I love the Holloway Road

Thought (i)

Old poems you've written are like former versions of the self, and as hard to straighten out.

The World's Last Barman Poet

I am The World’s Last Barman Poet,

apprenticed to Jean-Thomas Cruz,

half-French, half-Spanish wizard

with vodka, lime juice and thesaurus

via a backpacking trip that didn’t

work out, small misunderstanding –

Not drugs, talcum powder, see?

The times I hated Jean-Thomas,

all his prattle about the holy spirit

of cocktails, the preparation

a kind of sacrament, and of course

the importance of abstinence,

when he was tapping my girl

in his hotel suite every chance

he got. I lay in the room below,

ceiling fan beating its sultry drum,

schooled by the bedsprings' trochees,

him, between thrusts, shouting: Twist

of dark rum! Whisky! Orange juice!

Until one night I added a good slug

of hydrocyanic acid, thus became

The World’s Last ... you get the idea.

Copycat

Flung out to dry

sheets of soaking cloud.

A perfect mental copy?

No way to tell.

By The Hideaway

slick pavement’s

patchy glitter: fool’s

gold. Return.

Stretching for a knife

to slit my boot laces

I grip its shadow.

Nutshell Magazine (Issue 2), Summer 2010

Issue 2 of Nutshell, the literary/arts magazine I help edit is available to order here. It contains new poetry, short fiction and art, as well as an interview I conducted with leading British poet and editor of Picador's poetry list, Don Paterson.

Nutshell Magazine Launch Party, June 2010

Here's a clip of John Drain performing at the Nutshell Magazine launch party on 27th June 2010. This year's party was held at The Last Days of Decadence in Shoreditch. I wrote a review of the night which can be found here.

London can you wait?

I thought I'd use this blog to showcase events I go to, mainly in London, which I plan on filming using my flip camera. Clips will be mostly a few minutes long, with little or no editing. I'll also include things that interest me about living in London, such as the skate and parkour scenes, and maybe some poems, short fiction and reviews.