Which beer is mine, the Becks or the Heineken?
A ***** mauve has descended on the night, and
on the town a dank black silence, and I am sat here
folded like a peace crane. But I want to move.
I feel an itch to find someone, any resident up
for grabs - I can’t be the only one awake.
And my loved ones: if they worry, they worry; I’m
gone, but I am only looking for myself in another
form - the form of persons lost as I am, wandering
as I am through the lively dead-night. Which
baccy is mine, the amber leaf or the gold one?

The dog who watched us take off our shoes
on the steps before the laying Buddha,
this is for you. You were at ease,
not guarding, panting from the heat, warming
your belly on Bangkok’s stones.
Our shoes in a bag, passports strapped to us,
photographing the twenty foot high
resemblance of the man who asked not to
be praised - cast in mother-of-pearl the
man who shook off possessions - I
suppose to a dog looking up,
gods and humans are the same, barefoot idols
shuffling through a hotbox corridor
looking up at another barefoot
human with an immobile face,
downy eyes and nearly a tear.

Later you found shade beneath an
archway at the end of a long
line of Buddhas, almost identical,
decreasing in age towards you.
Some ideas are so respected
they need repeating in the same
manner every year, the same sculpture
carved beside the last, an echo,
a silent chant, and you lay there
at the end, the chant becomes your
visible panting. For a moment
you look into my eyes because
you recognised my feet, because
you know you take the place of the
next structure, you know that busy
hands will build upon where you sit,
that where you go, humans follow,
as they do with gods, with shadows.

To drop the latch and your belongings,
to say 'put down tomorrow's feat,
put down the tune of yesterday,
put down what calls away your
attention from the endless breadth
of now' - to drop the latch and slot
the key neatly in and not be reminded
of the worst *** of your life, to
look down at your shoes and not be
in a montage flashback of every
game of tennis last summer
when each stroke was a delayed rebuttal
from arguments before, the manly swipes,
the posed sliding on asphalt,
the gathering of ***** found sunbathing
with the brown baking weeds,
to run a mile and feel every jolt
and not imagine a face to run from,
and not pretend there is an
amalgamated idol of petrified lovers
just past the traffic lights, to not
invent telepathy and play it like a game,
reading the negativity in the loiterers
outside the post office across the road.
To see a mirror and forget to ignore it.
To watch the face in perfect humble
clarity, to see it as a friend would,
to say okay on a daily basis to the eyes,
to see for the first time their glory-
colour, to be okay without repressing,
to drink a glass of sauvignon blanc
without accompany on a Thursday morning
because the work rota allows the luxury.
To turn the television off.
to back into the night because you must,
to back into the night so you cannot
***** your way with hands, to keep
reversing and to watch what you pass
and to only stop when necessary, and
even then not for long, and turn around
and give thanks to walls and tripwires--

in the morning, with nobody there to know,
to take off all your clothes and then
that final layer, to be devastated
by the contours of another's, though
it may be only memory, to be distracted
by a speck of thought and start again,
to be one day older and to never age.

I wrote

'the waves adorned your feet
in silent hushes'.

I wrote and I never
said. When you needed it,
when you cried for it,
I never said. I wrote.

In your loft,
our joint belongings
swelled my throat
and I didn't say.

But I saw you looking.

Your feet descended first -
from the attic, from the attic,
your feet looked the same.

I couldn't say,
So I wrote this.

The working day is blue shirts and lies,
twelve last cigarettes, the balancing
of SMS from the powerful women who
know me. What are your plans later?

What are my plans? In the evening,
a globe I constructed from puzzle
pieces sits in my beggar's hands.
One day, they will be large enough
to cage it, but not yet. It's not time.
There is a cave-in exactly where I
next want to go. It's okay.

What are my plans? The rest of it.

When my Grandparents were young, or relatively young,
say, the age I am now, coincidence still had a name;
that is to say, was still rare enough to warrant one.
They had to wait for them - if they did wait at all.

But I am fortunate, am I not? I do not have to wait
at all, never, no way. I use an automatic service,
administered by somebody else whom I do not know,
deployed in ways I do not fully comprehend, utilising
techniques I do not fully comprehend. I have one
function in the algorithm: to press F5, to press
F5, and then - ! - a page appears which seems to know me:
'Lightning over Tucson'. Did I pronounce that right?

When my Grandparents were young, or relatively young,
say, the age I am now, coincidence still had a name:
'coincidence'. Did I pronounce that right? F5. F5.

We dance, half-poser, half-alone
and before the half-filled stalls
perform that half-twirl that moans:
'How do I look?' Head to the walls,
hands down and fingers parted.
We check our shadow from routine,
but the watchers have departed -
they have seen this show before.
Forget the shadow on the floor;
check the pulse, check the breath.
Quick. Curtain. One thing is certain.

To keep a routine, that's the thing,
that's what keeps it at bay. But
is that not just playing a game -
the shaving, the brushing, the toenail-
trimming every four weeks?
I think depression is no more
than the sudden dropping of pretence.
You keep up your image, because
that is what works, and then when
you should be at your happiest, it comes
like meteors come - not with the cold
efficiency of a mechanical bird,
but like the damning hellfire
of a heavenly body curved off-path.
Say you are going for a walk,
and it is Spring, and say your
love-of-the-moment is a short
distance away, as silent as peace
because she knows how you can get.
Say it is the first bright day,
but still chilly - the moon, having
been on a binge all night, holds
a silent tune so blissfully, a
dog whistle in the deep blue, and say
the fields are endless sheathes,
the crosshatch reeds of farmed corn
forming a mosaic riddle on the ever-
stubborn mud, and there are ghostly
rainbows in the hidden puddles,
and it is joyful unlike anything,
and there's the feeling of being lost
as a child is, comfortably lost, unphased
and focused only on the patch of
ground in front - the only patch
that is, not a patch on what's behind.
And say you feel a smile arrive
and you feel too clean, if anything,
too new and looked after, like a baby,
and just as quick you think: this is not the idea,
this is not my retirement, how dare I pretend
I deserve a moonlit walk in the middle
of the day, how dare I play this game?
What next? Will I drink the sun?

I’m thinking of guilt, of karma,

of cause and effect, of sky,

of midday sun

(a red judge)

of midday moon

(of its telekinesis,

its drowning game of

tennis with the tide).

They say you’re mobile now,
but like a cartoon, the
ghost of your outline suspends
behind you on the road.

How long it hangs before it is the
same stuff as breath on a cold day,
only God knows; and He
cannot be found for looking.

You have read every rule the
great poets and philosophers
have etched. Your technical
grasp of love is paramount.

But to the quiet tremble
of the skin, to the warm and
unfearing heart, you are the
sweetest of novices. Go, drive away

and read no more of love.
You have studied enough.
Go drive away until you
remember why you ever

coughed the ignition into life
in the first place. And take
it as a sign that the reverse
gear refuses to play along.

There is a gutsy finality to
the way you add curls of cream to the cup;
a knowing glint in the chintzy sheesha,
second-hand, jewelled, meditating on the
window-seat behind you. Beds of children
form foamy chains against the azure blankets

out there, above your head. Your glasses are
windowpanes, screens to a lighter view. Curled
in your belly is a shaman with the
bold dimensions of a project. You stir.

What are the lessons of today?
Are they informed by vague
hungry phantoms, jaw-slacked, who burr
on the tongue, that singular
nothingness before an itch
shows? The truths which form beneath
your skin are those which would
find more knowledge in some other
knowing mouth, ready for
digestion. Have you travelled
far today, pilgrim? Have your
feet insisted anything
of worth upon the forest floor,
or drawn up the simple
truths already buried there?
Did you subject yourself to rain
for miles of wandering
only to come out again
as the clouds hurried to
hide their shame behind the
hills? Have you been
troubled by the whims of
the broken twig, the taxation
of the wind's shanty breath?
Take off your blindfold and watch
as I give you a wave
from a shadow you nearly
tripped over. Give over your heart
to me and my land.
What have you learnt today, pilgrim?

Having died, you have grown
inside my heart for years.
It happened when I did
not care what happened -
in my subbacultcha
adolescence. I was
numb and you numbed
me further. You were not
much like a father anyway,
but I was shocked to
never mourn you.

I know now that it has been
a gradual mourning. I blindly
rampaged into my twenties
before even thinking of you.
And when I did, I did and
I did and I did and you were
there, suddenly, nightly.
It is worse this way,
in many ways – my griefs
are stupid, impossible
questions like: 'Why
Daddy can't you have known
me as a grown man?' I am
so much the son of yours
now. No longer a boy.

Having died, you have
grown – oh nevermind.

The ***** peers
its paw-print face
and knows the heart
of patience.

All night I walk
with the foxes
whose green eyes do
not see me and

a breath that does
not know me and
I tell you this:

humanity
while gaining all
has lost something.

Timeless rain, come carelessly, come
scour the furrows in the land.
You are most cathartic for the sky
and drop from fumbling hands.

Drumroll, drumroll - smiling, insist
yourself in grass and wood and fences
marked as Private. You are young snow
but with ambition. A stormcloud’s
in my head and you should know that
the world is drenched and wailing.

The sun is asking me to close my eyes
to trouble, to bend my will with his.
Sheep are running past the baking weeds
in double-time, marching to the bleats
of their folly-young, who look on
and follow the wrinkles in the land;

in case a godly hand should whisk them
up and out to weigh, they briskly run away.

For therapy, I found a place,
and that is all that's needed. Woods
provide a soothing face - and should
I need a quiet patch of peace,
I'll find it where I'm bound to. Trees
are goddesses of a Walden
kind of dwelling. In the forest
light is light, dark is dark, cycles
are the cycles of becoming.

Shh. My thicket is thick with it.
So I pick all the lower leaves
from the younger sapling trees
(barely inches above the ground)
so they shall grow before the rest.
And when I come back in summer
to treat my soul, I'll look for where
the trees are tall, and leafless too,
and that is where I'll find the truth.

We stopped beside the railings, years above

the harmless foaming spittle-waves, your hands

inside your sleeves as though you knew the land

would punish both of us before the shove -

which came without your help. I threw myself

into the breeze - you didn’t wheeze or cry,

but blankly watched your brittle lover fly

into the floor. I hit the coastal shelf,

survived the fall beyond all reasoned doubt.

The people found me somewhere safe to dwell

wherein my Clara couldn’t raise a hell

of my conditions. When I wanted out

they let you in. I thought I’d said enough:

‘Oh Clara, I do not deserve your love.’

The sprinting clouds ignore the cries
like clockwork, forming mushroomed plumes
and knowing only how to move,
they do: drift on, drift on, drift on.

Not caring what a kindness does,
forgetting how to stop and stare,
and knowing only how to move,
they do: drift on drift on drift on.

Thus deafened, keen to blindly steer,
a levitating orb survives
from knowing only how to move.
It does: swiftbomb swiftbomb swiftbomb.

We met between two hedges, a sly
passage cut out of evergreens for dogs
to escape through, children to avoid
by - you already had a twitch and breath
like the chosen one. Something lingered
on you on invisible shadows.
It was not physical. Nor were you.
Years later, I would plant hedges and
wait an age for them to touch, become
a passageway, and I would scour
their interleaving darkness for you.

I have a plague of planes upon me;
they travel such a distance
and yet are flat against the stars.
They draw their shadows on my passage.
They are undergoing an excavation
from that crazy distance, to
remove you from my soil.

On the river's bank - discarded waders
dropped there, cast aside the day before. A
little yellow orchid drooping, damsel-
head in danger, wanting fellow flowers,
wanting pollination, hoping summer's
kindly fingers touch upon the shadows.

To grace those plants which suffer most from thirst;
is this the noblest aim? Come Spring you may
breathe life upon the wilting flowers first.

The garden's wish is only to be nursed.
For those who care to look, trees know the way
to grace those plants which suffer most from thirst.

The saplings too, in knowing that they're cursed,
in ****** can attempt one last act: they
breathe life upon the wilting flowers, first.

So seeing someday struggling seedlings pursed
in sombre perspiration, you should play
to grace those plants which suffer most from thirst.

To love with equal temperament the worst
and best, to always beam 'yes', never weigh,
breathe life upon the wilting flowers first.

The lawn is shot, upturned, that bomb has burst
and all looks lost; the wind has swept the bay.
To grace those plants which suffer most from thirst,
breathe life upon the wilting flowers first.

after the act
there is a quiet lull

a kind of retirement
for the senses.

when the flesh
rampaged until dull
and dead and broken
from passion
            is a new canvas
            again, then

that assault
the dawn raid

artillery refusing to believe
in boundaries, saying
a path is better
a path is better

and this is a fresh battle

I took a walk indulged in that
ignoble state of mind in which
I feel forgotten by my friends.
And when I reached the traffic lights,
I thought I safely took my way.

But what if, having succeeded
to cross the road, I have died,
and walk on coma-like, thinking
that I live on when really I
am lying in a bed somewhere?

Maybe if I find my new ward
and enter in my formless way,
I might well see myself adored
before I duly slip away.

Be with it;
your breath is better
if it's known.

Shush, if you present gods - always are
their glassy likenesses in what’s
just past the door. The mushrooms,
those brittle wooded floors. Glossy
instances of truth, shielded
so elastically from what is.

It’s not only past the door though.
They make it up; they lie within.
Gods are always present if you shush.

Waking up to chainsaws -
Morning the spluttering
engine of mourning. It's
in the name of truer
trees. Slicing the butter
trunks, dropping the chippings;
garnishing with finesse
my olive tree below.

New Pompeii clasps the old
in a fingerless glove of
tourist gold. A grubby
British penny is grinning from
the rabblement of dust. In the
West it's all the same. A
compendium of histories fill the
Seine, the Thames back home's
a rotted filed-away old thing.
And I am bound upon the cascade
of the Atlantic waves - no matter.
What's here is here - and here I am.

The windowsill is badly placed; the sun
cannot indulge the speckled flowers. Catch
a ray, my little wilters, hatch
(in some enobled way, you vital ones)
your ancient plan. A blueprint known to man
and woman, aged notions often used
like: getting, knowing, owning, holding. Mused
by scanty winds atop a skyfull.
                               Scan
the skies for faintest glimmers, something clued
inside the trees. But know the placid breeze
has never been against you. Don't fall, please,
into forgetting: every atom's glued
to progress. Nature loves a failed scam.

You orchids catch what little light you can.

A ghost.
Reflected face
behind my own, drawing
a blank in scented bathwater
(or death).

Rapture, growing voice around the corner.

Crisp new diphthongs, sorry rounded vowels

unrehearsed. A twanging reverb. Certain

loosened phrasings shock the doorknob, like

'Clara...octaves...failings'. When I lift the


latch it's broken trailing consonants

streaming past the ceiling; bassy treaties,

sighing falling clothes and chord-crushed feeling.

Welcoming me through that stuckfast door
into your roadworthy womb, cigarette in mouth,
you tell me Socrates was right;
that suicide is so logical;
that no man knows;
that humanity, having spread,
denies a further virus.

A bottle of ale there on the hearth -
the nutty yeast of the head still brewing.
I bring out my gift for you -
a loaf of bread - and remind you,
my wander-weary brother, how yeast
multiplies and multiplies,
furthering itself, and no man cares why.

I can't swim, but I am keen to watch
your ululating rhythm in the pool.
Your head cuts smartly through the water's skin
like scissors through a plastic film.
You inscribe that well-drawn path of constance;
the recurring graph of a heart's green screen.

That's how authentic, automatic, you swim:
by a hidden sense so palpable, so
devastating, and your deadleaf hair so
Autumnal and out of place in the new Spring,
That the wind has hidden - ashamed, outdone.

Fire knows the wood's secrets,
the flame-tipped branch a pointed
lie. Deep out there, rumbled,
your animus treads through
broken brick - from an excavated
castle or a moat which lost its breath
just before the shovel and the gasp.

No hiding holes out in the field -
too open, too wide for lies.

I'd misremembered what I lack,
but in your grip, it pounded back.

We are, when bruised by some new qualm,
capable of human knowing;
indebted to the open palm.

Some trials, surely, test our charm -
are we sane, still? Life is showing
we are, when caught in some new qualm.

So someone's hand has brought us harm?
Violent smashes; hateful throwing
indebted to the open palm?

Do we ourselves give in, alarmed?
Powerful and old; we're slowing,
we are, when caught in some new qualm.

Or human friend – you need alms,
others' helpings to keep you flowing,
indebted to their open palms?

This mandala of loving arms
is ever-present handshake-throwing.
We are, when caught in some new qualm,
indebted to these open palms.

You were the first to make me smile,
I'm told. Descending from suspicion -
Your bedroom staircase above -
You accepted me then. I have
Passed ivy fences by that house
When striving to Magic with you.

Amigo! More than brother; ours
Being found on humour – better
Than most siblings we know. In fact,
You were ingesting first substances
To drop the edges, were you not,
When I stumbled into that? You

And him and I – godless trinity
Of wrenched enlightenment. He quenched me;
You kept me sane with jokes, if and
When you could. You never browbeat,
Never boast of any graces.
Right and wrong are solid to you.

Yet somehow you tread easily
Between seriousness and love -
innit, though? Forming yourself
Happily through your work and home -  
Though home is mother's, it's yours too.
How light, the heart that binds you

In marriage. I should have forged this
For that; unsure how to cast you
In your own plot, I bottled out.
Brother, friend, joker – which face are
You today? Now the heath is sprung
With new tender lavender. You

Shock me. You were the first to make
Me cry at lunch, when you gave
Your speech. You invoked the dead,
Charged glasses and glasses, you
Called upon no weary gods; danced
Into shackledom with Dad beside you.

burn your night away into photo ash,
Stalking your development like we are both
Babies, you and I babies, clutching foetal
Breath one-a-piece, I press these images,
These offerings of yours, O god of my neuroses,
My concrete, crazy-paved past,
I press them between two books in my
Eyelids, try my best to recognise the
New in you and try to map out how you
Have surely, surely changed, and I
Find you are not these pictures -
Try though I do (nighty night every night)
I cannot know you from these icons so
Burn in me some symbols again so
I can know you again so
I can know you again so
I can know you so
Know you so-so-- again--

Here I lie -
One vulnerable ear
to the marble silk of galaxies.

Even though
Your figure is an act
of miracle meteors
raining on the soft,
shocked retina,

the valleys
between your eyes and mouth
a dazzling constellation,

Your lullaby voice
a play of centered orbits
carved around me,

Even though the slow breath of you
is the many pulsing
gases, bright beyond
the fire of any human glint,

I am, firstly,
a sacred satellite
for the cosmic murmurs
of something grander.

I have been reset by the whistle-moans
of distant deities. They summoned me
with hot, budding secrets
in earthy cases like mushroom dust.

Then, my lullaby death under lunar stage-light;
I retreated into the detailed finery
of the open boarded stage.

I was left a sombre vault of knowledge.
A soul deposited. An I shed of an I.

Grounded, I glide; an effortless waltz.
The grand illusion taking flight at last –
There is no me, but a simple interwoven thread
in all this fabric.

A whistle-tone as I danced my last --
but no listener, and nobody produced it.

Those gloved hands, concealing tears of
The lady opposite. I ask her
For a moment of her time.
She looks through hair, through me.

I simply point –
To the passive, low-slung disc
Out there; a massive levitation
Breaking away from the burned horizon.
Its proximity and its haunting face.

It falls away, behind a tunnel.
‘A wink,’ I tell her. ‘A hint.
Nothing lasts so long
That the grandeur, out there,
Recalls it. The snow reveals the weeds.
The wind disrupts their seeds.
It’s all momentum, smooth and sure:
Less leads on to more – breeds more,
Breeds more.’

She doesn’t know I feel the same; that
The train and I are on our tracks,
Both inexorably drawn. And
If we alight at dawn,
We’ll see that the journey lacked
And open the doors – reborn.