4/3/20 – Rea

Posted on March 4, 2020 by carltellstales

Chris Rea wrote an album
Chronicling a Good Friday
Megabus journey from hell.
No one gave a shit.

The bursting of a net

Posted on March 3, 2020 by carltellstales

A woman vomited right in front of my feet
in a busy high street tonight.
A part of me agreed with her.
She smiled, had some of my water and left.
It’s been a while since I was sick,
but I enjoy the sensation.
The bursting of a net holding back too many butterflies,
the clearing of a loft, a lumpy scream,
a volcano drowning open ears,
a body admitting what it doesn’t like
and taking the steps to sort things out.

3/3/20 – Brooker

Posted on March 3, 2020 by carltellstales

Charlie Brooker started writing
A new Guardian column:

The man was jiggling like a one day old baboon made from the jelly of an anxious pork pie that had spent six hours stuck in the middle of the vertical descent of the Alton Towers Oblivion ride next to a passionately screeching orgy of Brian Blessed, an industrial sized pneumatic drill and the cast of Stomp in the eye of a tornado made out of bouncy castles, sledge hammers and a bucket of pig turd.

By the time he’d finished the opener
He’d completely forgotten what he was doing.

The inevitable crash

Posted on March 2, 2020 by carltellstales

Finishing reading a good book is an odd feeling.
It’s like waving goodbye to university friends
at the end of your final year.
It’s like devouring a whole cheesecake
and waiting for the inevitable crash.
It’s plucking that chin hair then having
nothing to play with in boring work meetings.
It’s flushing that complicated poo and
walking back to your restaurant table and
not being able to discuss it with your blind date.
I put my completed book down on the coffee
table today in my empty flat and said
Well, what shall we do now? to a yucca plant.

2/3/20 – Martin

Posted on March 2, 2020 by carltellstales

Chris Martin couldn’t stop laughing.
The audience laughed too,
In that way you do
When you see someone laughing so much.
Chris Martin kept laughing and laughing
And laughing and laughing and laughing
And laughing and laughing and laughing
And laughing and laughing and laughing
Until the audience left, one by one, crying.

A thousand invisible groundworkers

Posted on March 1, 2020 by carltellstales

I bought some white candy floss yesterday.
It looked and felt like a cloud, etc etc.
When my teeth chopped through it
a thousand invisible groundworkers
drilled
the enamel off my canines and molars.
The February rain was Dr Thomas’s spit
bursting through his mask.
The wind sliced through me
like the dental floss I never bought.

1/3/20 – Bieber

Posted on March 1, 2020 by carltellstales

Justin Bieber
Sat down to write a new song.
The first verse went:

“Girl, I like your fingers.
They’re all soft, like life.
You could be my wife
With those fingers you got.
You know the ones,
The ones in your trifle,
I like ’em a lot.”

He was thrilled with it.

Tom Daley diving through custard

Posted on February 29, 2020 by carltellstales

I spent last night on a slowly deflating air bed.
I was a broken plank in the ocean,
a fly in a slowly stirred soup,
the last bag on an airport conveyor belt.
My dreams were my awakes.
I felt like a slow motion action star
from the 70s falling from a cliff,
Tom Daley diving through custard,
the last seed to be found in a receding gum,
a helium balloon destined for the sun.