let me near enough
to touch you

i don't mind
getting cut
on your edges

too attractive for his own good
too attracted for my own good

face plasters the wall a long boring walk i’ve seen three figures turned into the pavement perforated in memory dismal dysfunctional riding the hour hand crumbles into rust waving without a head layer cake wonder if she ever finished that english degree filling wonder if she went back to darwin filling catching a bus filling sitting with her legs crossed out filling eyes glossed into the crossing filling lines running into her pigments filling think i saw four strangers living together inside the head of my dead father didn’t attend his own funeral didn’t catch his own mouth didn’t measure the etch so his ashes formed back into themselves lost in the sleeves of a book tying a knot through his guts wading through waves of deprecated language without an end in sight

some 4.5 billion years ago
the atoms that would coalesce
to ***** your evanescent features
detoured to a lonely chunk of
rock aimlessly adrift in the
Milky Way Galaxy

you stayed alive by pure instinct
fight or flight
you could not thrive
yet you survived nature's
attempts to crush you in
her fearsome jaws

bits of you walked with dinosaurs
bone fragments ground to dust and
reformed over eons of evolution until
you stood upright and found a
tongue to describe planet Earth

remnants of those dead languages
live on to this very day
they inhabit the ink stains i
leave upon this yellowed page
while folk tunes croon over
my shoulder and Dallas Green
breathes a city in multicolor

a map of the universe is etched
across your face and i cannot escape
the smirk that spread with mirth
nor erase the memory of eyes
like interstellar space staring
back at me
unblinking
for 4 minutes that felt
simultaneously like a lifetime
and the space between
2 fractions of a millisecond

you came from the Big Bang
when the cells that would form
our bodies were forged in the
cores of supernovas exploding
across the cosmos and we've
been on a collision course ever since
an unstoppable force and
an immovable object
for matter
can neither be created
nor destroyed

i find certain poets
too engaged with
a pronoun interchange,
and underusing nouns,
with some fear to
clear their footprints
to go further;
and there's no reason
for them to go further,
there's more reason
to stand-still... and disengage
from the basest description
language of overly using pronouns
and speaking like philosophers:
referring to everything with the
word thing, whether that's
a subject or an object or whatever.

this system of notation
this great archaic atlas,
is really misunderstood,
for some reason,
a reason very much bold
if not simply balding
from reasons outside
of genetics via a scratched head,
seems to confuse people,
you never hear of painters
having to apologise,
for outrageous neon red,
or ultra-violets that are like
paparazzi pepper-spray of
flashes leading up to an epileptic
seizure... you never hear it...
but for some reason, when you
write something outrageous
you have to conclude by having
to write some sort of apologetics;
for me people just don't get it,
why would a painter apologise
for excesses when there aren't any?
why would a painter get all the
slack and the poet a humbling
feel of anonymity? this sort of
dynamic only perpetuates mankind's
power struggle / gamble in the
medium of communication,
and when used to express something
as fanciful as poetry, immediately
taken to invoke a strict obligation
for a conversation as simple as:
- how much the bananas?
- two for one a third one gratis!
- in terms of pound?
- half a kilo for a quid.
- thank you, i'll have two portions
of that libra.
so by attacking the sole communicating
medium of perfect accord
we attack it's liberated expression
of poetry as we might attack
anything that moves with a knife...
although it's moving with a knife
ready to butter a scone or a crumpet
or a half toasted piece of bread
according to sting's englishman in new york;
and with such purposive attacks
language no longer serves a stance
of a required medium of communication,
but a required medium of discord;
as i said once, too many a times to
now forcefully repeat: if language
could be represented via chemistry...
it would be the most volatile substance
known to man: more volatile
than lithium in water, or the atom-bomb,
i dare say.