Some days we are but noise
beneath a silent sky,
Waiting and wanting to be heard,
The creek of an old machine still proving it's worth,
The light of a dying star illuminating the faces of people we love,
Framed, perpetually, by the world.



(Inspired by the Photography of Clive  Roughley)

A world in colour lies
                semi-distant, semi realised,
A near-forgotten future exsanguinates, yearning
              in the weakened glow, of infinite winter morning.
The voice, the voices, the voiceless, my anger, my age,
                Pan-millennial youth in coming years will fade,
It will carry duvet and pillow from hateful home
                to halfway-house until half way home
It will make all its hearts into the shape of cardboard,
                blemish the fire with chemical ****, **** hard,
It will seek forgiveness at the steps of screen,
                beat asthmatic chests, fingers, ribs and seams,
It will see itself cower in the horrible light of mirror,
               sail to the sun on wings of fakes lashes,
And it will burn, burn not in forgiving hangover sodium,
                but burn in the eye of a guilt yet to come,
And it will drown, drown at the blessing of the water,
               drown at its birth time and time over,
And it will wound, wound in scythe and cushion comfort,
                wound the waking dream in Siamese horror of sorts,
And it will leave strangled in the cords of its university hoody,
                leave alone at night, touch itself and cry.

Bursting rhythm from the panopticon, viewing all aspects
                of itself engulfed in ex-disney coloured acid
                spewing forth from the desired wreck,
Hurtling profound and profane into and beyond
                ******* and love and love and *******,
                *****-tinged snows lubricating seasons onward into each other,
Gut-busting, gut-busting, gut-busting societal downpour to harridan office
                from liquor dormitory, escaping and elevating
                on citalopram or selegiline,
The surgeons and nurses, the poets and builders, ever restless
                at the unbolted door, screaming into their unread palms,
                comparing varying hell to holy water lakes of others,
Sipping the dew from paradise wing, discontent with all
                in purgatory-England whilst licking the knee
                of America and imagined Europe,
Wanking itself dry at the lottery of thought,
                crude reckonings spiralling sugar into salt
                landing on the tongue of want,
Feeling crucified at the Atheist tea party,
                climbing the cross of trend
                supplying own milk and nails,
Unwanting in the chrysalis, ignoring coming candles
                but fantasising a thousand symmetrical suns
                to limited avail and idea.

But idea there will be, birthed, blood-hungry
                gnawing at the heel ‘til bare bone,
And it will rip apart fat riddled arteries,
                Deconstruct, Reconstruct all the bodies and the cites,
And it will write and spell all the words wrong
                realising that what ‘they’ are selling is sign language for the blind,
And it will note of itself as harsh but not unkind,
                reject bribe bread and water be it divided or divined,
And it will say of cartography “No need as of yet,
                I have seen men lost in the lining of a suit,
Crying into their shoes, uncombed, unfettered, unfertilised, without hope,
                after laughing into empty lakes.”
We can each say “My God, my empty sky, my cartoon prophet, my local MP,
                I have seen everything and want none of it,
                I am alone in a narrow shape of time,
                watching us all unfurl to the scent of burning feathers and hair,
                to the sound of punctured veins.”
We watch silent litanies for graceful pardons of filth,
                in “Amen” then nothing,
We watch our age’s world rend lung
                through hollow cheeks and air in our bones,
We watch ourselves into eyes or no eyes at all
                watch ourselves read last lines and then
                watch ourselves realise and whimper
                from ulcerated gut, tongue or pen,
                the everlasting knell…

                “…And it will happen again…”

She sat by me, in her skirt, hand grenade green,
And an off-white blouse obscured by a jacket with dust in its seams,
Like leather, like elderly skin, like a crossword puzzle with half the letters filled in,
She sat by me and spilt her sentences and her tea:

She claimed her husband had been killed by a cabal of spiritualists,
Killed by a bull elephant in the streets of Nepal,
Killed by the seven plagues,
And never killed at all,

That he was once a number
Somehow both perfect and prime,
That he was Prime minister of the sea,
And independent of time,

That his bones were cracked marbles
Bought from a widow in Tennessee,
That his name continued to escape her,
But that he looked something like me,

Leaving I saw her wings drag her heavenward,
I saw her terrible wings,
As I stumbled and veered from concrete to tarmac
I heard the pavements start to sing:

“I was once a flowerbed,
My father was a field,
My mother was a source of light,
Before which all the people kneeled.”

Then lost in the eye of daytime and night,
Drawn to the moustache of a Spanish racketeer,
He was once abandoned by his books and his babies
In the boot of a broke-down cavalier,

His pasts and ideas caught up to him,
And gripped him by his belt and his teeth,
His pasts gripped him in quiet of his nightmares,
And slashed his arms in the street,

Visions shook me by the bleeding palm,
Her terrible wings now pinpricks for the moon,
Visions shook me as deities died,
With eyes like a card-trick and fingers like doom,

Then stuck in the endless space between words;
She sat by me, in her skirt, hand grenade green;
Stuck in the endless space between words;
And an off white blouse obscured by a jacket with dust in its seams...

A few miles inland,

Told to lock all windows and doors,

There is Chlorine in the air,

As England remembers Soviet Russia,

Chemical spills tickling the throat of the century,

Stinging the eyes of the children

Bored in the beer garden of Britain,

The roads are all blocked and the whiskey is watered down.

People leave slower than ever,

Swimming in pools of exhaust fumes,

CO2, Radio 2, M52 bound,

Vehicular nightmare wound,

Lost in the A-Z of our Father’s arteries

Reversing through his varicose veins,

Stopping short of starry futures,

Air pollution spoiling meteor showers.

An end, an end,

Over and Over again.

Nice right foot, Johnathan,

You’ve got the job if you want,

You can be the rabbit for the season,

The southerners need something to hunt.

I have curled into a ball
in the corners of Europe,
Known the fractions of the nights,
Felt the breeze of the days
Pass softly through the gaps in my ribs.

The sky here does not know me.

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.

Day after day the days will unfurl
and from every table is a view of the world,
Around both the people perpetually are
Crossing their fingers when crossing their hearts,

Then stumble and falter as they rise
To yearn for lost time but then prophesize,
Of instances when car headlights will flicker
In meaningless Morse code from the foot of the river,

As calendars die and memories erase,
A single year rolls down my face.

Single years roll down my face,
I send smoke signals to teenagers
Lost in the sound of their personal midnight,
Changing their names to ‘lost’ and ‘gained’
and remain unquantifiable
in the loose streets of halogen New York,
or the loose streets of halogen anywhere,

Some places you don’t imagine, only experience,
Some places you don’t  visit but get sent,
Some places demand sacrifice of years you don’t have,
Some places are just prayers and graffiti,

And here, here
The railway bridge adorned,
with tags and padlocks
and ****** fluids with different stories,
I see all the streets and city embodied,
She has a face like blunt force trauma,
Her legs are seductive and her hands
are covered in blood,
Her lover’s smile is an open wound.

In these places there is a fire in every tower,
In these places there is something sharp in every pocket,
In these places there is a sad drawing in your child’s notebook,
In these places there is always a ticking growing louder.

A foetus in handcuffs beneath a middle aged man
hanging from a traffic light;
Incidents unrelated,
Become dead words in piles of boxes,
That don’t realise they tell us how
this city or satellite town
is gathering the dirt for its own burial mound.

“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

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

Th  lost l tt r
Cam  to m
V ry far in th  futur
Missing th  targ t dat  by mil s

It r ad of lov
A lov w  had miss d
Sw pt away, gon
In th s achang of y ars

I see you
sniffing the patches of sunlight you sit in
before sleeping with the spirits,
dreaming of the rain you'll never feel.
Outside of the windows
where you observed the decade
the gulls moved inland.

Perched uniquely
above the boiler room of the world,
Slave to nothing but your surroundings,
You watch the nameless go by,
Watch the nameless go by,
And when they cease to live,
You'll cease to die.

We met at night
By the leaking window of the evening train
On the two seats with the fewest tears
Two spaces apart
Her perfume was like being loved to death
An olfactory haven above the damp and the diesel
I commented on the weather
And told her my name

Her movements were the increments
Of some heaven or hell
Some Utopia or Gomorrah
Her words trickled between bones
And emptied the room of air
"I'm going to tell you a story" she said

"It begins with a person falling
And ends exactly the same"

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.

There is no one in the stained glass window,
Nothing real enough to drag us out the dirt,
In your presence I wear a suit of nails,
Your existence, a Wasp inside my shirt.

I long for the waves to be strong enough
To rip your filth from our shore
There are no good words for the likes of you
Introduced us to hate, taught us to abhor.

An insult to those we’ve loved and lost,
When, eventually, you go, what kind of tears will be shed?
Because truth be told if you’re a ***** whilst alive
You're still a ***** when you’re dead.

I stare into the room,
A wreck on a stone step,
Eyes strained, peering inwards.

“Oh don’t worry, nothing else is living here.
Please come in.”

Beckoned by a shawl,
Inhabited by a face that is never remembered,
Into a front room where the shadows had shadows.

I hesitate to sit,
Then the cold pours through me
As something moves
Deep
Within
The House

“I thought you were alone here?”

“No dear, I just said nothing else was living…”

What I’m really thinking,

What I’m really thinking,

Does anybody want to know?

I don’t want to, but I do.


I think of endings,

I think of other arms,

I think of once-fond memories,

And how they now bring harm,


I try to think of reason,

I try to feel worth,

I try to force away the demons

From every crossroads on the earth.


What I’m really thinking

Becomes other peoples notes,

What I’m really thinking

Lets water into boats,

What I’m really thinking

Is something to endure,

What I’m really thinking,

Today I’m not so sure.

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

We are alone, together
In the cold climes,
Transpenine Traversing, Riverbank Residing, City and Satellite Dwelling,
But out of apparent sight of capital
Some of us lost jobs, the railway and soon the hospital
Where we both End
                                    And
                                           Begin
                              End
                                     And
                                            Begin
Put a penny in the meter, don’t let the draft in!
Soon the heat will make our flats
All expand then retract
Then we’ll see the demise of the world at large,
Until the North becomes just a group of cats
Huddling for warmth under cars.

Wait and walk hollow in hollows
Above the earth
Army green, army green,
The silent army of silent trees
Aside desolate roads
Hear the empty voice that goes:
“I’m the one that follows you home”

Sit and talk hollow in hollows
Inside the world
Lily white, lily white,
Funeral flowers **** the pets at night
In unopened windows
Hear the empty voice that goes
“I’m the feeling that keeps the doors closed”

He, she, they,
Called out but once
Into red flowers, gravel paths, and steam,
then resurfaced somewhere in **
Without stepping on the sea

Lost, drinking in a bath of silence,
bleached under fingernails,
and left
The eye at the centre of the city,
where we all have names
but no address

Road trip the drains
Where the Dads and Dogs are *******
On bodies and memories
In the empty wells that you're fishing

Number station soviet
With all the frequencies hissing
The noise of trains and traffic
Near where the children go missing

In daylight and dreams
All my flowers becomes wreaths
And all the lonely creatures
Mutilate my counted sheep

In the corner of the cabin
She has flowers in her teeth
Her soft and glowing voice
Beats me to death when I can't sleep

While all the ***** and dolls spent holy holidays
Whitening their teeth on magnesium

While others whispered secrets into hollow trees
And almost cried in Asia and kitchens

While we're banging at the wall of the universe
Like particles hitting the side of the flask

While awake at 1am, 2am and tomorrow
Seeing life in the back of the eye in the mirror

While lost in the arteries of a machine
While lost in the arteries of a machine

He had a cacophony of seabirds,
In the attic of his mind,
In the loft of his skull,
Telling him:
What not to do,
What not to do,
What not to do.

There was a noise downstairs

Heard it creep into what we read
Whilst in my ears it starts to shout
A sound that slowly sows its seeds
Then in the knees it wins the bout

I hear it growing closer
To the threshold of doors long shut
Before clawing into the room
Through our bodies
And the windows too

Hear it repeatedly speaking of
Mother’s sons born blue
All polluted in utero
Cold water and yellow fog
While others hawked their morals above

Hear holy words said to us
Proverbs two one two three
Do not move our mouths too much
But never mention
That more than holy spirits touch

Hear that change comes
When the North Atlantic
Nears our lungs
But sadness when we only get
To remember him while he was young

Hear it ring out between
What all the emptied pens believe
That parts of us have contravened
When our hearts fester from scene to scene
Betwixt the Romans and the Pharisees

Hear it in words of grace
In the void where your spine should place
When stood between tectonic plates
nor time nor stasis emancipates
The silence of our delegates

Then hear it in atomic air
The souvenirs of yesteryear
That spill and mix into our despair
The thoughts our hammers won’t repair

There is still a noise downstairs

Nights
when hot evening in lemonade and canal water gives way to cold breeze dusk through white cotton shirts seeking jackets,
As last light leaves the party behind nameless hills and the pollution masks the stars,
Slow moons creep to the edge of eyes in monochrome film-light, distant rain, and drunken big-bands play

through speakers in dead venues, layers of dust, and layers of dust,
And from radios, lost on the dial,
In American cars, front seats the size of living rooms,
But no comfort to journeys of ammonia and neck pain,
Lost nights of Earth
Accepting warm drizzle through hats and shoes, and occasional ceilings,
Sirens paint and dapple scenes streets away from latest whiskey or whisky melodramas,
Before returning to curtains, decades of regret in floral patterns, chipped cups, and solar flares at the strained dawn,
Piercing blinds and migraines
In a successive run of
Mornings

I breathe and I tire,
Whilst all mouths and memories begin to conspire,
I see Odin weep outside the window,
I wander backstage where the humans can’t go,
One-eyed Wednesdays install beats in my heart and cracks in my teeth,
Show me a heartland with an ocean beneath,
Let me sleep, let me sleep, let me sleep.

I am thinking of moving,
from this country,
from this house,
from this couch,
At least,
At very least, I am a clichéd empty coffee cup,
A lesion on the bone of my own life,
Stopping under Ferris wheel lights,
As it all falls into the Mersey,
And resurfaces, maybe, elsewhere

I think of moving,
In yellow patches of sun,
In marked skin,
In between atomic level emptiness,
At peace,
At ephemeral peace, I am the clichéd busted wheel,
A tyre mark or pock mark on the surface,
Slicing the move East in two,
Drowning in meltwater
Bobbing up through a hole in the ice,
And resurfacing, maybe, elsewhere

I am moving,
through time (or it through me)
through faded dayglo
through a burnt filament,
At last,
At dreaded “and dear last”, I am roots and canopy, clichéd,
A fluttering of fingers in thorns and air,
Stuttering sentences on an empty stage,
Skirting the edge of newly lost continents,
While licking salt from faces and cliff faces,
Moving another ghost somewhere west,
To resurface, elsewhere

maybe

They’re putting bread on string
Out of reach of anything
Chandeliers in a Salt mine
Turning wine into whine into figments of what was mine

What was ours in the bastions of love
Which left us behind in the pushes and the shoves
Oblivion to oblivion in Lunar zodiac years
Turning tears to tears in barrels full of fear

Precious be thy emptiness in lost & broken trust
But our broken alloy hearts will likely never rust
Held to account in dingy basement dwellings
Turning your cells into cells when it’s more than salts you’re smelling

Hearts become holograms, there’s  interference in the tube amps
Our bodies become vehicles and this locus is the on-ramp
Desire lines in darkness punctuate the screaming night
Turning wander to wonder far from halcyon light