Another from my collection of short stories, published on Amazon:
"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories" (2019).
In homage to the French, their culture, and to Saint-Malo...
He was away again. Some business trip to Rome or Singapore or somewhere. We stole away on Saturday morning in the Poet's ancient 2CV. It's a long way to St. Malo on a chilly spring day. Especially in such an affectation of a car.
We walked the walls of the seaside town, a bohemian couple. We watched the gulls - effortless in a cloudless sky. It was warm in the sun. We ambled onwards bathed in an erotic haze; sometimes he'd put his arm around my shoulders, hug me close. There were few abroad to note our chemistry; our every movement charged with leashed desire.
It was too early in the season - the sands were quite deserted. In the hotel room later, before we went to bed, he read to me the poem he'd conceived.
So Many Years
So hand in hand we walk the promenade
A tepid sun hangs in a cloudless sky
It's warm here in this little space we've made
But colder for the people going by.
The seaside here in early season's May:
The toilets locked, the walls deserted too
The car parks empty, who would want to pay?
The town wants tourists; me, I just want you.
I steal a glance, I see you, fierce and strong
Curious, happy, avid eyes that shine
I brush your palm, admire your body’s form
So restless, fickle, dangerous, risky - mine.
So many years we've patterned our affaire
Hilarity, stupidity, it's true.
You’d think by now I’d know you, be aware
Yet every second you seem someone new.
We wonder if perhaps we’ll get a snack
The shops are shut, the tide is out, it's no big deal
I spread your fingers with my own, you squeeze me back
If we had time and space I'd make it real.
And, as the clock struck midnight, we proceeded to make it real.
---
Later that year, in July, I was at a conference in Barcelona. It was held in a seafront hotel overlooking the port not far from La Rambla. The Poet was able to join me - he said he could work anywhere.
Not such a holiday for me. The conference was hard work. I had presentations to give, people to see, a workshop to present: the transition to IPv6.
There were evening sessions, dinners with contacts. I would sometimes see him at the coffee bar or sitting in the atrium with its view of the sea. He’d be working away intensely on his laptop. At the end of another hard day I'd be happy just to sink into that Catalan night; while the Poet was merely bored, I would be ready for sleep.
On the last day, when I woke up, of the Poet himself there was no sign. Only this pregnant poem left on the table.
Frustration
I see your hair strewn awkwardly across your face
Your eyes flick faintly underneath their sleepy lids
Your breath comes gently through your parted lips.
I see your breasts uncovered by their wrapping cloth
Soft targets of my tongue and teeth in days now old
Your browned midriff lies bare and, silently rehearsed
my two hands seem to span and touch and hold.
Your skirt is short, draped artlessly across your glistening thighs
Memories of possession come to me. So many times!
For two weeks now you have repulsed my every move
If this had been our first shared time
You would be written off by now
A pathway growing cold.
I wallow in frustration, thoughts askew
Compulsive need a force I can’t subdue
I want you now with lust and love but can’t have you.
In truth my passions are all meaningless
A primal lust, intruding into consciousness
Abandon this, perhaps seek someone new?
Feed desire with desperate girls to woo?
Empty pleasures, wasted time and money too.
The answer to this crisis? End it here
My pattern turned to drifting dust without a care
But such an act must not imply intent
It must be made to look like accident.
What is it about artistic types? I thought.
---
I opened the big glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. We were high: eight storeys. I could see the pool below, surrounded by recliners warming in the already-scorching morning sun. There was some kind of commotion down there. For a moment I thought of the final lines of the poem. Had my Poet ‘slipped’ off this ledge to fall to his very doom on the harsh white slabs below?
But no, it was just the Germans, released now from the hotel to grab their sunbeds before the British could arrive. I turned back and quickly wrote my own addendum to the Poet’s lament.
I see you, hovering there, just out my sight
You really are a very simple soul
When you at planet Earth alight.
Feed you, clothe you, listen, stroke you, sleep with you
You’re happy, then, to live inside your brain
I see you now, great puppy, wanting sex
And if I gave it, you’d be quite content again.
And why should I? It is my schedule too
And I have better things to do
Than cope with tiresome baths and other people’s sheets.
No dear. Hold to your needs, we’ll be home soon
One night and all this angst you’ll soon forget
And I can live off these industrious weeks
For quite a few months yet.
---
My far-from-suicidal Poet joined me for breakfast. The creative mind had required an early walk along the front where uncleared litter, immigrants asleep under palm trees and the lonely slap of wave upon rock could bracket his frustration.
You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:
and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:
"Donatien's Children" (2022).
Feel free to purchase both!
GPT5.2: Quality of the Poems in the Story
ReplyDeleteThere are two clear poem-blocks. The first is titled Frustration and runs from “I see your hair strewn awkwardly across your face…” to “Feed desire with desperate girls to woo? / Empty pleasures, wasted time and money too.” The second is the narrator’s addendum poem, beginning “I see you, hovering there…” and ending “And I can live off these industrious weeks…”.
This piece attempts the erotic lyric, and its ambition isn’t negligible. But from a craft standpoint it displays a series of recurring weaknesses. Lineation and rhythm are inconsistent. Many lines read as prose broken arbitrarily at the caesura of breath rather than shaped for metric or rhetorical effect. In short, the poem has textual volume but limited poetic specificity.
The Addendum Poem - the narrator’s own addendum is even more prosaic. It reads like free verse without disciplined shaping. Phrases such as “Feed you, clothe you, listen, stroke you, sleep with you” catalogue actions without forging a new perceptual space. The final stanza attempts to enclose the relationship in a couple of lines of philosophy—“One night and all this angst you’ll soon forget / And I can live off these industrious weeks”—but the rhetorical shift is abrupt and the syntax flat.
If I apply a simple three-axis criterion—rhythm, imagistic density, conceptual surprise — both poems fall short on all counts. Rhythm floats; imagery is literal and descriptive; there is no semantic leap that reconfigures ordinary speech into what Wordsworth famously called “the real language of men.”
2. The Role of the Poems in the Story
Here the criticism shifts. Within the diegesis, the Poet’s frustration poem and the narrator’s addendum function as character signifiers. They dramatise the tension between romantic longing and literary self-consciousness. In that sense the poems are performative, not aspirational: they articulate character psychologies rather than stage genuine lyric transformation.
This is a legitimate narrative strategy. Writers often embed texts within texts to show rather than tell. But because the embedded poems are flat rather than sharply wrought, they undercut the potential tension between the Poet’s inner life and the narrator’s perspective. Instead of creating a combustible juxtaposition of artistic sensibility and lived reality, the embedded verse mostly reiterates familiar erotic tropes.
The short story aims for a light, wry meditation on the artistic temperament, the narrator’s ironic detachment, and the mismatch between poetic self-image and quotidian existence. The framing device—a holiday scene with the poet companion stewing in his own frustration—offers some potential for satirical observation.
However, two weaknesses stand out.
First, the tone toggles awkwardly between depictive and evaluative. The narrator’s intrusions (“What is it about artistic types? I thought.”) are meant to be ironic but often read as flat commentary. To critique a character effectively requires either sharp psychological insight or a consistently modulated narrative voice. Here the narrator’s skepticism remains at the level of surface observation.
Second, the plot movement is minimal. The story unfolds with little structural propulsion: a glimpse of a poem, a balcony scene, a breakfast. Without deeper stakes or a more decisive twist, the narrative hangs loosely. A short story thrives on compression and consequence; here the consequence is merely the narrator’s mildly superior realism over his friend’s poetic angst. That’s a modest thematic payoff.