The sun isn't even cooking me
it's just not raining,
the brown Liffey is dipping and lapping
the bus windows are all open.

"What think ye of Christ"
asks the poster by the driver.
"Not much," but if he's real
I'll thank him for the blue of the sky.

Is this what happiness feels like?
Because it's pretty ******* good.
The silver lines on my arms
tease me about years ago.

I remember
tightening a belt around my neck
and wondering how it felt to die.
But I was silly back then.

Look at the blue of the sky.
Look at the wispy clouds.
Look at my friends saying
"Go outside and look at the moon."

Life is strung up by a rope.
I miss the boy who I love
but not too much.
One day I'll find a prince for myself

in Rome or America
in a land far away on the sea.
I'll sail away in a couple of days
life's going good for me.

Crouched in a bath
in a house in my hometown.
5AM and the moon's out.
Kevin hands me a rolled up bank note,
and tells me I'm innocent
all in one breath.

There's blood on my hands,
rolling down my wrist.
Big, fat, poppy teardrops
blooming like the cherry trees
in my university.
Home is a funny thing.

I'm not a cool kid.
Just a drugged up, loved up,
half pretty girl with a good brain.
Mad
after the wrong people
in love with every
broken soul.

I'm just chasing dreams
and welded differentials,
the car turns and screams.
One hand on the steering wheel
and one on my thigh -
can't you just need me for a weekend?
Can't you just
sigh your little promises
and chew my ear?

sometimes I only feel at home
on empty streets

sometimes I pick up the phone
just to listen to the dial tone
(it sounds like the absence of you)

sometimes I fall asleep
hoping I wake up
and sometimes
hoping
that I don't

staring at the shattered glass
of my mom's wine
I dropped on the kitchen floor
thinking that deep red
looks good on white tile
and thinking maybe I deserve this,
in fact maybe I deserve to
lay on the scattered shards,
one piece of glass in the back
for lying to someone I love,
one in the thigh where he
kissed me while she was gone
for the night...
thinking I'm being eaten
inside out and it's only a matter
of time before something comes out
      about it.
twenty minutes later there's
wine on my socks and
the front of my shirt is wet,
with tears I guess,
but all I'm thinking is
guilty
guilty
guilty
I don't think
I can fix this.

His voice of crackling static
is known from round the corner.
It's raw from shouting news reports and
the music of an empty pocket
to a world, only half listening.

A toiling madness of chord and thread -
frayed, plucked fabric, strings
hanging from cuffs. This plaid ragdoll and
his bird **** stained guitar case are
collecting change like a magpie

His incompetent lips are their own shower
flecking the pavement. What music gathers
in the whited joins of his mouth is urban  
desperation, but their grubbiness suggests
you could still plant potatoes in his fingernails.

Twitching and lined, his visage isn't as old as his art.
The jarring strum and lacquered voice  
serve to remind us, that the tongue
is the only muscle in the human body
stronger than the heart.

Turn on

I
This is the BBC news at 1 o'clock.
A rambling diatribe,
lost boys, a lost war.
The falling cost of stamps.
'What do you think of the deficit,
Graham from Newquay?'

II
Some bald man
holds a cadaverous gaze.
'She don't want me no more Pauline.'
The ware and tear
of Albert Square
immortalised
in one ***** stare.

III
Ella looked into the eyes of
the African children with bloated
stomachs, scooping up brown water
she wouldn't even dip her toe in.
For a moment, they were face to face.

VI
Margret! Margret!

Look what they're...

Check the cupboard,
have we still got...

uh...

tinned peaches and caster sugar.

V
Our hands, in every listless waft,
wander through an electric soup,
thick as frog-spawn.
Spermatozoa of information.
A gentle fuzz of creation,
our atmosphere is
pregnant with
separate universes that
embed themselves
inside our own.
We broadcast
our noisy planet
to the skies.

VI
'I've seen what's going on,
you don't have to tell me!
I know what they're doing.'
The walls are closing in,
as each breath from her
dusting lungs is getting tighter.
'Besides, my eyes won't let me, or
my knees these days, It's all i'm
good for'  
She wheezes.
'I can see all I need from here.'

VII
Click
I swear 400
*******
channels
And there's nothing on

VIII
As I approach the blue glare
of the living room, I know
she's in there. Not even
watching,
she's on her
iPad. We don't talk.
We went to the
Maldives
once,
after the wedding.
she couldn't keep her eyes off me.

IX
Dead square.
Silent pixels.
Nothings watching.

X
We crept down in the morning - my sister
and me, before anyone else was up and squabbled
what loud cartoon violence would take our attention.
Nightie, pyjama cotton siblings, sewn in to the 7 to 9 o'clock schedule,
we were as vital to each other as sleeping bags and cereal.
Our building blocks stood in a castle,
we were unaware that one day,
they would be strewn across the floor
as we grew up.

XI
We're not going out tonight.
I just want to slip my hands down your
pants and touch you while
we watch game of thrones...
Deal?

XII
Smoke rises behind the mosque
in an arabesque twirl.
The blinding sunlight behind the minaret
crashes on the lens, like a flash bang.

The call to prayer is empty bodies, iconographic art,
cars hollowed, alien tongues, history, a melting *** culture,
cockroach romances, squalid graves, body hewn tunnels, little cuts on
trigger fingers, trained monkeys, orphans, marble carvings,
the stench of petrol, jobless drug habits, brickwork, wiring,
forbidden love, lust, teenagers, plastic explosive, god, work,
prayer, tears, life and death    

and briefly the box is the world in our homes.
We must see who's behind it.