The cursory glance at the gingerbread man,
today’s tenuous character,
only momentarily takes my mind
off the biro circles, patiently drawn
in the catalogue downstairs
since September

You’re in our blood and marrow
guiding us each beat,
but more

through oral histories
smoothed by years and the telling
around later dinner tables
with warm wine smiles
sharp edges and harsh, too-sharp clarity
burnished and buffed away,

as our minds turn over each recollection
we feel the warm glow of worn gold
to hold us, linger-hugged,
or ride the swelling tide from a fabled talisman
as we channel your strength
to stand up to them

or we might laugh recalling pompous brass buttons
‘til stitch given tears pour
at the tenderness of your
remembered buffoonery
where wisdom dressed up daft
and sang stupid songs to love us

To balance a justified arrogance
built by decades
against quixotic bosses
who pass through quicker
than a bout of diarrhoea
is tough

wrap your arms in the rigging
you intrinsically know
so when siren song sounds
or Scylla and Charybdis boil
you’ll still be on the boat
when spat back
to calm seas and good winds

With fat-winged thrash and clatter
you endeavour to nest build
in the most precarious of places
cat prowled and mown by me
(if a little infrequently)

You’ll have my admiration,
protection
and whatever feed I can find
as I keep in mind
it’s you who show us the
old normal
amidst the new

The path ahead is unclear
the first few steps seem fine
(as fine is redefined by times)
beyond is cowled in green gloom
with definition hidden
but enticing

We pause and breathe
ask feet to tentatively tread possibilities
for surer surface

The line ascribed
by timeless river run
seems safe
and the possibility of kingfishers
is a draw indeed

But we have seen these river banks
lost to inundation
and irresistible weight

To realise this too late
would be fatal

so we collaborate in waiting
and make the call

Sunday night
fever dreams grip
as Monday sneaks its sickness in,

The working week, an ague
of shivered sweats and broken thought
without the salve of your talk,
your medicinal tongue

Longer days hide Friday night
and recovery

Mainly blue, but colours shift
as the nape of your neck smell might appeal
or the mole on your cheek
that will stubbornly never be Marilyn

This love, like bright sunlight in shallows
will dapple and confuse greens and golds
as our souls ossify in cool weeds

Friends cause ructions,
paroxysms,
liminal and otherwise

but the constancy of those
who count neither shaven off
nor with fingers on the scale
are the whole of my heart

Panic buuyyyyy
paniiic buyyyyyy
go on!

Then none of us
worth any of us
will get anywhere

douches

Sundayish
with sun on us
remembered dishes
passed from smile hand
to hand

The love does not diminish,
immutable,
like all the good stuff

I’ll hold mine in reserve
for every one of you I miss

Morning comes with a narcotic buzz
as I eschew my uniform
for a He-Man T-Shirt and joggers.
A fraught quarter hour is spent
selecting which toy to take in
(the collective judgment can be harsh)
then off into the riotous grin
of the last day of term.

Remember the sandwich of youth?

On a drizzly beach with actual sand,
the grit crunch making things somehow better
for the supermarket cheddar
and margarine on sliced white

Let the memories come

The loved ones flinging frisbees,
or playing impossible cricket matches,
grand unplanned architecture,
studded with dead shells,
monuments to a hopeful utopia,
collapsed by the heavy-heeled truths of vengeful siblings
or everyday tides

Sea air makes you hungry and tired,
content,
like life and years try

I’m thinking of The Orb
and the crusty, mucked crystal
of the transition from child to adult,
scored and soundtracked

excoriated by blunt first loves,
first lives lost, tempest tossed,
into oversensitive abysses
from which there’s “Never loving again!”
except after growing and knowing

Lo-fi made it easier and harder
than these cheeky bleeders,
at least, I know my bare cheeks on film
would take weeks to get back from Boots
and not be broadcast to Kuala Lumpur
in seconds

Age beckons
always
in a way we revulse at
but blunder and succumb to

You becomes we becomes us
as no bad thing
but we must honour
our custodian status
and not impose

The stupid vine grows
where it’ll grow,
we demonstrate this
wonderfully

Hey
You
Yeah you
How you doing?
Getting on with stuff
In this rough of roughest times?
Or wobbling a bit?
Sit in your jimjams all day. It’s cool.
Anyone with anything worth saying
Loves you
Be annoyed a lot
And try to smile
But don’t fret if it takes a while
The ups and downs are real. Feel em.
If you have a hug to hand, use it.
If not, accept the alternative
Through screens
We mean it

Remind me again
of the where and when of it,
it’s slipping through my finger memories
and my heart slows

Tell me of the Technicolor past,
even with the scratched film stock
I need to see it again
to affirm the mummers truth
and rest easy

I know you tire of the words,
of me,
sorry, sorry me

But the third reel is fixed
and the epilogue’s flickered approach
rattles near

Before the credits roll
narrate me a last flashback
to suspend our disbelief in

Heat goes away
and we remember our austerity
with turned up collars and rotten ideas,
grey respite seems to like us,
invites us to thrive in a familiar taste,
but real or imagined,
passion fruit and mango
stubbornly linger

An explosion,
pulse quickened,
the adrenaline itch
threatened to stifle me

throat constricted,
mouth cotton dried
as I eyed the few I could see
in the front row

then the music
as familiar as my pillow
gave a beat and suggested melody
and as I sang I rose

Mustard coloured turtle necks
and haircuts that owe a lot
to the nearest mixing bowl,
the fuzz and fade of decades
in the album, closed and out of mind,
can’t dim the smiles
or hide those who are there
amongst the wrapping paper drifts

Quit your childish, mouth breathing,
shirt buttoned up wrong nonsense
and as a grown human
witness the others around you

Sometimes they cook and talk different,
sometimes look and worry too,
but as has been said for centuries
blood is always red
and there are way too many ******

The ones truly coming to take your lives,
your jobs, your holidays,
your houses, cars and sweethearts
speak on TV, Facebook, Twitter and the rags,
demanding you fear the folk
whose hearts and hands are desperate
to protect their kin, like you

In their money nests
the few snooze and giggle at your
wasted weight and misdirected roar

Bring it to bear

Sun sets behind, same as always
stretching my still unshapen shadow forward

My foot on the pedal presses,
maybe not as hard as before,
but always

The comic line perspective
forced to fit the frame, constricts
but at the same time comforts

Synapses that once crackled, fizzle
and with a little sadness,
still smile

In the midst of the tinsel scrum
with most calendar doors feathered open
sometimes a melancholy still calls.
The fevered peaks of nativity plays
or the constant electric anticipation
of just what is in that box
can give way to a sudden sigh
in Christmas blue.

A deep pulse of spinning waltzers
burn electric thrills
while pre-teens buzzed on sucrose
and fried dough
scream hot: they want to go faster

back on the promenade
Renee and Don, eyes on a horizon,
warm themselves reminiscing in circles,
minds dancing under glitterball embers

further back, gapped tooth shop fronts
shelter ripped tents, cold on concrete,
meagre piles of trash bagged jetsam,
of those stopped here by memory’s
pernicious tides
and forgot

My absent minded eye,
turned inwards on issues
of land and place,
did not at first see your dilemma

As the bully bird towered over
you hopped in looping rolls to flee

My eye caught up
and my fat presence unnerved the bird
who flew
and though I presented a different challenge
you bounded hedgeway
pausing in front of me momentarily

Our eyes met,
your black polished buttons
spelled your youth
and redundantly I greeted you

I stepped aside
to better let you escape
to tangle green safety
and I was alone again,
grasping at thoughts

The rest of my walk was elevated:
a wind struck tree,
dry guts splintered,
said something

A lithe muntjac
rose panic in me as it sought to pass,
it’s leaping form unusual,
but there and gone
before I knew

Green woodpecker laughed
at an unknown gag
and my brow furrowed

Toward the end
the complicated wren song,
a grammar babble way beyond,
underscored my lack of comprehension
all the way home

Iron in the stone bleeds a colour
against grey enamel,
bone bedrock

See ticks and tocks writ on lined faces,
craning to read flickered futures
where rock-solid certainties
and metal connectivities clash
in janky dissonance

Grasping the surety of a copper coin
in a clenched fist,
the shape as sure as love and rage,
when opened, shows
the sleight of hand and thought
sold to us all

At 6 A.M. the day started with an obscure
Eastern Bloc animation of sad animals
finding the spirit of the season through solidarity,
then by running fingers down the listed joys
of the Radio Times
I found it perfectly possible to navigate a day
from a hole in the sofa, subsisting on nuts,
as familiar celebrities made Christmas **** of themselves

Breathe:
another week
has passed without
disaster catching
you

Funny
how that
seems to be
the common
pattern

Autumn questions
with no immediate answers

gradually denuding
to reveal skeletal branches
penning their script against pale skies,
writing of the sharp tongued winter
lying ahead

To clap, or not to clap, that is the question
Whether it’s nobler in the mind to give
Undying love to those who save us
Or by opposing, expose those
Who have systematically underfunded
A public fed service with malice
It dies, we die, there’s the rub
Chatter and cheer will rightly raise from
Many whose hearts are true and proud
Whose hearts must be hardened
Next at the ballot box to lift us:
There is no country without unity
No unity without truth, no economy
Without each and every soul, always

Away, not home,
this continental heat.

The air pretends
this North Atlantic rock
is worldly

The smiles of the natives
lean manic
as we clutch at multipack lager
and disposable charcoal,
grasp at the living myth
of a cloudless sky
and give ourselves to these gods

Our worship sees us sacrifice
meat and skin,
both burnt to early hours regret
and delicate, bathroom sorrows

A sporadic bacchanal
whose scarcity ensures
that be it working week,
weekend or holiday,
feverish
we’ll pay the tithe

Sunstroke and/or hangover
prove penance for our lapse
from the frigid, three bar
Protestant norm,

but these exotic gods will beguile again
even as the blistered skin still peels

A green myth
to explain away why things
just aren’t quite right
and the briar patch of ages
twists in verdant sinister ways

The familiar snag and scratch
bleeds differently
and won’t be soothed the same
so welts scar visible
and tell tales

New normals are bandied about
with as much thought
as the path that led here
and the beatification of old normal
is sealed

Mushroom promises swell into existence,
flim-flam miracles,
pristine plump “truths”
when uttered, swelling proud
alongside peach-keen
endorsing smiles

But the treacle of decay acts quickly
so even the casual observer
sees the rot before the ink dries,
smells rank mould,
and we decry ad infinitum

You’ve recalled what it’s like to be cold
in this blustered autumn wind
your fingers may be privileged
to flick a switch on central heating
and ignore the insistent, shivering world
while it continues to divide and burn

bracken memory,
rock and boot mud,
air above with voiced winds,
water flowing, thoughtless,
pure
and fire, embers, ashes
you are to me

The smell of you,
an impossibly intense run of ones and zeroes
converted to map your DNA
G A T T A C G A...
like everyone and no one

Forbidden skin folds, slickly hidden,
I carried with me
with some half lies that helped
keep everything off radar
‘til ready

Cottoning on to the lost in me
with fingers and caresses,
blessing a gleeful wink of grins
to an adulthood
that refused to begin,
and refuses still

To peddle-spread hateful ideas
for those ignorant, well shaped ears,
I’ll give my soul and principles

I get paid
if I write about interest rates
or incite racial hatred,
means the same to me

the same commute,
the same sheets and pillow
the same hollow darkness
that saw me lost

I get one chance in fat font
to grab the weary and scared
so I’ve gotta make it count

Where’s the sweet spot
that I can tap with a
keyboard shaped geology hammer
and bust out the fossilised feelings?

My skill is to polish and shine
‘til their thoughts are mine
to sell with ill intentions
and a voucher for money off a burger

A moment catches:
scent thrills a heart,
grabs memory in a vice
that denies gut overhang
and aching bones,
never a thing before

are is good
were is heaven

Peach lingers as sunlight falls
  and behind, has even painted
      grey clouds happier
        and I try to inhale seven,
                                exhale eleven,
      but the frantic black-wire
                        gut-froth won’t tire
                     today

Stop dropping off fledglings
like I can just ignore
something that is not yet grown
and expected to start functioning
alone!

Last year,
you cocky redbreasts thought
that three could bob happily
in the construction site
and thankfully I found no bodies
or feather puffs

This year,
that cheeky blackbird
who happily stalks the lawn
(though moss pile is more accurate)
has dropped bright and happy chicks
in the pell-mell mix of my
****** horticulture

And don’t get me started on the pigeons!

The cats round here,
like everywhere
are at best loveable rogues
with claws on fingers
and toes that like to ****
for spits and giggles

In these times
I turn to nature to save me
but you crank my anxiety
like the ***** grinder’s
forbidden monkey

Gimme a break, please?

My dog-soul forgets to feed
and starves black,
paces circles for a bed
and with dead weight,
settles

thought and action,
usually smitten with intricacies,
are quietly smothered to nothing

a flat purgatory
scored with white noise, overcast
rendered in a pauper’s palette
on a canvas with no edge

ticks remain untocked
until at some distance
a mechanism is rewound
and a leash jangled
for an ear to lazily lift again

Next to me was this one
and her feet were never still
she twirled and span through contretemps
and likely always will

That one had intensity
but never said a word
from blackened fingered canvases
his voice could still be heard

These two stood in spotlights
and held everyone in thrall
performing other’s stories,
their own a quieted call

And the group raised up their voices
which entwined and fit so well
and the chorus spoke of everything
they’d never usually tell

These memories, these children,
who moved, who drew, who showed,
who sang unguarded clarity
while the emptiness bellowed

Used to have us allies
used to have us care,
now, become statistics
now, are never there

There were these moments when you’d remember something I’d forgotten
Or blotted from my memory
Often highly embarrassing episodes where I’d exposed my clear ineptitude
And you’d lead me back through them, laughing,
Walking in the gardens of my shame and naming all my
Clear inadequacies until you creased with tears in your eyes

And you’d think I’d hide
But it was love
and I miss you

You’d quite often leave a small amount of liquid
In every glass you drank from
So that every time I picked it up in a hurry I’d hurl it
Onto my trousers, or sofa
Or the pile of letters you’d refused to open and I’d curse and rankle
Wishing you would just tip things down the drain

And you’d think I would go insane
But it was love
and I miss you

And when you pulled the duvet round yourself to make the perfect
Bed based sausage roll and I shivered through
The night because despite the fact I’m twice your size
You had a vicelike grip that would never
Once
Slip

I’m ill-equipped to deal with the real of you being gone

I pace the places that you were and get lost a lot

But not lost like we used to when you’d tell me it was just around the corner
And I’d point to the fact that the century had provided me
With an infinite map in my pocket
And you told me “**** it, let’s just go this way and see what we see.”
And we’d end up in some seedy part of town with some ****** staring me down and you’d hide behind me laughing
And we’d have to run for it, me with these knees

And you think that I’d go mad at you
And tell you that you wind me up
And tell you that I’ve had enough and you can figure you own **** out from now on

And now you’re gone
And it was love
and I miss you

I play video games on easy.

Yeah,
I know how some folk will see me,
but now, here’s the thing:

I don’t thrive on challenge.
I grow from knowing
what I’m capable of knowing
and showing all of that
polished up

I get that people see mountains
and climb because they’re there
but me knowing there’s a cafe at the top
with flapjack, tea and Kendal mint cake
seems to make it fair

Better still if a tarmac track
or funicular railway
can get me halfway or more,
I’m all over that,
you just watch me summit

To return to the original sort of analogy:
if I can beat the enigmatic end of level boss
who tosses a second or third energy bar
in the mix
by spamming the same overpowered move over and over,
I’m doing it,
end of

When I stand in the ashes of the beast
whatever it might be
and take loot or XP
that might be not quite as good as on normal or hard
I’m good
I still feel the buzz of winning

If I have to grind repeatedly
and learn intricate enemy routines to evade or parry
and die
and die
and die

It’s not for me.

It could be because I cut my gaming teeth in eighties arcades
where I judged how good a game was
by how far 10p could take me
at a time when 10ps were limited

A forgiving difficulty level was a boon
(Yeah, I’m looking at you Mad Dog McCree
50 flipping *** a go and dead in 30 seconds!)

Anyway...

A little friction in life is fine,
no drama without conflict and all that,
but given the option
to up up, down down
left right, left right
B A Start
my heart will always take it

Something is rotten,
but not in the state of Denmark
the body politic is sickening from the spread
as the virus flows and ebbs around us
but that’s not the biggest threat
to our collective, collected health

the insidious radiation that emanates
when certain men step out
from their lead-lined bunkers
is weakening our sinews,
loosening our hair and teeth
and mocking and braying at our grief

backed up as it is
by mustard gas clouds of lies
built on the bones of xenophobes and the afraid
some with excuses, or, whatever,
but most with puce, spittle-flecked faces
apoplectic at the creep-dawning realisation
of their impotent, way it’s always been ways

and like the Cnuts they clearly are
rather than retreat from the waves
and figure out more sensible ways to behave
as centuries progress
they will ‘make a stand’
thick, bitter filled pint-mug in hand
‘til the tide will see them drown

meanwhile on dry, rich land
the tin-*** Machiavellis
rub their hands and drive long away
to have their eyes tested,
divest themselves of kids,
or check on their second homes
as the bloated bodies bob out to sea
all too slowly

I’m in my forties now
and if I knock my knee it aches for days
even if I can’t say
precisely when and how I did it

Vexed I am left to neck ibuprofen
and recall what I took for granted
in the fat rosiness of my twenties

But I have my own front door
and a car
and keys for both
and when things go wrong I can fix them
or at least pay a guy called Steve
to pop round and do that for me
while I watch the news and tut

I have my own front door
behind which I can hide safe
with only the news to scare me,
I put a tire iron under my bed
to feel better

Late at night I look out the window
from time to time
to see the reassuring flash
of my car’s alarm indicator
and I wonder in the dark who else can see it

The news and my social media
say things are bad and getting worse
so I’m glad of my front door
I don’t go out too much anymore
anyway

not like the past
when knocks and bumps were shrugged off
and my guts could take a hit
and I was one of the people
making drunken noises in the night
but it was just a laugh, right?

Not like now.
These folk have no respect.
I lock the door as soon as I am in,
car or house
and check the news again.
I might call Steve and see if he can set me up
some CCTV.

Millionaires down on our luck
that’s the story, isn’t it?

With one lucky chance or a gold watch
found in a yard sale
to propel us to the heights
of hob-nobbery,
this time next year, yeah?

Another item on the unwritten list
known by those that were born to know
is that luck is a commodity
like any other
bought and sold by ‘families’
who hoard it,
a surfeit
beyond any lifetime’s need,
releasing just enough
so we all see it
and believe it to be in reach

Unless the stars aligned
when you were born
chances are you won't be on
the List
and you can make a good fist of work
and burn your very soul
in an effort to reach that goal

yet when you burst your heart for the win
the posts have shifted
and you’ll lie spent
looking at expensive leather shoes
or highly polished boots
as they step over you

Work and noise are not enough
when the system itself serves
the few

work and noise are not enough
for things to get better
for all
and unshackle luck

no justice, no peace

Person Man Woman Camera TV

As much a testament
to current reality
as any babbled, 24 hour, rolling drivel
from partisan spokesfolk
who affix the yoke of profit
by making and driving the wedge

In the wide awake courtroom,
alone, maybe 3 A.M.
you can hear the truth,
have the human faculties,
can see the evidence,
even if the verdict hurts

It’s less painful than making eye contact
with a mirror image who allows
the lies
the loss
the inhumanity
just to heal a bruised ego
and still not sleep easy

If you did, then you would
but you don’t, so you won’t,

to pretend otherwise
makes an *** out of you
and a corpse out of me

Like silk threads, I watched my life today
stretch taught but hold,
colleagues and friends weighted,
reaffirming their bedrock
as again plates shifted

Our watered shoots
stood bewildered but steady,
as future wounds reached them
despite our insistent gauze

Looking through windows,
we grown, choked
as other faces told our pasts again

And we fought not to feel
though we knew that we had to

Because every day’s a school day

A sum total of immediate family gathered
at a seaside Italian cafe
half loving getting time together
half dreading the weight of the urn

taking turns to tickle flippancy
in an honoured tradition of laughing
in the face of the massive horrors of life,
scales on the crusty familial armadillo

It’s time

Each step beyond the coffee steam
feels further into foreign territory
where defences weaken
even though the climb is sweet

we walk up a hill to reveal a familiar vista
that youth ignored huffily, heartily
and adulthood yearns for,
where memories pepper current steps

The humour shield holds until the ash is cast
when my throat clutches to swallow
knowing that my reasoning can’t break this,
even though you’d wipe it away

You aren’t allowed to soothe these tears,
they serve for the years and years,
pay pennies into arcade machines
and buy novelty rock never eaten

The bedrock and foundation of us
stands on this sometimes sunny head
holding hard to the ropes and lines
until the next handover

You fed the words to me
slowly at first
easily digested syllables
that helped me navigate
a knee-high world

as a gift,
it’s not immediately apparent
how unlocking sounds
that name the nameless
saves us

but with time,
joy and adversity
the truth of our voice
shines through

to abandon words
is to lose one more grip
so
where you can

keep talking