Fiction etc

Libre

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Those 1950s American cars are a key symbol of Cuba under Communism, giving a bit of old glamour to all those Lonely Planet images and travel documentaries. They’re real enough, seen all over Havana. Many however are like ‘Trigger’s Broom’ – having had so many parts replaced they’re more new than old. There’s no denying though that they’re still cool. In Cuba, they are a key part of that desire for ‘difference’ that attracts people to a place. And their owners are only too keen to earn some extra cash taking visitors for a ride along the sea drive, the Malecon, under the sun and close to the spray of waves.

Less well photographed though are the Ladas. The reason the old American cars are still there of course, has largely been the lack of something to replace them, due to the ongoing economic blockade. Though now they’re so famous they are likely to always remain, as visitors will always want something of the past that meets their expectations. The Ladas from Mother Russia though, were the main replacement car for all those decades after the Revolution. They were popular locally for their ruggedness and relative modernity, though of course the Ladas themselves are now also ancient. While less well known as a symbol of Cuba, Ladas are a big part of the modest traffic that runs around Havana, in particular being used heavily as taxis.

I had little naivety about Cuba’s ‘alternative’ system. While there’s a general lack of the hunger and homelessness that marks much of the UK, in turn you are faced with a Government which tolerates no alternative political parties or dissent and heavily restricts its citizens. While basic needs are generally met, the standard of living is also low. Those old cars may have a certain romance and now a tourist income for their owners, but having to constantly repair a forty year old refrigerator has less allure.

The famous free education in Cuba also doesn’t always translate into liberation. In my final Lada taxi to the airport I spoke at length with the driver. He had a master’s degree in IT but saw little point in using it in Cuba when he could make more money by driving. As well as have more freedom, not having to work for the state. He talked about how he felt his education was wasted and how, like many, he wanted to leave. In turn he asked me about IT work in the UK. I said as far as I knew, it was well paid, but highly competitive. And that a lot of IT jobs were now being ‘offshored’ to other countries where labour was cheaper. He was aware also that we had to pay for university and asked how much it would cost to study for an IT masters. It took me a bit of time to work out the maths and then convert it into to Cuban currency. He was aghast at the expense. “Yes, it’s a real problem,” I said. “Especially if you’re from a poor background.” 

We were pretty quiet after that as we did the final leg towards the airport, pondering the madness of our two systems. Neither of which anyone really believes in anymore, both slowly falling apart. 

This piece was published in Elsewhere Journal in September 2020.

Liverpool and Wales: Longing and imagination in city and country

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

The relationship between Liverpool and Ireland is well documented. The relationship between Liverpool and Wales less so, yet just as deep. At one point, Liverpool had the largest urban settlement of Welsh speakers. From teaching to building to retail, the Welsh were a key part of the region’s fabric. The National Eisteddfod was held several times in Liverpool and Birkenhead. Relations were not always cosy though. In particular when Liverpool Corporation constructed the Llyn Celyn reservoir over the Welsh speaking village of Capel Celyn, helping fuel Welsh nationalism in the 1960s. Liverpudlians too, were also part of Wales. From the earliest opportunities the working class had for holidays, Wales represented open space, clear air, leisure and countryside.

Even now, Liverpool may no longer represent the economic powerhouse for Wales, especially as Cardiff has grown, but it’s still the closest major urban settlement to North Wales. A place to study, to go out, to shop. While, despite the advent of cheap flights, Wales remains popular for holidays and days out. And both still hold a pull to each other, particularly for the young of each place, long after cars replaced paddle steamers as the quickest route between the two. 

Possessing dramatic landscapes and cultures fired with passion and poetry, they are places separate but intertwined. Hills and tall buildings just visible through the distance on brighter days from up high. For populations with experiences so different, how each viewed the other was and is so much about perception, projection, longing. The Welsh idea of Hiraeth, is something many from Merseyside are also familiar with even if they couldn’t put a name to it. A bittersweet longing for homeland, for a lost golden age, even by those who never knew it or never left in the first place. A yearning to return to something which no longer exists, or maybe never did, but is a feeling which always remains.

In urban Merseyside, Wales is a place to escape to. Peace and space and blinding light. The intensity of openness. A bucolic place of nature, of school outward bound adventures, as much about crisps and kissing as mountain climbing and canoeing. Cheap, accessible holidays and golden if chilly beaches. The romantic weirdness of Portmeirion. Steam trains that go from nowhere to nowhere but at least the landscape looks pretty. This though, of course, ignores the vast holiday industry driven by Merseyside, Manchester and Birmingham, the undulating, boxy sea of caravans along the coast. There are the pseuds too who pretend they’re not tourists, that claim they come for the ‘real Wales’. What is real North Wales though? There’s the real of lakes, mountains and beaches, but also the real of intensive agriculture, nuclear power stations, Japanese factories and RAF jet bases. The holiday parks too are just as real.

In North Wales, Liverpool is a place to escape to, especially for the young. Noise and density and blinding lights. The intensity of urbanity. The possibilities are bigger in London of course, but also much further and harder away. Good times, clubs and music, different people and alternative cultures. Freedoms away from small town oppression. Anonymity and maybe even opportunity. A life closer to the edge, even if it’s easier to fall off. But of course, what is the ‘real Liverpool?’ All of this but also, pleasant suburbs, vast parks, technology hubs and polished shopping centres, like so many others. What both places have is a fierce awareness of themselves and their cultural uniqueness, but that sometimes blinds to what is more universal and what is shared. As well as that, living in cultures so strong, can create a drive for some to escape from it. 

The city in the distance. The hills in the distance. The distance is what matters, near but far. Something to daydream of, to work towards, to long for. A projection in the back of the mind, both real and unreal. The closer you get, the more the longing fades and you begin to think what you saw in the distance was a chimera. The longer you stay, the more you think back to what you have left and realise, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe. Fresh eyes. Hiraeth again. The intangible feeling.

And it is everywhere. Strive to break from hard lives or particular places and we find we always take them with us. When we achieve our escapism, we find it’s just another different reality. What we’re looking for has never existed and it never will. Yet we still always look for it. In the distance, just out of sight. 

This piece was published in Elsewhere Journal in July 2020.

The Clear Out

Kenn Taylor

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By Kenn Taylor

Sorting through his deceased father belongings provoked a mixture of emotions in David.

The scale of the task overwhelmed him. His father had been a hoarder who’d lived in the same house for 60 years. Even with the help of his siblings it would be a big job to sort through it all. They had put the task off until a few weeks after the funeral, but soon the house would have to be sold for all their sakes, so the clear out had to begin.

For the sake of organisation, they divided themselves into different rooms. After first looking through the house for individual items they wanted as keepsakes. There had been little conflict over this – their father kept far more tat and trinketry than they could ever want and, with them having all had their own families, old toys, personal items and the like had long been removed.

What remained was nearly all their father’s and their 9-years-deceased mothers stuff. David took the smallish room at the back of the house latterly used as a dining room. It was dominated by a poky resin dining table with wood-effect pattern and a large, dark-wood display cabinet whose lower drawers were stuffed with everything from a basket full of sewing kit to twenty-year-old birthday cards and boxes of ageing photographs.

It was a huge task to clear the cabinet and took David most of the day. His speed was slowed by having to sort through all the photographs. Nostalgia and sadness was inevitable as he sifted through the still glossy images in their fraying paper folders. After a while, he just put the boxes of photographs to one side, reasoning that he’d take them home and sort through all of them at a less pressing and less emotional time.

David had a sometimes difficult relationship with his father. John Hughes had not been cruel or violent, but his hard working life in the shipyard, especially during WWII, had made him somewhat distant and cynical. The harshness of the time had also no doubt contributed to his father’s hoarding instincts, which David now had to deal with the ultimate results of.

David had been born after the war and had grown tired of hearing about it or the Depression before it. He was a lot more optimistic and liberal. That said he was no hippie and he knew that his father was quietly proud that David had risen to the role of Technical Manager at the oilseed plant, before it closed and he took early retirement. It was never really something he had a passion for, but it had given him and his family a good living over the years and now he was retired, he had time more to indulge his fondness for art.

With the cabinet cleared, it left only the bureau to sort through. In his old age David now found it curious that their staunchly British father would use such a fancy word for the tatty fold out desk, but that’s what they had always called it and it had been in the same corner of the room since David had been a child. They were always forbidden to play with it as was where the ‘important’ things were kept; bank books, birth certificates, warranties. They were especially not allowed to go near it after one of David siblings had lent on it too hard and broken one of the brackets on the fold down desk top. His father, true to form, had never repaired it, so even now the closed cover hung off centre.

David walked over and pulled the desk top down. Slowly as, just as he predicted, it fell away when pulled. Once lowered he began to look through the various spaces that made up the interior of the bureau: small draws, racks and cubbyholes. Each one stuffed full with letters, documents and folders.

In the largest space there was a long green tin. Patrick pulled it out and looked at the faded labels above each coin slot: ‘Rates’, ‘Electricity’, ‘Gas’, ‘Radio Licence’….opening it up revealed just a few defunct coins and an ornate button.

David threw the tin in his rubbish pile and carried on. He pulled out payslips, insurance documents, brown enveloped letters from the Inland Revenue. He kept the odd thing, such as a small black and white photograph of his mother while she was still young, but most of it he placed in the pile to discard, with increasing frequency as he went along.

He pulled out a particularly old white envelope, then paused just as he was about to throw it away, noticing that it was addressed to him rather than his father or mother. He thought he had long ago taken anything related to him away to his own home. The envelope had been carefully and cleanly opened. David pulled out the letter inside, noticing straightway despite its age, the quality of the paper it had been printed on.

He carefully unfolded the letter and felt and lump in his throat when he read the dispatch address:

Liverpool School of Art
62 Hope Street
Liverpool
L1
Telephone: Royal 3162
Telegrams: ArtHope

He carried on reading

Dear David Hughes

We are pleased to be able to offer you a place on our Pre-Diploma Course based on your interview and your portfolio, providing you satisfactorily complete your GCE O-level.

If you wish to take up this place, the course will begin 15th September 1959. Please take this letter with you to the Admissions Office in the main college building at the above address, before 30th May 1959, to confirm your attendance and register.

The Admissions Officer will provide you with information on the materials and equipment that you will be expected to have procured ready for your classes starting.

If you have any further queries, please speak to the Admissions Office.

Sincerely Yours
Thomas Barnes
Senior Admissions Tutor

David examined the neatly typed, short letter for a long time. His nose stung and his eyes watered, though he didn’t allow himself to cry. Just as he hadn’t that time so long ago now when, on his return from school, once again his hope of receiving a letter from the College of Art had proved fruitless.

He had asked his father if he should go to the College to ask them, as it had taken so long for them to contact him.

His father looked up from his newspaper and, seeing the degree of emotion in his son, sighed. He walked over and placed his hand on the 15 year old David’s shoulder.

“There’d be no use bothering them. It’s time to accept that you haven’t got in David. Like I told you it’s not much of a thing to do anyway. You’re clever. We’ll go down the College of Technology next week, enquire about you doing a HNC.”

His mum had joined in, “Yes, it doesn’t matter David. Either way, we just want you to be happy.”

Hearing his sister enter the room, David folded the letter up, placed it back in the envelope and threw it in the pile of things to discard.

This piece was published in the Summer 2016 edition of The Crazy Oik. 

Welsh Streets

Kenn Taylor

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By Kenn Taylor

Ominous
as evening draws in.
The deep red
that cuts through this decay
is dragged back to the west.
Past the mountains
from where the builders
of these streets
came.

Sheet steel, not glass,
fills windows.
Buddleia spurt from rooflines
in roads where even streetlights
have died.

Indifferent now to the dereliction
that awes some.
There is little romance
in domestic decay
when you see it every day.

The silence though.
‘What happened here?’
A passer by may ask.
‘Fire, flood, famine, war?’
All this and more.
Though this place in England
is really the result
of the dropping
of a thousand bombs
of ideology.

In times past
the few with power
saw money to be made.
Scraping back the fields
to cram in labour,
filling demand in a fierce new era.
Keeping the trade turning,
taking and not giving
from places faraway.

People came
looking for opportunity.
They built proud,
as if still for themselves,
in the hills
to last a thousand years.

Homes for those
seeking a better life.
Trying to get by,
though always in the firing line
through depressions and wars.
See a 1950s house
in-between Victorian walls.

From peace came another boom
that saw many out
to leafier spots.
A rare time
when people
maybe
had a chance.

The more desperate though
moved in from around the world.
To the houses
not yet pulled down
in the name of improvement
by those who felt they knew better.

New communities
trying to get by,
despite the vicious treatment
from those who hate difference.
Until Orford’s tactics
see bricks thrown back
at the thin line of authority,
shocked
that the worm could turn.

Sadly though
the end result,
even more labels put on a place
no longer treated as a community,
instead
abused as byword.

Left and right
claim it as their quarry.
Use it to blame each other,
as photo-journalists from Hampstead fight
to take the best pictures
of trainers hanging from telegraph poles.

Here though
a new plan emerges.
From clever types
in league with
desperate politicians
in a desperate city
and a few descendents also
of those with an eye
for profits from the land.
They all conspire from on high
to drop another bomb,
one of renewal.
‘This land must be cleared,’
traded again,
razed of its problems.

Those who remain though
just getting by,
trying to fight their corner,
are drowned out again
by those who feel
they know better.

The developers on one side,
scrabbling for deeds.
On the other
the creatives and
heritage enthusiasts.
Martyrs to old bricks
who set themselves up
as defenders
of what was never theirs.
Fantasists of a culture
they have never known,
they stalk around
writing of
tiling and wrought iron,
missing out the
rising damp and
regulation
Corporation Green doors.
Until they head back
far away
to quaint, expensive
places of no change.

No longer a place
in all its complexity,
instead just more bywords
for the ideologues.
Abused by both
poet and profiteer,
they squabble over the moral high ground
as the streets beneath them decay.
A battlefield.

One day,
can they just be homes?
Or do they have to wait
for the next bomb
from those
after money,
power,
or truth?

Long after opportunities rot away,
bonds remain.
Money gets throw in
then taken away
just as quick.
Everyone
carries on getting by
trying to rebuild
brick by brick.
Let people decide their own fate,
their own path for their community.
Is it so much to ask?

A car speeds down the silent street,
the sun has gone.
No light from the windows.
I reach the end of the road
and turn away.

This piece appeared in the July 2014 edition of The Shrieking Violet. Cover design by Robert Carter.

Austerity

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

I went on a journey
of nostalgia
to somewhere I used to go
Down a dark path
In an unloved park
In an unloved town

The building was still there
but now secure
Plywood
and wire mesh
On every window
and door

Through a crack though
there was a gap enough to view
that where once there had been
animals to see
and friendly, old staff
now only
rubble and decay
Overgrown and abandoned

Another tiny tragedy
There are a million more
No headlines or campaigns
Just one more quiet sacrifice
to the god of austerity
While those that caused the mess
carry on
as before

A decision made over an account sheet
by people
who know the value of nothing
People who then wonder why
so many of the young
don’t even try

Protecting our grandchildren, they say
from the debts of today
I have to wonder though
what will be left for them
tomorrow

 The piece appeared in the January 2014 edition of The Shrieking Violet.

Distance Over Time

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Look ahead
First
Hard
Push
Down on the right
Cheap metal
Once again
Creaks into life
Balance is achieved
And motion begins

Momentum builds
Long straight road
Muscles strain and tense
Legs pushing
Heat dragging
Chemicals shooting
To the brain
Fingers grip
And burn

The movement begins to take
The pull
Faster
All sinews strain
As the click, click, click of the ratchet
Becomes one constant sound

Air is sliced
Sound trills
Metal and body
Shake and protest
Silenced though
By
Ever
Increasing
Speed

Lean into a corner
The frame groans
The wheels shake
The rhythm continues
Thighs aching now
Forward
Forward
As you reach
The crest of the hill

Sweat now coating
Head and back
Look down
Pressure is released
Relief
As all parts strain forward

Pause pedals
The wheels run free
Guided, fast
By forces
Now beyond your control

Another bend at speed
Lean ever closer to the ground
The wheels now a blur
Grinning ever more
As the hill pulls down

Feeling every crack of the road
Every twist of wind
Every grit in the air
Unbending rhythm with machine
Muscles stretched
Aching
Metal
And body
Slowly
Slowly
Disintegrating

Lean in again
Further, lower
The thrill
Free
Brake now released
Heart beats
Feeling only sound
Enveloped by wind
As the last corner
Approaches
Behind it
Only light

This appeared in the August 2013 edition of The Shrieking Violet.

 

Voices on the Tides

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Art is a call and response but, assembling in the Bluecoat, we anticipate listening. Tonight, we have come to hear some voices from the North.

Our first is Dinesh Allirajah, who tells us of the characters he has created and how each one has a little bit of himself in them. His experiences slipped under the radar into a story, from a bad knee to a favourite record, all taking on a life of their own.

“Like I did with my asthma in 2008 and like I did with being Asian 1992 – 98.”

Our voices are shaped by our experiences. Personalities determined by the connecting of synapses as we each go through life’s commonalties in our own unique way. From this our stories emerge. Changing and modifying, we iron out the details and preserve the best and the worst. The stuff we don’t want to lose or can’t throw away.

Some though, go further and write their voices down, make narratives from their own stories. “These people I have created,” says Dinesh, “in order to preserve slivers of my own life I want to keep. Preserved forever in the chilly embrace of a writer.”

We are all taken into this chilly embrace in the clean, dark auditorium. As the characters that writers create struggle for life, we see it all through our own filters of experience. We have come to listen but, as we do, we dig inevitably into our own memories and neurosis. A call and response.

Rebecca Sharp puts her own voice onto the spaces painted by Anna King. We are taken to insignificant patches of rough grass and distant tower blocks, worn looking wooden sheds and bent fences. The everyday changed by paint and then once again by verse.

We find ourselves in a faded and blurry place, somewhere in the back of our minds. We know we have been here before because it is everywhere. Places where everything of real importance usually occurs. These are where the true voices emerge from, not the seven wonders and centres of the universe, but the insignificant spots of ultimate reality.

Andrew McMillan talks to us about family. His own nephew impressed, not by poetry, but that his mum’s boyfriend can bench press him.

“Everyone has a family, even War Criminals.”

Andrew takes us a long way from here. To a crumbling building on the edge of a Serbian forest, or even a clinical but comfortable cell in The Hague and Ratko Mladić, wondering about his children. Like we all wonder. about. our. children.

In the interval, waiting for a Coke, we stare at the dead flies in the lightbox above the bar.

Back and, as the sound of seagulls fills the auditorium, Chris McCabe takes us to the Mudflats. Here in the theatre there is a theatre that has come from the basement. The place where we keep all the things from our lives and our families that we can’t or won’t throw away. What we hear when we are young embeds in our minds and we pass it on even as we don’t mean to. We may forget about the things we carry around, but it all lies buried. Writers may mine their lives for characters, stories, truths, but when we are faced with a question we can’t answer, we all do the same. A call and response.

All the love and pain of a family are revealed by the four on stage. People, and the ghosts that they live with. When those we love leave this life they remain in our minds, shorn of many of their layers and complexities. Only a cipher of what they said and did to us and what we said and did to them, all of the love and all of the pain and everything in-between. And their ghosts are strongest when they shape what we say and do to others. They are gone but their voices remain.

Grandmother talks to dad and dad talks to Chris and he talks to his son. Generations of change, but the same struggles continue. The same questions and confusions, getting by, trying to be there for each other despite the world, trying to make each other understand what we have been through.

We all tell our own story, drawn from the actions and experiences of our lives. Our own story, to suit ourselves, but others will tell it different. Our lives in the chilly embrace of others.

“WAR WOUNDS and WORD FIGHTS, that’s men!”

Dad once wrote a book because he had to but, in true Liverpool fashion, tells his son, “Don’t look at the dark stuff, tell the jokes!” Look back and try to view the past through the lens of humour. Let us forget the dark stuff. Leave it in the basement. It never goes away though, always waiting with the ghosts to come when you have to draw on your past to make sense of the present.

“What’s a tide dad?”

“It’s when the motion of the sea hits the shore.”

Tides come in and go out but the pattern always repeats. Like Dinesh said, it all starts with a memory. We pass on the experiences that we each have to go through, a flow between different generations, all waiting on the same tides.

Why be away from your family. “I have to work.” “I had to work.” We all have to work and we miss each other. Miss those who we love as we work to support them. This is the particular story of a family, a particular story of Merseyside, of ships and the lack of them. Of the North and the continual struggle were wealth and opportunity is limited. There are the truths and fallacies, triumphs and regrets, exaggerations and myths. The lies we tell ourselves and others.

The tide goes out in the Mersey and reveals the mudflats underneath. Authors may sit and write and we may listen, a call and response in the places of culture. What really matters though is that we pass our voices on. Whether through family or through art it is all part of the same attempt to communicate all that we have learnt and seen before we depart. As individuals, we’re merely keepers, of genes, but also of stories. Messages. All artists steal from the past, their own and others. We create voices from the voices we have heard. We refine and change again and again but fundamentally the stories remain the same.

The writing is done now, because it had to be. Because you have to work and you have to pass on. A call and response.

Now, “let’s go and play.” Before the tide comes in again.

This piece was commissioned as a creative response to the ‘Mudflats’ evening of spoken word. This was curated by Michael Egan, orginated by Northern Elements and held at Bluecoat, Liverpool in March 2013.

As Ever the Phoenix

Kenn Taylor

As Ever The Pheonix Image


His mind felt like it was cracking open, his eyes were puffy and red, and his skin itchy and sticky. He lay cocooned in his cheap, battered leather jacket and a t-shirt stuck to him by three days worth of sweat.

He held his head in his hands, keeping his burning, swollen eyes closed for as long as possible, only looking up occasionally to see the couple of Arab ladies opposite chatting through all his suffering.

The sound of the many washing machines turning was reassuring, though barely enough to drown out the brooding thoughts that threatened to career into his mind.

The laundrette had a stifling atmosphere. Strip lights on even in the day, walls plastered with brightly-coloured flyers advertising long past events and every surface covered with a thin, sickly-static residue of detergent.

He felt like he was breathing it in, the powder going deep, searing away at his already cigarette-abused lungs, slowly suffocating him as he sat beneath the grim yellow fluorescence. He put his head back in his hands again for a long time. Squeezing his eyes hard to try and take control of the throbbing, trying to take control of the feeling in his body.

When he looked up again the two ladies had gone and he found himself looking straight out through the large front window of the shop that looked across the junction of Upper Parliament Street, Catharine Street and Princes Avenue.

Cars, vans, buses, bikes and people all moved rapidly in all directions through the crossroads, all speeding along their own paths through the city. He felt a little better now, and continued to stare out at the never-ending flow through the window that was scarred around the edges with the dust and grease of a million washes.

He stared unblinking until his eyes started to stream and the Escorts and Polos and Hyundais and Transits began to blur. Blue and chrome became brown and plastic; the back of one car began to connect with the front of another.

As he watched, the pedestrians began to walk slower, their every action becoming long and fluid. Every single movement of every body could be seen in minute detail, dragged out and fractured. Eventually, their whole forms began to fragment and disintegrate.

The cars became viscous, their components stretching and flexing before losing their forms and turning into fluid shapes. These too began to flux and bend, breaking into pieces and floating off in many directions.

He saw a bird rise out of the now cracking tarmac on Princes Avenue, a Phoenix that struggled hard to free itself from the fragmenting road surface, eventually, violently, pushing its body outwards and turning the remaining tarmac to dust. It stretched out its brilliant red and gold wings as it rose away.

As he looked back to the road, he saw it had turned into a foaming torrent of a river, roaring forwards without pause down where the avenue had been. In it floated the last few forms of vehicles that quickly sank.

The Georgian terraces that lined the road began to crumble, their facades falling in on themselves to reveal thick jungle, soaring golden temples and, in the distance, jagged, snow-tipped mountain ranges.

The remaining people on the streets turned there, in the bright sunshine, into lions and stags and dragons and mermaids.

And, as the last vestiges of Liverpool 8 erupted, he saw the drive-in NatWest consumed by a waterfall and, far across the plains, the Renshaws factory was shunted aside by an emerging volcano.

Here were a million colours and forms rising before his eyes. Animals grazed on the rich plains and leaped through the surging waters now deep blue, then viscous green, now crystal clear.

It all became too much and, his eyes aflame, he closed them, squeezing them tighter than ever, but still he saw the colours on the inside of his closed lids, burning into his mind.

He concentrated all of his thoughts, all of his energy, on containing what he had seen: the sounds of the volcano; the continually rumbling drums from far away; the vivid, liquid brown of the stag’s eye; the flock of small, bright birds emerging from the dense, damp undergrowth.

All surged inside his head for what seemed like an age. When he eventually peeled open his dry, sticky eyelids again, he was confronted with only the dirty window of the launderette and a shrunken old woman gently snoring on the bench opposite.

Through the window, a Hackney Carriage honked and careered down Princes Road; but behind it, in the corner of his vision, he could see a Phoenix still rising.

This piece appeared on Northern Spirit in November 2012.

Anarchy Row

Kenn Taylor

Anarchy Row image

By Kenn Taylor

Daybreak on Anarchy Row
Hard sun
brings out the best

Long
bent
streets

Buildings
grand and shit
Scarred
by thousands of bombs
Real and
those imagined
by people who
mistakenly thought
they had the answer

The young
form into groups
for protection
and dominance
Shuffling
in bus stops
Long spliffs
burning through the day

Eyes
smiling with power
Kings of their own world
and
always ready
to come into yours

Help them
Condemn them
Say those with powerful places
to place words

Wringing their hands
in broadsheets
over lost communities
they never knew
nor understood

Communities that
have better things to do
than read them

Beats blare out
from bohemian neighbours
who keep doors locked
firmly shut
from the ones
who’ve been
running around
these streets
since childhood
Short on innocence
and peace

Down the road, the economy grows
Shiny flats and restaurants boom
Clean, honest, our bright future
Expensive lattes and
colourful
breakout
workstations

A world away
from
running down
shooting

Big people
Big ideas
Big machines
Coming for you

Do-gooders
and money-grabbers
try to intervene
To save
or
exploit

But everyone
just carries on

Anarchy Row
however much they try
will not conform

Respectability
is not required
Supplying as it does
drugs
women
all the
good times
All the needs
of those respectable folks
with respectable jobs
respectable houses
respectable families

All of it
lies

If you have mean eyes
second-hand guns
You can earn big money
If you do as you’re told

A tinted BMW
and a skinny blonde
If you do as you’re told

And
never
ever
GRASS

Stupid
or strong?
Organised
Refusing to
absorb the lies
You can’t shift cocaine from
Mexico
to Islington
by being a fool

As the light dims on Anarchy Row
people hit their stride
Taking the profits
down town
Glass and steel bars
where money
is all that matters
Italian suit
two bottles of Crystal
Not long before
the ladies
swarm around

Back on the darkening roads
and decay
Old men
from the times of
marches and strikes
still loud
but bitter
sit ranting
in the
few pubs left
But no one is listening
anymore

Older ones
from a different world
cower behind
still-clean
net curtains
while the kids
stalk around

‘Watch lad, we’ve got guns round here’
They do
but they also have bullshit
in tonnes
To justify the attacks on
those not locally born
and
shitting on their own
if they fail to conform

Fear is not permitted
Failing to question
until it’s too late
Blood on hands
A fate sealed
Just another bad example
that no one takes heed

Back out soon
kudos increased
moves up the food chain
till someone bigger
has their next meal

This is the law
that’s governed people
since the start
I’m the fucking hardest
so I’m in charge
The rest of you come and try

As a system
it’s not pretty
but it works

Not everyone
though
falls into line
Every second building
a community centre
of some kind

Forces fight
for soul
Both sometimes winning
But for every one
who gets out
two more
fall down

This is Anarchy Row
Infinitely richer
and poorer
than you can possibly imagine

This piece appeared on Northern Spirit in November 2012.

245 Aigburth Drive

Kenn Taylor

245 Aigburth Drive Image

By Kenn Taylor

The room was long and high, but dark and thick with silence. A lack of sound so heavy as to stupefy anyone caught inside it.

She lived at the top of the house, the bit where the mid-sized Victorian mansion spiralled off into intricacies of points and towers and chimneys.

Flats since the 1960s, these attic rooms had once housed the servants. Country boys and country girls packed off to attend the merchants of the city. Now it was home to just her, alone.

On the windowledge, a once bright flower, now a mass of fraying brown matter, slowly decayed in a thick, glazed pot that retained a brightness even through its dust coating. Behind it, she sat at her desk staring out of the long sash window that let through the filtered cold light of the day.

She had held her pen poised over the pad for so long that her hand ached. As she struggled to write down her story once more, it all seemed gone, lost in the depths of her memory.

Her spirit, though bright, had not escaped the passage of time, her body even more so. She had lived a high life of intense emotions, passions, dreams and excitement. In her time, she had seen and done all; partied for days, travelled far and alone, attended protests, attacked the system. She had been there at the beginning of things, seen great arts at their inception and history in the making.

In the end though, it was all too much. New young idealists began to fill the space. Idealists as yet unlined by the stress of it all, as yet un-jaded by the pain caused by all of these beautiful people. She chose to pull away from all the excitement. Retreat. Retreat.

Decadence burns you up faster, till there seems to be nothing left but a longing for peace. Now that she had peace though, she lived in replays of past glories: sights, faces, feelings, places.

Since then, she had tried many times to recapture her experiences, but there was no way of recording it all. Too much had occurred. To be there was to be there and not to have been there meant that it didn’t matter. For the joy was all in the moment itself, now long past.

Some of the best times though, still remained in her head. Small spots of brightness that cut through the thick fug of greyness and confusion that now filled so much of her mind. Things that had once seared through her were now just a vague tingle, a snatch of a memory drying her throat and dilating her pupils a little on recollection.

Yet, even though so much was gone, she felt some satisfaction that this state had been brought upon her by seeing, doing too much. Even if it was all lost, there was still the contentment of that, a cooling sensation in her body that collapsed the tension and gave her comfort.

She remained poised, fading into those dreams, her desire to recapture them for others, fading also, always flawed because they would never see through her eyes. All that mattered now was the memory and that was all that remained as the trinkets and the people and the places faded away, such as beautiful things always do.

As she retreated further, she lowered the pen slowly down onto the desk and carried on looking out of the dusty sash window, long after the view had turned to absolute black.

This piece appeared on Northern Spirit in November 2012.