Lost String ( 2023 )

Extracts...

In your spring hat, tied with lost string, you're searching the free paper for clues to which day you now find yourself waiting. And, as you well know by now, waiting on this particular corner beat today in the rain for the next delivery is always going to get you plenty of disturbed glances from local windows and trolley men...The steady clump of your drunk wet shoe against the cracked kerbstone shadows the high street, which is still roaring with anger over closure and debt and is also where even the most fucked up has memories when called upon or paid for.

So; you've been shadow hunting. Fucker. Isn't nice. And it sure doesn't look as if it is going to end well either, because people have already got their mobiles out and others are instinctively putting their hands over stash's and stolen wallets...From one of the stickered shop windows a tidy looking woman is shaking her head at the nasty row growing on the pavement outside. It was always about dodgy deals and money owed. Always. And always the same exhausted faces...The sound of blues fast approaching up the street usually moved on most as CCTV's are already being clicked off, wiped or removed.

And all the time is snatch's of stoned smiles floating through smoked windows of passing stolen number plates. Everyone knows the street cliches and seems to love them around here. And not ironically, ironically.

( Previously -Extracts from Yesterdays Broken Promise, 2022 )

Plastic Shoes

In their regulation daytime armour that still cracks with the coarse bedroom whisper of yesterdays broken promise, young women push vape shadowed baby carriers pass boarded up pub windows. The world is the local high street, where each day a bitter grey tide shambles downhill towards abandoned blue churches and disappearing city light. And it is here their plastic shoes slap into one off needles that litter paper gutters and where, even on dry days, the pavements are damp. 

Evenings Shadow

Here -

Where...narrow lane adventures are captured in muddy headlight and the cry of tortured bird..

Where...burdened broken lives are inherited..

Where...evenings shadow lies distressed on ripped rock and moss border..

Where...isolated youth walk through decades of frosted vision..

Where...small trees blanket fallen brick..

is the place language comes to die.

Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication