Icelandic diets and tiny woman in big cars - oriental twins stand next to bad graffiti - sick children in the exclusion zone

- the end of the family tree

- the branch snaps


two holes have appeared at opposite ends of the earth


they have give weapons to all those over 15 and told them to protect the city


God has been outsourced to a call centre in India

his Facebook page keeps crashing

                       emails go unanswered
my book was called "the eternal twitch of the nervous millennium"


the death of the happy polar bear, 1983 - 2016

My car tyres are going bald,
most probably cancer.

That would just be my luck.

I once had a bike that got AIDS.

Please don't ask.


Seeing it just fall about, a nut here,
a bolt there, the broken
spokes, the clunking chain that
would turn no more.
It's rusty revolutions.

Disintegrating in front of my eyes,
like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.

Seeing a BMX brings it all back.

Once at a car boot sale, I bought 3 car boots
only to find they were broken but
on a positive, someone bought my shoes,
even though they weren't for sale.

I walked home, socks on feet, the rain
seeping through,

the car boots on my back clunking,
I was thinking
life really isn't so bad

maps coloured in,
places where I’ve been
other maps show stolen land, places of war,
cemeteries marked with crosses
– plague cities black ringed
– places of pogroms marked pins –
arrows indicate migrationary trails –
outward from Africa monkey man to homosapien
the evolution of the thumb &
blind fishes

(the first restaurant sold primordial soup)

in Precambrian forests they hired
priests to baptise micro-chips before they left the factory
holy water sprayed from water pistols
– microchipped meat
you are a small blip on a map
on a map on a screen
on a screen in a room that doesn’t exist –
a small blip flashing
–
a liver made in a factor
a wooden lung

so many pills
she sounds like a maraca when she walks down the street –
rattle rattle rattle
– pills for all kinds of alignments
weight loss
erectile dysfunction
laser eyes
internal rot
diseased *****
side effects two many to mention
the Elvis shakes

I'll meet you in the bottom left hand corner of the map before we move across the great expanse of the middle ground - past staples that hold the pages together

through the middle ground of open space and forests
- we'll push on

towards the top right hand corner through to the small print

across the page references and place names

names that roll off the tongue

names that stick and choke

like swallowing a mountain
we will move across a geography of dry river beds

common land and ex towns
we'll arrive before the new edition removed our path

a season of plain white t-shirts against corrugated iron fences that rust expensive trainers
seasonal adjustment and a dropped stitch

chimney stacks arthritic broken fingers of the broken landscape
horizon of scratched surfaces

little children running into trees and

disappearing into shilouttes of long shadows
they moved the furniture to confuse the blind

Sometimes I forget that I am
me,

my memory is made up of affectionate toothpaste ads
of the past three decades.

On occasions I think I’m John Lennon
returning his CBE
over to that Biafra thing.

the rain wet floor
the man with a birth mark in the shape of Pangea

the backwards baseball cap

the re-used meme

the re-used meme

the idea of “retro”

cumulus clouds floating

heavy &

overhead

all electrical goods just sitting on stand-by

waiting

the machines are waiting

the blueprints that are 1mm out
at right angles to the rest of the world neon lights flash downtown

reflected on wet concrete

arriving at a destination and not knowing how you got there
my glasses leave an indentation on the side of my head
my children are asleep and I can see the signs

a new Netflix series that goes on for 125weeks – I have no stamina for this –

the mundane beauty of a leisure centre
the perfection of the shopping mall