if truth be told, I’ll recount every lie ever sold
in a body so weak it can barely stand itself.

I twist on a knife-edge with perfect composure
with a scar tissue backbone
mind a chamber of torture,
heart beating the rhythm of promised departure
forever delayed, scarcely in sync
you taught me to think in verses of fragility
after you watched me grow into regression

and you thought you knew the epitome of suffering.

nothing could ever be relative to your fatality
your ghost will never haunt me
as much as your living memory
I hope every recollection rots
with my hope of ever feeling safe in my skin.

in death, I see you in life
every minefield you left behind
as post-humous reminders
of your wounded mentality
that bred a burden
and made you the ultimate victim.  
I’ll die before I surrender
to what you made me
by weaponizing my vulnerability
and putting me in the firing line.

The villain always wants to be the hero,
but that’s always another story
told through rotting vignettes riddled with hidden discretion;
the narrative hacked with derivative prose.

If we never found deception on the timeline of human progress
they’d be as worthless as they make other people feel.

What is done is done
and what’s lost is mine to carry
I’ll embrace this vacuousness with a smile,
you taught me that baring your teeth goes a long way.
I won’t let the world see the hollowness that threatens to devour me
or that I’m already consumed, and there’s nothing left to exhume
but you’ll need to take my corpse and separate it from memory
to make me as weak as you.

We cling to connection like ghosts that don't know they've died
that tired old storyline,
where we don't know who is really alive.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective
perhaps it's relative
whether it's better to be dead inside
or create art with the emotion,
prose incanted with echoes of devotion we chase
to prove to the world
we're lifted from the mediocrity
as we pass the time
there's never enough of.

There’s no scarcity of meaning
with stage lights dimmed
and hedonism cancelled,
just absence of distraction.

Chase emotion to find purpose,
scour for desire, feel the caustic scrub
tearing away the guises
you adopted to be adored
push away the inclinations implanted by
the attraction of normative function.

We’re little more than sentience in a skinsuit
pick at the fruit that leaves you more than sated,
chase feeling, on your own trajectory
don’t compete with people you never saw at the starting line,
who you’ll never see at the finish.
You’ll only prove the point
that we’ve disjointed until we’ve forgotten  
everything but passion is just decoration.

Chase the chaos
embrace it
wrap both thighs around it
until it screams a name you recognise
and replies
with rhythmic fury
coursing through the contortions
spinning on carousels of shame and regret.

Everything is relative
but no one is relatable
when cheap *** sells
and romanticism is an affliction.

I want to play jazz chords on a piano of human bones;
in a world where superficial charm
leading to senseless friction
is the only natural progression
and shame is the only ***** word left in the dictionary
so spread your legs for the sycophants,
they’ll adore you until they abhor you.
Relent to the parasites
they’ll gorge on your skin until they’ve had their fill.
Pretend hypersexuality doesn’t run parallel with mental instability;
enable ego-driven addiction
lie with as many people as it takes to forget what you’re always trying to escape.
Swallow ecstasy after you have spat out that jagged little pill;
do what it takes to strip away the meaningless
from the fetishized act you’re always performing.

I have a carnivorous mind
never satiated on reality,
so I make my own.

I find the actors,
and forget to give them the script,
or let them know where they sit on the casting call
they cascade as they fall
like dominoes accepting the futility
of what it is to mean anything to me.
And then there’s you.

Don’t look down
where emaciated bodies lie beyond salvation
they’re beneath you
when you preach for profit.

Don’t look down
to idle bones on the edge of prison walls
they’ve already fallen
their hands too bloodied to shake
their eyes too blind to see the mistakes they are yet to make.
Save the souls with the pound sign goals
avert your eyes from the misery of the fallen
they’re not even there
if you don’t look down.

Lie back and think of England; it’s going down too,
under the weight of visceral addiction, the vice of realism.
Antagonist activists; wolves in sheep’s loathing
in the generation defined by degradation.

Sparks fly between taut tensions;
as modern maladies devour rationality.
Why think when you can react
why take the boot off your neck
when you can bruise the most convenient minority.

Death threats, the new love letter
As silence falls on the din of dim culture
where scapegoats are led to slaughter.

We’re too bankrupt to be cheap
too weak to stand for what we stand for
in the Brexit towns punching down.

You brought a pacifist to a gunfight;
someone that would never think to weaponize affection,
but I’ll stand my ground after 20 paces
with aloofness for armour
each step
an affirmation that the second smack of gunpowder is useless,
misdirected,
a ricocheting echo
barely registered.

Something told me,
never to turn and face you,
to keep on walking
to never see your face again
for a sense of finality that I finally had control over,

you imbittered my autonomy
for the sake of your ego,
what’s one more victory to you?
You’ve already taken my trust as a trophy.

Time for money
Sanity for country
pay your taxes
pay your dues
you only have your humility left to lose.

We've only just started ascending
we'll learn what depths we will reach
when the news starts trending.
Plugged into a jaded reality
curl up to benefit ****
grab some food
get warm
it's not your austerity
it's the ones you deem not fit to breathe
the ones you'll never see
because they're on floor 5000
their problems are there to count, never to solve.

Time isn’t linear,
It binds, stagnates, restricts, and corrodes,
the past entwines with the present;
teasing futures better left undreamt.
So, I hold onto you
as the rest of the world slips and fades
transfixed by the reflection in your eyes
as history shatters behind them.

My reality has become the taste of the adrenalised adoration
poured by my own hand as I hold you.
I found you reading between the lines of my own rapture
then we were left to make sense of the impulses
always so ubiquitous with pain.

We found synergy  in contempt,
I wanted the masses to see
but they’d never understand our parade of incomprehensible pretence and apprehension
or the way we paint universes
and only allow the other to step inside.

They’d never understand
how paths threatened to cross
teasing collision,
but we always chose abstraction,
the catharsis in subjugation
where each bruise is a tale of fantasy.
Obedience never leaves room for question.
Even in your absence I never found resent,
just an eagerness which swelled beneath my ribs
as though I’d found the key to the lock on the iron cage
which constricted me.

I write poetry for only flames to see
misanthropic prose which paints you a deity
on a pedestal above the flames
but still, I’m too afraid
to show how the last strings of my sanity are arranged.

Fixed on repeat with stagnation as aural salvation
they dance to the archaic discord
entombed in relics from 1973
rooted in pensivity behind the repetition of each melody
they've heard this one before
used it to pick themselves up from the floor
an effigy to lost lovers
who used to sit beside them
smoking on the balcony
paying duty to a capitalist society
taxing themselves with each breath.

They never hear the strings breaking in silence
dancing through progressions
which paint plaintive signs of the times
disparity haunts the rhymes
but nostalgia stole the show
apathy drives ignorance
to the songs, they don't know.

Artists gorge on the decline
too many pills to swallow
so instead, they'll do another line.

They will never see the full picture
they’ve already reduced you
to little more than a vessel to pour their slack self-worth into.
They just see just the negative as proof
you’re ready to reel into the predatory pantomime of illusory superiority.

In their minds that will never stretch to encompassed yours,
they’re the catch
in ours,
they’re the bait we don’t want to take
because we know that catch
is the spring of a mousetrap,
the hook on a line,
the cage waiting to close around us,
the expectation of something more from someone less.
You get what you pay for,
and what you never invited to come creeping in
from behind blue light
that depicts your portrait in grainy resolution
and dumbs you down
til your own knuckles are causing friction in fetid minds.

Nihilated from naivety, only you
could prove despair isn’t the only truth,
and remedy everything that cheapened me.

Every empty fill of vacuous desire
ebbed away sentimentality
until idealism was an affliction,
a coerced condition.

Stripped of venom as armour
reposed in your words,
romanticism is no longer an abject territory.

You’re the memory
I silently ached to make;
the expectation too unrealistic to hold
until your arms became the sanctuary
I could deconstruct my defences for.

Regression parading as tradition
Modernity rejected in culture at the end of history.

Echoes of innovation only linger in the technology
Of subscribed self-adulation,
Quench the thirst trap.

Drink until you drown in the sound of static.
The revolution won’t be televised
Everything’s a repeat, an omnibus of Section 25;
They’re gunning after the enemies of hegemony; 

Fight it, resist it; the truth will be twisted

In the teeth of lobbied grins
So sing the populist nationalism anthem -
The only hit in the charts
That sustains the sycophancy of sentimentality.


Everything old, nothing new
To sedate the disenfranchised 

Who can’t wait to see the day 

Asylum seekers never know sanctuary.

And now, I know how it feels for fruit to rot
to shrink from its skin,
collapse into itself,
and lose all grandiosity
in just one fleeting moment.
Just one moment in which an ego so fastidiously groomed frays
wrapping around the core of my being
under the effervescent ardour
of someone, I won’t love in an hour.

The darker my dreams get
the less I look for the light.

I can only see the duality
between my perceived reality
and the one you present.

I wake from gravity slipping
from the rot surrounding me
where everything is meaningless
unless there's someone to tell you that it isn't.

where everything is meaningless
once someone tells you that you are
and it turns out to be true
because they’ve shown you the nature of man.

I’ll light another cigarette
As the Roman candles burn,
Lace the atmosphere with lamented regret
And tear it away before it slips into the chain of deterioration.

I’ll cut out my tongue
While there’s something left to say
I’ll retain the mystery
Whilst the rest is lost to history.
With adoration as a breaking point
I’ll feel each part of me disjoint
Under the pressure.
I’m just another guilted plague-
Haunting the crypts of nature
When the morality bomb drops
I’ll collect the shards
Use poetry as a Perspex,
Desire as a casket
I’ll build wordless pyres
Under motionless fires
And choke the concordance
With a suffocating breath of ecstasy
Until my lungs are transplanted with ivy
Disrupts the chemistry
As hydrogen tears through me
And we burn under element number one.

Scratch the itch from the poison of modernity
in the tapestry of culture as it contrasts and conflicts
in gentrified decay; where UV is cast into stone
as it crumbles to the sound of archaic rhythm.

Only some of the clock hands refuse to turn
to allow different splinters of time to converge.
as others idle by propelled by contemporary euphoria;
grinding on ages already passed.

Mechanisms of time fragment in the sound of simplicity,
relics are no longer held in memory
but carved in hieroglyphs,
worn into cobblestones of interchangeable streets
all leading to a history which repeats.

Zealots will adore you
as they forgo romanticism for coercion
as they offer their insecurity
stemming from insidious roots,
a hardwired smorgasbord
of rejection, remorse and resolve-less apathy
they can barely stomach
so they get high, but never high enough
to make ecstasy drip off their sycophantic tongues.

They aim for the stars
waiting for by-proxy fantasies to be fulfilled
hoping that talent can implant by osmosis
through transposing kisses
you’ll want to scrub away
in the harsh light of day
when you want to forget the regret
but it’s sat right there
along with the denial
that it’s more than just about
holes filled and hours killed
that you were more than
just a body to strip and ****,
with only a façade left for protection.

It’s called ***-positivity, apparently
don’t say what you mean
make them feel special,
spin a tired old narrative
because you’ve got nothing else to give
then take it away in the harsh light of day
pass it onto another
and pray that they’re naïve enough to believe.

testing which betrayals you’re lonely enough to forgive
sniffing out fresh wounds to salt
checking for cracks in the armour they helped to construct.
You’d stand naked if they had it their way,
each inch of skin just meat for seasoning
you're just fuel for an ego that constantly seeks naivety to plough through.

The clock drips by
never asking
why you’re waiting
just mocking
as the hands
draw
idly by
listening
to the shivers
and the sighs
three hours
have passed
each moment
I prayed
they would last
and stretch across eternity
to exist in perpetuity.
The anticipation
drags by
it’s always worse
when you’re high
where each touch
is just all too much
there’s no time
to serenade
when you’re holding a grenade
between shaking thighs.

It's just another day,
but what if it wasn’t?
What if our hypothetical half-lives
crawled from the empty parallels,
would they be one more thing to wish away?

I could sentimentalise,
throw flowers on your memory
agonise the opportunity to part with any gratuity,
wish you could see every success
through meaningless desire to conjure what never was
what never will be.

As you ebbed away to degeneration,
every strip of dignity
was a drop in the temperature of your cold stare
that epitomised our tenuous connection.

Even if truth be told,
would there be anyone to understand
how you created something so arbitrarily
only to derivatively destroy it?

**** sensibility
I need sensitivity
emotions
that pour
as black
as tar
from
the ashes
of our complexity.

I glossed over the cracks
that kept the illusion intact
sweet vapid intention
which was never intended for annihilation
just a purpose
that may have been beyond our comprehension.
I waited for the neural itch to decode
I waited for the dream state to dissipate
after I found the roadmap in the scars you could never hide.
We never had a direction
yet we embraced the fluidity that allowed us to exist in a vacuum
of possibility
where we forget the name of every ghost that lingers on the periphery.

It’s lonely only finding truth in philosophy,
when only phenomenology can tell us
that we are just compounds of need
falling into traps of manipulation
set by the veiled hunger others

There can’t be two sides to every story
if we are just navigating altered perceptions of reality
warped by insecurity and ego
using endless disingenuous promise
as a means to an end
that we can’t see
or understand
so underhand, we take all that we can get
to sate some innate desire that devours us
never letting us see its teeth.