Little Prayers - Oct 11, 2025
- The Big Ship
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
What is Little Prayers?
Little Prayers is a self-destructing art writing column. With each instalment, the previous one deletes forever. The vital alchemy of a Little Prayer - short in length and lifespan - permits writing at its most personal and experimental. Feature your Little Prayers by responding to these prompts.
This week, outlining what was to see what is to come.
Edward Hopper - Axiom
I don't live in poverty - far from it
I can almost always buy bread, milk
and butter
almost always have a packet of cigarettes in my pocket and if not those
then rolling tobacco
most of the time I can afford to drink
and once a month, heavily
I can’t blow more than a week’s pay check on anything
although I’m always short on rent
and I pay my council tax
when the red letter comes
I will never own a car, boat or a home
unless somebody bequeaths
one to me or I win on a scratch card
I will never own a wallet
I will never travel the world
or own a heated clothes rail
I will never own a headboard, ironing board
or an iron
I will never own sandals or loafers,
a tie or a suit jacket
I will never own sun glasses
I have worn watches on occasion
but they get wet when I wash the
dishes
and then they stop telling the time
I will never have a pension
or life insurance
I will never have a mortgage
I will never own a hairdryer
or a torch or a clock
I will never be married,
unless in Vegas
or have children
unless by accident
I will always have the nerves
and I suppose that
is the real downside of things for me
however better living
can be achieved through
chemistry
I’m not content
but I desire nothing
I am always hungry but never
without something to eat
given the opportunity
I will always choose sleep
over anything else,
most of all consciousness
to me the most valuable things
are the morning, coffee, cigarettes,
beer in the afternoon and cunnilingus
poems are made of these things
I am never lonely
I am a coward, that’s undeniably true
and it has served me well in my life
and has kept me safe from harm
I can only spend so much time in company before I begin to
feel
deeply resentful
I don’t care for weekends
I am disinterested in Birthdays,
anniversaries and public holidays
and find them irritating to remember
save for Christmas
which I will allow myself to indulge for a day or two
even though it is always very depressing in the end
most of all I hate bank holidays
which I find needless
I don’t believe in free will
things are as they are
some will take this further to
mean pre-ordained
which I’ve never gone in for
I do believe however,
that I do that for which I am
compelled
and that my will,
is little more than
chance
I’m doing all I can
or all I ever could
- Written by Sam Telford
Yoshitomo Nara - All My Little Words
The hat is green and stupid and perfect. A halo if halos were for bastards. I'm holding a ball of fire in my hand. A heart aflame which once filled my tight child chest and was ripped open with the first puff of a cigarette the first defiant kiss the first time I spat out the taste of being good (I'm a tube-riding cowboy the rogue of London's Underground) and these doll-limbs that used to run and wave and punch and kick now swing lazy beside my simmering body. My shadow keeps up. Sometimes it gets ahead. I pinch myself until it bruises pretty purples and yellows. I am bigger than I've ever been and heavier. I take up more space and carry more weight. My hair is grey and while I feel young I'm apparently closer to the form of someone old. Someone like my damn parents (crap!). I've been twelve for decades. I've been forty since I was six. The cosmic twinkle in my eye has puddled into something murkier. I have softened and my morals have hardened but in my mouth are still milk-teeth rattling like dice when I laugh. I hate when they do that. The fireball is gone now and I think I swallowed it. My stomach is glowing and no one can see.
- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Louise Bourgeois - Implants (Lost Mary)
Hackh! My god! blow me
up on ur big god thumb.
Make me blebby, ballooned,
poofed inside out, a fat pink speckled
triple mango baby, blue razz
bluelight beaming lazers for eyes,
jingle-jangling full of plastics,
and rocket me on high,
with implants for thrusters,
with nicotine for wings.
Aheagh! I’ll be ur god goon,
ur lvl 12 warrior,
mechaboyzillaprime,
I’ve got billions of baddies,
with sharpies for bullets,
I can take 100 men in 24 hours
1000 men in 24 hours.
Fillette (Little Girl) is a plaster and latex cock on a hook. Bourgeois played at transgression, often, pre-sexually, and fetish, at times, as droningly Freudian as a crucified fly. But all those things Fillette is not. It is not a fly, or a pheasant, or a bat, or an alien, a "home-body" - a lair or a senate of ants - it is not a wand or a sign, a slipshod relic of Haxan, it is not erotic for it is not on the brink of the abyss. It has toppled over into the pool: it is sex. It is a latex cock on a hook. It is not sex in the abstract. All our anxieties around sex are in the abstract, over what sex might come to be, but sex has always been of motion, in the bulge or in the let. A damoclean blister. Scissors and a water-bed. /Futa, /Breeding, /Inflation. Prosthesis, for all parties, is the name of the metamorphic game - elongation, filling, plasticity > bursting, flooding, release. Looking now at Bourgeois' inventions, sixty years down her Gothic production line, the contemporary audience is scared of The Lair and its cold plastic wraparound vacancy that suggests inevitable return. Is it me? Augmented? The tube, the turd? No, can't be, they think, I'm far too certain that it's what I'll become. But if The Lair is, as Bourgeois said, a woolly embracing cocoon, then where is the miniature peeled from its silk, womb-bright, still smoking? Where is its eclosed pupa, where for sixty years? A lot can happen in that time. Plastic can move from "unnatural" to "augmented" to "corrective" and "inhaled". Come, Fillette would like to meet you now. She is a little girl. She is a latex cock on a hook.
- Written by Caleb Carter
After Hans Holbein the Younger - Portraits of Henry VIII
Every portrait of someone is a box in which they are meant to sit still and be knowable. Paintings in the National Gallery, a building that sits atop Whitehall, tell us this is the face of Sir so-and-so, Lady what's-her-name, costumed in permanence. Look at the various copies after Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII, where the King takes up the whole canvas like a barricade. The portrait is supposed to be a claim: Here I am, this is who I was, you can close the book now. But what happens when the artist's hand bleeds over the line, when the subject extends into the margin, when the face is blurred by accident or desire?
In British art history, the portrait was always about that projection. Not just a likeness, but proof of reach, proof of contact. The portrait of Britain is always a map, and the map is always borderless, at least in fantasy. Borderless for better, borderless for worse. This little island declares that it spills into Africa, into India, into the Caribbean; that it can redraw itself endlessly, that the portrait is not a frame but a projection: Gainsborough painting a merchant in oils that came from Venice, on a canvas woven in Flanders, framed in oak shipped from across the Atlantic. To look at a British portrait is to look at a map, every mark testifying that the island is not an island at all.
And now we live in a moment when the English flag is being waved on motorway bridges and roundabouts, not as innocent pageantry but as unmoored claim-marking: this is ours, not others. It's happening under the slogan of patriotism, courtesy of "Operation Raise the Colours," a gesture of intimidation rather than national unity. Reform UK surges ahead, not merely a political party but a loud alarm that the portrait of Britain is being redrawn. Nigel Farage and Reform do not offer a painted likeness of England's people; they offer borders, deportations, and notions of purity. They tap into a hardening, nostalgic longing for a Britain that has never truly existed: one that demands sameness in the face of a history as woven and leached as any painter's canvas. Britain once sent our boys to the beaches to kill men like this, to face down the fascists with bayonet and fire. The flag then was a rallying cry against tyranny, not a warning to migrants on a motorway bridge. But while I like to think of England as the island that stood against fascism, to most of the world, it is the empire that arrived on their shores (I've even seen this being from the North East, so close to Scotland's border line: England as both defender and oppressor).
And so this idle notion of "British identity" comes to lounge in the margin, as if identity were something fixed. It has never been fixed. Holbein's Henry portraits may loom large in our national galleries, but they are still just portraits of an empire that could only exist in motion. The hand that painted him bled into cloth, into gold thread, into markets and forests beyond the frame. His image was meant to be immovable, yet look how the politics of now displace him, how identity ruptures his permanence, and can now only be mapped through a cartography of fear, reach, contradiction:
- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Anne Carson - Actual, Practical Advice on Writing Routines
Surrounded by the nervous warmth of a public Q&A, shocked at the crisp whale of their own voice, a writer asks a "professional" writer about writing routine. They misunderstand that the "professional" writer (that is, they who earn a full-time wage on words alone) has earned the luxury of a routine-less life. The professional writer then seems to misunderstand that what they are being asked is not "What is the best writing routine?" But "How do I find time to write when there is so much else to do?"
0. A Room of One’s Own (Places I’ve Written That Are Not My Room, chron. order): the walls, lying on the carpet (with crayon), school desk, car, car (at night, between streetlights), bus, train, plane, sat on a stationary bike in a wooded glen, on tissue whilst cold-calling the public, in my head whilst stacking shelves, in the walk-in freezer of a supermarket, pubs, bathroom stalls, fields, forests, rose gardens, a different bench every time, lecture halls, bookmarks, in books, post-its, post-its, scrap paper, post-its, receipts, cafes, on a reception desk, on christmas decorations (erotica), the costume closet of a children’s book museum, offices, on the stationary drawer of a bookshop, stockrooms, staff rooms, other people’s bedrooms, on my hand, my thigh, and up my arm.
1. If you work a job that starts late – 10 or later – and finishes late, like service work, or retail, wake up early to write. Before anyone else if you can, as it remains true that writers are best (and happiest) when they are alone. Otherwise, stay up too late.
2. If you work an office job, usually 9-5, usually with longer lunch breaks, then write on your lunch break and also before bed. Turn off electronics and tell your partner you’re writing. Also, if you take public transport, try to write on the way to work, so that you’re not starting from scratch when it’s midday and you’re hungry; hopefully that way you will have spent the morning brimming with words.
3. Try to work from home, because it will be crucial to skive. Unfortunately, gone are the days when you could write hellfire and be taken in as vagrant bard by the angel Verlaine. You’ll need a job. Fortunately, by this point poetry will have already blackened your blood, so facing down the ire of middle management will be like bowing your head slightly to the oncoming wind. Smile, agree, disobey.
4. Keep a pen in your pocket at all times, and if you can’t keep a notebook then steal paper, any paper, or write in your phone notes if it suits. So much of practise is about refusing to let the engine cool – letting your pen atrophy – whilst maintaining a critical eye and curiosity. This takes internal rhythm, ritual (syntax) and a respect for the give and hold of the day (sense). At the end of the day, transcribe your phone notes or turn your pockets inside out and file your words in your notebook like petals. Your notebook should be 20% project, and 80% foraged seeds. You should forget what is in there or why. There will come a time when the seeds are needed: this simple action of sowing and reaping is the magic of writing. If you plant, diligently, the rest of the work will be done underground. Keep faith.
- Written by Caleb Carter
Credits:
Sam Telford is a poet and tea merchant and lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne
Caleb Carter is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship
Bryson Edward Howe is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship
