I remember the Canary Islands,
I remember them well.

The patchwork of rock on the roadside,
And the glasses of wine on the balcony.

How I remember the fruit we would carry
Up the mountains and down to the pool.

I remember the permanence of the coastline,
And the fake opulence of the hotels.

They stood arrogantly from the cliffs,
Bleach white and scented with sunscreen.

I remember the movement of your body,
So ******* shadowed from the sun,

As we walked those many miles
To find ourselves a bit of fun.

We dined out by the seaside,
And we watched the tourists meet.

They lay sprawled out on their blankets,
Sunburn on their feet.

I find myself speaking in rhyme,
When I think of the simplicity

Of you and I in the sun,
Away from the din of the city.

Poetry is dead.
I am only writing to you as a
Ghost myself.

Do not fear though,
For in death restrictions are forgiven
And we can roam senselessly
Through the annals of time.

Let us read of the modesty
Of the notebook. Oh, how I’ll
Remind you of the typewriter,
Lest we forget its aggression.

The pound of the letters,
Each stamped with vengeance
Onto the page.

The digital age.

This is all still just an elaborate
And effortful attempt
To paint our hands onto the
Wall of a cave.

So, poetry is dead
And I believe you are too.
Else you wouldn’t be reading this,
You would have something more unhealthy to do.

What venture is next?
I have misused the neck
Of my guitar too often
To deserve its forgiveness
And another chance.

They tell me I have the
Face for radio, but not the voice.
Well, I say,
Let me stay silent between the songs
Or else you can throw me to the street.

I will play the best of the best,
You can hear it in the strings,
The arrangement of a higher power,
The conductor of everything.

And look I can speak in verse,
I can even write in rhyme,
But I know that’s nothing to the publicist,
Who wont even give me her time.

So what’s left but revert to some stories?
Some stories of a life once had.
I guess I lost them before they started,
A life not lived but always sad.

The sirens sound across the street.
It sounds like tinnitus in my ear.
Down in reality where lovers meet,
In the open air so fresh and clear.

So, I find myself in the glow
Of the dulled screen and its bleached-white page.
Oh, I hope to god my desires show,
In the eyes of a more studious age.

Longing. Longing, the word defined,
By my non-action; an artists’ life.
So I must sit and read, my words refined.
The husband of art, lustre; my wife.

This wine tastes like young vinegar,
The tobacco like dirt. They will these
Rushed little sentences together
Like mixed fibres in your polyester shirt.

Another poem for the ghosts.
And another for those in between
The place where desolation meets the coasts,
And the places it’s already been.

A rose.
A rose for you, dear reader
Who has stumbled upon my words.

I’d give you another my sweetheart,
But my expectations weren’t too high
You see,
And so I bought just the one
And kept the change for me.

A hug,
A hug for my dear reader,
They all come for free,
An embrace of my gratitude
For your praise at my mediocrity.

I’d hold you for longer, my robin,
I’d keep myself warm at your breast
But you see,
But my shyness outweighs my love,
And most definitely my generosity.

What’s left?
What’s left for my dear reader?
Who has stumbled upon my words,

My voice can not scale the chorus,
So let me write you a verse.

You are art manifested in my eyes.
The glow of the camera
tells of soft skin and heart.

Oh, you are a papery beauty,
mystic and fair
as the childish storybooks
and all of their impossible colour.

Long hours I spend,
planning what is to be said
between us.

I imagine my confessions
spilling out in perfect eloquence.
I imagine a connection beyond
the regions of my past experience

and all of the poverty of the present.

You are the unknowing and benign
conquest in my life. Oh,
how I place in you
the catalyst for my escape.

The warp of time,
a memory so refined
and pigmented
that it sits naked

and parboiled;
cradled in your mind.
My baby, you cry
‘oh, what is this division

that has cast us so apart?’
Time. Time and tremors
and the absence of lusture
in our lives.

I kiss the scars of our past.

The heady punch of whiskey,
and the overspill
from your father’s ice machine.
I remember it well.

And, my friend;
the cigarettes in the park,
the first time we split
and cut school together.

I remember it well.

Sat cross-legged
in the supermarket aisles
or else
mistaken for lovers

by the strangers on the streets.
Half-right and half-witted
we fell into the role
with a bumbling

grace. Bless yourself
with the compliments
you know I have for you.
Remember them well

whilst I kiss the scars of our past.

Her hair on her *******;
soft freckles are constellations
hanging in the sky

I lie in waste again.

I pace the carpeted floors,
with the padded feet of a big cat
so hurriedly cautious to mute
my steps.

The high is dull and repeated,
repeated.
Every day spun out on these
wine stained bedsheets.
My mind

is emptied
like a small town orchestral hall,
dusted and stale.

The lights on the screen
bend and converge into spirals of colour,
and the sounds from the speakers
coo subtly through the air,
soft, soft.

And the moon,
the moon hangs fat in the sky.
A hollowed spectre gleaming
Pearl-like
in the cushioned blue shadow of the night.

My lids fall heavy and dry;,
each blink an effort to keep consciousness
but the resin lines my blood
and holds true
in my bronchioles for just a little
longer.
Please,
a little longer.

A light fix of no consequence
and the return of an appetite long
lost
in the hermitage of depression.

The high is dull and repeated,
repeated
to still the pacing of my mind.

To capture the world within a frame,
and to quieten the thud of my heart.

A standardized suit.
A universal fit for
all those
who do not feel the nourishment of food.

A career path
cut
through the hem of childhood
and choked by a cheap thin
patterned tie.

The mothering
of a paranoid system;
“it’s not my fault,
just jump through the hoops.

I get paid to read you this book.
Lend me half your ear
and I will half teach you:

Think.
Don’t think.”

Spot the simile.
Dot the t and circle the i.
And I.

I am all in a room painted
with flyers.

They work like road signs,
luminescent with lasered ink
and ladled with pictures
of success.

You can.
You can’t.
You shall.

They hang
like smiling convicts on the wall.
A warning shot to remember
every time you catch yourself
staring into the sky.

Save for the tramlines
marked seafoam white across
my forearm,

the evidence of my obsession,
my fetish
for all that has passed
remains unutterable.

And we could kiss
in a film still moment
that I play so incessantly in my head.

We could.

But it will ring.
Discordant and a lie,
our blackened lungs telling all
of the innocence we left behind.

The school bells chime,
also out of tune but
in time
with the slap of my hardened feet
on these city streets.

Oh, I could smoke
under the bottle green bridge,
adult and proper
with ash disturbed into the fibres of my jeans.

I could.

I could tempt the hand of death;
otherwise fold
under the weight of your eyes
that stare back at me
every time I close mine.

You chase me through photographs,
polygraphs.
A lie, a lie, I conjure a lie
to sleep between
to lie within

a cut of skin.
Would you marry
the middle C?
Hammer the strings
twice for yes

to meet me halfway.

For now I will hold the fort.
A thought please,
as I wait under the eaves
of the dripping tiles
for all of you to quit playing adults,
and return to me.

It is a flash of light and metal,
The chop of a guillotine
Exploding through the lens of a camera.

Severed arteries spray blood through the gutters,
Broken limbs and powdered bone
A pain that reverberates through television screens
And is felt across the globe.

The clamour of film crews in the aftermath,
The twisted steel and burnt lungs
Caught by shaking hands
Soon carted off on a stretcher.

It is a time for Americans they say,
The white boy in the oxygen mask,
The chaos and the broken glass
And a woman laid out on her back.

The flags will ascend and the band will play,
Tears will be shed and the choir will pray.
But with every minority that shall be blamed,
It is a time for humanity, I say.

Let me rest.
Please, just let my mind rest
Away from these words that twist and crumple,
And fall listlessly onto the page.

I need a reprieve
From these thoughts that spiral
And catch on a loop
Which will then echo infinitely in my brain.

The wind falters
As bad blood settles back into the air
In the promise of another spring
Of disenchantment.

I’m not sure what this poem means,
And through the tides of time
These words will be no more
Than a speck of a speck.

But for now your eyes are upon me
As I hide behind the spaces between the words,
More than human,
Less than air.

And I love you
For simply being there.

My inner child,

Recently I have found myself crawling through those hazy archives of my past, when it was only you and the dirt on those endless afternoons. And I wonder to myself how much of these memories truly exist and how many blanks I may have filled in along the way. I try to formulate a hypothesis on this but my mind is preoccupied with the image of the mound of soil at the back of the garden. The one our sister swore was a buried lion – a truth you swallowed so readily. Since then you have moved house and dug a grave for the lion yourself, only this one was your best friend.

We have drifted you and I. I rarely see you. Sometimes in the midst of pills and drink I swear we cross paths but soon my heart thuds heavily and I do my best to just keep my feet and then you’re gone. I am now just a composite of lessons learnt and punishments served. A sum of all the times I broke a heart, failed a class and tripped on a stone. I look ahead to adulthood – I know we never believed we’d get there - we never needed to, but here we are. I don’t wear a suit, I don’t drive a car and I have no money. Beards don’t suit me and as things stand, it is unlikely I will become Batman. I would tell you that we’re not a failure – that I’m not a failure but the world tells us differently. We need a real career.

It is a tired cliché admittedly, but I do miss your innocence – your boundless inquisition into everything about you. The incessant inquisition still remains, but the plague of indoctrination-education and the scorn on your school friends soon puts up borders in your mind. You soon realise which questions are stupid, even if they are right to be asked. Cleverness soon becomes more than being able to tie your shoes. You must be strong, you must be brave, you must be ruthless.

I think back to how much we loved our mother and how it hurts now, to see her ignorance and her emotional frailty for all that it is. The day when your mother becomes human is truthfully one of the most frightening days to experience. Still, for you, those wonderful April shower mornings in the park are a refuge. Feast on those sandwiches, huddle together under the shelter of the slide and listen placidly to the rain hit the metal. Do not think for a moment of what needs to be done or what has been done. Live in the present before you get lost the cogs of causation.

Learn to fall in love. Not just with people but with animals. With words, with pictures, with colours and tones. Textures, sounds and imagery. Please never lose the wonder of lying in the grass and seeing a separate world. I know you don’t understand beauty, perhaps because you are beauty within itself. Perhaps only I can understand beauty because mine has been lost through these fatherless years of self-effacing thoughts and relentless hangovers. Perhaps it is only now that I grasp for beauty, in order to claw back some of what I have lost. Just to taste it again.

I wont keep you for much longer. I know you need to run and yell and play until the sun falls. I simply wanted to tell you that I love you. You are what I love about me, despite what may have been lost in the classrooms. I know now that I should get my head out of the screen and cast my eyes beyond my bank balance, so that I can see you in the distance and greet you as a friend. My old friend. I hope I get to see more of you after writing this, because I miss you and my brain is sometimes just so loud and I think you might be the only thing to quieten it. I am going to fall into bed and sleep dreamlessly under the covers now. If nothing else, I promise you that as you grow older, you will look forward to bed time!

Yours in complete awe,

A very confused person.

The stale stench of cannabis,
Settles deep into the fibres
Of my heavy coat
And already I miss the haze of dull beauty,
A mind that whispers instead of screaming
And that wonderful appetite that can never be extinguished.

And I sit at my desk
With dawn fast approaching.
She burns my tired eyes with demands of sleep,
But I will resist
And I will write
For no reason and with little aim,
Filing time before I can collapse into my sheets,
Or else hear the crackle of cigarette paper,
As resin laces my lungs.

Oh, I miss your paws more than ever now,
My wordless little friend.

I know that it feels like forever,

Since we walked down the streets of our homes.

And I miss that young breathless summer,

And the belonging I felt in my bones.



The boys tried to **** with your body,

To make themselves feel more like men.

But I made you feel like somebody,

Before I ****** with your mind once again.



So I know what I’ll get I’ll deserve it,

The wrench in my stomach and lungs.

To ensure that I’ll never forget it,

The moment you walked and I clung.



And I will taste other women,

And feel their weight on my bed.

But its you in the spaces I dream in,

Every time I lay down my head.



Oh, its you I go back to in winter,

To those familiar pages I’ve read,

While the trees wither and splinter,

Our love falls so still and dead.

Somewhere

Across the the tides of nothingness

is Earth's twin.



Men with brilliance sit in suits,

and drink wine as they do here on Earth

but do not get drunk on their power.

A thin white dust of snow littered the concrete path like an overspill of Styrofoam *****. Summer had her hands buried deep into the lining of her coat pockets and her chin pressed tightly within her pashmina scarf. It was the first bite of wind she’d felt in a while. She had been holed up with her friends for several days and the concept of loneliness was already foreign to her, much in the same way as privacy. She could feel the cheap red wine rust in her veins as her body told her “too much” and in truth she was ready for the crackle of vinyl and the promise of fresh sheets and a shower. The week had been fun, she guessed, she’d certainly felt closer to her friends than ever before, even though they all went back for as far as it was worth remembering.  ‘She guessed’. She’d been guessing for a while now, living in absences with everything held at an emotionless distance – whether or not this was deliberate she could not decide.
It wasn’t a particularly long walk back to her house, enough to take the bus - but she guessed she wanted the walk. The cold air made her eyes glassy and occasionally she had to blink furiously to catch the water forming along her lids. The din of distant inner city traffic consumed the airwaves around her but the path that lay ahead of her was surrounded by parkland, and within eyeshot there was a lazy brook where children would often be seen playing, though they’d be at school at this time of day. She guessed. She wasn’t quite sure of the time, but she knew it was the 15th of February. She couldn’t always be sure of what year it was though, her head was often stuck back in the 1960’s, before she was even born.
Summer could feel the claustrophobia of youthfulness shedding from her every angle and with every insipid step she took, the world took on a more familiar feeling and she took her first real breath of air for days. From out of nowhere she felt overwhelmed at the breathless ease of the faint snowfall and the slate grey of the sky. The clench in her stomach – Summer often found herself weeping for no real reason, and she could never quite work out whether she would be weeping for beauty, or for sorrow…she guessed that there was some compromise between the two. All she knew is that she was very sorry when she reached her front door that her walk was over and that she must again disappear into the walls.
The heating had been off for almost an entire week now and Summer could hear the house groan into action as the radiators cracked back into life, and she felt much the same. The kettle jittered on the spot as the water steamed and bubbled welcomingly and soon the kitchen was greeted with the smell of tea. Summer retreated to her room upstairs. A wide room with white walls meant that it was often brighter than the world outside and it often appeared to unadjusted eyes to have a ghostly glow about it. Summer thumbed through her proud collection of second-hand LP records until she settled on listening through Pink Moon for what was now an uncountable time. “Saw it written and I saw it say, pink moon is on its way”. She let out an exhausted but contented smile and fell onto her bed. The sheets were cold from privation of use but the coolness on her cheek was welcome and she closed her eyes and imagined she was still outside on an effortless walk, with the sounds of Nick Drake overpowering that of the exhausts of one thousand cars.
After several moments of another world, she reluctantly sat back up and began to take off her clothes to get a little bit more comfortable. It felt good to get out of her clothes, she’d only meant to stay for one night so she had not been able to change her clothes for days and she’d appreciated the idea of clean underwear in a way she never considered worth noticing before. She unclasped her bra and felt it fall clumsily to the floor and just sat there for a moment, bare-breasted in the pearl white of the chilly room. She couldn’t help but feel like an illustration, of pastels or watercolours. Her mind was still a convoluted collage of the past few day’s events – the haze of alcohol and **** still occupied a small corner of her being, despite the cleansing walk and the wonderful clunk of a familiar guitar bouncing across her walls. Her ******* were hard from the cold so she threw on an extra large male t-shirt that fell to just below her upper thigh.
She slid off her skirt and underwear, which fell limp at her pale thin ankles. Looking at her thighs, she could still make out the small thumb-sized bruises scattered across them from the distant and removed *** she’d had at some point last week. At least she guessed, it could have happened back in the 60’s for all she knew. It felt as if the past week was not real, a familiar feeling. She was almost certain that man who had shared her bed did not really exist and her bruises contested her own existence. At least that’s how it felt.
She turned over the vinyl and remembering her tea, slid between the covers and warmed her hands against the steaming ceramic. The tea was perhaps the most wonderful and delicious thing she had ever tasted and she felt it nourish her metaphysically. In a way beyond words, she felt herself heal with the rush of warm past her lips and the sweetness on her tongue. The room was slowly warming as she skimmed her legs back and forth against the mattress in complete comfort. Once the last of her tea had been drunk, she let the empty mug rest on the bedside counter and almost immediately fell into a dreamless sleep.

So I sit in the corner of the room
And I will myself to conjure something
An aura
A pulse
A telepathic beacon
Anything.

I can almost feel my bone marrow
Shudder and weep
Against this powder keg of neurosis.

I just want that eye contact from a stranger,
That speaks a language
Beyond that of the most effacious of tongues,
And stretches beyond time and space
To comfort me.

“I see you
And I understand
And I know you and I love you
Even though we have never met.
You are beautiful
And you shouldn’t worry so much.”

More than this;
I wish I had the power to do this for someone else.

I guess it is time to heave myself
Out of this rut.
The clamour of essays,
And careers
The gag of beer in my throat
Will fall aside as I
Finally
Finally
Lay down my words on the page again.

The self-doubt gave me a reprieve
Of creativity
Of which I’m still suffering.

This is all too literal
Too automatic
But I must do something
To overlap the hum of silence
Of being lost in a northern town flat,
With nothing but the stench of routine
And the festering couple next door
To remind me to at least kick out
At the sheets I lay tangled in.

I can feel the atrophy in my soul again,
I can’t tell if this is the bite of winter,
Or the rot of age.

You were a shadow to me,
You would follow me without question
Around every corner and on the fold of a bedsheet.
You would leave the house
Explore a tree
But you always left a trail of pinecones
To find your way back home.

The graceful thud of your paws
On my sleeping body,
Black fur darned with white socks
And I loved you,
I always loved you.

Life had dealt us a silent friendship,
Language was our deficiency
But we made it our own
Speaking through pupils
And reading the curve of our bodies.

And you were small,
You were always so small.
The runt of the litter
But you had the personality
To **** all the demons
That had scattered in my head through the day
And lull me back to sleep.

This knot in my stomach,
And the tears I concede
Are all for you and I don’t want to stop.
I will atone for every summer as a child
Lost in a dizzy haze of fun,
As you sat in the window
And waited for me.
Just waited.

Now it is my turn.

I saw you break into a shadow of yourself,
Even smaller every day
As you faded away by degrees.
I saw you fall limp into a dreamless sleep
And now as you are buried beneath the snow
I hope the first thing you see is me sat at the window.

Today I find myself less of a writer
And more of a weatherman.

I’d like to talk to you about the settled snow
In my stepfather’s suburban garden,
That he worked so hard
And cracked his dried skin
To call it his own.

I’d like to tell you of the still air
Crisp with an early-January cold
And the sun that is daring to peek overhead
In the distance on a roof.

The only snowfall now is from the dendritic bark
Of the apple tree in the centre of the garden,
Melting just enough to slide from the branches
And the squirrels shovel snow
From their houses

A ***** film fixes itself onto a loop behind my eyelids.
The particulars fall apart all around me
And Plato’s cave becomes more of a cell.

How hard it is to swallow
The pill of panic that sticks and forms
Into that lump
In your throat.
The one that resides from the first steps into school
And onward the rest of your life.

And I write,
I write to stay sane
To calm my breath
To organise those thoughts
And to reduce that shriek of depression
Into a bray of indifference.

Hey Porter,
What price for the forgotten vinyl in the corner,
And the dog-eared books
Donated by the whiskered old woman?
Hey Porter,
What price for that fish,
To save me the thud of scales on wood
And to see of its return to water?

And I write,
I write to stay calm
Revision: to become calm.
To attempt calm.

And I play,
I strum to the sound of my heartbeat
Until the buzz of strings slows enough
For me to lay down
And crash into my pillow.

How exhausting it is,
To care about every gnat’s demise in the
Twilight of an Indian summer
And every flicker of doubt
You see in the strangers you pass by.

Home is a funny word.

Home is the napkin
That you use to wipe the salt from your hands.
It is found on dime-a-dozen
Christmas cards and TV meals.

It is paraded by the letting agents;
Founded by stay-at-home adults,
Who will do anything,
Anything.
To break the monotonous tug of home.

Home is where you mind your manners
And comb your hair.
You plaster your flesh and bone
With a bracing tolerance
To hold fast against the moronic company,
All with no nicotine in the bloodstream.

Home is the shrapnel of memory
That has been so scattered in your mind,
And home is the filing system
That finally puts order to it all.

It is a mug of tea
Poured in your favourite mug
But not to your favourite taste.

Home can be the well-adjusted face
To the most maladjusted of bodies.
The gritted teeth,
The clamour of attention,
The lack of comprehension,
‘You don’t understand’
No you, you need to understand.

This might not be home anymore.
Until I am gone.

A paper lantern,
Crafted by the small hands
Of a girl with lime green nails
And flecks of dried glue peeling at her fingers.

It sits in visceral stillness,
Made of bleached white paper
Usually reserved for the tedious documents
Chronicling this-and-that,
The unimportance of the adult world.

There is a smell of felt tips
To replace the lost one of chalk
That used to settle so stubbornly in the air
And reside powder-blue in the lungs.

We are in the proximity of Christmas now,
Nothing but a daze away.
And festivities are tangible in the city streets
As those shops and stalls display their colours
And sounds,
In the mating ritual of buy-and-sell,
Make-and-take.

The classrooms are empty,
The corridors somewhat cavernous.
Empty coat pegs tell the stories
That cannot be heard in the voices of the children
Still echoing against the walls.

The buzz of Santa Claus is permissible
For just another year.
After that, magic must be shelved
And brought out only for the first dust of snow,
A meteor shower,
Or in a generous two-for-one discount.

But for now the children go home for Christmas
And the paper lantern will sit
Constant.

Every era that has ever been
Has engaged in the auto-dissection
Of their yellowing underbellys.

Yes, every generation has predicted
that the end is nigh,
That god is on their side;
But the devil has a crowbar
And is busting out of the basement.

Each decade is a mimicry of the last.
Different fashions, same trends
And always, with a fool on the hill.

A lonely steel harmonica can pierce the airwaves
Across space and time,
Through the grooves and crackles
To enthral an audience,
And to beguile that every generation
Into believing in their autonomy,
Their solitude,
With a fate independent of all those centuries past.

Through every disembodied spew of Dylan lyrics,
Or the corporeal and common alienation
Sympathised in every Wilde reference,
Comes the same fury at the chaos of a world
That is no more than indifferent at the plight of the people it houses.

Indeed,
Every generation has sought to either
Cure the ills of the Earth;
Or else set lighter fluid to the lot.

This stretches back to the first blood-spattered edition of the Bible,
And further, much further.
To all of the captains,
The heroes,
The anti-heroes,
The road gritter,
The malevolent dictator,
The schoolteacher,
The emancipated woman
And the borderline feminist.
To every young child who is reluctant to take the spotlight,
Or look you in the eye,
Ask questions, or speak out.
For every one of those who at some point were labelled
‘maladjusted’.

And so the Pharaohs and Caesars are all but gone now,
Replaced by the big-wigs,
The fat-cats,
The purple hearted,
The playboys -
The men in suits.
But they are all the same.

The same behind the decadence of
A solid gold sarcophagus
Or an Armani pair of shades.
They all built their empire on shifting sands.

And so we will all kick and scream
To our own tone and our own time
At the indignity of the world.
At our bespoke knowledge
To deal with all inconvenience
But that which privates the preclusion
Of any and all major slaughters of justice.

As for that young child,
With the lack of eye contact -
And all that he will become:
He will sit. And he will type.

He will type until his words fall beyond that
Of the spiralling noises inside his mind
And blossom into something pure and ugly and beautiful.
He will sit and he will write

To forget.

My darling,
Go back to sleep.
Leave the hurry and the rush of the world to me
And just sleep.

Let the waves of slumber
Fall into you in a warm rush
Of blankets and breath.

My girl, my woman,
Lie back down and stop worrying,
Calm those lungs and slow your heart,
I will give you all the time in the world
If you will just slow down.

My bags aren’t packed
And there is no seat on a train
With my name on it.

Your career will come
And you will make a splash.
If not we will live on a diet of bread and noodles
And scramble the rent together each month,
Feeding scraps to the dog.

And don’t you fear.
Don’t you ever fear
About the stumble in your step,
Or the snort in your laugh.
The freckles on your back
Or the troubles in your head.

Your imperfections are what makes you beautiful to me,
My dear,
In this world of change – please don’t.

I have laid claim to the Tyne Bridge - it is my home.
You can keep the streets, the shops, the bars
Share them between you
But please
Let me have the bridge for myself.

The bottle green arch of Newcastle,
And the stew of water that runs beneath
The sheer drop of air between them,
Lightly salted by the sea.

It is but the only childish affectation
To follow me and hold true
Through the contaminant of temporality.
Just please, let me keep it.

I shed the skin of adolescence
And left my school tie at home
When I made the journey North.

I arrived expecting transcendence
But instead I received the unwanted gift of the present.
From the clamour of Manhattan,
To the desolation of New Mexico and Peru,
The present will forever be the most effective ammunition
In shattering the stained glass of the world’s wonders.

I know this from the beauty of memories.
Those wonderful fragmented images of childhood
That so efficiently cut out the hours of exceeding boredom,
And the tedium inflicted by the men in suits.

And the future,
The future of flying ships,
The mining of the moon
And downloadable pizza.
But we know in truth, when we arrive
There will still be lawyers
And adverts,
Beggars on the street
And apostrophe’s used incorrectly.

I digress.

Let me return to the Tyne Bridge
My bridge on the Quayside.
For despite the bird ****
And the playboys that trundle over it day after day,
It stands defiant over deep waters,
Daring to cheat death
Or vice versa.

You *******.
How dare you lie awake
And feel short-changed.

There are children in Africa-
No listen,
There are children in Africa
Did you know,
Eating dirt and drinking ****.

And yet you lie there,
You *******,
And lament the broken socket in the wall;
All those sorry women you didn’t lay.

What now?
A tantrum again, you *******?
Your friends wont hit the town tonight,
And your woman wont let that depression bite,
So now your book will never get written
You ******* you ******* you *******.

Your mother loved you
But it was the wrong kind of love.
And your father,
Your father left after you were born:
A peaceful death but a tasteless funeral.
He left before you could recall
A slamming of the door.
He left no trace for you to search
The corners of the Earth for his return.

There is a privation within you but you cannot create something out of nothing.
No, you needed a slam of a door,
And the ache of tension in your gut.
You needed the punch on your heartstrings,
To create the music and the art
That would finally validate your lack of colour.

Oh, you poor *******.
Too unstable to hold down a job
And get a house in the burbs.
Too contented to set fire to the lot.

But I know you I do,
And you will pick up that guitar in a week or so
When I have set myself all tranquil-like
In the corner.
And you will try again,
Fruitlessly, may I add…
To concoct another potion of chords
To save another anonymous soul
That never needed saving.

And you hold out your hand
For just another ******* like yourself.

But I see you’re running late,
You must get to work.
You have small talk to be getting on with,
Yes, that dryness in your throat,
That heavy tongue
And those sentences you play out
In your head on your way into the office,
You know they will fall apart
Into useless, uninteresting stutters.
And the sweat under your armpits
Will cling to your ironed shirt
In your day-to-day panic attack
Of routine.

Yes, I’ll let you get on now,
And I will be waiting for you again
The next time you walk past a car window,
Or wash your hands in front of a mirror.
See you soon,
You *******.

I wish I could describe to you the catching of the sun

On the afternoon leaves.

To tell you their story and appearance

In a way you have not been told

Every other day of your life.



I wish I could instil in you the same thrill

That flutters my heart

When the chemistry of words spill across the page

And fall into a perfect endless spiral



I wish I could sing to you

Past the broken sounds that fill my throat

And the stifling of that timid ghost

That haunts me every day.



I want to fill the rafters

With the tapestries of my non-experience

And the feel the groan of the orchestra behind me

As I tell the tales of my selfish angst.



The same angst that still tells me I am exceptional

Every time I sit down to write.

And those afternoon leaves still sway by my window,

Kissed by the sun.

I need to break out of the wide-open cell I have locked myself in.
I can spot the thieves, the robbers, the vagrants,
all shifting through the sticky tin and plastic
of my life's wasted moments.

Every alternative reality mocks and condescends me,
highlighting every stutter and stumble
as I fall through life on this (temporal and fleeting) trapeze.

And clinging onto the hopes of a softer landing,
I know I will always fall into the safety of the net
so that I do not land deep in that shallow water
and drown in a six-inch pool.

I have been thinking of rope again.
The simplicity and mastership it would take
to efficiently break my neck so that the crack of bone would precede
the crack of thread.

I have been thinking of sleep again.
The simplicity and infallibility it contains.
Incorporating every aspect of being
and painting it in the only colours I can see.
And I see.
And I understand.

I want you to be my lover,

the crumple of your lips.

I want to be your saviour,

pressing up into your hips.

But for now you are the space

on the wrong side of the bed.

For now you are galaxies away

from where I lay down my head.

Let me go to war.

Let me go to war against all the odds,

Against all the ends

And everything that treads in between the grooves

And the cracks in the pavement.



Let me go to war for all that was lost in the fire

Or in the stewing **** of the flooded toilet.

Let me go to war against the loaded dice

And the big fella in his baseball cap

Shifting his fat on the stool,

Awaiting that certain hand that will feed his boy

And get head from his double-dealing wife.



Let me go to war against the ivory towers of hypocrisy

That is the church.

The breathless opulence of a rain soaked cathedral

And the poverty of righteousness

Found in every leap from scripture

And every hungry soul.

In every forgotten feminist.

And still the Pope stands in his robes twined with gold,

Claiming to feed the world.



Oh please, let me slit the throats

Of every person who scoffs at the teenager cutting his wrists,

Or at the old couple fading to grey in a world of multi-coloured ****.

Let me begin the culling

Of those who undermine The Beatles

And all other music

By turning it into another cash cow

And for those that stand with their cameras,

So desperate to chronicle this experience,

That they forget to experience.



And finally, let me go to war.

Let me go to war with myself

For being too quick to judge

And assuming I am the arbiter of fairness

And where the ashtray should sit on the table.

Let me go to war with the demons that fester in my brain

And scratch on the walls of my mind when I try to sleep

And rattle their cages every time I step into a new world.

Let me go to war so that on my deathbed,

My last thought isn’t this:



That for all the money I had made,

For all the times I had got laid,

And even the times I had got high

That I didn’t let those opportunities go by

Where I could just sit in the dark of an October dawn

And watch the rise of the morning sun.

My eyes are glazed over and my mouth is hanging open.

I sit here and feverishly type, gathering momentum

To swing the creative cavalry inside my mind forth

And to **** all that throws itself in front of my periphery,

So desperately catcalling my attention.



I live in a creative vacuum,

From the hum of the fan

And the slamming of the doors,

To the static from the TV set

And the voices. Those voices.



I feel there is a poem in me

Or a song,

That will claim the hearts of others

And tug on the hems of their peripheries

Just as these homely distractions do to me.



Until then I must write and write harrowingly.

I must disregard the rules set down by centuries of genius

And throw back the paradigms put forth

By every raised eyebrow and polite accolade.



I am only twenty-one and I have not yet felt the ache of age

But I can feel the atrophy bite in my bones,

Making me cower at this transient life

And again I find myself at a desk by the window

Feverish, so feverish.

The greatest writers in the world

Use the language of simplicity.

I strive to be a beautiful writer

And to pepper the page

With every colour on my pallet.



However like a photograph in grey scale

The most beautiful writings

Come in the most simplistic of forms.



Only once you get through the spew and bravado

Do you begin to find the reasons people turn to words;

For solace.

For companionship.

For honesty.

For memories

And for the confessions of another maladjusted soul.



I still hide sheepishly behind my words

And twist them into a maze

In which I can hide my true intentions

And the reasons why I ***** these blank pages

Every time I find myself alone.

Your love is terminal and has weighed so heavy on my heart

Ever since that bottle of cider we shared was emptied

And let to lie there on the carpet and slip underneath the bed.



Revision: my love.

The weight still tugs at my chest,

And though I do not think of you that often

That long summer of nothingness will always find me

and warm my bones

and remind me of what was lost

in the tangled thistle as we came of age.

And I must concede;

That some things last a long time.



I remember when you refused my kiss

And seeing the restrain you had to pull

To stop yourself from falling into me once again.

The relief on your face as you broke the cycle,

It was plain to see that this was the moment

You would walk into that cowboy sunset,

You would grow up, fall apart

Tie your laces

And leave me on your roadside

Beside the dogs your father sent away

And all those forgotten, broken toys.



I’m fading away by degrees these days,

And I’m falling short of a ghost in the snow

And I feel that even if I could watch you sleep

Just one more time

I would just be the rain upon your window.

My callused fingers will be worn to the knuckle

Before I produce what outside people would call a ‘song’.

I live in a world of one.

The idea that another pair of eyes truly exists frightens me

Let alone another pair of ears.



Another pair of ears that hears the pathetic wobble of my voice

As I mutter through another verse

And attempt another mimicry at all those artists

That transcend myself in every aspect.

What can I expect?

Not once in my life have I surpassed an outside person.

Sometimes I catch myself in a car window;

A shop mirror,

And mistake myself for one of them,

Before I see the ripples of odious self-doubt

That pierce the pores of my skin,

Reminding me of my place

And so I retreat back into my cage without a lock.



I am the ghost the world forgot,

The more-than-welcome guest left in the corner by the dog.

I want to dig my nails – no longer ravaged by my teeth
Into my life.
I want to see the zest spray onto my chequered shirt
And hope there is something sweeter inside.

I could go out tonight
And drink until the gag of beer seizes my throat
And causes me to cling sagely to the bathroom tiles.
Until I feel the Earth’s axis shudder
And those plates of rock rumble together in an endless Blitzkrieg
In the centre of the world.

These pseudo suicidal thoughts permeate,
Like an artist painting his meticulous masterpiece
Next to a vat of scarlet paint or lighter fluid.

I could go out tonight
And take a pill until the pound of my heart
Causes my eyes to open
And see past the blackness of my life.
I can dance double-time in an endless ocean of strangers
In the centre of the world.

Oh, I could take a scalpel
To every freckle on my skin,
Before I realise we all burn in the sun.

Do not lance your hair

Just to satisfy those men in suits,

Or your woman, sat there with that expectant gaze

Reserved for only you.



Let your image be cultivated

Through the culture of the downstroke.

The lazy thick steel on the neck of the guitar

That shudders at your touch

And responds with the readiness of one thousand ******

Cooing their broken sounded and false approvals.



I see your fingers fumble across the chipped mahogany

And I recall on the benefit of all men

The first and forgotten lovers,

Buried beneath years of clumsy ***

And vicious disregard.



And from the shadows in the archives of your grey matter

You remember every wince of self-doubt,

Etched across the faces of your women

That you never cared to notice in the dizzy ecstasy

Of your youthful wantonness

And the hardness of your ****.



So age will bite at your features,

And you will squint in the wind,

Cowering at the cold that clings to your bones.

At some age you will cut your hair

And iron your shirt.

Nurse your whiskey

And find yourself in receipt of all those women

Still tangled in the hotel sheets

In the back lodgings of your mind

And everything they did to shape you.



And you pick up that old acoustic

And play the tune of one thousands odes.

What rage there is,

In youthful lovers.

The lustful want of incitement,

Excitement.



Passionate energy.

Unreserved and incorrigible resentment

For the men in suits,

Settle down.

Don’t settle down.



The pressure of ***

And the stench of expectation.

Bated breath as I reveal your weak

Underbelly.

Don’t speak, don’t apologise

As I count the freckles across your

Inner thighs.

I need to know I don’t need you.



Let me love you,

Let me.

It is time for a new speed.

A fresh pair of cotton socks and a handful of cash.

I’m going to take that road I have walked one hundred times

And walk it backwards.



I have slammed enough doors

To know when I’m ready to soften.

I must decide whether to hold my breath

And climb out of ground zero.

Or just lay down in the rubble.



I can see the dregs.

The grit in the tea, the flattened beer.

The paltry tobacco at the bottom of the bag.

Desolate and sparse. The ineffable honesty

Of the etchings around my eyes.



My legs twitch in a lethargic energy.

They kick out and twist in the bedsheets

Tangled in routine.

I’m kicking out against the bars

That constantly hold me in.

For seven-eighths of each day

I long for those instantaneous moments of

Unbridled joy.

I bid so long to Marianne

As I hear the full bubble of wine

And welcome Suzanne

And the fullness of her moistened lips.



Oh, if the eyes are portals to the soul,

Then the throat must positively be the vessel

To all that soothes the thunder

and causes our souls to shudder

In the watery pits of our gut.



These toxic tonics that we hold

Betwixt our baneful id,

And our most pathetic of egos.



This lamb that tames the lion,

Purple hearted with paranoia

and a lack of trust to rival even the most barbarous

Of governments.



**** me or don’t.

Perhaps the only mark of solace in this life

Is to be stabbed in the front

And to avoid the hustling of the scheming lovers

Behind the roman blinds of your devotion.



Set fire to Marianne.

You can lay with Suzanne

But don’t share a smoke with her.

Because she will take.

And take.

Take.

T.

Since I was a child I believed.

Believed in the near tangible,

The provable

The almost-rational.

I could never swallow the bitter pill of faith,

Religion,

God,

The dust and ash of rinsed out fables.



I still search the skies with a lack of avail.

I’d settle for a twitch of movement

But I dream of those purple beams,

So violent and foreign.

The opening of the doors

Should budge our closed minds.

Your sleepy scent,

Knotted hair.

You are the ineffable advent

Of each of my days.

I guess you were once my woman.

But I was just a boy.

And I assumed I was your romance,

Crushed rose petals scattered in joy.



I guess I caught the first taste of tears,

The salt that would line your eyes.

Every time you caught your beauty

And for all those men who lied.



For in you I smelt a mother,

The softness within your skin.

Oh, it was in you I felt a lover,

That clench in my stomach,

That causes men to sing.



And I guess you were once my woman,

And I wish I could return

Into those breezy arms,

And feel the familiar pages turn.

The sound of silence
So frequently documented
Resides in my bones.

My restless brain sleeps.
Saved from the wretchedness
Of one million sounds.

And I let myself write.

The din of a stadium
Full of klaxons and canned laughter
Is now but an echo
And it is just Nina and I.

I can stare endlessly out of the window
And not be asked why.
I can sit stubbornly with my mouth taped shut
And not be asked why.
I can sit and strum
Out of time and out of key
And not be asked why.

And I let myself write.

A scattering a books and a half-made bed.
A cooling mug of tea.
I am laid bare afore the eyes of nobody
The fool of the romantics, and the jester of the ghosts.

And I sit here and just sit.
Twitching my lips along the grooves of these words
Stumbling over them in a soundless whisper.

And I let myself write.

This sound of silence,
So fleetingly fair
Will last just moments.

The chimes will soon sound
And one million yawns
Will tremble in the throats of others.

So for now,
I let myself write.