paul-sands
Born in 1962 and raised close to the River Trent in Nottingham. / / He went to junior school and then comprehensive school and couldn’t be bothered to go to university but did work from the age of 16 in the IT industry (between playing in various noisy beat-combos) for twenty-seven years until downsized and outsourced in 2006. / / After dallying with photography he now lives and attempts to work as a Learning Support Assistant at a college of further education in Lincolnshire. / / He probably swears a little too much but considers himself to be following the example set by Chaucer. / / He writes of memories, experience, anger and dreams but does also like to make things up so a pinch of salt is often required
I am no philosopher
I am Paul from The Meadows
pulled skinny poor from the shadows to put a deal of fat on his bones
so how did I end up here?
what penalty did I accrue?
taking the ten point deduction for conduct unbecoming
I place my attention deficit on re-order that I don’t yet forget
smothered in the scrim of this Hogarthian hood every chip toothed blue scriptured face
proffers passage to a poisonous but tantalising hook
to write the junk must I taste the junk?
peddled or paddled for a sweeter flight this avenue never taken,
hedonic ingress unwalked, unwanted yet still wondered
could such deep surrender be so sweet to allow the most intimate of plunder?
am I Dante?
corralled around the streets
of a society that shows no compromise amongst the dying embers of fallen enterprise
eternal damnable gyres around a fucked **** pyre
of concrete, glass and broken humanity
with each uttered breath a cold cocktail of profanity
the bouncing soles of the air I wear may ease me over the gummed archipelagos
flag spij-speckle guaran islands slab secure and fast
against the counselled wash an eternal fossilised chaw
that resists the fiercest chemical blast
lost in this sea I cannot be but shaken by the waxy man with his head of startled hemp and coterie of cracked carbon
as he breaches the domestic brink
turning a key, his shoulders hunched in protective shawl against
the spittled spate
he stares back through me
for sightless miles insides out, front to rear, then scuffles, rattling, townwardly
cannot resist the insecticidal compulsion of the green and white purgatory
where the neatly stacked wash of fluorescence makes oven ready your heaven
amid the threnodial thrum of
a hundred syncopated Siemens
following that shuffling cortege of the bussed in dead and dying
I am dutiful, altar bound, avowed and accursed the host with the ghosts in this haunted mall lost and lonely within England’s mountain green
it is no longer the god bothering needles and blunts that draw the crowds
as flat screened pharmacological rapture,
that trinity of distilled, medicated caffeination
lead a once pious nation through a precocious dream
maybe Allah yet sees here his
Jerusalem and leads his children
upon England’s land of crescent green
Dec 3, 2016
Dec 3, 2016 at 1:16 PM UTC
have I been here before,
the variations of anywhere
framing the limits of waking within a wretched humility?
am I become one of the blown boys, those dear, dear boys
and their desolate, punctual, martyrdom,
or a resolute extra in a post-mortem smack fug
at ease to fester with my wounded, skyward muttering,
where even fake flowers offer injury?
I
easily shaken by bleary imaginings as obdurate
as a politicians dancing lips which, if they are moving,
must be lying,
rather crave the ocean's incoherent, uncorked, yawn
its contorted salutation an easy answer to the hardest ask
Jul 30, 2015
Jul 30, 2015 at 1:14 PM UTC
in three lines expect
not the minutiae of life
fill the gaps yourself
Jul 30, 2015
Jul 30, 2015 at 12:44 PM UTC
I would not refuse to **** you.
not on a mere ethical technicality
a cursed dialectic sheared and far less pretty
than the contents of your *******
smooth as oysters lips from where your barraged ocean
falls on salty fingertips
you shall bathe in this warm artifice of my adoration
and be my play waif,
my relief from the wristed finesse
that I have become so used to
and I shall take you away from this place
where the chill of a boneless glass sustains
the shadows and fog of a self-financed ******
and Eurydice might still be expected to rise
from beneath a carpet of stone blossom
but in the sober morning a killer may raise
the bones of dead eyebrows and watch the moping steam
evanesce from the wet heart bed
bled full of drowning lungs,
the mangled target of perspective reduced
to something so blessed
Jul 29, 2015
Jul 29, 2015 at 1:25 PM UTC
as I looked at your photograph,
and couldn’t be sure,
I was actually ready
for you to be
a boy and all that
brought with it
until I stood
naked in front of the mirror
camera in hand
and saw
a foolish charade
for I am not an attractive man
the hope of flesh betrayed
before me
mapping my every
dream, decayed
Jul 17, 2015
Jul 17, 2015 at 1:57 PM UTC
skinny dipping on sopping silk
a cold pooling of lunar refraction
steeps our summer drowsing
ghostly fish, lustrous slivers,
skip across tumid fleshy belly
where I kiss that soft arousing
lip traced phantom trails
follow silver shimmering wandering avenue
to a mellifluent mossy dowsing
-
Jun 23, 2015
Jun 23, 2015 at 2:12 PM UTC
the air seized it’s chance today screaming
**** me!”
and every seed burst
obligingly in a torrent of stars and silken hope
yet a mere quarter hence
the deciduous mantle will slip, dowager dry and lentigo browned,
to dance tiny pirouettes with devils of dust & grit
amongst a litter of sepia confetti as summer’s rusted brides fall
their contract fulfilled
Jun 5, 2015
Jun 5, 2015 at 12:22 PM UTC
The kinda words where nobody blushes
The kinda sleep where nobody breathes
The kinda *** where nobody touches
The kinda nights where everyone leaves
This kinda life
This kinda love
This kinda wondering “is this enough?”
Jun 4, 2015
Jun 4, 2015 at 2:19 AM UTC
I fail at sleeping
in a show of unconditional accusation, the reproachful slander of your hereafter,
amongst the placid hours,
I try to be the grand man, but I shake too much
unhinged by the overreach of my skeletal height
much to the delight of every unskilled whistler
tough love and rougher hate interprets the shuddering motions, as my left hand lingers
over a possibility where dreams might bring
freshly ****** flesh and afternoon tea
I barter with **** and borrow into strained relationships
awaiting the unfounded precedence of my childish brain’s
blinked silhouettes burning themselves out
crumpled and brewed, and even while tempest soaked, charcoals outnumber my pasteled ambition
this distinct morbidity, by which I call my life, lacking
in that level of consistency
that spire sponsored screams might bring
for despite the consequences of ambient respectability,
reckless maturity brings terror to the aisles
and grave duels in the carefully measured medium
of the margins
and the starving are no longer a postulate amongst the rummaged toil
but the impotent sickness of a painters earthy delivery
counterfeit conjecture hung in the resentful stench
that remains too good
for the likes of you and I
May 28, 2015
May 28, 2015 at 8:58 AM UTC
italic Sundays run with a poisonous doubt
a wronged wash in the what might have been
where we fidget like fleas on a rabbits hide
and verses drafted in the cross stitched sky
cannot disguise the well-practiced curses
with the pre-packed presumption of lilies
and static
abstract amongst the sheets
your limbs offer a confusion of choice
where context is lost
besides the arch and coil
of a tenderised neck
and that secret I shall whisper
into your ear?
two pronouns and a verb
you shall not remember
until the crystalline dew draws you clear
that it might be revealed in the heat of noon
or within the cold puddles of a rubicund swoon
as my fingers fund delight
from your long-drawn frown
May 24, 2015
May 24, 2015 at 8:32 AM UTC