If I were beaten down one day, what would I do?
I would get angry and
defensive.
I would stand up and fight for myself.
Wouldn't I.

If I were beaten down one week, what would I do?
I would stand on trembling legs,
strong.
I would stand up for myself.
Wouldn't I?

If I were beaten down one month, what would I do?
I would pull myself upright,
wobbling.
But I would stand, for myself.
Wouldn't I?

If I were beaten down one year, what could I do?
I could stand, perhaps leaning against a wall,
wondering.
But I could still stand.
Couldn't I?

If I were beaten down for decades, what should I do?
I should stand or at least sit upright,
take a breath.
I should rest perhaps close my eyes.
Shouldn't I?

If I were beaten down for centuries, what could I do?

Enveloped in this casket of riddled
Darkness, eyes are the only source
Of white, I scratch at them myself.

Extinguish the beckoning light , I
am gorged on the blanket that
covers me, it caresses thoughts

I am entwined in this place inside,
My mind is a web of onyx capturing
Thoughts corroded and entrapped.

He says that if you walked long enough in one direction, you’ll only end up where you started.
He says that bullets and escape shuttles share the same address and veins are just smaller bridges. so he leaped off the edge of a knife and even though he felt like he never made the cut his wrists didn’t always feel so.
Good times are just cushions we try to rack up to fall back to when the bad times come. He’s been falling on the same cushion for so long it’s not different from the concrete.
The world is a dark room and he still hasn’t found the light switch.
On days like today, he tries with all the walk that ******* has left him.
On days like today, when the world is trying its hardest to prove to be black and white, he tries to be a gunshot in the spine of a rainbow.
When you die we’ll put two money stacks on your eyes cos heaven has to be far from this hell hole that we live in
But you know better than most that you know nothing about what comes after death.
So sail, sail on a canoe of timber and broken dreams on a river of your own blood. Cos maybe heaven is better believed than lived

Somewhere at the centre of every tornado is a violin playing “surrender to the good Lord”.
The skeleton of every raging storm is an orchestra of rivers overflowing with sin and blood from all the times I’ve tried to wash myself clean. So being planted by the river doesn’t help me much anymore.
But I hear there’s something of a Jordan to your tears, something of a white to your blood. So take me to your river, deep me in your smooth waters. I hear you have experience with ****** hands. I hear you have holes in your hands from where the nails used to be, I have a few holes too, and all the superglue music doesn’t seem to keep the rain from coming in. “So take me to your river, l wanna go”
Been travelling this road for so long now. With nothing but an echo of mama’s voice and a faulty compass heart to guide me. Most times I just follow the sound of water, hoping to find a river to go with the flow.
So on those days, when the sun is nowhere to be found, and two stars in a black sky are all there is to remind you that home might as well be billions of miles away, allow me to sink. Cos swimming just feels like another tornado gathering strings.
I’m trying to find my way home, with an army of brown skinned girls with tomato lips that always tempt you to bite, with a cup overflowing with blood that needs emptying and with a heart with missing pieces from all the times its been broken trying to free the creatures that hide inside.

— for Victoria*

Seasons shuttle the tall stoic figure,
Graceful and solemn as wafted mist,
When seen, as if he was always there,
Overarching into meek, gloamy skies
Of mornings and dusk, mid day, lost,
Seems not right for wading out kills
That crane from above into the mud
And murk of the penny eyed waters
Only the ferryman will tender, for time
Slips, sleeping with the fishes, spears
Puddle and rim in the wakes, sparks
Of waters break like a sputtering fire,
His dart eyes are as yellow as golden
Sun dancing in funeral pyre.  So green
Creatures, must they always be gotten,
Gone, have it coming from the sheering,
Mercies of the Great Blue Heron who is all
Seeing, scything, down to dazed judgement,
Incited, pecking to order at the squirming fold.

Take her sidereal night,
its darkness
and the shimmer in it.

Draw a co-secant,
a beam,
in your full-light trace.

The script is embedded,
it runs on its own:
see?

A pulse,
myriads of whirling suns,
a blaze within her,

a firmament
for a cotillion,
a constellations' jigsaw.

Her night breathes,
in symbiotic pace
with its aural lover

and, within its velvet,
darkness is an indigo,
drunk on orgastic throb.

15.5.2015

Concealed amid the Summer green
As stars await their turn to shine
The thrush sings thrice his song unseen
And we would like to hold back time

As stars await their turn to shine
We want his song to never stop
And we would like to hold back time
As another cork we pop

We want his song to never stop
We hope for shooting stars up high
As another cork we pop
Watch nature's fireworks in the sky

We hope for shooting stars up high
The thrush sings thrice his song unseen
Watch nature's fireworks in the sky
Concealed amid the Summer green

If I said I want you,
Would you run and tell the stars
To close their eyes and ring dry
The clouds of tears?

If I said let me hold you,
Would the earth crack open,
To shudder the rolling lands,
Not cradle the hatching seeds?

If I said I am yours,
Would your name soon dissolve
And be lost in the revolving
Night that candles you in light?

If I heard your voice,
In twining dream and woke
Beside you talking in your sleep
What would your question be?

If I called your name,
Before the first sunning year
And heard you, Echo in the wind,
Would time guide us to the door?

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…”