“Haha! Dangling by his shoelace
- ******* shoelace - from his ivory tower!” Oh, **** me,
Priceless.
Watch - his hair is plastered spiderleg across his brow
His fringe as bland and tasteful as his alopecia will allow.
“The ******. Never took a little pride.
“Come on, don’t give me that. He never tried.”
And now he stands, and laughs, and someone’s died.

I lay my head upon the altar
Censers filled with weeds and salt from
Seas long fled
Inside my head
And vestal ****** cover me in oil
And light my bier
And follow me awhile along the pier
For soon I will be dead.

Come see my prayers laid bare across the floor
The clutching fingers that can’t close around existence anymore
Come see my life sprawled underneath a pin
Come cold hosannas wash me free of sin
Come heaven and bright water Christ don’t leave me now.

The craven wakes.
It is alive with narrow insect grace
And hung with trailing cobwebs,
Swathed in shadows red and brown.
Its scalp is silvered down
And pocked with craters nape to crest;
The craven cracks a rigid stance
A sideways glance
And twitching muscles break the skin of dust.

Wet limpid eyes absorb the calculated gloom -
The cluttered claustrophobia of that morphine-scented room;
A spastic jolt - a helpless wasted cry
A moment of collective silent-mouthed insanity
A sad hand flutters open like a flower.
A sour taste;
Lack of blood inside an unfamiliar face.
Long fingers trace the lines of unknown years.

A stark solidity of truth; a dreadful revelation
A cloying yellow smile hangs like a joke
A laugh begets a croak.
A human starts to choke.

The craven sleeps.
Slumped in a peaceful sprawl upon its chair
Clutching a point made moot by modern logic like a prayer.

He stands
A silhouette against a lifeless flat expanse
His flaccid tallow-yellow hands clasped awkwardly across the rails
The skin is white beneath his nails
The fear beginning to ferment
His shallow-knuckled grip indicative of lunatic intent

Intent to finally insuate his end into the books
To compensate for all the awkward silence and dead looks
Insinuate himself amongst indifferent carbon molecules
His skin and sinew separate from all the inconsistencies
Immortalised in asphalt now
A martyr on the asphalt now
Away from death and listing eyes.

She was a weird slipshadow of a girl
All churlish silences and artless gloom
She’d come to realise herself before her waking time;
Lost happiness in periodic tantrums and cold looks,
Ate little, and immersed herself in books
Found solace in the solitude of sparsely-furnished rooms.

She knew herself too well - she took her flaws
And scrawled them on the wall in solvent ink
Her logic being that her social standing
Was diminutive
And nobody would truly give
A righteous ****, should she be found
Floating face-down, amongst the bullrushes.
Perhaps there would be solitude in death,
Solace in God.
Because it’s ****** to be free,
And that’s too sad.

Flora and Fauna, the sisters of Season
Of Spring and of Summer
Allow now our drummer
To drum out the beat
For the feet of the sisters
To glide and to creep
Like the encroaching sleep
Which may perch on your shoulder if we cannot keep you awake
And on the edge of your seat, sir.

Now the former, sweet Flora, will finger the flute
While the other continues to glide and to slide
Like a sequined Venetian harlequin bride;
And now Fauna will mimic the movements of bird and of beast
As she graces the work of our landscape artiste
And all is completely unfeasible
Completely lacks reason
We guarantee.

Presently
In the eye of the beholder
Sweet Flora seemingly draws from the aether a lyre
And with flourishing fingers she plucks from the heavens
A song of the seasons, a pagan ode to Pan!


Behold! No aid of hoops, no strings
The vestal-******-harlot sisters sing
Of beautiful Persephone
And with unseen damselfly wings
Ascend from mediocrity
All melody forgotten
All the drums create cacophony
And you will find serenity in chaotic monotony
Now let this climaxing crescendo banish all your sorrowing!

No more that light; no more that sacred realm
Life’s door was dappled gloam; now all is black.
A man of wax with saintly, hollow eyes
Devoid of sin, devoid of love and light
That golden room is lost – you can’t turn back.
Now love has lost its lustre - lust lost joy
And coy eyes turn to watch the empty man
Struck by eternal beauty, and condemned
To haunt the broken world of mortal men;
And shrilling wind caresses empty hand.

Our hero lifts his head.
He does not bathe because he woke up late again.
He dreamed the dreams he always dreams
And night-time and bright cloth muffled his screams.
Industrially lubricates his hair
And he is told it doesn’t suit him
And he says he doesn’t care.
Our hero is a liar too, it seems.
He eats a meal he does not taste.
He will be empty when the sun turns pale, and the earth to paste.
Now our hero looks so chaste
And he knows he is pretentious-
Now he lays his brain to waste
And sweeps distortion through the songs of birds
To leave them bleeding in the dust.

He feels frail, and his heart is beating faster than it should.
He feels that this cannot be good.
His tongue now tastes of blood between his teeth of wood.
The feeling does not suit him.

Later, digits drowned in antiseptic
He will feel like a heretic
As he voices his opinions of a person as pathetic.
Thinking, “I should call him ****,”
But cannot find a window for a moment to succumb
To the fabricated beauty of a consequential phrase.
Anyway, he knows it would not suit him.
As he walks, he tries an air of menace
But it does not suit him.

Later, our hero receives some news
Surprised, he finds his brain is on a high
And that the feeling doesn’t suit him.