Distraction! The skirting board is alive.
Last year's grit at the back of a desk;
you have a story to write,
a good friend to deceive, phone calls
to make to indifferent ears.
Dirt accumulates, black algae
in the carpet, and nothing on your mind.

There is an ****** in the sidelines,
it will have to wait – a soap opera,
a bath of salt, a supply of coffee:
catalyst for the morning,
some razor blade, a brand new face.
“A necessity!”she drools, a fragrant potion,
whilst children cry and die in Gaza.

The cigarette falters in its promise,
the fantasist friend, last year's prophet;
you have a life to live
but that can wait another year.
Love sits in your mouth, fat accumulation;
tasteless reprieve from hunger, a motion-
anything to escape stillness, immediacy.

Men in drag lift their skirts to the screen,
the fool is on the hill, the billboard; a dream
of fame litters your focus, your self-hood.
There is a pyramid built for better people,
all these old institutions – indefatigable ladder!
The rings of tea caramelise on the table,
married to the places you have been before.

Elusive enterprise – unfulfilled spark,
you suffocate in oxygen, heat lost to air,
embrace yesterday's comfort, tomorrow's snare.
Take another day inside this indistinguishable prison.
The walls are glass. Eligible, you vote for Hope.
For the drug of the future, a disbursed present
for minimum wage, accepting slave; your eventual grave.

I followed you out of the picture,
our subtle breakdowns, anti-matter,
too drunk to function, too vibrant to sleep.

The tables were numbered when we sat to eat,
uniform plates, revolving staff, doors open
to the public, red wine on tap.

I met you in the bathroom, venetian white,
***** on your sleeve, tears in your eyes,
love on your tongue – an emptied stomach.

I know I can poison you with words,
stop your taste for wine with a kiss.

I followed you to the open grounds,
pollen thick in my lungs, the wind ate sound,
removing all history: you and me, you and me.

The fountain turned copper with generosity,
faded queen, bottle-cap fraud; crowds took us
to alleyways, to your opened front door.

I met you in the kitchen, synthetic white,
heart on your sleeve, *** in your eyes,
tongue upon tongue – truth amongst lies.

I know I can save you from endless distraction,
this need for a fiction; this want for an action.

Pain is getting old, nuisance slug
of toothpaste on a morning suit,
crest of daylight over dry eyes
at the first itch of addiction, processions
of commonplace panic begin
before the kettle comes to boil.

Pain ****** me like an alpha,
chained me to the kitchen sink. The brink
of insanity - messianic car-crashes, dead poets,
and cult leaders occupied our lives. Pain
lived inside, petroleum on fish-scale,
bone upon bone, a lie amongst lies.

Pain came to doctor the fairytale,
black-faced censorship, attention to detail
when forcing guilt under hysterical skies,
a cumulus jury, the persecution of 'I'.
Pain came to go over old grievances,
the people I knew, the friends that I missed.

The door slammed shut so long ago,
your shadow in the breeze,
I find the pencil and the song you wrote
that brought me to my knees.

Christmas came on lower branches,
the cheap seats, the lonely guitar,
I sang to the person who you used to be
and smoked out who you are.

Even now I am still diseased,
still struggling to find a G-d.

Thought I found him in the autumn leaves,
before I was certain, he was gone.

The window shook on its hind legs
as the widow swallowed her sleep,
the spider came out from his abattoir,
all searching in darkness deep.

In a single bed, teeth grit shut,
twisting sheets in the street-light glow,
I hold my pillow like a brand-new woman,
exchanging heat for the money I owe.

Even now I am still fatigued,
indebted to G-d and home-grown guilt.

I have learned to grow and plant my seed
far from shadows that bring me to wilt.

Alexandria, former lover,
though I knew you well.
Halls lined with books,
we memorised the details-
it was the meaning we forgot.
The river ran dry so long ago,
burned your books to the ground
and became the resting place
for men bearing gifts.
Learned the trade:
love in the modern age.
You took your fill,
left before you were dismissed.

Alexandria, you learned to open your legs,
blot out your heart,
endless doodles on a wet afternoon;
ear to the phone
in an empty room.
Need someone there to fill your time,
the day so long – crop so dry.
Wine in the evening,
your life-long amnesty.
We took to drink together
but you drank for yourself.
All those years of lost prudence,
all knowledge turned to ash.

Alexandria, your former glory,
the peace that will depart.
Entropy over your bed-side desk-
your habits always coloured your interests.
What happened to your monuments,
Your brick-by-brick
malaise
into being? Lost it to superstition,
found a religion and stuck to it-
the alibi of the thief.
You always fell beneath the sheets
at the first sign of winter,
every time you heard love
on someone’s tongue.

Alexandria, wordless chorus,
poetry in your movements.
Used to watch smoke
crawl into the fibres of your cardigan,
all studious and high in the garden.
Weeds came through the concrete.
The sun always seemed to be coming down.
Foxes looted the back-streets.
Took the same walk each day
in an attempt to bring down the walls.
All that is left of you is not mine.
You only ever belonged to yourself.
Alexandria, you sat in silence

whilst inducing men to sing.

I think about you.
In a public suit, tight smile, destitute,
running out of steam in your mid-twenties.
We suffer for you, we do.
We do.

You died twice, you, once as
ruined core, ants scheming, plundered sugar.
The second, a rainbow funeral.
You were early to the party for once,
but as usual, you refused to speak.

Clouds turn pink in January, the second frost
over her cardboard grave, a birth of worms.
I will see more winters than you. You who
found *** in a private joke, the Great Electron
in all of your Buddhist theories
and those endless streams of smoke.

I mourn a kitten. The slowing stream of green tea,
the poison in the air; the malignant children
of consumerism. I do not **** for anaesthesia,
will not be killed for a chance at peace.

You, who comes to mind at each muted note,
each muffled string of potential sound.

I want the love
familiar chords promise
as I smoke by the windowsill
and think about quitting.

Hair doused in seawater
and drying out in the sun,

a conjured reality suffices
to salt my food, to revive my senses.

I want the love
of an angry mob,
revolution on every tongue

and violence never far from the centre.
The removal of myself

from society coincided with my brief insanity
and I should say that I am never coming back.

I want the love
that remains after that.
In the absence of Jesus,
in the absence of Fact.

The library is more like a hospital.
Bleached lights cause migraines,
the words too clinical and exposed
like eczema scars on my wrists.
It is too bright to fall in a thicket
of cognitive thought  and blind imagery.

The secret of beauty is good lighting.
I could never fall in love with a word
under such a surgical glow,
all intimacy on show in a place meant for
German Dictionaries and free wi-fi.
A place for the missing to sleep,
and not a place to daydream.

There is no smell of coffee,
only the occasional whiff and crackle
of a surreptitious sandwich interrupting
the stale breath of printer ink and ointment.
I am all for public places
until I find myself within one.

Exposed under these artificial stars,
I come here for a chance of no distraction.
Each time, however, I find myself languid.
Eyes set to some indefatigable point
whilst I catch the taste of shared air,
the sirens in the distance,
the location of nowhere.

There is a higher power in the salt shaker,
and a divine truth found in the tea leaves
that circulate green water
and bring taste to my afternoon.
Customers suffice laden minds through new year's wind,
past recollections of old stores and vacant faces.
There are skeletons in their back pockets
and a common secret behind their eyes.

Each one of us desires time alone or time in company:
the dissatisfied, default state of the human condition.
I fell asleep to a world of smoke and ****,
then awoke to words and a sea of coffee chains,
gathering a philosophy from faces in the wood,
and having conversations with my own conjecture.
The black mass of last year is behind me.
It stalks my dreams but cannot sustain through daylight.

Happiness has fallen over me, clumsily,
so like a child learning how to walk.
I stumble out of the door, consulting each car window
reflection, to ensure that my crazy is not on show.
But this is the town that Crazy built.
We walk in patterns, performing domestic rituals
to occupy our mind, amongst societal demise.
It feels as if there is nothing left for us

as the drop-outs drink Special Brew by the gravestones,
and the rich turn tail-lights - tired pilgrim of London.
Only the lunatic fringe still look for contact
in a wireless world of sedentary care,
frequenting the bars that they used to love
before this small town fell to a blue-eyed catatonia.
The milk is settling in the eyes of the chronics;
the old folk coughing blood and ******* in their pants.

There is a higher power in my stride today
and a numinous edge to the girl in black stockings.
She lays out in my mind,
spreading her fingers in temporary joy.
I play the customer and pay for my tea,
for a material justification for why I left the house.
There is time here, to imagine my heroic escape.
How I will shake off all this Crazy,
how I will fall back into shape.

The room is full of blueprints.
City layouts; an imagined society
idolised in street-art,
in music halls,
and Greek tragedy.

Unfinished songs are stuck to the walls.
Archived chords to a forgotten verse,
all sentiment lost through the unsung months.

I am living with my mother again.
No longer a patient
but the unfortunate son,
the vein in her conscience,
the guilt in her lungs.

She leaves clothes folded by the locked door
as I stumble through an addict's routine,
Hope returns in the combustion of resin,

in the sweet demise of anxious lies,
in the cloak of a chemical dream.

The neighbours are making their rounds.
They tend to their allotments under the allowance
of nature, a certainty in the seasons
as they compensate for the disorder
in their lives: the mislaid decisions
that gave comfort
at the expense of vitality.

James watches them from the bedroom window,
the way everyone walks with a proud hunch.
How the stem of a flower grows into the wind.
Flakes of white paint fall off the windowsill
like sugared almonds: the sweetness
of his anxiety,
the agitation of tobacco.

It is the only patch of green in a mile,
a cell of vegetation behind a locked gate.
A frost threatens and calloused hands
turn to pink cushion, blue extremities
folding tarp: a devoted shelter for
next season's radishes,
whilst the homeless die in the streets.

The snow piles up and is then washed away
like the change in an alcoholic's wallet,
appearing too briefly to instate a memory,
whilst the world remains unchanged, come morn.

Last year I smiled with tears in my eyes
as the snow fell and I waited for the bus.
I could feel the onset of a great transition;
but I had to lose my mind, before I found myself.

It has been a long year of beer bottled ash
and months spent catching up on lost sleep.
The pills came to take a weight from me,
until I gained the strength to carry the rest.

Songs have appeared with omniscient timing
to carry my breath through the bulrushes
of the river that never seemed to reach a source.
I am still looking for the ocean blue, the view

that will take me from these seasonal lows,
to a place where I can thaw out and live.

She stands still over the tectonic fracture
between the love divined through a song lyric
and the disappointment felt in the immediacy
of familiar faces; love as some sterile function.
Tightened gauze over a worried stranger's head,
she tends to the Troubled as a rock garden:
arranging immovable boulders to a sea of pebbles,
opal textures and softened hearts come as a result
of her well-practised, beckoning smile.

She causes grown men to sing at their guitars,
turgid chorus and muttered longings for completion.
An imagined sight: her hair falling in waves
and eddying the islands of arousal across her
heaving, welcoming lungs. In truth, it had been
years since she had given herself to anyone,
more letting out her property for those that she
is obliged to love, and feel love in return.

She collects flowers and fruits in her mind's orchard,
in those spaces between phone calls and the eyes
that follow her strides during tired lunch breaks.
A mindful stupor has overcome her way of living
to the point that life is a procession of duties,
or truths only confided after the fourth glass of wine.
She stands still in the wake of her condition.
The way troubles gravitate into galaxies of doubt,
the way she hides beneath a polluted sky,
stood at the point I blindly stumble towards.

At seventeen I stepped out of the cloud
and into a clearer knowledge; an atypical
viewpoint skewed by my heritage and
stubborn willingness to always be right.

Some kind of British tolerance has kept me
from howling 'injustice!' in the streets,
whilst some idiotic notion of love or truth
presides, to keep me invested in this life.

With knowledge comes the weight of knowing
and it wore my shoulder down to a chip,
causing me to walk in hurried strides
in order to keep balance, to make my way.

With clarity comes a more potent love;
all features and laughter amplified
to make you forget the sound of silence,
until you cannot deal with its return.

Some kind of solace has been found
in reducing life's events to a plot device,
whilst some irreducible desire causes me
to wake, to persist with a purpose.

At twenty-three I found that better sight
only illuminates the complexity of existence,
the fractal nature of the developing foetus;
echoes of evolution: a better self each day.

I cannot write an honest poem
in the fear of losing you.
That the shutters of concern
will be lowered, as everyone
turns to face the screen instead.

I cannot deal with blind windows,
I cannot suffer in privation.
But the thought of eyes on me
and sustained conversation
leads me to blackout again.

The story rolls on
and days keep coming by.
The seasons change
despite my lack of animation,
and they cause me
to see the world as it is.

The Agentic State
has stolen our land
and human nature.
We swallow stillness with panic
and over-stimulation;
no chance for peaceful completion.

I cannot give you any truth,
when my truths got me here
in the first place. I cannot
write to you about the coastline
as I never get to hold it.

All I can do is remain in my place,
tarry within the comfort of lies.
If you allow me more time
in poverty, I will repay you
in thoughts turned to rhyme.

*Though I know you'd prefer cash.

World of code;

riddle,
and a brand new
language.
I hold you close my
dear, as you stumble on through the dark night.
This knowledge
is hastening to bring my demise.
You sit within my pentameter,
so when did
I lose my peaceful mind?
I'm still struggling in poetry, in finding art
amongst the burdens of the street. You're applying sunscreen
to your back and shoulders, and then
you're basking in the heat of my astral beach.
I'm stranded here
alone now,
sending these postcards
to nowhere at all. I have grown tired
of this mere existence,
of fading in the city sprawl.
Now Mathematics
is the language of the universe,
and will speak for
centuries to come,
gravity making sense
out of chaos, and will talk forever over
the nuclear bomb.
I'm learning
my sums again darling, I'm going back
to a clean state of mind, hoping to discover
an answer, to why I'm

constantly falling
behind. When I find the equation I will
call you, and profess them unto the stars,
a love never lost
in
translation, now witnessing both the sea and the source.

Don't give yourself to points of misery
every time the die doesn't fall your way,
for tomorrow could be the day you wake
to all of the outcomes in the right place.

I have seen it for myself, my dear friend,
the way days drag on but you have no time
to find a conclusion, to find a reason
as to why you even woke up at all.

But the day will come when fear has no hold,
only loose ties to old loves and old selves.
You can learn to count your blessings amongst
all of the wreckage of your misfortune.

You will find yourself amongst lost pieces.
You will finally see all that you've done.
You are noticed my friend, and always loved.
The day will come when you see it for yourself.

I remember all of the stupid things.
The gap in my first love's fringe
that appeared only when she was flustered,
or torn between *** and G-d.
The nursery teacher who resembled
Jane Goodall and sat with me
whilst my hayfever was too potent
to play out in the sun.

I remember the exuberance of heat
on the concrete slabs in my first back garden.
How my mother would take
boiling water to the empires of ants
that would find life in the cracks
and crevices between my footfalls.
I remember how silent they were
through oppression and death.

I remember my first sight of the ocean.
How serene it looked in the distance,
how unforgiving and cold it was
once I threw my whole weight into it.
The shivering donkeys on the beach,
agitated by the ice-cream crowds;
the man who handled snakes for a living
and persuaded me to touch a killer.

I remember my first guitar
and how I stared at it helplessly
for two hours, like a teenage boy
on his first sight of a ******.
The first sad song to deliver a feeling
never experienced, but communicated;
how adults failed to answer the questions
that music gave forth effortlessly.

I remember when you started leaving
kisses at the end of your messages,
the formulaic gaps in time
before I would hear from you again;
your costume of nonchalance.
The way you appeared in the wasteland hours,
playing the therapist with your kind words
and history of neurosis.

I remember the sheet of plastic
that shielded me from the rain as a child,
the rubber wheels of my carriage
buckling through puddles and gaps;
the first exposure to nature's lullaby,
as I fall asleep through storm and traffic.
I remember how easily sleep once came,
and how I resisted it all the same.

I remember my recurring nightmare.
A big red button and the doors of hell;
some spectre of infinite density
that caterwauled for the destruction
of all things human, all things new.
The way my mother's arms were infallible,
the priest's glare, omniscient;
the revolting concept of a cigarette.

I remember all of the useless things.
The rings around my grandfather's eyes
on the only occasion I saw him cry.
Kissing Rebecca on the lips,
cementing our love with tree sap
and the promise of an endless summer.
I remember the first time I felt sad
without having a reason to be so.

I remember the shine of the room
when I took pills for the first time;
the incorrigible thirst for water
and the racing confessions that followed.
I remember how it felt,
the first time I trapped someone in a poem;
how easy it was to forget them
once reduced to words and half-truths.

I fell in love with a superstition.
She kept crystals at her bedside
to ward off wraiths and bailiffs,
selling friendship bracelets to
strangers on the internet whilst
keeping family in her prayers.

She would wander the fields
of **** and sunflower seeds,
howling at the moon without
another soul to converse with;
obsessive-compulsive murmurs
of a Hail Mary and incantations.

Potions of ayahuasca and sugar
brewed on the hob in the kitchen,
fridge magnets full of idioms and
passages from the Book of Psalms.
By the fire sat a pristine tin cauldron
with the price-tag still left on it.

Broomsticks were mounted on the wall
like lazy guitars or executed deer.
No photographs, only proud trinkets
and yoga mats; a crucifix hung over
every doorway, whilst she had learned
to cross her legs from all men and pain.

She laid me down on the bed
with a hungry sleight of hand
to show me her favourite trick;
I saw the marks on her arms
before she came alive in the dark,
and by the daylight - she had gone.

You cannot own my river
but I will let you name the sea,
with its fortressed depth
and alien life,
all out of sight and out of mind;
the poisoned sustenance of brine.

Leave the blame at my feet
and forget me over time,
you can take the roads
leading north,
if you allow me to take the south,
with no chance of a future collide.

We can cut a deal over the reservoir
if I can retain the quarry,
it was never yours
from the start,
but you can play the victim's harp,
whilst I tattoo over my scars.

I will sing for the Star of Bethlehem,
you can fall into the arms of David,
you can make it out and
pay your dues,
shine lights onto your winter blues,
whilst I anaesthetise each painful bruise.

You can paint over the wallpaper
whilst I am replacing all my strings,
we can change the meaning
to our favourite songs,
I will sever the ties to unalterable tunes;
all of those words that lead back to you.

My hands are trembling more than usual,
so I have altered my coffee to a camomile tea.
I administer everything as if it were medicine;
a chemist punctuating his day with
guilty cigarettes and vague homoeopathy.
It's all *******, I know-
but whatever gets you through the day...

In the season of advent, my fingers are bitten
down to the quick; throat seared with
half-functioning lighters and fragile matches;
I can scarcely operate either in this state.
The fairy-lights turn the high-street to a runway.
But all I see are charity shops
interceded with bookies and coffee houses.

This home-town exists to keep up my interest
in finding some purpose. A path to eventual escape
from all of these old bonds and ties,
pinning me down with memories of ***,
and all of the street-names I have learned by rote.
*I'm treading water here-
living in the comfort of a sink-hole.

G-d knows I have tried
but he did nothing to help me.

I met my father at the end of the world
in a soundless meditation;
the still waters surrounded us
on some obsolete island,
but he could offer me nothing
apart from the same watery smile
I find in the mirror each time I drink.

Love came to me once
but I never felt worthy of it.

Since then, human touch was reduced
to formulaic platitudes;
a handshake from unerring acquaintances
and embraces from old friends
that always end too soon.
It is hard to be kind to yourself
when your bed is resolutely vacant.

Words may come to comfort others
but I am tired of hearing my voice.

Self-worth was lost to cigarette butts
and a loose grip on my sanity;
tasteless food sits in my mouth
and I can no longer appreciate
the fruits of privilege and shelter.
I am shielded from the rain
but the winter still finds me.

G-d knows I am doing my best.
It never quite seems enough.

I re-discovered an old habit today.
Hot water was drilling down my spine
as my extremities tarried in winter's cold.
Steam rose in translucent plumes about me
as I stood and stared at the drain;
angry torrents of colourless molecules
clamouring for the better seats
on their endless, thoughtless commute
through blind tunnels and inescapable voids.
I turned the shower pink.
I was not sure why but I enjoyed the art:
the statement of life amongst
well-ordered shampoo bottles
and the pristine white of the room;
a chance to claim substance again
after slipping into old routines
and falling off the face of the Earth.
The old habit came in an airport reunion;
a thrill of recounting long-healed scars
and that familiar embrace with an old friend
you thought you would never meet again.
I remember your smell, I know your taste.
I stopped shaving a long time ago.

I am humble in my love
and patient in desire,
prepared to submit old selves
to an archived sacrifice
upon your new-age pyre.

Memories turn to fertile ash
and Eden forces a bloom,
with brand new eyes and cheap red wine,
I could crack the shell
to my sun-starved tomb.

These hands have been empty
and turned up to the sky
in some anxious bid for lonesome calm;
a fettered attempt for higher states,
and a fading, sober lullaby.

O come fill them up
with something I can hold,
no dream of love but love itself;
beyond the snare of death
and all of the stories we have been told.

Where will I go when I am dead?
Will I get the chance to rest my head,
to finally find a comfort to sleep,
to make up for the lovers
I have failed to keep?

Will I meet my father at the end?
Where fragments gather and come to mend-
all of these pieces that I have been,
all broken strings, false surnames,
and sights left unseen.

Will I come to say what was never said,
or else forsake these words for your open bed?
In death, will there come a feeling I have missed,
through this fear of living,
this drunken, tearful mist?

I light up a joint on the cemetery walk,
skimming the tombstones with swollen eyes.
Whether pen or print, engraving or chalk,
will some higher truth sustain me
beyond a life of erosion and lies;

will any of these misguided words
make it through to more tolerable times?

Eating lunch alone.
All tables are numbered
and each meal standardised.
I used to have someone
to distract me from the subtitled news
and the taste of microwaved mashed potato.
I fear I am growing old and mute.
The dole comes in but all funds are withdrew
before the chance to purchase a smile
or a new pair of shoes.
I have been walking in circles and perimeters
for too long now
but to sit and sit alone
is more painful than blisters and a bruised sole.
I miss the company
of clinking glass and snorts of laughter
between tasteless bites.

I chose coffee over beer today.
At least that is something.

But sobriety only expands the view
and makes these empty spaces
even harder to fill.

I don't want to work for you,
fake a smile in this costume,
I don't want another day
of a boring job and ****** pay.

And I don't believe in G-d,
no TV expert or demagogue,
promising a different way,
it's the same formulaic play.

So I twist in sheets and walk around
to escape all of these household sounds,
the news is spouting war again,
I close my eyes and count to ten...

...And I wait for some change to come.
Your patient ***, your siren song.
Are you maladjusted too?
And do I have a chance with you?

Because I slip a pill to fall asleep-
nothing else will work for me,
I've tried everything there is
to cure me from this restlessness.

They **** the many to save the few,
they decimate all that we knew
about what it means to be free;
doctoring our history.

And I don't want to be the one
to bring you down or mess you up,
I just want some peace to come,
no broken streets, no fallen bombs...

...Is this all there is?
Pockets of momentary bliss?
I just close my eyes and think of you;
my drunken words,
your ocean blue.

I'll close my eyes, my mind, my tomb;
if I could have a chance with you.

What would you write about me?

I know how you would shy away from the term 'best friend'. Such a lofty position to hold in one's life – one that, you think, could never be afforded to you and your self-effacing ways.

Never one to gush or to quantify feelings into measurable and incriminating words of affection, or indeed, to impart friendliness through any means other than private jokes and last-minute hugs; I know full well that this enterprise of writing for you is rather trite and pointless. I would be better off wringing my hands and waiting anxiously by your front door.

But I am through with transient sensations of red wine and naked, fictitious, unobtainable women. I am through with curing a world that does not want to be cured. I have drank more than enough coffee, so to write bitterly would only **** all sensations.

In rations of cigarettes and endless walks, you helped to facilitate a recovery that at times I felt was beyond me – and probably was, without you. You and I, experts at self-hate and isolation, found a kindness in the exchange of insults, dead arms, and dreams of an escape from these streets of all-too-familiar names and faces – our unwanted dependence on our mothers and indifferent friends.

There have been times when I have left you behind. It scalds me to think of those years you spent in containment, inside the four walls of your mother's house with only her acid tongue for company. No job, no voice, and only tedious entertainment – those torn nights where you went out of your mind with boredom and hopelessness. All whilst I was too busy and too far-off to take the time to notice.

I discarded you in favour of a love that was always going to lose its charm, lose its patience with my lazy sadness and horrendous monobrow. It was a wretched way to treat a friend, I know, and no silly poem or attempt at prose could come close to bridging the deficit.

There is no ugliness in fragility, but it is gruesome to be lonely. In the cheap affair of swing-side smoke and your father's stolen whiskey, you taught me there is no need for success, if failure is found in good company.

And yet I wish you completion and contentment with a desperate gratitude above that of all others. You have lived too long a life set in compromise with your captors; persistent aches of insufficiency in some form or another, and self-punishment for everything that is out of your control.

In sleepless nights and deathly, early mornings, in which you cannot differentiate between the two, or where dreams begin and end; you are piecing together a life of your own. A brave, painstaking betterment of yourself, after bathing so long in a helpless void. Not once was I there to help you through, to be the voice at the end of the line that I so claim to be.

Despite this, you gave me those late-night vigils, talking between screens, in words that resembled care and concern, regardless of their off-hand and conversational tone.

I know that I have made you cry during the times I have wanted to die. I know I have shut myself from you at times when you needed an open door. So from now on, everything is left on the latch for you. No weather, time, or entity, will prevent me from repaying my debts.

I have found a friend to crawl home to. All of the rest is filler. All of the rest, I can live without.

Pain has ruined my mind
to the point I can only meet
Pleasure behind Pain's back.

A synthetic thunderstorm envelops me
and I forget where my life is.
I forget about you and your fluent tongue
of disinterest, puppetry, and misinformation.
I forget the speakers and soundscapes;
wires and ties and strings attached,
the way I struggle to sleep alone,
but cannot share my life with anyone.

I forget the next payday, the next lay;
the need to borrow words and feelings
just to make sense of my own.
Distraction and hunger for nicotine
become near-echoes of a past life-
an umbilical bond to old decades
of habit and mistrust for the sober mind.
I forget the ash and ends I have left behind.

The ocean is close but occupies no space,
only the airwaves with a rhythmic breath
to still my own, reducing my identity
to fractals of self-interest and oneness.
I forget who I am amongst the writing desk,
The Book Of Longing, the cooling tea;
the stagnant water. I forget flesh desire,
violent ***, and apologetic *******.

I forget, for once, the need to live,
amongst all of this living.

Rock bottom is fantastic for perspective.

everything feels fun and new.
i mean, i'm in no way a functioning adult
but some sort of weight has been lifted.
i feel good. i am singing - of sorts - again.
i am writing better words
and smiling more.
there are still spaces to be filled
and a few more caverns to explore
but there is no endless void or black hole.
only oil-lit passageways underground
where i will go when i'm low
in the knowledge that i will find my way out.

When the night comes
so will you.

He chains black coffee and cigarettes,
knocking ash into last night's beer bottles
whilst Tom Waits is yowling from the stereo.
The Sunday morning is bright-white
like the bleached kitchen counters
that spread in uniform fashion
across the neighbourhood.
The window blinds him with the brilliance
of daylight, after staring too long at the screen.
Another chance to make a go at living,
but with the opportunity
of squandering it all the same.

Conscious that he was standing in his boxer shorts
and more so for the inevitable morning *******,
he checked for humanoid shapes in the allotments;
no Peeping Toms or curtain-twitchers,
only carcasses of Sunflowers
charred by November
and forming a Tunguskan fence.
In his incomplete state of a half-grown beard
and lack of full-time employment,
he found it quite impossible to think
that he was the present day culmination
of all humanity's endeavours.

Save for a relentless talent of self-destruction
and a penchant for giving oral ***,
he had long given up on a remarkable life,
instead savouring the aesthetic of smoke
curling by an open window,
or else watching the squirrels renovate their homes
to the patterns of the seasons.
A strain of survivors lead to his existence
but it didn't steel him in the slightest;
the most energetic thing he had done all week
was to kick a dog-chewed tennis ball
across the park in disgust at his life.

He kept a chart of happiness tacked to the wall
but he was always too depressed to fill it in.
Instead, there were books to be stared at
from their shelves, women to be thought of
but never spoken to;
a windowsill to lean against
and feel at one with the Earth.
Despite the cruelty of self-imposed detainment,
he had come to find a solace in stillness;
to slow his days to a glacial pace
with tense, quivering yoga poses,
and a disdain for daytime television.

During this hiatus for living he had finally
stopped biting the skin around his nails
to the point his fingers would bleed.
He was a man with a myriad of bad habits
and an maltreated disease,
but now the world was crashing around him
whilst he stood in the sidelines
as a disinterested spectator.
He has no stake in the outcome
of endless war and lottery tickets;
only the next collection of honest words,
and to where they might lead him.

You have been living as a ghost for too long.
Too long under the flood-lit hoardings,
advertising a necessity
you have never thought of before.
Too long spent pushing someone away
rather than letting go.
I thought of you in bed last night,
your pale complexion
and the way you smoke cigarettes;
an ache of habit
disguised as a fashion statement,
spinning into a pirouette
after tripping over the step.
You chose a career of kindness,
siphoning knowledge to a new generation
at the expense of your punk-rock credentials
and afternoon naps.
I thought of you again today.
How you are leaving the house
and all your old selves;
how I lag so far behind,
that I can barely see you now.

Slip a little something in my coffee.
Make me weak at the knees
and treat this disease,
because I am tired
of this hard-fought living,
this city of mortar,
my dungeon-held daughter.
I am tired of submitting to ***
like a calf to the slaughter,
or turning words over
like cigarette ends
by the homeless shelter,
by the beer garden,
where wine is thicker than water,
coursing through your veins,
as I lay your hair out
like a river delta.

For all I have written,
I have nothing left to say.
No promise of pay,
or an off-chance for loose change.
I have dug my hand
through every pocket,
through sofa cushions,
under coasters,
and a fork in the socket.
There are a million ways
to get yourself high,
to find those lights pirouetting
in the sky;
some pill-drawn lullaby
of amnesia haze
and ***-shot girls;
she concedes to the camera,
and even pulls a twirl.

Break your fingers at the piano.
Play me a tune
to enliven my moods,
some fast-paced chorus,
some prodigal son,
some forgotten chord
laid down by Horus.
The race isn't run,
though I faltered at the sound
of the starting gun,
I think I have found a rhythm,
I am hitting my stride,
I will cheer the **** up,
and not lay down to die.
Please, lend me a kindness,
as I pay off my debts,
either passionless crime,

or transactional ***.

Bury me inside your appetite
for rough *** and bad poetry.
I want to lose my Self
to memories of your ******* father
and catholic guilt;
your fears for the Holderness coast,
and how large bodies of water
enter all your dreams.
Ever since I learned your name,
I wanted to drown within it.

The billionaires tend to their garden
at the expense of the forest,
whilst landlocked towns
invest in pine trees and surfboards
to sell a notion of escape
against the cell of a poorer tomorrow.

Religion lost its claim to G-d
once the churches locked their doors.
The homeless started a choir
on the park bench by the chapel
once they grew tired of food;
fame now the nutrition of the masses.

The baby boomers are a dying breed
set for containment and greed
and rapacious war;
the dreadful threat of a next door neighbour-
their extinction amongst
a millennial wantonness.

Heiresses brush their hair in vanity,
as does the poet to his white-noise
crowd of lunatics and alcoholics.
He crushes diazepam into his whiskey sour,
then lifts a shaking hand

to find the power he is preaching against.

What a bliss-
to wake up beside an old friend
and feel familiar hands
hold you in familiar sheets,
a habitual ache
you have known since childhood,
and can never quite feel yourself
without.

Someday,
when the weeds are
growing all around me,
I will bury you in dirt
and then choose the words
that will act
as a cold-reading pacifier
for the crowds
who thought they knew you.

Maybe
you thought I would
be the first to go;
a near-certain bet
for the first to our death,
only for me to find youth
in my old age,
hitting form at the after-party,
just as everyone else
is looking for sleep.

Sweetheart,
I learned to stretch out
the hours of retirement
in a posture that can be sustained;
beyond mood shifts
and weather patterns,
to a place in which
I welcome the rain.
The allotment is flourishing,
my unsheathed Vishuddha.

Still,
**** my hippie fantasies
if I cannot hear your voice.

I need to clothe this manic obsession
for acceptance and digital affection.
The mornings turn to midnight
before I have started my day,
and the wind is blowing reminders of Newcastle;
the lack of warmth becoming prominent
in the absence of loving flesh.

There must be a better life somewhere,
beyond uncertainty and marketed freedoms.
Beyond where only question marks
punctuate endless months
of Novembers and displacement;
the chasm between who I am in the doorway,
and who I really mean to be.

I hear you are carving a living
out of the ways you almost died in the past.
You are signing forms for others,
you are making tea for trembling hands,
all the while wondering how it came to be you
sat on the right side of the table,
and away from the wrong side of the bar.

You told me an operator will find me,
a receptive ear to put me through
to someone who will know how to help.
In the meantime, you said, I should love music,
for when the shop-fronts have closed
and friends grow fat and indifferent,
Tom will sing Hold On until I can find sleep,

or at least a viable dream.

When I make it big,
I will take my friends with me.
We will drink beer like tap water
and walk the parade into town,
a gallery of sun-glass women
in floral dresses
and old men smoking shisha
outside the beach-front bars.

When I make it big,
I will stop writing letters pleading
to be fixed. I will smile at the waitress
as she brings over my coffee
and talk to new faces
about the cost of living,
the price of success,
and the limited budget of death.'

When I make it big,
I will wear my depression
like a badge of honour.
Sitting on the park bench
where I nearly lost my life,
I will press my soles into the grass
and with exhausted tears I will know
that I have never felt more alive.

When I make it big,
perhaps this town will not seem so small.
I will erase guilt from memories,
left with a clearer image
of old faces and buildings,
recalling all of the elements
that have created me.
When I make it big

I will find a brave knowledge.
I will know that if I fall to pieces,
I can put myself back together again.

You fenced off your eyes
with a charcoal black,
then stranded in snow
and an endless depression,
you painted your death-mask
in venetian ceruse,
hoping that it would be enough
to appease your critics;
to keep away from the sun,
to slip through the seams of time,
and to a place where
the evenings do not seem so long.

You gave your sanity
to a useless drug
and kept your identity
to the picture
within his wallet.
I hope you know your bravery is noticed.
I hope that for once
you can find peace
amongst this constant state of war.

I want to see you stripped
down to bare elements;
a deaf-blind entry
into knowing you,
because I am tired of words,
words, words,
and a lack of warmth
beneath my hands.

I want to see your hair
spread like a river delta
over the pillow;
content and raw
with exhaustion and red wine.
Drunk and torn
from the monotony
of long nights in an empty bed.

I have tried to replace it
with peppermint tea,
I have tried to repress it
with Phenibut and ****.
Painting wood the colour of metal,
I moved to erase the splinters
by feigning progression,
whilst all the while
that thorn in my side
became a mental health obsession.

I have tried to better it
with morning walks and coffee,
I have tried to harness it
with Chaturanga and poetry.
Siphoning words through a trusted vessel,
I came to meditate belonging
through crystals and nicotine,
whilst all the while
that space in my bed
could no longer be filled with wine.

I have tried to fulfil it
with an endless stream of ****,
I have tried to out-live it,
but always fall asleep by dawn.
Kissing through the sweat of a fever,
I bite my pillow-case and
think of your inner thighs,
whilst all the while
that warmth of touch
is lost to the cold, empty skies.

She arches her back on the yoga mat,
channelling Durdle Door.
In full-length breath
and composed hypertension,
she remains unmoved
as the world about her
suffers to mass
and the moving ocean floor.

Well-versed in the effects of cold air
and rhythmic bombardment,
she has learned a stillness
to rival the effects of pink wine
on her nerves
and her taste for cigarettes.
My sweet Venusian,
despite physical prowess,

cannot sustain her poses
against time and internalised illness.

The market is so ingrained in us
that even revolution needs
a memorable slogan
and a celebrity face
to mask the crowd.

Had you been born,
my Tibetan bowl and whale song
would have been deafened by
dawn-struck alarm clocks
and ***** down my album sleeve.

Had you been born,
I would be toiling dishonest fields
for an honest go at living.
I would be sober for an evening
and wake with habitual ease.

Had you been born,
none of these words would be written
and poetry could only reside
in the spelling of your name
and your clumsy, childish gait.

Had you been born,
you would have stolen all love,
to the point I would hate myself
and only find fractions of it
in the women I would meet.

Had you been born,
I would have learned how to speak
in assertive tones
to regiment your mind,
to distil you from violence.

Had you been born,
I would now be an adult
with no margin for error,
no time for a future,
but with the promise of a home.

Are you suffering from Bleeding Heart Syndrome?
The regrettable empathy for swollen crowds
of decimated veins and charity bags
being laid upon every front door.

The red tops scorn compassion and reason.
If you are searching for derivatives and elements
amongst insoluble problems, then you have no right
to a meaningful opinion.

Do you battle with your conscience as the addict
bundles his syringes into the public bin?
You have been told more than enough times
to flog and to point the finger.

And so why do you cry? Blood is precious
and yet you pour it out for another lost cause,
whilst there are countless functioning adults
who have worked hard to earn your approval.

Do not waste your time with understanding
when there are taxes to be paid,
whilst bombs retain our strategic place;
whilst we are running low on space.