Another set of dreams with another man’s
name, whom I know to be better,
and says it better, was talking last night-
which is how it works;
I get back to it and realise that the words
were mine; back in the place that
speaks, when you can’t, or you’re
not in the mood, because I’ve barely
read a word of this poet, and his stuff
is all still here, ready to connect.

My house is busy today, being painted outside
by a squat giant;
flesh hanging from his vest with just
enough form, and smiling work expression,
to tell you that he works instead of giving up,
and setting fire to any face that disturbs him
because I still hear his ladders until 5ish,
when his van pulls away, and the rest of his day
is beyond my eyes.

I’m writing a paper on the Stanford
Prison Experiment, which now connects to Abu Ghraib;
one set of men walked into a plaything, a basement
in the bottom of a University, and could quit
at anytime; and roll into fresh mattresses
again,
but when it came
a second time round, and there was another reason
to be afraid, what happened
was different;
no get out clause in the basement
just the hands of mindless hearts
of those already
too numb
to do anything different
when down there.

I pray that the city is a germ
spreading up from the bottom of the country
to infect me
again.

I let the architecture of her name
multiply out from the clock holes
and throughout the day.

Her uniforms have no gender
and change every time
tourists on the back of workers backing out
travelling along a giant line of tattooed
buildings with derelict spaces that hold
a strange light to my loading eyes.

Normal as the silence in a taxi-cab
empty of people, but a place that has
become
a familiar mural
to me; a night that is concentrated
and stream line
over weight with art and adhd.

Streets continuing when bored and often robbed,
and transport that never stops.

All it would take
to turn all the gods inside out
for a short while
and make em
wear their organs outside
like Christmas tree lights
and change the science of experiment and fact
into shadow

is if the Sphinx yawned
just once, and stretched out her back shaking off her sand
in the middle of the naked desert;
stood, and walked around for a while
I doubt that the stars have changed much for her
she’d say good bye to the morning;
getting half a scorpion stuck in her back
as her skin returned to sleep

it probably wouldn’t matter
if no-one was watching, in fact
its probably better that way

it’s not asking too much
I don’t think.

I bake in the one week of cool hard summer that
July brings this year, enough warmth on the street
to make me not care about the nats touching my face
as I smoke and look up;
the building is asleep as it should be
and I’m careful not dream in the black to long
looking at my old home.

I turn back down the road and turn from 5 to 30
as a man approaches me with a different accent,
to mine, and since the night is nearly
complete, I feel easy
and give him a light.

I see him again as I walk home
as he speaks to a stranger near my uncles block,
and takes his phone.

It was a gift, and is engrained with the words
“The whole world is about three drinks behind”
now it catches up-in
humour;
of marathons, and sprints, families of credit
hustling their own into bunkers at the coast edge;
where the crevice can house no more than two,
watching the war come
from a small peep hole.

I look inside and see the wealth of crushed cans
and crisp packets, I walk over the mixed grass
and sand rock finding a place that stares out to the sea;
better than I can, but is happy to seat me
for a while, words of love affairs
cut into the smoothing rocks;
and they wont last a thousand years,
but have endured until now,
my skin resting upon them,
as I accept the seas hypnotising world,
which is enough.

a new flag parked into the moon
a knife parked into the neck
the way eye-***** dart when stimulated
life poured out from the body where the
world creeps, away, into its own place
and the names we have been given
go.