Month: Jan 2017
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Miz Quickly’s Day 7: A Moment with the Mechanic
The Mechanic He’s explaining how it all works, why that yellow light comes on, when it resets and regenerates, how it clears. It’s all about this diesel particulate filter. He keeps saying DPF and DPF, and I realise it’s one of those things condensed into three letters, which makes everyone outside his circle of friends…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 6 (take two)
A Simple Life I am at home on this fertile foot, my own place above the sea. This is my small plot, veiled sombre and fair. I hold it close as life, a treasured lock of hair. And I tend it, as if in its obedience. Taking to its roots and tubers, the carrots and…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 6 & dVerse Pub Form
Brushed Off This was his landscape, that young boy who played the streets, whistled tunes and ran barefoot. Happy ignorance, his laughing days, each morning caution raced him hand in hand. And he brushed off death when he took to chasing trains, that young boy who walked the tracks, always laughing, tempting fate. …
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Twiglet #5: A Cold Radiator
And That’s All I Know I was born in a pocket-sized skinny town that was pelted with a great deal of want. Our neighbour was a large man, reminded me of a cold radiator, or a kettle full of thunder. I recall that he had impeccable aim; he could pee on a gnat before it…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 5: Limitations
A Withering Rain for example, he says, the rain drummed on small thunder, but we called the drought rain. The red ground naked by night — a fine drizzling, a withering rain. To dance, to dance, into all that falling and blowing at clouds, and men with mud faces spilling the air, and the mist…
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dVerse: New Beginnings
It’s Pleasant Enough You and I fell into this notion of newness, me tucked into your fluid surface of thought, floating away easy as water-logged idleness, and you’re a reflection in the eyes of stars, I say, and I’m a silhouette, or a ripple in the bathtub. It’s all very new, new as your touch;…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 4: Unexpected Tales
The Night I Smiled at a Fox I saw a fox in the garden last night. It was the colour of rusty iron. Or Kenyan soil. Sturdy little thing with a long thick tail, just like the tail on Daniel Boone’s hat — Fess Parker’s Daniel Boone. On telly. When I was twelve or so, I…
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Miz Quickly’s Day 3: A-Not-Ghazal
Chairs Our chairs are wooden, straight-back and Puritan. There’s godliness in discomfort, or so I’m told. And to think that chair came from deep forest green. Its nose in the clouds, feet deep as a biblical read. I dust off its rungs once in a while, when I remember. Is that sloth…
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dVerse Quadrille #23
A Cold Front The air is brisk. Engaging. Better than this day deserves. Close fog sniffs at curls of rising steam from the lake, and all I hear is the lapping of wandering waves against a metal rowboat. But summer will come; manicured lawns, yellowed by heat. dVerse Quadrille #23 “Curl”
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Visual Verse Vol. 4, Chapter 2
Brighter than Cold She was luminous, like aluminium bleachers or magnesium light. Always running hot and cold, tempered, and oblivious to her own chill. For three months, when I was 12, I thought maybe I loved her. She’d stand in the doorway, and absorb every thought, most of them about her — self-absorbed comes to…
It's Still Life 