I thought the ceasefire had come.
I had survived the press gangs
and carpet bombs
and the drum of war had been
reduced to the constant undying
thud of my heart.
I was hoping to feign retreat.
Three days of deepest winter
before a new year in the sun
hanging like Christ over the Zodiac
and not from the branch
of my father's tree.

The extension cord came loose.
Bread knives are now curious
fascinations
and sit in my stomach like
so much red wine and that writer's pride
in greeting death.
I was hoping to gain a peace.
To place it like a necklace
or badge of honour on my breast
to remind the tourists of the ******
that ravaged the town
I had grown up in.

I have eight years left to die.
After that I will grow fat
and loose in mind
and forget why sadness is
so important in the modern world
of dying art.
I was hoping for vague release.
Something to **** cowardice
and that hesitant breath before
the pull of a blade or jump to the sea
of endless black hole
and icy relief.

I thought the ceasefire had come.
We had stood outside to watch
the confetti
fall to the ground with delay
in a wind we had come to suspect
would destroy us.
I was hoping to gain belief.
I thought the rockets  had stopped
or else been pointed to the sky
in a bottled message from all mankind
to another place,
to another time.

I started sipping on nettle tea
after I figured I should warm myself
now I cannot afford the heating bill
I could not quit the cigarettes
nor the obsessive clipping of the skin
around my fingernails
it is the kind of night to call you
it is the kind of night
not to be alone
I am getting good at it now though
They have started a new reality show
on the nature of consciousness
but mostly they just **** and fight
it is fantastic to watch
I think we are being prepared
to begin surveillance on each other
in this broken down state
I hope you will catch me stealing
I hope you will look out for me
it is all that I do

I

We lost the art of brand new sight,
of sleep unaided in dreams of flight,
when tendons grew
our hopes diminished,
we set to flame
all the books we had finished.

We faced childhood's end upon the start
of routine pain and a world-weary heart.
When sadness grew
without a good reason,
we viewed happiness
as just a passing season.

We felt parents weep upon our shoulder,
experienced loss but never grew older.
The passing of time
has kept you away,
but upon my first kiss,
I shall ask you to stay.

II

Our father was a lion buried under the mound
in the jungle grass of our garden. When trains
passed by at night, we roared our father's calls
back to him. We always felt we would meet him.

In boundless energy, we would climb the tree,
scale the back-alley car-park, parading maladies
as a badge of honour. We were going to be
astronauts, playing football on the moon.

There was no time for debts or tomorrows,
only the taste of sugar and plastic mints.
A long soak in the bath was a punishment,
with nothing but dirt to wash away.

III

I think of you in comfort
as I open unfamiliar doors,
as I fall in love with a photograph,
as I find myself sleeping on floors.

I think of you in solace
when waking up is hard,
when love has been reduced
to the print of a greeting card.

I think of you too often
as I dodge another bill,
as I waste a field to play within
and settle for the windowsill.

The wires are poking out
and a small childish plaster
covers over a broken artery,
turning to the colour of black pudding.
Cold toast sits on a plate
next to the smallest vat
of salted butter
and somewhere amongst
whiskey and tiredness,
I have become ill again.

Politicians organise themselves
like smoking aids for quitting.
They claim to start a war
against the malformations they rely upon.
Old news spreads like rumour
as the nurses tend,
bend necks over bed-sheets,
learning to gossip over
the topic of tumours,
and suicide rates in men.

Mothers wring their hands
beside comatose sons with
screws fitted into knee-caps
and a procession of staples across the skull.
Entropy has sent us here,
only partial, always anxious
for when the curtain will fall,
willing to rely on healing crystals
if all medicine fails, as the church
cries for prayer or else: acceptance.

The tree-tops peek out
and evidence the wind
that keeps on blowing,
only promising a boundless freedom
now that I am removed from it.
New patients arrive and leave
as fast as it takes me
to learn their names.
Nothing has changed
since I stopped drinking.

I am always the last one
out the door.

A toadstool is swelling
inside my limbic system.
Spores sweat amongst tissue cavities,
dining out on grey matter,
until they force me
to stay in bed through the day.

What a thing it would be.
Depression as a fungus.
A mildewed mind as damp sets in,
the trumpet player
with athletes foot,
casting out the air-borne blues.

Misfortunes follow one another
along straits of fate,
as if sadness were a colony itself.
I want to take a pill
to **** the mushroom
that plumes over my head.

You can only diagnose
through words and symbols,
only treat once you set down your pen
and hold the hand
of a patient lover,
of the savant drinking at the bar.

For now I will let air in
through the open window,
watch the dreamcatcher sway
and hang like a tarantula
over the stars and crescents,
spilling out over my bed.

When I close my eyes
I hear the ocean in distant traffic,
sounding as waves when rolling by the door.
I will drown in seawater
and hallucinate a scene
of happiness.

Of a place for a poet's retreat.

I see everyone as bright-white in beauty
whereas in the shadows you shall find me.

Uncorking the wine to keep myself busy,
replacing blood-sugar, feeling dizzy.

I paint the cave with fruit juices and poppies,
intersecting patterns, carbon copies.

There is comfort to be found in lonely breath,
to contemplate life, the absence of death.

I heard the choir sing in the cathedral,
I watched the black busker smoke in the rain.
The words she writes are calm and cerebral,
her keyboard maps out our commonplace pain.
You can listen to the flutes in the leaves,
the percussive crack of ice in your drink.
I listen as your heart sounds a mantra,
persisting to live even as it grieves.
We can balance upon the ocean's brink,
a mineral spray, our unspoken Tantra.

We are drunk again.
The smell from the dustbins below
rises up to our luxury balcony
that overlooks a building site.
A phoenix is going to rise
from the ash, when the city burns.
I think it will come in half-price rentals
and coupons for a sack of rice.
Nothing makes sense
in this dying skyline,
all the people in planes
will go back to where they
came from before.
If they are lucky.

You asked me to talk some more.
To acknowledge your existence.
A selfish mood and darkened clouds
cut in by September.
It kept us inside and barely alive.
Everything became a block of thought,
each separate from the rest.
I lost my peripheral vision.
Could only see my sadness,
and not the wave-breaks that it makes.
We sat on a beach in Indonesia.
Ran to collect shells in the peculiar
ocean retreat. When the waves
came back as a cathedral,
we never stood a chance
in the blood-shed
and lack of air.

There is a rubber ring
out there for me.
Beyond the paranoia
of possible sharks and oil spills.
When I get pulled on board
they will slip me into a suit.
They will let me write poetry
in the day-time, and be cradled
by the sea as I search for sleep at night.
In the morning I will eat without sickness.
I might talk to the waitress,
prove myself sober with an orange juice.
She could laugh at a joke
I would only tell about myself.
If I was lucky.

I can run when we make the first port.
Whatever tongue, whatever lips
to set upon, I will take it.
A bed for the night
or coupons for a sack of rice,
I will drag the loot home
and fall asleep in my clothes.
Learning Spanish from a folk-singer,
he stubs cigarettes into my fingertips
and feeds me whiskey
to **** the pain.
The wine is cheap and the people
are easy, they let me smoke inside
if the weather is turning blue.
They bring grapes when
they sense a sadness,
and will not gripe with me
until I am ready to gripe with them.

I tried to write you a letter of apology
but it read more like a suicide note.
It is hard to talk about circumstantial meetings
when you can see this nonsense world
dissolving into parts.
The sun-set makes no sense to the poet,
and still he will quote it all the same.
A convenient landscape for any occasion:
you can use it for the end-piece.
Everything I could write to you
would only sound formulaic;
the best melodies have now been played,
and so we are left with imitation.
For now I will have
a plastic-bag career,
walking home on foot
and sleeping soft at night.
There are no chances
of new landscapes in the present.
So I will lay open in bed
and allow this landlocked town
to be my paradise.

The summer had passed without consequence.
Through blissful parks and cemetery walks,
I measured time by the slits in the fence
and hunchbacks forming on sunflower stalks.
I found a thought of you amongst the pills,
in the pelvic bone of a wishing well,
I searched through the postcards, the old film-stills,
the notes for a story I could not tell.
I know that autumn will be my demise.
Dry toast and jet-lag upon each morning,
painting anecdotes into my disguise,
and act as if a new day is dawning.
Whilst all of the time I shall think of you
in Saturn's arms, or held in Neptune's blue.

The white-noise sends him off to sleep,
a sedative pill to ensure a peaceful stay.
The nurses look on through the peep-hole
at night, and thud knuckles on the door
come morning. They are watching for signs
that he is still talking to the stars.
He claims multidimensional beings
can manifest as light,
and correct old constellations
into broadcasts for today.
As the students peer into his cell,
they scowl with concentration
and write furiously on clipboards.
'A high-functioning romantic'
he wrote in self-diagnosis,
and the pills helped with that
in the only way that they could.
He has learned to **** under observation,
a Gorilla in the leaves.
They fog the glass in fascination
at the sleeper in the cell.
Once they caught him *******.
He thought that he should put up a show.
That natural function too hard to swallow
or compress into a hand-book.
In the evening he watches
the sports-news revolve,
wishing his soda water
was something a little more severe.
By night the inner-city light pollution
near-destroys any hope of a message
The pill is slipped before
he has begun to lay his head.
He may be losing his sweet imagination,
but he happily chose sleep instead.

Our relationship belongs to the press.
The word has been out for a week now,
along with a ***-tape
and my drunken messages
from a sleepless hotel room.

They captured your good side. From behind.
You know that I always loved you in blue,
collarbones on the mantelpiece
and toenails painted with
the colour to match your moods.

I heard you crashed your car in a bunker
as you were documenting loss in Gaza.
The rockets flew overhead
as you were carried, pearl through dirt
into a white-skinned hospital bed.

I denounced my royalty by text message.
I blu-tacked a passport picture on the Queen's
vanity mirror, and took a ****
in the Yeoman's shoe.
We slipped out at night to blind cameras.

Our relationship belongs to the state.
The bills have been due for a week now,
along with better luck
and a wine glass full
of whatever will suit your taste.

There will be another day to be remarkable,
another day to be compassionate.
I will save the pandas after
I have slept this off.
There will be another day for self-actualisation.
Today I shall be drunk
and quite intolerable.

I left my midnight shifts
and stepped into their spaceship.
The grass was thrown into purple light,
a royal carpet between my toes and
all with no scorch marks left behind.
I had wanted something
flesh-and-blood to believe in.
They would stroke my back
until I fell asleep, purring rolls of sound
through vibrations in my spine,
into the epicentre of The Electron
and its throbbing, binaural flute.
I left the planet on a whim
with common strangers
who understood the distance of stars,
but more importantly:
how to get there.

There is no genius here,
only mental illness conveyed
in an eloquent turn of phrase.
A Christmas Nativity in August
begins, with a topical birth
of a commonplace bride,
told that purity is
some form of ribbon
that is to be cast aside
upon the briefest love for a man.

We feel a tiredness beyond memory.
Memory of when it set in,
or how long it can be slept off
before sleep becomes the problem itself.

The choir sings in broken melody.
Fat faces that glow in spotlight,
dreaming for a future in film,
in a town built for passing things by.

There is no coastline here,
no way to look beyond road strips
and broken-down shop-fronts.
All we can do is keep on waking each day,
stirring the tea leaves
and keep looking for the next high.
A way to see out over
all of this separation,
that repeats in echoes and falls
from the early evening news.

Soft-shoe across the dance-floor
at your granddaughter's wedding.
You swallow an anti-inflammatory
with your double whiskey,
and feign living again
until you begin to convince yourself.

You told the college boys not to tell
on you, when they saw you smoking
**** in the old folk's home.
In return you would
throw back their ball
every time it would come past the fence.

“A lifetime is all that you can make it”
was you mantra for living when you died.
From then on I tried to look for
the sunlight in a distant fog of stars.
I looked to capture a moment of permanence,
to remember your name
beyond the need for time at all.

I suppose you are tired of it now.
Waiting for the rain to fall on the window
in that exact manner to bring about a tip-tap
sound of calm, against the backdrop
of suited racists and poets;
all claiming freedom
in their ten-minute slot.

The corn-fed chicken sleeps on the roadside.
It is covered in a kind of paste that seems real
in the moonlight, but even the strays
have learned not to touch.
Where are you now, imminent revolution?
Did you disappear in drink?
Perhaps you didn't exist at all.

Still, the pipes kick in through early morning,
heating the sheets you have just fallen within.
You allow flutes to bring you to slumber,
but awake to a pop song interference
of adverts and traffic news.
There is a lottery win and a winter cruise:
just enter your number,
and then apply within.

You cannot remember the last time you felt alive
thumbing through old anecdotes with friends,
all the stories have been told to completion,
or else have turned to myth nonetheless.
The pavement is real
but the passing faces are not.
The Clock Tower is heard
by all the people the town forgot.

I suppose you will still be drinking red wine
for each rough afternoon, family tradition,
or freak acquaintance to somebody
you thought that you knew.
I suppose my poems lost their meaning
once I spewed them out in parts.
I gave up a new direction,
to sit in the dirt of a dying art.

I would trade the thrill of one million explosions
to see you find your smile for more than a minute.
Even for the revolution, or some convoluted invention
of peace, I would sacrifice it for your chance of oxygen;
to breathe amongst autumn leaves
and orchestras, bringing sound to your afternoon walks.

There must be coastlines or hill-sides to walk on,
beyond the traffic roar of peak-time tourists.
All in time, or out-of-time, I would forsake the freedom
of some distant land of people,
if it ensured me a date when I would hear your voice
as you recited your short-hand in a meeting of the minds.

I know that vinyl scratches over time, but at least
the melody stays unhampered; only nuanced in lectures
on how not to set the dial, how not to play Scrabble
in darkness. I suppose you are gone from me now,
with tasteless luncheons
and a lack of real punctuation to your long days inside.

Miranda felt for the light-switch after stumbling through
the hall. You heard her snorting in the bathroom
and crying over the phone to a dealer who promised love.
We were all hooked from the start, over the thought
of cardboard boxes and dogs,
yet were left howling at reality and superstitious woe.

Did you see her pass the ice-giant? Stuck to a cold heart
for life; until a meteor passes in her direction,
or until the Sun burns out.
Did you see her circling Neptune in REM sleep,
or else faltering in her tobacco pouch for papers;
a way to set flame to those  consequential reminders
of a lover long left to a misery of doubt.

I keep playing the high string
on my second-hand guitar.
It sounds off against the rest,
a year older, more sour,
and cynical at best.

It knows the breadth of my sounds,
the cradle of my voice
over words meant for someone else.
Centred over my shaking fingers
and constant questioning of self.

I keep strumming the same old chords
and hoping for a new sound.
Twisting cheap rhymes and wine,
another glass-full, another smoke,
all from the unemployment line.

This writing was an attempt
to make laziness an art.
So that singing through Wednesday
is better than a desk-job,
better than my next far-off lay.

Yet here I am once again friend,
finding a friend in this:
my inter-planetary longing
for some unrealistic bliss.

The soldier laid down with the children
in a city of mosques and mortar,
he kissed one on the head for the papers,
then another to atone for the slaughter.

A writer penned her last words in dirt
beneath the swinging of a cord,
beneath the swelling of a century
and that sweet, unvisited fjord.

I heard the bar-maids circulating rumours
of their dreams and lack of time,
how men-in-suits can deliver their freedom
at the sound of a wedding chime.

There was a journalist who found peace
in the breathing spaces of war,
who left the safety of the city
and all that he had known before.

He joined the scientist in the bushes
as the baboons re-invented the wheel.
They held hands at humanity's failure,
and to a God, they learned not to kneel.

The drunkard sang into the gutter
in broken rhyme and verse,
collecting cigarette ends
in case the economy grew worse.

He was a forward-thinker
who kept in touch with his students,
and for all the lessons he'd failed to learn;
he passed them down through common sense.

The baptist laid down with the hippie
on a straw-floor in Bethlehem's heart,
they both disagreed upon the ending,
yet felt unity from the start.

School children walk by in their dirtied rugby kits
as a reminder that it only takes five years for
inertia to calcify and turn into a state of mind.

I smoke by the front door, ear to the hallway
in case a phone call comes from the government,
lending me money so that I can break up the days.

There is no need to change. No reason to pull out
of these clothes and take to window shopping
in the market town of charity shops and fast food.

My bed is full of crescent moons in nightcaps
and faceless stars, sewn together in Indonesia,
some small hands that gave me a comfort which

faded through wash cycles and pill-drawn sleep.
I have given myself to application forms and binary,
Yes/No answers to my heritage and right to work.

All I can do is lie exhausted in the night sky,
draw the curtains from daylight, and hope that
poetry is enough to punctuate the afternoon.

I thought depression was a creative drama;
a way to filter reality into a thousand petalled lotus
flower that blooms through broken skin and sends

algae past the ionosphere and into the breathless
lung of space. There is caffeine for food and boiled
sweets to give the sensation of mint and sugar.

I thought depression was a poet's ultimate muse.
I thought depression brought the most peaceful sleep.
I thought happiness came in basaltic columns,

echo chambers that sang with water flutes and
siren songs. I thought that I would find the current,
lengthen my back, and then float to dry land.

They cut the cake and gave a smile
that would last longer than the marriage.
He held her hand whilst she closed her eyes
and thought of tumours and the Orient Express.

The DJ crooned his cat-calls to the
bridesmaids. The grandmothers wept and
bid farewell to their function now lived out.
Children played in the revolving rainbow lights

and chased their shirt-tails in circles,
grazing their knees over the varnished floor.
The bride and groom danced in their sweat
as two-hundred eyes opened their jewellery box

of devotion, causing them to revolve
forever, together, in the same old direction.
For a moment they caught eyes and told each
other without a word, that this was a mistake.

This is my song of honesty,
a confession tied to a melody.
Some white-man complaint
of feeling old and blue,
but this is something
that I must live through.

My brother is playing cards
on the beach,
one-hundred million miles
away from me.
And my father, I never saw his face,
so you can see why I feel so far out of place.

I know life isn't really so bad,
I got all I need so I have
no right to be sad.
And yet I can't fill a room
when I walk on through the door,
and I'm not from this planet anymore.

So this is my love letter
to all the broken hearts;
howling at the moon
and living in the dark,
feeling like a *****
or ****** right out your mind,
looking through all you have lost
to see what you can find.

I cut my hair
and brought a new suit
and tie

to replace the noose
that was around my neck.

A sunflower
turned its back on me
but at least

it grew into September
to take me past the fallen leaves.

Women pass by
over the concrete streets
and weeds always

find their way through cracks
in an emerald defiance.

I will give myself
two weeks more of
rolling cigarettes

and smoking them in the field
whilst dogs **** in the grass.

After that the rain
will force me indoors
with the incense

and artefacts that accumulate
in the astral bowl of life.

They'll drop the dosage
and shine those bright lights
over my bed

to keep me happy in winter
and away from cemetery walks.

I am cracking a code
to find a place in the sequence
of self-control

and learning to love you
far from our crooked states.

She bore her second child
in a room of white powder,
cylinders of blood, and grey
masks. There was pain but
none to remember. A slab
of live meat burned in her
arms, leaving marks over
wrists and blooms of red
between her bruised legs.
It wouldn't stop crying.

The thing had a *****.
It was an off-white thought
that permeated her sweat
and that smug look of concern
on her husband's face.
She was a calf born into a
slaughterhouse. Stirring to eat,
to milk; to forget, spawn,
and then lay down whatever was
left beyond bone and tongue.

It was time for balloons and grapes.
Re-printed greetings cards
from Aunt Elaine: 'congratulations
on your human function,
and here is some money
for your new kitchen sink.'
The doctors were talking over
the Tupperware cradle. They must
be able to see the symptoms
of dispensable modes of thought.

They ask if she wants to hold him
again. When she told them that
she was tired and would rather
sleep the whole thing off,
a clean-shaven man-child gave
a dark look and wrote something
down on a clipboard. He made her
nervous. She could hear his
new shoes squeak, and could count
the blisters forming over

his earnest young feet.
She could not remember getting
home weeks later. Or how her
hair was combed into shape
every morning. Mother was round
most days, sitting in the garden,
making tea with too much sugar,
and giving lectures on the
importance of breast milk. The boy
would have to get used to unreal food.

The third time she went to hospital
she returned with no children at all.
Her mother still came to see her,
bringing stories of the brothers.
It was better this way, of course it was.
It is easier to listen to the falling
of bombs behind a newsbeat vibration.
A far-off land where worry can only reach
you in off-hand bulletins, bright white
pills, and a needle to send you to sleep.

I use technology to take me to a time when it only half-existed. In a blue-shell room of mega-pixel photographs and rolling news feeds, I can put on my headphones and disappear into an instrumental Sunday.

There are stamp collectors making their lazy way over beaten roads and disused railways. 'Surrender' only means to fall asleep and to leave your book as a hut on your bedside table. Where war may still go on and on,

but at least you don't have to hear about it. Show me the place where pine-cones fall and women stare across the river. Where coffee is for taste, and not self-medication. I want to walk bare-foot and feel thorns

toughen my heels, infect my blood with Earth or God or Any Other Name. We will **** in the bushes, singing those fragments of Leonard Cohen lyrics that we can still remember from times spent smoking in my room.

I can almost feel that pointless happiness. That location in a canopy to retreat when the bills are due, when the walls needs re-painting. When the neighbour strangles puppies and all you do is complain about the time.

I use new music set to old sounds: freed slaves living in the cross-hairs of tradition. White lovers breaking their hearts over guitar strings and harmonies, always a semi-tone apart. I find your hair on my pillow.
There is no technology in the world to distract me from that.

I have become a mirror. Reflecting the smiles
of others. No thought is my own. Only a mesh
of arms that helped me up or held me down.
Essays traded for certificates. All science or
established old philosophies. I pilfer inner peace
from the Buddhists. I map my memories by
the names of streets. I eat my food from the
production lines. Maybe I should invent my
own language. Maybe then I will say things
differently. I will only draw in the dirt. Avoid
the arrogance of permanence. I would only
lose out to the weeds and meteorites in any case.
It has been two decades of a borrowed self.
Whatever was mine has been stolen long ago.

I wrote her lyrics on the back
of a postcard. Half of them were
mine, the other half stolen from
an undisclosed source by the sea.
I meant to finish the piece with
hope or a splintered olive branch,
but instead I changed hands
and wrote illegibly:
I expect to hear from you
next time you are bored
or alone.

It has been four years now
and I haven't heard that song on
the radio. It has been four years
and the letterbox remains closed
like the reluctant mouth of a
four-year-old in a dentist's chair.
I haven't seen the doctor for a long time
and often I know that I am dying.
I close my eyes and slow my breath:
there are stellar clouds and old
Arcturus is falling from the sky.

The farmer's truck is offloading pigeons,
descending the cages as they fight
for the freedom of an updraught.
I watch it behind a television screen
and I see acceptable nature through
my parent's back window. I have learned
to experience everything behind
a screen door, to keep out mosquitoes
and compassion for far-off deaths:
Twenty-four dead in dust cloud,
as freedom spreads to the East.

I wrote her a letter the day before
my wedding and told her the whole
affair was simply to get a mortgage
and to have a reason to shave.
I knew she would likely have moved
address, or else threw out my envelopes
along with pizza leaflets and
charity bags. I wrote clearly with
my better hand:
*I have found a place to rest my wings,
but they still cramp at the thought
of a cloud.

The weeping willow offered a branch
for me to hang myself.
I tied a knot in boy scout memory,
always prepared and never without
The Lord. I smoked my last cigarette
and watched the town lights
swallow up the stars.

There is a receipt for a soft drink
in my pocket.
I don't know how long it has been there,
but father fell asleep so long ago
and I have had enough caffeine
to last me a life-time.
I watch the frogspawn ooze

in a brook full of ****-water and mayflies.
The moonlight bounces off the headstones
like a snooker room in the old men's club.
Life can find a way along every ill attraction,
through alcohol to poverty; to the way you
are never noticed, until you are already gone.

When I told the tree I couldn't do it,
the street-lights dimmed
and eyes stung from the brine in the sea.
I stole a chip from the Weeping Willow's
shoulder, hung the bark from my neck
as a necklace: a collarbone sign for peace
in a landlocked town full of drunks

and absent-minded teachers.
The Weeping Willow told me to get some sleep,
before handing me a self-help book
that promised change and new wisdom.
I read the first couple of pages
and realised that I was lacking in self.
Ever since I just use the willow
to **** my pain again.

He educated her on John Coltrane,
on Heron-Scott, and Black Power movements.
Old jazz romantics and second-hand
hipster records; two white kids
indulging in slavery guilt
and the throb of aching trumpets.

They kissed to the taste of cheap red,
her lipstick fogging on his mouth, clouding his
mind with south-western coastlines
and the promise of an easy tomorrow.
Incense burned and curtains twitched
as they agitated the silence
of New Suburbia.

She told him stories about the moon,
how a million collisions made sense out of entropy,
and how a million letters could be sent,
but still words can never be enough.
They dined on a park bench overlooking
the arcade; shadows of yesterday's Britain,
a simple summer for older generations.

Their own summer had passed
in a shrug of shoulders, families staying in to watch
the latest action film.
They reclaimed the autumn
as a time for new living, as a time-lapse
to remember, as a half-formed memory,
given to **** and old melodies.

The sheep pastured on a steep distant hill,
rolling green and cigarette papers turning like
leaves of a book in the coastal wind.
She drew a breath, dissipated cloud;
he held his own, held her close,
and like a blind man, he read meaning
through the undulations in her spine.

I have the portable blues;
chained to the screen
or else out on my knees,
looking for that whiskey shot,
or the next new-age way
of getting high.
I tie my shoes,
walk away from the evening news;
an outsider looking in
on the rhythm and blues,
the irregular heartbeat
of looted city streets,
and the army knocking
on every front door.

They're selling Coca Cola
for half the price of running water.
Close the borders,
regulate the ******
and lock up your daughters,
to save the ****** from temptation,
and politicians from scandal.
There are vandals
sending misinformation
to a nation of eaters and sleepers,
fair-weather preachers claiming cures
for cancer, toothache, and weight
gained through the menopause.

Let's whitewash the wall,
whitewash the streets;
dreams of white faces,
white people,
and white snow at Christmas.
You can send laminate cards
of ghost-written love
to every person that you meet.

I take my writing to the coffee shop.
Surrounded by books,
it is the only place left untouched
by the angry mob.
They are looking for that
advertised freedom,
running away in those
brand new sneakers,
popping pills and stealing tablets
to replace their food,
to light up the room,
and heat their child,
still sleeping in the womb.

And then the newspapers come
to doctor a sight,
to write-off rubber bullets
as a pinball machine,
a Whoopee Cushion intervention
against the unwashed masses.
They're growing lazy on benefits,
cutting school,
shooting pool
in broken bars:
the virulent, violent
lower classes.

The church choir pretends to sing,
heads bowed in prayer
for an incoming message,
a silent ring
from their half-stalked lover
who is drinking white wine
in paradise
and rolling the dice
of couch-surfing travel,
leaving a trail of half-written blogs,
and photographs of
every single meal.

I hear you can rent a folk-singer,
string him up
like a marionette,
watch him hang himself
with his guitar strings;
his five-day stubble
and Four Winds rings
ready for auction
at the next B-list convention.
There are black men
on Fox News, smiling, fat,
and drunk on the price
of their suits.

They are blaming colour,
religious fervour, and foreign lands,
for the turning sands
in the timer, as more brothers
slip through society,
crushed by the weight
of ***** and drugs,
and those that follow behind them.
They refuse to bite
the white hand that feeds,
that threatens
to exclude them
from the excursions of oil
and Monsanto seeds.

The summer ended
with Parkinson's and wine,
an ill-timed suicide
of a laughing face
and crinkled eyes.
No tide can be turned,
only bridges burned,
and yet still brothers converge
to sing a verse
of improbable change,
and poetry in silence;
an antelope bounding
across the shooting range,
hopping a fence,
and dodging a bullet,
in the hope of a friend,
a better tomorrow;
a safe place to mend
beyond all of this sorrow.

The Earth is the only thing
you can count on to never
let you go.

After that,
it's all up to chance.

She draws black wings to her eyes
in a green-wash reflection, light
cascading through the shutters
of the ceiling fan, whilst red lips
rehearse a smile for her lover.

He will hold her like a wallet as
they pay their way through town.
It has been months since she felt
human touch, mammalian warmth,
or whispers exchanged across the pillow.

His eyes are on the screen as she
undresses and then falls beneath
his weight on the mattress. An empty
thud, a hollow sound, as his night is
given purpose, and then falls to sleep again.

She lies awake and wonders where
her night went. There was laughter
across the table, drinks stirred with straws,
and UFOs painting pictures in the sky.
The sea roared in the distance like

a passing train, and so there must be
an escape to a far-off land for her
to start again. Start again beyond
waistlines, over coastlines, and all ties
to employment. To start again

with a half-naked lover, who will
watch as the wind kicks up her hair;
as her skin freckles once more
in the sun.

He's sitting on the toilet,
he's late for work again,
he's toiling in the blackened fields
to redress the sins of men.

The letters have stopped coming,
the pen-pal moved address,
the money he had been saving
somehow counts for less.

Mother is calling daily,
mother is sleeping in,
mother takes a pill for her dementia,
and another one for her skin.

Windows are for the sunsets,
windows are for looking out,
windows infer the world's existence,
and yet he is filled with doubt.

Doubt for the academics,
doubt for the pilgrims too,
doubt for days of greener grass
of which he has seen so few.

He's waiting in the orchard,
he's eating from the tree,
he's choosing freedom from superstition,
and he is striving to be free.

There is no poet alive
who can relate to us the distance
of each falling, passing star.

Her skin darkens as she salutes the sun,
staring soft from the yoga mat,
sunbeams cast motes of light
across the surface of the Alzou River.

The neighbours collect skulls of the
rabbits they have killed, turning them
to a fortune whilst honouring the dead.
She had forgotten what it meant

to fall into a silence,
to sit and read in an endless afternoon.

The cyclists roam in the crooked streets
of the cliff-side village, the Buddhists
are smoking **** in their hammocks.
She had faltered to a start,

falling into a corset,
to sit on him and kiss his calloused hands.

She had lost herself to advertisements
promoting freedom in a cinematic drawl;
time-lapse pictures and memories
of a summer spent landlocked in defeat.

She has fallen for her music.
To sit and listen to the drumbeat’s awful sin.

I don't remember how I got here,
when the notebooks accumulated
and anxious thoughts became ideas.

It is a nice feeling. To turn old friends
into characters of their better selves,
and to turn loneliness into a stranger's

companion. Those bus journeys into
the city, to pour drinks in a Hawaiian
shirt seem like a distant memory of a

fragmented self, now slowly turning whole.
The ashtray is still full, and worries
still form and pester my mind,

but they don't trouble my dreams,
and now I fall asleep to the sounds of
summer rain, and I feel the inner thigh

of a pen-pal who is sleeping by the sea.
I found my first grey hair when I grew a beard,
and found a second when I finally turned sober.

There are picture frames of smiling corpses,
showing more life than ever I caught in their
daily living. There have been a million words

traded across the pillow, and I have found
intimacy in the form of written word.
I have time to ramble to the forest, to meditate

beneath the slowing autumn leaves.
A bicycle is all I need to reach a silence,
as the hangman's noose begins to lose its grip.

There is humour to be found in my failings.
There are lovers found over every continent.
No more whisky slurs to keep me out of wedlock,

no more running away from where I want to stay.
I am playing guitar, perched on my single bed,
watching the branches sway in the suburban streets.

I no longer miss a childhood long since turned
to romance. I no longer crave the absence of my
head. My features are turning handsome in the

sunlight. I have traded dance-floors for the
promise of my bed. There's no money left to
get myself ****** up. So I will simply sit inside

and write my poetry instead.

After crawling, they finally stood up.

Silver bullet, black skin, red blood.

The Police barricaded roads to justice.

The candle died when cancer arrived.

He swung by his father's grave.

And then Palestine became an idea.

The power went out. About time.

She poured her last ever drink.

He counted to six, then stopped.

Quite by accident, they had ***.

The canned laughter turned to screams.

She wasn't ill; just needed sleep.

New shoots grow in old Chernobyl.

The circus was back in fashion.

They watched their own ***** film.

God created man: three star review.

The slam poet sings his songs of false hope,
feigning poetry and swinging his hips in time
with his ego. He is patient with his beer, nestling
it into his confidence like sugar in the blood.

I remember him telling me that poetry belonged
to a voice, that silent passions only go so far in
getting you laid. He held a joint between his
fingers, and then drew his name in the air.

It lasted just a moment; a flash in the pan.
He said that this was the essence of poetry,
of music and art: 'You cannot possibly hope
to live forever through printed word alone.'

We sat in the beer garden listening to cover bands
and arranging our set-lists for an upcoming gig.
He crossed out most of my suggestions
in favour of ****-breaks and introductions.

I remember telling him after my fourth whiskey
that I wring my hands in between writing verses,
swallowing pills and jittering my leg in time
with slow jazz tunes and next door's bass-line.

To that he said: 'forget the oldies, forget Christ;
nothing that dies will come back again. Poetry is dead.
We are in love with Frankenstein's monster,
and we'll only kiss each other in electric bursts.'

The slam poet went back to his backlit stage.
I sat at the back and started on my fifth.
There was a blonde girl in a blue dress, mouth open.
Her eyelashes curled. I was persuaded to sing.

I am half-awake in the August rain,
the last strain of summer squeezed
into my glass and cooled with ice.

It is nice. To be up this early with
the morning news, Palestinians and
Jews at war over berries and wheat

in the broken streets of Gaza.
The cats are sleeping on the suite,
ears pinned up for a flash of sound

or stench of meat. My brother is
planning his moves for the future
against the ways I have failed in the past.

I have been half-asleep in debt and
addiction. I have buried myself in a
dream of words; into worlds of

all-talk and no action. I am no longer
a fraction of beer bottles and ashtrays,
fantasies of easy lays, or notebooks left

incomplete and full of cancer fears.
They are in tears; brown-skinned and
forgotten rights, a desolation site

of ground-zeros and a desperate fight
for life. Depleted uranium laces lungs,
as well-versed tongues in heavy suits

kiss the shoes of the corporate brutes.
As empathy trickles down in political
verse, a hypnagogic curse for liberal thought

and consciousness. They are forecasting
sorrow as the sun comes up, to detach
from our Earth, and the late summer rain.

I forget myself
in the quest for happiness
and a perfect love.

I have been trying for that mountain top tranquillity
whilst eating salted dinners and flicking the channels.
The rain stains the plastic patio, looking out onto the
garden fence, the concrete perimeter; the brick wall.
All indoor furniture orientates towards the television,
my family now but fellow spectators, instead of blood.
The fruit bowl holds post-its and tangled earphones
instead of pomegranates, clementines, and apples.
A writer's worst enemy is not her depressive vanity,
more the ivy creep of boredom and lack of taste in life.
We are running out of reality with each passing hedgerow,
through soap operas, wallpaper, and that halogen glow.

I am sitting on the riverbank,
watching rocks cleave the
running water and thinking
of all the times I allowed the
moment to slip within my hands.

It's not a healthy process,
to lament the past or forecast
the future, and so I am learning
how to divide my time between
the two; to find the moment
that lingers in the centre.

There is progress to be made,
if you sacrifice some time for today.
I have music playing as I stare
up at the ceiling, I have friends
waiting to heal me at the bar.

I am catching trains to London
and back, trading secrets for living
with those who have seen me grow.
I am trying for a new wave of thinking,
a way to revive that former youthful glow.

There's smoke in your lungs,
and then you breathe it into me.
Set me free from all of this trouble;
trading innocence for mystery.

And there's a time to kick and fight
and struggle. That's not now, or ever
again with me. We could be the next
Hollywood couple,
or else fade off into obscurity.

And those chimes,
they play in early morning,
and they bring
thunder to my dreams.
They sing
'boy, you sure look lonely,
living through your memories;
you're just living through your memories.

There's a place I know where we can go
and get high, then listen to the trains.
When it rains, I'll hold you like a pillow,
when it pours, we'll just get high again.

I'm on the brink of a suicidal cocktail.
Take a drink, then nurse it back in bed.
I lost my pain under the weeping willow,
when I took the pills to numb my sorry head.

Now I'll climb
until the mountain is a spindle,
until the wine
soaks into my blood.
This time
I'll listen to her lecture,
I'll sit and wait until all is understood.

And those chimes,
they play in early morning,
and they bring
thunder to my dreams.
They sing
'boy, you sure look lonely,
living through your memories;
you're just living through your memories.'

There's smoke in my lungs
and you breathe it out of me.
Set me free from all of this trouble,
no longer living through memories,
no longer living as a memory.

An employment scheme
in a lucid dream,
you work
yourself
to sleep;
hold close to the fortunes
you keep.

And all you can think
is to have a drink,
to solve
the patterns
of the day,
and to feel a little
less afraid.

And the busker pleads
upon bended knee,
to validate
his melody;
coursing from the source
to the sea.

Without a band to fill
out his sound,
he wastes
in the frame
of the doorway;
before the pills come to
take him away.

There's a better you
and an ocean view,
if you live with the intention
to love.
If you great me like a friend,
well then you'll never
have to pretend.

There's a better you
and an ocean view,
if you take exception to your
stolen life.
If you greet it like a friend,
well then you'll never
have to pretend.

Laughter is the greatest medicine of all, and if that fails, there's always anaesthetic.

She left her glasses on the table
when she stormed out the house.
Alone in a café, her eyes blurred over
the menu, but she could smell
bacon frying. She treated herself
for the first time in years.

The world was still turning somehow,
as she tried to plot her escape.
She was alone with her thoughts
of country roads and strange men
that would make her forget his voice.
He'll be sleeping by now.

There was enough money in her purse
to take her out of the country.
From there she could waitress
by some sea-side resort, reading
books through siestas, and sleeping
with the mosquitoes.

Walking to the station, she ripped up
old bus tickets she used to save
to remind her of the everyday places
both of them had been.
Even now she was missing him,
as he laid out and stared at the ceiling.

She was stopped before she made it
to the airport. She was bundled in
the car, eyes swelling and lights flashing
as she was driven back to the city.
She was stripped, searched and
thrown into a locked room.

Her husband still lay there.
His eyes were shelled out
and trodden on by her heels.
There was a river of blood
in the ant's nest, and he would never
look at another woman again.

Louis took a cold shower
after sleeping in all afternoon,
thinking about those sweaty
summer bedsheets from last year.
Her skin was always soft
and he used to run his thumb
downward along her hip-bone,
setting vibrations along fault-lines
and stifling any sound with a kiss.

He turned on the radio
and brushed his teeth, removing
the taste of sleeping pills and
last night's cigar.
A mono-brow was forming beautifully
and he had finally grown a beard.
Now it's beer for dinner,
wine for dessert, and John Coltrane
rasping loneliness in stereo.

Louis admired his backside
with the retractable mirror,
reminding himself that old lovers
could never forget that ***.
He reminded himself of his poetry,
his dog; his back-catalogue trivia
of white-boy lyrics was sure
to make him a desired object,
far away from her loving arms.

He turned on the ceiling fan
and dried out to the jingles and adverts
that interceded the music
he'd never cared to listen to before.
The sad guitar and Indonesian flute
spun webs of memories in hypnotic
circles, keeping pace with the motor above.

The picture ran clear in the half-lit room.
Louis burned all his notebooks,
for all the good it would do.

He's all nervous twitches at the keyboard,
googling his fatal diagnoses, and listening
to old jazz turned digital. Nothing is real
any more. There's powdered sauce and
elastic pasta: just add water. There's the
street-light glare and recycled laughter.
He didn't know how he got to this point,
but he knew would have to take the diaper off
at some point soon.

There are no numbers on these tables
to quantify our place. We sit and smoke
in the beer garden glow, forgetting the
circular thoughts of home. This small-town

will turn you to drink. It will soil your liver
and cloud your breath. She's serving cocktails
to strangers, her hair bleached by the summer
light. I'm still rooting in her shadows,

as proof I ever had her at all. My Big Brother's
wallet is only slightly fatter than his head,
and yet he talks of heartache as if it is
a sort of passing trend. This is an alien life

without footsteps overhead. A chance
for bacon and *** in the morning;
a chance for music and coffee, come
lunch. I have learned that love

can be simple. It is the absence at night
that turns lungs to black. 'I miss you'
sounds out as a mantra. I travel in dreams
to our coastline,

to where you may finally allow me
to love you back.

http://www.mixcloud.com/ed_coles/

I have decided to read aloud,
to project my thoughts out to the crowd.
I'm probably ****,
and I'll most likely stutter,
but it is better than leaving
my words in the gutter.