Hastings

Hastings

You have drug problems, and some pretty good pubs

Hastings

You have beautiful woodland and back-alleys of grime

Hastings

You have Saturday night chaos and Sunday morning bemused tranquillity

Hastings

You have discarded heroin needles next to graffiti about love

Hastings

I grew up in you

Hastings

I have walked your surface as many different people

Hastings

I am a drop in your oceans

Hastings

I can feel the rhythm of your tides

Hastings

My tears have often got you wet

Hastings

In ecstasy, I have performed clumsy handstands on your withered grass

Hastings

Clarity and confusion run into each-other nightly, and dance dialectical in the space between your citizens

Hastings

I have skipped through you at 4am drunkenly shouting half remembered lines from Ginsberg

Hastings

I have thrown countless pebbles into your sea and felt calm

Hastings

I have kicked a pint glass at your coppers

Hastings

I am one of your very few Leninists

Hastings

You have provided everything that is important and beautiful to me

Hastings

I have felt your rain pour over my face, and perhaps

Something of me ran into the water

And soaked into your pavements, as past generations have

And will continue into the air of the future

As new feet walk over them

Living strange lives

Like you and me.

A little confession

I reall am a raging homosexual

.

It had been a dark and confused winter, and the authentic mind was hiding. It was as if the cold had seeped into our homes, and closed up our mutual spaces. All of our contact took on an alien, defensive quality. But in all the uncertainty, she was there. One night in November we stayed up, drinking on the sofa. I looked into her eyes, her face warm in the lamp-light. Rested my forehead against hers. With hot mulled wine on our lips we kissed and kissed and kissed, messy and wonderful, giggling, sighing, hands exploring, fucking and cuddling to sleep, as if with one great burst of affection we could shatter alienation forever and be free, and for a while we were.

Began

Michael was lying in bed, bored, when it began.
Lucy was downing her 6th shot when it began.
Greg was climbing a tree when it began.
Lucinda had just been mugged, and then it began.
The guardian had just gone to press, and a storm was brewing, and the unions had gone on strike, the day that it began.
It took most people a little while to realise what had happened after it began.
They were wrapped up in world-blanking kisses, screaming black howls of despair, hot with lust in high-wire fucks, kicking themselves in realisation and quietly contemplative as it began.
At first only a cracked and whiskered old tramp, drinking white cider with grit in it, noticed, and that was an hour after it began.
He muttered to the shoes walking past him that the shadows were missing but it was too late, because an hour earlier it began.
Above all of the ordinariness, at the top of a bell-tower, silhouetted shapes danced noiselessly and blended into a hellish myriad - and smiled as it began.

Koestler

There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.