Ragged Claws

Cities and statues, churches and gardens: we garnish the world with our Gods and our graves. We’re always dreaming of something beyond us, forever leaving bits of our souls to blind faith.

The man next to me was very drunk. He had first tried to talk to the barmaid but she’d been too busy. Now he was trying to start a conversation with me. I wasn’t really paying attention, so I was slightly surprised when I suddenly heard the words: “In a perfect world slot machines would [...]

Outside, the neon and the rain; in here, the heat that like soft prayer rises from the radiator, slowly moves the curtains. Distant armies march. Night’s colours rise again, to break upon some waiting shore. There’s dying and soft laughter – desperate prayers. We are born again and die again and we become our nights, [...]

God is out drinking; the Devil is asleep. The angels linger in the outfield; who is there to guard my sleep?

Caught between the stony banks the river now flows meekly to whatever sea awaits it. It bears the sun, the mist, the rain as it endures without complaint the lonely angler in his boat and the fat merchant ships transporting coal across the world. It flows without comment or speculation. But once, beset by some [...]

It was a competition and a carnival: each tower a candidate and a cacophony of blue. The whole city watched while the twenty carts, each  one representing a tower, held their annual race. In the weeks before the race, every morning, streams of people left town through the six gates and late in the evening [...]

Standing on the bridge, talking to the white-capped waves that are not truly there, I whisper to the ghosts of trees, somewhere on the other side of what I left behind, before it came to this, I came to this forgotten bridge. Burn the sails and set the candles. (I do not really listen to [...]

Long, grey plumes rise from the chimneys towards the darker canvas of this early winter night and the red triangle lights of a descending plane break through the cover of snow-filled clouds. Behind me, here in this fourth floor room, more present than the world, more imminent than time, the warm, soft rise and fall [...]

Too tired to tell you the stories you gave me; too tired to show you my latest tattoos. My body is covered in bright, fearful colours that keep me awake with wild fever dreams. My Lady, I’m tired. The shadows are rising like flames on a funeral pyre. Too tired to fly now, to follow [...]

Why? I remember now. Like a match struck in some prehistoric cave reveals the scratchy figures of hunters and  prey, I remember. You were always asking me why and I could never find an answer. Now though, I see clearer. I see everything much clearer now. This – this is Paris, yes, some twenty years [...]

I want some perfect sentence fit the night: the dark and dust of skin and blood; the hush and dying of the embers and the stubborn, hidden roots of life and love but I’ll make do with stumble, shadows; shapes and distances – wild births and all these common midnight causes that I try to [...]

Por qué una negra noche se acumula en la boca? – Pablo Neruda Your muddy shoe-prints, dried now, look like fossils: grim grandfathers of unlikely fish. (You’re gone though and I’m left with memory and ghost.) The two door gate still creaks like the badly oiled wings of pterodactylae, with a touch of dying forest [...]