TO FORTUNA

 You were a Cobbler's son
Painting the ragged west
With a shoestring brush
Glancing at the tattered fleet
Of auburn sails
Sliding into sheltering silver

Staring still
That gaze could fool a sailor
Who afloat caught the dove
When grappling
With a restless dusk

Father passed at sea
After toiling with obscurity
His soles dredged the mire
And kissed the sands adieu
His heels they dragged in church
Whilst the lacing fastened you

Today the shoreline
Casts an easy-setting mesh
It's weathered palms enclosing
To trace a coast
Yet steer from it's tide
Another lasting reminder

You were a hurting Man's son
There will be another one 

INFRASTRUCTURE (Extract)

The following is a paragraph lifted from Alfie Burgess's various unfinished works of fiction.

The numbers sat and stared in my direction, enveloping the hollow space which housed them. Substantial and dramatic, boldly and unapologetically forcing themselves upon anything that mattered. Half-paralysed, I had made up my mind and got up to take the needle off the record when the music ceased entirely. I stood for a moment, processing exactly what had just happened. The numbers hadn't changed, they were still carefully etched upon the violet satin, now wrinkling beneath me. I saw not a shadow. The apartment felt as still as possible. Wasting little effort, I hastily grabbed the plug beneath the straw table and yanked it from it's socket, before moving the needle and releasing the record from it's furnishings. A flame threw notes of saffron and ginger into the room, inducing an elegance that was likely offset by the life-sized cut out of Babe Ruth that had been poorly stashed behind an intrusively dull mint velvet armchair. No takers as of yet. The walls surrounding me grew increasingly oppressive. At least five shades of a bleak dirty blue had been hurled onto the surface with little thought given. Notes of hollow navy clambered for space, barely escaping from the clasp of one another. I sank back down, somehow exhausted, into a cold brown leather when the toilet flushed. God, I was relieved.