← Previous
- 1
- …
- 3
- 4
The Naked Troubadour 