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Blue tigers by Paul Sutcliffe copyright (c) 2016

He went in search of a
Blue tiger
Somewhere near the Ganges
…
But how near?

Sleeping in ashrams
On mountains
Waking up
Bothered by goats
And woken by the twitter of a subcontinental
Owl
Traversing the globe
On speculation
Is something rare
But who would miss the
Chance?

Shining light (c) Paul Sutcliffe 2015

It came from the east
Or the west
If one found oneself on the other side
Like the styx

You wanted to cross but you had no coin

This light
Stunned
Shrivelled
And shone even into the deepest
Cave and cranny

A light that went at lightspeed
Speed of day or speed of night
It moved from
A to B
It was A-B
Or AB
Or, B superimposed on A

Even goat herders in a nation called Sim-u-sel,
called by themselves,
stopped and gazed
at the light that entered
on the night in December

Looked like Borges Copyright (c) Paul Sutcliffe 2015


I saw him from a hidden window
Well, hidden to me as much as I remember
Through ivory broken towers of toppled greatness
I espied him,
walking,
slouching,
breathing away
He was
In all his glory.

The body, the posture, the eyes and the nose
Just like Jorge Luis
I saw him
On a hillside in Tlon
Or maybe
I dreamt it
When walking through labyrinths
The ones where tigers purred and rattled the cage
And broke down the walls of heartache
via the door

"Things That Might Have Been" by the great, Jorge Luis Borges



I think of things that weren’t, but might have been.

The treatise on Saxon myths Bede never wrote.

The inconceivable work Dante might have had a glimpse of,

As soon as he’d corrected the Comedy’s last verse.

History without the afternoons of the Cross and the hemlock.

History without the face of Helen.

Man without the eyes that gave us the moon.

On Gettysburg’s three days, victory for the South.

The love we never shared.

The wide empire the Vikings chose not to found.

The world without the wheel or the rose.

The view John Donne held of Shakespeare.

The other horn of the Unicorn.

The fabled Irish bird that lights on two trees at once.

The child I never had.

The Anti-Realists…………. short story © Paul Sutcliffe. 2013

They spake in foreign languages. We did not know where they even lived. Mexico City was still small in those times. I walked up Calle Turin where it met Marsella and saw that tiny café where the anti-realists met.

Run by an old German sow called Birgitte, grey-haired and with the whale skin of an elephant, the windows were remarkably dirty and scratched. Although from the outside the name said “Café Brandenburg-Metz” , everyone simply called it “the Café”.

There were days when the anti-realists would encourage fights. One named Georgie, (from some small,shit town in Europe, near Antwerp) would stand up and proclaim outright that the philosophical notions of F-ness, G-ness and H-ness to be null and void. He would work himself up into a frenzy, almost spilling the hot coffee in the moment it was set down by the old Frau, foam spurting out from the corners of his mouth onto her shabby Bavarian outfit..

Then a mechanic called Hernandez would pull himself up from his chair, walk over to the Belgian, grab his moustaches and throw him right across the room, in a single, graceful movement, howling in his gruff southern dialect, “How real is that, cabron?”

Incident at Restitution Falls short story © Paul Sutcliffe


A dog; a speck of a thing. It arrived in some sort of bus, unkempt, mottled, needy. A dirty mutt. Making noise and disturbing the breathtaking, natural peace. The falls, like shadows of fully-forming instant-glass. “It comes down all year round, without everrr stopping”, the local had said.

It was the first time any of us had seen such a sight. Aunt Consuelo had never even been out of El Topo. The force of gravity’s grip, the white wall of terror, pulled all of us out from our bus, and pulling us in. Right in.

Even our driver - blowing a plume of cigar smoke out of his grizzly mouth – stared trance-like, at the slushy, streaming white shower, falling, falling and falling. And all of us, as well - transfixed...to be honest. And then, the dog. Yappy. Yapping. Yap-yap-yap-yap-fecking-yap.
“Yappy little shite”, Aunt Consuelo murmured, spitting a whole globule of phlegm onto the brittle earth, cracked,crackled, below our booted feet.

The whitewall, the water, rushing down, faster and faster - and the dog, rushing headlong towards....
Dog no more. Oh….no. No more. The little bugger had been swallowed up, whoosh!! in its orgiastic power. And, now - not even a paw could be seen. .

We all stood and watched. Some even clapped.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Woodrow Wilson

Trees swaying
In a bright breeze
You set off, no maps, no dreams, no world-to-come
Over rock and dale and then higher, still
A moon in orange, almost brittle
Shrill

Waking in dawn's dewy reign
Sleeping under stars that do not know your name
Walking, walking, dreaming,
dreamtime,
of the time
to come

Fade to gray © Paul Sutcliffe

Black,dark,ebony
Rich.purples and
Crimsons
Flowing into night

White,wispy,curling,twisted,
Frail and moribund
Clouds
Have passed

Oh yeah
We fade to grey
…………Fade to gray

The Bluest House © Paul Sutcliffe

In, or rather, near, the village of Troiscroixsandamarria, lived three families of troglodytes that had no desire for a house, until one day Jean de Croc de Arazanes arrived from the province of Navaranna. This man, moustaches greased and forever beaming a smile of knowing something the rest of the country did not, arrived atop a steed of unfatigable strength, and straightaway within the week, got to work on his lifelong project - the one to build the bluest house in all of the kingdom of Frankria. Arazanes had learnt the blue dye recipe from his time amongst those from the north of Britannia – the Pictos. The house took three years to finish - men working through harsh winter months, and scorching summer nights. On completion, on awaking the following morning, Jean took himself out onto the porch, naked as the day he was born - his pubis clean shaved in the manner of the Seljuks he had spent time amongst before the heavy wars - and he stood there, yea, letting out the loudest yawn he had ever yawned, and there, looking up, he spotted, facing him, three of the ugliest creatures known to man or beast. The troglodytes, covered in filthy war paint. Jean spoke up…clearing his throat.
“Ah. At last! I have been waiting for you these three years. Come let us have breakfast!”