Prison Ship - Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

Silence crashes into untouched chip paper as power pulls gutted interest from unwilling hands.

For Andy Smith and Lee

Falmouth, 2023

Thin Whistle at Dawn - Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

Mystery man, shadow man is what they used to call him. Him when he was the latest three day thin whistle at dawn millionaire returning from sea to die like his father. Shallower sea back then, better cut cloth, broader smiles. Now though, after too many rope marks and twisted bone, life comes mixed to stillness with drink, sharp curses and dark corners.

Newlyn / Grimsby, 2023

Write with your Ears ( Part 2 ) - From 2011

Last night in the pub I was sat opposite a very elderly couple. A gentleman, was recalling story after story to a rather mystified and confused looking lady. He told her, over several shared bottles of Newcastle Brown, about his father and the various attitudes he had held towards work following WW1. He was, I have to say, a very good storyteller. 

So...30 years previously in Brixton, London, I'd had a conversation, in a pub, with an elderly lady who told me she had been born in a brothel in France during WW1 and was still wearing her mother's fur coat from that time, that very evening. And 10 years before that, I'd got drinking and chatting in a pub, to an elderly father and son. The father telling us both all about his experiences as a boy soldier in the Boer War in 1900.

It seems clear to me now, as a writer of MicroFlashFiction, that source material has a tendency to shift with the times.

'Write with your Ears', An 11.59 Publication

Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

The Right Shadows - Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

Daytime Hideaways

Between rubble and broken glass, in backspaces unseen from roads and rear view mirrors, shaking hands are being shaken. Here tracksuits are worn to hide shape, weapons and sex, and trade, like this space, is invisible and unknown.

The Right Shadow

Grey, when you's staying at Clink Hotel. Black, when you returns home to no fixed address. Each casts the right shadow, makes you invisible. Makes you useful.

The Mercy Path

Once you bypass the last starched lightning tree you enter a hillside world of midnight stream and border wire music. Here across shilling debris, early shadow and blisters of high mist, nature composes movement from iron and broken bone.

The Proposal

Cut into bitter grey stone by masters of dead trades, is your life story. Brief, like you, words torn from broken parents target the elders who created your passing.

No Paths

Here, where young people never return and there are no paths, is the place language goes to die and old people stop to watch lost cars drive pass.

Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

Up at the knock - Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

You's always in the hidden places; sometimes seen walking along the cold suede banks into the windowless tin roof shacks that are haunted by the black hair of the missing, and sometimes seen down the tight velvet lanes where the wild horses run and beer is drunk and apples still grow in secret orchards.

Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

Half Stolen Buildings - Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication

In a regulation daytime armour that's still cracking with the coarse whispers of yesterday's broken promise, young women push vape shadowed baby carriers past boarded up shop windows. Their 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 plastic shoes will slap into one off needles that litter paper gutters and where, even on dry days, the pavement is damp.

Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication