What rage there is,

In youthful lovers.

The lustful want of incitement,

Excitement.



Passionate energy.

Unreserved and incorrigible resentment

For the men in suits,

Settle down.

Don’t settle down.



The pressure of ***

And the stench of expectation.

Bated breath as I reveal your weak

Underbelly.

Don’t speak, don’t apologise

As I count the freckles across your

Inner thighs.

I need to know I don’t need you.



Let me love you,

Let me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The street-side artist drew your body with
charcoal and claimed the best form of life came
after the forest fire, over a more
fertile land, when the ash-cloud will come to
unsettle your vision from what is laid out
before you. He shaded your ******* in with
his thumb over the blackened lines of hope
that you would come to envisage yourself
in the way each passer-by came to do.
Once you paid up and walked the promenade,
you came to the lighthouse in the distance
as a ship turned to change its course for you.

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

I sit here and feverishly type, gathering momentum

To swing the creative cavalry inside my mind forth

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

So desperately catcalling my attention.



I live in a creative vacuum,

From the hum of the fan

And the slamming of the doors,

To the static from the TV set

And the voices. Those voices.



I feel there is a poem in me

Or a song,

That will claim the hearts of others

And tug on the hems of their peripheries

Just as these homely distractions do to me.



Until then I must write and write harrowingly.

I must disregard the rules set down by centuries of genius

And throw back the paradigms put forth

By every raised eyebrow and polite accolade.



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

But I can feel the atrophy bite in my bones,

Making me cower at this transient life

And again I find myself at a desk by the window

Feverish, so feverish.

I have been singing for forgotten things,
beer bottles hidden in the hedgerows.
The opera singer, the strangled vibrato,
ash-filled cokes cans; the afterparty sunrise.

This recovery has been long, fickle.
Reckless optimism and the science of failure
collide into the colour
of a Daniel Johnston cartoon,
or a songwriter's sense of humour.

Disused pencils stand as monuments
to old dreams of grass-roots art,
the fragility of neurotic *******
drawn with innumerable straight lines
that composite a woman's naked body.

I have been drawing on memories
and hoping for a brand-new image;
dissolution of old borders - a strangled voice
in a room full of opened tongues.

The Hawaiian shirt made light of depression
in darkened hours and wax smiles.
Plastic cocktails, the pending brides;
desperate men - the post-work demise.
I have learned a lie ever since.

This recovery has been imperfect, a fraud.
Swollen truths to satisfy the concerned,
only myself left to fool.
I have found the early morning
but cannot reach a sober conclusion.

Redundant habits mildew my mind
with the backwater of yesterday,
familiar street names to mourn
those who became strangers,
the negative bias of my mind's eye.

I have been writing words of action
from the safety of my desk;
all that the desk-lamp can illuminate,
all of which words can make sense.

This half-lived recovery is bunk, irretrievable.
Working poverty and untied knots
are co-morbid in meaninglessness;
chains to hold me in Plato's Cave
whilst her skin freckles in the sun.

Disused and living outside of love,
morning curtains open to a sheet of light
that obliterates loneliness
in the presence of shared heat,
only for it to return again, come night.

They put nails in my palms
for loving you.
You described bookcases
as a ladder to the moon,
and they did not care for that.
You labelled the radio
as the death of the album,
and upon each of your words
another sparrow flew
from the windowsill in my mind,
off to join you for warmer times,
your flesh on mine,
your glass, my wine.

They told me that you eat men.
High heels and corsets
as you make their acquaintance,
a black hood and axe
as you take a moonlit walk
past the old cemetery.
I would be lying
if I said I was not scared of you.
I would also be lying
if I told you I came with devotion,
or any other plan that did not
involve taming you with ***.
They put nails in my palms
for loving you.

They put nails in my palms
for never wanting you to go.

The world is fast and reckless
like a stampede of beasts and
teenage ***.

It constantly reminds me
of my once mobile life,
before atrophy set like plaster
in my bones.

Everyone used to walk
to where they needed to be,
not because the roads were congested,
but because it was so.
It seems that excuse is just not good enough
anymore.

At times I think:
neither am I.

I still walk the streets
and browse the shop-fronts.
It takes me a little longer these days
to read the signs and labels,
the easy mating calls of the merchants
standing under bigger names
and brighter lights.

Nobody courts anymore.
Hands are held far too easily
and intimacy seems to have become
yet another commodity.

I remember my sweetheart
and the years we lived in absences,
sleeping with a lie
in a life of compromise.
Our eyes stared past the darkness of the room,
beyond to something, somewhere,
far from where we found our lives to be.

I remember her well
amongst the ruins of my years.
How desperate were the days
before we met,
exchanging platitudes for company
in our first loveless marriages.

How bitter I was,
bound within ever decreasing circles
of routine and passionless chains.
I exquisitely recall the day
I finally broke from them.

You and I
met over letters,
our eyes scanning and reciting
each other's loneliness
and fear of never finding a place.
The saliva of the stamp
brought us to a closeness
unbounded by geography.

These days,
nobody understands the thrill of a postbox
and the welcome mat
has become nothing more
than a place to wipe the **** from your shoes,
as the day nurse comes to visit,
kicking pizza leaflets
to the edges of the hallway.

There was excitement in the morning,
sleep thinned to prepare
for that slap of paper
and rattle of metal.

Presently my life feels little more
than an emptied school
in the endless weeks of summer;
a sugar paper lantern
left to bleach in the sun.

I lie in wait,
for the times you appear - a phantasm
in my day. A moment reserved
with the assumption you will be sitting there,
ageing with irrefutable brilliance,
in the chair you stubbornly frequented
ever since our retirement.

I’ll take the hit that comes with it.
I’ll accept the come-down
when I enter the room
and you are not there,
if it permits me a moment of belonging.

The air is cancerous
with the noises of the streets.
We used to stop and listen
to the busker by the bridge,
always pleading upon bended knee
for someone to validate his melody
and make his callouses worthwhile.

Now, I live on in near-silence.
It has been weeks since I spoke to someone
who did not rush me through my sentences.
I am trying to learn the patterns of today,
a way to bow my sad head
and pay up for my goods
in the blink of an eye,
in a way to defy that I am old and slow.

I avoid home mostly
and instead, I walk through
the same route each day,
hoping for a friend
or else never to be noticed.
Hunger will eventually deliver me,
confused at our door.

I turn the television on quickly
to **** the silence that forms
in the spaces you would have spoken in.

On the rare occasions
that I talk to someone,
my eyes blur with inexplicable tears,
a kind of tension grips me,
as if I have missed the last step on the stairs.

I swallow panic
like all of those pills that never work,
instead fogging my mind,
distorting all anchors
to a meaningful life.

The television shouts at me
across the room, patronising like
the cold-callers and politicians.
Everything seems to be an advert
and the news is getting uglier.
Sometimes I turn on the radio,
to give my eyes a rest,
but music isn’t music anymore.

We  never wasted our moments on kids,
but I have grown soft in old age,
and perhaps I would like
to have the comfort of your features
blurred with mine, bestowed upon
our trial-and-error attempt at a legacy.

The money will dry up.
I have started smoking again.
Though I still smoke on the doorstep,
because I know you never liked the smell.
These are just the thoughts of an old man,
some doctored flicker show
Where I can cut out all of the ugliness,
and leave just us.

Since I started full-time employment,
I have been seeking out moments of release
amongst the wreckage of the working day.
Looking for that kind of place to meditate,
somewhere to find a peaceful completion.
I have turned my attention to toilet cubicles,
scrawling verses over awkward thighs,
ankles bound by the descent of my boxers;
pockets of inspiration flourish as the by-product
of Newcastle Brown Ale and work stress
pollutes what's left of the open air.
But I don't care.
I never had a sense of smell.
And there's ******* flying everywhere.

The beer is flowing
All hot and high,
Insect repellent on the house-
A restaurant by the roadside.
The streets a little easy
Now that the tears have dried,
But the population still dress in black
For the year the King had died.

I’ve been doing a little dying too,
All the faces I have been,
All the places, all the names;
All the waste I’ve come to see.
It piled in the entryway,
Too many obstacles to leave,
Too desperate to sit and stay,
Witness the death of the autumn leaves.

Too much steady state back at home,
Over here, it’s chaos in the streets,
Used to take a pill to make me calm;
I used to lie and steal and cheat.
I used to have a drink to **** the day,
Now I take a load off of my feet,
Nurse it back and eat well and full;
There’s no trouble in falling asleep.

I see the waitress get a head massage
In the middle of the working day,
I mind my manners a thousand times
Still, my brain does not behave.
*** lingers on every corner,
In every blind-alley retreat,
Every time she smiles at me,
Or hands me my receipt.

Now I sing for life and I sing for death
And neither is full of fear,
Sometimes I tell the world to go to hell-
But at least I sound sincere.
At least my poetry is full of me
And not the absence in between
When I wake in this sober state;
When I fall down to my knees.

This is not the perfect life,
I would never claim it was,
But it’s a thousand shades brighter now,
In the shifting of the fog.
My notebooks are all clean and new,
My eyes alight with love.
This is what true living means,
This is not what dying does.

I have come a long way.
Those endless nights spent clouding the mind
to a comfortable blindness
where I did not have to witness
the war at my own front door.

I have come a long way.
Locked in fear I could not communicate
with my foreign tongue;
learned that good company
was the mere salute of open arms.

Learned to swallow breath
as I once did pills, *****, and cigarettes
to find that patient calm.
Chemicals promise anaesthesia;
only pain is left when supplies are gone.

I have come a long way
from the departure lounge,
staring at heaving grey skies
and contriving a paradise
no one could hope to find.

Walked suicidal through
tourist-lit streets of central Bangkok.
Half-drunk I wondered why
I continued to breathe;
why my heart refused to stop.

I have come a long way
from believing happiness
is a steady state you can attain
through time-lapse images of victories
and failures you forgot.

Fell in love with an older woman
who would sleep beside me
when she could not see her son.
Through nights of *** and amphetamine
she would sway through each melody

even when the meaning was lost.
Taught me how to speak Thai in the moonlight,
left food on the handles of my motorbike
when I was too hungover
to face the day.

I have come a long way.
Travelled 6000 miles to learn
that home  means anything
from a constant pleasure
to some happy accident.

That love is not pillow-talk;
it’s the rain on the windshield
that gives shelter from the storm.
That truth is not what you hope to find.
but the words that you meant;

fractions of yourself
you could never leave behind.
I have come a long way.
I have made love in enough hotel rooms
to tell you the ashes of yesterday

can be both the aftermath of a flame
you cannot replace
and the fertile ground
to change your name
and start over again.

I have come a long way.
I am still my worst enemy.
Every day is still a fight;
each moment filled with darkness
when I cannot see the light.

I have come a long way.
Stood brave in the entryway
of every opened door.
Made a toast for all the people I could be;
all of the people I have been before.

I love the sound of the city she says
It is like a storm against the window
I can lie naked and ruined
after a long day
and be grateful to find stillness.

In the morning I hear monks chanting
In the afternoon it is all traffic
In the evening I hear stray dogs
as people find each other in the dark.
I love the sound of the city she says

the sound of chaos
the sound of calm.

Think of me not as some maritime devotion,
born upon the salt, suspended in the air,
our friendship but a spit of land, a temporal
bank set upon its tidal death through erosion.

Tarry not on your scattered desk of grey matter.
The folded notes and pencil shavings you hoard,
in the sorry hope they’ll fall to a collage of memoirs
and make sense of all this, their endless chatter.

They talk in circles, double-dealing confidants,
so free of tongue, yet so confined in spirit.
In haste they claim unto you their longing
for the fame, the glamour of the on-screen debutants.

Still stubbornly, you cling to those memories anew.
A memory of a memory, a doctored past is
a game of whispers, to colour in the grey,
to fill beauty in the present, to set ourselves askew.

So you rest with sad grace, thinking on what’s gone.
You make a bed and twist in the sheets of old deceptions,
your pillow case of cigarette ash, wasted petals;
instead, old friend, here are my words to lay upon.

So think of me not as some wasted emotion,
born upon the haze, a clinch of jutting bones,
our friendship but a stretch of truth, a temporal
face set to fade, in all of life’s commotion.

The old man tempts smoke down
The throat of green beer bottles
From the night before.
Cigarette a tool of precision,
Smoke falls like a lozenge
Until the bottom is occluded; endless.

When viewing art he takes to the moor,
Emergent properties of flocking birds,
Overhead patterns he can understand
Without knowing what it means.
Creation is ongoing, cumulative.
Bone upon bone, centuries of death
To build a monument for living.

The old man paints fissures on the foundations
That cultivate famous skylines,
Smoked windows interrupt sunlight;
No one is looking out for him.
The flocking birds circle the air;
Static black on the page - angry, restless.

When making art he suspends disbelief,
Essence of life locked in time,
No beauty in the fault-lines of a face
If no one has seen it smile.
Empires are falling, unknowing submission-
Tower of Babel, Interstate Highway;
All roads lead to terminal erosion.

The old man bites the skin
Around his weathered fingernails,
Fear is his mantra.
Cigarette a tool for soothing,
Smoke falls like a lozenge,
His hunger is permanent; endless.

There has to be an island somewhere, where people just sit around and play music, write, laugh, and get drunk. Where nobody cares about jobs, instead picking fruit from the trees and feeling content in the moment. A place where you are judged solely on your enlightenment, on your kindness of heart and what you display to others. A place where creativity is currency, and material wealth is only a means to an end and shared amongst all.

I dream of this place most nights, and each time when I come around, I fog my brain with beer and ****, in the hope that mist forms over these eyes, hoping it is enough to change the current landscape.

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.

She left me white flowers
on the balcony
on the day she stopped trying
to win my love;

the first time I watched her tail-lights
with a crumb of regret.

Used to leave a loaf of bread
on my doorstep
whenever she could not find me,
drunk, alone;

furious in her offer
of easy company.

She left and in her absence
I found little solace
in the poetry I kept from her.
All these pointless words;

another lover lost to meaning,
another lover lost to impossible

dreams of perfection.
All this time afforded to me
to form my words of purpose
and total inaction.

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.

The Empire is built on the soil of a million dead soldiers.
Drug of war, crater covered up by miles of dust and distance;
cameras cut to graves of the fallen 'brave'
as if bravery can only exist in death.
Meanwhile, cameras forgot
to catch the fall of the still-living into poverty-
a life of psychological warfare-
how can you fund for a disaster
when you have no proof that it is there?

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.

I have stopped singing for success
but instead for the ancient river's 'ohm'.
I have memorised the timeless lyric,
but can't hear the key in which it belongs.

I have stopped trying on clothes
and shifting like an old man in the mirror.
For whenever I get close to myself,
my breath fogs; and nothing is clearer.

The policeman strides the concrete,
some poisoned daffodil
in his stage boots of tread and leather
and fear of authority.

Troll-like he emerges over the sound
of the head-dressed busker,
her simple song, her trio of chords
singing under the shops,

who despise her art.

And I, against the tide of footfalls
and ‘aww’s’ at the latest range
of lipsticks and daily distractions,
I stop to watch as her will falls limp.

Her squeezebox is strangled of sound,
and the music dies at the order
of an order, the noise pollution
of the High Street’s mating call.

Chair folded, she evacuates through
the traffic fumes, ‘cross the road,
and with hope, with fingers crossed
and eyes wet, I hope this is a retreat

and not a surrender.

Once more he strides the concrete,
his fluorescent jaundice coat
a warning, a reminder, and I see
his eyes mouth the words:

‘Your license please,’ he says to her,
‘your paper proof of your right to play.
What profit plan do you have in place
and who approved your name?’

‘You can’t call yourself a busker’, he says,
‘much less an artist or work of art,
which talent show do you hope to enter,
to validate your part?’

‘Your part in this wholesome land,’ he says,
‘how you do your bit, your profits large,
because our economy is going asunder,
and so we have no time for art.’

‘So it’s with no due regret,’ he says,
‘that I’ll send you on your way.
And if with you goes the death of music,
well that’s just progress made.’

And so I walked away from this scene of
deflowered and purpled hope,
my stomach wrought with injustice
and no nicotine in tow.

And it is to this table I am sat,
with just one vocation upon my mind;
to reclaim her song, now sung in silence,
and steel her memory in time.

And it is to this table I am sat,
with everything on my mind,
to tell of what I’ve seen,
to indulge another rhyme:

Sing to me your sorrow,
sing unto the skies,
play to me your pleasantries
and please purge me of my lies.

Pay us with your sorry tune,
pay us with your life,
all your forsaken childhood dreams,
your faded hopes and strife.

And please,

bathe me in this sunlight,
and bathe me in time,
scour me with city streets
and allow me what is mine.

Lived the life of an artist
long before I became one.
Pressed to guitar strings
until my fingers were numb
to all exposed skin
that was not my own.

Listened to one thousand sad songs
over and over
until the pointless chords
clamoured over one another,
psalms of living
fall on deaf ears.

Trawled archives of *******.
Lauded aristocrats of cheap whiskey nights
and black coffee mornings.
Garnished my days with addictions carried
by better men
in love with real women.

Grew thin, moved about the apartment
in the graveyard hours
tacking songs to the walls.
In the absence of chains and ***
I fixed myself with neon lights
and cigarettes.

Spilt paint over undeserving paper
beneath the halogen bulb
to colour radio silences
of past friendships,
mountains I should let recede
like a ship in the night.

Stood alone in crowds
to witness the onset of a moment,
openings and closings of mouths and doors;
each one to allow another person in.
I go home alone
and sleep with my thoughts.

The wicked, they come
In a cerulean dream.
The cellar door opened,
With an opposable thumb.

A disposable past
And no ties in the future,
They live within ******
And die through their caste.

Oh, Ford! They cry out
For all of their blessings.
Oh, Ford! I cry too,
To drown silent doubt.

“Take me to your room.”
She breathes, voice coppered,
She conducts me. Unzips in
One movement, fit to bloom.

“Lenina,” I call,
Eyes blinded by her colour.
In a world so built and grey,
I live only in her sprawl.

We finish, my heart descending.
She nicks her lips to my ear,
Then reminds me thus;
“Ending is better than mending.”

To bed we fall; once, twice, thrice.
Each time I cling longer,
Wrap her in bedsheets,
‘Till she feels our ****** splice.

With no use, she’s gone
To some other embrace.
Some cold shouldered support,
Then to the salon.

She’ll tell all to her friends,
A gaggle of giggles.
And he’ll speak of her,
Like some means to an end.

“Pneumatic,” is she,
He’ll say with no stutter,
“You should have her,” he’ll offer,
Like the fruit from a tree.

No, like meat, like meat,
She is passed around.
Like animals, the Alphas
Bruise, **** and maltreat.

Community. Snake-like,
It moves as if one.
Each person a muscle,
Not separate but a part.

Identity. It blurs,
‘Till I forget the use
Of my name. Push it out,
Repeat in my dreams.

Stability. It comes,
A two-gramme holiday.
A superficial guffaw
That veneers my face.

Oh, Soma! Come take me,
From where I don’t belong.
To where passions are birthed
Far from the hatchery.

To where feelings are heartfelt,
Not found in a pill.
Where waistlines aren’t throttled
By a Malthusian belt.

A savage I am,
In my pursuit for more.
When I long for freedom,
And not another half-gramme.

Gaia, she held us in her womb.
From fish to ape, she mothered too.
Now all that’s left is this soulless gloom
Where man is born only to consume.

Roadways have flayed greyed arteries
Into the greenaries of the land.
A kingdom of metallic cities,
An empire built upon shifting sands.

And bombs stain the badlands
In dusty countries far ashore.
It is a time for distractive actions
And a constant state of war.

But what a dull reality!
To focus on the undulations,
The consequences of being free,
The purge of the weaker nations.

For life can be easy
If you live through glossy pages.
The life and lies of a celebrity;
The superficial ages.

A sorry state for families
Who talk only about the weather
And other temporal pleasantries,
On their proud suites made of leather.

Oh, what a poor affair!
Caring more for the clouds above,
Than the climates of our world-weary hearts,
and for all the ones we love.

And lo, we're careless and carefree
for all that does not appear on screen.
They'd gush over some royal baby,
But not pine over the unseen.

Our modern sicknesses
Are conjured and conceited too.
For what value is there in compassion,
If oneself is feeling blue?

Does charity begin at home?
You once said it does nothing at all.
But is home solely what you own,
In a world so close and so small?

These questions are silent,
But they are asked in the thousands.
By all those that are used to deaf ears,
Across all oceans and lands.

To the soft-hearted I call thee,
To not be so stilled and so dampened.
By the weight of the majority,
the crowds of the minds unopened.

And to myself I hope,
That we shall meet dear reader.
Above your recitation of my words,
To something more real,
To something much clearer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are young, they say,
like the new stars forming,
like the ocean sounds adorning
sleep to the city dweller,
with his leathered face
but handsome pay.

He's exchanging the sirens
for a more rhythmic pace,
taking off his coat
and professional face,
to press you to the wall,
forgetting the Keats and the Byrons
that came before.

We are young, I'm sure,
despite having to crawl,
despite disappearing into
the city sprawl,
and returning half a person,
only memory intact,
and a stream of shutting doors.

You're giving up too soon.
Too soon a disciple of established fact,
too soon beguiled by
your own stage-lit act;
a smile worn, rather than felt,
a dress bought for him,
but never touched,

and for all of the hands
you may have dealt,
not a single one
has kept you young.

Woke up on the edge of it
the sober morning light
woke up and felt assured of it
but it didn't make it right

So now I paint my eyes so blue
and they colour all my days
all I do is think of you
in the sunglass shade

Woke up with my mind set on
all that's come and gone
are you still listening
to the same old sad, sad songs?

Or does the sun reflect your mood
now you made it out alive?
Do you still need a drink or two
to fall asleep on time?

Woke up on the edge of it
the sober morning light
woke up and felt assured of it
but it didn't make it right

So now I paint my eyes so blue
and they colour all my days
all I do is think of you
in the sunglass shade

Everyone has *** darling,
you cannot claim that as your own,
nor your past of broken heels
and your father's broken home.
I scored blood over my wrist
and toiled, toiled, toiled
in the sun.

I stood in line for my freedom
to find that there was none.

We are all maladjusted darling,
all singing to an empty sky,
all pastured by the government
and living amongst The Lie.
You cannot claim your illness
as the dissolution of G-d,

you cannot find a kindness
if you do not spare the rod.

Everyone loves a ******* darling,
in that you are not alone,
your father with his whiskey breath,
all cancer and flesh and bone.
I scored a high in an empty field
and howled, howled, howled
at the moon.

I stood up for the years that I had crawled,
for all our happiness that came too soon.

I fell in love with The Smiths
before anything else.
Ever since,
all affection is met with
sheer inadequacy,
and a near insufferable sadness.

I do not want to talk about love today.
I do not want to mention
affectionate contact or semi-regular ***.
The newspapers are bringing forth
welcome divisions between mankind;
fault-lines of irreconcilable differences
to justify my half-hearted attempt at solitude.

I do not want to talk about sobriety today.
I do not want to bore you
with those nervous hours between cigarettes
and how I fill each moment spent inside myself.
******* offers a ladder of perfume and hair
for me to ascend to some anaerobic bliss,
towards an isolated unity between myself

and the woman stretched out on my astral bed.
I do not want to talk about much today.
I have over-thought all that is worth a mention.

I plan on using your shaving mug.

a plan not worth telling
unless you knew of
the many howling adolescent evenings
I spent
jabbing my fingers in the snout
to touch your leftover hair.

It was stuck,
preserved with ancient soap,
cleansed of life, of pigment.
I wanted to touch the filament
that once burnt you
into being.

Yourself entombed
in pottered clay, soft beige
monument. The hands that once
shaped it, like yours;
they tend to me, bring me shape
in a formless world.

The same shoots grow here;
on my crown and over the temples.
I worship your concept,
myself a replication - thin haired
and inadequate. Less loved, more turbulent,
with naught left but life.

It's less than what you have;
idealised memory, a shrine of compliments,
a spotless life of saviour and sin.
How I love you, oh privation,
How I miss you,
dear Father.

now is the time though,
to clear my reflection.
now is the time
to wash you out.

They said Keith couldn't *** without a finger up his ***,
they said Ruth was a **** for not sleeping with her man.
They said George was a woman because he couldn't grow a beard,
they said Molly was autistic, because she was a little bit weird.

They said Mr. Winchester was a ******* because he wore an overcoat,
they said Ms. Wheeler as a witch, and once sacrificed a goat.
They said Mr. Winter was so fat, he was more or less bulletproof,
they said Ms. Walker was not attractive, but if it came to it:
she'd have to do.

They said Lucinda was thin because she chose not to eat,
sitting by the bathroom doors in the lunchtime canteen.
They said Leonard was a ****** with his long, blonde hair,
they said Luke was a downy because of his vacant stare.

They said Mr. Fresco was a drinker who beat his wife at home,
they said Ms. Finkel was a *******, seen standing out in the cold.
They said an awful lot of things that decayed away over time,
but it takes a strength to train the mind

to not trod the tracks of a lifetime past,
to keep yourself to who you are,
not those ancient words,
nor those faded scars.

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

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

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

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

to find the power he is preaching against.

Save for the tramlines
marked seafoam white across
my forearm,

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

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

We could.

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

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

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

I could.

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

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

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

to meet me halfway.

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

My desk is scattered with
notes, drafts, prototypes,
of my love letters to the world.

Ugly, thin spider-scrawls
of hieroglyphic ink,
pleading for my future self
to flesh the bone,

of the skeleton in my thoughts.

Beside them, the trusted red wine
to chase down the pressures
of the world, hold them in line.

Each sip, a godsend,
each bottle a promise
that love will never end.

The simple pleasure of a desk;
a confounding beauty,
the collage to your life
and all that preoccupies you.

Your personality is laid before you;
each picture, beer bottle, notebook,
a fragment of yourself.

My desk is scattered in
the loves, hates and frustrations
of my place within this world.

Ugly, thin spider-scrawls
of unintelligible ink,
pleading for some higher power
to flesh the bone,

of the skeleton that is myself.

Oh, Danielle
your voice carries south
and whistles
through the ages.

Oh, Decibel
your sound hollows out
and compounds
through the stages.

Oh, Wishing Well
full of stagnant doubt
and rusted,
wasted wages.

Oh, Danielle
your voice naught without
keeping me
in cages.

She drew each suit
Of a deck of cards
On my arm with a
Black ballpoint pen
We nursed our shared glass
And took ice once
All the customers had taken
Their motorbikes into the night
We made love beneath
The fairy-lights and
Cleansed ourselves
In simple, beautiful poverty

I knew that the ink
The glass
The ice
The fairy-lights
And the ***
Would all burn out
Or wash away

I knew that the poverty
Would lift
Eventually
And expose
Our rushed
And reasonless
Foundations

Watched them clear away the tables
thought tonight was the time
they would finally
wash us away
after one thousand guests
dined in our wake

One thousand people in love
or else hoping if they sat long enough
love would become
*** was never ours
it was borrowed like time
from the death throes of G-d

One by one
we drowned old fools
beneath the surgery light
we toasted tomorrow
as they do in Hollywood
and poured another wine

I can still hear you singing
though where you are
I do not know
watched them clear away the tables
the colour leave your face
the water **** the stone

You would not recognise me
I have grown so old and slow
love now the blue pill of evening
that blurs all features
and cause the edges to glow
they ring the bell for closing time

I wonder how long I must wait
I wonder when it is my turn to go

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.

Here is a toast for a future life
of foreign seas and captivating wife.
I'll write in the day whilst she is away,
we'll get drunk on good wine,
with no debts left to pay.

We were together
Staring out at the black sea;
A void in some backwater alley
Of central Bangkok.

You were laughing at its beauty
And like the stars I stared blankly,
Looking for everything I could not see.

Alternating undercurrent
Of raw sewage and street-food spice,
Alive in the shadow
Of a searing neon skyline,
The moon made of bone;
We blacken our lungs
Six thousand miles from home.

Set in greed for *** and company,
The familiar lilt of Latin tongues.
In a dream I still need to breathe,
Still need to feel the heat of love
Or at least the touch of anyone.

I lean, habit-ridden
Over the railings of misspelled lovers
That carved their names half-drunk
With hotel keys
Into the dandelion paint,
That with gradual loss,
Succumbs to the traffic
And falls in the breeze.

You wept at the sentiment.
I baulked in their loss.
I drew you in closer
To keep hold of this dream,
Before the night fades,
Before time has forgot,

Before life pulls us apart,
Before love loosens its knot.

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

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

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

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

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

Now it is my turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tried to fulfil
the caverns in my eyes,
sleepless nights that echo
the chamber of creativity.

So much to do,
so much to do.

So many symbols to contrive
so that when I die,
I do not leave.

When did this ridiculous past-time
become a reason to be?

There is more truth in the flute
than a lover's tongue,
more heart in the metre
of well-formed words
than there is to belong
to any God or anyone.

Tried to fulfil
the hunger for movement;
restless flicker-book
that rearranges
the same old routine
of skipped pages
and human error

into art and reason.

A library of poetry
cannot articulate
what is found in
two minutes of Chopin.

Don’t let the *******
Get their foot through the door
Say yes once, at the wrong time
And you’ve said yes ten thousand times
Soon they’ll be taking the hours
From your life

It will happen slowly
Creeping up on you
Like glacial tides
Like choosing a Pope
Like *** cancer
Until one day you are consumed
And struggling only pulls the mud
Further up your throat

They get you with all the necessities
Food, water, beer, clothes, and cigarettes
It takes POWER to say no
Not a lot of people have power
At least, they say no to the wrong things
They’ll say no to a mid-week ******
And yes to the slow death of 8-5

You see the injustice in their eyes
You see they are looking for an escape
You know, though, that they wont
The ******* move in

They claim they already own the place
That they never moved in at all
They’ll start rearranging
The furniture of your life
Orientating everything in their image

Don’t let them in
Don’t even open the door
They’ll take everything-
But it’s yours to keep

To keep so long as you
Love their cruelty
And allow them the last thread
Of consciousness
That leaves your body before sleep

It’s yours so long as you
Turn up on time
And stay late
Punch the clock
And throttle all human smell

It’s all yours
If you give yourself to them
They will use up your patience
And then start on your confidence

Until they have you
Decorating your iron bars
With raised, clenched fists
Declaring loyalty to those
Who would drop you without hesitation

Soon, they’ll **** that spark
That Blue Moon spark
The one you feel when the sky
Mimics colours of happy memories
The one you feel when
You wake with movement in your bones
The one you feel when
A balloon swells in your chest
Or when ecstasy fills your spine
How the wind at the back of a motorbike
Blows the cobwebs from your mind

They’ll take it all away

They’ll take it all
Compensate you with a paltry sum
For all of your hours
For all torn relationships
You have no time for

They’ll turn the vice
A little tighter each day
Until you turn crazy-
If you’re lucky

If not
You’ll be there
Spent on purified sugar
And a lack of motion
To your days
You’ll be there
A hollowed shell
Of violent potential
Lost

Lost in timesheets and long weekends
You’ll take pictures
Of days spent in the sun
So that in your luxury
Your geriatric, loose-skinned luxury
You can look back
On your small life and say
“Hey, I did everything expected of me”

And that will work
For no one

Don’t let the *******
Get their foot through the door
You have no POWER to resist
You won’t be you anymore

Homesickness blues,
Blue skies; confused.
Paradise has slipped from view,
Occluded by opened windows
In emptied rooms.
Let the light fall in
But it falls on nothing.
Dust kicks up in the wind;
Brief interlude of a confident June
Before falling down again.
No single tongue that speaks my own,
Home was when I talked to you.
Now that you are gone
I wait by the phone
And hope you are waiting too.

I will wait here.

I will wait precisely in this cabinet,
Until you prise it open
In that delicate curiosity
That is lost in ‘today’.

My words are more patient than myself.
I know that now,
I think I always did.
It is why I love and

Why I love so patiently.

I will wait so gladly in my place,
Until poetry is fashion once more.
It is a sure case
In a sorry state.

Hearts that beat too fast
And breaths that are too frequently
Forsaken for a foolish enterprise
Of some invested individual

Sat watching behind a blast screen.

I will wait here and think back.
To remember the fuzzy nothing
Of my childhood mind. I recall little
But the polarities. The spaces of life

That intercede mere existence.
I bask in these doctored images of a past
That I never quite had. A fatherless summer
Forgotten instantly in garage top vigils,

Kicked footballs and years that were endless.

I wonder if my words will last longer
Than the etchings of your gravestone.
I wonder more so whether you would
Approve of them and how much I would

Have cared if you did not. A father is lost
And is abstract for me. Like God,
An ever-present utterance of nothing at all
Or perhaps everything that I am

Or could possibly ever be.

I wonder whether my love of words
Is nothing but a longing for permanence
In a world that has forever shown me
Futility. I have read of it in your name

Again and again through till now,
And thenceforth years to come. Your name,
How it needs to mean something,
Your voice, your ‘I’ through the ages,

For it envelops me within it - we are the same Mr.

It is within your void that I search for a father.
An ancestor to tell me who I am
And from where I have come. The plight of the
Ape-men that have been, their legacies

Wrought in blood-stained gold
But also in each yellowing poem
And from the hand prints on cave walls.
These are the will of my fathers,

The trinkets on my mantelpiece.

It is within you all that my words
Remain patient. It is within you all
That my will remains clear. For I know now
(Or perhaps I always did)
That there is a voice amongst us.

It may sleep through the noise of today,
All-talk and no communication. It may sleep
Right on through until we awake. Our eyes
Will burn for staring at the screens,

But our hearts will sing for their reprieve.

We saw her leaving Jericho
Tearing down the walls
Throwing a childish tantrum
Whilst ******* in the halls

We saw her chasing pigeons
In the local council park
We caught her chewing daffodils
Whilst humming 'Baby Shark'

She drank a lot
Ate nothing much
But the ice
Inside the tube

Grit her teeth
Swallowing bubbles
The plastic straw
The noxious fumes

She was forever
Chasing a high
That cost too much
And left too soon

We saw her licking batteries
Relaying messages to Earth
We caught her hiding sanitary towels
Underneath the dirt

That lined the filthy walls
Of her low-rent, low-mood high-rise
Ghosts that wraithed inside her head
Left bruises on her thighs

We saw her join the homeless men
In the shadow of the mall
She combed the streets every day
And still found sweet **** all

She sang a lot
And never slept
Beneath the weight
Of a poisoned sky

We knew she was sad
All the time
But we never saw her
Cry

We saw her live
Her lonesome life
Even saw her when she
Died

From the other side of hell
We decorate our homes
Forget the fine line
The thin divide

Between our professional smile
And the crazy inside our bones

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

Hair doused in seawater
and drying out in the sun,

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

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

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

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

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