Art
of the Novel |
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| Fiction | Poetry |
| Kevin Anslow | |
| Georgina Benson | |
| Lynn Bryan | |
| Vikram Chauhan | |
| Nasrullah Kahn | |
| Jay Mandal | |
| Peter Maughan | |
Kevin Higgins
Weblink: |
| A Balancing Act Consider less the cruel universe, than the face in the mirror who always nicks himself shaving; the bit of a chancer, who’s just glad to be here, given the odds against him ever having been born were overwhelming. No Olivier playing Hamlet; but a B-movie actor who still can’t quite believe the part is his. You who’ve come to understand dialectical materialism like the back of your hand: your ideas as clinical as surgical instruments: must know knowledge is a commodity all too often squandered, that the trick is not to spot the flaw in every fabric; to conduct elaborate experiments in new forms of paralysis. So what if, like Shakespeare, you sometimes mix your metaphors. Leave what they call ‘perfection’ to the long-faced followers of St. John of the Cross. Never settle for a nil-nil draw. If life is a sort of a balancing act, the most careful of men fall off in the end. Foreboding Once more the endless Monday to Sunday and back round again, the days content mostly just to be a small dog peeing against the same old tree. So why then do you get the feeling that the future’s about to leap at you, like a baboon with a hatchet from a man-hole or a closet, screaming something which can only mean‘ This is the end of the old regime’? A Reliable Investment The way you put it all off until tomorrow, just sat back and laughed, while others gambled their last on another gin and tonic for the woman who didn’t blink when they said: “cunnilingus”; your ‘where’s my Liga?!’ face as you lapped up the ‘Oh, no! Not roast beef again!’ of your mother’s endless second-helpings; and the solitary pickle, which lay in wait for the rest of us, somewhere near the back of that bedsit fridge - Best before April 1986 - all this makes it difficult now to swallow the cold porridge of your moans about the wife, who, at the time, you said seemed like such a reliable investment. *Liga: a type of baby-food Time Gentlemen, Please Again your head full of novels you’ll definitely get down on paper one of these days. And Prague? Budapest? Hemingway or Che? The same old questions (only a little bit less) night after night for years. Until all that remains are a few old acquaintances over hot whiskeys whispering: “Not quite here, yet not quite there. His life just a fence he got piles sitting on”: as through the mild October streets your hearse makes haste. To Sunday Evening Morning slick as a tabloid supplement, its glad anthem of eggs and bacon. But then things slipping off the agenda the network not responding, please try again later tossing us out through the afternoon: its shut shops, sad bottle-banks, belts of weather edging in from the midlands, bringing long spells, brief interludes; to the place where you undeniably loom, like a vicious rumour turning out to be true. |