the internal monologue at the beginning was

the 
pit pat patter of rain on windows then
wind through the trees but louder it grew

like waves &
the sounds of war

screams from the experimentation
expressed in words 
scratched on surfaces 
stretched canvas of skin

with blunt knife strokes 

kids with mouths like coin slots 

fingers caught in the elastic of her underwear
rejoice
rejoice
rejoice

I've seen how the loss of industry can decimate a town.

Like when that yo-yo factory was closed down
and the workers all hung themselves from lampposts
and just bounced up and down.

Up and down.

100% dedication to the wrong thing

weeks of planning up in smoke

she walked away and left her shadow waiting

no need for precise measurements here

best guess &

best guesses

long wave radio and the strange signals –

transmission interrupted

– wavering

– on waves like the ark

– new ideas

third aisle on the left

that secret isn’t safe

the secret has escaped

they asked me if I was a spy

the bad compass points south –

things go down

magnetic forces

the limb

gnarled ends

impossible to be in two places at once

the belief in something that isn’t there

turn left when you exit this town

she reads the words then tries to forget

but she found the evidence

the picture in the frame with the four fingerprints

( find the four finger ghost )

the spies that wore a leather glove on their left hand

it was a sign – hidden but open

just like the looks she gave me

————————–

the Beatles came from a city of boats –

direct decedents of Neptune –

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