remembering farkhunda

Farkhunda. Farkhunda was her name.     Some news stories are so odious, so heinous, that the stain of their airing lingers. Festers for weeks.     It is raining here as I type.     Eight days ago, outside the Shah-Du-Shamshaira mosque and shrine, set in the heart of Afghanistan’s reformed capital, Kabul – a short distance from the Presidential

for farkhunda

▼ PAUL BOWLES: THE GARDEN from “The Voice of Paul Bowles” cassette TELLUS (#23) (US) 1989

feek and feck

Feek and Feck were lovers. Rolling off the tongue as sailors swaggering on shore leave, sewn up in cunnilingus, eating out on on calamari.     Feck was the blushing damson. Feek the bruised and butch one. Together they ripened as one fruit, conjoined, no one could come between them. Their bliss was slow cooked. Try as

colours

It was raining. Not a tidy deluge, nesting its own rhythm, but the vilest of drizzles. Flurrying up into the face and ears. Fizzing on the end of one’s nose.     A celtic rain.     Birds settle in trees and eaves to escape it. Those mistiming it wheel back on the wing as if struck by

one minute poem

There is nothingquite like tossing and turningin one’s quiltone foot caught in the tearto beata trip to the laundromator sewingthe cat in the bag to hurlin the torrentof one’s own worst nightmare

fagin, retiring

Overcome by the coughing, tins of beans rattling against my knees, I danced into the side street. Opened my mouth on a wad of phlegm.     It leaped into the gutter.     I paused to catch my wind. Convinced my heart would stop.     “What a horrible old man.”     The bile wafted down from a tenement window. I

chops

Not in the best of tempers, I was reflecting on the demise of the music weblog, the nature of those snide terrorists conspiring to plague all with DMCA takedown notices, when it struck me that those last throes may not be quite so premature after all.     ——–, for instance, that obsequious jockeying motherfucker in his

the package

I should not have answered the door.     It was late in the afternoon, and I assumed it was safe. I was working on my second glass of the day when I heard the summons. Deliberating on just how expensive it used to be to operate a typewriter. You know. The paper; those ribbons. It all

somebody in nizhny novgorod likes me