Black is the colour
You see it in
The core of my eyes
All the excuses I steal
All the malformed lies

In all the sheep I lead
To the slaughter
In a thinly-veiled
Wolf's disguise
Black is the colour

Now you see it
In the headlines
All the friends
You could not keep
All the colours

That pass you by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pink pill turns black
on its tin-foil hammock,
putrid cremation
beneath a butane lighter.
A choir of bullfrogs
sing the advent of a wet summer,
whilst trembling hands gather
to capture the fumes
through the paper vessel
of a makeshift straw.

She gathers spring flowers.
Places them in a jewellery box
alongside the ring he has never worn.
Wide-eyed, she speaks in Thai
on their sweet scent,
amongst the burnt incense
and his vacant, impatient stare.
Tarried for the next hit of nicotine,
for the self-immolation
when he is left to sleep alone.

Lungs tarred with amphetamine,
she will return to her infant son
as if nothing has happened
whilst he wakes
to a morning bed of ash.
Mosquitoes fog the windowsill
as they languish
in off-hand, stubborn ***.
She falters to a ******-
he keeps his cards to his chest.

Dawn croaks its miserable head
as he suffers a silence of symphonies
with no words.
No common tongue;
heart brays over
a pillowcase of pebbles
and a mouth of sand.
She paints her nails,
smiles with professional assurance.
She lives in a comfort

he cannot understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I was born for Nebraska
I was born for the Massif Central
I was born for the mountain top shrine
with nothing but the music of nature
to distract me
I was born for the weekly news
on some sleepy island in the Pacific
I was born for Covent Garden
The Pangea of Culture
New Orleans trumpets;
the flamenco player
twisting lime into his drink
I was born for the cotton fields
I was born for the salt marsh
for the tug-boat all out of fresh water
I was born for the Ganges
I was born in the shadow of the Hajj
I was born for the G-dless land
of Death Valley
the streets of Harlem
I was born into the spirit
of old Afghanistan
I was born on the false strings
of liberated women-

I was born on a stage of puppets
a backdrop of Glaswegian tenements
or of fjords unvisited
beside Scandinavian seas
I was born for Rugby Cement
I was born to be fixed in place
This wandering mind
These restless legs
I was born with a travelling soul
in a town where I can barely walk

It is a flash of light and metal,
The chop of a guillotine
Exploding through the lens of a camera.

Severed arteries spray blood through the gutters,
Broken limbs and powdered bone
A pain that reverberates through television screens
And is felt across the globe.

The clamour of film crews in the aftermath,
The twisted steel and burnt lungs
Caught by shaking hands
Soon carted off on a stretcher.

It is a time for Americans they say,
The white boy in the oxygen mask,
The chaos and the broken glass
And a woman laid out on her back.

The flags will ascend and the band will play,
Tears will be shed and the choir will pray.
But with every minority that shall be blamed,
It is a time for humanity, I say.

Late night drive-thru, red lights, stop signs.
Lately I’ve been blue all in the absence of you
And I won’t lie
The Philistines are out in force tonight
And I won’t lie
I’m back on the bottle again tonight.

I can’t control it, the weight of the morning,
I read the warning but I never saw it coming
In my field of view, or in my mind’s eye,
Well, I’ve been blue in the absence of you

And I
Like a beating drum,
Like a washed-out popstar,
Like an artifact
After the fact-

I’ll cling onto what I got stored up in karma,
You see, I’ve been a good man
But I’ve done some bad things in my time.
And I won’t lie
Everything must go here tonight.
And I won’t lie
I’m back on the bottle again tonight.

They say laughter is the greatest medicine.
They say a lot of things but it never makes much sense.
They’re climbing up the walls
To get their monthly pay;
They say laughter is the greatest medicine.

Late night, junk food, I’m ****** without you.
I’m a badly drawn cartoon with red eyes
And an ego on fire.

And I won’t lie
The lunatics are out in force tonight

And I won’t lie
There’s too much wrong here
To try and make it right.

And I won’t lie
I’m back on the bottle again tonight.

https://soundcloud.com/ed-coles-667440414/bottle

****** in the afternoon,
Orphans brawling in stereo,
hometown ballads of unseen terraces,
bar stool swallowing peanuts, pretzels,
salted anti-depressant,
the foul smell of life amongst
folded towels, synthetic apple,
the Magna Carta of Suburbia.

The allotments buckle and spread,
fragile sexuality, the April sun;
quick to heat, quick to tears
after a long winter of recovery.
Grit in the carpet, art in the air,
it comes too thick to catch a breath,
too thin on the lungs
to turn it to a song, or prayer.

This G-dless drug,
hippie theories, old self-harm habits,
slanted handwriting to prove a point;
intelligible fears for acceptance
as words form like train tracks
in my disappearance from this:
the peak of the day,
at the bottom of the world.

The prophets are corrupt.
Tablets that are easy to swallow
but impossible to tolerate
in the swarming ache,
accelerating climate;
the act of being human at all.

Human at all
in the face of the clock,
the tick, tick, tock of progression,
incremental change;

the feeling that you are heaving a boulder,
only to wake, to shave,
and to do it all again.

The drinks are cheap here,
and old habits live easy.
I am doing better than most
in the humdrum collision
of everyday living.

I am doing better than most,
but still I climb into the canopy
only to wake up ******, alone,
and at the bottom of the world.

I tried to keep my focus on the out-breath,
to the things I can offer
rather than what I keep inside.
I have tried yoga poses
at the crack of dawn
with nothing but my underwear on;
I tried to drink eight pints
of water a day
to ensure that my veins do not rust away,
to fill myself with the basic essence of life-
but I could not handle the broken sleep
each time I woke, desperate for a ****
in the depths of the night.
I tried to blu-tac unfinished songs
to my wall, emulating product-placement
but with nothing left to sell.
I know I cannot keep smoking ****
to emulate a stalwart companion.
These broken streets
look more second-hand to me,
and I have tried to find
that sober sleep,
that wide-eyed wonder
outside of these stale, chemical dreams-
but all I get are cold sweats
and cold shoulders;
people growing all around me
like stalks in a cornfield,
blocking all but a circle of light
that hangs over my head;
the bottom of a well,
the bottom of the world.

I am doing my best to keep on top
of all the things
that threaten to bring me down.

You were the bowl of oranges.
Lilac skin and a blue heart
On your sleeve.
The lights and colours that erupt
In stars behind closed eyes:
I saw you even when I drank myself blind.

You were the solution of words
Once all the chemicals lost their kick.
The Truth was out there,
We stayed inside sheltered routines
Which blacked out the skies,
Cast a ceiling on our dreams.

You were the Earthly phenomena
That kept me from drifting to the stars.
The coastline in my breath,
On my tongue - to everyone.
You were the name my friends
Were tired of hearing;
The name I cannot forget.

You were red wine;
On my lips and on your dress.
You were... Late-night farewells,
You were the sun salutation,
The birth of a nation
That could blossom into colour in my mind.

You were beautiful in the cloud forests,
Astral depths: we never had to speak.
What age did we reach
Before that daydream started to ache?

You were the faded fantasy
That I held like sand in my hands.
When we kissed I would tremble,
I would lose a little more of you.

You were sad singers.
Old souls that tread the line of their sanity
In fine-point precision;
You were the art that coursed my veins
When surrounded by grey food, grey rooms, grey walls.

You were the messenger with an olive leaf, a blue feather;
A signpost for dry land. You were the panic button
That would take me to the safe place in my mind.
You were the way I said ‘I love you’
In a voice that was finally mine.
You were my lighthouse in the distance
And all the words I cannot find.

You are a formidable woman.
Forgive me the term,
as I know woman has meant 'wife-man'
in times not quite yet past.

But in now, and in essence,
you are more than a dedicated string
to my bow of love,

but instead, and in spite
of life's unholy glow,
you're my confidant woman,
whilst the world is at war.


Be here now, and in essence
darling, as we scale through our European scape,
be here now, and in substance
woman, to splay out upon our infant coastal shore.

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.

Do not lend me your hand,
instead, lend me your money,
shared income, insurance,
and ownership of land.
Pin me not to the bed,
but instead, to your catalogue
of meek suggestions
for which shirt I should wear.

Do not lend me your ear,
instead, give me your money
so that I can cheapen love
and reduce it to some teenage tear.
Keep me not in your heart,
instead a part, of no sum,
of zero character,
yet adoration for my hair.

Do not lend me your friendship,
instead, hand over your cash.
I will pour your drinks - and smile,
should you not forget to tip.
Think of me not as a man,
or a tan of skin, of freckle
and violence,

but of tomorrows and histories combined,
blurred memories of childhoods past,
torrents of joy that pass so fast,
all dues paid in my sparrow heart,
weak upon my childhood's start,
when with love, came unending pain,
a heart overcome in the heavy rain.
For, with a heart so tiny,
and bounded in flesh,
chained to the body
and thus, to distress,
I found my heart to be feeble,
and harried in grief,
for there is far too much longing,
in a lifetime so brief.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm high all of the time
and old habits scatter my desk.
Tobacco leaves, beer tops,
balloons and razor blades.

What else is there but
flesh-excitement? I have
found nothing in my life
worth holding on to.

As rainfall breaks its banks
Of concrete, potholes, and dust
Men in yellow jackets
Descend on the makeshift
Flooded car park
Its tea-coloured, temporary pool

With a bare left hand
And a green sack each
They pull bullfrogs from their throat song
In the shadow of my high-rise
I cannot make out the struggles

That, without doubt, ensue inside the sack
Limb entangled with limb,
Body upon body
Blind save for the odd cadence
And crack of light

Deaf in the caterwaul of disorientated
Angry males forcing a lifetime
Of movement into their last few moments
By sunrise half will be dead
Whilst the others dry out in the sun
Get shifted onto half-melted ice
And eaten once the sun
Goes down again

All will be still in the end

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

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

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

Gave up on being a saviour,
A martyr in the thicket of danger,
I won’t fight for my place
In the Free Speech Corner.

Gave up on being a bleeding heart
Run dry.

I won’t burst into flame
To prove a point:
Burn myself out
Until the chip on my shoulder
Sings like a flute.

Gave up on being a shelter,
Passion rains upon your window,
The traffic hum of weather
Just sends you off to sleep.

I won’t kick for the current,
Float to the surface,
Wait for the ambulance.

Gave up on being a lighthouse
Stood brave.

I won’t hold a torch
For love off in the distance.
I won’t carry death on my tongue
Until the moment comes.

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.

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

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

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

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

Follow the echo of dissimilar climbs,
wavering landscapes, silhouettes;
undulating skies of cloud and shadow.
Old peaks left to weather,
as pills carve the plateaued mind,
all ribbon and bows,
all the flowers left by the roadside.

There is a blanket of darkness
and yet always a small box of light.
It illuminates the path, allows for a splurge
of words, of honesty - after all the lies,
after all the pills that gave sleep;
a soft defeat, the irregular streets
and the memories left by the roadside.

Follow me through my choices of word,
shifting coastlines, marionettes;
a body moving in a slow disease,
mental health ailing; the red, red wine.
Those pills came and yet still I remain,
stubborn as a **** on a concrete street,
perfecting the Bojangles walk,
the drunken fool,
the wanderer left by the roadside.

There's a direct link
between your time spent writing
and your love for cats.

Since you left I have been nourishing
my ego with long walks and vitamins.
Since you left I have written poetry.
A lot of poetry. There were nights spent
in the haze of **** beneath
plastic canopies and stars.

Since you left I have listened to the trains
pass from my bedroom window, lighting
incense and learning how to sleep
again. Since you left I have been
visiting old friends. They cheer from the
sidelines. They fill out my time.

Since you left I have been looking for jobs
and ways to write an honest letter:
an apology to reverse our goodbyes.
I have been counting my change
to take you out to dinner.
I have been losing my appetite ever
since you left.

Well the dogs begin to bark, disembodied
on the cemetery hill. Gravestones are silhouettes,
furniture in the night. From here you can see the housing estate,
constellations of halogen bulbs and bicycle reflectors.
All is still but my mind and the sound of the dogs in the distance.

A lofted branch, a hanging thread:
when did the rope-swing become a noose?
We came down from the trees
to burn them to the ground.
A thousand signals pass overhead. Unintelligible.
Unseen. The homeless leave ****-bottles of cheap cider
and backwater in the flower bins

but no one has seen them do it.
A chapel reflects the distant street-lights, unmoving,
so that only the trees share my discourse with living.
The dogs have shut up. The signals continue.
I lost my way again on the cemetery hill.
Scars have become medals.
My heart refuses to still.

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.

I have been looking for truth in silence,
I have stayed up all night long,
I am waiting for new information
of which I knew all along.

I have been trading in all of my secrets,
I have been fishing for a life,
I have been falling in love with strangers,
whilst searching for wife.

I have been thinking of quitting smoking,
oh, you've heard that one before,
but stagnation sets in with old habit
and temptation closes the door.

I have been studying great romantics,
I have been drinking in the bath,
I have been coding all troubles to words,
and reciting Sylvia Plath.

I've heard that truth will be found in silence
and solace within a song,
so I've been framing my life in artwork,
I've been faltering to belong.

I have stopped dreaming
I stopped a while ago
and during that time
put it down to wine
and the misery of money
After thinking it over
I remember a picture
from a could-be memory

I have found the reason
I have found the root
to all despair of age
and vanishing friends
It came in the moment
I stopped chasing my shadow
It came in the acceptance
that it would never walk away

I spend far too much time,
writing about wine.
I spend far too much time,
needing it.

And I spend far too much time,
making words that rhyme.
And not enough time,
living it.

For the banks of the Tyne,
I sing for what's mine,
And all of the brine
it searches.

For the bells that do chime,
and green nails of lime,
You are all that I dare
dream about.

Though I spend too much time,
cleansing the grime,
And far too much time
cursing it.

And there's not enough time,
to live like a mime,
to only chronicle secrets
in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water skids the ephemeral valley.
Tight turns, night gowns and cigarette ash beds,
with countless souls lost in ruby red wine.

Fingers indiscernible, scaled hardbacks
lay upon the shelves in deadened beauty,
whilst creation is born in digital sound.

Oh, precious friend
of life and light,
who too, seeks the answers
in the night,
in those humble pockets
of solitude,
in which all of us
will brood,
who too, struggles
with the pace of day,
with their troubled soul
left to decay;
fear not on death,
nor life's dismay,
when you come to me
on Christmas Day.

Dear friend of mine,
in lifetime's past,
before the court assigned
our caste,
from troubled years,
where we learned to love,
when we moved to question
the stars above,
when we learned the value
of today,
to beware even
the ides of May;
but fear not on doubt,
nor love's delay,
when you come to me
on Christmas Day.

And, my fellow soul
and Earthly delight,
who too, thrives upon
friendship's sight,
the warmth of wine,
and future schemes,
of how to attain
your lucid dreams,
who too, lives upon
where souls do play,
lest childhood minds
fall astray;
but fear not on loss,
nor what you portray,
when you come to me
on Christmas Day.

There is a beer can bobbing on the horizon.
It poisons the sea; La Cerveza Valdez,
an opposable thumb to flip the swtich.

I think being human is an artwork.
Pierce me, flay my arms in tribal shapes,
kiss the rag of religion, break your soles

for the Hajj. Let's overpopulate the party,
trading red for blue in an endless procession
of masks. Let's straitjacket our sanity,

and document our depressions in late-night
emails, and early morning black coffee.
I lost my mind when I turned sober,

remembering what it means to forget.
There is a hospital bed in the future.
But there are pills I can take for that.

Love is not the scrawl of notes

left on the bedside, whilst

the alarm clock suffers to clouts

and rings, awakening her.



Neither is love the aperture

between silhouettes

as they embrace so readily

against the walls. Some clinch

of absence, the antiptosis

of the you and I.



Love is not the spaces between

the ‘I miss you’s’ and the

‘here we are once more’s.’



Neither is love the separation

between our wants and needs,

to the disparities in the world.

It is not the defiance of obligation,

nor some holy rest-house

to the ills of the modern world.



Love is not some shared novel,

a story born out over a communal

conjecture of where humanity shall

rest upon the end of everything.



Neither is love the offering of a rose,

or any other bouquet of severed

life, strangled for the nourishment

of her; the justification of your

placement in her life. These are just

condescending gestures,



weak offerings to the Lord

of all you claim to be divine.



Love is not a life to be feasted upon,

nor is it the self-satisfied glance

in the mirror, as you finally decide

on your definition of ‘I’.



Neither is love this malformation

of words, this attempt of veritas,

this hollowed pursuit of whiskey-fuelled

longing, longing, longing for

some great hand to deliver life

upon my doorstep, upon our’s.



Love is simply the eternal rite

of Gaia; the motes of existence

that tumble with great devotion

and all-cause to their eventual demise,



their inevitable return

to the spiral that created them.



Love is the spaces between my breath,

between your’s.

Those pockets of meditation,

and the realisation of union

between all that was,

and ever will be.



Love is the acknowledgement

of power between us. Our previous

lives, blades of grass wilting together

under the footfalls of the now-trees,

the now-governors of our lives.



Love is in the ‘I know you’s’

and the ‘what would I do

without you’s’ that we have so struggled

to forsake in the day-to-day

tumble of our lives.



And to this, I say, that love is

these spaces that you may

no longer occupy. The barren stretches

of grey matter that no being either

mortal or otherwise,

could ever reclaim.



Love is the birth of bespoke experience,

and the knowledge

that nothing can erase us

from the archives of

everything that should ever matter.



Love is us.

It is time for a new speed.

A fresh pair of cotton socks and a handful of cash.

I’m going to take that road I have walked one hundred times

And walk it backwards.



I have slammed enough doors

To know when I’m ready to soften.

I must decide whether to hold my breath

And climb out of ground zero.

Or just lay down in the rubble.



I can see the dregs.

The grit in the tea, the flattened beer.

The paltry tobacco at the bottom of the bag.

Desolate and sparse. The ineffable honesty

Of the etchings around my eyes.



My legs twitch in a lethargic energy.

They kick out and twist in the bedsheets

Tangled in routine.

I’m kicking out against the bars

That constantly hold me in.

Never dreamed I would fear
The best thing for me
Forsake longing
In the daily pursuit
Of escapism
And ugly living

Lack of meaning
Beneath the tongue
To almost anything
And anyone

What do you expect from me

When you stand there
Bold in the beauty of life
Full of struggle without a scar
Fingers delicate in prayer

I am ravaged by the storm
All movement without lustre
All shelter torn
All sails at half mast

Years spent searching
For dry land
After years spent learning
Nothing is built to last

If you lend me dreams of your future
I will confess to each demon of my past

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.

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 hotel bedsprings sag to our weight,
we can hear the builders singing
down the fire escape.
They're singing for their winnings
and to drown out future losses,
and I think of how I came to be here,
over time, and the paths that it crosses.

And Tom is singing Hold On over the speakers,
whilst we're smoking a joint and
hiding from seekers.
I kiss you ******* the mouth,
and remove the need for words;
for polluting this moment
with a clumsy rhyme or verse.

You see me for the first time in sunlight,
the sunlight of a cloud canopy;
I whisper to you the secret of poetry:
in the simplicity of you and me.

You return my words with a silence,
but with a symphony of soft eye-gaze;
and forevermore I sleep in your witness,
forevermore, in your light, I will laze.

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

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

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

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

We were lovers once, for all of time eternal.
That's no fabrication, says old Sugarman;
but that's a concretal fact.

We spoke as friends, atop the canopy of rainforest.
Costa Rican insight, we speak in tongues of delight,
pushing, pulling, pushing upon desire - all the while
smiling serenely into your ***** cocktail,
aware of the pressing concerns
into your later freedoms.

We love. We love and love instantly.
Skin baptised in humidity and rains rising in abundance
across the steep
valley of further treetop,
fading to cloud
beneath us.

Beneath us is the world: unbounded and plenty.
I settle eyes onto yours, stomach knotting, yet ensured,
as smiles weep to emancipated longing,
and this sheer belonging now felt
for this; our Eden, cast upon Astral shores.

In prophetic view of paradise, I pour water from a jug.
Clear as mind, I see through solar nourishment,
the expanse of all life, the life that crescendos
each time you sip on your straw.

Memory cleansed of all magnitude, now but fragmented
thoughts of nothings and second-hand sentiments,
I remember only the passage of our time up here,
the balcony of heaven and of Earth combined.

We kiss in the rays of Astral sunlight,
brighter than the longest of our day!
We sip red wine leant across the railings,
your dress clings emphatically
to the motions of your body.
It becomes as if brutality never existed.
I concede to life
and its offerings for all.

I kiss you greedy in the fast-fading sunlight,
as the sky is re-birthed in the conception of tomorrow.
I kiss you ******* the mouth
as we survey the old kingdom of man,
and these dying moments
before our next subliminal fall.

Please stay with me now in suspension,
this devoted region of nature, of plumage
and the removal of all sin.

I am done with whiskey slurs
and cigarette burns,
of chasing zeros
and memories unconfirmed.

I am done with complaining
about all of tomorrow,
about all of the pound
pound
pound of the heart
that resides in this chest,
this useless vehicle of flesh,
of matter born to die
and innocence always corrupted.
Please stay with me now,
as I go down
down
down...
please stay with me now,
my new sight.

Somewhere, amongst the debris
of cigarettes after ***,
chemicals to induce sleep,
I forgot what it means to love.

I forgot what it means to breathe,
to sit still, and just be.

Somewhere, beneath these hooded seams
of solitude and well-versed grief,
beats a heart less cynical,
less tamed by vague distraction.

My nervous ticks and bad habits,
line of best fit for a near-hit
of satisfaction:

This is not enough, I know.
This is not nearly enough
to cool the bray of life
that still rattles meaning in my bones.

I forgot what it means to love,
what separates a house from a home.

Somewhere beyond this thirst
for brand-new words
is a gratitude for all that has been.
Every cliché holds a truth.

Every sentiment, a cocoon,
that I should lie so still inside

until I am wholesome,
until I am new.

Your sleepy scent,

Knotted hair.

You are the ineffable advent

Of each of my days.

I didn’t lose the fight, I threw it
I had planned it from the start
Spent my time living ugly
So I could make dying an art

Troubles came two by two
And no help ever arrived
Friends were always slow to come
But the codeine never lied

I nursed my pain and boredom
Beneath the weeping willow tree
Those troubles came in twos at first
But the drugs just made it three

Now I’ve grown old in a matter of weeks
And the coffee is staining my teeth
Can barely move through the working day
Through all this medicine and slow disease

I didn’t lose my mind, I outgrew it
I had planned it from the start
Spent my days severing the strings
Of my crooked, hovel heart

I’m trying my best now.
I am leaving the house on occasions
and letting the sun sink into my skin.
I’m told that it is good for me,
and for once I’m willing to listen.

I’m wiping flakes of pastry
and powdered sugar from my lips.
Almonds collect on the plate beside me,
as I stop and think of you over coffee;
assessing how far we’ve come.

The folks in here are old.
They move slower than the usual
rush that is found in the streets
below; never thinking, never stopping,
but always looking for more.

I wonder what they think of me.
I should be out having ***, trying on
loud shirts and sporting caps in the mirror,
whilst binge-drinking the fountain of youth,
and chasing it down with holy wine.

Instead I sit with them, frozen
in place with a notebook I don’t deserve,
sipping falsely on a macchiato,
whilst hoping I don’t get found out;
whilst hoping to become the furniture.

This death is approaching me.
I see it in the demise of poetry,
and in the grey hair of the book shop loyalists.
I see it in their ringed eyes,
as they look upon me like some species of bird

they’d long thought to have gone extinct.

I am still trying my best.
Stretching my legs to the coastline,
lactic shackles of inertia
are cast off.

I remember the ease
of animating these young limbs-
concrete strut, woodland walk;

it is hard to think of you much these days,
even in the confines
of unread books and filter coffee.
I have forgotten you, your blue dress,
your punting on the Thames.

There are harder habits
than caffeine and rich women.
As Ol' Tom Waits says,
“you don't meet nice girls in coffee shops.”

The glass roof of the arcade
offers translucent sunlight,
a high-street retreat from the nature of the sea,
all mankind's institutionalisation,
all these walls and closing times,
bigger names over bigger signs.

I am still a rare sight of youth
amongst the patient, ringed eyes
of those book-shop loyalists;
a choir of silver on their heads,
acquired wisdom of faded routines,
old laughter etched like the Nazca Lines
in their faces, lips eroded and pale;
sexless in the fluorescent lighting.

Breathing spaces where life exists
are always held closest to the fear of death.
I am still finding a clean way of living,
a way to accept my place, my face
in the mirror of my self-hate, anxious words
and half-conscious recollections;
the remnants and scars from asphyxiation – old drownings:

the sorrow that separated myself from others,
the sorrow that separated you and I,
you and I.
Your pursuit of a well-ticked time-sheet,
my love for sentiments that rhyme.

I have learned the patterns of the waves,
the way money is exchanged.

Oh, my dearest depression,
my ache for acceptance.
My endless, endless ocean of blue
can be sad, so sad,
but it can be beautiful too.