Gravity has a sister.
Men chant her name in the firelight show;
one million flames set alight the owl,
deciding the fate of millions.

Old complexes nest eggs
in our morality; more potent than the id,
and akin to the ***** degradation
of all sweetness and limbic reaction.

Fork your tongue to revenge,
and you will feel her tug at your navel.
She'll tense your fist, fight for your place,
she'll grow and learn to swallow you whole.

And then you'll be lying on your front,
to set a front for all inferiors.
She will be close at hand in the hindbrain,
she will be the shadows to your thoughts.

Each moment to myself,
I find that I am writing.
I am writing nonsense,
a stream of consciousness
to make my squalor appear
as a palace. To enforce beauty
out of a blind state of mind,
as those purple curtains
block out approaching daylight,
but retain the glean of the disco ball.

I talk to makeshift friends over
and over again in my head,
as I walk past the field of irises,
feeling them watch me
under the jittery yellow street-lights.
There are far too many poems
to be thrown out to strangers,
like lonely sambuca kisses
placed beneath the dripping raindrops,
falling from the alleyway stairs.

I know that poetry must be controlled,
to flourish only the best to others.
It is hard to leave words undisclosed,
when you can go weeks without a friend.
This is not a *******,
nor a target for pity in privation.
I have a degree in human minds,
I have a ***** and white skin
to get me through interviews,
and a tone of voice to escape all arguments.

Fix me with a stare
and I'll fix you up a drink,
no questions asked. We could be
ice bucket lovers, turning the tide
with pens and straws to mix the cola.
You'll reach out and kiss me on the cheek
to afford me lipstick sensation,
as I stumble without any cause
through this temporal employment;
this hiatus of youth.

One day I shall grow up.
One day, there will be no more poems,
and what is left will be the ghosts
to lay alongside old lighters and photographs.
I will forsake these pointless notebooks,
this obsession with laying experience
into metre, rhyme, and verse.
Soon, I will exchange my pen
for the television remote.
I will flick the channels,
I will smile at my life.

Take the pavement into town,
over bridges, galleries and pain exhibits.
Sip beer on your own;
a bottle into the half glass,
before sinking into that spectator's chair.

Slip a tenner to the homeless man.
You don't know why,
but his face felt like wisdom.
You take off your jacket in the sun,
beneath the underpass as notebooks
pound together in your black messenger bag.

Take a fantasy to heart,
collect images of her and her soft music.
Allow the melodies their art.
Their art of fogging reality,
of allowing one to appear as they are not.

Keep you thoughts on the banister,
safe from the fall of pleading into old dreams.
Wilt before the kaleidoscope
of all adopted memories,
the time you bathed Christ beside Olympus Mons.

Ride the ghost train to the present,
past the infidels and terrorists of truth.
Never fear that fear of consequence,
of tomorrows lived in yesterdays,
of appreciating life,
yet forgetting to live.

The crowds flock to protest the new recipe,
as thousands die in the city of Jakarta.
Even as the tulip fields promise diversity,
another whitewashed wall appears
by the old laundrette.

I cannot understand sanity in a world so crazy.
Police barricade the homeless
and set the rapists free.
Each jewellery room is iron-gated,
whilst hospitals turn to soup kitchens.

There is no app to save us from human folly,
no special offer on compassion, or a trial period
for higher states of mind. Eyes are bleeding
by TV screens, as all expectations
are lowered to the high-rise.

Where comes politics in Democracy's atrophy?
Voter apathy, faceless names
and blood-lined tycoons fill the news.
They are saying “nothing will change,”
whilst promising the world.

The shot girl laced up her corset,
pressing brand new *******
into their vice for the night.

A Malthusian belt for shot glasses
and a holster for change
that conceals pepper spray.

She holds herself by the mirror,
reflecting a room of text books,
post-its, and old stuffed animals.

She kisses her palm to own her body,
before it is decomposed by eyes
and laid claim to by countless hands.

Her boss took issue with her skirt;
that it shows “too little leg”,
reversing all she'd been taught before.

She had a birthmark on her thigh,
and thought if nothing else,
she wanted possession of that.

For one more night, she says,
she'll flirt for a living,
for one more night, she says,
she'll numb herself.

Old ladies pick at the crumbs from their almond croissant
with lengthened nails and arthritic wrists. Middle-aged
men polish their lenses to make sense of their lattes,
for once glad to be away from the bar. We have been trading
alcohol for caffeine; one vice for another as we claim to
be stepping out of old, bad habits.

They say you should never start smoking. You become an
addict for life – even if you ditch the smokes. For each fear
that can be identified and calmed, comes another in its
place, or even in its absence. Oh, the human mind;
dependent upon dependency!

Couples graze by the bookshelves to conquer a lifetime
of literature together, with texts full of *** to correct their
ageing bodies. Everyone is beige as they circle the tables
of fake flower stems in a plastic vase. I see comfortable love
everywhere I go, so why then do I feel so restless?

I found something akin to a medicine man
in the way he would offer up his philosophy.
Tabby cats lounging on garage roofs
are the ******* icons of Mother Nature.
When he would huff on nitrous oxide,
he'd come to, and say to God:
“Well, now you're just showing off.”

We spent long nights in his high-rise flat,
discussing the nature of our morbid thoughts.
I once told him that I trusted by default,
and to that he said I may as well believe
in the British summer.
He was self-assured and self-involved,
using me as a passive Dictaphone,
as a kind of straw-man audience.

I still think of him sometimes
when my **** is wet and I'm sitting in grass.
It reminds me of that cannabis glow,
and the way we stayed up to watch the cathedral
light up like an old cartoon.

The bus stinks of McDonald's and receipt paper.
A Chinese man has fallen asleep on the phone
and I know precisely how he feels:
conversation can be as wearisome as insomnia.

No joy is found here,
only litter and yesterday's gum.
The poor move along with the poor,
as the rich drive alone.

They sip on coffee through the Newcastle rain
that peppers windows into a multitude
of miniature rainbows. They are driving into
the town,
and they are driving us out of the city.

On my way home from work
I passed by a *****
In a tent-sized, plain orange t-shirt.
It was forever-stained
With fossilised fluids;
A chest cavity of spilt milk,
And subsequent tears.

A double-take took me
To the green and brown keratin
That dragged relentlessly over concrete.
His sloth paws were protesting
Every step of grey existence,
In the colourful expanse of new morning;
They were clawing the ground
And submitting to gravity.

He looked right on through me,
Through everyone and everything
As if part of a hologram
That was no happier, but at least
Apart. I re-count his limbs to ensure
Whether he is even human anymore.
I surmise: only partially.

He milks his palms whenever possible
To heal the cracks of wind exposure
And old substance abuse.
This was no doorstep lounger;
He was a stray cat with no freedom,
And only washed his hair when it rained.

Then, as I later adjust my mask
In the foggy bathroom mirror,
Mind preoccupied with dissertations,
Affectations and payment schedules,
I realise that it is I who has lost my humanity.

He asked me for my name
and so I told him that I had
lost it long ago, once men
stopped calling me by it.

I told him that my father
only knew neck-ties and
employment binds;
that love and men only exist

together in the breathing spaces
between wars. I told him
that the Americans own
the canyons, and the Chinese

may learn to mine the moon,
but this heart is too full of wine
to ever find room for a man.
He looked confused by my lack

of desire, and claimed that life
must have long left my rusted
veins behind. I told him that
I sleep with the radio, and I

spend nights with the poets'
******-babble and misplaced
hope. I told him of meditation
and coffee shops and Sunday mornings

stretched out with biographies,
and the rain grazing my bleached
skylight. I told him that some
pleasure can out-live an ******,

and that physical love is just
finding your favourite place to sit.
Yes, I told him all of this,
as he laid me out on the bed.

A mood is lifting,
As we tilt our chins up to face the rain.
This bitter detox has been hard to swallow,
A new range of old stone tablets,
Decreeing buy and sell, buy and sell,
And that everything can be owned.

We have defined ourselves
By the patterns of the weather.
Capricious friend, my book companion;
Steer with me now, across the bend
And into insanity. We can embroider
Limbs over our Sunday mattress,
And salute the new week
In ****** and teenage songs.

I’ll take you through the bridleway.
These approved paths of nature,
Contrived and confined by beaten mud
And memories of the 585 bus departing.
I will hold your hand
But not hold you to anything,
Freeing up the paths you made
Before ours intersected.

Yes, and take me to that barren farmland
Where you learned to drive.
The mud-splatter and swearing
Contained within it the only happy memory
Your father ever gave you.
This mood is lifting as we indulge each other,
As we laze into love;
As we warm by the flame.

What is the use of rites and group-think,
This long-term stay in the communal mind;
When all we know can be cast asunder
Like individuated snow?

And where is the profit in humiliation,
When all autonomy must go?
For I don’t care about tax and freedom,
If it’s your oxygen I share.

Oh, how does it feel to breathe the coastline
Whilst I slave away in Flares?
Can you still see that ark of memories:
The footprints leading out of the sea?

Who are you to define what love is?
All I can see is symmetry:
The fish I caught returned to the river,
To the fluidity I have sought.

And why do I keep old train tickets,
From the journeys I have bought?
For all the miles that have worn at my shoes,
I am still forcing smiles,
Still unable to choose.

We came as a strand of life from the source.

The estuary signalled creation, and finally; the residents spoke back.

There she was on the veranda; a Costa Rican sunset.

He sank pills with beer, and then he promptly disappeared.

And when they burned down the library, all humanity died.

The pixels flared upon the screen: now she is dead.

I surfed meteorites and time, just to see you again.

She planted the seed, then laid down in the soil.

She’s married now I think; I care not to check.

A woman took over God’s role: The results improved dramatically.
E. J., Coles-Jordan. (2014). An Equal Society: A Necessity for Cultural Revolution. Journal of Made-Up Thoughts and Wisdom, 1, 1-9999.

I am living as your echo.
Lung cancer victim,
Vague pilgrim of kindness,
Tainted by the everyday;
By our suicidal blindness.

Keep the noise low,
As you walk on past the room,
You might hear our quiet love;
Collecting forget-me-nots,
Memorising the feel
Of the hand beneath the glove.

I am living in displacement,
Neither north, nor south,
And soon landlocked in yesterday;
Too many miles from the coastline,
And with too many debts left to pay.

Keep your lips strange
And foreign, as if we’re falling
In love again. Don’t forget this youth
When we leave it,
But let this heartache turn to gains.

There are no decimals to love.
Binary code, you’re either in or you’re out;
You’re either kissing the toad,
Or questing for an actor
To tolerate you;
Without any essence of doubt.

I don’t know where I am, father.
I can’t see the floodlights
That used to beam over the allotments;
Polluting the stars. My bike is chained
In the garage, my legs are tired,
And Cawston Woods only brings me to despair.
I want to claim back my royalties,
I want my piece of the share.

We have all paid our dues now,
We have worked ourselves sore,
For this malnourished freedom;
Of which still lays a cure.

We must see politic as silence,
In its content and fact,
To see the newsreader’s babble,
As one orchestrated act.

We must love for the earthworm,
And for the life-giving bee;
For the nuclei of dead sunlight,
For our brief eternity.

The tightrope expires
And the skyscraper hollows out.
This hate is vicious and repeated,
Repeated; repeated on the news reel,
And in a Hollywood romance.

We’re skipping generations
Through faded vinyl sound
Of dust mite and crack;
I’m folding digits over chords,
Extinguishing lovers
By turning them to songs.

Oh, reality convenes, convenes
On the mind, and on the consciousness
Of fact. Don’t steal my job,
Don’t **** my land,
And never fall asleep
Under the sun.

There is poetry to mathematics,
Scaling the harmonics of the sound,
Some universal language;
Some bottled message to our brothers
Who are looking back at us
From the distance of the stars.

And, terror is called from every side,
Until we’re terrified to eat or breathe,
In the tremor of a terror
That can never come to be.

The tightrope fell down with the buildings,
But its idea, it still lives on.
We could be on the precipice of better times,
Or under the shadow of a nuclear bomb.

I am a lonely narcissist,
In a fit, in a struggle,
And straining to exist.

The almonds are sugared,
The potatoes: starched.
A hipster-dream
Of third-world colours,
Stretched out on my back,
And lamenting the distance of stars.

Bumper caravans of **** and cherry cola vacations;
They fill my mind in the coming of summer.
There’s beer bottled tears
And eyes left bloodshot,
In this fevered remission
To a life we forgot.

But change, is change, is change;
I’m listening to jazz and not heavy guitar,
And my teenage lover is a sacrificed cathedral
In the laying down of all arms.

Still, I’m looking to stay sober
For a week or so, or more.
But another day, year or era to come;
For now I’ll just get up and off the floor.

I’m self-obsessed but devoid of self,
In a rigid flow of car window reflections;
A body check to see if my shadow still exists.

How much does a shadow weigh?
But first: where can you get me some blow?
You see, I need to sharpen up my ambition,
To thaw out in the frozen snow.

It can’t be long, old friend,
Before one of us succumbs to addiction.
A ****** jaw, or a healer’s mouth;
Well, I guess that either can offer
A place for us to mend.

I think I see my life now.
Its purple light is cast off in the distance.
I am coming off chemo
For a couple weeks more,
I am combing the meadows,
And I am asking for more.

"Lets go on a walk, Sam."
Let's go on a walk; go on a walk with Sam.

Mummy is driving, not walking.
She's being quiet;
I want to be quiet, too.

A Ford Escort is going past.
It's blue and the people inside
are laughing at each other.

The two girls in the backseats
have pretty brown hair but
they're too busy laughing to notice.

"Where did you get that hat?"
Where did you get that hat, Sam?
He needed it for the walk.

Laughter is weird. I do it
sometimes, but it's not with
other people. I'm okay with that.

When I laugh, people look scared.
Mummy says it's like a sonic boom,
and that's why people pull faces.

"Where did Jess go?"
Jess went on the walk with Sam!

Sometimes I wish I had a Jess.
Mummy got married at nineteen,
so I only have two months

and twenty-seven days
until I find my Jess.
Until someone loves me.

No wind hums
As I move into the next sunlight.
Spring is at my door
And apparently that’s meant
To mean a thing or two
For happiness.
For the dancing tiptoes,
And being allowed to
Drink in the day;
So long as the sun is in the sky.

This is the British Summer:
The arrival of soft jazz over beer gardens,
With scones and coffee
For the brand new lovers.
They’re too scared to drink,
For fear of saying something true about themselves.

They nod, they nod and agree, agree, agree.
She internalises sexism,
Whilst he tolerates sexlessness;
They’re both clinging to that coastline postcard
That is now lost to pollution,
And to the havoc of streetlights on stars.

She heals cocoa butter into her pores
As he falters on through his Big Mac.
They met in McDonald’s, for fear of suggestion,
Yet he could tell from her nose ring,
The life in her eyes,
That there was something beyond
Their corporate collision.

Oh, this is my life.
Mere fantasies of far-off places,
Of far-off loves and feelings;
Where everything descends from intuition;
From where everything stems
From my childhood heart.

I’m living on a diet of Citalopram, **** and Snickers bars.
Soft jazz bubbles and falls through the alien hum of the speaker,
As the numerals collide with that three a.m. alienation.

Eye on the clock, everyday feels like an urgent countdown
Of time, time, time; the little I have got, and the amount that I waste.
Still, I grind, grind, grind on the leaves to tempt morning and sobriety,
Whilst my inbox piles up awfully on the side.

It’s misery here. Academia is not for me; it’s not for anyone
Anymore. For all the Starbucks and cheap *****,
These qualifications will never outweigh the costs.

It has been months since I fell asleep without assistance.
I cannot remember what a dream feels like;
Only that there’s you,
And you are laughing in the park.

He washed his hands in the Caño Cristales.
Five colours of healing bruises put to pasture
Within his purpled veins. There was blood again;
He was now a resident of Earth.

****** hair had grown wildly into a half-beard.
He scratched at it in the Columbian sun,
Sweating in the lack of British rain
And thinking of all the miles he had
Put between the two.

He’d spent all his life combing the mirror.
Combing the mirror and expecting change;
An escape from vanity publishers and
Celebrity snapshots. Combing the mirror,
And so always ending up in the same place.

Searching his memories of Peruvian plains,
There were diagrams set by the former residents.
He took out his folded notebook and started on
The Brand New Testament; before throwing
Its ashes into the liquid rainbow.

I am drunk within the brand new light of morning,
This cigarette sends spirals to my head,
All I have come to do is now forgiven,
And all I’ve meant to do is an outcome all the same.

I should be sleeping now in the yellow sun-lit alleys.
The growling pigeons are my hostile call to sleep,
But all I can think about in this division,
Is how daylight is but the malformation of dreams.

So what time I lay my head, it doesn’t matter.
No, all that matters is the cycle of the sun;
All that has come to pass will remain in the Earth and
In the soil that becomes purchased into land.

I have been writing songs of escape whilst staying inside.
I have become sexless; young bones but an old soul
Painting in caves, and shielding eyes from the sunlight.

There is no *** in self-pity. The new Casanova on pills;
Hands clamming over a glass of whiskey and ice,
And eyes plastered to the sports news for the next tragedy.

I remember the chestnut hair of my childhood.
Rubbing potatoes over tree bark to show nature’s artistry;
We need not create, when creation does it itself.

Now, there are just photographs of corpses in the clouds.
I walk the same route each day, expecting a different outcome,
Going over old ground, yet striving to feel new again.

The three of us sat on the disused, plastic patio chairs. Their white facade had faded into a malformed sort of grey, with grazes of mud and collected rainwater erosion further condemning them. We were blind drunk after three-and-a-half beers that were tempered with lemonade. The dreary five a.m. dawn threatens daylight, bringing an end to the party. In a few years’ time we’d be here again; coming down off drugs and talking about missed chances.

Tom and Amy are in my parent’s room, as we whisper conspiracy theories about his impotence, in the light of our lonely morning vigil. I barely remember what else was said, after we spoke of *** and love, and of our life beyond home. “There has to be something more, somewhere…” we would all insist. Yet, one by one, we have turned to shrugs, and those left to insist, do not.

What I do recall is the coffee (I never drank the stuff then) and dry crackers. As the sun came to rise and patterned the skies, we had seen one day slide into the next; we aged brilliantly in a moment. I stared out at the Rugby field just beyond the overgrown allotments; you could only make it out by the floodlights that towered over the trees. I knew then, of where I had always been, yet knew not where I needed to go.

I still don’t.

The answer is in the quantum world.
Each probability exists in some reality,
As a multitude of collisions bind us
To who we think we are.

We cannot see the coded matrix,
This code to solidity in the face
Of empty space. We are not
creation’s children, but creation itself.

None of this is preconceived.
Lesson One came in the knowing
That no animal, angel, or adult
Has any knowing at all.

Life never attains ideals.
There’s a sand-grained image of you:
“How did you manage sunburn in Great Yarmouth?”
The pain now forgotten as anecdote.

How steep the passing,
How righteous the fall,
Lay me down
As you draw my spine,
As you claim to see it all.

I have no vision,
I have no career,
I pay my bills
As the final curtain bows,
As foreclosure is coming near.

There is no patience,
There is no advance,
Left in doubt
We will circle the drain,
We will leave things up to chance.

Take me from this British land
Of phony politics and prescribed freedom.
Take me from these expensive tastes
For cheap wine and cigarettes;
Artificial food for a waning appetite.

I do not want to grow old here,
And lament potholes and cappuccino froth.
Take me to that warmer climate,
A slower pace; where love is a friend,
And death is not a failure of ambition.

Take me from these long winters
With flash-floods of tears, once politeness
Has ended and boredom kicks in. Let me read,
Finally read, and witness the sound:
I’ll know when the forest has fallen,
For I’ll be living within the leaves.

Take me from the towering masses
Of concrete, billboards and sirens.
The high-streets stir and distract attention,
Calling; Labour, Tory, God, and Money!
It’s a eureka moment – a flash in the pan.

Take me from this British land
Of hard-earned cash for harder times.
Let me find my place upon mother’s crust,
Where oceans divide the new from my old.

To where profanity fails to scale this feeling;
This art of living, this place for healing.

The daylight comes through curtains,
Giving the afternoon an echo-glow
That comes only from a lifetime indoors.

It is going to be another night
Of pleasing thank you’s,
And scouring lipstick off plastic.

My teeth are yellowing in a caffeine binge,
As hands tremble over loose change;
Too much change to be sure of anything.

I am tired of this departure lounge of life.
My bags are packed, I’m ready to leave,
Yet still I sit, whilst others take to the sky.

If I struggle with the answer
For the price of these beers,
Please let me get on by,
For it’s a wonder I’m still here.

We’re swarming through headlights
As we make our way through town,
The women fix their heels and lipstick,
Whilst the streets fill up with sound.

And I can’t think about tomorrow
Over the loudness of my shirt,
An imitation of new Hawaii:
Throw a rainbow over hurt.

Yet still I say ‘thank you’
As you throw up in my face,
Then I’ll pour you another *****;
Everything can be replaced.

I’m filing as a missing person,
For all these months I’ve spent inside.
Despite the pills that I’ve been given,
You can never turn the tide.

All I wanted was some freedom,
A chance to stretch out in the sun,
But I’m having conversations with the streetlights;
Talking to friends where there are none.

This bus is full of lonely people,
Who’ll cry only in the dark;
For all the dreams they’d left in high school,
And the teenage lovers in the park.

We only send out grateful letters
Once old friends have moved address,
And I can’t fight this sleep much longer,
Whilst I am straining to confess.

This life isn’t what I wanted,
Nor can it be what I wish for,
But I will settle for the sound
Of you knocking at my door.

Your lips will shake
Under the weight
Of one thousand promises,
As you set the start
To the funeral march
Of all yesterday’s returns.

I have forgotten how
To value the pound,
Above that of human life.
And all I think
Is of tyre swings,
And memories of doubt.

This time will pass
Over crooked paths,
We’ll share oxygen again.
I’d lost my soul,
Then learned to crawl
Past statues of better men.

Come talk to me over the chattering mouths
Of customers and acquaintances.
We can drink coffee in the beer garden,
Agitating the tobacco leaves far too often
And using friendship as therapy.

You’ll sit with your sunglasses framed in your hair.
An old scar is a teardrop, as we claim compensation
For the damage done in our years apart.
Come walk with me through old graveyards,
As the living take to existence.

Teenagers catcall and chase each other in the park,
They shelve their hair in the wind
And religiously practice apathy.
We link arms past the tree hollow full of syringes,
Knowing there is nothing left to surprise us.

These streets are turning into a gamble;
Bookmakers, cash converters and hairdressers
Train feet towards the old clock tower.
Only the sprawl of supermarket isles
Keeps ignorance well-fed in this town.

Come listen to these old songs with me.
The poet is dead, but the melody lives,
And it is still wonderful to be alive.
Come with me past the crooked spire;
The devil left long ago.

Glass eyes fit over waxed, jaundice skin.
“I love you,” he whispers to his darling,
Careful not to break her celery fingers;
“just remember that,” he says,
As he kisses her forehead goodnight.
“And if you don’t see me in the morning,
It’s only because I’m finding my way home.”

Her eyes bake briefly in the ceiling light
Before he flicks the switch, and takes
To the carpeted stairs. The house is filled
With photo-frames and still-life happiness.
It causes memories to filter out the reality
Of some former life,
Some weekend spent in the Masif Central.

They say the eyes are windows to the soul,
But Helena’s closed behind Roman blinds long ago.
Black dwarfs are pupils,
Set in the salmonella grey of irises,
That once were stained
In streaks of bottle green and ginger ale.

In death, this was not Helena.
It was a vinegar haze and deflowered carcass,
Preserved within her husband's arms.
As always he tended to her living,
As always he would fall to
violent acts of grateful lust.

The police stormed in
as he was putting on her makeup,
as he dressed in drag
and started howling at the moon.

I cannot recall the moment
that sanity became a working goal.

Drugs are expensive,
sobriety; even more so.
Somewhere between all of this
I will have to learn to live.

The homeless are pushed out of town,
asleep beneath the railway bridge
that sends rain through rivets
like bullets.

I keep punching the clock
as it throttles Eros with slow hands.

“Sometimes just a smile is enough”
reads a cardboard placard.
But I have not cracked a smile
since I started popping these pills.

Is this a new life,
Or has it been lived before?
I heard the salesman calling,
Knocking on my door,
As I defeated the notion
Of the cavalry roar;
Our history’s disclosure,
And memories of war.

These pills gave rise
To a new wave of thinking.
I have hands made to write,
And not just for drinking.
I have brand new ideas
With thoughts I’ve been linking;
New continents will form
For the land that is sinking.

No meaning is left
As I write in the dawn,
As I fall asleep
Just as the folks mow their lawn.
I have not surrendered,
To a life left still-born,
No I shall I get myself lost
In these high fields of corn.

For now I’m imprisoned
In this ****-filled detention,
As poetry clings
To my heart’s retention.
All is not gone,
In my life’s hypertension,
As I hold close to this Earth,
As I sing for ascension.

Somewhere from this heavy present
Is a lighter mood, is a confident June;
Is a glass of wheat beer on the veranda,
Circling ice giants with my sweet Miranda.

Somewhere from this lacklustre town
Is a foggy new start, a life lived through art;
Is the full potential of human kindness,
As we finally see through this third-eye blindness.

Somewhere from these burying sheets
Lives an autumn love, where death and beauty meet;
Lives an ocean swell of sheer independence,
Where hunger is nourished, with all in attendance.

The dragons of Eden
Are forking their tongues
Along the silver edge of acetone rain,
Foreclosing yesterday’s shop-fronts
In favour of a clean white page.

They smoke in tailored suits,
Blackening their lungs
And toasting freedom with afternoon champagne.
They took man to the moon, they say,
And gave light to the modern age.

They tweak offshore accounts
With battery farms
Of the hardly living, and hardly human.
Forfeiting progress for profit,
They scandalise the streets in debt.

The dragons of Eden
Are flexing their arms,
They’re setting their minds from union, to fusion.
They’re alighting our memories,
But it is our choice to forget.

The old sage laid out my life in egg shells and incense.
He told me that I was as much the smoke,
Curling amidst the radio waves,
As I was the fragments of calcium
And memories of a former nest.

The old sage had not touched anybody for years.
He said that he could feel the sorrow
Of one million faces passing by the monastery
Without even looking;
He said that human touch had always failed him.

The old sage asked me to see into the future.
He laughed at my helplessness and then
Pointed to the sea. “See here,” he said
In some beckoning wisdom; “you can see
The waves’ fate, before the conclusion.”

I wish people could see the world as I see it right now.
Bleak British fog and thundering rain grazes
The bus windows, as we enter the seventh hour.

Ryan Adams is singing Sylvia Plath, as rapeseed fields
Threaten to bring colour to the north. The pills are
Working, and I’d cry for joy or for poverty if I could.

This isn’t the spring I was promised, but that’s okay.
I have learned that a promise is but a sincere lie,
And expectation can only offer far-off feelings and

No time. I’ve stopped throttling the goose to demand
My supper. I have stopped walking through the rain
And complaining about the weather.

It is time to start living.

The vintage shops are closing,
The sweepers are cleaning the streets.
Our modern minds are locked in change,
As poetry suffers to defeat.

Oh, the Christmas bells are chiming,
To greet the start of June.
They’re calling, calling, that love’s tokens
Can never be bought too soon.

And, the infant yell of binge drinkers
Sounds over their bosses’ tones.
They’re drink-driving to the liquor store,
And weaving through traffic cones.

Now the engineers are catcalling
In their neon-breasted suits,
Hard hats to hide their flaccid love;
Oh, purple-hearted brutes!

This hometown is full of characters
In the brief demise of day,
And all I can think in this lonesome state is:
Darling, please don’t go away.

This photograph of childhood
Stains my eyes with smiles.
Such a full and healthy appetite,
Now gone over so many miles.

Still, I search on for a reason
To live within this hive.
I’ll give my all to find this sanity;
I’ll give everything just to survive.

They’re crowding around the DJ stand,
Arms up in ecstasy, heads are down in pills,
Decoding rhythms of synthetic sound
Over spilled beer from dented cans,
And the scent of baking soda and ****
Clouding lungs, and blacking minds.

Lights hang low, sweating heat through
Exploding bulbs. The youth press together
In a slave ship of fashion and ***. Nothing
Makes sense to the acid kids staring in
Mirrors, old razor blades
And plastic bags scattering the flood
Of **** and stench, and trailing shoe laces.

Eyes closed, the lead rain of death
Is suspended, as aurora fields stain green
Light and visions of Christ and Buddha
Across whatever is left of me.
Elbows are pressing invariably into my sides,
As drunks and dealers move like cattle,
Farming their wages for one more drink.

How did it come to this? What happened
To the domestic love of paved-over gardens
And standing on sheds? What happened
To the easy sleep, as we turned to dreams
As we do now to habit?
How long is there left to regain the self,
That we spend a lifetime catching up with again?

I have taken to writing on receipt paper,
Sitting in the bar alone, sipping pints
And listening to all of the nonsense talk
From the revelling crowd.

Each one of us troubles with the fault lines
That appear on our faces, over the passing
Of the years. I don’t know what I’m writing
For anymore. There no career path in place

To make the whole dam thing work.
I know I should shelve my poems for a rainy day,
To refine them and sell them off as if they are art.
But, I see no value in the bulging of my wallet,

Save for the purchasing of cheap seats and wine.
So, why would I ever foreclose the spaces that I
Live in, when all I want is to be
*A voice at the end of the line?

I do not agree that there is a ‘forever England’.
How could I, when I can’t even recognise my face?
For all of the innocence that died in a decade,
For the concrete and car parks
Built over my childhood's place.

It is time to remember in this sinking sadness,
Of the conjuring mind, and the fickle passing of winter.
In the presence of death, there is opportunity for living;
If I only grasp and pull through each turgid torrent of time.

Rome fell and so too, will this empire.
This ivory tower of profiteering,
And dodging answers on the screen.
Love will out, if you give it time and patience;
As continents collide and create new land
On which to dwell.

Friends pass through life, as I hold them like sand,
As memories modify, romanticise and alter.
I cannot keep tending to the past to make a future,
Nor can I make new friends over suicide hotlines.

With pills to take me from these trembling hands,
I burst into rhyme, and embark upon new lands.
All I ever knew shall untangle within photographs;
Into affection that no words can understand.

Please stay with me, reader, as I grow up;
As these new bones falter to a start.
I am waking up to find the youth that
I thought I’d lost in the fullness of my heart.

I found the reason for living,
In the beating of a drum.
Where everything has a purpose,
A place where everything belongs.

And, I’ve been living in the fallout
Of an atomic bomb,
There may be stumbles in my footprints,
But you’ve never steered me wrong.

So don’t you feel embarrassed
By your young suffering,
For what is learned in the morning,
By the evening, becomes instinct.

I’ve been dreaming of a culture,
I’ve been auctioning the sky,
As you draw me a new future;
Oh, it’s so beautiful, I cry.

So now I’m getting on that train,
To put some miles in between,
Who I appear as in the doorway,
And who I really mean to be.

And, I’ve been living in the fallout
Of an atomic bomb,
There may be stumbles in my footprints,
But you’ve never steered me wrong.

I have suffered through this awkward silence,
and barely lived through all of these weekends
of pouring drinks to quench this thirsty city;
they laugh with me, but none of them are friends.

They pollute their dreams with future blueprints,
a formula to manage all their bills;
some childhood land turned into a car park,
and all of their memories that soon will.

I'm planning to execute a kidnap,
I know it's gonna be the perfect crime,
as I sing to the hearts of the lonely:
that you're not alone, oh now, you are mine.

Oh, I'm tired of working for a pay-cheque,
I think I shall start howling at the moon;
now all I've got is my superstition,
and all my friends that grew up far too soon.

And, if you come to see me in the morning,
I can't promise that I'll be there at all.
I'm packing bags, heading to Costa Rica;
I'm standing up for the years I have crawled.

I remember the walks we took,
Smoking cigarettes and cursing the modern day.

I remember the Canary sands,
And how we fell into each other,
Our bodies still warm from the Sun.

I remember how your body tensed,
Each time you were caught in vulnerability.

I remember those ancient postcards you’d send:
“I miss you, I miss you, I miss you”
As the hours strained in your luxury.

I remember seeing your beauty from afar,
But curtailing my interest through circumstance.

I remember how you’d say to me
That all love was bunk,
Until you finally tasted what kindness could be.

I remember our intimacies;
Grown children planning world *******
Under the torch-lit covers.

I remember every story you ever told me,
And how all of your words have birthed mine.

I remember how the train took us away.
You stretched out on your empty bedsheets,
Whilst I tarried in the past.

I am tired of trying to find
Words that rhyme,
Words to quantify
This meaning bereft in my chest.

Where are you now?
You promised to be here forever.
You said that nothing could steer you
From the love found within our bed.

Darling, I know that I’m a fool,
That you did well just to keep with my moods,
But now that I need you more than ever,
I have lost you to some art teacher.

He’s killed Rufus, and stripped me of art.
He has taken from me my constant,
An oxygen tank in this tear-gas foreign field;
Now my lungs are drowning in dread.

And all I can ask in this strange composure
Is where I went wrong in flesh surrender;
Did I not keep you warm through North-Eastern winds?
Did I fail to capture what you felt was the end?

I have seen this town grow
through the tides of my time,
to the low and call of the market men,
to all of my drinks laced with lime.

The cracks form in concrete,
as they do to my aging face,
but never are the streets unrecognisable.
No, here, I can always find a place.

And the clock tower calls,
just to signify the passing day,
oh, all of life’s sorrow falls
to the saying: “come what may.”

I know you all, I’ve seen you crawl
through these jobs; waiting tables,
pouring wine, and shooting pool
in the stagnant afternoons;
claiming your past as part of mine.

Rupert Brooke is now but a name,
some archaic poet of yesterday.
His name now naught but of drinking fame,
as all the customers line up to pay.

Oh, I miss my childhood, old friends now past,
only stark reminders that nothing is built to last.
I need you now, my lifelong friend;

to my soul, give warmth,
to my heart, please mend.

I’m not bitter in this depression. No, I am more thankful for what I have got, to cushion my fall from the bridge. It’s mostly fabrication, this depression – I know it. It comes from a half-lifetime of neurotic deities, spinning their indie white boy musings around as echoes in my head. I convinced myself that sorrow was the only way to feel the soul.

Some people take pills for their ills. They pop them like sugar cubes into their mouths – gaping at their daily escape to sanity. They heave sanity like a boulder each day, just to feign animation. Others will talk on and on about their issues, leaving the rest of us in blearing boredom; but at least they’re feeling okay. The remainders take to sweet surrender, nourishing panic attacks with red wine and ****** paintings.

Nothing matters anymore. Not the Damascus Road to scaly eyes and computer screens; or giving your life to spreadsheets for the boss with his eyes on your skirt. I see no God up in the sky now, as the adverts pollute the stars, and I see no science in all of this self-pity; as a white guy has very little to complain about.

Everyone is just a representation of a memory now. Each conversation feels like an abstraction from some ancient, fevered dream. They criss-cross my life in every decreasing patterns – old friends now nothing but a passing, reluctant nod. Family spin yarn around me, and let me laze on the couch, but never can I tell them of the places I have found myself in. Trust is blankness. I’ll give you all of it now, because there’s nothing left to hurt.