Well, its that time of the week again.

8pm Wednesday 22th November 2006 at the Lacuna Café, Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, Scotland

Each week the performances have been getting more assured with practise. I’m sure anyone reading this who has been before will not need convincing.

We will be having our usual mix of open mic strangeness and slightly more organised regular campus performers reading new work.

If you wish to read we’ll do all we can to accommodate you. The best way to get on stage is to email toad@toadinmud.co.uk noting your interest, perhaps including a few examples of what you will be reading, and we’ll tell you all you need to know, which isn’t much. Otherwise, just turn up on the night and we’ll find a time for you.

-toad

Beware when you pay your fare
Of prognosticators
And the other alligators,
I’m an alligator, baby,
I’m snapping at your thighs -
I miss you, baby, every time,
If I ever get my head
Out of the oven,
I’ll grab you, sweetness,
Throw you down a mineshaft
With a life-raft
Filled with grenades,
I’ll throw that after you,
Pomegranate baby -

But the prognosticators,
Turncoat alligators,
They say none of that
Will be so,
But if I slit their eyes
And I screw their thumbs,
They’ll say it’s so,
So what I say comes
And what I say goes -

You’ll never beware
And you’ll pay your fare,
It’s not devil may care,
It’s I care and if I
Fill my lungs,
Just any old gasp,
We can talk in tongues,
But that can’t last
When I’m passing -
Your hubris will tell you
That I can still smell you
In the exponential
Nostril death,
And it’s true,
I would smell you
With my last breath
But I’m alive,
Else I’d never tell you
And the alligators
Are no prognosticators,
They’re dinosaur rejects,
Long outdated.

I woke up rough on drink and pills
Without a fag to clean my gills
Alone I dive and swim through streets
(Insides queasy as ocean floor)
Alone I sway as bus I meet,
Another face; I never saw;
You were not there.

There, sat, my head in no fit state
But still I tried to contemplate
This break to come, away from all;
From you. In glass I catch my stare
Saw plans to make and friends to call
And then, All sudden, came aware
You were not there.

In car with rich and errant friends
Bright day; my body self-attends.
The golden syrup tongues my throat
I hungry fuck each cigarette
My nostrils wear a snow white coat.
Laughed that I did not regret
You were not there.

A cottage; village, then just hills
And liquid; solid; powder; pills.
An unexplored, uncharted space,
Good company and time to blow.
Thru fags we burn and drinks we race –
Did I care? Or just always know
You were not there.

Went to the lake to entertain,
To rent a boat, despite the rain.
There at the wheel I stand and smoke
And feel the spray against my face,
The roaring wind turn breath to choke
And I’m content here in this place.
You were not there.

So home and short sincere farewells
And I reflect and rest my cells.
What memories accompany
The vodka-filtered time I had!
Myself alone, in harmony,
Now looking back I guess I’m glad
You were not there.

Thank you yet again for the (intimidating) turn out. I’m pleasantly surprised by the amount of people wanting to spend a Wednesday night drinking coffee and hearing poetry.

This success means that, of course, we’ll be doing it again:

8pm Wednesday 15th November 2006 at the Lacuna Café, Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, Scotland

This coming week we will have Alan Bisset, author of ‘The Incredible Adam Spark‘, reading aloud. Alan is a tutor and lecturer on Glasgow Uni’s very own Creative Writing MPhil course and is sure to be a treat. Of course the usual mix of extraordinarily talented regulars (albeit of only 2 nights), open mic performers and inexplicable interruptions will still be out in full force.

We’re just getting into our stride.

If you wish to read we’ll do all we can to accommodate you. The best way to get on stage is to email toad@toadinmud.co.uk noting your interest, perhaps including a few examples of what you will be reading, and we’ll tell you all you need to know, which isn’t much. Otherwise, just turn up on the night and we’ll find a time for you.

I know it’s the essay season (don’t I know it), but take a break, no one likes unmitigated successes, have some light refreshments and listen to us pour our hearts out.

- Toad in Mud, Tom Coles

She was eating it
because he wasn’t,
the baby octopus
with its arms strained
against her lips
like a tired child
desperately clambering
out of a rocky diving hole
at the end of that first stretched evening
of a holiday,
as the blood sun
drowned to the tune
of a chirping dusk.

Gum bedded blades of coral
graze its pinched egg head
as it spasms rhythmically,
stung by oily spice residue
and the tongue’s warmth.

It had fallen over itself
like a wheel of muscle
repeatedly rolling in circles
bounded by the edge of the dish,

it was burned by the air,
by the strip light’s
sodium glare, the smoke
of untipped cigarettes
and what oven heat was
still retained by
the earthenware.

And although her incisors
had invaded the rubber body
and met inside its tiny coil
of nerves, it still pulsed
and bulged itself as rings
of muscle squeezed,
pushed, relaxed, squeezed,
pushed and relaxed, while
across the table
her drunk father gagged.

Red-brick defunct factory funnel
strong against a diluted blue sky
but cowering underneath a thick grey tower block.
Not a skyscraper: an ambitious,
glamorous American invention,
(more than just an aeroplane away from here)
but games with over-sized concrete Lego bricks.

Those pictures of builders
sitting, nonchalant, high up above New York
on iron bars. An inch the wrong way
and you’d tumble like a talking egg from a nursery rhyme,
a tiny body shattered on tarmacked streets.

Above dim concrete panoramas of Glasgow,
They precipitate the fall by jumping.
Stories of splattered brains, crumpled features,
bodies shattered on tarmacked streets.
The smell of bloodstained asphalt remains,
and white washing whips in a breeze
outside a window many floors up.

Come heart-beat kick of the four to the floor
Shall I compare thee to a sonnet’s form?
Perfect, contained in self, inspires awe.
The rhythm beats and we can but conform.
The rhythm beats, our feet in unison
With soles that search for the hypnotic force.
Like hearts exploding to the poet’s tongue
The beauty of the form prompts this discourse.
So beautiful a form need not evolve
For culture makes art trash or some ideal.
The sonnet and the rhythm both involve
Invoking a response that feels more real.

You see, as sonnets best reflect romance
The four to floor reflects the way we dance.

I work in the office canteen
Where the walls are blue & the borders green
And there’s so many suits without heads
And the air is obscene.

They surge through dim-lit tunnels from above.
A school of sorts at frenzied feeding time
Mechanical and mute, a carnal mime.
Gargoyle-like glares more sad than fierce look
Upon their bait: the vats of mince. The hook:
I catch their eye, they hunger for the stove.

And then the few that do not gorge on chips
Will swarm about the iron salad bar
(That formulaic sustenance bazaar)
Saliva wet for tuna-sweetcorn rolls.
I hand them fish and smile at watery holes
That quiver back, devouring their lips.

I work in the office canteen
Where the walls are blue & the borders green
And there’s so many suits without heads
And the air is obscene.

Decanting food from tin to box to bowl
Observing chewing - tuna, cod or cow
I dream of far-off fishermen and how
Their blue expanse is greater than the sky
That’s shuttered out of each unblinking eye
In this deep torture chamber of the soul.

Their bones and flesh submerged, they can’t be heard
But for in this canteen cannot be seen
(Consumers of cadaverous cuisine)
These suffocated humdrum headless hordes
All daily falling on their forks and swords
I make my humble theatre absurd.

I work in the office canteen
Where the walls are blue & the borders green
And there’s so many suits without heads
And the air is obscene.