Grimbeau

Scroodles

Category: flash fiction

Omnibus Blues

Change is decay, all growth is benign, progress is not what it was, nothing ever changes much, people come and go, that’s all there is to it, what more do you want?

Every cloud has a silver lining, Wilbur, so let’s buy some buckets and spades and build some fancy new-fangled contraption and go get stinking rich

Waltzing Matilda fell through the door, collapsed on the floor, crawled into bed, and descended into lavender fields bathed in water

Looking for the gear lever, awful grinding sound, smell of abject poverty, damp cardboard boxes, stale body odour, taste of mass consumption,

overwhelming hyacinth dreams of wonky power alchemy on toast, wobbly jelly roll agenda
Roast chicken Trujillo drumroll

personal hygiene seldom if ever funny take your daffodils follow prescribed instructions
very tiny small print don’t forget to do-dah

host harbours hierophant unhinges white anchovies extinguishes two milk bottles
challenges goldfish to nine holes medal

perambulator

yellow wave insurgent sea
splashes hurdle ‘arbour wall
drench morning strollers
shiny black mackintoshes
up buttoned collars

seek out scoundrel’s last refuge
working man’s café
hot cup of green tea
do more good than harm
waste not to want not
facing stark choices

Bovril or Marmite
Mermaid or Dolphin?
wash your face at least
funny taste of surgeon
red carbolic soap tablet
fiddly little cuss it is
the only way is…Oops!

Autumn Almanac

Dancehall days are here again
Couch potatoes go to seed
In front of Goggle boxes
Outside equinox well
…Equinoxes

You can strictly stick Strictly
Come Dancing up your sad arse

Farce repeats as history
In
…Paradoxes

In Her Own Write

book of the week ends with six pips
her name was Beryl Bainbridge
her sparkling eyes & dazzling quips
cascading from her lucid lips
finely sculpted flattened vowels
came back to me from
a documentary I once saw
about John Lennon

lambada

Two hours shut-eye, blinds pulled tight,
               undreamed of tranquility.

 Long morning shift: stiff
               para limps on, empty blue stage,

 no obtrusive ramps, 
               bench press lifts  
               broken, poor doors…

 just one more amazed 
               interview then an ice bath tonight-

 Shall I learn the lambada 
               over this perpetual winter?

Tribes

Feral Beryl married Bill Sensible - 
a brown shoe salesmen
They lived for a while 
in Strawberry Hill
Then came the schism 
Reason:
Post-Imperialism

Beguinage

Seven Books,
spider words,
snuffed snow
black candle.

A leeward window draft.
Please reprise the reprise.

Axminster Aztec
brick brown rug.

Time to go south,
flight to light.

Nice.
There to remain in sunshine nights.
Mornings open doors to lazuli
lapping the boulevard.

Coy smell of fish, cognac, and coffee.

Dogs yelp gulls off:

Jazzzzzzzzz…..

‘Awe! That Fall…’

bum sore after Sunday
drunken stumbling clunking fall
loose green sock cops blame…

Aragon Nite

Tomorrow is not happening yet—adverse climactic features, heavy sweaty day scowls disapprovingly down, sparkless key bashers bang away down tin pan alley,

becket wrote endgame in such conditions staring down at Santé Prison in one second on a grey autumn day in Newcastle, Co. Down in the year of our Ludd 2016.

Mother-of-Pearl skies loom, make for a luminous emptiness, a milk-ivory lamina patina, we inmates parallel such lineage for diversion in my dowdy sweatshop.

The relief of Mafeking Head! The whirligig dances of the Dervish push no rivers, pull no punches at swim in the holy whole of holies

When they ask Jimmy the Greek to ‘resolve a wager before war breaks out, is that the sun or the moon up there?’, he gives his droll stock response:

there is no point in asking me as I hail from the Craic of Doom, Doomsville, Doomistan…’, and goes about his mail order business with added gusto.

Lo Energy Sport

no great hopes for this
one—no obligations or
contracts to fulfil
all hours are zero round here
countdown to entropy
always commences with
your starter for ten