I was playing in the jungle
I was taking lots of risks
I was saying this won't happen to me
I've seen it happening to strangers
But strangers don't exist
I said "I'm too smart, yeah I'm too quick y'see"
I spent more time out in that jungle,
Going once or twice a week,
I was making up excuses to go back,
That snake he was a-watching,
He sensed that I was weak,
he coiled up, preparing to attack...
I made some bad decisions
don't expect you to care
but I'm deep down in the belly of a snake
My friends try to help me,
find my way out of there
But the stomach of that serpent is opaque
his jaws closed around my ankle,
But still I soldiered on,
I can kick him off any time I please,
Before I knew what happened, he had my other leg,
And his scaly maw was up around my knees
People asked about the serpent they said "boy are you ok?"
I didn't have the heart to tell them "no"
Feel digestive juices working,
Yes I'm withering away,
But I tell myself I've some way left to go,
Now that I'm trapped inside,
he takes me everywhere he goes,
As he eats me up he tells me he's my friend
And when I'm inside that serpent,
I don't feel no pain,
And I'm thinking that he was right in the end
Sometimes I get a burst of strength,
and crawl towards the light,
I try to prize those mighty jaws apart
But the outside is so cold and scary,
maybe not tonight;
That I let myself slip down into the dark
Nov 1, 2024
Nov 1, 2024 at 6:35 AM UTC
Quaint crumbling yellow tower blocks. Heaps of trash and traffic choked streets.
Geckos smiling sweetly on the wall. Cockroaches and rats in the background. Two children. One mischievous toddler and one innocent baby. My wife in the distance looking away. A middle aged Asian man drinking, scolded by is wife and mother in law.
My wife in the distance looking away. A middle aged Asian man drinking, scolded by is wife and mother in law.
School aged children laughing and crying.
A laptop in a lonely dark room. Piles and piles of prescription drugs: tramadol , codeine, ****** ritalin. Tubes of corticosteroid and moisturizer creams.
Jolly fat men in their 30s drinking bia hoi, smoking endless cigs. A rock band plays to an inebriated crowd.
Sunlit mountains. Limestone karsts. Emerald rice fields on straight flat roads heading on forever with a fat sunset overseeing the lazy water buffalo wallowing.
The faces of old friends growing hazy.
A gaggle of women, enraged or sobbing.
School aged children laughing and crying.
A heavy lidded eye dropping a tear into a panic stricken and bloodshot one
Aeroplanes heading over the vast sea. My late middle aged parents smiling stupidly.
Various friends smile
A girl looks on with pity, flanked by a hard faced man in a polo shirt.
May 21, 2024
May 21, 2024 at 5:48 AM UTC
Why am i waiting
To feel something
Like when I was young
Thoughts and memories
Accumulate inside my head
But still my heart is numb
I feel anguish
And sometimes I might feel some pride
But it's only surface deep
I watch my actions
As though I'm watching someone else
Making mistakes on repeat
Every day I'm
going through the motions
It's all work and it's no play
And when I find the time
To catch up with my old friends
I've got nothing to say.
Neural pathways
Digging grooves inside my brain
Habits getting more entrenched.
Mounting addictions.
I must resist this limbic friction
but I just don't have the strength.
When did my horizons
become so narrow?
Ambitions have slipped out of sight
The future is empty
Just body clinging onto soul
Going gentle into night.
Apr 16, 2024
Apr 16, 2024 at 7:01 AM UTC
When the newscaster, he preaches for a war abroad with drones,
And why battle-hardened soldiers must shoot children armed with stones,
They say "Genocide? apartheid? No!
These are strategic goals."
Remember that their wrong.
When you've waited four more years and now finally you can vote,
And you've leafed through manifestos that your favourite party wrote,
They're now in power, but you're just as powerless and broke.
It isn't you who's wrong.
The seas they are a-rising and the temperature's so high,
That the forests are a-blazing and we know precisely why,
Billionaires build bunkers, leave the rest of us to die.
Remember that they're wrong.
In distant mines and sweatshops our nation reaps rewards,
The wheels of commerce greased by blood of poor people abroad,
If you'd rather see their boats capsize than make it to our shores.
Remember that you're wrong.
In misery you've toiled and with anger you have burned,
For security and comfort and some meaning, you have yearned;
If all this has made you hopeless, then forget all you have learned!
The union makes us strong.
By now you are a skeptic of the ideology,
That says serfdom and consumption's all there is for you and me,
The hope that felt like weakness, now's a stark necessity
'Cos the union makes us strong.
Feb 12, 2022
Feb 12, 2022 at 5:19 AM UTC
Divorce
this time
Don't worry
its your side im gonna take
don't you worry mate.
I'm here for you unconditionally
I know that you loved her
right until the bitter end
right until your dignity was stretched out
over hot coals
Drops of fat hissing and spitting
like a fool
like an utter ****
you deftly ignored all of those negative signals.
all those silent nights in
avoiding the future
avoiding anything
anything might come too close to the truth
the crippling truth
Too large and frightening to look upon
Like the sun
That this time
in all the hundreds of millions of times
that this **** goes down
with romance
and excitement
and everything that for a brief moment justifies all this ******* ****
this neurosis
the moments of utter indifference
when the difference between crossing the road safely
and intentionally hurling yourself under the roaring wheels of an oncoming lorry
grinding up the bones
Splintering through the skin like a hideous pin-cushion
insensate human patty.
The reason you syou do the right thing
the sane thing
is for fleeting moments like these when
for a moment at a time
we can ascend beyond the ordinary constraints of every fuckign thing
at once that was you. You were the thing that gave meaning to the shallow dichotomy between work and friends. Everyone wants something from you
but you stood apart from the din
the unholy din
Of your seams tearing
forces pull you in opposite directions
Jul 2, 2019
Jul 2, 2019 at 4:03 AM UTC
The next room
I want to Take you into the next Room
Share cynical laughs at their expense
And make a toast to we, the privileged few
And share backhanded compliments
****** your shoes upon somebody elses bed
knock all their possessions on the floor
throw caution to the wind and live the youth you never dared
kiss me till my lips are sore
The bands you loved before the world caught up
they never did improve upon their first
now fading from collective consciousness
cos every album just gets worse
Give me something sweeter than oxygen
from a time when this was all brand new
I'm just trying to feel without thinking
this is too good to be true
Give me something that can satisfy
Give me joy that won't disappear before my eyes
give me something I can taste that isn't ashes on my tongue
instant gratification never took so long
We sigh in mock despair now without hope
Having watched Everything We Love's demise,
And the sacred cows all twitch with BSE now
From the culture they cannibalised
Jul 2, 2019
Jul 2, 2019 at 3:59 AM UTC
Keep It Light, Keep it light
Keep it light for fuck's sake,
for fuck's sake keep it light
Keep it light, just keep talking about the weather
Don't look directly at the objects weighing on your mind
Identify the myriad peripheral minutiae
And save this sombre revelation for another place and time.
Keep it bright, cos I need some comic relief
No need to state the fact that things are really ******
So keep your stinking bandages wound up nice and tight now
Everyone can see but they're just trying not to look
Keep It Light, Keep it light
Keep it light for fuck's sake,
for fuck's sake keep it light
Keep it light, keep that unthinking tongue moving
You and I both know there's nothing much to say
Keep doubling those negatives, don't stop your glottle.
Create meaning in keeping silences at bay
Don't invite comparisons between each petty grievance.
Sanctify the failsafe that disconnects them all.
Tell yourself there's more to this than sum of it's parts.
Keep on counting up the bricks but disregard the wall.
Keep It Light, Keep it light
Keep it light for fuck's sake,
for fuck's sake keep it light
Don't excite yourself by looking straight at your problems
Just relax, pretend that tomorrow is a different day
Take enough pills to put it off a few more hours;
but not enough to permanently make it go away
Keep it in, don't think your insights make you special
The self-aware will all still share the empty-headed's fate
Vibrate the air with sickly cares if you want to.
none of your pretty, ****** words will hold any weight.
If You're lonely?
Well We're all lonely.
and if you're You're tired
Well so am I.
You wish you had more time to waste
In ways more fitting to your taste
You wish you didn't mind it.
Living life as you find it.
Don't think your the only one who sees the yawning void
Beneath this hideousness and decay
and whilst you cook up artful ways to try and make us see it
All we're tryna do is look away
All we want to do is look away
Jul 2, 2019
Jul 2, 2019 at 3:36 AM UTC
This moment, this juddering dread.
Its purely circumstantial
and it will pass
One explosive act, drunk on adrenaline I chose to be strong
for once
and Now I look where it has got me
“you did the honorable thing” they will say.
And they will be right
“for the first time in living memory”
They will add.
Scooping up the layers of ugly truths that coat this place
these walls, today, this life
like so much finely powdered snow
like so much asbestos...
easy to ignore. But never forgetten.
I wash them out out of my eyes each morning
And start my day.
Dismissing them as mere dirt.
I empty my pockets and find them there,
They are under my fingernails.
A taste in my mouth.
The parts per million build up inexorably .
I will sicken and die.
You are kind. You try to help.
But you are wrong.
Soon you are contaminated. Sickened.
This failure to do what's right
provides the background white noise to waking life
The scratching and chittering of the conscience
Like rattling pipes, Like rats in the walls
disturb sleep
you see the powdered snow
Innocently.
Trying to clear it up
hands cracked
Thinner, weary
Uncomprehending and trance-like. You have felt the sunlight dim.
You have gazed into the abyss to long…
“It's time to talk about this” you say
I resist, deny all knowledge, stare out with detatched wonder
at the swirling blizzard
of toxic flakes
That blows in through the open window.
You begin to talk about this
I cough out a weak joke,
splutter some excuses. Polluting the air with benign untruths.
Which settle in heaps about the place like finely powdered snow.
Your face it streaked with tears.
I scoop up the snow, now discolored by age and filth,
Compress it, hard like a diamond
Your face is streaked with tears
Your eyes, your ears, your pores are open,
At least you are brave enough to feel something.
You face is streaked with tears.
Your eyes bright with the still-hot fire of life, are desperate to meet mine.
Downcast, I shrink from them
Merely distracted, not happy, not sad
Solemnly kneading the crystals of poison snow in my palms...
Bent Double, wrenched inwards in an agony of unfeeling calculation.
The task is beyond my Jellied spine.
You are pleading for me.
The man, the ******* man
To make the decision.
Somewhere beneath the layers of carcinogens an old voice, rendered unfamiliar by time is crying out.
I listen.
Unsteady. Drunk on adrenaline. I take aim.
Doubled up. Wincing. God only knows what how you felt when it hit.
When the full weight of these months of accumulated deliberation
and guilt
and truth
made contact, with the face I have kissed a thousands times before.
And now here a quiver, judder
a lame and broken invalid
I first time I made a decision.
“You did the right thing” they will say.
I pray that it's the last time.
Jul 2, 2019
Jul 2, 2019 at 3:04 AM UTC
I made mistakes
I gave some people venereal disease
I acted with ****** impropriety
I ****** the girlfriend of my best friend because she had fallen out of love with him
Multiple times
And I didn't even do a good job of it
To the point where she went back to him
Because at least the *** was good.
I wasted my time here on Earth
I played video games
Past the point where I enjoyed them
I smoked ****
Past the point where my mental health started to crumble,
I took drugs and went to parties
Past the point where even I thought it made me cool
I made dear friendships
Which I allowed to fall by the wayside
I procrastinated
Instead of doing the things that I needed to do
I drank alcohol
As a matter or course
I worked jobs
Where I hated every second I was there
Every second I cursed my bad luck
Like I didn't apply for the job, pass the interview and voluntarily clocked in 5 times a week for years.
And I was too cowardly quit until I wasn't .
I sacrificed my life and my health
For those rotten ********
And still I will dream about particularly unpleasant callers;
I will have pretend arguments in my head in which I'm somehow not utterly spineless
My soul still wears the O2 customer services lanyard and the call centre headset.
And maybe it always will.
I smoked cigarette after cigarette
Whilst encouraging my friends to quit
I have taken pill after pill after pill,
All in secret of course
Opioids, benzos, amphetamines,
Codeine, oxys, ****** tramadol, ritalin
Just to knit together the tattered fabric of my sanity
So that it will hold firm till the end of the day
Praying that if I lie to enough people
I can some trick my body into forgetting to keep the score;
I moved to a distant country
Where I could better exploit the white privilege
That I was too inept to exploit in my home country
to exploit women who wouldn't look twice in my direction back home,
Who must secretly resent me
For playing through life on easy mode and still getting a pretty pathetic score.
I loathed myself
I have cheated on women I loved
Because I thought getting new ***** makes a person cool
And masks the insecure void inside me where a personality should be.
I made racist jokes, sexist jokes
Knowingly upholding principles
Which I'd long since rationally rejected
To get a few cheap laughs
I sat on my bed
And wasted whole days hooking my brain the dopamine machine and letting the books on my shelf grow dusty.
May 17, 2019
May 17, 2019 at 5:25 PM UTC
It's nights like these
With nothing prepared
Just a few close friends,
And some time to spare.
Talk some ****
We've talked before
The same old stories
But I don't get bored
Theres been a week of work
You faced four separate tests
Small talk with strangers
Gotta get it off your chest
it's just like grooming
It's just Like we're of apes
Connections found in the mundane
Analysing mistakes
We'll play a bit of music
Start trying to impress
Have you heard this cool new ****
But Ego is all that's expressed
Found comfort in the familiar
Dropping the facade
Luxuriating in nostalgia
When memories were still made
Open up a seventh beer
Only one working day remains
Work is gonna hurt tomorrow
But so does bearing all the stain
Of a life of repition
Mar 28, 2019
Mar 28, 2019 at 1:50 PM UTC