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    On The Verge
    On The Verge
    On The Verge
    Ebook88 pages41 minutes

    On The Verge

    By Tim Ellis

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This verse-novel tells the incredible story of a young hitch-hiker who is given a ride by Arno, a bad tempered trucker who drives a gigantic juggernaut. Arno’s bullish and profit-driven world-view causes much friction between him and his passenger as the ill-matched pair embark on a terrifying journey, their adventures becoming ever more surreal.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTim Ellis
    Release dateMay 17, 2013
    ISBN9781301266777
    On The Verge
    Author

    Tim Ellis

    Tim Ellis lives in Harrogate, North Yorkshire in the UK, where he runs a small gardening business. He is fascinated by wildlife, especially birds, and with his partner the artist Robbie Burns he has travelled around much of the world seeking out the rare and the beautiful. As a poet he divides his talents equally between page and stage. His first book was a collection of 40 sonnets around a theme of birds called Birds of the World in Colour, published by Flarestack in 2004, and his second book was a poetic journey through Latin America called Gringo on the Chickenbus, published by Stairwell Books in 2011. On Smashwords he has self-published two "verse-novels", On The Verge and God The Banana, the latter in three parts called The Prophet of Amanga, The Temple of the Monkey, and The Evil of God. His poems have appeared in several magazines including The Dalesman, Orbis and the Poetry Society’s Poetry News. He has won many prizes including 1st prize in the 2011 Huddersfield Grist Poetry Competition. On the performance side, he is a well known face at slams, festivals and Open Mics throughout the North of England. He is a previous winner of the Ilkley Literature Festival Open Mic Competition and in 2011 he won the first York Poetry Slam. He can occasionally be found at poetry events in York and Leeds, but his principal haunt is Poems, Prose and Pints at the Tap & Spile pub in Harrogate.

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      Book preview

      On The Verge - Tim Ellis

      The Spirit of the Road.

      Everything’s got a soul you know.

      The animals and birds,

      the rocks, the rivers, flowers and trees,

      sunshine, rain and snow.

      Or spirit, perhaps, is a better word.

      Use what word you please.

      Through ages past I’ve quietly flowed

      but latterly I’ve stirred

      - my breath’s gone bad, my tendrils squeeze

      from a multiplicity of nodes.

      Wherever you go you hear my drone.

      My musk’s on every breeze.

      Face the fact: your lifestyle’s owed

      to me, to me alone.

      Hush now!..listen!..can you hear me?

      The Spirit Of The Road?

      I worm through fields, I bore through stone

      and all wild creatures fear me.

      Love me, loathe me, whatever - you’ll bear me,

      because I’m in your bones.

      Editor’s Note.

      The poem you have just read, The Spirit of the Road, is quite literally found poetry. I don’t mean that in the usual sense; of a piece of writing that interests a poet, into which the poet inserts more-or-less random line-breaks and presents it as his or her own work. I mean that I ACTUALLY found it, scribbled in blue biro on a screwed-up piece of paper, on a roadside verge in Cornwall. It was almost ten years ago, and I was on a conservation working holiday planting native trees alongside a by-pass. My volunteer group was picking up litter from the work-site before we began our day’s work. I assumed the scrap had been thrown out of a car window like most of the other debris that mars the roadsides of Britain, and I didn’t think much of it as a poem. However, all poetry interests me to an extent and it did strike me as appropriate to the moment, so I tucked it away in my pocket. Later at home I filed it away with other scraps of verse that I collect from time to time.

      It was about six months after when I found twenty-four more poems that are now in this collection. I bumped into an acquaintance of mine at a local poetry evening, someone who is published and fairly well-known in the poetry world. This man had heard me reading my work on previous occasions, and he remembered I am keen on formal poetry, as well as being somewhat militant in my environmentalist opinions.

      The man had a question for me. He had recently been contracted to act as judge in a major poetry competition, one that invites aspiring poets to enter a portfolio of work of up to five-hundred lines total. He said that the organisers had received a particular batch of twenty-four poems, but the writer had foolishly forgotten to include his or her name and contact details. He told me that many of the poems were on environmental themes and they were very badly written in a variety of traditional verse forms. Remembering hearing me read my own work, he said he’d immediately thought of me, and asked if I was perhaps the author?

      I took a quick glance at the portfolio and assured him that I was not. However, some of the titles interested me, so I asked if I could have a proper look at them once the competition was over. Yes of course, he said, you might as well take them now!

      I queried this because I thought he would need to keep them,

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