John Mingay runs both Raunchland Publications and Lung Gom Press. He lives in Scotland where he was Writer-in-Residence and Writer-in-the-Community in Darlington. In addition, he was editor of 3x4 magazine from 1989 to 1995, and has been widely published in literary magazines, anthologies, collaborative projects and in over forty individual collections.

Four Texts in Another Season One Drawing together my anarchy of words, once again, dead steps settle like midnight comes to rape each reticent day, the cool air hissing with ceaseless inevitability. Two I face my present afresh, as a flame pulses in soundless air - the glow and shade hinting at life's course. Three True, I too confess this passionless struggle through life; but, where breath and pulse take me, I go part way - in chains. Four When battered and scarred by iniquitous maturity, I still ignore my eyes and distinguish my days by feeling. I accept the intricacy of intent spreads as long as circumstance blinds, yet cherished are awakenings where breath and pulse drowse; where to know the season of dying may come soon. Losing the Plot When the way comes to an end, then change - having changed, you pass through.                                    I Ching           * Somehow, unsuspecting, reduced to tremor and terror, you found yourself weeping and wailing within for your sorrowless soul, flat as a flood-filled field, everything growing swept clear away. Ravenously scavenging through a remembered past, relief and reasons then began slowly, subtlely surfacing through familiar notes and pages, keystones in your bridge back from here to now, so long neglected. Yet, even with definitions, all to be done was to wait to change with each dawn's choices to be pondered to go onwards, to pass through the end, the deluge, the floodline left as presage of what, differently, lay in store. So really, still, you are nowhere, caught between what was and what will sometime come, waiting on every daybreak, thumbing through a suddenly empty diary in anticipation of having somewhere far to go beyond this haunted, sodden patch. Amongst the Living-Dead While all this bitter time goes round, I continue, recognisably, as myself, able to see clearly each component of every cunning, colliding dichotomy that comes to mind, turning, churning, in need of expression, of solution. For nowhere is the sky as raven as where the earth beneath it trembles, cracked by too long an hour hostile to the moment, the spontaneous, as though the heart-ripped corpse that stumbles into many a dream. Though, with my soul so out of balance, of shape, of water, my scales shimmer an entire spectrum across the rippling sands, far into the distance, beyond sight, beyond knowing where the present ends for another whispered future to commence. And then, if so at two-score life begins, it has unquestionably been the living dead I have walked amongst these ten years since, stifled by their endemic blind faith in stasis for the sake of defence, of ease, of holding on to the romance of what has gone, has been. Yet, for all that and this, there remains a thought the bitter time may never end, except for knowing it is not I, myself, who has brought such weariness to bear upon my being, such tangled thoughts as to seem to make the days go on forever.