I am living as your echo.
Lung cancer victim,
Vague pilgrim of kindness,
Tainted by the everyday;
By our suicidal blindness.

Keep the noise low,
As you walk on past the room,
You might hear our quiet love;
Collecting forget-me-nots,
Memorising the feel
Of the hand beneath the glove.

I am living in displacement,
Neither north, nor south,
And soon landlocked in yesterday;
Too many miles from the coastline,
And with too many debts left to pay.

Keep your lips strange
And foreign, as if we’re falling
In love again. Don’t forget this youth
When we leave it,
But let this heartache turn to gains.

There are no decimals to love.
Binary code, you’re either in or you’re out;
You’re either kissing the toad,
Or questing for an actor
To tolerate you;
Without any essence of doubt.

I don’t know where I am, father.
I can’t see the floodlights
That used to beam over the allotments;
Polluting the stars. My bike is chained
In the garage, my legs are tired,
And Cawston Woods only brings me to despair.
I want to claim back my royalties,
I want my piece of the share.

We have all paid our dues now,
We have worked ourselves sore,
For this malnourished freedom;
Of which still lays a cure.

We must see politic as silence,
In its content and fact,
To see the newsreader’s babble,
As one orchestrated act.

We must love for the earthworm,
And for the life-giving bee;
For the nuclei of dead sunlight,
For our brief eternity.

No wind hums
As I move into the next sunlight.
Spring is at my door
And apparently that’s meant
To mean a thing or two
For happiness.
For the dancing tiptoes,
And being allowed to
Drink in the day;
So long as the sun is in the sky.

This is the British Summer:
The arrival of soft jazz over beer gardens,
With scones and coffee
For the brand new lovers.
They’re too scared to drink,
For fear of saying something true about themselves.

They nod, they nod and agree, agree, agree.
She internalises sexism,
Whilst he tolerates sexlessness;
They’re both clinging to that coastline postcard
That is now lost to pollution,
And to the havoc of streetlights on stars.

She heals cocoa butter into her pores
As he falters on through his Big Mac.
They met in McDonald’s, for fear of suggestion,
Yet he could tell from her nose ring,
The life in her eyes,
That there was something beyond
Their corporate collision.

Oh, this is my life.
Mere fantasies of far-off places,
Of far-off loves and feelings;
Where everything descends from intuition;
From where everything stems
From my childhood heart.