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seven days and six nights the hero watched relentlessly. horizontally under the sky.
without food, drink or friend. what was he after. what was he looking for. a sign? an answer? a way out?

something new.

Welcome to We Her Majesty's Prisoners, which is finally being updated again after a three-month hiatus. As L7 once pointed out, bricks are heavy.

This site is an outlet for my fiction, poetry and various other stuff I scribble down from time to time. I publish my work here mainly because I've been too lazy to make any proper attempts to publish it "properly", but also because I quite like the idea that there are millions and millions of potential readers on the web who just might stumble on this site, one way or another.

I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, and currently work as a freelance music writer, and, hilariously, as a builder's labourer. I've done a heap of various other jobs in the past - I like the idea of being a kinda wandering, itinerant worker, doing something different every couple of years, keeping life interesting. I like experience. Or, to put it less romantically, I get bored easily. Anyway...

Why do I write? I often ask myself the same question. The best answer I can come up with is that our lives are essentially comprised of the stories we tell. Our life is defined by our memories, and our memories are the stories we tell ourselves. So much crumbles to dust with the passing of each generation - so much is lost, mislaid, thrown into the fire along the way... When we are gone, only our stories remain, imprined on the face of the coming generation like a slight residue of some strange radiation.

So I like the idea of writing about this strange, sad, beautiful world, of recording my experiences of it, both in a literal, autobiographical sense, and more allegorically through the stories that seems to occur to me every so often. I like the concept of trying to capture moments, fragments of memory, the little shards of life that stick in our minds. We pour our lives from our hearts into memory, from life into sepia, and we endure - we leave but do not go.

Um... what else? That's Patti Smith's quote (and her bad punctuation) at the top of the page, from The Amazing Tale of Skunkdog. The page title is pinched from an old Manic Street Preachers b-side. It should go without saying that everything else on this site is strictly copyright, so don't go stealing my ideas - I don't have many, so I'm kinda protective of the ones I do have. If you're the knight in shining armour who actually wants to publish some of my work and rescue me from a life of mixing cement, do get in touch with me. In the meantime, you'll hopefully soon be able to find a little volume of my poems around Melbourne, cos I'm publishing it myself. Making money? Ha. So last century, darling.

And finally, in the sort of strange cosmic coincidence that would only fucken happen to me, it seems that another Tom Hawking is publishing poetry on the Web. Publishing, um, well, to be nice about it... pretty godawful poetry. *sigh* So if you happen to stumble across anything that sounds like it was written by a 16-year-old in England, it probably was. Or that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it...

All content © 2004-5 Tom Hawking

Last updated: 12 December 2005 - More music writing