Vinyl Villain

My fingers were sore from the string that held the bundles of records together as we walked down the hill to Vinyl Villains. They were pristine inside the tied up boxes and when the record shop guy turned the first one over in his hands he asked Sheona reverently if they were all like that. My own records were already binned, played to death and ripped to shreds but both sets were redundant without a player and with another baby on the way there was no room for old stuff to just lie about. She got £120 for her collection. As we walked back up the road and I wiped her tears away, they turned to pieces of silver in my hand

On throwing away an old copy of LOTR - blank verse

One volume, binding all in paperback,
with spine of crisp and yellowed sellotape,
Its corners folded into cabbage leaves,
Not dog-ears, unless in some dreadful fight.

Redundant on now overloaded shelves,
Replaced by illustrated, Alan Lee’s.
Too tattered even yet to give away,
I turn it over in my hand and see,
A price that tells a story of its own,
One pound and pennies for five hundred sheaves,
Of day dreams and delight; for half a life-
time spent in lands whose air I’ll never breathe.

Then Aragorn strides out one final time,
Last chapters shift and flutter to the floor,
Bound for the black pit; the fellowship’s doom,
Beyond Grey Havens never to return.

LOTR stuff to throw away

On throwing away an old copy of “The Lord of the Rings.”

One Volume, paperback
with spine of yellowed sellotape
Corners folded into cabbage leaves
Not dog-ears unless in some dreadful fight
Too tattered for the Shops
Of Charity to take and sell
Redundant on new overstocked shelves
Replaced by illustrated, Alan Lee’s.

I turn it over in my hand and see
The price that tells a story of its own
Pence and shillings for a thousand
Pages of delights and daydreams.
For half a lifetime lost in lands
Whose air I’ll never breathe.

Appendices shift and flutter to the floor
Aragorn strides out for the final time
Into the black pit and the fellowship’s
Doom without return.

Horror Box

Rambly free verse unedited as yet

The horror box


I put my hand into the narrow
Circle of the hole
Grabbed by the writhing tentacles
of a demented squid
my arm is flayed in a frenzy of suckered hooks
My fingers crack between the jaws
Of the dull scissored beak
Crushed and severed digits fall
From one hand to the other
A hapless juggler in a circus of distress.

I put my nose up to the puckered hole
Slaughterhouse smells of blood, shit and rot
Marsh gas from intestinal swamps
Mingles with the lurking underwaft of
Stale piss, rotting nylon and sickly
Sweet pine of cheap air-freshener.
Olfactory meltdown,mucus streams
The sense of smell is replaced by
A dull ache and a caught breath

Involuntary reluctantly I taste the thing
Chitinous crawling creatures leave acid trails
Across my tongue the ripples of filth
wash Rancid milk and Bilious meat
a sandwich of mouldy bread
stuffed with the gag of fur and taint of metal.

Holding it before me it shrieks
A writhing mass of venomous metal
with scrabbling legs and glutinous slime
It stabs and slashes its way free
Repulsed and plunging to the floor
It skitters to the corner
A stain spreading in the gloom
Tendrils worming to the wardrobe
Poisons seep into my pores becoming part of me
Its remnants multiply within. Dividing,
Subdividing in a honeycomb
Of cryptic chaos and
Putrid birthing cells
Today’s shame is
Tomorrow’s horror.

Flying to Drumore

It was a beast of a thing
my Dad's old car.
All wheels and engine
but small inside.
A tardis in reverse
with red brown leather seats
that stank of woodless pine and sweaty knees.

When we left the Little Chef
a rumble turned into a roar.
Flying to Drumore one hump at a time
in the goony bird express.
Seven hills, passing on single tracks
A last bridge seen too late
and flight both longer and less graceful
than the rest

The bubbling spring of coke welled up within
Spewing out geyser streams as I yelled stop!
My Father's Brylcreamed hair slicked back
and suddenly immersed
in the former contents of my sugar loaded mouth.






-------------------------
almost a true story,
I missed his head.

The Electric Boy - A Terza Rima

Its funny how childhood memories seem to come back once you start this creative writing lark.
The poem is based on an incident that I was told about as a child, at length, by my parents.
A boy who lived in our street (but whom I didn't know for some reason) climbed over the rails of the electricity sub-station
his older sister was there too and tried to pull him away from the machinery with a bit of fencing. He was, according to my Father, burned to a crisp.
I used to walk past that generator on the way to my Aunts and the hum of the wires was a very eery sound . Needless to say I gave it a wide berth.
I still have an image, which I didn't manage to work into the poem, of a black and white plastic ball, melted half to slag on top of one of the machines.
I think they left it there as a warning.

Poetry

Up next is the dreaded poetry scetion of the course.
Sadly I don't like poetry very much . Maybe it was early exposure to Douglas Adam's Vogons that did it but everything I write is in that style.

Hey Ho..onward and downwards !

25 word short story - The Mayflies

They met over morning coffee; by dinner they were in love; by supper their marriage was consummated; by dawn they’d died. So the mayflies dance.

Two versions of an encounter in WW2

This story is prompted by a tutorial request to write to sequences telling the same story but from different viewpoints.
The seed was an encounter between a British and German soldier in WW2.

The Tommy's Tale

The first time I saw a real kraut was exactly ten seconds before I killed one. He was standing to attention, with his arms behind his back and a blindfold over his eyes. I was creeping, quietly, through an empty village in Northern France, four or five miles east of my proper drop point, when I looked round the corner. There he was, blindfolded, with his grey uniform jacket opened wide, showing off a white vest and the top of his pale Aryan chest. An officer stood five feet away from him, his jodhpurs flapping in the stiff breeze, pointing a pistol at his head. From the officer’s movements and puffing cheeks I guessed that he was shouting, but the wind caught every word and threw it down the road away from me.

Shoot the bastard officer first. The revenant of my drill Sergeant shouted in my ear and my arms raised my rifle without conscious thought. I sighted, took a breath, let it out and squeezed the trigger. A hole appeared below the officer’s right ear and he dropped like a theatre curtain to the ground.

‘Who’s a useless pansy now, Sergeant?’

I ran forward in a crouch from my position, ejecting the spent shell as I went. The other soldier had fallen to his knees. As I approached him, I could hear him talking to himself. Hellfire, hellfire. It seemed an odd thing for a kraut to say.

Moving closer, I saw that he was slim and tall, with an ill-fitting uniform. Below the strip of cloth that wound around his head, his pale cheeks were covered with the soft honey down of youth. He curled further and further forward until he toppled over, cracking his head on the ground. I reached down and put my hand on his shoulder, feeling sorry for him. Touching his ear with the outside of my hand I said,

‘It’s alright. It’s alright.’

He rolled on to his back and shouted at me.

‘Nine. Nine. Bitter she’s meek neek’

‘Shush, shush. Quiet down.’

I pulled his blindfold off and his blue eyes flitted wildly across my face, and then looked at my uniform. He scanned down between my legs and gave a look of calm bewilderment. Behind me, lay the body of the officer.

The youth gestured to me to untie his hands then flinched as I reached down to my belt and pulled out my bayonet.

I cut him free and he stretched his hands to my face then kissed me on both cheeks..

‘Tanker’ he said ‘Tanker’, and then kissed me again.

This time, I dropped my rifle and my bayonet and kissed him back.

The Hitler Youth

I stood to attention as Officer Gerhard prepared to carry out my summary execution. He had placed one of his own handkerchiefs across my eyes. It was a nice touch, I suppose, but perhaps it met his own needs more than mine.

When he chose me for his personal assistant, I had assumed it was because he liked me. I was not wrong. We had been corrupted by the rampant power of our overlords and become decadent in our desires.

He justified himself of course in those tender moments after he had used me, with passages of Greek philosophy and stories of Thebes, but all of that was forgotten when he found me with a French boy in my bed. He raged and railed, calling me a pervert and a traitor then made me sign a confession on the spot before dragging me out into the street to shoot me.

Tears ran down his cheeks as he bound my hands behind my back and covered up my eyes.

‘Goodbye’ he said.

‘F___ you, you hypocrite’ I would have spat if my mouth hadn’t been so dry.

That set him off. I heard him step backwards and then he started shouting again, but the wind came up and the blindfold covered my ears so that his angry words were lost on me.

I did hear the shot, but when I did not feel the bullet, I thought his nerve had gone.

I waited for a moment, but my head swam and my legs trembled so much that I dropped to my knees.

Footsteps clattered along the road in front of me with the clicks and scuffs of a common soldier’s boot.

‘Help, Help’ I said

The footsteps closed right in to me and I expected to feel the sharp pain of a bullet or a bayonet. I curled forwards, making myself as small as I could, until my head cracked off the pavement. A strange voice said something I didn’t understand and a hand touched my shoulder. I rolled away from it, onto my back.

‘Please, Please don’t shoot me.’

The hand ripped away my blindfold and I looked into the face of an angel. Then I saw his khaki uniform and there on the ground behind him, was Officer Gerhard.

I worried at what he would do now, but tried to look friendly and gestured to him to cut my hands free. When his hand touched his bayonet hilt, my heart leapt and I fixed him with a pleading gaze. He cut me free and in my relief I kissed and thanked him. As he kissed me back, I wondered what was in his thoughts, but the sheer animal joy of living overtook me and I surrendered.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The overall title for this should be Brokeback Arnhem reallly .....

Prose in the form of a play

Prompted by the line
“The dance, in a black leotard, did not much improve her robust figure, only her appetite”

The scene opens in a living/dining room of an ordinary semi-detached suburban home.
Bob is sitting on a sofa watching TV.
Jane enters, carrying a large plastic carrier bag.

Jane: Do you have the table set ?
Bob: Mm ? Oh, hello dear.
Jane: The table ? Oh never mind, they’ve put in chop sticks. I don’t know what you do when I’m out. I think you just waste your time, while I’m improving myself.

Jane sets the carrier bag down on the table and unloads a prodigious quantity of take away food.

Bob: We expecting company?
Jane: I’m starving. All this exercise makes me quite giddy if I don’t eat. Anyway, I need to keep my strength up if I’m going to master all these steps and leaps. Do you think the exercise is helping ?
Bob: Mmm. You do look a bit slimmer.

Jane takes off her jacket and twirls round clumsily.

Jane: Do you really think so? Sometimes I feel like an elephant, but this black leotard makes me feel like a swan.
Bob: Mmm. Yes.

Bob sits at the table

Bob: Better get tucked in before this gets cold, eh.



Notes: The main difference is this almost all show and no tell. Even more so than in a play, character is inferred by the reader rather than stated or acted out and setting is sketchy at best.