World of code;

riddle,
and a brand new
language.
I hold you close my
dear, as you stumble on through the dark night.
This knowledge
is hastening to bring my demise.
You sit within my pentameter,
so when did
I lose my peaceful mind?
I'm still struggling in poetry, in finding art
amongst the burdens of the street. You're applying sunscreen
to your back and shoulders, and then
you're basking in the heat of my astral beach.
I'm stranded here
alone now,
sending these postcards
to nowhere at all. I have grown tired
of this mere existence,
of fading in the city sprawl.
Now Mathematics
is the language of the universe,
and will speak for
centuries to come,
gravity making sense
out of chaos, and will talk forever over
the nuclear bomb.
I'm learning
my sums again darling, I'm going back
to a clean state of mind, hoping to discover
an answer, to why I'm

constantly falling
behind. When I find the equation I will
call you, and profess them unto the stars,
a love never lost
in
translation, now witnessing both the sea and the source.

I guess it is time to heave myself
Out of this rut.
The clamour of essays,
And careers
The gag of beer in my throat
Will fall aside as I
Finally
Finally
Lay down my words on the page again.

The self-doubt gave me a reprieve
Of creativity
Of which I’m still suffering.

This is all too literal
Too automatic
But I must do something
To overlap the hum of silence
Of being lost in a northern town flat,
With nothing but the stench of routine
And the festering couple next door
To remind me to at least kick out
At the sheets I lay tangled in.

I can feel the atrophy in my soul again,
I can’t tell if this is the bite of winter,
Or the rot of age.

I take a walk into the parkour graveyard,
looking for Polish dealers and cellphone halos.
I heard Thoth resides in sobriety,
but words fail me
whenever you are near.

I let my tongue run in endless stutters,
disguising 'I love you' as some off-hand request.
I could take you to dinner,
I could show you a longing
without the need for ***.

This late-night food has lost its flavour.
This ******* never picked up.
All that is left is to dial these numbers,
and wait by the window
for any car but yours.

Let's take a walk to the railway bridge.
We'll smoke a joint by the open forest.
You'll push your breath into mine,
make me high,
and forget why I ever
felt so low.

It is not true that everyone
wants to reach for the stars.

Some of us just want to get high.

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

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

Home is a funny word.

Home is the napkin
That you use to wipe the salt from your hands.
It is found on dime-a-dozen
Christmas cards and TV meals.

It is paraded by the letting agents;
Founded by stay-at-home adults,
Who will do anything,
Anything.
To break the monotonous tug of home.

Home is where you mind your manners
And comb your hair.
You plaster your flesh and bone
With a bracing tolerance
To hold fast against the moronic company,
All with no nicotine in the bloodstream.

Home is the shrapnel of memory
That has been so scattered in your mind,
And home is the filing system
That finally puts order to it all.

It is a mug of tea
Poured in your favourite mug
But not to your favourite taste.

Home can be the well-adjusted face
To the most maladjusted of bodies.
The gritted teeth,
The clamour of attention,
The lack of comprehension,
‘You don’t understand’
No you, you need to understand.

This might not be home anymore.
Until I am gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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 tell myself that I am beautifully bruised.

I think it's finally happened.
I'm functioning again.
Thawing out on a deckchair
in my concreted garden,
the sky is thinning and
promising March.

It's finally happened.
I don't have to pretend.
I had forgotten the taste of air,
now I walk through the book shops,
peeling through new volumes
and nesting for my own.

I think I'm getting there.
All barriers descending.
Misery is not ending
but changing, forming
to constellations of doubt
in the vast expanse of space.

I'm finally getting there.
I'm functioning again.
The papers are stacking
and news is coming in;
we have thrown down our arms,
crossing continents in the sun.

The winter used to feel long.

Ecstasy was a pill
on the tip of my tongue;
a common thread I missed.

I used to walk the streets
as if I did not deserve my shadow.
The imminent falling bomb
the only reason to exist.

Sobriety was a sleight of hand

hiding in plain sight.
Paradise were the moments
where I did not have to fight.

I used to sing for love
I would never get back again.

I used to talk to God
in the absence of a friend.

The winter used to feel long.

The summers were too brief.
Turned to every medicine
for transient relief.

I broke my back for a living.

Now I drink in the sun-glass shade.
No anaesthetic; no clouded mind.
I walk the river

a thousand miles
from all I left behind.

I want to be loved for one night,
then I shall be content in isolation,
comfortable in the lack of weight
on the other side of the bed.

One night, to be kissed brand-new
by foreign lips; a familiar fear
as she leaves her dress on the chair,
and our inhibitions on the floor.

Absence of physical touch, heard words;
no tangible proof I exist, or should exist
at all. I miss the fatigue. Brief sensation,
some energy - our collective heat;

the way we sweat beneath the sheets.
The way you need to call out to me.
I have not heard my name in weeks.

I want to be loved for one night,
then I can return to pollute these pages
with something beyond conjecture,
something worth holding on to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My thoughts stretch like
Centuries. They pull apart
And snap and make my body
Little more than a vessel

Of something or other. I feel
Flesh as if it was the bottom
Of a mossy pool. Or something
Else I know not of.

They stretch like mothers.
Bending, breaking in pieces
For the hand of what will be,
Forgetting what is and

What was.

I strain like a tendon. A fragment
Of an atom. A multitude trying to
Understand itself, over and over.
It’s over.

I am not the man for you.
I know that I am not.
You are looking for that bright potential,
that sword-in-the-stone appraisal;
the Chosen One on steroids,
the hero on the screen.

I am not the man for you.
I know that I am not.
You are looking for an easy weekend,
smart dinners at the comedy show;
ribbons and bows of devotion-
those grand gestures
I could never bestow.

I am not the man for you.
I am not for anyone.
You see,
there’s a fatal, fatal flaw in me,
that I will only love
once the love has gone.

I am sorry.
I am sorry I never learned
to greet the daylight,
or smile through songs
of pain.

I am sorry for relenting
in my wisdom, for boarding
the train to nowhere at all,
and crying at the window
the entire time.

There’s nothing left
to kick against as I’m treading
the water of my own tears.
I barely breathe without you,
and now I must find a way
to do it all of the time.

There is no poetry here, only:
I love you
I love you
I love you;
as the rails thunder distance
between us at last.

Am I the one you think about
when the skies open
and you expect a storm to take you?
Am I the one you think about
when sheets turn angry
in the sleepless heat of the night?

This partial solidity,
this gulf of an ocean;
words recited by heavy eyes,
the palm reader's devotion.

Am I the one you think about
when elephants drown in the salt-marsh fields
and tears sting your eyes?
Am I the one you think about
when you apply your eyeliner
and mourn your reflection?

This endless question,
this echo of no movement;
lipstick on your glass will bloom,
my sickly, time-lapse delusion.

Am I the one you think about
when the tanks move in
and you go to war with yourself?
Am I the one you think about
when the skies open
to miles of dust and distance?

I stood pretty as a picture
In the full-length mirror.
Eyelines painted black
And traced like a cat
‘Round the pools and pigments
Of my icy blues.

My hair smoulders with gloss of youth.
A fire left untamed
With scorched red wine lips
Oh! Such rare delight,
To embrace my image
And not decorate

It with scorn.

I imagine pupils pouring
Over me. Men turned
Boys upon my wake.
Skirt hitched demurely,
Landing with subtlety
Above my opaqued knees.

I comb the heaving, damp dancefloor.
Search out for Beta-***.
The kind to pin me
With softened kisses.
To love for the night and
Then like fireworks

Perish by day.

The music though, it takes me with
Skill. Oh! It knows the sweat
That clings upon me.
The rhythm takes me
Beyond the tooth and nail,
The attempt and fail

Of every boy to come before.
Sweet ***! How it lifts me
And the mere presence
Of youth is enough.
I go home alone in
Absent knowledge of

The plight of women.

You stop me in the streets. You say
“Where have you been tonight,
Where are you going.”
But - not a question.
For, you dictate answers,
Scurry my body

With your eyes, soon hands.

You tower me, masculine height.
Oh! Such dizzying peaks
For my giddy mind.
I say “I must leave”
You say “Where” once more. I
Wonder, do questions

Ever line your lips? Catcalls and
Footfalls now so long gone.
We are alone and
We both know the case.
Your vast darkened hands clutch
At my belt buckle,

Draw me in.

Reeled, I kick up in death throes,
Mouth open but soundless,
Lungs devoid of air.
Laid out on the block,
I’m your catch of the day,
Your squalor by night.

Regardless how much give out,
How little I fight, we’re
Both in the knowledge
I am your’s tonight.
Your lips, they steal my neck.
Paralyse me, not

With softness
But with fright.

I stand pretty as a picture,
No look in the mirror.
A reflection of
Shame and submission.
Pools and pigments devoid
Of life. Emptied lungs

And icy blues.

If you had seen the poems I'd written,
left closed in a drawer,
or else in an envelope unsent,
you would lay down your tools
and cynicism, for in me;
there can be no risk.

If you had heard my words of silence,
as I troubled the streets,
forming ways to display my longing,
you would lay down your drink,
for I would hold you
into sleep.

I have not been well recently.
I have been waking from dreams of falling bombs,
lighting up the sky like a mourning sun.
Each time this happens,
I predict the comfort of a dark black void,
and in waiting for this moment to arrive,
oh brother, have you ever felt more alive?

They say the North-East is in ruins
without my careful footsteps over the ground,
without my drunken tears and absent sounds.
Everywhere I land
has become nothing more than a sea-foam scar,
a painless reminder of all I once had,
now lungs of tar, the birth of a deadbeat dad.

I have not been well recently.
I have been waiting for more persistent ***,
with opened legs and sunscreen on her chest.
The scars may return
in the false new light of a British summer,
I will endeavour to do better this year.

I will smile through the stoning,
and I will celebrate my fear.

I had a lover in Calgary
who used to paint the mountains.
She was all words
and no ***, and so I was bound
to hurt her eventually.

I had a lover in Monteverde.
We would take the sky walk to the clouds
and lighten heads with wine.
I could never stand out from the beauty
that surrounded us.

I had a lover in Chernobyl
who used to collect children's shoes.
She was all memory
and no life, living in the fallout
of love and love's decay.

I had a lover in Alice Springs.
We would **** and drink in her shanty house
and argue through till morn.
I could never stand the sight of sorrow
and aboriginal rust.

I had a lover in every country.
They kept me from the sports news with gifts
of poets and good music.
For all the kindness they had offered,
I never had a speck to give in return.

I hold onto love
Like sand
It scatters easily
In my hands
And I will attack it
Probe it
Interrogate
Intimidate
Isolate myself
Until nothing remains

All this
To prove
To those who love me
That I am unlovable

I started leaving the door open for you.
I started to write and live honestly.
Endless nights spent chasing
another song of defeat
across the ashtray
forgetting my own words:

you can create art out of suffering;
you should never create suffering for art.

I started waiting for you.
I started to notice the decline of my moods
coincided with sublime precision to your
tail-lights in the distance.
Half-drunk
I had forgotten my own words:

suffering may be borne out of love;
love should not be borne out of suffering.

I started leaving the door open for you.
I started to expose each sleepless night
and commonplace hangover
as a symptom of a malady
and not a way of life.
You helped me to recall

peace arrives once the war has ended.
For peace, you do not have to fight.

I was sixteen and lying in *****
on the bathroom floor.
My friends were similarly
in the ****; with parents questioning
'what is all of this for?'

In the dizzy spin of the basin's drain,
a new perception gave birth.
For in that moment of void
and capitulation, gravity held me;
and I fell in love with the Earth.

I have been the crying drunk in the hotel lobby,
The mosquito bite in the thin white sheets.
I have been the monsoon rain in the tropical heat;
I have been everything you said I could never be.

On the streets of dust I can eat my fill,
No more clouded eyes, no more ash-filled windowsill.
No more patient wait for my timely death,
No more passing glance; no more loneliness.

I will find my place with this foreign tongue,
On the precipice I write my immigrant song.
This culture shock makes me feel alive,
It kick-starts my heart; I finally turned the tide.

I finally made my peace in this call for arms,
In this incessant storm, I could feel the calm.
Could feel it loosen my bones,
That age-old ache, that I kissed on the mouth,
That I tried to replace

With every chemical within my reach,
With every pill or lie
That passed through my teeth.
I have been the crying drunk,
I have been the victim, too long.
I sit still and breathe.
I write my immigrant song.

I have been drinking green tea by the evening light,
I have been wearing all my travelled hats again.

I have been striving for something beyond my reach,
in the hope that by stretching, I'll end up taller.

I have been eating croissants and drinking coffee,
exchanging currency and staring out windows.

I have been comforted by the sound of the rain,
as it taps on the drain by my bedroom curtains.

I have grown easy in this dormitory life,
sleeping through the day and then working through the night.

I have grown lazy, laid out in the olive grove,
in the eternal garden of the writer's mind.

I have grown weary through my scowling at the moon,
no more a wolf than a painter's aesthetic muse.

I have grown ugly through vague vanity's mirror,
I have grown privileged through my vacant stupor.

I'm still waiting for the love that has now perished,
a love that's now forgotten, that once was cherished.

She sits naked on the floor
Picking songs and sipping
On her warm beer

I smoke by the window
At a new lover's distance
Watching her intermittently

The city is still
It's 3a.m.
Our bodies
Are spent on each other
The bedsheets still wet
With our sweat

After the fire
We separated
Into component pieces

She combed her hair
In the mirror
As I poured cold water

Over myself
And ******
With the bathroom door
Left open
My ****
Still a little hard

I could hear her sing
As I toweled myself
Watched the last of the water

Fall into the drain
And for the first time
I could remember

I did not have to try
There was no rush
There was nowhere

I needed to be

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

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

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

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

Strung up by new beginnings,
I am well known for being nowhere at all,
disappearing through drunken intervals,
no taste on her tongue,
but she memorises
my self-indulgent drawl.
I have found a knack for solitude,
craving fame in the eye-line of no one.
I am well known for my melancholic air,
my toxic love; fettered philosophies
and the snare of my postures-
my fatherless past.

I am well known for beating myself
to the rhythm of the Blues;
old country songs sung for the new,
love found in the words
of a loveless life-
the first cut of the summer,
the last drink of the night.
Strung up by old affections,
I am well known for falling apart;
disappearing into a haze of silence,
then falling victim once more
to stolen words and bad art.

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

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

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

as I set you in ink.

I fell in love with a superstition.
She kept crystals at her bedside
to ward off wraiths and bailiffs,
selling friendship bracelets to
strangers on the internet whilst
keeping family in her prayers.

She would wander the fields
of **** and sunflower seeds,
howling at the moon without
another soul to converse with;
obsessive-compulsive murmurs
of a Hail Mary and incantations.

Potions of ayahuasca and sugar
brewed on the hob in the kitchen,
fridge magnets full of idioms and
passages from the Book of Psalms.
By the fire sat a pristine tin cauldron
with the price-tag still left on it.

Broomsticks were mounted on the wall
like lazy guitars or executed deer.
No photographs, only proud trinkets
and yoga mats; a crucifix hung over
every doorway, whilst she had learned
to cross her legs from all men and pain.

She laid me down on the bed
with a hungry sleight of hand
to show me her favourite trick;
I saw the marks on her arms
before she came alive in the dark,
and by the daylight - she had gone.

My callused fingers will be worn to the knuckle

Before I produce what outside people would call a ‘song’.

I live in a world of one.

The idea that another pair of eyes truly exists frightens me

Let alone another pair of ears.



Another pair of ears that hears the pathetic wobble of my voice

As I mutter through another verse

And attempt another mimicry at all those artists

That transcend myself in every aspect.

What can I expect?

Not once in my life have I surpassed an outside person.

Sometimes I catch myself in a car window;

A shop mirror,

And mistake myself for one of them,

Before I see the ripples of odious self-doubt

That pierce the pores of my skin,

Reminding me of my place

And so I retreat back into my cage without a lock.



I am the ghost the world forgot,

The more-than-welcome guest left in the corner by the dog.

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.

This place is filling up with people,
as the workers settle into their chairs,
I have been sitting here for hours,
smoking with the 'barely-there's'.

We all shuffle to the bar-maid,
we mumble concedings for a drink.
We come to escape the front-lawn shepherds,
we come to avoid the kitchen sink.

You must wear your badge of honour,
the pills you take when you lie down,
till then you'll write another poem,
before heading off into town.

This is not what I imagined,
after the bruising years of school.
I can't drive off into Atlantis,
if I'll drown in a bathing pool.

Oh, when did this high turn to torment,
and when did truth fall to mystery?
When will my words turn to cliché,
and when will you remain, my history?

Summer time,
Eyes vibrant; alive

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

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

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

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

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

Record player to erase perfection
And leave what is human.

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

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

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

Tattooed a hundred reasons
Never to fall again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paranoia of approaching darkness:
Another day without conclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where will I go when I am dead?
Will I get the chance to rest my head,
to finally find a comfort to sleep,
to make up for the lovers
I have failed to keep?

Will I meet my father at the end?
Where fragments gather and come to mend-
all of these pieces that I have been,
all broken strings, false surnames,
and sights left unseen.

Will I come to say what was never said,
or else forsake these words for your open bed?
In death, will there come a feeling I have missed,
through this fear of living,
this drunken, tearful mist?

I light up a joint on the cemetery walk,
skimming the tombstones with swollen eyes.
Whether pen or print, engraving or chalk,
will some higher truth sustain me
beyond a life of erosion and lies;

will any of these misguided words
make it through to more tolerable times?

I’ll remember you best
As the key to my chest,
As the crumbling fiction
Of art.

And I’ve given up on the test,
In need of a rest,
As my eyes line in poverty
Of sleep.

It’s hard just to be;
To feign that I’m happy,
With all I desire
Out of reach.

I’ll remember the bee
And nature’s symmetry,
As my two halves of a person
Collide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are bags under your eyes
from where sleep haunts you,
or the lack of it, at least.

The gorgeous and the gruesome
always have trouble getting rest,
only the monotonous
and the sedated
escape to dreams with ease.

Where did your sobriety go?
Was it lost when you realised
even your parents were clueless,

or did you suspect that all along?
I would count you amongst
the gorgeous,
but with a gruesome turn of mind.
Whatever you do, do not drift away

if it means leaving your Self behind.

It won't be long.
It won't be long
until you find yourself
running to the platform
with your suitcase
faltering over the cracks
in the concrete.
As the train pulls out
you see blinding fears
diminish and then
disappear entirely.
You see false love
for what it is
and then thank whoever
for your opportunity
to experience it.
It won't be long
until those psalms of travel
become a reality.
Until you are removed
from your pigeon-hole
and post-code
which have been tagged
to you since birth.
You can replace
them with a new name
or in the different way
you apply your eye-liner
and look across
the new rooms
you frequent.
It won't be long
until you find yourself.
I promise,
it won't be long.

You paint me in platitudes
each day we awake,
though you're not the dear reader
I crave.

You make love in the spaces
I claim for myself.
I submit to your ***;
I behave.

It's not that I can't love
what will come to be,
it's just I live for my childhood
so brave.

How I wish I could live in
a promise of joy,
but my mind only lives
in the grave.

And I wish I could live in
a life humble and slow,
where all that I love
is bestowed.

I woke up today
with the future upon me.
It pressed hard to my chest
in paralysis;
a hypnagogic sigh.

Other people pass by
as if the sun only shines for them.
They pester the street
with ease and no care;
I'm always questioning the sky.

The pain has returned,
and all the tears have dried.
There's nothing left in me
to pour your drinks, to smile;
to carry on with this lie.

Come together, he sings,
I think I'm in love, is his own reply.
All I have is the rhetorical romance
of art, never reaching completion;
the bonds I could never untie.

Cocoa butter is my solace,
returning the youth to my skin.
The rest of me is a scrapheap of flesh;
of knotted bones
and only stirring to die.

I'll fall asleep tonight
with no future upon me.
Old friends press memories
to my chest.

I hold them close, wish them well,
and for all that I can barely breathe,
I have no tears left to cry.

I put you to the back of my mind,
not because I don't care,
but as the grieving mother-of-two
places her own mother's
garments into the attic:
none of you
has left me,
I promise.
It's just that I do not fit.

It would be too painful
to throw you away.

So now you stand
as a measure to dust and distance;
as a measure for every woman
who calls me by my name.
We walked together
on lonely mid-night crawls,
the pillow-talk in my empty sheets;
you were the stalwart companion
in all of miy dreams.

The miracle in the chicken shop,
the sanctum on the screen.

I put you to the back of mind
so that I could focus on
what is in front of me.
None of you
has left me,
I promise.
My hands blister
from holding onto you,

but it would be too painful
to throw you away.

I never knew my father, but I see him pass in every window reflection. Collar turned to the wind, he bumbles towards the book store with a coffee shop upstairs. I'm entombed in literature and fellow hermits. We become non-existence for all moments but this; as we hunch over scalding cappuccinos, eyes darting to each other semi-covertly, for once hopeful of human contact.

I never knew my father. He died of lung cancer before memories bloomed, in the space between the womb and indoctrination. All traces of him are left in trinkets, soap-preserved hair fibres in a shaving mug, and ripples of gravitational waves. He tells me that I have a place, without ever saying a word. And, he never tells me off for smoking.

I never knew my father. He was a military man and belonged to the Salvation Army. I don't think we'd see eye-to-eye now, but perhaps he would have saved me from my artist's starvation; with my bleeding heart pouring pointlessly into each and every gutter. I would have walked with more of a stride than a fluster, and call out names to the streets, without ever caring for consequence.

I never knew my father, but I met him once. I met him in the caverns of mind, as I swung around with a flashlight; hoping to find meaning in meditation. He held my shoulders as I fell to sobs, as I told him I missed him, as I told him I was lost. To that he just smiled and said:

“You're already there.”

The neighbours are making their rounds.
They tend to their allotments under the allowance
of nature, a certainty in the seasons
as they compensate for the disorder
in their lives: the mislaid decisions
that gave comfort
at the expense of vitality.

James watches them from the bedroom window,
the way everyone walks with a proud hunch.
How the stem of a flower grows into the wind.
Flakes of white paint fall off the windowsill
like sugared almonds: the sweetness
of his anxiety,
the agitation of tobacco.

It is the only patch of green in a mile,
a cell of vegetation behind a locked gate.
A frost threatens and calloused hands
turn to pink cushion, blue extremities
folding tarp: a devoted shelter for
next season's radishes,
whilst the homeless die in the streets.

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

Jim clutches his phone in his pocket,
in place of the hand he had grown used
to holding. From where laughter came
was now just silence. Awaiting a call
that was unlikely to come. It had taken

an attack to sever the nation he had
come to call as home. And now dug
in the rubble and salt marsh, he would
sell freedom for her. Words mean nothing
when they are heard by no one.

Jim has disappeared out of town again,
rambling through woods to occupy
his time. He searches the gutter for
cigarette ends and lighter fluid.
He spreads her out in a five-minute

dream of soft touch and hard kisses,
of come-down and sunrise under the
hem of her red dress. It is Jim's turn
to wait around. It is Jim's fault
he even has to be there at all.