ISSUE # 4: Poems for Park Benches - Autumn 2010
Printed in a local copyshop and left on public benches in parks throughout Paris and London for people to find.

ISSUE #2: I Found This On The Metro - Autumn 2009
Printed in a local copyshop and left throughout the Paris metro, London underground and New York subway.

ISSUE #1: Let's Never Buy iphones - Spring 2009
Home printed and left in selected bars and cafés throughout Paris.

Selected excerpts:
(to get your hands on any of the issues, click on the 'about/ buy issues' link above)



IF THE BUILDINGS WERE THE WORDS AND EACH SENTENCE WAS A TOWN,
I'D PULL OUT ALL THE LETTERS AND WATCH THE BRICKS GO TUMBLING DOWN.






Old Mr Toad

Happiness and its direct consequences derive categorically from the ability to be proud of oneself. This is not to say failure and rejection can deter eventual happiness. But this is to suggest that laziness and addiction is the key to its unattainable manner. Disappointment, self inflicted or otherwise, is a vile poison fed into the soul to blacken the heart. Its antidote is hot sweated determination, though the common course of treatment is often a self-pitying seat under a steady drip.

I met my friend the toad this way. It was a Sunday and Paris was grey, as though all its beauty had been shaded in charcoal, then trampled on by its tourists. I took shelter in the rain by the canal and watched my broken reflection shatter with the drips from my hair or nose or eyes or sky. I hardly noticed his presence for near half an hour, and daresay he knew as much of me. A desperate hope, however, leant me to catch his eye.

“How do you do” said I, in a tone like lead and mud and gristle.

“How do you do” he replied, much the same.

“Would you like to borrow my umbrella,” I asked him, “on account of the rain?”

“No thank you,” he replied, once again, much the same. At this I threw the umbrella in the stream.

“Why do you sit out by the canal in the rain?” I inquired. “The weather is quite atrocious. I find myself beaten further by every drop. Slowly eroding I believe. Dissolving maybe. One can only hope.”

“Indeed,” he replied.

“And why, pray tell, would a good old fellow like you want to cave like some chalky cliff, destined to slowly melt away centimetre by centimetre thanks to this tortuous, continuous, unfailing drip? A poor man like myself, a horror to society, a sniveling, driveling wart of a man. A man who frightens and disgusts and repulses. A man who eats and drinks and sleeps and hopes that one day he will be forgotten. A fellow of no consequence and estranged family. A man bread from a strange consequence, moulded from nonsense, scratching and clawing for his underpriced rent. The stars had it right for me. Let my skull thin slowly, let the water diffuse into my brain and blow the fuses. Let my entire body combust and let them look on and laugh. But a good man like yourself, take shelter and be thankful,” said I. And breathed a sigh, looked to the sky, and awaited his reply.

But good old Mr. Toad was a man of few words, and a reply never came. Only an old lady walked past, and with a glance at the pair, her nose turned to the air, she offered me her Umbrella.

Helen Scampion



1973 by Sarah Martin


  image used is the composite image of the universe from the European Space Agency's Planck telescope.

The End of it All
Streaking across the universe, an unstoppable force flashes at the speed of light.
Encountering a massive rogue star, it blasts the stellar mass into oblivion.
The explosion debris lights the skies.
The resulting nova lights the universe.
The force continues unabated.
When the force encounters the edge of the universe, it doesn't bend following the curve of the cosmos- it bears straight ahead.
The unstoppable force meets the immovable object.
The collision blasts the entire universe; in an instant the entire unive...

by Mike Berger


Things for You- To Do List




Recollection of a day

    The sun rays danced upon the surface of the Saint Martin canal as I took a seat on the cobbled paving to watch. It was mid-spring and the joys of the season were just beginning to be seen. The trees that hug the waterside had started to show their former glory and I could feel the sun’s heat upon my face. I was on my return home from a long day of giving out CV’s and my feet were tired. Reluctance to spend any money had led to a day of walking so as to avoid taking the metro. As I sat and rolled a cigarette and began to contemplate my options if a job did not come my way soon, I was joined by a well-groomed tramp.

    He stumbled over and asked me for a cigarette and I obliged. I handed him some tobacco and a paper, but he denied the offer of a filter. He took a seat next to me and began to roll. He was bearded and wore a coat that did not reflect the temperature and his breath had that stale smell of cheap beer. He looked very clean, which he later informed me was because of a shower that very morning. We talked for about half an hour and he wasn’t in the least bit offended by my curiosity in his plight. The conversation was only hindered when he was distracted by a small child trying to walk on the ledge that ran by the canal. He seemed to yearn for the child’s attention and made a bid for it by mimicking their movement, all the while the child was trying to gain the attention of their parents.

    As we talked I said, “ah oui” or “je vois”, feigning full comprehension in an attempt to keep the conversation going. After a while he asked a question to which I replied, “d’accord”. From his expression I could tell that I had guessed wrong and had but a few seconds to regain the flow of the conversation. I quickly went back to the last thing that I had understood and made a joke that I could soon be living like him if I didn’t get a job soon. He was satisfied and again my loose grasp of the French language was enough to fool the French that I had any grip on the language at all.

    Eventually he decided that he had more pressing things to attend to, and excused himself with courtesy and an apologetic smile, saying that he had to be somewhere else. Before he made his exit, he said to always be aware in Paris of those people that will try and steal your attention with the secret intention of stealing your money. With this thought in mind I headed home towards Gare de l’Est and him towards Bastille. I checked my pockets for a missing wallet and wondered how a tramp had more things to do in his day than me. But I suppose maybe, like the tree’s, he was in the process of returning to a former glory.

 

Luke Appleton

If you fall like rain

If you fall like rain

If your peripheral vision greys,
And cateract clouds threaten:
Please, hold back your weather.

All those mornings with darker hair,
And cigarettes and all those people.
Not a word, fifty years of smoke to exhale in an instant.

Two globes of blue and white
Reaching out past the buildings
And the birds.

If you fall like rain, in the hallway,
Or in the street outside,
Your slowest descent will be a raging
Waterfall inside my ribcage.


Sunset on a Stone



Sunset on a Stone

I never cried but I was never here,
I'd disappeared like breath on a mirror,
Lost like fingerprints in sand,
Or a beam of light in the grasp of a hand.
I never shed a tear.


Swimming through the same played songs,
Of broken records that were skipping all along,
Stumbling through our stale stories,
Mumbling every word that will no more be
Meant now that I'm gone.

As though it were a sunset on a stone,
Reflecting the sun's shine and that alone.
No moment or feeling captured, only light,
Until shadows fade into the camouflage of night.
And I'm the stone.


Recollection of a day


Recollection of a day

Today we drove to the end of the world. Following signs in your Dad's old car to 'Le bout du monde' down country lanes and dirt tracks we came to a dead end. We parked the car and climbed a stile into a meadow surrounded by cliff faces rising 50 metres straight up out from the field's edges like walls.
As we walked to the end the cliffs narrowed and squeezed together over our heads, making it feel as though we really were reaching the end of the world. Right at the end, hidden amongst high trees came the sound of water crashing on rocks and from somewhere high above us came a stream pouring over our heads. It had to be climbed as what was beyond the end? And what was beyond the end of beyond? So we clambered and slipped, clinging to roots and rock edges till we reached the top and howled like wolves to the people below. We built a dam that broke and burst over the edge before slipping and scraping our way back down to the world below.
Driving home we saw some land on a hill for sale and thought to buy it. An empty slope sandwiched between vineyards we could call our own. We'll build a simple shed with a glass roof and a large window that could be our home, so when it rains we can sit and watch over the valley below and listen as the rain falls pitter patter pitter patter.


You, the sea and me




The edge of the world






In the Station of the Metto

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

E. Pound

THE PHOTOGRAPH

Looking back to that summer, the memories develop in my mind like a photograph in black and white. A simple unblemished nostalgia evoked in a grainy image of smiling faces on a summer day. The grey tone camouflaging the dirt and hiding the smell, a moment captured unspoiled by babble and clatter, romanticized and disguised in a fading snapshot.

                                                                            --------- 
As I remember it, the old house had been empty for months before we moved in. Joe had witnessed the owner, an aged and reclusive man, fall into sickness and eventually be taken away into care. Resparking a flippant idea from our adolescence he invited us down to stay and within a fortnight five of us had moved in. It was the start of June.

The house was small and set well away from the country road. There was no real sense of a garden, just wilderness that was overrun and wild, shrouded by hedges and trees.  It felt as if we were amidst a miniature enchanted forest, giving it the allure of being like something out of a children’s fairy tale. Inside it was dark and cluttered, full of old trinkets and worthless treasures. It reminded me of exploring a forgotten attic.

It was a good summer. The days were long and hot as summers should be. We walked down to the river every morning as the sun came up through the mist. Each morning was like a baptism as we shed our clothes and leapt off the weir into the racing water. Every evening we’d lie out on the roof and bask in orange glow and each night we would write songs and make up far fetched tales of the peculiar old man who had once lived where we lived now. On hot afternoons we would have barbecues and fill our faces till our bellies ached and burst. The days it rained we sat in under the porch and watched and listened till the water finished falling. On those days we didn’t say much to each other. We didn’t have to. When the nights were cold we’d grab our blankets and walk up to the woods. There was a den from when Joe was a kid, once a fort it was now our fireplace. We would sit around the fire with the old cassette player that played the music from our childhood and shout and sing and joke and laugh and that never-ending feeling would return.

None of us had jobs. We didn’t need them. There was no rent to pay, no electricity, and being the summer no heating to worry about. No hassles. On the weekends we would pile into the van and drive and drive. We drifted to hills and fields, woods and rivers, always returning to our mystical home in the trees. This was our sanctuary, a kind of creative kibbutz; the walls were plastered in paintings and poems and the halls were filled with different songs from different rooms.

We read the poems of Blake and Wordsworth and believed ourselves visionaries, enlightened, wanderers above a sea of fog. With Nietzsche and Sartre we were ourselves philosophers and with Kerouac and Thompson we were like them. Free spirits, carefree and comfortable, vainly believing ourselves eccentric: unmouldable, reckless and effervescent. We would paint on the walls and proclaim ourselves artists. With our songs and riffs we were musicians and with our poems and stories we were writers. And that stale stagnant feeling never returned.

But nothing stays the same; nothing remains constant, not even for a moment. With the falling leaves and slow onset of a chilling winter came a knock one day at the door. It was the owner’s family, peering in through grimy windows and tut-tutting at the dilapidated home. We kept quiet and hid amongst the empty beer cans and moldy plates. But we couldn’t hide forever. The summer was over and so was the dream. With no belongings we filed out of the house into the cold bright sunshine.

Each of us went our separate ways. It was years before I saw any of them again. As our lives each took their own course we became unrecognizable to each other. We forgot about that house like the autumn forgets the summer.

---------

 Nothing is how it was, not even in memory. Images of faces recede into the memory like corpses, the sounds and smells recalled each time more distant and distorted like a disappearing echo. I found an old photograph of the house, dog-eared and fading to a rose tinted sepia tone. In the foreground are the five of us smiling happily. It is all that is left now of that summer, faded like our memories but picture perfect, a moment captured and remembered Shangri- La, fictitiously flawless, a time too ideal to be real.


Recollection of a day

Dylan's 'Absolute Sweet Marie' rushes in.  We're standing under the steel arcs of Gare du Nord at the end of platform 11.  It is October 2008, you're 19 and I'm 22.  I'm making the same joke three times, but its because its not really a joke but a very real desire. You shouldn't be catching a train to a suburb twenty minutes away under a station roof like this. There should be steam and handkerchiefs and grandeur and drama- you should be going away forever- or why go at all? I feel the steam and drama anyway, I explain. You say something in french that I don't understand and smile through your flushed cheeks. The train leaves and handkerchiefs fly from the windows. I put my hands in my pockets and head underground, two steps at a time- because if I don't take stairs like this now then when I'm old I know that I'll regret it.

The metro carriage is rocking from side to side as it barrels down galleries of graffiti that everyone ignores. A woman is sitting on the fold-down seat opposite and smiling at me in a dislocated way. Its hard to tell if this is because I have been smiling to myself constantly since over dramatically entering the train, half in the air, just as the doors began to close, or maybe she too heard Bob Dylan at the train station. The carriage keeps rocking from side to side in between stations. I'm peering into the darkness to see if a man is going to hold up moving scenary to the windows- but everything is still in colour so I doubt it.