Faster Than Sound, New Perception EP Design

I designed and painted the EP cover for the Scandinavian SKA band Faster Than Sound. Here are the pictures of the finished EP which is on sale now. Check it out here.

Faster Than Sound, New Perception Front Cover

Back Cover

Inside. Please note my name. Twice.

One last time

It wasn't clear how his days would be
now he had climbed out from the inside
and left behind what was built from the ashes
of time that was never his.
He had grown stronger
than what had scared him then,
stuck between two versions of himself,
and with his hands gripped tight to each other
he closed his eyes,
counted five short breaths
and for one last time
thought back to when
even outside was too much.

From one to the next, onwards

I imagine it as a dog chasing its tail,
it running in great circles
until it was tired,
running still in spite of itself.
I should have stayed up until morning
watching it run
until the run became a whir
and I could hear time passing.
It was something different
and it didn't matter.

Christmas

The silence after was heavy with
the smell of clementines,
a souvenir left over
from the mornings joviality
and a cloying reminder of what had,
by now,
past;
like ants we sat in lines
as the air settled
and found its place back to where it started
and I knew then
that we all got lonely sometimes,
in spite of pleas to the contrary.

Angela Lansbury

It was almost as though
she were there again,
the room around her disappearing,
his voice melting like rice paper
on her tongue. 
Her mind danced back
to a life she had lived in lights,
one that now shone in her eyes,
and her mouth spoke the
words from her past,
a memory she had forgotten.

Christmas Party

He sipped through two glasses of wine
and poured one more as holiday music played
from the room next door
and filled the empty air with sugary sweet cheer.
He closed his eyes,
took a breath
and thought back to this morning,
before it all.
It hadn't snowed yet this year
and the bare streets outside the window
made his bones cold.

From the inside he looked

Because he hadn't always felt
fully real
he clung like wildlife to the arm of his friend
as they walked towards people;
and hoped her touch
would transmit all she had learned
from years spent taking chances.
He himself had been waiting a while
to become completely adult
and worried suddenly that it had
happened some time long before,
back when there was
so much more time.

26

I woke up
with the grey light of December
squeezing through cracks in the blind,
thinking back at when I used to take photographs
and how keen I had been once
that they be a lasting reminder
I had mattered.
I could give away all of my money
and really disappear, I think next,
recede into a Winter
that feels so much bigger
when you're in its middle.
I blow out the candles in my head
and imagine the billowing smoke
spelling out the year
above our dining room table.
Lost but still looking.

Girl on a bridge

He had pulled her out
from a past he had known once
and dusted off what they were
until it gleamed and shone
and lit up a life
that had grown small.
He sometimes held her hand now;
as if holding it tight
would keep him from being lost
again
he thought.

Julianne

The table was almost as big as the room
as we sat,
her in blue,
me in something I do not remember,
against white walls that stopped
all of a sudden
and before they really should have.
Her words like a hand beneath my chin;
I silently thanked goodness for her
and greedily took all that I could
like a boy uncertain
of when he would eat again.