Let's raise our glasses to the lads and the lasses who have raised their glasses before and more, let's raise them again and toast those that ain't. the sinner, the saint, the forgotten, the woe begotten, the lonely and lost, sod the cost, you can't take it with you.

remember the markets that became supermarkets, the church that became luxury flats and the estates that turned into council dumps.

remember the drunks
the pious, the punks,
the man who cleaned shoes on the prom',
mostly
remember where you're from,
it doesn't pay to forget.

Within the woods
a cluster of silver birch
stand proud among the pines and hazel and elms.
Below the gaze of the silver bark eyes
half hidden beneath the mulch and loam of ground
a toppled circle of stone can be found
to a kean eye
faded traces of blackened soil
painted by the death of a flame
It holds memories, if you listen,
of promises and dreams intimately whispered about the fire
when everything and the world died except you and I.

Take my heart
Cardium carpal
Impossible to hold in both hands
In every glorious piece
Valve, ventricle, artery
Pulsing, pulsing — but no blood
Not pink, not red but grey,
Grey matter, but no matter

Take care not to lack a hole by
Ebon ivory of your skeletal hands,
Pulsing, pulsing — but no blood
Only bone grasping endocrine glands
Blood eagled atrium across your palms
Venae cavae hollowed hands.

no shinning light

ambulances and cop cars and nightmares
concrete and ashes 

streets too dead for dreaming

the abandon buildings
like tombstones waiting


as night edges prison walls
in the vanishing landscape

we were kings of the neon sky


and when the bars close
through puddles of lost tomorrows
running every red light
on main street

in a sun turned black as night


we were the kings of the neon sky

~
Hark!
He knocks.
Time, it's time,
the Kuroi Jukai within me.

Finding an unordinary
drifting off to sleep point,
a hollowed-out spot,
where I can let
God dream for me.

Whistles in the wind,
in lullaby the sky and sea
seem to trade places,
bending around me
as vertical blanketed surges.

My carcass is a colonization (of bones)
for my dearly departed ones,
forbearers of migration,
seeking endless sea,
until like them,
I settle upon
their ancestral shore.
~