Drunk on depression
Tired tabernacles
Seeking solemnity
Breathing through tubes
Fed at night
In the cage of the borough
Lost leaders
On ******* soliloquies
Driving on the right
Speaking in tongues
Crashing through the wall
Of absolute certainty
In doubt and mascara
Butchered red
Meat cleaver hands
Post-manifesto
Bargaining for the soul
Carcinogenic television
Cacophonous libraries
Care giver corridors
Closed

Open to infection
Untreated city
Treaty of wherever
196 flags
Good for Kerosene
Live on paper
Minimum wage
Retirement age
DWP death sentence
Closed border
Cancer of the bone
Mouth to mouth
Of the drinking classes
Flecks of ****
On the **** of distraction
Pay gap mentality
On dead meat and banter
Liposuction of conscience
Free market *** attack
Fit to print
Fine to hate
For now

I drowned in the history of China,
In text and torn genes,
Immersed in yellow rivers and red books
and sought refuge in Kowloon,
Practiced medicine within the wall,
All to find you.
To have a hand grace your shoulder
On a pavement in England,
And tell you where you’re from,
And that it doesn’t matter

I saw you, I heard you.
Today on a screen my future appeared all black, white, and grey.
Nothing at first but bubbles of contrast
swells of innards and technology.
But then I saw you.
Your bones a beautiful highlight,
Our blood; flutters of movement -
Head bowed the two of us saw through your mind.
And then I heard you.
Pounding spikes, white rhythm on black.
Tiny pump like a machine blinking -
My own heart beating faster.
Alive and real, your beat fills the room and echoes through blank pages and clean slates, into empty homes or ones not yet built, cries out in the night with warm comfort and soothing heat.
Now your likeness sits in my pocket
Until the day we meet.

The sound of open water

Driven evil in your mind,

Backward of reasons

Given to Children and wildfowl,

Explaining Pacific Theatre

And its lack of stage direction,

Hosed down Holy Cities

In buckets of **** and Holy Water,

Made Holy Hell and Holy Romans

Wholly Unacceptable.

“As old as man,
Way back before the past…”
Said by the historian in the perpetual cemetery,
His book and ours open on the same blank page
“What is to become of us,
we are just memories of sound in a silent room”


The image of man
Tearing down his own tower of babel
with an “Eloi!, Eloi!” to himself
Grasping at the light
Without thought of the fire
All felony and no fingerprint
forever

And I watch
And I watch
And after my illness, I walk alone
And notice the words of children
collecting sun in a bucket

To 80 years from Spanish misery
To Syrian sand and tears
Mixing with the shores of ****** and Liverpool, London and Lemuria
Nothing gathered
Nothing gained

We slip further into the walls of parliament
Slip into the walls of web, corridors of code
And hear of occultist cataclysm
and those so intelligent all before them is dismissed
(“eloi, eloi, I am eloi!”)

In cold grey-green bathrooms
of flatblocks or apartment buildings
licking seasalt and gunpowder
from the fingers of our Atlantic cousins
In human skin suits

Today I spotted
a disfigured man
by the lake.
His right hand
in a soiled
bandage loosely tied.
Left eye missing -
I dared not
uproot his repose.
I feared for
him so frail,
Beside black water.

Today I spotted
a disfigured man
aboard a train.
Earphone hung from
melted plastic ear,
does he listen?
He smells foul
and looks unblinking -
a commuting ghoul.
What station can
such a man
find his home?

Today I spotted
a disfigured man
at dinner alone.
His teeth rotten
with gums bleeding -
drinking soup slowly.
Waxy red blood
staining cheap napkins
He doesn't care.
An omnipresent reminder
that no man
survived a week.

Once felt in the lonely, identical corridors
of hotels, hostels, hallways of homeless flatblocks;
The urge,
The urge to move the moment,
Move the momentum of the meandering life
From work to shop to sleep to work to shop to sleep,
Supplanted by the unattainable mental utopia,
Supplanted by delusions in the colour of dreams,
Supplanted by 10,000 madman notes on the nature of daylight,
Tender sounds accelerated into screams,
Lost in the pylon forest,
Trapped by Tendonitis, Tinnitus, and terrestrial TV,
Stifling the electoral laugh,
Deafened by D-beat, Dubstep, and Democratic conventions,
Bled to death in Bosnia,
Died in Damascus,
Executed in Entebbe,
Murdered in Mogadishu,
Born in Berlin,
Lived in London,
Carried in Copenhagen,
And again in Amsterdam,
Until tomorrow’s endless oceans
Forecast nothing of their waves,
Until tomorrow’s endless oceans
Safely say their real names.