oktop:

How to draw a horse by Van Oktop.

Wedding In The Old Field Hospital

This one decries a false promise of cosy sleep,
those beds are laid out in rows stretching down to
metal rafters and splintered wood, it skews our vision,
casts beetroot shadows down onto the sheets.

The bayonets in the display case are rusty,
I take a canope but my appetite is shot, and as
the best man warbles over a flute of champagne,
he brushes a display of poppies, their spawn across
the room in amber sunlight: the Maitre’d sneezes.

A clunky Wedding March, and the well trodden
path of hurried nurses feet is over run by those
not as vehement, ready to tap out impatient lives -
And now it’s the bride who appears out of the gloom,
and for a moment she is a solider’s ghost.

fuckyeahspace:

Earth and Moon as seen from the Messenger spacecraft, May 2010.

(via MESSENGER, andrenavarro)

Marcelo joins us in the waiting room.  I leave him drawing pictures of the other patients with his pad and pencil. I go and see the Doctor and when I return he has sketched five people, each with a speech bubble containing a different phrase:

“Roman coffee is an old drink for sailors”

“She’s teaches herself those tricks in her sleep”

“We were born under the same moon”

“If only she could of seen me when I was on form”

“Ted can make music from a horseshoe”

I ask Marcelo as we leave the clinic if these people really said those things.  He shrugs.  It starts to rain so we pull our hoods up and quicken the pace.

Why should you get to know Rosli283?

I’m originally from Texas, but my accent has faded during my years in London from a big fat pink marker pen flashed joyously across bleached white wallpaper to a pathetic scrawl written with dregs of biro ink on a piece of toilet paper. 

My friends back home used to call me Sparky because of the glint in my eye, but now I get called The Ghost.  I get about four hours of sleep a night; I’ve tried Valerian but despite helping me sleep it makes me dream is of horse riding and fishing in the sunshine back home, it makes me really sad.

Rosli283 describes her ideal match as thus

Someone who is as jaded as me, preferably a foreigner washed up on these filthy shores that can’t relate to these grey mealy souls who stare and push.

‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’

Lunchtime Break #1
 
On the wall in a study hangs a framed black and white photo of my employer’s cat, now deceased.  It is lying in some long grass staring directly at the camera lens, it’s tight mouth pallid and frozen.  It has a knowing gaze that the future is being cast back upon it; a future without it.

The frame hangs at a small angle, perhaps due to the touch of a heavy handed duster, but the photo inside is at an opposite angle as if to compensate.  My head spins for a second as if in zero gravity.

Underneath the frame is a brass plaque. It reads:

“Lady Muchly: 1950 - 1959, a feline missed.”

I take a step back and come out of this trance, oh how these small transcendences from the everyday plague my work. I place my empty coffee cup down on a sofa arm and grip an upright mop standing in a bucket.

Back to it.

Later on the coffee cup willl topple from its resting place and shatter, and picking up the fragments of china I will look up and make eye contact with the cat once more, and curse this familiar for my bad luck.

(from flickr)

The lugworm castes are markers to dance through,
watching your cartwheels traverse the chicane,
I dig ‘em up, then giftwrap, the yellowed saltwater blood
soaks through the newspaper for our seaside ablutions.

We cast wrought vengeance over the kids braying
whilst crunching the backs of crabs with old light sticks,
I still see you curse them in the fug of stale sweat and sunshine,
backtracked by the steady flow of brown clouds at the sluice,
with cod skeletons wincing in the bubblebath foam.

Later that summer you cooled your heels,
wrapped in some other folk’s seaweed.
The flint and razorshell that pierced your callouses
and etched promises into the pier,
are now blunted and rare, stolen by the tide.

Rub chalky hands together and clap twice:
with sun dried scales under fingernails I’ll
summon a powdered surprise, it rushes into a lance;
a shadow on the water that thrusts ocean-ward
bursting cuttlefish eggs and breaking corallic hearts.

Flickr: Sinclair Spectrum development sketches