Experimental Writing

She is the police of my thoughts.

She is wrapped around me like a penicillin snake.

My elastic arms and legs stretch out

to her and then she is over me

Eyes like stones, frog-coloured at hers.

She strangles me like snakes.

I'm reptilian in the air.

My wind-pipe closed up

I float up high and touch

her with my sky.

She is the moon

I am the floor.

Because beautiful eyes can't see straight

It looks past me.

In thoughts of her like woman-wrote thoughts.

My head heats up, all right temperature

of the sun.

My watch melts into me,

The touch of my belly,

Because I left you alone,

For that I am sorry.

Too many faces in the wall

White-shadowed. Embryonic memories

build her.

Two-thousand movements

an eternity later.

She connects to me

like a common Shiva.

Bogart-grey.

Hold still while I describe you.

Come into my arms,

I am sleeves.

Hold still while I disappear.

My devils are dry this evening.

Perhaps I will go out. Drink.

More motions. Get pissed-off.

Find a small fortune of miseries.

The cold of orange darkness. Evening.

Coffee. Because the sky is blue.

I mean black, right now.

***

When I wrote these things I was listening to The Beatles' Abbey Road, especially Because which was a cool song to listen to like that. I read some poetry by Ted Berrigan for some reason here: http://www.poemhunter.com/ted-berrigan/

I watched some videos on YouTube as well. I watched this video on the brain being either a separate entity from the body or you are the brain or you are everything of your body. The longest living cell, I think, are the skin cells, which live for some time even when the rest of the body has died. It's on this channel called Vsauce, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3teflb1QNN4&feature=g-u-u

Also, this video which explained how difficult the idea of diciding by 0 is. Because if you do 1 divided by 0 = infinity, then 2 divided by 0 must = infinity, therefore 1 is equal to 2. Pretty strange. this is on a channel called Numberphile, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRRolKTlF6Q&feature=g-u-u

A Night at 12:47am

I lie on my bed, sideways, my foot on a bookcase

which cracks under the pressure of me.

The room gives the only light.

The water isn't running, they turned it off to fix the pipes

overnight. I wondered who'd want a job fixing water-pipes

overnight? I wondered what they did with the water

while it was turned off. I wondered if I was still paying for it.

I sat and listened to the hum of my life. The silence of life

is a hum. Like electricity. Either some modern principle

or some electrical synapse of my inner-vortex within my brain.

I listened to the house and heard it settle. Cracked its bones.

Lapped its mouth. Slept.

I listened to another sound as if someone was coming up the stairs.

Stood waiting outside my door. I knew there was no one there.

It was 12:47am. I heard the pull of a curtain.

There was no fear in me with this light.

I thought maybe I could communicate with the dead.

Ask it if it's worth dying. Or worth living.

The ghost didn't respond.

Instead I was reminded of you. This was not fear.

I can't pretend to hate you any more.

PIYE and Novel Extract

My writing is now available in America. Issue's #1 and #2 of PIYE (Party in you Eyesocket) are available in Sherwood Forest Zine Library in Austin, Texas.

http://sherwoodzinelibrary.tumblr.com/post/33370752941/101112

My friend, Ionie Ince, is the creator and editor of PIYE and she let me edit some of the short stories of issue #2. It's available for £4 from http://partyinyoureyesocket.tumblr.com/ where we are currently accepting submissions for issue #3. It's a new anthology for short prose mainly in black comedy, science fiction, fantasy, thriller genres.

It's available from News From Nowhere on Bold Street, Liverpool as well.

An extract from my newest novel:

"'I've got older, you haven't aged a bit,' Sally said.

'I'm ageing. Just slower, I guess.'

'But you look exactly the same. Have you found the fountain of eternal youth?'

'No.'

'How's life.'

'Boring. How's yours?'

'Okay. I'm so happy I'm an actress. Are you proud of me?'

'Yes.'

'I've just turned thirty.'

'I know. I remember your birthday. Would have sent you a card but to be honest I didn't think we'd see each other again.'

'Would you like some more coffee?'

'Please.'

Sally ordered more coffee. There was a silence for a moment. Then she said, 'I've been thinking about you, Catherine. That's why I called. And now I see you, I'm glad I did.' She sipped her coffee. She tore a paper sachet of sugar and slowly tipped it in. She stirred it with a wooden stirrer. She did this very methodically as if so practised in the art of coffee drinking. She sipped it again and gave a vague, sub-conscious smile. 'How old are you now?' she said.

'I'm forty-four,' Catherine said, somewhat embarrassed.

'But you look twenty-four. Why is that?'

'I don't know.'

'I wanted to ask you if you had a secret to your looks. Your skin. Your eyes. What is it you do?'

'I don't do anything.'

'Oh.' Sally sipped the coffee again and left a red lip-print on the cup.

'Sometimes,' Catherine said, 'I think I'm not going to die. Why is that?'

'I don't know.'

'I was almost killed in a car accident coming down here.'

'Oh my God.'

'But I didn't die. Would think I was crazy if I said I don't think I would have died.'

'I don't know.'

'For years I've never gone a day without thinking of David Milton. Ever since he died I've always wondered why that had to happen to him. And I know why. He was fixing the TV. The TV I'd told him to fix. Why didn't I fix it.'

'He was an engineer. He knew that kind of stuff.'

'I think I'm being punished.'

'Don't be stupid. There's no reason you would be punished.'

'I think I'm being punished for David's death and now I'm going to live forever.'

'Are you serious?'

Catherine sipped her coffee. It tasted good. They ordered some more. The rain stopped and the sun shone and reflected off the raindrops on the window. The light lit them both up.

'Where are you staying?' Sally asked.

'Some hotel.'

'Stay with me. I have a spare room. You should see my house anyway.'

'Okay.'

They got up to leave. Some people took a photograph of Sally as they walked out."

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Poems from the Beach - And Short Story

Morning on the Beach

It's uneven where I stand, the beach, mostly.

The world sways whenever I think.

And that thought, next to me, unravelled

and twisted, quivers the world in the river.

Five or six swans cross my path.

Each, white-feathered and tired-looking,

Breakfast table-ignorant, quacking,

Dropping into the water. There is no other sound.

Only they are not swans, they are geese,

And one watches me as I pass, not saying a word.

Its feathers whiter in morning light, its holiness

Diminished with a look of mutual awareness.

If I were a swan or a goose I, too, would

Stand and stare at me. Because what else

Is there to do? The sunlight grows.

This morning magpies its jewel sunshine.

I turn to the right, the roar of wind and earth,

There is a sense of absolutely everything beyond me.

I turn my head to the left,

There is silence but the waves.

This is an untitled poem.  I wrote both when I started jogging in the morning on the beach where I live. This one I used the leftover images from the previous one.

For me, when I run, I'm vacantly religious.

I don't have to think and I don't have to

live like I do when I'm slow.

Mediocre sand-colours swarm a bleak screen

Up to a point, blown like dust. A dog coughs.

When I run, I'm important elsewhere,

A mighty King of Nowhere, surrounded

By horizon, left soft overnight.

And the rocks, water-marked, breath-held

Like dead fish, present a familial presence

Somewhere. Back home, maybe.

When I run, the earth screams at me.

I love living when I don't have to think,

But I think I don't live when I love.

There is no sand so holy without me.

Back home, somewhere maybe, I am

Slow. A pregnant rat, its belly engorged

And stretched, pink and balloon-like.

She sees me and runs away,

She, too, is vacant. I see it

In her religious eyes. I see it in

Everyone I meet. Like a daydream.

I walk, most of the time, slow,

A lot less religious than I was,

And I think, perhaps, no less holy than sand.

I'm on Write Out Loud, a website that encourages performance poetry. Here's my profile: http://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/michaelholloway

Here is my short story The Young Man and the Old Man which appeared on the wall of FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) which is an art house cinema in Liverpool. It was on display there earlier this year.

The actual story is here:

The Young Man and The Old Man

He got on the train and said goodbye to her. Held her in his arms as she clung to his chest, reluctant to let go. She stood and waved from the platform.

He sat down. There was an old man sitting in the seat opposite and facing him. He had white receding hair which flopped over the rest of his scalp. A huge nose. Skin rough and thick like the soles of his feet. A woman with a crying baby got off the next stop and the train went silent.

'What are you?' the old man said.

'What?'

'Six foot?'

'I don't know,' the young man said. 'Yeah, something like that. Around five-nine.'

'Like me when I was your age. Tall lad. Nice girl you got. You look like me when I was your age.'

'Is that right?'

'Just think,' the old man said, 'you'll end up looking like this.' He pointed at his thick-skinned face, tobacco-coloured and wrinkled.

'I doubt it.'

'I know you do.'

'Yeah.'

'When I was your age I didn't listen.'

'Yeah.'

'When I was your age – '

'Okay,' the young man said. 'Okay. I get it.'

The train went silent once again, but for the rickety-rick of the wheels and the air whooshing in through an open window, from which a burning smell could be smelled from the factories.

'If I were you,' the old man said, 'I'd forget about myself. Just focus on her. On what you got right now. You don't matter.'

'Okay.'

'Women are rare. Love is hard to come by.'

'Okay.'

'You're not listening.'

'Hey,' the young man said, 'I don't know you. Why should I listen?'

'I'm just giving you some advice.'

'I don't need any.'

As the train picked up speed, the window created a pocket of air that roared like a fire, but then there was a fire outside. It was a person, burning alive as black smoke flew off her. And then they passed her by.

No one else saw her except the young man. The old man carried on giving him advice. But still the young man didn't listen. When the young man got off the train at his stop he was the only one to get off. He didn't smell any burning. Neither did anyone else.

Cold Coffee

Cold coffee while I write. I wear my glasses but they don't really help me focus. I wonder if I really need them or I need something else. I was reading Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I'd been told to read it ages ago. I bought it in News From Nowhere while I was looking for PIYE #2 which I'm in and I help edit. http://partyinyoureyesocket.tumblr.com/ I had to walk back to work in the rain. It was the first time in work I showed some people my writing. I guess they liked it. It was the short story called Man Smoking on a Wall, it's about a man who is sat on a wall, smoking a cigarette and talks to this other guy who seems curious about him. The smoking man then goes on about loneliness and feeling worthless. I was having these ideas of weird self-immolation fascinations and I read about the Buddhist monk who burned himself alive. The smoking man describes a man smoking on a wall who burns himself alive with a cigarette. Then the story ends. I like my short story style which I think I've adapted since I first read Hemingway in 2007. I've been told nothing happens in what I write, but I write scenes and they're like those real-life scenes, like talking to someone, where nothing happens but you and someone else talking. You can get so much out of those words than the actual actions.

Unfortunately I've become too good at ending suddenly, so it makes it difficult to write my novels. The chapters seem cut-up into vague scenes.

Here is an extract from my new novel, which is untitled:

"Two people sitting on wooden chairs holding hands. Outside fireworks, silent behind the window. Red, green. Flash-bangs without the bang, light up the room for one second every few seconds, revealing their hands drooped in a concave arch between the chairs, glowing, one part hairy and thick the other thin and girlish. The two sit fixedly in front of the television which lights them up just as the flashing of the fireworks outside. It flashes, blasting away the blueish dark now and again, and on the TV are the familiar viewing of the outside world. Red, green. The flash-bangs. War-like world on TV. The fireworks above Big Ben the new dome everyone talks about, in the papers, like some alien craft. Must be some alien things going on, the second millennium ends and what happens? War, death. They think something alien is afoot. They struggle to believe the world won't end now. But the world will end now. It will end for many people in many different ways and that strange, alien assumption they press on and on about is something like a bad dream. But some don't believe the bad dream has happened; some don't believe the bad dream will happen.

The TV, a fat Panasonic which had never been serviced once due to its flawlessness, showing the last of the fireworks, a red and green dissipating into the black of TV space, suddenly gives out and dies, revealing the black of TV space to them once again, now without the fireworks, only like ghosts, the reds and greens reflected from the outside and look almost sickeningly sweet as they bang in some false one-second sunlight.

'The television has gone off,' she said. 'What do we do now?' They parted hands. Their hands flopping to either side of the chairs, dangle like tree vines. Their fingers hooked in the same position as if remembering the previous embrace.

'What do we do now? We can watch from the window, I suppose,' he said. He went to the window to watch the fireworks light up the sky, the dark clouds lit up looked like scars. 'Catherine,' he said. 'Come to the window. It's just as good as the TV.'

'No, I don't want to look out the window. It doesn't interest me like the TV does. Can't you fix it? Can't you do something about it?'

'I'm not fixing the television on new years eve,' he said.

'But David,' she said, 'it's a minute after midnight. So it's not new year's eve any more, it's new year's day.'

'Oh, it's January now, isn't it. It's 2000.'

'That's right.'

'Has the world ended?'

'It has for me if you won't fix the television.'

Catherine sat and watched the blank screen, stubbornly glancing at the reflections on the black glass, wondering if this meant the end of her life or someone else’s. She was 35 years old and was losing the ability to stay happy at times, as if the world had sucked the life out of her before ending, and she hated being 35, not that she was older, the oldest she had ever been in her life, but that it was so confusing. She hadn't been this confused since she turned 15, an adolescent with the smells and looks of the earth that both disgusted and delighted her, but at thirty-five she had been through that and was a woman and the confusion just made her mind want to shut down and not work out any of the world any more, to just sit and watch the television. Only if it was on, mind. And it wasn't.

'Fix it,' she said. 'Fix it now.'

David, a tall man with thin hair and who always wore this tweed jacket indoors and outdoors, stood facing the window, ignoring her. Outside he saw three people stood at their gate across the road with what looked like small glasses of brandy in their hands, casually falling into mere movements of jest. One of them was Kate “L.A.” Wallace – the L.A. Meaning Los Angeles because she was an American, though she wasn't a Californian, she was from Chicago, David supposed Kate had been Hollywoodised in the eyes of the British, that all Americans were movie stars, and the fact that he thought of the word “movie” instead of “film” made him that slightly more Hollywoodised than he would have liked to think. The reason he looked at LA, stood in the dark, lit orange by a lamppost and an orange dot of a cigarette in the mouth of the man next to her, in a small dress, exposing each long bare leg, each curve of her, was that he was in love with her. He was unfortunately in love with an American. He was surely to be even more Hollywoodised if he did anything about it. So he didn't. Besides, he had Catherine. A 35 year old with the constant look of someone without a hope in the world.

'Why don't you listen to me?' she sulked. She had her hand pressed to her face, leaning into it and stuck out her lip.

David turned around. 'Sorry,' he said. 'What is it you want?'

'I want you to fix the television.'

'Why do you want me to fix it right now?'

'Because I don't have anything else. Now please fix the damn TV!'

David got on his hands and knees and in the early hours of the new millennium he fixed the broken television. It took him three hours, crossing over wires and checking the slight connections inside the box and opening up the screen to the television organs the colour of red and green spilled over the floor, the same colour as the fireworks, and the brown wires, the live wires, he separated with thumb and finger as if they were delicate worms filled with some humming danger of death, despite the neutral and earth wires being just as dangerous. He cut a wire with a pair of pliers and tried to cross thread the copper wire inside to a chock-block which he hooked up to a tester machine he had with his tools. The machine beeped and said the connection was good. If he was in work he would write a serial number and the date (1^st January) and stick it to the appliance to say it had passed an electrical safety test. It seemed the TV's electrical connection was fine so he hooked it back up to the mains, precisely like a puzzle, and made sure each wire was colour coordinated correctly, and it seemed they were, so when he had hold of one wire with one hand and another wire with the other, he didn't expect that when he plugged it back into the mains that he would have over 250 volts shoot through his body at the speed of light, throwing him back half as fast, allowing him, for the present time, to visualise his 34 years on this planet, 34 years of the 20^th century which had come to an end just like that, a fitting end, on his knees, fixing a TV."

Now and again I invoke David Foster Wallace but I try not to. Most writers will mimic what they read. It's almost impossible not to. I'm curious how I am as a writer and I suppose I'll only find that out once people read my writing, though I should neglect my laziness in place of some proactive publications and at least try to find an agent (I was turned down by Curtis Brown which seems to have put me off).

I have three complete novels written. One is a final draft. Though I've come to hate it, which I won't explain since it annoys me when I try to explain my hatred of the things I write and people don't get it, though I think it's something to do with having to read the same sentences over and over, reading what's not good so as to fix it, and now, in my head, it's a terrible piece of work. I suppose that's why I've been writing more and more, trying to finish another new book after another.

I recently read this poem out at The Pilgrim pub:

A Night at 2am

Your presence reminds me

How thin the air can be.

When I get drunk

Leaves grow out of me,

Branch at my arms,

My legs rooted to a chair.

Old Buddhas of temporary streets

Are looking at the time: 2:15am

This place is snoring.

Silent as ladybirds.

My eyes are moving,

I can feel them. 2:20am.

You change the taste of the air,

How dare you choose who you care about.

It was for In The Red Magazine which had been published in that magazine last year. It wasn't the best of reading I've done. I suppose I was put off by having not read out for six months and was just beginning to come down with the shingles virus which put me out of actions for two weeks. It was the most painful illness I've ever had. My whole body hurt. Terrible nerve pain. I was told I could have written something about it, but I never really use material like that straight away. I'll probably use it for some other piece of writing later on. I made a new collection of poems. I have 18 good, edited poems. Not much since they were taken from piles of about 100. I'd publish a collection of poetry but to be honest I'd rather publish fiction first.

I read that the poet Gillian Clarke wrote a poem for display in John Lewis Cardiff. http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/142017/ It was penned in honour of the department store. It made me think, really, since I work in a John Lewis, why a poet would bother to write about such a place. I don't mind my job, but I wouldn't write a poem about the place. John Lewis run this weekly magazine for internal news and things and I was asked why I don't go in it, apparently I'd make an interesting story. I told them no. I just wouldn't want to compromise my image by aligning it with the store, or with any store, and I don't know why. I was told I'm too modest and I'm making it harder on myself to make it as a writer if I don't promote myself. I guess I'm more camera-shy than anything. I'd rather go unnoticed than celebrated.