Critic Cal

On a bad day on the inside of my head, of which there were many, my arms were the arms of a gorilla. On better days, they were the arms of a man. On no day at all did they pass as the arms of a female teenager, or indeed a female anything. Except maybe a female gorilla. This was just one of the many many points on which I failed to meet the spec. I was desperate to bring myself up to it somehow ... but how? Not a clue. I'd picked up some hints about things  not  to do. For example, attacking the excesses with razors precipitated an increase of future excesses. So ... what exactly? If anyone of my acquaintance was an expert on the subject, they kept that shameful fact appropriately quiet – but, even if I'd known whom to approach, I doubt it would ever have occurred to me that such a drastic measure as asking was a legitimate option. So I just dragged my gorilla arms around with me, one on each side. And, along with them, the weighty consciousness of them. They (and other

A thing that I made for  Sophia Network's Poetry Month  ...                  JARRING                  ...that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.                 She was always giving him lip                 these days; she used                 to hold her peace, at least, he mused.                 He was the pain in her neck that would                 not lift; she’d left                 too much too long too unsaid.                 She had been a thing he could handle –                 once; her new stance                 was in spite of the manual.                 He would shoulder her over, at                 ev’ry turn; God                 forbid he be less than above her.                 She came with a body for flaunting;                 she taunted him,                 wanting him endlessly wanting.                 He still tried to pull the old ‘foot down’                 routine; as if                 that decided al

I used to watch a lot of films. We married in a liminal age; a time when people still rented DVDs, but selected them online and had them home-delivered like a very slow and ultimately inedible pizza. As frugal students we made meticulous use of our LoveFilm account, steaming through as many acknowledged must-sees of the cinema world as the speed of Royal Mail allowed. But I got old; fidgety; conscious of the finity of hours and more greedy to create than to consume. I'd like to say that I preserve my sapped appetite for screen time for the cream of the cinema crop. That I ponder over the Watershed program in careful search of a foreign language arthouse opus worthy of my next quarterly big screen pilgrimage. That I attend in solemn state supplied with fine red wine and an elegant Moleskine notebook in which to neatly print my cannily-observed remarks for later contemplation. But the sad truth is that my selection criteria has descended to "whatever's free on Amazon