Internet dreams and
lullaby, the mountain peak
of an infant cry.

She stands still over the tectonic fracture
between the love divined through a song lyric
and the disappointment felt in the immediacy
of familiar faces; love as some sterile function.
Tightened gauze over a worried stranger's head,
she tends to the Troubled as a rock garden:
arranging immovable boulders to a sea of pebbles,
opal textures and softened hearts come as a result
of her well-practised, beckoning smile.

She causes grown men to sing at their guitars,
turgid chorus and muttered longings for completion.
An imagined sight: her hair falling in waves
and eddying the islands of arousal across her
heaving, welcoming lungs. In truth, it had been
years since she had given herself to anyone,
more letting out her property for those that she
is obliged to love, and feel love in return.

She collects flowers and fruits in her mind's orchard,
in those spaces between phone calls and the eyes
that follow her strides during tired lunch breaks.
A mindful stupor has overcome her way of living
to the point that life is a procession of duties,
or truths only confided after the fourth glass of wine.
She stands still in the wake of her condition.
The way troubles gravitate into galaxies of doubt,
the way she hides beneath a polluted sky,
stood at the point I blindly stumble towards.

May you never find a garden ugly,
a day when music has no life,
may you always slave at your soul,
your perfect reflection;
a kiss in the festival night.

May you never meet a door unopened
in the corridors of love,
may you always pick at your plate,
your humble inflictions;
the death of the stars above.

May you never find an empty space,
a day when beauty has no sight,
may you always search the skies,
your ****** wisdom;
a kiss in the festival night.

I have tried to replace it
with peppermint tea,
I have tried to repress it
with Phenibut and ****.
Painting wood the colour of metal,
I moved to erase the splinters
by feigning progression,
whilst all the while
that thorn in my side
became a mental health obsession.

I have tried to better it
with morning walks and coffee,
I have tried to harness it
with Chaturanga and poetry.
Siphoning words through a trusted vessel,
I came to meditate belonging
through crystals and nicotine,
whilst all the while
that space in my bed
could no longer be filled with wine.

I have tried to fulfil it
with an endless stream of ****,
I have tried to out-live it,
but always fall asleep by dawn.
Kissing through the sweat of a fever,
I bite my pillow-case and
think of your inner thighs,
whilst all the while
that warmth of touch
is lost to the cold, empty skies.

Spent the evening walking nowhere streets
dodging horns and sirens of hungry motorbike taxis.
It was a parade of street-food vendors,
security guards half asleep by bottles of whiskey.
Every woman I passed was beautiful,
laid their *** on the numbered tables
as off-hand as their mobile phone, their purse;
their bored men. Each one had their toenails painted,
wore short skirts and vest tops in the stifling heat.
The best of them wore tight dresses of black or red
and ate their food in the same studious manner
I imagined they would take to the zip of my jeans.

Could feel the sweat roll down my back
kicking gravel out my sandals every ten strides.
The playboys rev their motorbikes
as if it were a talent they had been working on,
a kind of siren song to tempt the free women.
Each one is on the lookout for a bargain.
Each one streaks past to some indiscernible point
where they will bury themselves amongst
the massage parlours, karaoke bars, and short-stay hotels;
Each one a straight-up brothel once you make it through the doors.
I feel too awkward in this ******* town to order a sandwich
let alone try out my second language to ask for a cheap *******.

Every foreigner here had some kind of breakdown.
Some kind of complex that drew them like a moth to flame
to some place where white skin is enough to feign riches,
stimulate desire and place you amongst better men.
We steal a living for a year or two of forever blue skies.
We eat good food and toast ourselves every evening
with cold lager and palm leaf cigarettes.
We cannot read a word in these humid streets
where every single building holds a portrait of the King.
Spent the evening with my shadow, both alive in the night
beneath the heady aroma of cooking oil and street-food spice,
both hurting to become, both slipping out of sight.

Our relationship belongs to the press.
The word has been out for a week now,
along with a ***-tape
and my drunken messages
from a sleepless hotel room.

They captured your good side. From behind.
You know that I always loved you in blue,
collarbones on the mantelpiece
and toenails painted with
the colour to match your moods.

I heard you crashed your car in a bunker
as you were documenting loss in Gaza.
The rockets flew overhead
as you were carried, pearl through dirt
into a white-skinned hospital bed.

I denounced my royalty by text message.
I blu-tacked a passport picture on the Queen's
vanity mirror, and took a ****
in the Yeoman's shoe.
We slipped out at night to blind cameras.

Our relationship belongs to the state.
The bills have been due for a week now,
along with better luck
and a wine glass full
of whatever will suit your taste.

The soldier laid down with the children
in a city of mosques and mortar,
he kissed one on the head for the papers,
then another to atone for the slaughter.

A writer penned her last words in dirt
beneath the swinging of a cord,
beneath the swelling of a century
and that sweet, unvisited fjord.

I heard the bar-maids circulating rumours
of their dreams and lack of time,
how men-in-suits can deliver their freedom
at the sound of a wedding chime.

There was a journalist who found peace
in the breathing spaces of war,
who left the safety of the city
and all that he had known before.

He joined the scientist in the bushes
as the baboons re-invented the wheel.
They held hands at humanity's failure,
and to a God, they learned not to kneel.

The drunkard sang into the gutter
in broken rhyme and verse,
collecting cigarette ends
in case the economy grew worse.

He was a forward-thinker
who kept in touch with his students,
and for all the lessons he'd failed to learn;
he passed them down through common sense.

The baptist laid down with the hippie
on a straw-floor in Bethlehem's heart,
they both disagreed upon the ending,
yet felt unity from the start.

A thin white dust of snow littered the concrete path like an overspill of Styrofoam *****. Summer had her hands buried deep into the lining of her coat pockets and her chin pressed tightly within her pashmina scarf. It was the first bite of wind she’d felt in a while. She had been holed up with her friends for several days and the concept of loneliness was already foreign to her, much in the same way as privacy. She could feel the cheap red wine rust in her veins as her body told her “too much” and in truth she was ready for the crackle of vinyl and the promise of fresh sheets and a shower. The week had been fun, she guessed, she’d certainly felt closer to her friends than ever before, even though they all went back for as far as it was worth remembering.  ‘She guessed’. She’d been guessing for a while now, living in absences with everything held at an emotionless distance – whether or not this was deliberate she could not decide.
It wasn’t a particularly long walk back to her house, enough to take the bus - but she guessed she wanted the walk. The cold air made her eyes glassy and occasionally she had to blink furiously to catch the water forming along her lids. The din of distant inner city traffic consumed the airwaves around her but the path that lay ahead of her was surrounded by parkland, and within eyeshot there was a lazy brook where children would often be seen playing, though they’d be at school at this time of day. She guessed. She wasn’t quite sure of the time, but she knew it was the 15th of February. She couldn’t always be sure of what year it was though, her head was often stuck back in the 1960’s, before she was even born.
Summer could feel the claustrophobia of youthfulness shedding from her every angle and with every insipid step she took, the world took on a more familiar feeling and she took her first real breath of air for days. From out of nowhere she felt overwhelmed at the breathless ease of the faint snowfall and the slate grey of the sky. The clench in her stomach – Summer often found herself weeping for no real reason, and she could never quite work out whether she would be weeping for beauty, or for sorrow…she guessed that there was some compromise between the two. All she knew is that she was very sorry when she reached her front door that her walk was over and that she must again disappear into the walls.
The heating had been off for almost an entire week now and Summer could hear the house groan into action as the radiators cracked back into life, and she felt much the same. The kettle jittered on the spot as the water steamed and bubbled welcomingly and soon the kitchen was greeted with the smell of tea. Summer retreated to her room upstairs. A wide room with white walls meant that it was often brighter than the world outside and it often appeared to unadjusted eyes to have a ghostly glow about it. Summer thumbed through her proud collection of second-hand LP records until she settled on listening through Pink Moon for what was now an uncountable time. “Saw it written and I saw it say, pink moon is on its way”. She let out an exhausted but contented smile and fell onto her bed. The sheets were cold from privation of use but the coolness on her cheek was welcome and she closed her eyes and imagined she was still outside on an effortless walk, with the sounds of Nick Drake overpowering that of the exhausts of one thousand cars.
After several moments of another world, she reluctantly sat back up and began to take off her clothes to get a little bit more comfortable. It felt good to get out of her clothes, she’d only meant to stay for one night so she had not been able to change her clothes for days and she’d appreciated the idea of clean underwear in a way she never considered worth noticing before. She unclasped her bra and felt it fall clumsily to the floor and just sat there for a moment, bare-breasted in the pearl white of the chilly room. She couldn’t help but feel like an illustration, of pastels or watercolours. Her mind was still a convoluted collage of the past few day’s events – the haze of alcohol and **** still occupied a small corner of her being, despite the cleansing walk and the wonderful clunk of a familiar guitar bouncing across her walls. Her ******* were hard from the cold so she threw on an extra large male t-shirt that fell to just below her upper thigh.
She slid off her skirt and underwear, which fell limp at her pale thin ankles. Looking at her thighs, she could still make out the small thumb-sized bruises scattered across them from the distant and removed *** she’d had at some point last week. At least she guessed, it could have happened back in the 60’s for all she knew. It felt as if the past week was not real, a familiar feeling. She was almost certain that man who had shared her bed did not really exist and her bruises contested her own existence. At least that’s how it felt.
She turned over the vinyl and remembering her tea, slid between the covers and warmed her hands against the steaming ceramic. The tea was perhaps the most wonderful and delicious thing she had ever tasted and she felt it nourish her metaphysically. In a way beyond words, she felt herself heal with the rush of warm past her lips and the sweetness on her tongue. The room was slowly warming as she skimmed her legs back and forth against the mattress in complete comfort. Once the last of her tea had been drunk, she let the empty mug rest on the bedside counter and almost immediately fell into a dreamless sleep.

Blister packs  and Auld Lang Syne,
the rain-dance in the rain-forests
where no one keeps time;
the maypole, the bar stool,
the sunstroke pilgrimage;
the Superbowl commercial,
the secret raiding of the fridge-
all conforming to some routine
of half-comfortable bliss;
we stumble blindly through
our blueprint futures-
we borrow our happiness.

The truth is out there
if you look within:
the circadian rhythm,
the central nervous system;
the clamour of your mind
in the face of chronic stress.
The Lenders are out
in the crowds now,
with their placards of high-interest
amongst the indifference
of the street-meat vendors,
the numbered tables at the bar;
we spoil ourselves in the reach
of the so near's;
that we forsake all of the so far's.

I see everyone as bright-white in beauty
whereas in the shadows you shall find me.

Uncorking the wine to keep myself busy,
replacing blood-sugar, feeling dizzy.

I paint the cave with fruit juices and poppies,
intersecting patterns, carbon copies.

There is comfort to be found in lonely breath,
to contemplate life, the absence of death.

Someday,
when the weeds are
growing all around me,
I will bury you in dirt
and then choose the words
that will act
as a cold-reading pacifier
for the crowds
who thought they knew you.

Maybe
you thought I would
be the first to go;
a near-certain bet
for the first to our death,
only for me to find youth
in my old age,
hitting form at the after-party,
just as everyone else
is looking for sleep.

Sweetheart,
I learned to stretch out
the hours of retirement
in a posture that can be sustained;
beyond mood shifts
and weather patterns,
to a place in which
I welcome the rain.
The allotment is flourishing,
my unsheathed Vishuddha.

Still,
**** my hippie fantasies
if I cannot hear your voice.

What would you write about me?

Poetry is dead.
I am only writing to you as a
Ghost myself.

Do not fear though,
For in death restrictions are forgiven
And we can roam senselessly
Through the annals of time.

Let us read of the modesty
Of the notebook. Oh, how I’ll
Remind you of the typewriter,
Lest we forget its aggression.

The pound of the letters,
Each stamped with vengeance
Onto the page.

The digital age.

This is all still just an elaborate
And effortful attempt
To paint our hands onto the
Wall of a cave.

So, poetry is dead
And I believe you are too.
Else you wouldn’t be reading this,
You would have something more unhealthy to do.

A toadstool is swelling
inside my limbic system.
Spores sweat amongst tissue cavities,
dining out on grey matter,
until they force me
to stay in bed through the day.

What a thing it would be.
Depression as a fungus.
A mildewed mind as damp sets in,
the trumpet player
with athletes foot,
casting out the air-borne blues.

Misfortunes follow one another
along straits of fate,
as if sadness were a colony itself.
I want to take a pill
to **** the mushroom
that plumes over my head.

You can only diagnose
through words and symbols,
only treat once you set down your pen
and hold the hand
of a patient lover,
of the savant drinking at the bar.

For now I will let air in
through the open window,
watch the dreamcatcher sway
and hang like a tarantula
over the stars and crescents,
spilling out over my bed.

When I close my eyes
I hear the ocean in distant traffic,
sounding as waves when rolling by the door.
I will drown in seawater
and hallucinate a scene
of happiness.

Of a place for a poet's retreat.

My country is in chaos.

seats of power are exchanged,
unelected come-down
and steep fog of uncertainty.
The poor are painting their signs;
others lock their doors.
Tear gas spills in streets
far from Suburbia-
on the shoulder of Europe.

I struggle for sleep.
Not for tragedy,
but missed calls
and lack of shelter.
For you and your darkened corner,
bleak winters-
the last time I saw you in the sun.

Petroleum fills
the lung of the sea.
Swarms gather in luscious greed,
footfalls over concrete:
the peace sign,
white poppies,
paper cranes.
Stubborn **** in the rock,
the busker with fingerless gloves;
the nightclub spilling over
into violence.

I strain my eyes,
not in tears
but in chemicals
and lack of vitality.
For you and your
elusive path through life,
your over-complicated strides.
Simple, temporary medicine

that is the comfort
and never the cure.

The stars blot out
one-by-one.
Each neon skylight
fractures the night
in pink clouds:
flowers die over the railings
where they could not
save his life.

I contain my breath,
not in calm
but poisoned blood
and lack of air:
I can barely breathe
without you here.

My country is in chaos.
Earth spins in a slow disease.
Still, all I can think of is you.
Whether you are thinking of me.

My country is in chaos.
Seats of power are exchanged,
Unelected come-down
And steep fog of uncertainty.
The poor are painting their signs,
Others lock their doors.
Tear gas spills in streets
Far from suburbia,
On the shoulder of Europe.

I struggle to sleep.
Not for tragedy
But missed calls
And lack of shelter.
For you and your
Darkened corner,
Bleak winters-
The last time
I saw you in the sun.

Petroleum fills
The lung of the sea.
Swarms gather in luscious greed,
Footfalls over concrete:
The peace sign
White poppies
And paper cranes,
Stubborn **** in the rock,
The busker with fingerless gloves;
The nightclub spilling over
Into violence.

I strain my eyes,
Not in tears
But in chemicals
And lack of vitality.
For you and your
Elusive path through life,
Over-complicated strides.
Simple, temporary medicine

That is the comfort
And not the cure.

The stars blot out,
One by one.
Each neon skylight
Fractures the night
In pink clouds.
Flowers die over the railings
Where they could not
Save his life.

I contain my breath,
Not in calm
But poisoned blood
And lack of air.
I can barely breathe
Without you here.

My country is in chaos.
Earth spins in a slow disease.
Still all I can think of is you-
Whether you are thinking of me.

The sirens are wailing again.
They're coming to take another
half-baked lunatic, megaphone in hand,
into the metropolitan dungeon.

Filth lines the walls.
People move as ghosts through
heavy daylight, jumping at each
shadow's stirring, each laden breath.

We watch as they crack into his skull.
A spectacle no more, yet it reminds
us of the immortal mountain that
buckles over our heads.

Synthetic lullabies sing the rich to sleep.
New hammers and strings over
old, old songs, as the one-stringed busker
plays his ode to death.

The cannibals live outside old suburbia.
They saw society fall, and fell
instantly into their animalistic selves.
Only the gang-lords stray into their terraces,

for only they have something to offer.
The rest is just flesh and blood-justice
against the rich augmenting their memory,
against the poor for toiling the fields,

against their God for not existing,
against themselves for never straying to object.

My life is naught but
hollowed laughter;
some canned sound of paltry humour,
calling, calling to ‘amuse us’.

My language is naught but
borrowed idioms;
no thought laid anew, nor words
that twist so unexpectedly.

Some patient of the modern world,
my tongue speaks directly,
some awful diatribe of malformed poetry,
of confessions laid in pixels,
not pressed onto the heart of the page.

I’m calling, calling ‘hold me’,
‘hold me in your palms,
as you read my thought’s patterns,
and I, your lifelines. In print,
I shall discover your fortunes,

run my index over the ball of your thumb,
and massage into you my touch.
My touch upon your cheek,
to catch your tears,
to capture those moments

you have stared in awe upon
the fogged and pastured British fields,
the blink of the crested wave over the shore,
and all memories not locked in time.’

I waste myself for you, oh page.
I battle sleep and demons and
Face what I would otherwise
Curtail, for the simple act of
Filling you up.

I trap everything that I am
Within you, page. A web for my
Foggy thoughts, dew caught like
Tears, crystallising the opaque
Within my life.

You are the recipient in my mind,
Oh page. Brain chatter forced into
Structure, a soldier. Almost a child.
You **** me like an alpha, my borrowed
Pleas at your feet.

And so I tread you like infant snow.
Each print a scar, each word a brittle
**** stem. Your silence a truth beyond
My own and whatever I say
Will pollute it.

So I walk round in circles. Tiptoes
Like sparrows, piecrust shapes in
The snow. I walk in circles to not
Carve a path. To hide my meaning.

Don’t follow me home.

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 want to write a pop song for you,
To spiral and loop in your head
As you apply your shampoo,
To constantly reappear
Through the airwaves,
Drowning out your lunch break
With force-fed thoughts
Of you and I
In that wet afternoon,
That train-stop goodbye;
Darling you were the last breadcrumb
I ever thought
Would leave me behind.

I don't remember how I got here,
when the notebooks accumulated
and anxious thoughts became ideas.

It is a nice feeling. To turn old friends
into characters of their better selves,
and to turn loneliness into a stranger's

companion. Those bus journeys into
the city, to pour drinks in a Hawaiian
shirt seem like a distant memory of a

fragmented self, now slowly turning whole.
The ashtray is still full, and worries
still form and pester my mind,

but they don't trouble my dreams,
and now I fall asleep to the sounds of
summer rain, and I feel the inner thigh

of a pen-pal who is sleeping by the sea.
I found my first grey hair when I grew a beard,
and found a second when I finally turned sober.

There are picture frames of smiling corpses,
showing more life than ever I caught in their
daily living. There have been a million words

traded across the pillow, and I have found
intimacy in the form of written word.
I have time to ramble to the forest, to meditate

beneath the slowing autumn leaves.
A bicycle is all I need to reach a silence,
as the hangman's noose begins to lose its grip.

There is humour to be found in my failings.
There are lovers found over every continent.
No more whisky slurs to keep me out of wedlock,

no more running away from where I want to stay.
I am playing guitar, perched on my single bed,
watching the branches sway in the suburban streets.

I no longer miss a childhood long since turned
to romance. I no longer crave the absence of my
head. My features are turning handsome in the

sunlight. I have traded dance-floors for the
promise of my bed. There's no money left to
get myself ****** up. So I will simply sit inside

and write my poetry instead.

The Mother's pull is stronger today.
She persists me into the ground,
Sun milk over the weak grassy mound,
and it teaches me of my astral self,
the only means to my escape.

The Mother's delight is lessened today.
It persists to pull me to the machine,
of concrete rule and Corporate Queen,
and it teaches me of my ****** self,
the very lock unto my prison.

They're hysterical in the streets as the power goes out,
whilst we peel through the volumes of our love.

They're twitching in their sleep with caffeine on the blood,
whilst we twist through the veil of our thoughts.

Some call to the Lord for the all-promised cleansing,
others poison themselves just to get by.

Some forget old friends in the luxury of living,
others see ghosts out in the marble hall.

Laura is waking to the lofted smell of coffee;
Jack is *******, late for work again.

Laura is nursing back her life to take it slowly;
Jack is shooting up all of his tomorrows.

They're selling bags beside the old abandoned temple,
whilst we sit inside looking at the rain.

They're feigning love and gaining innovative profit,
whilst we pick at the scars of yesterday.

Some pin string on maps to plot out their escape route,
others settle for feeling far away.

Some build up their biceps to bring about beauty,
others waste in chairs, hoping for reprieve.

Mary pacified want through the ohm of the river;
Joseph touched wood to keep his mind at peace.

Mary paraded in her soft and fragile spirit;
Joseph ruled the land with an iron fist.

You are the one I turn to in all eventual outcomes;
I have turned to a preacher at your door.

You are the limitless fuel for this vital ache;
I have turned to a shadow of before.

Only imitation of daylight touches me.
New air finds yellow skin through vents in the window,
or else in the brief presentation of my bowed head
each time I succumb to nicotine and black lung.

It is a depression of inactivity,
not worth the document. These daydream catacombs
afford me translucent substance of consciousness,
and untraceable, numinous identity,

so that with each day I can be spun-out again.
The only reality in which I engage
is that of words, words, words – meandering delights
of categorising all fear into known terms.

Lo, how the quantum world beholds this emptiness.
Great depths of solidity, Mother Earth's mantle -
tectonic collisions of Biblical tirade,
of all shield, political firewall and bloodshed;

discarded in the nothingness of the atom.
These ****** words too, will offer no quantum relief.
Each thought lives brilliantly, but in a moment,
and words, words, words, are but the thunder that follows.

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like taking a tab of acid
and disappearing
to town in my worn suit.

Buskers bathe in the eternal winter,
clamouring sounds at passers-by
until Jericho falls in on itself,
money spilling out of its sides
like a fast food waiter
on his cigarette break.

Trawling through the record shops,
I feel as if I've travelled through time;
each bootleg, a manuscript,
each seven-inch, a sonnet.
Pulling fingers through Venetian sounds,
I have found my place
in the library of New Alexandria.

The pigeons are swollen at the ankles.
Like humans, they are losing height
at the promise of another meal,
at another chance to rifle through the crumb.

School kids are waiting for the bus
as I go walking past.
They're unaware of the ease of tread
they have over land,
unaware of how quickly it can fall
and the scathing jealousy
I feel for each of them.

In eyes wet and wide, I turn to go home,
I walk in the rain, before settling for the bus
and returning to that familiar, lofted view
of the world passing by through a maniac's eyes.

It is only then that the world shifts in focus
and lotus flowers crop up through the carpet,
the world outside has grown far too unreal,
to the point hallucinating makes sense of it all.

There was a time I walked with you
Beneath the railway bridge inside my mind.
Where rain fell hard and we stayed dry,
Collecting memories and passing time.

There was a time I would talk to you,
The vestige of care for my swollen heart.
How it overflowed with love for you,
How it still does, though we're apart.

And I still dream of you, you know,
I dream most every single night,
And when I wake, this broken man,
You are the only smile, the only light.

But you chose to stay and I understand
His love was safe and warm as a glove.
I blew hot and cold, a Bipolar storm,
You cannot rely on me, my love.

So you'll grow old and fat and kind,
Beneath the eaves of his easy years.
I'll grow wise and tough and cold,
Bent and crooked, effaced by fears.

But if you ever feel the breeze of doubt
Inside your confident stride,
Just know that I still walk with you,
Beneath the railway bridge inside my mind.

Petty change collects
in the transparent theatre
of the long-emptied whiskey bottle.

A birthday gift,
it lasted longer as an empty vessel,
than it ever did a drink.

In its costly demand,
I wonder whether enough coins
could even fit in the **** thing
to cover the cost of the whiskey itself.

Copper upon copper,
the small flashes of optimistic silver
offer the only belief in the reality of travel.

I have long lamented money
as the means to existence over life,
so why then, do I need so much of it

in order to fulfil
these ancient nomadic dreams?

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

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

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

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

You have been living as a ghost for too long.
Too long under the flood-lit hoardings,
advertising a necessity
you have never thought of before.
Too long spent pushing someone away
rather than letting go.
I thought of you in bed last night,
your pale complexion
and the way you smoke cigarettes;
an ache of habit
disguised as a fashion statement,
spinning into a pirouette
after tripping over the step.
You chose a career of kindness,
siphoning knowledge to a new generation
at the expense of your punk-rock credentials
and afternoon naps.
I thought of you again today.
How you are leaving the house
and all your old selves;
how I lag so far behind,
that I can barely see you now.

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

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

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

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

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

I have been living on a diet
of cigarettes and digestive biscuits.
My bowels empty into the System
and my hunger concedes
to the supermarket glow;
bigger names
under surgical lights.

The operation was not successful.
You can see it in the grey faces,
upturned collars;
that manic headphone stare.
The lone smoker skulks a bus-stop
like angry eczema
on a bride's upper lip.

I see it for myself now.
How crowds congregate by light,
stamens of fat and sachets of salt,
then separate as sadness
cuts through the delusion;
working poverty and panic attacks
on the hard kitchen floor.

The ache of anxiety
caught up with you again.
Self-imposed catastrophes pile up
as you find yourself walking against
the grain of lunatics passing your way.
The pupae gather and slaver
at their freedom;

you broke through The Promise.
I followed the path of your recovery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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.

A speck on a tile,
the cabinet floor,
my patchwork wooden table
left to disrepute.

That red speck of being,
crack open another,
the sharp side of glass or else
the fluid within.

It laces my blood,
or else is blood itself,
staining my innards
and shaping my mask.

My martyred heart
and its tireless pound,
marching the red-coated soldiers
to their eventual demise.

Incorrigible workhorse,
sustain my progress
when all else has turned to ash and rain,
when all else has been slain.

My Boxer, he pleads
to keep on up the hill,
to allow him his efforts and fluid,
when we’ve all but given up.

And so I shave in the light
of the late-morning glow.
My hair collects in your old shaving mug,
remnants of yesterday.

So for now I’ll ignore
the speck on the tile,
and all of its false promises
in the time of my storm.

For now I’ll awake
with taut skin and white scars,
with broken-sleep eyes, pastured bone
and some far-off notion

of forlorn hope.

In adolescent vain, I studied myself
in a pilgrimage of identity.
I sought the avenues to find belonging,
I scoured song lyrics for personal truth.

In maturation, I have distanced myself.
I wish to perish my breath, my beliefs,
to clear my skies, my mind, so dutifully.
Hold true, my dear wholesome meditation,

so I shall live this life as an estuary,
opened-armed to all rhythms of the tide,
to be cradled by the land in life's dispute,
but still hear the whale-song of consciousness;

to realise this unifying truth.

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

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

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

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

Let me write my books of poetry,
Sing into a microphone with no connection.
Let me wash my hair in the rain
As a means to get myself dry,
To find a connection;

To cleanse my skin with ancient water
That tiptoed the forest before Man.
Let me punch the code of my identity
Into the melody and not the spreadsheet.
Allow me to **** all the people

I was before I felt alive.
Old means for yesterdays,
Ends that caused me
To start over again.

Let me send letters to New England,
Let me drink coffee on the pedestal
Of a day spent sober-
Buckle of the grass in the wind,
Mind lost to cloud canopies
And transparent heartbeats.

Let me kiss a foreign tongue
To learn that all lies taste the same.
Let me take off my clothes
When I am alone, simply to remember
That I can.

Moon: a companion,
Windowsill vigils at dawn,
Medication for the side effect
Caused by the cure.

Let me wash up in the Jovian seas
When my feet are rooted to the Earth.
Let my mind pester the working day
With dreams for tomorrow,
With catastrophes blacklisted in the sky.

Let me write my books of poetry,
Songs of sadness with no tune.
All the feelings I forgot,
All the passion I outgrew.

I still care.
Sitting behind the net curtain,
I burn incense to cover the smell
of cigarettes and watch the street
fill up each morning. I may have grown
old and fat and short of sight, but you know
I remained as half a person with a childhood mind.

The bodies come.
Mass graves as far as the eye
can see, and yet still I think of you
and how you patterned your hairstyle
to the changing of your moods. I wonder
how you are looking today, how you are feeling.
Though I am finding grey in my whiskers, I still care.

I paint now.
Nothing special, just irises
from the neighbours garden.
I grew tired of writing  once I found
that there was nothing to show for it.
I am too lazy to tend to a garden that
creeps up around me, I have given up on

trying to out-run the world.
I still care. Somewhere beyond
cynicism and charcoal, I still care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Train track sonnets, the drunk piano,
old trumpets and dreams of West Virginia;
gold tobacco in an antique pipe,
finding a new look in outdated surroundings.
Patients of self-hate stand in bandages,
long sleeves, and in brickwork formation,
all this to the beat of the white man blues,
a country guitar, harsh vocal, the sleepless smoker
on the bedside; new speakers for old tunes.
A new look amongst past disguises, ancient lies,
angry blisters on the road to recovery,
pathetic bottle of emptied red wine.
Tom still sings Hold On through bad hands and lotteries,
he will stay to drink with me, when on a winning streak.

We never found each other
amongst the traffic of our lives,
though I waited for you
in a pauper's tomb;
overgrown with pre-existing grass
and violent rosebush.

What is left after old sentiment?
After the nights spent hoping
for your uncertainty,
for any kind of sadness
that may bring you back to me.
I have not found the answer yet

and I have stopped asking the question.
I just work the day,
collecting free moments
as ash mounts the incense burner,
over-thinking each word exchanged
across the pillow of my mind.

The television news keeps rolling,
the world keeps turning.
Despite atrophy in routine
and the absence of you;
that deficit I cannot absolve
when left alone in its entirety.

Love arrived once I wrote it off
as a folly of forsaken selves;
freedom reduced to paranoid glances
at inactive screens.
I am ready for pain again,
if you are the one delivering it.

I guess you were once my woman.

But I was just a boy.

And I assumed I was your romance,

Crushed rose petals scattered in joy.



I guess I caught the first taste of tears,

The salt that would line your eyes.

Every time you caught your beauty

And for all those men who lied.



For in you I smelt a mother,

The softness within your skin.

Oh, it was in you I felt a lover,

That clench in my stomach,

That causes men to sing.



And I guess you were once my woman,

And I wish I could return

Into those breezy arms,

And feel the familiar pages turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I build my new life over graveyards swollen,
each journey stolen on paths walked before;
the oak church door, the adolescent postures,
first breath of ****, first taste of flight
amongst grounded freedom, amongst polluted nights.

I trade eyes with women over numbered tables,
contriving fables from coffee cups, loose-tongued gospels
for manufactured apostles, remnants of mistreated advice;
last pocket of ****, last drink of the night,
I have learned when to swallow, I have learned when to fight.

I found myself in the ground-zero wreckage,
last vestige of meaning and useful obsession,
those drunk-dial confessions, aftermath of silence;
first smoke of the day, last image of starlight,
I have forgiven my failings, I have kept them in sight.

My hands are trembling more than usual,
so I have altered my coffee to a camomile tea.
I administer everything as if it were medicine;
a chemist punctuating his day with
guilty cigarettes and vague homoeopathy.
It's all *******, I know-
but whatever gets you through the day...

In the season of advent, my fingers are bitten
down to the quick; throat seared with
half-functioning lighters and fragile matches;
I can scarcely operate either in this state.
The fairy-lights turn the high-street to a runway.
But all I see are charity shops
interceded with bookies and coffee houses.

This home-town exists to keep up my interest
in finding some purpose. A path to eventual escape
from all of these old bonds and ties,
pinning me down with memories of ***,
and all of the street-names I have learned by rote.
*I'm treading water here-
living in the comfort of a sink-hole.

Rugby town, of landlocked streets,
of wasted field and barefaced retreat;
I miss you now, in absence of a friend,
I miss you now, in the verse that I lend.

Suburb grove, of sleepy mist,
oh, battered housewife, oh blastocyst;
you will remain in place forevermore,
and forevermore, you'll become a bore.

Holding cell, of sporting fame,
you stole my dreams but gave me my name;
I think of you: a multi-storey view,
of happy faces, of which there is few.

Still, my town, in debt's nightgown,
the shop-fronts vacate, we're feeling down;
these streets are poisoned with names of the past,
each memoir to teach: nothing's built to last

Rugby town, of weary folk,
the private school is a private joke;
I miss you now, as I sleep through the day,
I miss the old walks, and all that you'd say.

Old market town, the aftermath,
of British summer, suicide bath;
of open mics and closing the shutters,
of waking graveyards, sleeping in gutters.

Hopeless climbs, of dreary times,
of childhood state and nursery rhymes;
each time that I come home, I know you less,
becoming a stranger in my redress.

Clock tower, chiming, chiming loud,
singing for history long and proud;
of Rupert Brooke and the question: “what if?”
What if I was born to some lover's tiff?

To some large and friendless town,
to some body of land, which I drown;
to some active place of pain unknown,
to some place that I'll not gauge that I've grown,

oh Rugby dear, stay with me,
let  me live on the periphery;
and although this town seems terribly dull,
it could be worse – I could live in Hull.

Rugby, Warwickshire
16/10/2015

Unholy streets of G-d, liquid tobacco,
gentle froth and steam
from the coffee estuary, split beneath the clock tower
on the idle hour; more pigeons than people,
more buildigs than choices
on this small-town, charity shop parade.

The women are still beautiful, still unattainable,
still on the brink of a breakdown
in the most confident dress.
Street-pastors carry the drunks home,
the street-cleaners appear by the afterparty,
clear out the old bottles
before the commuter picks up cigarettes
from the newsagents that never rests.

Tattoo parlours, barber shops,
Christmas on the radio come Hallowe'en-
this is the town that crazy built:
war-time poetry, jet propulsion,
chief inventor of sport,
of mild alcohol addiciton.

There's hundreds of places to get drunk in this town,
hundreds of places to hide away;
a foreign face in a sea of family and friends.
Landlocked, gridlocked,
centrally located but left out on a limb;
this town clings to the tracks,
it's avenues of escape
the only margin to keep the residents
out of mind and in their place.

But this is where I grew up,
always more car-park than parkland,
my first steps on Campbell Street,
on Armstrong Close,
first time I broke the law on Bridget Street,
on Selborne Road.
I'd push my bike all around this town,
no stopping off for a smoke,
for to get my fix-
I'd push on and on past graveyards and open bars
without a second gance.

Now, it's all shooters and soul-singers
and happenstance;
chicken wings on a late-night binge,
a box of wine, a night of sin,
wake up in shame,
life's a guessing game
and guess what, you'll never win.

Chewing gum, patches,
vapour that scratches the back of my throat,
nicotine in my blood,
you know, I'm trying my best to get clean.
Blister packs of vitamins, bowls of fruit,
buying coconut water over the counter-
green tea by the rising moon,
incense sticks and vegetables in the garden,
yet by the time night rolls on by
the locus of my eyes, they darken;
I'll be back on the beer,
I'll be smoking a carton.

This is the town that crazy built,
even the flowers by the roadside wilt,
cement factory, hum-drum poverty,
post-code belonging to Coventry,
kept out of the war
by a matter of minutes,
kept from the future
by corporate interest.

Hospital lights, supermarket glow,
I can't remember the last time
I wasn't loaded with chemicals
every time I get home,
every time I sign out
and put my head on the pillow,
I see familiar streets, familiar signs,
the job centre, the floodlights,
the 12% lager, the twist of lime.
I struggle with rhyme,
I struggle most days to get out of the house,
but at night, I know, that sea of doubt
is a river of light, to ruin my liver,
to spike my fever, to calm me down.

There's hundreds of places to get drunk in this town,
and this world it don't spin,
it just throws me around.