Tim Tomlinson’s Comments

“Bow and Arrow”
My streets of early sorrow …

“Bluff Road”
When I was eighteen, I lived aboard a research vessel anchored off Morgan’s Bluff, Andros, in the Bahamas.  On Friday nights I’d get drunk in Nicholl’s Town, two miles away, and walk back to my skiff along the Bluff Road.  The encounters I had on those walks seem as if they couldn’t have happened, but they did.

“Neighbors at 9 AM”
An unconscious influence might be Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around,” which I discovered by accident on some endless Sunday poking around the New York Times Magazine.  I loved the turns the poem took, and its undercurrent of violence.  It felt closer to me than “Little Lamb, who made thee?“

“Fuck the Troops”
Sometimes while waiting around in airports I do some automatic writing and later, when transcribing, I see what’s come up.  “Fuck the Troops“ grew out of one of those sessions.  For the record, I love the troops, in the way Tim O’Brien loved/s the troops.  What I hate is the way hypocrites use the troops as an excuse to advance hideous, hateful agendas that are actually harmful to the troops and other living things.

“Morning in Islington”
My wife and I lived two years in Islington in Central London.  We spent hours staring out our windows at the gardens and fountains and pedestrians and sunrises.  Sometimes we saw foxes, and sometimes I thought, Little Fox, who made thee?      

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