Breakfast at Southville Deli

You don’t know this but last night

I lay awake and watched you sleeping,

Heard the soft scrape and wheeze of your breathing,

Felt the warmth of your body and thought:

‘What on earth are you doing here?

I’m not married to you, Audrey Hepburn,

And I’ve never eaten breakfast

Outside a downtown jewellery shop.’

Politely, Miss Golightly tossed and turned

Till the milkman’s electric go-cart squeaked.

It was never meant to be. She spurned

My offer of staying the rest of the week.

Which, all things considered, is just as well.

Manhattan fantasies are nothing but rot

For drunken fools who are over the hill

And believe there’s more than they’ve got.

There isn’t. Love simply changes its hue.

Sometimes, it pulses a deep, vibrant red,

Sometimes it’s insufferably blue.

Whatever. The amorous film stars are dead.

Which means, my love, there’s more to life

Than what passes for it on the telly.

Audrey Hepburn would never be my wife

Or do breakfast at Southville Deli.

Tom Phillips 

A poem from 'Recreation Ground' the book

Fenlanders

Perfectly flat source

of glass-half-empty wisdom

(You never gain without you lose),

these drains and fenland ooze;

unbroken horizontals

bred smallholders quick

to silence, feuds.

Cousins, not on speaking terms,

learnt allegiances, who was who,

precise degrees of indifference to use

in the family’s every orbit.

A lack of generosity in nature, then,

accounting for a hardness of heart?

Well, yes, there was that – breeding fruit

and veg from plots that felt the brunt

of poor winters, North Sea winds,

relentless, giddying skies.

No wonder they took the dim view,

were adamant they knew what they knew,

distrust of water, close observation

of changes, levels and rules,

the fragile treachery of things,

a closed world better off for keeping closed.

From here, though, also, eccentricities of will:

great-grandfather who made do

and the most out of left-overs,

sticks, old hat. Always on the loose,

ditch-strider, habitual trespasser,

or, back home, his having to explain,

if anyone should ask, why the swan

he’d killed was better called a goose.

Such stamina for living on the hoof:

as if each morning, bent-double and running,

he was tempting snipers to shoot him down,

which on such open ground they could have easily done.

Tom Phillips

Copies of Recreation Ground in which 'Fenlanders' appears are available here: http://tworiverspress.com/wp/category/people/tom-phillips-poet/ 

From 'Below Tsarevets'

Excerpt from a work in progress

Chance has been a fine thing.

In Sozopol, in the Bar Small Tequila,

I was ordering bottles of Burgasko

for a friend from home I’d not seen

in months – and not being able

to find my hotel in labyrinthine Nesebar,

who’d have guessed that I’d run into

that Irish Bulgarian after closing time

who was staying in the room next door?

Never mind how we coincided

six months before ...

     *

And so, yes, now I’m sitting below Tsarevets

as lights play over the church, castle walls,

thinking you should be the first to know

that I’ve reached Veliko Turnovo,

that I’m learning to trust to my luck.

Tom Phillips, Oct 2013

100 Miles North of Timbuktu

Originally a ten-minute 'curtain raiser' for Theatre West's first A2Z season at Bristol's Alma Tavern Theatre, an hour-long version of '100 Miles North of Timbuktu' is currently running in A2Z2 at the same theatre (until 12 October). There's an interview in which I talk more about the play and its evolution here: http://www.venue.co.uk/theatre-features/21068-desert-storm

And a review of the current production here: http://www.venue.co.uk/theatre-reviews-0-9/21149-100-miles-north-of-timbuktu

Things that are on

Sat 21 Sept: Balkan Peace Park Project AGM, Kings College, London, from 2pm. Ffi:http://www.balkanspeacepark.org/news.php - all welcome.
Sun 22 Sept: DANSwithMe Bristol 2 - an afternoon of solidarity with the anti-government protestors in Bulgaria on Bristol Harbourside, also from 2pm:https://www.facebook.com/events/507435076008991/ - all welcome again.
Tue 1-Sat 12 Oct: '100 Miles of North of Timbuktu' - Theatre West stage my play about three chancers who accidentally find themselves with the power to play God:http://www.almataverntheatre.co.uk/theatre/what-s-on.html
Wed 16 Oct: a scene from 'Man Diving' gets read as part of BOV's Open Session fortnight.
24 Oct: me talking about travelling in SE Europe at Stanfords bookshop as part of Bristol Festival of Literature: http://unputdownable.org/event/on-the-road-off-the-page
11-15 Nov: 'Deeds Not Words': Ship & Castle debut another new play, this time about the Suffragettes and the Edwardian government.

Bulgarian protests

Running through the centre of Sofia are the 'yellow pavements'. A wedding present for Tsar Ferdinand from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, they're sturdy enough to have supported the rolling tanks of communist Bulgaria's military parades. Now they are the scene of anti-government protests which see thousands of people taking to the streets to demonstrate against the all-too-familiar triumvirate of power, corruption and lies. Even though the protests are soon to reach their 100th consecutive day - on the Monday after the 105th anniversary of Bulgaria's declaration of independence on 22 September - media coverage outside Bulgaria has been, at best, sporadic. This, it seems, is because, in the early days of the protests, the few foreign correspondents that the west European media still employs were engaged with the Edward Snowden story and because editors were unwilling to commissions stories about protests which don't involve 'violent clashes'. Tellingly, media interest peaked on Day 40 when protestors blockaded the parliament building in Sofia, trapping MPs inside - the only action to result in wielded batons and bloodied heads. It would seem that, if you want to attract the west European media's attention, the most effective course of action is to start ripping up paving stones.
Such a course of action, though, is not characteristic of the Bulgarian protests. Despite years of anger and frustration, the protestors remain peaceable, warm, good-humoured. Last Saturday (Day 84), a national holiday, there were fewer people out on the 'yellow pavements' than normal, but the street was still packed with protestors of all ages, from toddlers to students, parents to pensioners. The message to the Bulgarian government is simple: 'Octabka' (resign) - a word chanted over and over, to the accompaniment of drums, whistles and horns, or written on banners, cards or pieces of paper sellotaped to lampposts. People carry umbrellas: in Bulgaria, spitting is a metaphor for lying - and the protestors feel they're being rained on by watery lies. At the protestors' camp outside Sofia's second parliament building, we stop. Beside bubble tents and two pianos, the umbrella contingent line up at the railings guarded by unsmiling police. A stationary crescendo of drumming, whistles, horn-blasts and boos gives way to the Bulgarian national anthem, sung acapella. And then everyone sits down. It might be the start of an urban picnic. What it is is one minute's silence in memory of Georgi Markov - the Bulgarian journalist killed in London in the 1970s by a pellet of ricin delivered by the tip of an umbrella. The centre of Sofia is at a halt. Later there will be beer and ice-cream, and someone playing one of the pianos, a model of a communist-era building made from empty coffee cups. For now, there is silence on the 'yellow pavements' - and soon it will be Day 100.

WWW.NORESHARSKI.COM POSTS REGULAR UPDATES IN ENGLISH ON THE BULGARIAN PROTESTS.

10 July Day 27

For Vasilena

This evening, squabbles on the bridge,

contested rights of way:

wheels locked, one cyclist

mouthes off at another,

a pram’s slewed across the pedestrian lane.

Tempers quickened by seasonable heat

disperse in complaints, muttered protests,

fading after-thoughts. Outgoing,

the tide inches back from algae’d banks.

*

No news again, but photographs online

are reminders of the elsewhere

which friends can see as making good ...

in whose name they have marched:

that much might be deciphered

from mechanical translations.

This evening, boulevards and plane trees,

the hushed rally’s footsteps:

so little for us to go on

in our own “wild country, far away” ...

*

But this evening, the belief,

reparation, an ordinary square

with tables, coffees, laptops,

and, in diminishing light,

the first sound of voices

and bird flocks startled upwards –

unfamiliar words, Facebook updates,

and then, settling in, a rain of doves.

*

In this, my own wild country, far away,

backgarden laughter, this evening,

and those easily forgotten complaints.

Tom Phillips