Five Poems
they come in the night
in the sleaze corridors of soothsayers
in the ice cream bowls of last minute betrayals
in the last ditch efforts to conceal impossible defects
they come sneaking around and whispering
they have ideas about you and your kind
the lamplight is dim and refrigerator empty
you lay on your back and feign indifference when they call
when the time is right you stir a bit and perhaps roll over
since better off dead like a gorgot against the throat strangling
you lie fallen or in repose like the bum on the parkbench
it’s Spring
and the wildlife is fucking righteous again…
By Jay Passer.
Does Not Play Well With Others
The cynical part of me would say that my experience with people so far has shown me than none of us are who we seem, and we can all act in ways that surprise ourselves and our nearest and dearest. I love domestic settings, writing about families and what happens inside our houses because I do think it is within our own little castles we are at our most real and we feel we can let the bad sides of ourselves out. I’m certainly interested in human beings at their most authentic and truthful – and the truth about what we are is not what we say but what we do. Violence is very instinctive – very honest. The thing I love about crime fiction is that it covers the whole spectrum of what I want as a reader. The more formulaic versions of it are terribly comforting and conservative, and there are times when I need to believe in the fiction that the answers are always discoverable and discovered and that in the end the bad people get put somewhere away from the rest of us.
Alan Kelly interviews Jenn Ashworth.