Oh, I am dead to this false, worthless venture
of word and page, of half-baked pain and lie.
Oh, I am so tired of rhyme and not living,
bending thoughts in chaos-mind to structure.

Oh, I am done with this cyclical closure
of will, for the sake of all quiet art.
Oh, my heart is done with the strain of growing,
of growing old in all life's exposure.

Old empire, I love you. In faded brick and verse,
polished limestone taken by the African wind,
I recall in only fragmented evidence,
your victories of past and how you since failed.

Archaic tongue, I hear you. Song of time now gone,
you leave notes in hieroglyphic calligraphy.
Infrequent and with no great cause for poetry,
you sit and you waste, waste in your comfortable love.

Retrospect tolerance, I need you. I need you
as depression requires air, reluctant drive
onward, onward to petty crime, awkward malaise
and a history of grey matter violence.

Old empire, I love you. In faded heat and verse,
I recall your stance in the sun, your agenda
of change and hope and of a youth not yet wasted.
Old empire, I love you for all that you once were.

Accidental absolution – how I love you.
How I live within page to satisfy your fee,
to distance this self from her television woe,
and the way she so gave up on life, before end.

After the rain,
there be flood of joy,
there be pianist fingers
shaping the keys, tending
sounds to solace.
There be stray dogs
falling in love
over railway tracks,
there be dinners of taste
and wine unending,
after the rain.

After the rain,
there be confident stride,
there be sun rays milked
over cloud as I see daylight.
After the rain,
there be confetti in the sky,
there be cleaner blood,
crisp wind and salt in the air.
There be long walks
through the old park,
cardboard lots of treasure
and a peaceful guitar,
after the rain.

After the rain,
there be faded scars,
there be off-white reminders
of the passing of winter,
the tide of Spring, as tears
come over in the promise of day.
Beauty thawed out
and turned to ice-water,
dulling the drink of Aquarius;
he pours it out to the needy valleys
and all the humans
with their acquired tastes.
After the rain,
we drink together,
we drink as one
and we drink in one,
the diluted drink of the Gods,
after the rain.

After the rain,
I write with force,
I write with foresight
and a wit to say sorry.
After the rain,
there be no more anger,
there be no blame
for severed friends
and teenage excess of love
and turmoil.
After the rain,
there be no more waste,
there be no plastic existence
under the guise of these walls,
there be no flag-waving,
there be no election,
there be no shepherding
of sentient light,
no tendon to chew
and no blood to pour,
after the rain.

After the rain,
life will finally happen.
After the rain,
there be no more cloud.

Another fated Saturday,
where shadows often lurk,
please let me settle in my place,
please, don't make me go to work.

Another night of ungrateful drinks,
and hooligans gone berserk,
please save me from this dull disgrace
and don't make me go to work.

Not long ago,
I hurried my heart
to the rhythm of the day.

Each emotion amplified,
each action weary,
I went about business
much as bees tend to honeycomb,
or a great mountain
to the shifting plains
beneath.

In the passing of tomorrow,
lengthened shadows over ground
and years listed in names
rather than digits,
I do well just to venture my brain
so far as homoeostasis,

Scythe in hand,
I would play the cornfields,
cultivate them to size, to clear the path.

Instead,
each year that passes is another just gone.
Each journey home, a false promise
of reunion and return
of function to these bones.
Each year that comes is another false prophet,
each journey home, now a question
of home's definition
and of any possibility of return.

This is not the young child in the garden,
nor the adolescent dream turned to man,
I have forsaken sunlight for wages,
now a wreck of my optimistic plan.

No longer a hero of my struggles,
instead the wine-corrupted loss of will,
I'm fading by degrees in this sorrow;
the erosion of an archaic mill.

I am not the pilgrim of devotion,
of revolution and eternal rite,
instead but the crux of sorry failure
and future life lived in calcified plight.

This is not the adventure advertised,
it lives in brief moments like peace and snow;
as fleeting as the shy British summer,
passing like suffering felt long ago.

Oh, this is not the young babe held in autumn,
nor the cooing eyes of all adults blessed,
this is the braying and sharp reminder
of a life with all innocence undressed.

Whisper to me upon Valentine's Day,
cool the water of scalding tide.
For, I've been lacking in absence of you,
I've been lacking all twenty years through,
please, lend me your ghost to confide.

Since us, I've been living in weather
turgid and hostile to flesh,
please, send me your songs of the sunlight,
darling, send me your heat through the night,
hand in mine 'till our fingers mesh.

Surviving on the promise of our children,
brown eyes - your living legacy,
their movements of mood mimics yours,
as British rain upon tropical shores;
how little in them, I see me.

Oh, whisper to me on Valentine's Day,
more than memory taken in wind,
for, without you my breath remains stubborn,
whilst all else I know is falling apart,
my appetite waning and thinned,

all because of this long-broken heart.

Well, I'll sail away
on this effortless sea,
from fortune and fame
and celebrity.

Off to a world,
where all is in place,
where God is a friend
and all doubt is erased,

off to a world,
where scars turn to skin,
where all passion is pure
and hostility, sin.

Off to a world,
where the coastlines will be,
where discovery lasts
for all eternity,

that's where I'll sail away,
to the motionless sea,
to the bringer of 'I'
and all infinity.

A silence of mind
and vinegar wine,
the shopping precinct
a disembowelled mine.

Bombs stain the mountains
to build a hotel,
for tourists to buy
a wish from the well.

A wish for comfort
and one for new love,
in marital bliss
and skyscapes above.

Escape from their God
of tablets and time,
of substitute taste
for tonic and lime.

Escape from their want
of waistlines and faith,
relief from the haunt
of some childhood wraith.

Travel sets its price
to find your own face,
to find there's no cost,
in finding your place.

I am more
than the flame extinguished
at the forefinger and thumb,
of established thought.

I am more
than the alien footfall
as I pass through the daytime streets,
of functioning life.

Oh, how I hope I am more
than these textbooks and fissures
of time between you and I,
between then and now.

I am more
than these spidery hand-prints
that fog and dim my glass,
glass of wine and budget meal.

I am more
than this home, this flesh, this lack
of gut, this bone; more,
than I could ever care to know.

Oh, how I hope I am more
than cyclical thought,
the process of remembering
what I've chosen to forget.

And, I am more, so much more
than this insistence of 'tomorrow'
for, I am more within the present,
than ever could I be elsewhere.

All paths link,
from chaos to mend.
All humanity's start,
is humanity's end.

Internet dreams and
lullaby, the mountain peak
of an infant cry.

Closed eyes
to the fountain of youth,
to higher hopes
and new reality.
I claim spirit,
but give mind,
in fact give all
my scattered self,
in the hope some poor *******
sorts through.

Winter's guise,
I flicker off-white images
of galaxy and twine,
of breath mints and wine,
of sorry dancers
with broken heels,
reinvented wheels,
and augmented rhyme.

Light comes
and I storm it with cold,
I storm it with pens
and whiskey lies.
I storm it with science,
and I storm it with God,
I storm it with the golfers
and playboys,
about to tee-off.
I storm it with hate,
with the promise of pay,
my unrequited love
of Saturday.

And with wind came age,
came the steady hand
and furrowed brow
of sleet-strewn rain
and growing pain.
Of doubt. A bout
of flu,
a touch of death
and funds withdrew.
No more the kiddie
in the window,
aww-ing at sound,
the colour of air,
the steam of kettle,
forgiving snare,
life's poison-treats
and poison-poisons.
Un poisson hors de l'eau,
still - I'll thank you
for your time
and bad French,
old guru.

Still to shift in
this physical prison.
A prism of light,
of partial solidity,
of unending uncertainty;
a multitude misunderstanding itself.
It claims to the borders
and it clings to the bed,
it holds true to thought,
and all the worries
in my troubled head.
They descend,
never end,
in a crescendo,
a caterwaul
of mistreated sound,
dog in the pound,
and waistlines round.

Thigh gaps
and mind-the-gaps,
signposts and brochures
for the short-lived living.
They pester my mind,
interference, crackle,
prattle and rattle
of mediocre wisdoms,
of borrowed idioms
for bulimic bones
and broken homes.
They tailor my mind,
cuts and seams
of needless pleas,
for order in chaos
and blueprints
for blind entries.
All to settle the stomach,
to settle the plot
to settle this fever
that burns so hot.

Old-film stills
to the fountain of youth,
belligerent fist of tears,
for forgotten woes,
for sweaty prose
and swollen leaves.
Yellow birds and
old lime trees,
dear Suzanne
and her poetry,
about thorns in the side
and turning tides
of tambourine men,
and helter-skelter girls
turning empires
of simple love
and worthy sin,
to English tea
and to profit again.

She turns the tide
in a lover's brawl,
in winter's shawl
and Hollywood ball.
Sings Hallelujah
to the wonderful world,
to the shot girl's tips
and crazy catcalls.
To the Pink Moons
and old jazz tunes,
to the orange peel
and plastic sand dunes.
To Parisian men
and Las Vegas girls,
to twirls of meat,
and ballet shoes,
to the smoking student
and his heavy blues,
to the loss of art
in the modern street,
to busker beats
and sausage meats,
of coffee fumes
and white man dreams.

And we're entertained.
Oh boy, we're entertained!
Entertained at a rate of knots,
tangled headphones,
tangled minds,
tangled tales
of truth confined.
Television makes everything real,
it flavours life,
spices the story,
feel, kneel, heal the plight
of the Navy Seal,
invading land,
invading minds,
invading dreams
of love unconfined.
We're entertained
at the point of feeling sick,
of parrot-joy
and marketing intent.

We speak in circles
and we speak in phrase,
we speak in unending drivel,
of quote, motto and haze.
Haze of meaning,
and haze of depth,
of fortressed country
and insoluble debt.
We speak in telephones,
they speak on the bus,
they speak in the ghettos,
the nightclubs,
the churches,
the underpass
and they spill from the gut.
Whilst we torture ourselves
in the new-found freedom,
of living within
and not to the kingdom.

The kingdom of choice,
of self-salvation,
of astral self,
and meditation.
Of origin's tale,
of Earth-life passed,
of intelligence squared,
and foolishness fable.
Of infinity realised,
of time altogether,
of solidity-illusion
and falseness of summer.
Of warmth in the winter,
of red in the sky,
of collective catharsis,
a universal sigh.
A sigh for relief,
and a sign of mercy,
a plea for conception,
a gift for the future,
and humanity's redemption.

The weekend revellers
hand over a half-hour of toil,
of eros, of prayers in cash,
of dizzy heights, life lived
and to be lived again
as I hand over their bottled beer,
their ice and *****,
their poster boy of good times
and the erasure of all day
spent watching the wheels.
Spent watching the clock
wind its endless route
to freedom.

Legs cramp,
eyes blur to focus,
and cash moves dirtied hands,
one to the other, to the other
and back again.
Back again to the dancefloor,
to the gape of sweaty arms
flailing in catharsis,
in sweet memories
of playground kisses and
lunchtime riots.
We play sweet imitation
of black-man-blues
and toast the new day
as it comes 'round the corner,
steamrollers through
into Sundays spent
with cigarette ends and
heads in buckets.

This, my origin of misery,
their open-doored appearance
to substantial existence,
to footprints of two-time
than carbon.
To commutes of whiskey sour
and wine dry,
car left in park at home,
whilst the taxis
pick up the slack.

Poisoned in the promise
of forever-youth,
the cougars cover
the same old ground,
the same old ground
every week.
I spot them in the corners,
by the doors,
in the cloakroom
and in the fire of backway passages;
the closest hope to
human touch
they'd ever dare to dream.

And the shot girls.
The shot girls kick water
in a sea of salted men,
football hooligan,
semi-political lyncher
and the neck-tattooed reality hero
who crawled in from
some bar or other,
to condemn losses with shouts
of *****, of *****, of please.
“Please, just once,
afford me a want in life”,
comes the mating call
of lads and businessmen alike,
as young female flesh passes by
their lives,
like some unfulfilled match,
kicking up sparks
but refusing to flame.

Each day I wonder
why dread exists. Why I
cling to the bedsheets,
why stories are poured
and glasses written,
why I settle for anti-living
and artificial light,
why woman is singular
and drinks are solo;
whilst all life passes by
in the excruciating hours
spent stood behind
the beer taps,
behind the barrier
that separates me
from them.

In Morrissey fuel
and cigarette vice,
a map pinned up
with dreams of travel,
in eyes darkened
and swollen wrists,
in paralysed belonging
to established hypnotists
of hunger, of servitude
and self-discipline,
of not nurturing the childhood
nestled within,
and of friends now fable,
and of friends ill-spent,
now is the time
for the young man's repent.

If all is lost to fire tomorrow,
I shall remember life as this:
that my saving grace in life's decisions,
were those moments spent smoking
and watching the weeds break through
the whitewashed wall.

Do not lend me your hand,
instead, lend me your money,
shared income, insurance,
and ownership of land.
Pin me not to the bed,
but instead, to your catalogue
of meek suggestions
for which shirt I should wear.

Do not lend me your ear,
instead, give me your money
so that I can cheapen love
and reduce it to some teenage tear.
Keep me not in your heart,
instead a part, of no sum,
of zero character,
yet adoration for my hair.

Do not lend me your friendship,
instead, hand over your cash.
I will pour your drinks - and smile,
should you not forget to tip.
Think of me not as a man,
or a tan of skin, of freckle
and violence,

but of tomorrows and histories combined,
blurred memories of childhoods past,
torrents of joy that pass so fast,
all dues paid in my sparrow heart,
weak upon my childhood's start,
when with love, came unending pain,
a heart overcome in the heavy rain.
For, with a heart so tiny,
and bounded in flesh,
chained to the body
and thus, to distress,
I found my heart to be feeble,
and harried in grief,
for there is far too much longing,
in a lifetime so brief.

My voice falls limp,
carried reluctantly
across synapse-space,
landing upon the deaf brick
and insulation. Even this,
this inanimate audience
breathes fog of indifference,
into the speech
I call my song.

They trace shapes,
doodles and musings.
Anything to amuse above
these listless words,
this dead-pan circuitry
of sound, of chorus,
of rote strings, broken chord
and the misery of
unachieved catharsis.

Still, in humble melody,
I mumble through another verse,
fingers rolling in bands of
forever, walking up and
down the root notes,
as if scales were naught but
a busy mind, stilling orbit,
thawing memories
in the motion of music.

Distant as the far-off maritime state,
undeniable as the endless mismatch
of rock turmoil in the centre of the Earth,
and as vital as the pound of flesh, pulp
and lung, tired bronchiole, wasted lyric,
and cancer's ever-present weight
upon your mind.

Familiar as your lover's intonation,
as she asks of the breadth of your love,
attractive as the modest celebrity,
with legs splayed in bronzed celebration
of this, her life's affirmation.

Bound as the pages of your old journal,
full of misdirected sorrow and old, old love.
Curtailed as the dance floors abandoned
at request of the lights, sugared, spilt drinks
to rot the wooden boarding, now devoted
to misery-cleaners and the bringers
of tomorrow.

Firewalled as the world is to debt.
Cardboard shop-fronts, straw-men hippies
and bent products, cash out at Christmas,
then a haemorrhage in the New Year of
old floods and foreclosures. Covered up
as is the rusted kettle to stifle flame.

Lost as flavour is to ketchup, as winter
is to hope of heat, to desire of spring
and the end of forever-night. Thin as
my wrists, as hands hold the banister,
gaining small balance in life's rare incline,
long stripped of exercise, of enterprise.

Unutterable as the soul-sounds
I feel when I pick up the guitar,
as unattainable in this life,
as is beauty once my knotted fingers
press consciously upon the strings.

A truth legacy found in blood and
distortion, found in intuitive drives,
warped by consumption. Dismissed
theory of Atlantean ties,
of old Babylon
and Reptilian lullabies.

Luring, luring, luring to distraction,
into the night and the plight,
into the absence of Arcturian light!

Keep close to me, please,
oh, feeble recollection,
please take me to truth,
in this, my meditation.

Only imitation of daylight touches me.
New air finds yellow skin through vents in the window,
or else in the brief presentation of my bowed head
each time I succumb to nicotine and black lung.

It is a depression of inactivity,
not worth the document. These daydream catacombs
afford me translucent substance of consciousness,
and untraceable, numinous identity,

so that with each day I can be spun-out again.
The only reality in which I engage
is that of words, words, words – meandering delights
of categorising all fear into known terms.

Lo, how the quantum world beholds this emptiness.
Great depths of solidity, Mother Earth's mantle -
tectonic collisions of Biblical tirade,
of all shield, political firewall and bloodshed;

discarded in the nothingness of the atom.
These ****** words too, will offer no quantum relief.
Each thought lives brilliantly, but in a moment,
and words, words, words, are but the thunder that follows.

Petty change collects
in the transparent theatre
of the long-emptied whiskey bottle.

A birthday gift,
it lasted longer as an empty vessel,
than it ever did a drink.

In its costly demand,
I wonder whether enough coins
could even fit in the **** thing
to cover the cost of the whiskey itself.

Copper upon copper,
the small flashes of optimistic silver
offer the only belief in the reality of travel.

I have long lamented money
as the means to existence over life,
so why then, do I need so much of it

in order to fulfil
these ancient nomadic dreams?

I shall never know,
if you faked those blackouts.

The ones that made you crumple
on the stairs. Or else out in the cold
of Andy's rusted shed. Once I caught

you naked, you know,
during one of your blackouts.

I shall never know,
if you faked those blackouts.

I wouldn't have blamed you,
a shed-full of
wasted tanks and canisters;
lighter fluid, degreaser, air freshener,
foot spray – they spoilt the flooring,
and they spoilt our thoughts.

Never once deterring
from the self-manifest dream of escape,
of truth and eventual decay;
we took to bare arms
to satisfy
our escape from oxygen.

And, in open view,
you laid out naked with her.
You more studied her,
than ****** her,
you more observed ***,
than became it.

I wanted her
as much as I wanted to be you.

So, I traced my dreams to your nothings,
upon your heralded wisdom,
but never could I untangle
from some impossible condition.

No, I never could untangle
the means from the ends,
and never could I darken
at will,

my old blackout friend.

I wish I could hold in me
the same indifference
to near-everything,
that you show with
such intrigue.

Objective steward,
you **** my mind with
one-thousand malformed thoughts.
Thoughts of my hypocrisy
and the spineless way
I have given up on
revolution.

Following the bloodstains home,
we tread the land with bristled soles,
to cleanse the souls of the wide-eyed youth,
spectacular fireworks to alter the truth,
tar the land, and pepper the streets,
concrete the corner where strangers meet,
the placebo joy of the modern life,
left vacant in the money-man's wake,
a cardboard lot left to decay,
oh, this is my Britain of today.

The newsrooms are clinical,
policies in place to reduce moral outrage,
to reduce it to a hysterical mess,
a cartoon-disaster of life's distress,
so the public in fear, exist but not live,
to fight the recession; you must give, give, give,
give, your life to your freedom
to live without choice,
you can sign a slip,
to mimic a voice
and to ensure the vow of regular pay,
oh, this is my Britain of today.

A history of salvation,
we lend heroes to established truth,
we parade on corners in our concrete joy,
rejoice in the miracle of the new royal boy,
who shall live in fat, and live in health,
sacred tender to the country's wealth,
of empire and power of totalities,
of stone-walled cities,
and Northern breeze,
the Jack tattooed on imperial flags,
oh, this is my Britain of today.

A stream of entertainment,
how it pounds the floor in seamless sound,
how it drizzles the walls in a trophy glitz,
a hypnotic and false, synthetic blitz,
of caffeine veins, and digital sea,
of attention-span in atrophy.
Wait not on thoughts, instead mind-chatter,
you say “don't talk on dark topic,
and keep depth away!”
oh, this is my Britain of today.

Following the apathy home,
I tread the land in heavy-worn soles,
to cleanse my soul of restricted air,
to dream of travel, to fortunes fair,
but in this bliss of a greener grass;
it is for Britain I hold communal mass.
For each Blair, I know, is a Rupert Brooke,
each levelled city, there's Wilfred's book,
or some Dickensian dream of caricatured past,
where only tyranny is built to last,
for each liberty taken, is Huxley's piece,
is Lessing's thoughts and Shelley's release,
and the meander of Avon through grey rain,
adds desperate poetry for the lives still slain,
so we can live in peace, and in sugared tea,
with red wine lips on the periphery;
in those day's hard living,
in those days' worth spent,
with only a book
and blood descent,
the community dances in the advent of May,
oh, this is my Britain of yesterday.

In adolescent vain, I studied myself
in a pilgrimage of identity.
I sought the avenues to find belonging,
I scoured song lyrics for personal truth.

In maturation, I have distanced myself.
I wish to perish my breath, my beliefs,
to clear my skies, my mind, so dutifully.
Hold true, my dear wholesome meditation,

so I shall live this life as an estuary,
opened-armed to all rhythms of the tide,
to be cradled by the land in life's dispute,
but still hear the whale-song of consciousness;

to realise this unifying truth.

Upon this my heart's contusion,
edge of a blunted knife,
when I work my lungs for air,
I do so without life.

And I will faint at the future,
with all its awful stare,
for the lack of my autonomy,
knowing you'll not be there.

I will miss you in the morning,
but more so at night,
when I enter dreams without you,
I enter without sight.

Milk-stone tiling, with some
figure-hugging brown
and Castleton's ceiling pervading;
cement works, cement works,
on my mind.

The shroud of Christ's teachings
is left in damp upon the soap-fused wall.

Fan beating in aggressive pleasure,
it staves off stagnancy,
instead cleaning all humidity
with purity of essence.

Cleansed, cleansed,
the soaps are tinted in poisonous colours,
lethal toad and paradise mountain,
you scale all levels of disappointment,
to leave in want of better investment.

As in all politics, each day I intend
to settle my doubts in your cleansing augment,
of all that is pure, and all without grime,
from the stubborn North wind,
that freezes bells before chime.

In reclamation of a childhood-mind,
I storm my sobriety with a torrent
of half-assed joints and forgotten poets,
until all that is formed is some vital compound
that links intrinsically, possessively, autonomously,
the motion of sound.

From this I'll crack open that nitrous,
in an attempt to leave eternity bare,
within these primitive paws, sweated clutch
and insufficient air,
that filters oxygen as a reluctant fool,
some corporate machine, or human tool.

It is in reclamation I tend to my childhood-mind,
to storm my sobriety in receipt
of half-assed tragedies and rhyme,

'till all that is left is this fragmented page
of that paradise lost,
on minimum wage.

You are a formidable woman.
Forgive me the term,
as I know woman has meant 'wife-man'
in times not quite yet past.

But in now, and in essence,
you are more than a dedicated string
to my bow of love,

but instead, and in spite
of life's unholy glow,
you're my confidant woman,
whilst the world is at war.


Be here now, and in essence
darling, as we scale through our European scape,
be here now, and in substance
woman, to splay out upon our infant coastal shore.

In sleep I leave thee, mortal tomb,
to respire and snort amidst the gloom
of ****** haze and time's distort,
graveyards to the wars we've fought.

Impossible colour in the light,
the child-god redeemer of my appetite,
for that deep-set rock ocean blue,
to remind me of all that is true.

To faces, to faces, to faces
it bends, of childhood teachers,
and teenage friends,
in one pulse forgiveness,
in another amends,
all outcomes played out,
before the end.

Falling further into a breathless stream
of thriving light and ecstasy dream,
I see the clasp of our lips set in between,
all that was, and ever has been.

In sleep I kiss thee, wholesome womb,
pressing light bodies in a violet room,
abundant in pleasure,
and absent of sin,
in the promise that the Sun
will rise again.

We cling to each other,
and we cling to the bed,
to all gravity's demands
and all the lines we've been fed.

With pleasure I leave thee, patient friend,
to my Garden of Life on which I do tend,
to find my wisdom, to find the truth,
to settle within your arms of youth.

Please settle this longing that is in your place,
this constant fear, of an empty space.

The Mother's pull is stronger today.
She persists me into the ground,
Sun milk over the weak grassy mound,
and it teaches me of my astral self,
the only means to my escape.

The Mother's delight is lessened today.
It persists to pull me to the machine,
of concrete rule and Corporate Queen,
and it teaches me of my ****** self,
the very lock unto my prison.

A flash of light in a concrete jungle.
Hands folding in a mesh of loving flesh
to counter the iron-willed Northern wind,
to counter all these days spent so solemnly.

You press your outer crest – your weight on me,
when all is tired, all substance expired;
to counter separation from the heavens,
to counter all life's unwholesome blemishes

that otherwise shall leave me unfulfilled.

The last star, now corporate logo.

You're my spoilt demand of love.

The hitch-hiker is buried at home.

Weight on the mattress, no more.

Conceding to smoke in my lungs.

Beheaded treetops, and a poisoned sky.

The lighthouse blinks - oh blessed recovery!

The last human uploads his consciousness.

The cancer spread to bone marrow.

Thousand lensed eye, yet no identity.

He plays the last ever chord.

Sequel: And she dances to his echoes.

With no land left, only sea.

Third eye opened – to New Eden!

The unbelievable new fathoms of physics.

With wonder, she first saw Earth.

The veil lifted
from the mechanical slaughter
of the coastal engineers.

Waves crash in that soft,
whispering hiss. The sound that
is usually betrayed, contorted,
through terabytes of purchased bliss,
of a meditation wrought in sickness.

Freed of employment ties,
I stand at Earth's compromise.
Wavering boundaries broken,
conquered, and regained once more.

Cyclical, cynical, tempered battle.
War-torn property rolls in the throes
of the Moon, endless, gentle
discrepancies between land and sea.

I dip my hand in the brine. Long
written of, rarely encountered
in my daydream, salt unreal on the tongue,
only when spoken.

This roar, the old marginal sea,
it obliterates the pneumatic sounds of the
yellow-coated henchmen of progression.

Slaves, breaking backs to build roads
for the already-fallen pyramids,
already stolen marble coat and golden
spinning top,

we've dug it all out.

And the lighthouse winks. It winks
through the fast shadow of January's afternoon.
No land at the horizon, instead a sheet
of hostile, infertile water, and clouds
to stifle my lungs.

Oh, lighthouse; my childhood's end,
now but a lack of time taken to notice
you. You spindle-spin the light, powerful beacon.

You roll back the decades,
to times of ships and books;
of journeys born and placed
over profit's end.

This journey, this journey now so brief,
once dug by many, once an undertaking,
now one quiet train ride away.

Like a prophet, I strive. I strive
to notice Earth's balm,
the Mother and protector,
of all terrestrial innocence.

Bind me not in gravity, nor in debt.
Instead, let me scale the North Sea's
surface. To join the glamour of the
fairy-lit, tough Norwegian liners,
grey like Scottish shores.

Boundless power, opulent force
in a decaying town. City street lights
stretch up to bring the folk under the
dentistry light.

The groynes will hold this beach
like a girdle, as a holster of sand,
a harness for erosion, whilst the
traffic sounds signal lack of footfall;
mounted failure.

But, for evermore, the waves sing to us.
They sing the truth: that they will remain
long since our passing, long since the stench
of fumes; long since we've given up
on the fall.

With this and lightened body, brought
to betterment through cannabis and
Astral Selves, I turn to my life
and remember it well, as a fraction
of the entire self.

Kiss blown to darkened waters,
the paternal, cooing waves and whispers
of ancient whale, I turn back to the sand dunes
and hardy grassland.

A hotel stands at a distance,
privileged guests with fluorescent luggage,
and half-filled parking spaces,
whilst the Romans still stand in ruin.

That lighthouse weeps its goodbyes,
the sand drags me back in my prints,
knowing me, identifying me – careful police.
They sing, “Oh former tenant, Northern heat,
gentle visitor, help us cleanse your feet!”

Clumsily, I stagger back to my lifetime's
worth of worries. Back to the conglomerate
of blackened, distorted figures, sculptured
rain-soaked children, standing with feet
indiscernible from the globe beneath,

locked out of motion.

To them, I understand their isolation,
their helpless gravity in a heavy world.
To them, I return to artificial light,
where will suffers, where lungs heave,

but for all this I am glad,
of the sweet ocean-side reprieve.

For all the worries in your head,
all the tears that you have shed,
will we all know what it meant,
when we reach our life's ending?

And the rain stains the path,
to the stagnant Roman Bath,
to the fall of consciousness,
we call the Garden of Eden.

The forgotten circumstance,
of humanity's romance,
with a lifetime in the sun,
that'll last through the centuries.

And the truth in Emerald stone,
no matter how much wind has blown,
will whistle through the night,
to serve a reminder,

of the scope that we have spurned,
forgetting everything we've learned,
settling for the dregs,
in this pitiful freedom,

where we vote for men in suits,
and some purple-hearted brutes,
who sing in colloquial joy
for the empire's end-game.

Is this all that we have left,
from all the blood in sorry theft?
For all the tears that have soaked
into the fibres of tomorrow?

Because upon my gentle heart,
and in the poetry of art,
I still kindle for that loss
I have felt in my division.

Water skids the ephemeral valley.
Tight turns, night gowns and cigarette ash beds,
with countless souls lost in ruby red wine.

Fingers indiscernible, scaled hardbacks
lay upon the shelves in deadened beauty,
whilst creation is born in digital sound.

Today is your birthday, spindle-top maid.
Another year of desolate bridges.
Bridges by us, once believed to be true,
now laid to rest in mineralised brine.

Though my desires have long since faded,
small town streets will forever sing your name,
calling, calling, for youth and infant love.
Time may have set, but as with Giza stone

you lay in evidence of what has been.
And now, in years progressed, I tend to this,
my page. Some hungover apology,
for cruelness, that in ignorance, I wreaked.

For, though in my life there is ugliness,
and evil now apparent in this world;
I have learnt through experience, virtue
of kindness, of careful tread upon land.

Oh, mother of Horus, and Christian slave,
you bought me devotion in time of aid.
I'm calling, calling, in meekness undue,
for your sandstone likeness to hold in place.

With time comes erosion, African wind,
to scorch at the kindness, held to your breast.
So, in fear of forced blindness, cynical
waste; I mumble in this dirt-kissed prayer.

God of knowledge, oh God of braying flock,
bring to me your scripture, word of Thoth.
All so I can deliver, all so I
can sing; this tuneless ode of my redress,

this humbled hope for spring.

In youth, I bathed in television glow,
literature but some passing fragment
of old humanity; irrelevant
cries from sad-eyed, androgynous poets.

Yet, birthed from a collective klaxon of
marketable, modern joy, I found my
voice unremarkable when out of text.
Lacking magnificence; I turn to words.

In lapse, we bought gifts
in threes for what is two now,
on the first Christmas
without you around.

And in lapse, I see you
in those shadowy doorways,
and it scorches now,
without you around.

Oh, your silent will
gave forth to what is true now,
over the ground
on which you have run.

Oh, my patient friend,
I'm still sitting at our window,
on this first Christmas
without you around.

Oh, precious friend
of life and light,
who too, seeks the answers
in the night,
in those humble pockets
of solitude,
in which all of us
will brood,
who too, struggles
with the pace of day,
with their troubled soul
left to decay;
fear not on death,
nor life's dismay,
when you come to me
on Christmas Day.

Dear friend of mine,
in lifetime's past,
before the court assigned
our caste,
from troubled years,
where we learned to love,
when we moved to question
the stars above,
when we learned the value
of today,
to beware even
the ides of May;
but fear not on doubt,
nor love's delay,
when you come to me
on Christmas Day.

And, my fellow soul
and Earthly delight,
who too, thrives upon
friendship's sight,
the warmth of wine,
and future schemes,
of how to attain
your lucid dreams,
who too, lives upon
where souls do play,
lest childhood minds
fall astray;
but fear not on loss,
nor what you portray,
when you come to me
on Christmas Day.

With Georgia on my mind,
and coastlines tailored
upon the brim of my sun hat,
I take to the road in canvas shoes,
a crescendo of black man blues
and the song of kissing beer bottles
in my camping bag.

I know I have a soul.
I have a soul and
the promise everything is fine.
No more to the tune of modern frets,
instead the strings on which he sets
our raison d'être, our healing scope,
and parallel joys.

‘Neath London’s rain soaked skies,
shadowed reflections
combine footsteps over pavement,
and to the pigeon’s deep throated call,
under frequency of footfall,
I hear the passing of this empire,
so hurriedly built.

So with hitchhiker’s thumb,
I rise up like steam.
A lightness of living and the
true rejection of security;
my sins become my purity,
and time becomes naught but the measure
of what I have done.

Rest within my sight,
remove all your conscious doubt
and simply be loved.

With noon’s grim call, I rise too late.
Condensed sunlight through greys and slate.

Awake with a steadfast hunger for sleep,
to push out these pains that so make me weep.

Each day is rushed to a ****** too soon,
like some alleyway lover, ‘neath the moon.

‘Neath the moon, I give into wine;
vessel over my wholesome Tyne.

It’s all I have, to numb this pain,
pattern my thoughts, order my brain.

And with self-disgust, I discuss the past,
self-talk: The only friendship built to last.

I think on us all, and what we have been,
a filtered film-still, or some beauty queen,

when life weren’t fair, but fortunes true,
when the sky still ran that azure blue,

love no more than a hungry kiss,
some manufactured teenage bliss.

And lo, I’ve no friend to confide my heart,
each pound of muscle to create my art,

each longing of longing for reader’s love,
and my origins with the stars above.

No, reader, my dear, you’re all that is left,
to align my soul, frequently bereft.

So, read not this page as poetry,
but of the union of you and me,

we sit in life so clumsily
and yet with poise, we love so endlessly.

To bed I took, in habitual slumber,
cursive prayers die at my cynical tongue,
all pinned badges of the day cast-off
to the floor, only for my sorry soles to
impale upon, come morn. ‘Come morn!
I called, to the chasted walls;
‘come morn!’ I sang,
hoping to fill the thinned curtains
with a filter of light.

In oil paints, old dreams coloured themselves
in patient, kaleidoscopic hues. Though
withered of form, they delight in me,
promise to deliver in utero joys,
connection to the Great Mother;
all that was lost in the fall.
The fall of man,
so gravely reported, and so
limiting to humankind.

I fell. I fell to sleep as Romans did peace.
With grudge, with dissonance; mind-silence apparent
only upon the death of the day.
With stubborn regard, my ears tarried in vigil,
I awoke to each pine of the hallway,
each tremor of heart, pulse of thought,
and Lord of sound.
‘Come death!’ I sighed,
to my life’s rushing blackness,
‘come death!’ I cried, to my stars.

In cannabis, I attune, only to calm;
to bask in the light of some meadow-less dawn,
and in pains, I pray only for dullen thoughts,
to poison my days in some indolent mess.
And of Ávila, Teresa
shelters my mind. She comes to me
in sorry demise.
‘My child,’ she calls, voice echoed since,
‘fellow child,’ she pines, entrusted sphinx.

Spawn of Thebes, she riddles through centuries,
all panicked pores, all sickening spirals,
forgotten in the present, all-eternal.
A shepherd am I, amongst my thoughts,
she calls thus that I am not my mind,
rather, a chosen observer,
the sum-of-parts;
to be confused not upon the
idiocratics, more, ‘what is.’

A lowing at my window, she calls unto me
in reverberated tongue, nutritious tone,
a cyclone of holistic power.
Bright glimmer of light, she calls once more, ‘my child!’,
she cries, ‘my fellow child of the Lord!
Please, rain unto me your sorry state,
lack of appetite,
cooling plate. Oh, you that live so solemnly,
you who knows not of the arbour of life.’

I call not in terror and I call not in my fright,
upon the window, that ghostly glimmer,
she heals the walls in half-light, swimming
in opal reflections of ripples and chimes.
And, she is calling for beauty,
she is singing unto me,
‘come morn!’ she weeps,
‘come morn, and with it, the tidings,
of your blessed life to be!’

Stumbling, I trip over the apparition’s words,
she speaks not in life’s shadows and sinister plot,
but only in those that speak like a God.
In the awful haze of light-polluted skies,
auspicious streets and government plot,
her prophecies fair, but yet
not practical.
‘Come now!’ I say, in no hope, ‘come
now,’ I say, an adult.

‘There’s no space for me here in this lifetime,
there’s no soil for my roots to embed,
in painful years past, I’ve been in sorrow,
and I’ll be expecting them in all the years, hence.
So what, if I’ll join the army,
or some other capricious,
malicious intent?
All tributaries lead to the river,
as all humans to their torturement.’

Teresa, she radiated with colours,
and Amy, who lived within my chest,
they called out as one in my silence,
as a union, a conquest of the childhood mind,
to abolish the present tense.
As one, they sang unto me,
They sang, ‘be born!’
under the moonlit streets, ‘be born
to all that you are, and ever you could be!’

And from this dream I came out in denial.
From this dream, I appeared to awake. I awoke
to the song of the starlings, and to
the precious pleasure of life’s augment.
With this groggy thought I’ll admit that,
in separation I fell apart,
I call, ‘come out!
‘come out and greet me!
Old Eden, my eternal womb.
The union of mankind and nature,

and the union of our pasts combined.’

I wish to write a poem,
but my heart is just too tired today.

Think of me not as some maritime devotion,
born upon the salt, suspended in the air,
our friendship but a spit of land, a temporal
bank set upon its tidal death through erosion.

Tarry not on your scattered desk of grey matter.
The folded notes and pencil shavings you hoard,
in the sorry hope they’ll fall to a collage of memoirs
and make sense of all this, their endless chatter.

They talk in circles, double-dealing confidants,
so free of tongue, yet so confined in spirit.
In haste they claim unto you their longing
for the fame, the glamour of the on-screen debutants.

Still stubbornly, you cling to those memories anew.
A memory of a memory, a doctored past is
a game of whispers, to colour in the grey,
to fill beauty in the present, to set ourselves askew.

So you rest with sad grace, thinking on what’s gone.
You make a bed and twist in the sheets of old deceptions,
your pillow case of cigarette ash, wasted petals;
instead, old friend, here are my words to lay upon.

So think of me not as some wasted emotion,
born upon the haze, a clinch of jutting bones,
our friendship but a stretch of truth, a temporal
face set to fade, in all of life’s commotion.

My life is naught but
hollowed laughter;
some canned sound of paltry humour,
calling, calling to ‘amuse us’.

My language is naught but
borrowed idioms;
no thought laid anew, nor words
that twist so unexpectedly.

Some patient of the modern world,
my tongue speaks directly,
some awful diatribe of malformed poetry,
of confessions laid in pixels,
not pressed onto the heart of the page.

I’m calling, calling ‘hold me’,
‘hold me in your palms,
as you read my thought’s patterns,
and I, your lifelines. In print,
I shall discover your fortunes,

run my index over the ball of your thumb,
and massage into you my touch.
My touch upon your cheek,
to catch your tears,
to capture those moments

you have stared in awe upon
the fogged and pastured British fields,
the blink of the crested wave over the shore,
and all memories not locked in time.’

Love is not the scrawl of notes

left on the bedside, whilst

the alarm clock suffers to clouts

and rings, awakening her.



Neither is love the aperture

between silhouettes

as they embrace so readily

against the walls. Some clinch

of absence, the antiptosis

of the you and I.



Love is not the spaces between

the ‘I miss you’s’ and the

‘here we are once more’s.’



Neither is love the separation

between our wants and needs,

to the disparities in the world.

It is not the defiance of obligation,

nor some holy rest-house

to the ills of the modern world.



Love is not some shared novel,

a story born out over a communal

conjecture of where humanity shall

rest upon the end of everything.



Neither is love the offering of a rose,

or any other bouquet of severed

life, strangled for the nourishment

of her; the justification of your

placement in her life. These are just

condescending gestures,



weak offerings to the Lord

of all you claim to be divine.



Love is not a life to be feasted upon,

nor is it the self-satisfied glance

in the mirror, as you finally decide

on your definition of ‘I’.



Neither is love this malformation

of words, this attempt of veritas,

this hollowed pursuit of whiskey-fuelled

longing, longing, longing for

some great hand to deliver life

upon my doorstep, upon our’s.



Love is simply the eternal rite

of Gaia; the motes of existence

that tumble with great devotion

and all-cause to their eventual demise,



their inevitable return

to the spiral that created them.



Love is the spaces between my breath,

between your’s.

Those pockets of meditation,

and the realisation of union

between all that was,

and ever will be.



Love is the acknowledgement

of power between us. Our previous

lives, blades of grass wilting together

under the footfalls of the now-trees,

the now-governors of our lives.



Love is in the ‘I know you’s’

and the ‘what would I do

without you’s’ that we have so struggled

to forsake in the day-to-day

tumble of our lives.



And to this, I say, that love is

these spaces that you may

no longer occupy. The barren stretches

of grey matter that no being either

mortal or otherwise,

could ever reclaim.



Love is the birth of bespoke experience,

and the knowledge

that nothing can erase us

from the archives of

everything that should ever matter.



Love is us.

The policeman strides the concrete,
some poisoned daffodil
in his stage boots of tread and leather
and fear of authority.

Troll-like he emerges over the sound
of the head-dressed busker,
her simple song, her trio of chords
singing under the shops,

who despise her art.

And I, against the tide of footfalls
and ‘aww’s’ at the latest range
of lipsticks and daily distractions,
I stop to watch as her will falls limp.

Her squeezebox is strangled of sound,
and the music dies at the order
of an order, the noise pollution
of the High Street’s mating call.

Chair folded, she evacuates through
the traffic fumes, ‘cross the road,
and with hope, with fingers crossed
and eyes wet, I hope this is a retreat

and not a surrender.

Once more he strides the concrete,
his fluorescent jaundice coat
a warning, a reminder, and I see
his eyes mouth the words:

‘Your license please,’ he says to her,
‘your paper proof of your right to play.
What profit plan do you have in place
and who approved your name?’

‘You can’t call yourself a busker’, he says,
‘much less an artist or work of art,
which talent show do you hope to enter,
to validate your part?’

‘Your part in this wholesome land,’ he says,
‘how you do your bit, your profits large,
because our economy is going asunder,
and so we have no time for art.’

‘So it’s with no due regret,’ he says,
‘that I’ll send you on your way.
And if with you goes the death of music,
well that’s just progress made.’

And so I walked away from this scene of
deflowered and purpled hope,
my stomach wrought with injustice
and no nicotine in tow.

And it is to this table I am sat,
with just one vocation upon my mind;
to reclaim her song, now sung in silence,
and steel her memory in time.

And it is to this table I am sat,
with everything on my mind,
to tell of what I’ve seen,
to indulge another rhyme:

Sing to me your sorrow,
sing unto the skies,
play to me your pleasantries
and please purge me of my lies.

Pay us with your sorry tune,
pay us with your life,
all your forsaken childhood dreams,
your faded hopes and strife.

And please,

bathe me in this sunlight,
and bathe me in time,
scour me with city streets
and allow me what is mine.

Lest we fashion ourselves
in artificial joy,
we must sing to this world;
the poet’s envoy.

In these days so heavy,
In these days without cure,
we forget the homeless
asleep on the moor.

They’re asleep in our wake,
they’re asleep to the hiss
of advertised pleasure,
manufactured bliss

And forget not the old,
with those faces of fault lines,
so haplessly devoid,
like the old coal mines.

They live in their shadow,
they live within their past,
this world on which they’ve learnt
that nothing’s built to last.

No notebooks in the drawer,
Nor diaries of old,
The story’s in the sale,
Not from what is told.

So, before we get lost
In day-to-day routines,
Let us piece together
What life really means:

The faded word of print,
A sugared ring of wine,
Favourable melody,
Endless stretch of brine.

The winter’s passing rain,
And August’s fatal heat,
The swaying of the tyre swing
Where lovers care to meet.

And we will return to
Our places in the skies,
Where life is lived in centuries
Devoid of all goodbyes.

We’ll weep not in longing,
We’ll weep not in our haste,
For losses felt yesterday,
For all that’s laid to waste.

Upon the explosion
Of all these dying stars,
We’ll rejoice in the so-near’s
So much as the so-far’s.

We will live out our dreams
upon that foreign shore,
and sing out to our lives,
‘till we breathe no more