Friday 31 March 2023

A Perfect Place To Be

Another new morning in Deal. I haven’t checked the telephone, and I sure as hell haven’t switched on the TV with all that news.
 
So I lie there and wonder if my lucky dip has won the Lottery, and I decide that it has. Until I find out otherwise. So I will buy that villa in Barbados and the flat in the city. And I can see the smiles on my pals’ faces as I hand them cheques for lots of money.
 
No one I know is sick or unwell. They have all recovered during the night. Friends and family are all happy to a soul. Nothing is out of place. Nothing sad has occurred.
 
The sun is shining brightly and a gust of wind shoots in the window with a smell of the sea and takes my breath away. I feel at peace.
 
Another new morning in Deal and (for now) the world is a perfect place to be.

1977


 

 
Christmas that year had been sad and disappointing. Sad, because it had been the first one without his mother, and disappointing because his cousin, Fred, in England had promised to ship a copy of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and it still hadn’t arrived. 
 
He’d have to hide it when it arrived since his father had become real religious since his mother had been taken. His father had wanted to cancel Christmas, but his aunt had made sure there was food on the table and a little present for each of them. In front of his plate was an envelope. It didn’t seem promising. In it were three tickets to something called Star Wars, due out of the 27th. He smiled a token smile. ‘Thank you’. 
 
What the hell was Star Wars? And today, as on old man, in 2023, he thought back to that Christmas and the tears ran down his face. If he’d only known back then what Star Wars would mean to his life, he would have jumped from that table all those years ago and kissed his aunt. 
 

Wednesday 15 March 2023

YOU'LL MAKE IT


 

 
 
You’ll make it, I know you will,
You’ve come too far and now is not the time.
If only you stopped and thought about it all
The walls you’ve climbed, all the troubles crossed
All the failures faced, all the little victories
And one day soon you’ll make it across
To where you can start again
I know you will
You’ve come too far, to stop.

bobby stevenson 2023
 

Monday 13 March 2023

THE UNLOVED


They knew you see; they had always known.
 
They had come from somewhere out there. Some folks said they had lived underground; others had said that they were from Atlantis.
 
One guy went on the television and told the world that he had been abducted by them and that they came from a star second from the right and straight on till morning. But we all kinda knew that he was plain crazy.
 
What wasn’t crazy was the fact that they came for people. Sometimes in the middle of the night, a soul would hear a knock on the door and there they would be.
 
And here’s the strange thing, I heard that they came to hunt down the Unloved - and that would naturally get you thinking that they were talking about the homeless, or the lonely or the suicidal, or whatever.
 
But it wasn’t, sometimes they knocked on doors where large families lived, they’d asked for the soul in question, and they would hug them and hug them until the sadness had been squeezed right out of them.
 
What those strangers knew was that folks could feel unloved anywhere. They knocked on the doors of the rich, and the poor alike. The well fed and the hungry. The married and the single. The saint and the sinner.
 
You couldn’t tell that someone was unloved just by looking at them. Some hid their sorrow behind the grandest of smiles or would give the impression of being the most confident son of a gun going. But they weren’t - and they never had been.
 
So, friends, if, or when, they come knocking on your door, it might be that they are just coming to hug the sadness out of you.Let them
Sleep well.
 
bobby stevenson 2023

Monday 20 February 2023

CRAZY

 
I know when I first saw him, it must have been back in Washington Square around the early Sixties. The story I heard was that he’d been brought up somewhere upstate. His grandpa or his great grandpa (I ain’t sure how long these things lived) had been brought back from the War and kept in a garage in Saugerties.
 
He’d been taught to play the banjo for cents and dimes, and he could dance too. At Christmas all us kids could talk about was going to see Crazy (that was his name) – the dancing, banjo playing, monkey.
 
When he started to learn to sing that I could not tell you. I heard that some crackpot folk singer from back West had taught the ape, or whatever he was, to sing the folkie’s songs.
 
One day a real important guy from Hollywood came and took Crazy away to be a big star. As for the crackpot folk singer, I heard he got paid off, and was working in some burger joint in Harlem. I’m thinking he was called Mylan or Dylan or something like that. Never did hear from him again.
And as we all know, Crazy the Monkey, is now the biggest star in the world. All singing, all dancing. Me and the family watched him down in Austin being supported by some guy called Elvis.
 
Everybody’s crazy about Crazy. I tell ya.
 
bobby stevenson 2023

Tuesday 24 January 2023

THE LOOK OF STRANGERS


There are those amongst us who slip into to this life like a well-worn glove, who very rarely question its strangeness and in most circumstances prefer to take everything that it offers.
 
Then there are people like me, Michael Andrews, sometime author, sometimes happy but mostly otherwise confused. There are days when I intentionally tell myself I’m stupid so as not to think too much, so as not to over analyse too much. But on other days…well on those other days I look around and scare myself with what I see. All of us sharing a little rock in space without rhyme nor reason, perhaps that is part of what makes me an author or maybe I’m just going plain mad.
 
There can only be two answers to this universe; either there is a God in control of everything or there is no one in control and now that I’ve had that thought I don’t want to get out of bed – ever.
 
Perhaps I’ll just hang on to my mattress and hope that Gravity does its job and keeps me in place.
So on the days I have to go into the city to see some colleague or other, I look at the faces on the subway or on the buses or on the trains or in all those faces of people walking. I look for some recognition that I am not alone in this belief, the belief that this existence really is only for the stupid and that the rest of us are terrified out of our minds the whole time.
 
And then there is always that nagging feeling which has been around since I was a kid – a feeling that I might have forgotten something important, something that when I remember it will make sense of all of this.
 
Then I see those faces in the city, those faces looking back at me and I rub my own face looking for marks, or bleeding from my nose or words written on my forehead that say ‘stare at this man’ – but there’s nothing on my face, it’s just the look of strangers.
 
Maybe they are also looking at me for some recognition that I am going through the same hell as them, but I have that well disguised expression of the stupid and they find no comfort in my face.
But I now know what it is and the truth is even more terrifying than my fevered imagination could have ever created.
 
I am going to tell you all this as a warning, to tell you to take care. I will tell you what I know and then let you decide.
 
Last Saturday morning the sun was bleaching the streets of the city and so I decided to take a walk from the central station up to the bohemian part of town.
 
I passed by the government buildings, the Royal palaces, the squares and avenues that were full of tourists. I walked under trees and arches and I walked around bistros, street cafes, theatres, cinemas and all of them full of strangers, some of whom caught my eye and other who walked on.
 
Then as I passed a glass shelter at a bus terminal a strange thing happened, I could see in the reflection that many of those who were behind me or had walked passed me were now looking in my direction.
But when I turned around no one was looking. No one was staring and everyone was going about their business. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying it’s the start of the decline, the start of the long journey into the dark. Soon names will be a thing of the past and I will be left in a corner with vacant eyes.
 
Perhaps I was thinking something similar myself until it happened again.
I had a pair of sunglasses, the type that allows you to see behind oneself, maybe made for this very exercise and there they were again, people looking at me behind my back and when I turned once again – nothing.
 
Paranoid? – Perhaps.
I took my phone, the one with the video recorder, and began to keep it in the palm of my hand, always filming behind me. At the Gin Joint Cafe I had a coffee and excitedly started to watch the film.
There they were – people who showed no interest in me apart from a look while passing – who, when they were behind me, would stop, look at me and apparently discuss among themselves some detail or another. People who were apparently strangers were talking about me.
 
Insane? – You would think.
I did what any insane person would do, I turned quickly and started to follow them through the streets and the arches and the squares until several of them disappeared into a doorway, one that slammed shut in my face. I waited on them but no one came out.
I waited and waited and still nothing.
 
I walked with my head down back to the railway station until in a shop window I saw more of them, a new crowd watching me.
I am ill, I must be.
 
I let it be. I went about my life ignoring the look of strangers. Some still walked by me and watched my face as if they were drinking in every last detail.
I just assumed I was wrong.
 
Then one night in the Gin Joint Cafe I drank more than I should have. I sat at the bar like the old soak of a writer I was. It had just gone eleven o’clock when the girl sat next to me.
 
“You’re Michael Andrews, the writer?”
“What do you want? An autograph or maybe you want to buy me a drink?”
“I just wanted to shake your hand” she said “we are not supposed to do this. It’s against everything.”
“What is?” I asked, slipping back another short.
“Well talking to you, the greatest writer since Shakespeare.”
“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
“No I haven’t, Michael Steven Andrews, born 1963, died 20… wait I’m not supposed to let you know that.”
“You know when I am going to die?” I asked.
“You died years before I was born” she said.
“We come back to visit all the great ones, you and Shakespeare are the most popular.”
“Come back from where?”
“The future, your future, I mean you have already found out that Einstein was wrong and things can travel faster than light. It won’t be long until you start sending objects back in time.”
 
I was about to ask what asylum she had escaped from when she disappeared.
So now you know what I know. When you get that look from a stranger then perhaps they are more than just inquisitive. Perhaps they are one of your own descendants or a student or a time tourist.
Who or whatever they are, just do what I do and keep on walking.
 
It’s safer that way.
#SciFi


Tuesday 31 May 2022

SHE DISAPPEARED

 


She disappeared long before she disappeared
She never sent a postcard
She just left
Without remembering any of our names
She never knew who I was
Just the man who lay beside her
On the bed wishing she would remember me
Then one day in the hospital my dad
Gave her some crisps
She said ‘why don’t you give them to Bobby’
She had come back to say goodbye
And then she was gone forever
I still keep those words locked somewhere safe.
 
bobby stevenson 2022

Monday 9 May 2022

I WISH I HAD FALLEN MORE

I wish I had fallen more,
It would have shown I was trying harder than I should,
I wished I had pushed more doors open, cried more often,
Listened more, started more fights, started more smiles,
Made more friends, held more people,
Dried more tears, caused more fun.
Wished I had laughed more,
Until the pee ran down my leg,
I wished I had said ‘sorry’ more,
Talked to more hearts,
Wished I had fallen more,
Got rejected by more strangers,
It would have shown I was trying,
Wished I had failed more,
It would have meant I was alive,
I just wish I had fallen more.
 
bobby stevenson 2022

A Perfect Place To Be

Another new morning in Deal. I haven’t checked the telephone, and I sure as hell haven’t switched on the TV with all that news.   So I lie t...