Jack Cooper

 If only I passed the more difficult tests.

Squinting between the periodic table / vicious hail

and the toppling motions of high

siders on the A1.

  Where sometimes markings disappear

and there’s a square rumble from the rear tyre.

Standing water and stories of futile charges

in Argentina, where the reward was death, a medal

  and a legacy of radium. So turn your headlights off

          The shell of my lamp sounding like a bell! The smell of Satsuma giving my room something fresh. All the times you have called, collected and signalling together. The adjustable workings of my typewriter which is now placed in the perfect position. All of these things.

 I would peel oranges all day, slowly soaking up the tiny bursts that inflame my cat’s senses.She says: ‘he likes me’ with her hair tightly coiled in an old t-shirt of mine. The wetness of it

      does not reach into the pillows you so frequently despair of. Waking five years later to another prospective sleep – I tell all my friends about you. The way we name dogs together, the latest being called ‘musket’. How is it I continue to fit through your kitchen window, there’s a carcass in the fridge tonight.                 I felt it wrong to disturb it. Please, when we are next in town, get yourself a key cut. A maintained blade will be sharp, a man on tip-toes watches me count the day’s take. You are mad to believe that there is no drama here, but thank you all the same. Your children have accompanied you for tea on a step in the front garden; it’s sunny at this time. I cannot hear anything from this new position. Accept my thanks also, a brown corduroy blazer to be worn on Election Day. I will find you those mirrors we spoke of. I liked the thing. I left the most beautiful woman to a party filled with adolescents. There has been sex in toilets. I should never have left her. My sweat falls in trustful swaths – my grey hairs extracted if they present themselves. My blood is still red, and redder – as I leap down and across your floor in the agony of an artery. Casey called for his mother and cried for a year. Palmer would take his hit and disappear upstairs to masturbate and potentially die alone – this was an obvious strain on all of us.         The Turncoats of WIndsor have formed an alliance. Around the base of the castle’s most obvious tower they have joined hands and refused to move for several minutes. They have flagrantly ignored the ‘please stay off the grass’ signs. Civilisation is ending where it begun. This sweat is faithful – at night I sometimes leave you.

         Three lovers – head down in the dirt. There’s some concentration – that is easy to see. If only we could love those that love us in return. This is a dedication. If you ignore the rules of this road, there will be no second chances. I have to be quiet. A lady sleeps. A lady is unwell. I have cleaned the kitchen, in preparation of her return. This is a form of love. It is physical – I started to show it, steam made its way into my eyes. The utensils can stab and maim. Please continue the sound is soothing: the plates crashing and services being chipped in your haste. Don’t worry – that mark was made one hundred years ago, that one there, fifty. Three years together for an afternoon spent  crying in the arms of a blue Peugeot.                                        You are beautiful – I should have said so.

 So what is the cost of twenty violins? Do you deceive me? The wood is obviously poor and the strings are nowhere to be seen, a few left dangerously upwards disguised on the floor. The deals are made – all week – untiring, constant, forever passing the terrible reserve and venturing up the abandoned stairs of an empty bait and tackle shop. I left a party in High Wycombe to return to my car park in the industrial estate near Lidl.

 Wet sandwiches became silent fisherman, a woman giving out leaflets in a car park above sea-level. I believe in her likeness, I ignore my own instincts and go the way she proposes. Now faced with two people, screaming and waving needles – locking doors. Frantic needles loaded with disease – get comfortable down among the boils and piles of unwashed clothing.

 Take to the trapeze, spider! Where am I going to put you? Your web

I am my own tide. It’s incredible how close you can be, like sleeping next to a nuclear reactor.

Let things stay at this temperature, it suits me just fine. Please, why take off your shoes... we are leaving in just a few minutes. The way the air circulates around our edges. Forgive me. Forgive my anger. Blame the sea. The recurrence of the lighthouse – its intrusion is so regular. So, after a few attempts – I am getting the hang of things.

People like the sound of saxophone. Not the pounding down of thoughts. Sweet melodies, pianos selling themselves with jazz interludes. It’s taking so long for things to boil. No gas. Naked flames. Catch a Boy Scout or Girl Guide in your hour of trouble. Don’t ruin Nina, let the music play, there are no moving parts to worry about – modern items in atrophy. Your gaze across the table: this particular broth takes time, and the heat is relaxing with my mood (which is indigo).

There you are again – creeping up on me. The contours of my arm, musculature defined in half-light. We have even poisoned our own blood, contaminated apricots, yet decade’s old meat from Vietnam continues to taste swell. I lust after the syrup. I’d take lust over trust any day and right now I have neither. Virginal searchlight – I can taste you. Hercules in pursuit seemed to arrive when we did now Chinooks carry the night between their twin blades like a kind of portable black hole.

The breezeblock foundations shake. The wheelbarrow wants nothing more than a load.

It’s a new day in Walberswick. Indelible, not a mark on any of the walls for men not to notice, but a fresh stain on old sheets. New wives would proclaim their bleeding over the roadways of old towns. It is not something to be embarrassed about – these are people who understand. Enjoy the eclipse. Photographers arrive early with tripods to shoot birds and our row of huts for something to do in the hours prior to the main event.

I know that it will not wash out – only lighten, change in shade. I have had to buy several sets of new sheets for my mother after frustrated early morning fixes with sleep-slow veins and reluctant circulation. Deny everything. The colour the cloth went when applied with water to my carpet was down to tobacco, not drugs, spilt chances. I’ve rubbed cotton buds into wall of my bedroom, where careless firing had left spots of sticky solution. Fired paint into my arm, watery, like a badly dissolved Bupe.

Make that camera take something powerful. A naked woman obscured, in the heat of her monthly agony. I apologise, I am a man and an amateur. I am just a mere man. New to these paragraphs. The sun shows itself for the eclipse. An exhibitionist to the very end. A nudist. Though this would never be admitted. I took to the beaches, my grandfather shared the local rumours, who was fucking who, and where and at what time.

I have anonymity. I have religious obscurity. I have pocketed something that declared me as chosen. Now I take to the path, orange men have lain concrete for the next decade, just beyond the reach of the waves. I will leave her sleeping. The sunshine means nothing. Magnetic fields drew that colour out of you. The constant push and pull – I could almost be jealous. Enjoy it.

These layers... your hours spent sleeping, to the white noise of my writing.

 Look now – the scrap is returning, he’ll come at you with a waddle. A duck-step with locked eyes and an array of unfulfilled threats. If you’re going to do something, then do it. Workshops in the Chilterns are not to be trifled with. WE WILL LET YOU LEAVE NOW. I will pay you. I am ashamed of the stereotypes of my race. The bumbling professor, with far too many things, afraid of an outstretched arm on a bench seat.

TERROR

If you were to take the passing glances and eye-contact of the road, separate us from the metal and upholstery, yet keep the context the same, you would be somewhere near to the looks you receive from strangers whilst stopped for hamburgers at the Beaconsfield services. I queue with my sharpest key placed snugly between my knuckles. I am wary of South Africans and full of preconceptions. I am rewarded for my intelligence almost daily, my ability to cut through the softer tissue and make good with repurposed things. My xenophobic terrorism blames a loose lid on scorching coffee a deliberate, hateful act; as something to be deplored and deserving of rough justice. If it wasn’t for the kind women to my right, no title, yet both weak and courteous, I would have been

rendered obscure with spilt coffee.    

Jumping from the whirlpool into gambling – a pub sits at the centre of this corporate roundabout of free wifi, bad accommodation, faux leather and sad attempts at re-cycling.

An example of this good will being:

Just make sure the red triangle goes in its corresponding hole. It’s the same shape and colour. It’s not so easy to escape. What look like doors are actually just windows, and at night they reflect so much they may as well be mirrors. I can’t stand to catch my reflection – hands greasy from my evening meal, so much so that it’s difficult to handle my keys and they slide all over the traditional exit. So there is one, it’s deceiving.                 Like placing essentials deep inside               a supermarket or

making the entrance a strictly one-way street.

I could continue this narrative, as if it had some kind of theme. That would be nothing but false though. I would be ashamed of myself. I can only hope it is not wearing a sense of cleverness only the author can understand. That would be terrible, as I have no idea what any of this means. I am attempting to convey a feeling. Putting words like that in italics, where there is an obvious flexing of the muscles of speech, is an answer to all my questions in the phrasing itself. All through the various guises of English Literature tuition I received in the United Kingdom between 1998 and 2009 were a similar collection of red words.

Two trains, buttered paws. This isn’t a mathematical question – but if you could have a go at answering it anyway. If two trains leave the circulatory system in Hertfordshire , specifically departing from the hand at 9.45pm    etc     etc

 And I’m subject to all kinds of turbulence, potholes and general distortions. Just what the hell do my taxes pay for exactly! Still, now there is somewhere for the surface water to dissipate – calmly channelled through rubberised grooves. I imagine the radio shows I am hearing and making crisp changes in direction with confidence.

 If steel crosses muscular tissue at 21:55pm after an evening spent considering emigration in light of the possible election results so close to our position, and pierces the soft ‘pop’ of vein at 21:57pm with a minimum of fuss what is the percentage chance of radicalisation?

 Answers on a single sheet of A4 paper, free from perforations that is only to have been used 28 times in the past. Set your watches to his sickness – it arrives earlier than ANY train and is, on the whole, a LOT worse.

 Vitamin C from Falujah.     The sharps of the Rajah.   Trusty American,

The year's out, and the month so we can afford to spend the afternoon on your  mattress. When Valentine arrives  we are going to bake the most spectacular cake. In fact, would you like to see Mary Berry with me? Locally and including a copy of her new book:

I am stained with - I tasted my ice scraper on a January morning, I knew I’d be right. If only I passed the more difficult tests. Squinting between the periodic table into vicious hail and toppling motions of wind-beaten lorries on the A1, where markings disappear. Standing water and stories of futile charges in Argentina, where the reward was death, a medal - a BBC radium legacy, so turn your headlights off; It’s not clear who we are.

A      corporate transition – I like to sit in the corners, one out of three was lost, worse odds than Afghanistan in ’08 or ’09, leaving my traces on the lips of glasses and in flecks that adorn their carpets. So many failed transfusions... A well-lit tunnel, between here and my house please. With white galleries and trashy shops above, only designer crockery for baking, bailing out water and scooping up rogue butterflies and lumps of mud.

It can be seen as a link between the rural isolation and sylvan beauty at the start of the film and the claustrophobia of void and unknown that permeates the second and third final acts.

B       Another quiet week on the cusp of North London – or weekends on the cusp of the West, regional broadcasts are transmissions from the Empire Algol – my bowel like a thermostat in reverse, just waiting. The coffee is good. 9.09pm and the car park is full, the ghouls sag with loaded petroleum, downward cut and shuts. Thrusts of refrigerated metal weaken the tarmac we linger on, although when the temperature is lower, you do get more for your money. I stand up and don’t notice that I’m counted. I flock to familiar signage.

A dab of flame, settling my words up,  in differing arrangements. Uncomfortable.  If I’m able to deceive these spectators,  then you, with all this cyclical blood,  new hair and wild experience, must be  in love with these fools. It’s diminishing –  but sometimes, like today, when I looked  into purposeful mirrors, the way I was talking  was illuminated with the same speed and necessity  as the route I was progressing along. Another dab,  this time as equals, this time to STOP,  and it’s even clearer

Behind me, the rows of this estate are burning.

These zen branches, exertions made to the betterment of children.