Today’s slow cooked ragu
has a lot of familiar ingredients
but spun a little different

The devil in the pork grease
gave me such a wink
I lost my place in the recipe

Liberal with salt, chili flakes,
zest and anything,
this quixotic cook’s hand
throws much freer than weekdays

I only lack the fat slack
of pappardelle for this,
as they were out at the supermarket

Penne will have to do

The old deceptive sky trick
looks warm to the eye trick
warm under glass
while my well shaded *** shivers

deliver the goods, spring

so yeah, them birds are singing
and blooms conspire too
making you think you’re good and clear
and it’s time for shirt sleeves

but these goosepimples beg to differ

Have a care,
they said
if the wind changes you’ll stay like that

and I think I missed the breeze
that fixed me in place
in among the hurricane days,

but the aches and pains
don’t shift no more,
just there
to be muted
by whatever suits
and ties

Well, ol’ boy
stood in the vista, a little lost
but feet finding the pub
nonetheless

that sun tried to make its point
which, though we acknowledged,
we tried to sidestep

clag mud added heavy boots
while loose, happy chat sat
in apotheosis

til a moussaka
and a couple of sublime fish dishes
let us sit down and rest

after miles
these muscles pretend to ache

Rattle the cassette
with the biro etched “Car Mix”
grab the keys from mum’s bag
“Fill up what you use!”
“…Ok, can I have a fiver then?”
scuff to the car in unsuitable boots
slump in, adjust mirror, checking stupid fringe
which then existed
snap in the tape so the first bars
of G-Funk, grunge or B*Witched pulse
then it’s off to pick up
shotgun

Starting fires
and suggesting that they sit
in flimsy metal pits
from hardware stores or such
is all well and good
until flames remind you
they have no gods,
no morals, just free will,
while the smoke marks you its own

I would scorch the end of the cork
and score bags under my eyes
if the black of my tired spleen
was not already weighing

Like the luggage of the ******
packed in haste, always in haste
so that essentials are oft forgot
like health, or peace, or dignity

As it is, the cork stays unburnt,
but out of the bottle
as a gentle “**** the lot of you.”

Stuck on the actual prime meridian
where gambling and grown up shenanigans
are viewed all *****
hurting society, though I could legally go to the drain on my street
and drop a thousand twenty pees in it
nae bother
our equivalent bet
as high rollers we are surely not

I miss you Vegas
with your daft anti-reality cushions,
the strip with no history or heritage
necessarily
but with goofy drunken dreams brimming alive

and I know vice, bad, horror, addiction yadda yadda

I miss you Vegas

Christmas
as usual, buttered
with senescent conversations
this year fizzed with a citrus dialogue
of scrunched ears, hot water bottle hugs
and altogether too much hair
on the smallest head

What’s in your glass, huh?

What’s your poison
with the noise and the noise
in and out of the head?

What swirls, has legs
and kicks like a mule?

Fool juice, nana called it,

but **** me
I could use some fooling

Saturday afternoon with borrowed sun
that we’ll miss another day

I commit to develop my cooking
by using stock
which seems to be the unspoken gap
between stuff that tastes OK
and stuff that tastes ace

they should really tell us that

Bullace
hedge haematoma
blue-black against the fading,
once young green,
bruising for sharp winter thoughts,
clean frost lines,
untouched snow-blank focus

but before, to swell and drop
in the last pale suns,
feed the field mouse, rabbit
and endure the muds

Caulk these broken bows, please
whether salt or fresh water,
it has weight, presence
and if allowed to pour in
it will sink me

Trying not to think too much
won’t work
as the only perpetual motion found
in this empirical life
is in our anxious minds
so as life jackets go
it’s a no no

To ask for a shipwright is unfair
but to have you there,
tar brush in hand
is enough

Off the daily cuff
blood pressure rises,
no real surprise
when this number over that
seems to dictate it all

For it to fall to a level
where there is no dread
of a sudden clutched chest
or brain wildfire
requires time for self care,

And though there’s the rub,
your work will never love you back,
so feel no guilt stepping away
before you crack

Bookends with fatty livers and bad backs
squinting at instructions
for another **** fool distraction
and the laughing, thankfully

On the walk, bees, butterflies,
catkin reminders of time and loops
and irregular pooping
as constants

Thankfully, laughing
requires just enough muscles
from those that still work,
but I’ll feel it tomorrow

loose moral blossom
flaunting for all comers
throbbingly defying
pigeon-holes
to let life thrum

Before the storm, the river had all but given up,
the guttural roar of wind and deluge
rattled all souls, except her
and in the aftermath she swelled
and bore delicious weight again
and my eye-contact
with the pageantry of the green headed drake
told all the muddy truths:
to underestimate is to lose

Friday:
faux finish line it may be,
but colour me happy
as my knackered toe to tip
crosses it

The ouroboros of eight,
mouth full, speaks forever
of doors and portals cautiously opened
from times past when scared eyes
scoured woodlands for sacred evergreen
and feasted to last the dark,
through the missionary rewording of the same,
to now, the snaking trucks
of the cola company

What does Eunice bring
on these blustered, raging winds?

Busted fences put up in haste,
a forlorn balloon cut loose,
with a smiley face harking back to those
asymmetric aceeeed days
when polarity was frowned upon:
what’s your name where you from what you done?

A man cut from rich serge
can be employed to gaslight
blackened eyes to white,
but the **** in Kent’s hedges
don’t lie

We don’t often visit
the pit of our stomachs
but when we do
things just aren’t good

Blackbirds backwards
and your solid foil to my boiling yawn
is remembered

I’ll always love you my dude

even though it’s mostly memory now
we travelled odd eighties early nineties
hinterlands
full of clear stupidities and hidden
immutable truths

but I’ll always hold
ridiculous dry heated cricket pitches,
run dark *** and loose joints
as what drove us

“What should we do today?”
“I dunno”

I seem to be a man,
it comes with ups and downs
and sometimes I don’t get my way,

but like an adult,
and broken-heartedly, a woman,
I’ll try to be OK

I rest in the quiet thoughts
that might involve tired arms
and unadorned hearts and faces

to fantasise boredom with you
is a new low/high to replace
my easy crippling everyday nowt

I currently know that
to fall asleep with you
unwashed and noisy tired
is all I think I need

No sooner through the door
than spider-legged anxiety
scurries back haphazard
like a frenemy whose cactus skin hug
begins in September and ends in July

If I state I’m going to do something
then don’t, as often happens,
then I’ve planted a ***** seed
that’ll grow into a choking vine,
not free, or wise

So dark January resolutions
might help Calvinists,
or masochists, or both,
but for the rest of us
comfort in our skins is better

I have no preach for you
to do this: just listen

Your own heart cries and sings
all day, every day
and you will beat yourself
far harder, over cheese and *****,
than anyone who loves you would

So go inward a while and think,
and even if your conclusions
don’t match the zeitgeist,
love you, as we do

January will not be missed
but stubbornly,
mist it is

Like pitch dark chocolate
Sunday nights are fi-i-ne

But always leave you wishing
For less bitterness

October butterflies
game against blue skies,
wind that gusts indifferent

fading buddleia’s
purple sashes
give one last hurrah
to the peacock, admiral,
as the lowering sun
sees through wings that were

#autumn #fall #october #butterflies #turnturnturn

The answer “Ok, just tired.”,
like a reflex action,
as knee-**** as the daft decisions,
naïve, fear driven, not yours,
that put you here

In that “tired”, a million branched to’s
trigger a billion possible do’s
flowing like black sand
while you run on fumes
trying to clear
just
one
space

No one wins
digging holes on the beach
while the ignorant tide comes in

Cold white numerals
from the Teutonic-honest dash:
9.5°C

Not so cold, I guess
but not the weather to press the button
for the windows to drop

I do while accelerating
too fast for the road,
the fresh air has volume
that angry-loves my tired,
house-cat skin

The wub-wub-wub pulse in my ears
has a cause I control
for once
as the next curve beckons

Have you considered the owl?
Excluded from days
like a diabetic warned off fudge

Is the carob of night enough?
Sure, it’s dark, possibly smooth
and those tasty rodents move there

But look at the day
with a head that can turn right round
you’d see every rotten thing

Every bad stroke and selfishness,
every creaky knee and thumb
in clarity, loud

Oh to be the owl

Forgive me if the fatigue means
my eyes cross
and I lose the thread of your beauty,

it’s in your words, see?
Always has been,
a bit like me

And now my head nods,
we’ll say in affirmation
as you’re a patient person,

though my snort-start awake
will give me away

I’m desperate to stay awake with you,
but these days, y’know?
These days.

You know that noise
they like to use in the movies
right now?
The one that sounds like
discordant foghorns falling
bwaaaarmmm
as the big bad arrives?
That’s 2022 that is,
bring the popcorn and watch

Pan - all
Demos - people

Everyone touched and fiddled with
tricked, cut, broken and hauled
across coals that hurt directly
or by degrees

More pernicious than a novel virus,
exposed to the utter selfishness
of folk who won’t even cover their mouths to cough
or at best will wear a cloth across their mouths
but leave their noses to bleed casual indifference

I want to love my fellow man and see them as allies
so I struggle to suppress my surprise
that too many would claw and fling
sad corpses of different colours or origins
to the rising tide
just to stay unhappily dry, never mind alive

Disposable gloved hands stretched out with open hearts,
basic ***** hygiene and an even playing field
are a tiny ask for all

Take a deep (covered) breath,
be deaf to the filthy fear peddlers
who try to cling to power
by screaming vitriol and division
one tweet and cable TV show at a time
and reach instead for the sublime and silly brilliance
of being human

autumn drinks heavily
slides into winter black
singing old songs in the dark
of loss and lack
and imperfect memory

these months weigh more:
grit under the eyelid
cold **** in the soul weight
that scratches and suffocates

but the coals will glow
and windows steam the same,
inside from time to time
and safe

The limited palette of the January riverbank,
#nomakeup #nofilter
just the burst capillaries and thread veins
bare

A tired earthy visage,
still allures the blackbird and wren
who never truly got the hang
of saying when
and feast past decency

The idea is to recuperate
and re-emerge fresh and green
but truth seems more like this molasses mud
that hold boots firm

First footing towards
what could be bridge or precipice,
hard to tell in the usual mists
of another spin round the sun

The groundhog sting
has left us wary of what’s to come:
with an alphabet begun
how many masks need to be worn
before omega calls?

But the sun is shining
and it’s abnormally warm,
so that’s good,
isn’t it?

The weight of the world
as it waits for the red, red earth to move
a collective breath held
as a personal fear is shared

For a news cycle, we care
and choke a little at the tiny coffin
before clowns and sabre-rattlers
blind us from the graves behind

Having dispatched the sound rabble
with mostly love,
our already flaccid balloon
deflates with a final raspberry

a fitting fanfare to a term
that left its markers marked,

the shared mirth,
across eyes and hearts,
at a **** noise
proving once again:
we are why we’re here

This pareidolia grips me
with fingers made of nothing

Clouds can’t lie, just are
and what I choose to see is mine

Whether this weather flatters or chides
is all inside, inside

1.
I’m heading to the sea
in a slot not big enough to fit a holiday
so I’ll day
trip

I think I’m packed:
a mind still rattled by life and lockdowns?
check
a palpable desire for vistas unknown?
check
a rucksack of memories, of sand, of wafer cones,
of wasps, of crystalline, sweet wrapper lights on mad, unsafe beach rides, on windbreaks, on digging, on seaweed and brown British waves?
check

Let’s start this engine, then

2.
Should’ve gone before we left
the irony’s not lost on me
even though I’m now the boss of me
I’ve still had to stop in local circles
cos someone needs a ***

I’ll blame the coffee

3.
Frightening fast the local roads fade
the five and ten mile loops of life
are gone
and the roots we commute and commune on
rest bone rigid, obscured

Passing Crowland
impossibly flat plains
thoughts turn to darkness
and misunderstood witches lost here
until the smirk of Cowbit assuages

Only the Welland, alongside
still talks of home
til even she changes
speaks in wider verbs
tidal verbs of ebb and flow
showing thick mud beneath

These long, straight roads are deceptive
leaving meanders to river and mind
while hiding accidents in plain sight

4.
The road sentence ended
and after chewing a space to park
shoes changed to something wholly uncool
but fitting me well
first steps on the unsure grammar of sand
reminding that syntax here takes much more effort

a dune cleft gives a known view
I’ve never seen before
and then I’m through

sky and horizon blast me

for frozen moments I’m lost,
these common seas I shrug off in my head
smirk at
as nothing against turquoise
or rock raged waves
still bring tears
against my smile

I listen at the language in the shallows,
the rush and hustle,
and feel a glimmer of foreignness as I can’t make out the message
but I get the gist

5.
To honour holidays of old
I sat a spell in Wolla Bank car park
though inauthentically the rain didn’t fall

I was forced to imagine the windscreen steamed
and had no fish paste on white
as I’d paid full price to eat at a cafe
unheard of back in the day

I did read the car park info sign
about the clay pits around
where historical sea defences were mined
and that did the job of taking my mind back

and the closing thought of petrified trees
beneath the waves til very low tide
did its best to haunt

6.
Heading home
wistful I suppose,
though I’m not sure where I got all the wist

the sea is a keeper of memories
a chewer and cogitator
so when they return to the shore
and are spoken again
what you thought you knew back then
may have changed
deepened, softened
and hopefully your youthful idiocy
is allowed to be forgotten

if you came for the ride
thanks, as ever, for joining me x

The world doesn’t know it needs setting right
but we do it anyway
against bucolic backgrounds,
corners of this sceptered isle
known only to types who like to ramble

point to point meticulously planned
by his draughtsman’s hand
our mouths and minds driving us more than legs
words to square away despair at the world
or delight in some magical new tech
to save it

these are footsteps I’ve always followed
always will
despite a mardy heel drag  in my teenage years
the muscle memory - one foot, then the other -
cannot be unwritten
even as knees now complain otherwise

Sometimes tears
don’t come from grief
or sudden pain,
from moments moved
by others’ stories
real or sharply imagined

Sometimes it’s just the steady
incessant
tap tap tap
of life that just won’t pause
for any cause or reason
for any chance of respite

We’ll often deny those tears
as weak
but listen as they speak
or they will never, ever stop

Some days I don’t want to leave the cinema
I sit dead centre,
hope the screen will fill my field of vision,
each speaker will cover my ears
in numbing sound
allowing thrills and broken hearts
of others’ made up tales
to supplant my own for two hours
and change

The dark holds me anonymous,
lets me depart and drift,
try on the moods in lost safety
so when credits roll
choked tears and shiny blisses
are returned, rewound, reset
for what comes next

Into the long grass,
the long, long ponder
lost to breath and tears
lost to wonder
lost to the clear and present
or the hereafter
but there in the past
a cancer tumour twisted
all the slow growth
til the now,
this rotten gutted now

Leaf litter sheep ****
verdant verges
flowers that smell foreign but aren’t
wet earth telling truth
moves to concrete and tarmac
who lie often
and heat is turned to memory
steps from animal tracks to animals tracked
have tumble drier breeze
mocking those prior flowers
**** smoked appreciatively
to thank the peace
as if laws don’t exist
and the lick of car exhaust
to recall poison
and then home

Impossibly,
pigeons sparked against a cerulean sky
spinning like a tossed hand of loose change
in appreciation of the day’s artistry

On the bed’s edge,
trying to align and affix,
gingerly stretching muscles that used to behave,
their co-ordinated flight cast me
momentarily saddened
as each sock and trouser leg moaned on

Still,
the sun kissed us all, anyway

Thrilled, wrapt, beguiled,
bruised, broken, lost,
tempest toss’d
or star-sky smitten,
it’s your heart we love alone

even if it feels so,
you never are x

To be ginger in a heatwave
is to know that a surfeit of energy
that enthrals the populace
has consequence

Like any addict with an allergy
landed on a thing they love
you learn to skirt and sample
knowing sickness follows

The uninitiated will gorge and fall
swearing off the juice for good
and withdrawing a raised voice
which is bad

Pace yourselves for the longness
of an unexpected summer
so that when winter hits
we continue to burn