RAINBOW CLOWN NEWS

Rumours flying around at the minute suggesting Sony are about to launch pocket rainbow bookmarks! Hank Coyne refuses to comment.

In dark houses over the river, black timber feet perched over the streams of plum fish and tiger sharks, you read your books and play your trumpets and think carefully about your next ten years. Your next ten years could see you lost in old woods in strange continents, strange towns, strange alps. Snow on your shoulders, windows fogged with rice, you could be on the highest mountains looking over the darkest valleys smoking strange cigarettes and talking about instruments. The next ten years could see you in container ships hitchhiking to Norway, eating bad crab, bad chocolate, cold fish, wrong oats and rotting cabbage.

You cannot leave the dark houses easily. They can be warm at times, but in the early morning they grow so cold the ceilings sweat with cold sleet and rain. Once you leave them you cannot return. You can walk inland over dew speckled mountains, east to the sea and the long strands of icy beach, or you can follow the river, to its mouth or its root, to wherever it goes. The houses are still standing. They go on haunting whoever they hold.

You can wait for those houses to walk you downriver. You can sit in dark rooms listening to old records, listening to old books of dust,  jars of dust black and grey and blue with strange silts.