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Poetry and Short Stories

"Williamson's Tunnels" by John Davies

I shall set you to dig,
you war-broken family-men, you scourge,
until all sound is a clump of earth
and every laugh a lungful of sand.
To where your breath confronts you
the next man's voice travels silences,
from the vast roar of a banquet hall
to a slit your spine scrapes through,
the walls wet-mouthed on your palms-
these tunnels will see past all of you.

Fifty years later they will fill us in
with ale-jars, plates, oyster-shells,
and the rats will crawl in afraid,
or the slinking gangs hold you by the throat
and conceal the mark of the man
on every placed brick and stone.
As we move below your kitchens,
drips from your cellars
will rip all existence down to our level.
Soon railtracks will rattle over our heads
and they will hear the strike of the spade
as if it's from Hell.

"Alfresco Lecture Series, no 1" by Urbin Flack

Little kids are funny things. Sometimes they look at you with such big eyed trust that you just have to tell them how it works. Well, I beat about the bush for a while, talk about space ships and frogs, highlighting the importance of oral health etc. But on Wednesday morning I finally crack.
'Listen pet, there's no such thing as polar bears', I say to the small thing standing at the kerb, strands of light hair blowing in the back draft of skateboarding commuters. 'You listening to me? Butterflies are machines, evil machines sent by the government. Whales? God, don't get me started. Lazy, clumsy things, spend most of their time doing crosswords.' I get the hip flask out and watch her face go hard. I was a kid once. I wanted to be an air traffic controller and I wanted to marry a mermaid. I met Daphne when I was twenty six but she had the same heart defect as the rest of them. They buried her in the sea and I figured there'd be space for both of us, but they brought me back muttering something about permits. I downgraded my ambitions at that point. Happiness is fine but peace is forever, that's what I say. She would like to run after her mates but she can't. My voice has the tug of truth.
'Love is a wonderful thing. It will feel like the morning sun is entering through your arsehole, turning your turgid guts into pure luminous energy. The light will fade slowly but the memory will remain like a splinter in your head.'
The cognac makes her cough but her eyes are locked on mine.
'We need strife because it sorts the good from the bad. The good are clearly identified by big monuments and the bad are in management. If you want to get anywhere in this life you're gonna have to work on being a bastard. You got that?'
Did I go too far? Should I have been more allegorical? The kid passes the flask and retorts bravely.
'Is that all? I'm late for school mister.'
'No. Christmas gets progressively less exciting and Santa Claus is actually a woman.'
'That's not true, my dad said…'
'Your dad would say anything to shut you up, you know that?'
Blubbering softly, she backs away from me, but I can't help her across the road. It's nine o-clock and my shift is over.

Tales From the Valcro Room volume 2 by Urbin Flack is out now at good local bookshops (like News from Nowhere)

"Health Impact Assessment: or why men don't do self-care" by Val Walsh

By the age of six, it was announced,
boys lag behind in oral communication

And it's official:
Men don't like being told what to do.
They don't like making appointments.
Or queuing.

They don't like being given tasks.
They like to work things out for themselves.
And they like competitions.

It's official.
Men haven't been brought up to admit
to having problems. They don't ask for help
with just about anything. There's this fear
of appearing weak, not being in control. A
reluctance to admit to not knowing something,
or showing any kind of vulnerability.

Apparently:
Men see health problems in a mechanistic way,
their bodies viewed almost like cars.
But they don't want to look under the bonnet
if they hear a new sound, notice a change.
Gears crash and the engine sounds rough.
Warning lights may be ignored for miles,
until the body limps into the nearest repair centre.
Or has to be carted off for scrap.

It's official.
Men are easily embarrassed.
So serious messages have to be packaged as jokes.
Humour and catchy one-liners are the way.

And they try to outdo each other,
to prove prowess, till death do them part.

But recklessness impedes learning and development:
critical self-awareness. Don't ask, we are advised,
'Are you depressed?' Look for the symptoms:
reckless behaviour, drink and drugs.

The oral communication deficit logged at six
accumulates disadvantage over the years.
Conversation, dialogue, enquiry, understanding
fail to flourish in this self-denying desert.
Talking cures. It's official:

Health Impact Assessment for men is about
how to survive the reckless years. Without killing
themselves or each other. Or those on standby.

And without losing face.

The Gender Equality Duty could be a lifesaver.
Look under that bonnet before the engine explodes,
the vehicle crashes or grinds to a halt.
Apparently, inexplicably.

"It Snowed On Liverpool" by Denis Joe
(After Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Winter Landscape With A Bird Trap)

Being near the sea, it isn't supposed to be
like this: waiting over an hour for a bus
into the city, only to discover that they
stopped some running, because it's too dangerous

out there in the wildness, that comes
creeping towards civilization (and they
haven't gritted the roads; not expecting so
much snow. Living so near to the sea).

The flakes are as big as crepes and cold
as a policeman's soul. They melt
in the heat of exhaust fumes, piling up
like plumes of fallen ice cream cones.

It's said no two flakes are the same, but
you can't see because your glasses have
frosted over giving you a dimmed view
of the world as cars go past.

Slush splashes as traffic moves
by too fast and everyone is in a
hurry to get into the city to find
warmth and throw snowballs.

When a bus does come and it isn't
the one you want, you still get on as it takes
you a few stops to catch the one
outside the shops whose driver has

seen this all before and has no fear
of heaven and its petty vindictiveness.
See, he's like Yves Montand in
Le Salaire de la peur.

Nature claims the city and freezes it in Christmas-
card illusion. So no-one seems to mind
the barricade of the wind or their
damp clothes that cling for tenderness.

The wonder of determination is the
man struggling along on crutches
with snow white cast on his foot knowing
it would be easier by ambulance,

but it's quicker this way because
the cars sway as if they had
too much to drink and people
suck in air like boiled sweets.

Some scally takes a pot shot at a lone cop
and scores a small and rare victory
for all the downtrodden and punches
the air that showers him with confetti..

And the world becomes better
than any TV show and hardships
dissolve like the snow on the road.
And we expect Davina Mc Call

to come and tell us all that none
of this is real (though the pain of
a fall seems real enough) and if we
click our heels and repeat the mantra

we will find ourselves at home.
But the going home is a gridlocked
city centre. A bus crawling along at
a metre an hour or even slower.

It's like a Stockhausen concert;
as people text and call loved ones
to say that no one is hurt though they'll be
delayed, but everything is OK

And strangers turn their heads and talk
to strangers who turn their heads,
replying to pass the time of the
long journey home. And children sing:

Here we go through the snow,
doggy pee looks like Day-Glo
Everyone goes: 'Ho ho ho!'
Walking in the snow.

"Store Wars" by Sammy Dat

It would've been ok if only one crate of shortbread had arrived in Dundee from the Trashco distribution centre in Coventry, not a whole truckload. And certainly not seven truckloads, one after the other, apparently from different centres all over the country. And this could've been explained away as an isolated incident or a glitch in the network. But then there were the tins of tuna (and not line caught either), which arrived in Yeovil - containers full of the stuff. And the mountain of pan scrubbers arriving in Carlisle.
Trashco blamed all this on their rivals Allmart. They had somehow altered the codes used by the computer programme controlling Trashco deliveries. Allmart immediately issued a vigorous denial, with the counter claim of Trashco's interference over the incidents of the million bottles of malt vinegar sent to the Canary Isles, and moored off-shore in a ship. Then the unexplained arrival at all their stores of thousands of small plastic pigs made in China.
The press picked up on these strange events. Making fun of all sides and coining the phrase 'Store Wars', they ran conspiracy features linking shadowy intelligence figures with cybernetic sabotage. There was the Motoya case, when they had to recall millions of cars because a computer chip in the engine had been wrongly coded, with the result that cars accelerated when you stepped on the brake, and the tampering with online petitions about a tax on the banks.
Things took a more serious turn when the Chinese People's Daily accused the US of launching a 'hacker brigade', and said that Twitter had been used to spread rumours and create trouble in Iran. Then came the news that the computer controlling the gas pipeline from Siberia to Germany had been interfered with. The gas had stopped flowing causing a major energy crisis in the Frankfurt area. It was only by using a manual override that the flow was started again. The Russian Department M accused the US of cyber terrorism and creating instability in the economies of Europe.
The US reciprocated with accusations that China had penetrated US computer systems in search of design blueprints and other intelligence. The Obama administration said the Chinese had violated freedom of speech and human rights. A bit rich when the US had been doing the same thing to countries such as Cuba, Iran, Syria, Sudan and North Korea for years. When all the cash machines in the US failed to dispense money causing riots in the streets, the US withdrew embassy staff from Beijing.
So what had caused the problems in the first place? A cybersecurity expert said, "It seems the plan was to test if the critical infrastructure of a country could be controlled by using sophisticated cyberintelligence. Water, energy, banking, communications, air traffic control and almost all military systems are dependent on the smooth running of complex computer systems. If a virus or hacker provokes a collapse, then water won't come out of the taps, petrol won't flow from the pumps, ATMs won't dispense cash, the phones won't work - and your missiles won't launch. All this can be done without leaving a trace. But the potential for double and triple bluff is endless, and we ended up not knowing who did what."

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