Like modern day knights
we muster around a
table.

We don’t wear shiny armour
we wear suits that are 50% polyester
50% rayon.
Our jousting poles are have been

replaced with
nervously bitten biros,
and on a fuzzy screen the MD appears
speaking from a country where the currency is
colourful

but ultimately worthless.

His voice is delayed giving

and talks of mergers, leverage &
buy outs.

But I fade out like a ghost image in a propaganda film,

doodling hieroglyphics on a pad.

From the window I see workmen digging a
hole and I wonder will they ever reach China?

Tea consumption is reaching critical levels,

I am an Englishman after all.

And I won't go out in the mid day sun
for I will wilt
in the summer heat
where my dogs panting
in front of his metallic bowl.

And in fashionable postcodes, across the capital,
Japanese girls in tartan skirts carry ice cream cones
that drip onto their smooth
foreign
skin.

The ice cream slithers down arms,
leaving trails like the
tributaries of the 5th greatest river,

their postcards home
smell of vanilla.

I am eating sweets like a spoiled fat kid
the elated surge of sugar coursing through veins
like kiddy *******,
zooming through  internal tubes
green lights all the way
soon to be shuddering as I pass the summit
and descend,
coming down faster then theTwin Towers

when there’s a boom there’s always a bust

what goes up will always come down
gravity is invisible and it's inevitable

a ghost hanging on your shoulders
the sheer weight of all this.

Boredom flogs me
and time is the vinegar thats poured in my wounds.

I want be on the savannah shooting lions with the sun turning my neck into cracked leather. I would shoot it without mercy or malice I’ll look it right between the eyes then I’ll pull the trigger. I’ll watch the dessert ground absorb his blood. It will just dissappear.

I am an astronaut bouncing on the moon. I have planted bombs in capital cities. I have stolen from museums.

My dreams are compact

and filled with bored accountants waiters leaving second hand shops
in fashionable post codes,

dressed like bit part actors
carrying spare hands,
gripped at the wrist,

dangling.

Their voices are a magical shrill,
a goats bleat
a synthesizesr whoop,
mesmerizing pigeons
and paper sellers
alike.

And you know how it is,
when you find you share a name
with a famous person

you look for frames of references,
points of similarities
but you find none,

only that you share the same name.

Signposts at the crossroads point in all directions

like skeletal fingers

like ghosts moving across a tundra of white

like thin skin that you see through

like rice paper held against the sun

like your hand that shows veins that run like tributaries

into the delta on your metacarpus

flecked with freckles

where small hairs stand on end.

1.

Through the wall I hear you move,

feet padding across

the floor,

avoiding the toys left out of boxes.

You appear at my door

nightmare hair matted on your forehead.

My arms will hold you now as then,

when your soft fontanel throbbed

in those endless sterile

nights of pacing

and the creak of the old rocking chair.

2.

During daylight hours you look at me like I was made of stone,

As if I was permanent

like this island.

3.

Maybe you’ll remember these moments,

I can't say you will,

but I hope.

4.

All I know is we live and so

we die.

5.

Restaurants

old sofa

the pet
cat, dead.

Beach
breezy Autumn piers

rainy football matches Saturday & photographs

taped in scrapbooks

with dusty corners.

These I leave to you.

Lunchtime stroll = ugly couples, prams pushed by youth, smell of corn on the cob,eyebrow maintenance, baklava.

Dull train update: man who looks squeezed at both ends, like an accordion, with glasses, a lucozade bottle half empty, lady appears perplexed by a crossword clue (but it may be sudoku).

Clouds outside seem to cover the black to white spectrum.

Dull train update:  a sign, a lyric repeating itself 'an even cash flow: this cannot be underrated', the cranking of metal the smell of meat.

50/50 weather.

Left foot, loose lace

and canned laughter follows him everywhere but he feels nothing, inside he is empty, save from a series of ropes and pulleys that control his movements.

The parents are being pushed in the swings by their offspring, grown men in nappies crushed up in bulging prams. Cats eating dogs. Humans ******* on pigeons. It's all a bit weird today.