The Art of Conversation
This table is heavy, laden with your pithy thoughts. You gurgle your Pinot Grigio as you laugh, apple crumble sliding down, easy does it, two halves each one ought to leave at nine it does not do in this place to overstay one’s welcome and you’ll have waxed your lyrical on p
Sex vs. Books
Editor’s Note: this piece has been kicking around The ISIS archives since 1983. I was going to write something myself, but I couldn’t be bothered. Then I found this in the archives, and given that it already has my name on it, I was going to pass it off as my own work. So I […]
Poetry
Well I went. They speak on issues that are mine. They don’t realise it though. “Council housing” “The working class” That’s me! I’m here. Hello? They served me octopus terrine! Served. To me? And I’d never had terrine. And I didn’t
Poetry
I was Lord of a country no one cared for. The Queen fucked men for money, and the King dug graves. At luncheon, he played Death with his favourite courtiers, kissing them once on the forehead and then declaring them knaves – he buried them living. Nobody cared. A good King kills one man for [&
Sonnet for My Grandparents
You, doused in sugars from my papa’s cane. You, a sickening cinnamon burning. And this plum amidst your wet, fat folds: pain: It knows of none. Nonna’s dough is churning. Pubescent grand-kids shunned sugar-gnocchi All the while adults gorged, and nonna fed. Tongue-buds grew. Sweet-lover,
Poetry
<html> <body> He tells me online life is orgiastic, all mental spasms, congealing cancerous cysts licked by dread, self-flagellating until torn + tarred + turned on: – u ok? – Cossacks everywhere, hoofbeats, drumbeats, that ultraviolent noise, sensory deprivation up-regulated
Fiction
The following pages were found in the female toilets of the Wyevale Garden Centre Oxford, along with a large shopping bag containing goldfish food, a chimenea, and a kit to assemble an Alexander Rose Turnberry 2-Seater Bench. A friend of mine, who happens to work weekends in the Weed Control departm
Poetry
The hired car rolls, wriggling down south along the river, away from the colonial glamour of the Bund (among which is gemmed their hotel: young, alcoholic, cosmopolitan), towards, now visible in quiet prominence, the PSA, with its clean geometry: concrete box & long line of a smokestack, stickin
Poetry
reading your facial expressions i interpret screenplay, dramatizations of us rendered larger than life in a rousing performance of scientific discovery you softly diagnose anatomical anomalies: brow bone, lumbar vertebrae, clavicle – skin-adhered-eyes in lab-issue goggles, curiosity unchecked,