Muscle cars slink along Canal Street in their wheel skirts. Vroom, vroom. Radios on high bass shake the sidewalk passers-by. Big men wear big gold watches and smile their big gold teeth. Pushing and laughing and butting fists. Are they the murderers to be or just some mother’s little boys? Music along Royal...
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For 25 years I’ve been writing stories about work life. Many of the story ideas were triggered by my own work experiences and some were based on stories I had heard from other workers. However, all are fiction and any resemblance to persons alive or dead, as they say, is purely coincidental. Late last...
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On returning from Greece’s Peloponnesian Peninsula, what I will remember most vividly is the sense of antiquity and right beside that memory I will place the ageless beauty of the flowers of Peloponnesos. They grow everywhere in the craggy ruins of Mycenae or Epidavros or Mystra or Monemvasia. They even grow miraculously in the...
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The path was steep at times and dangerous in the darkened corners of the craggy centuries-old rock steps of Mystra, so I should have been more careful as I aimlessly wended my uncertain way to the heights of Byzantine history. Looking up to one of several remarkably well preserved churches instead of down at...
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The summer of 2013:  hot, dry and glorious. Summer and the gardens are working overtime to produce their gorgeous colours, sweet fruit and an array of vegetable delights. There are the daisies (yellow, red and shocking pink), the pansies, the rhodos (burned by the hot sun),  the dahlias, and the roses. Oh, the roses, those...
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This long poem was written after an incident in a Vancouver China Town cafe in the early 1970s. It was during my Simon Fraser University days and four of my fellow students had persuaded me to join them for Chinese food. I had lived in the SFU dorms my first year at SFU and...
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Justin Ouverture was speed-walking along Royal Street in a hurry to get to his office at the far end of the French Quarter when his right foot hit a raised termite cap. As he inspected his slightly scraped hand, having reached down to the uneven pavement to break his fall, a group of tourists...
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Edith stumbled on the metal stairs as she handed her plastic identity card to one of the stewards who routinely pointed a handheld electronic device at the card and glanced matter-of-factly at her picture as it materialized on the small screen. He nodded and seemed to dismiss her as he signaled to the next...
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It was hard to know whether the old man was dead or alive. He had stopped breathing again. No doubt about that. It was the third time since I’d been rolled in beside him three days before. Our temporary digs: Room 7114, Beds 1 and 2, of the hospital’s Wing 7 East, was crowded...
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Harminder crouched near a fence well away from the Parliament buildings compound where he assumed the hostages were being held. He lit a cigarette and wished he hadn’t drunk so much kava earlier in the day. Not that it had made him sleepy; he was used to the dish-watery unofficial national drink. But...
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