I am encouraged by the middle-aged woman
who still believes that I am hard at work,
as I digest my latest beer.

The blonde Russian gives hope to me.
She gives me a consequential look of interest,
and I'm suddenly reminded of my youth.

There is no sexlessness in flesh.
It comes with the freckles,
scaling melodies across naked thighs.

I am kissing the Russian on the mouth,
as I hold onto her cheek,
as I pass by her on the bus.

Where is this welcomed doorway kiss?
Where is this elderly love?
I want to share with you, my garden,
I want to eat with you, our feast.

This atmosphere is thin,
and all passions hollow out
in this echo chamber of half-truths.

I have played out these lines,
these humble melodies,
and yet still end up in a writer's demise.

I am half-drunk and half-******,
with fake whiskey sours and downloaded bliss;
fragments of a slower pace of life.

This old soul, he troubles to breathe,
he wades on through discarded thoughts,
and lives within captivity.

I am living life above the chimney tops.
I am a beckoning haze
for the clouds above,

I am killing love in all maturation,
I am blitzing the market,
I am starving a nation.

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.

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 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 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.

I fell in love with music
when I fell in love with women.
Cassettes will weep upon demand;
homing melodies for the neighbour
who lives across the green.

There's no sense to *** or violence,
and yet I'll teethe it all the same.
I'll give out tepid love, flashes of blood,
and a weekend of cemetery wander,
if it means I'll get a modicum of sleep.

Zopiclone, Citalopram, and long walks
will do a lot to elevate a mind.
You see a painted blue
and an ocean view; yet you've lost
that old dignitary smile.

I am told to separate my wisdom,
to quote history as if time were a fact.
There's no love in the decimated forest,
the Earth now calloused and fickle,
to shake off the parasite of man.

I fell in love with cigarettes
when I divorced with yesterday's papers.
I have no wars left to fight,
and no money more to make,
now all that's left to ask is:
where do I belong?

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

Do you hear the crashing sound
of a society at war? Can you find the
answer, for what has come before?

There's no petrol in the tank
as they clear your ******'s name,
the man who came to teach you
that love is a guessing game.

I hear they're selling rainwater
as a reason to stay inside,
they say you'll drown in the struggle
of trying to turn the tide.

Can you understand me now you've
seen it for yourself? If sanity is mimicry,
then I'll remain in my ill-health.

Summer time,
Eyes vibrant; alive

With occluded featureless smiles
And women in vest tops;
High-waisted jeans.

Innumerable particles of dust.
Old autumns,
The fallen, forgotten;
The flying are free.

Local cover bands play
In the central courtyard
Of the landmark church.
Lazy vendors, market stalls;
Head shops selling smoking papers
And gauze to gather the dregs.

Alone, acquiring old technology
To keep my search for intelligent life
Away from the screen:

Typewriter to enforce thought to my word,
Punch to every letter like swollen breath-
No going back.

Record player to erase perfection
And leave what is human.

Constant temptation to stay inside,
Dream of our day in the sun,
Constant recollections
Of debts accrued; summers spent

Glass in hand, stretched out on the grass.
Free time without the desperation,
No imprisonment from the moment,
All hot and high
Over dwindling supplies,

Simply laid to the elements,
Burgeoning love
Before the scars came.

Tattooed a hundred reasons
Never to fall again.

Part-time gardeners tend to fenced-off fields.
Far from the commute,
Freed from the suit; the neck-tie
Ceases suffocation.
Sweat paints a Jesus face
On the lining of their backs-
Old grey t-shirts
Toiling an enterprise
That paints beds of dirt
And enlivens the stems
That wilt with age:
Their weekend Eden.

Straight mile to the beer garden,
Old foes, friendly faces,
Residue rings, the sweat of lager
And loose change over numbered tables,
Stained and chipped
In the entropy of revelry.

Crates and boxes of wine,
Patio furniture not orientated to the screen.
It is easy to believe
The modern life is free.

Teenagers learn to drink,
Learn to love what will finally
**** them.

Parks filled with cannabis haze, dried snacks,
Picnic baskets beneath disused goalposts.
Single mothers dutifully mind the sandpits,
Longing for an ashtray; an outlet.

Someone to stand beside them:
To say they are doing fine.

Air cools by evening, shawls appear
Over exposed shoulders.
The high-waisted women,
Shudder a memory
In my lack of a moment.

Paranoia of approaching darkness:
Another day without conclusion.

Cataracts that form in the night,
Tomorrow’s stain; last year’s trauma.
All the money we spend
Trying to forget.

Asleep; skin cools and reddens.
We praise our vanity,
our hangover;
our morning
Beyond the experience.

We forget September,
The onset of winter.
Details sharpened
And losses forgot.

They drink in the beer gardens,
We bathe in our love,
Until the warmth gives out,
Until the feeling is lost.

The streets are filled with violence,
your room of cheap perfume,
let's sleep this off together
and wait till the madness is through.

Another year is over,
another chance has passed,
another cartoon president,
how long will this madness last?

Because every dream of the future
is a ******* nightmare now and
the second Berlin Wall will fall
before it even stands.

So hold me close now
and we'll let this moment stay,
we'll hold onto the finer things
that they can't take away.

I don't know which way to turn,
I know the left isn't always right,
but this life is a **** sight easier
if your skin is pure and white.

Now the police are the criminals,
spilling lies, they speak in tongues,
we'll happily drink down their poison
so long as we all own a gun.

So hold me close now
and we'll let this moment stay,
we'll hold onto the finer things
that they can't take away.

Another year is over,
another chance has passed.
This empire is built on shifting sands
and nothing is built to last.

Another cartoon president,
at least he'll take our country back.

Another cartoon president,
red, white and blue
unless your skin is black.

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.

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.

Summer arrives
in animation of limb,
to ramble the forest,
to reflect upon sin.
I keep smoking cigarettes
in the drunk-talk of friends,
I will kiss her on the cheek,
I will slur to her
my amends.
Summer arrives
in the advent of love,
I will settle my debts
with the great skies above.

Do you remember those blues?
That early twenties something:
revolt against the people that
you are growing up to become.
Do you remember the music
we played to keep us company
in those nights without purpose,
in those days spent drunk and
saluting the sun upon its demise?
Do you remember the letters
of sadness we sent back and forth,
relaying uncertainty in our little
sink-hole of neurosis and boredom?
I wonder when that stopped.
I wonder if I miss it sometimes.
Do you?

Winter let you down again.
Hidden in layers, still your thin skin
Breathes in every particle, every wave.

In the heat of every symbol of love
You grow cold and depraved.
Beleaguer every drum,
Every instrument of calm
Until you are left with your breath
And what happens when it is gone.

Smoke a cigarette
When your mind will not rest,
Unwind in the secondhand sheets,
The daily reminder
Of your ineffable lack of sleep.
The pills that you take;
The ache of routine.

The panic button,
The false alarm,
A new lease of life
That swiftly lost its charm.

The talisman of a heaven-sent sign;
Extinguish the stars
For the city light lullaby.
Hear the ocean in waves of traffic,
Hear the truth in interludes
Interceded with static.

Hold fast to the tracks
You have trod before,
The pyrrhic loss,
Each opened door

That seemed to close
Each time you reached out,
Each time you fumbled for change
In your pockets of doubt.

Winter let you down again,
A dalliance with autumn,
Your terminal friend.

In the heat of love,
You grew cold for shelter.
Away from your moods
That shift with the weather.
Away from the rain that follows the storm,
Another surrender;
Another false dawn.

It is 16:18. It is April.
Winter has thawed and all feels new
now that I can sit outside without discomfort,
without pale, immovable hands
and a wind to unsettle my thoughts.

My first beer of the day,
no idea of when the last will be.
An ashtray of previous cigarettes;
two of them are my own.
Always the follower of better men,
of charlatans and well-travelled fools.

I refuse to be a consumer,
yet I live to consume;
the pavement beneath anxious strides,
the warmth between her ethereal legs,
the drug still in my system,
the cold sweats in a half-empty bed.

My first crisis of the day,
exchanging money for a quiet place to sit.
To find my poison, toast my newfound health;
a wealth used to line my stomach,
or else to devour a box of cheap wine.
My last day off work,
last chance to sour in a sulk,
to gawp at the shapes in the ceiling,
to stay up through the Sandman's song.

When will I learn to turn with the world?
To not cling on in desperation
through each changing, unfolding scene.

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

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

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

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

I don't know why you came here.
I don't know why you brought
two gallons of wine
and a series of dresses to try on
in front of my postage stamp mirror.
I haven't slept a full night in two years.
It gets a little easier after the first.
You learn small tricks to bore yourself
into unconsciousness
but now you have given me a reason
to stay awake during the day.
How could I ever go back to dreams
now that you are stood in my doorway?

They didn't notice me until I went crazy.
Until the lights went out and they heard me
moving around the house, my head to the wall
to force out blood, or sleep. They feed me tea
by the pint. Two sugars and milk to keep me awake.
I need to play the patient. It makes me their son again.

Food arrives on a tray with 20mg of distraction.
I can smoke outdoors in the cemetery walk
while father sleeps with the larvae and embryonic
Earth. My brother has turned eighteen
and I have become the canary to his coal mine.
He can live in the spaces that I have died.

There is always movement on the stairs.
Contestants cheer miserably beneath me
like a slave-ship bet of the first to their
death. The ocean rolls. The world keeps turning.
She is wearing sunglasses and painting toenails
into colours I had made her forget.

Mother, take me to the straitjacket cellar.
I will lie still and let the moths drink from
my eyelashes. There are books and women
meant for better eyes. There are trees for a
different childhood. There is nothing left
but to learn a silence. To become a whisper

hidden in the dirt.

I thought I had found my love
but she was just a name;
a series of letters
that held up all my words.

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.

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.

Tomorrow you will witness no surrender,
you'll see me turning all those ***** tricks again.
I'll coast on through,
kiss the morning dew
and welcome back the energy I once had.

I have waited far too long in transit,
I think I've waited my whole entire life.
But tomorrow I'll be strong,
tomorrow I'll play along
to the red-tape parade of our age.

Tomorrow I will walk the streets with purpose,
you'll see me as I'm passing along the way.
I'll bless this ground
and the welcome sound
of the world still spinning in its place.

You have not grown gills.
You have just grown used
to the feeling of drowning.

It’s crawling up the drain pipe,
It’s crawling in your bed,
It’s coming back to remind you
Of everything you said.

It’s standing by the broken lamp
That used to light your way,
It’s filling in the empty spaces
When you’ve nothing left to say.

It’s fogging up the window,
So close you cannot breathe,
It’s watching you undress,
It’s watching you retreat-

Into your habits,
Into your sheets,
It’s waking you up
When you’re trying to sleep.

Into your whiskey,
Into your tea,
It’s spiking your food,
It’s all you can see.

It’s the rat inside the wedding cake,
It’s the rain on a perfect day,
It’s the wind that rattles everything,
Every cymbal in your brain.

It’s coming from the blind side,
It’s arriving without warning,
It’s brave and dark in the moonlight,
It’s small and fearful in the morning.

It’s Muhammed in the headlines,
It’s Jesus on the cross,
It’s the bias in the history books,
It’s the meaning that got lost.

It’s playing on your heartstrings,
A song you cannot sing,
A broken piece you cannot fix,
The calm the pills don’t bring.

Into your pockets,
Into your blood,
It’s getting to you
Much more than it should.

Into your mirror,
Into the screen,
All that you feel, all that you see
Are ever-decreasing spirals
And absent routine;

It’s pacing the halls,
It muffles your scream,
It’s holding your tongue,
It’s the mould in the crumb,
It’s the secret you keep from everyone.

It’s the reason why you stay inside,
Why walking the street,
Why leaving the house
Is like turning the tide.

It’s the jet-lag gloom
It’s the familiar ache
That weighs you down
Every time you wake.

It’s crawling up the phantom limb,
It’s the corpses in the sea,
It’s the debris that covers everything,
This constant anxiety.

I am listening to old jazz classics
whilst drawing up our next dystopia.
This malformed thinking,
this habitual drinking,
is a life ill-spent,
talking to mirrors
when in lieu of a friend.

There's peppermint tea freshly poured
and sat steaming amidst ***** glasses,
old bracelets, and hand creams to soothe
all cracks that form. Nina knows how I feel.

There's dance songs on the radio.
They're playing for the drunk entourage,
and for the shower-capped bedlam
of those with nowhere to go.

I am waiting for the ash to settle like snow,
to tell us all that death is just a season.
A season for returning,
like forest fires burning,
from aftermath comes afterlife;
it is light in the shadows,
it is the safety of night.

There's unsent letters in my mind,
exchanging function for memories and wine.
***** luck, old habits, and Nancy. She descends
the stairs, and shoots me down again.

There's folk songs for the runaways,
for the hill-climbing peace-seeker, who
takes photographs of landscapes,
so that he can remember in spite of tears.

I am striving to find that beauty,
to hold it close, and thaw out in the sun.
My brain is mending,
now that letters are sending,
now that I can reclaim motion
and park-bench conversations;

taking back the 'I miss you's',
in a race we finally won.

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.

We were just hanging around.
The car park with a cardboard fence
to separate us from **** Alley,
treble bars playing noise
from speakers that faced the street,
enticing the bingers, the splurgers,
to throw up on their cocktails.

A couple walked past,
talking about the morning after pill.
We listened close from a distance,
eyes reddened in the street-light glow,
crime silent for the night,
only in our eyes,
only in our eyes.

We were just hanging around
in our semi-darkened corner,
beer in the back seats,
a box of superkings,
your queen-size bed
our eventual destination,
after the **** and the rain,
after taxis and broken heels.

The moon shone in malignant pain
through the neon and the stalactites,
traffic fumes and traffic lights;
we leant undisturbed on your car door,
a long journey, no direction,
endless travel without motion,
without emotion.

We were just hanging around.
The misfits in a flat-pack world,
half-functioning lighters,
your lipstick still untouched,
the stain of rain on the cathedral.
We were just hanging around
when I fell in love with you,
the way you remained a stalwart blue,
your happiness, and your sadness too.

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.

Take me to the fields
where memories form
in rolling banks of bonfire,
torchlight, and dead-end riverbeds.
Pass smoke in a kiss
across the group,
blowing wind up your skirt
to satisfy a dream.
If I could afford this life,
I'd live it; where everything
is so endlessly free.

I am bitter in pills,
as they clench my jaw shut.
I'll feign a good listener,
if you'll brush your hand
against mine. Our high-wire
existence is based on lies;
the lie is out and now
we're all too tired of *******.
Just hold back on the cider,
if it  makes you feel sick,
or forget how to live.

What happened to
London? This new wave of thinking?
It turned to drinking
and a healing bruise;
waiting for trains to break
my mind-silence. I can't feign belief
in some new lover's meeting,
or a cure for dementia.
I'm sure I'll forget you
in a lifetime of drink.
I will hold you immortal,

as I set you in ink.

This beer was brewed in Prague,
far from these crooked miles of eternal November,
these long winters that often
stretch out into the fall.

I hold this drink because I can't hold you.
Because, all that I want is that vanity rainbow,
that fossil of love born in music,
and in our doubled desires.

Play a drunken chord for me
as you set your long fingers to the keys,
as you look to the cityscape's future,
and begin to sing for the past.

In faded suit, verse and rhyme,
I still cling to you. A poem of taxidermy,
small forget-me-nots and old love's tokens
to confirm that you were here at all.

I set flame to the Parisian lighter.
There is a hope that crowded breath
will bring you near, or else further away,
in the knowledge you shall never come back.

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.

He's clutching his cash
in the torrent of the market,
she's dreaming of friends
just to keep them in her sight.

She's getting to work
when the sun is non-existent,
he's thrashing in his sleep
the whole time before that.

He's talking to her
with one eye upon the cradle,
she's ordering wine
just to keep him in her sight.

She's dreaming of Paris
and the sighing violinists,
he's watering down
all the drinks at his bar.

He's a drinker most nights
when work is non-existent,
she's smoking all day
just to tolerate this life.

She's opening her legs
to the thud of empty guidance,
he's kissing her neck
to dominate the land.

He's looking at ****
and jerking off in bathrooms,
she's painting her nails
a deeper shade of lime.

She's fouling all her make-up
to cover tender eyes,
he's nervous in the aftermath,
he's playing out his time.

He's playing with her hair
as she's cradled on the couch,
she's covering her *******
from authoritative eyes.

She's hiding from her father
in the cellar of the house,
he's looking for his own creation
that has somehow gotten out.

She's shaking in the hallway
as he holds her by the throat,
he's laughing at the daughter
he claimed to love the most.

I hear the town sing
beneath their fatal groans.
They have loans, embankments of debt,
and light fittings to figure out.
I hear the child-bride sing
amongst the echoing pool.
She sings out for oceans, and static moons
to deliver her from
the television roar.

I remember you left
in a panic attack.
You lacked what you felt two winters ago,
when bells chimed at your bedside.
I remember the mist
over Cawston fields.
The yields of wheat, in my bicycle freedom;
you left when I kept slipping
out of the door.

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.

You remind me of the old abandoned quarry that was turned into a reservoir. We were lethargic lovers, I dreamt of picnics over the board-walk, the swans begging and always somewhere between a deified species; and clumsy birds that scare the **** out of us. A film-still moment at best, I lay still as you inspected your vanity, and then kissed me to pin me to the bed.

You remind me of the guilty taste of beer, as I find myself all alone again. There was once a time that we flourished in the cemetery, but now that's long-passed, and we're cynical fools again. You remind of cats out at midnight, of early-hour lorries delivering food in the dawn. More so you remind me of bus-stops, of always waiting for the signal, but never getting on.

You remind me of a circumstantial meeting. One born out of interest for the other. In some ways formal, in most ways desire, my jaw is still hanging from the moment that you left. I miss that feeling of your speech pattern, as it lingered in well-spoken tones, I miss the heat of the sunlight; and now I feel like a shattering of bones. Forgive the rhyme, it escaped me, as I cover up disappointment. I'm not quite sure what I'm disappointed about, but it's there all the same inside.

You remind me of poetry in vivo, the way that you just pour from my mind. A silly fit of nothing-at-alls, but simultaneously offering up my life. I think that your face fits like a portrait, the archetype I have long placed in my mind of what I believed love would look like. Then you walked through the door. My eyes are too swollen from tears to really take everything in, but I see you all the same. It's as if I've been seeing this my whole life.

The street lights kick in,
a pinkish hue,
some artificial moonlight,
in the fast darkening blue.

Only cars rush by,
cars and brave people,
back from work, their home a church,
their satellite dish, a steeple.

And here I find myself,
entombed in caffeine,
paint pages with words,
yet know not what they mean.

I sit in my sorrow,
and I sit in my haste,
to not disuse my emotion,
to not let this feeling go to waste.

And all that comes to my mind,
is to conjure a rhyme,
to garnish my words,
like liquor laced with lime.

Oh, innumerable streets,
with your innumerable lives,
each person a pattern
of what fate contrives.

There's just not enough time,
to scale these peaks,
truth far too elusive
to ever care to seek.

So I shall just stare into darkness,
in this coffee shop glow,
and chronicle this world
that sits at the window.

How heavy this is,
My waking young soul.
So childish and meek,
So hapless and whole.

How stubborn this is,
The browning dry leaf.
Reminds me I’m but
A lifetime so brief.

A spindle or spoke,
In the world’s great wheel.
Features but a blur,
Of all that I feel.

But what use is this,
To lament my stay?
To curse tomorrow,
And not live today.

I am waving at you across the dark.
I tried screaming but your ears were trained
To happy melodies,
Better sounds,
And all in the reception of G-d.

I tried reaching blindly for your arm
But only grasped the warmth
From where your body had been.
I am always holding out
For thin air.

I tried conspiring potions, pheromones
To dethrone you from your impassible place
Amongst the glory of creation.
I was always terrified,
Too scared to walk amongst the living.

I tried to lace your lips with my promise
So even when I cannot kiss you
I steal your words,
your taste,
your lipstick..

I am still waiting for you.
I fumble at the switch
In a room of locked doors and iron windows.
Too scared to let the light in without you.
Too scared that when I do

You will be gone.

I've chased sanity down
with whiskey and ice.
It has been months
since I have fallen asleep sober,
and even longer
since a smile lasted longer
than an ******
or new haircut.

I've come back to rooms
of coasters and candles.
They're mowing lawns
and discussing old events
to renew their youth.
I cannot see past
their prescriptions and remedies
for a tired mind.

I've abandoned meditation
for pills and the limelight.
Old friends lend jokes
and out-dated platitudes,
disclosing pity in mobile apps
and reptilian notions of survival.
Cap and gown,
they congratulate my heart rate.

I've retired from hopes
of fame and recognition,
and now all I want
is to find some time to sleep.
There is no privacy
in this fish-bowl existence,
and there is no piety left
in all that I have strewn.

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.

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.

This Poem Has Life.

Dear reader
And fellow lover of words,
I want this poem
(if you can call it that)
To be anomalous from
All the others
I have written in my despairs.

For, I want to write to you
Of soaring peace
And to give you a piece
Of indolent hope

In your day which I’m sure
Has been filled
With ugly news
(do not worry, it’s mostly lies)
and an absence of art.
I have for too long
Written only of my

Longings for reprieve
And for once,
This time, I wish to tell of
The joys of the world.

I breathe romance.
I consume it like
Poppies do fields,
(red is the colour of the arbiter).
It is in every action that
My little body is
Locked within.

It is the reason why we are here
My friend. It is the
Reason why
We are talking through

These pages.
Each day that the sun comes up
Is another promise of warmth
(the night is a shadow to cool within)
from a God that may
or may not
exist.

Let us not busy ourselves
With these big questions,
At least for a moment,
And let us simply

Live within the answers.
The evidence for love
Is found
(within the ground, not ourselves)
In the carousel movements
Of nature, and its promise
To return to us

As water does the sea.

Oh Blythe, you were always in the wrong,
you lived your life as a sad, sad song.
They say addiction starts and always ends in pain,
great Sisyphus, heaving the boulder again.

We're hooked on all our broken dreams,
suspicious of love like it's a pyramid scheme.

Oh Blythe, the world couldn't compete with your mind,
I talked to you, but it was the blind leading the blind.
When you took your life I had almost took mine,
feeling the pain, even once I've left it behind.

They found you in a sorry, sorry state,
oh, I know how it feels to always be afraid.

Oh Blythe, I know I shouldn't call you my friend,
and I can't pretend to know what drove you round the bend,

I won't preach colour into your world of grey,
and I can't say that "you just have to be brave"
but we're more than these words,
more than a pattern of breath.
You were bursting with life
despite your eventual death.

Oh, where did you go,
my ghost in the snow?
Oh, where did you go,
my dear ghost in the snow.

I've been looking for a place where I can lay in the rain,
it'll be a while, my friend, before I see you once again,
I hope I don't see your face again.
Wherever you are, I hope you don't have to pretend.

Where did you go,
where did you go,
my ghost in the snow.

I stood on the cliffs of Cabo Girao,
I watched the village slip away,
into to the mouth of mother nature;
into the sea of salt and spray.

And in my baseball cap, I leant out,
and threw my t-shirt to the sea,
I was done with missing sunlight;
I was done with autumn leaves.

I headed out to warmer climates,
and I was cradled in the sun.
I experienced new beginnings,
in the roots of Babylon.

They whispered through ayahusaca,
as I force-fed myself the tea;
as I malfunctioned into sanity,
as new voices came to be.

We laughed on through the Amazon,
and in the emptied streets of Rome.
Earth fell upon the weight of change;
now all of the land was home.

Old pick-up trucks are left to rust,
as all memories are altered.
A cigarette will tempt our death,
in a breath so rushed and faltered.

The voices left me in the high-rise,
in the car-park that we once looked out;
we saw the limit that is the horizon,
we saw a future full of doubt.

I have travelled through the aftermath,
and found no one left at all.
At least there's peace in my delusion,
away from the ancient city sprawl.

Yet, still with all these questions,
of what was caused, under which name;
you still send them to expire,
as I linger on your gaze.

I've not seen you in a while now,
you could be dead or worse: happy.
All I want is to find Eden,
and have you descend down from the trees.

She was the type who would comfort her attacker.
All memories of love were postcards for her wall,
as she slipped undetected through life, collecting
bus tickets, old receipts and post-it notes,
all with an atypical tolerance for red wine.

She spent her days lying in waste, lying in wait
for the moment that life would catch up with
her beautiful mind. She gave love to him
in magnetised letters and pillow talk,
but she was forever replied to in silence.

She would reinvent herself in hangover light,
before ordering take-out, and spending
the week inside. She cursed her translucent skin
in the sunlight, and yet she glowed in the summer,
as the breeze unsettled the hem of her skirt.

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.

Yesterday's rainfall erodes the callouses
on my feet. It sends my soles
to tenderness, cleansing out
my footfalls from over the recent months.

I'm new again. The water removing
my strength much as the approaching winter
does to soften my will, my tendencies to
walk along these day-lit streets.

Christened to the elements, I'm expected
to pour strangers drinks with a
manufactured smile to cloak
the pains of my feet as they walk this world.

And you come to my mind,
as you often do. I hope you're not floundering,
I hope solemnly that you have found your place,
or else that your head falls peaceful

each night you lay down to dreams.

Because it's heavy weather in this world.
The air too dense for breath,
and daylight far too brief,
to sit and wait impatiently for life to begin.

And dear, all I can offer is my well-wishes,
I am afraid that it is all I have got,
for I can barely take care of myself,
filled with the fear and the shadow of loss.

Please, don't revoke me,
or assume my life to be a self-obsession,
or my friendship but a fleet of foot, or worse
a fragment of a chapter in your life.

I am still here, chipping away.
Still here in this coffee shop, still conjuring
a ghost of imagination, inspiration; words
that fail to scale what I hope

to impart.

And dear I'm scared that my life shall be curtailed.
Gone before I've had my fill of time,
oh, death before old age;
I'm not sure which one of them scares me more.

So I comfort myself with the thought of us all,
scurrying like wound-up clockwork toys,
aimlessly filling the world with delight,
hoping only that the hand that bore us

took the care to clear our way,
that she took the care to give us time.

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.

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.