Your life is threadbare
and it's cosy

Uncomfortable
but safe

Poor
yet secure

It's not killing you
but then neither are you living.

The head is above water,
Struggling against the tide.

Grinding along on a hamster wheel
that badly needs oiling

I mean

You now earn less than you did at your first job.
It was **** all then

and that was 5 years ago.

The years have not been kind. The hairline has crept upward
Roughly in line with inflation.

A job's a job's a job's a job's a job.

There's a damp roof over your head.

Are you ready to trade all this in for a taste of adventure?

A main course of personal growth
washed down with a side order of

Drudgery

loneliness

and Japanese Encephalitis.

Will they find you out?
Will you be pulled into an office

while a polite local
explains how her English is better than yours?

That could all happen, says the head

but the frightened, quivering heart longs to change.

To jump into the fire and emerge reborn
strong, dynamic, brave. All the things you aren't now.


Just don't hope for too much.

The jealous poet
Is careful to write more than he reads,
Worried that each reading leaves
A stone
Upon a rocky mound
That time cannot age or wear,
For as stones lift it from the ground
It makes his own cairn seem more bare.

I wish that you would not admit
So easily and freely

That since we are legitimate
My presence makes you queasy.

As we dug our sinful crater
Out of burnt and broken hearts,

You felt like we were greater
Than the sum of both our parts.

With a look over the shoulder
Those kisses felt pyretic,

But when coals ceased to smoulder
Said kisses felt emetic.

What if you aren't the one you thought
And can't live life but can distort
its shape to make in mouths a taste
to which mouths can't help but relate?

Stood at the edge of the fray
No body, but a mouth to say,
In life unlived, emit a call
of truth that can be heard by all.

A restless heart defeats the weary feet that wish to lay in uneasy asleep

Repeated every mundane day, work, eat, excrete sleep. Watching your only life deplete;
One night at a time with cheeks welded to your seat
But its easy; distractions are replete;
Satisfaction - that's a little harder to achieve.
Bereaved, knowing your living someone else's scheme. And your life's an reflection of someone else's greed
Yet you can still feed yourself
and you only need to see the TV to see people whose most basic need aren't met.
So why fret?
If your so lucky in the scheme of things
Then why dream of things
The free time to pursue  your interests
When your sitting behind that desk
With a tie round your neck
And an invisible ball and chain round your leg.

But tonight you seek a little transference, a defiant display of independence from Facebook and HBO, you leave the door without knowing really where to go.
You just ride on your bike
Leave the rest to your psyche

When his mother was dying we each said goodbye
I was moved to tears.

The funeral came and though I tried to remain stoic, English, I cried.
Then he died, pulled under by umbilical cords, tied by my bloodied hands.

When the service came I cried then too.
My parents told me not to cry, as though it was an admission of guilt.
Still I wept through the service, as though their sternly worded advice meant nothing.
I sat and felt several tides of sorrow wash over me.
I tried to clench my bowels when it came. Through the first I stayed strong, forcing the emotion down.

The second wave made my eyes water; and whilst a stray tear dribbled off my chin I remained strong, forcing the emotion back down my swollen throat to maintain composure.

The third wave came, and though I kicked and struggled to keep my head above the guilty waves I sank below
My weeping, scabbed face betrayed the guilt of a murderer and finally I let go
Allowing the full horror of what had transpired to engulf me.
I drowned, my face covered by my ***** jacket.
The priest offered for us to share a final moment with the victim before he was burnt to ashes
And I, like the guilty party sat stock still, paralysed by the truth; that I, at that young age, had killed
And whilst I swore that I would never **** again
I collapsed adrift on a bitter sea of tears,
Howling at the injustice that I had wrought.

Later, when composure had been regained I felt a stirring in those clenched bowels.
I sat down on the porcelain throne and proceeded to **** out a large and meaty ****
I strained, my eyes watered, and my **** tipped to the edge of prolapse.

Comforted, I wiped and then felt nothing.

With humility I knew, that I was not noble Simon Daedalus but lowly Leopold Bloom.

The same avenues corporeal brinkmanship that led me to that sad place
Had led me to safety.

It was at first a sad realisation
But I’m happier now.

Stand up. Give me your full ******* attention.

Don't pretend you can effortlessly, carelessly produce a "real work", seated, with one eye on self-awareness, a tongue wedged in a cheek with one foot in the grave of perceive- opinion, not yet received, with a cool smirk on a proud chin sat atop a cool fist on a hard wrist on an indifferent arm held up by numb tendons leading down to a self-deprecatory elbow, the joints forming a fierce coalition of empty strength, that separates you from the hellish fire of embarrassment, the horrifying depths on mediocrity, that tempers the hot heart with a cool head.

Cast asunder the filthy cancer stick who pours its stinking grey ash upon the clacking, laughing keys. Throw that glass of water (for tomorrow) on the floor, step on its shards and dance, embracing them in soft padded flesh. Castrate the ***** of the feet and bleed out the last vestiges of your projected third person that stalks you like a shadow.

Ignore the clock that tocks and ticks towards tomorrow, towards a real life of bills and rent, distill your repent and drink deep brother. Sense the too-familiar scent of childhood fear borne out of decades of internalised guilt and tell me that it isn't sweet tonight, if this isn’t worth staying up for then I dare you to present me with a life worth going to bed for.

So strip yourself in front of this mirror, off each layer of potential, pretension, self-satisfied introspection, flawed, self-assured contentment that whispers that if only you applied yourself once in a while the confused mess of thoughts, regrets murmered under-breath, and little deaths that never escape the abstract place might one day add up to something of concrete beauty. Shatter the sardonic prism through which you view each new offering from those whose cardinal-sin was actually trying -that affords your cackling Medusa that the caustic chorus of “I could do better if I wanted to”.

Well don't you?

Tear down the veil between you and what you can't put off any longer; inspect the flabby mess of sores, leaving the limp **** to shrivel against the chill. Let the goose-bumps cluster like tumours. Like it or not this is you. Better live in bitter disappointment than forever bear the dead weight of mendacious expectation.

Cast poisonous complacency aside and hurl yourself against smirking canvas. You cannot win. You will die in a fluid florid final frenzied flourish; you will look this creeping inertia in the eye and just and say truthfully, for the first time I am not afraid of you.

Give me black despair any day over this living death.

Give me the truth, without distractions.