Take a step. Breathe. Take a step. One more minute to resurrection. One more… Breathe.

Lights flicker on wet streets rotating in kaleidoscope visions of blurred intentions. Red splashed across girls’ night out, yellow on the old woman waiting for the bus, blue speckled on middle-aged tourists. Sirens play discordant harmony from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Techno spilling from every club in the square. The universal heartbeat.

At the top of the street, a woman screams at her boyfriend, tears running down her face as she pushes him away and storms off. He chases after her, berating and pleading, confused by her complaints.

The homeless old men cluster in front of the bus station, gnarled rooks cawing and picking. Desperate for scraps. The boys mill around the fountain, smoking and playing tough, watching every face with arrogant intensity. They won’t be like those fucking drunk bums. They’re young. They’re invincible.

A bachelorette party clatters down the middle of the street, glitter horns and brutal catcalls to anything passably male. She’s drunk. She’s happy. She’s only in tonight. Leading her posse to the next bar.

Beside the tree, I’m just a shadow of a shadow. Not enough of a threat to make wary, not enough of a target to bother with. The world coloured with rain and neon and Nine Inch Nails in my ears. Drowning out their truth. Drowning out their lives to make room for the ones I create for them.


My café, mid-afternoon. The lunch crowd gone, leaving space to think and watch. The waitress smiles when I come in, expecting me.

“You’re late,” she says, placing my usual large coffee and a glass of water on the table. Her accent is thick blue velvet, sunsets and warm beaches. She smiles again - no hard feelings - and glides back to her position.

On the other side of the smoking section sits a girl, scraps of paper fanned out around a school copybook. Her hand intense in relaying its message. Long, wavy black hair, eyeliner circling her eyes, layers of silver draped around her neck. She holds herself closed and quiet, but something tremors near the surface. Sadness. Isolation. Boredom.

We mirror each other. Her with her walkman and copybook, me with my minidisc and picture-pasted notebook. Cell phone, cigarettes and pens scattered around me, hands hesitant and sporadic as they struggle for words, find them, and rush to mark them down before they flit away again. Shoulders tense and restless. Wanting. Seeking. Needing.

The girl looks up, staring into me as deeply as I stare into everyone else. Searching for secrets hidden in guarded eyes. Five minutes, five seconds, it’s all the same. Two creatures fixed and focused, testing the barriers. The difference. Connecting without words, without motive, without intent.

She blinks and looks away, then silently (like a swan on water) collects her scraps and vanishes from the café.

Disconnected.


Walking through the pedestrian zone, a thousand different people going in a thousand different directions. All crushed against one another without the slightest idea of who they’re pressed up against. I slide through them, one more ghost into the sea. Children gawk and mothers frown, the boys in their perfectly matched school uniforms yell taunts and jeers and the girls in their plain, drab skirts point and giggle. And I lock myself in a fortress of sound and thought.

Two monks in brown robes and sneakers brush on either side, their conversation disjointed words as their hooded backs dissolve into the crowded streets.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been…” He breathed softly, staring into the shadowy murk of the confessional. A mouse skittered across the floor, sniffing his boot, then disappearing through a hole. “Ten years since my last confession.” His fingers gripped each other in tight knots, pressed into his lap. The dreams, the ghosts, the memories, the guilt. He wanted it gone, all of it.

lipstick trace
venomous skin
hissing through the subterrain
threshold crossing
eyelet heart
tumbled breath in twilight husk

No. Back. Focus. Breathe. Furrowed brows trying to recapture that thought, freeze that image. Keep it clean, keep it safe, waiting for the moment when. Eyes drift almost closed, watching the street through mascara-clotted eyelashes, an overlay of a darkened church and a mismatched boy whispering his confession. Hold it close.

“I’ve got a crush on a pretty pistol
Should I tell her that I feel this way?”

A lithe boy with spiky brown hair on stage in the underground club of all underground clubs, singing his theme to the world. Screaming, laughing, dancing voices every sensation so perfectly crystal clear and magnified.

I rip off my headphones, shoving them in my pocket as I duck down a side street, other hand already fumbling with the clasps of my bag. Crouched against the wall, frantically digging for pen and paper, trying to get it all down before it lands on someone else’s lips. Flipping through pages of disjointed notes, random phrases and descriptions jutting off the paper with no sense or order or remembrance.

Blank page. Torn in half, but there’s space. Words crawl across the page in handwriting even an expert would be hard put to decipher, left hand twitching at my temple with the rhythm of each sentence.

“You write prose like poetry.”
Don’t think.
Just write.

“Coupla quid for a cuppa?” Raspy voice, brown coat, gnarled hand shoved in my face. The inevitable, inexorable. She’s the epitome of every storybook witch. The Hag of Shop Street.

Impatient, irritated, I shake my head and wave her away. With me, she just hobbles away to harass someone else. No spitting, no protruding, warted tongued. No pleadings or prevarications.

Write her.

A page and a half of jumbled, blotted lines. Marked out words and doodled symbols. I probably look deranged, and maybe I am. Or at the very least delusional. A soft, little boy studded with spikes crouched in an alley writing in a notebook like it’ll save his soul.

Cell phone rings, breaking the moment. “People Are Strange” echoing against stucco and cobblestones in distorted, tinny notes. 3 missed calls, 1 text. This one’s Mom. “Yeah?”

“Where are you? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you,” she says.

“Shop Street. I had my headphones on.”

“Well, I figured that. I’m mitching work. Wanna have coffee?”

“Sure. Meet you there.”

Notebook and accoutrements back in my bag. I push off from the wall, staring up and down the alley for a moment, debating, wavering. Back to reality. Back to normality. Quiet the shadowy faces and endless spirals of words. Absently, I untangle the headphones and slide them over my ears.

Take a step. Breathe. Take a step. One more minute to resurrection. One more… Breathe.