I want to be loved for one night,
then I shall be content in isolation,
comfortable in the lack of weight
on the other side of the bed.

One night, to be kissed brand-new
by foreign lips; a familiar fear
as she leaves her dress on the chair,
and our inhibitions on the floor.

Absence of physical touch, heard words;
no tangible proof I exist, or should exist
at all. I miss the fatigue. Brief sensation,
some energy - our collective heat;

the way we sweat beneath the sheets.
The way you need to call out to me.
I have not heard my name in weeks.

I want to be loved for one night,
then I can return to pollute these pages
with something beyond conjecture,
something worth holding on to.

Everyone has *** darling,
you cannot claim that as your own,
nor your past of broken heels
and your father's broken home.
I scored blood over my wrist
and toiled, toiled, toiled
in the sun.

I stood in line for my freedom
to find that there was none.

We are all maladjusted darling,
all singing to an empty sky,
all pastured by the government
and living amongst The Lie.
You cannot claim your illness
as the dissolution of G-d,

you cannot find a kindness
if you do not spare the rod.

Everyone loves a ******* darling,
in that you are not alone,
your father with his whiskey breath,
all cancer and flesh and bone.
I scored a high in an empty field
and howled, howled, howled
at the moon.

I stood up for the years that I had crawled,
for all our happiness that came too soon.

There is a higher power in the salt shaker,
and a divine truth found in the tea leaves
that circulate green water
and bring taste to my afternoon.
Customers suffice laden minds through new year's wind,
past recollections of old stores and vacant faces.
There are skeletons in their back pockets
and a common secret behind their eyes.

Each one of us desires time alone or time in company:
the dissatisfied, default state of the human condition.
I fell asleep to a world of smoke and ****,
then awoke to words and a sea of coffee chains,
gathering a philosophy from faces in the wood,
and having conversations with my own conjecture.
The black mass of last year is behind me.
It stalks my dreams but cannot sustain through daylight.

Happiness has fallen over me, clumsily,
so like a child learning how to walk.
I stumble out of the door, consulting each car window
reflection, to ensure that my crazy is not on show.
But this is the town that Crazy built.
We walk in patterns, performing domestic rituals
to occupy our mind, amongst societal demise.
It feels as if there is nothing left for us

as the drop-outs drink Special Brew by the gravestones,
and the rich turn tail-lights - tired pilgrim of London.
Only the lunatic fringe still look for contact
in a wireless world of sedentary care,
frequenting the bars that they used to love
before this small town fell to a blue-eyed catatonia.
The milk is settling in the eyes of the chronics;
the old folk coughing blood and ******* in their pants.

There is a higher power in my stride today
and a numinous edge to the girl in black stockings.
She lays out in my mind,
spreading her fingers in temporary joy.
I play the customer and pay for my tea,
for a material justification for why I left the house.
There is time here, to imagine my heroic escape.
How I will shake off all this Crazy,
how I will fall back into shape.

At seventeen I stepped out of the cloud
and into a clearer knowledge; an atypical
viewpoint skewed by my heritage and
stubborn willingness to always be right.

Some kind of British tolerance has kept me
from howling 'injustice!' in the streets,
whilst some idiotic notion of love or truth
presides, to keep me invested in this life.

With knowledge comes the weight of knowing
and it wore my shoulder down to a chip,
causing me to walk in hurried strides
in order to keep balance, to make my way.

With clarity comes a more potent love;
all features and laughter amplified
to make you forget the sound of silence,
until you cannot deal with its return.

Some kind of solace has been found
in reducing life's events to a plot device,
whilst some irreducible desire causes me
to wake, to persist with a purpose.

At twenty-three I found that better sight
only illuminates the complexity of existence,
the fractal nature of the developing foetus;
echoes of evolution: a better self each day.

I remember all of the stupid things.
The gap in my first love's fringe
that appeared only when she was flustered,
or torn between *** and G-d.
The nursery teacher who resembled
Jane Goodall and sat with me
whilst my hayfever was too potent
to play out in the sun.

I remember the exuberance of heat
on the concrete slabs in my first back garden.
How my mother would take
boiling water to the empires of ants
that would find life in the cracks
and crevices between my footfalls.
I remember how silent they were
through oppression and death.

I remember my first sight of the ocean.
How serene it looked in the distance,
how unforgiving and cold it was
once I threw my whole weight into it.
The shivering donkeys on the beach,
agitated by the ice-cream crowds;
the man who handled snakes for a living
and persuaded me to touch a killer.

I remember my first guitar
and how I stared at it helplessly
for two hours, like a teenage boy
on his first sight of a ******.
The first sad song to deliver a feeling
never experienced, but communicated;
how adults failed to answer the questions
that music gave forth effortlessly.

I remember when you started leaving
kisses at the end of your messages,
the formulaic gaps in time
before I would hear from you again;
your costume of nonchalance.
The way you appeared in the wasteland hours,
playing the therapist with your kind words
and history of neurosis.

I remember the sheet of plastic
that shielded me from the rain as a child,
the rubber wheels of my carriage
buckling through puddles and gaps;
the first exposure to nature's lullaby,
as I fall asleep through storm and traffic.
I remember how easily sleep once came,
and how I resisted it all the same.

I remember my recurring nightmare.
A big red button and the doors of hell;
some spectre of infinite density
that caterwauled for the destruction
of all things human, all things new.
The way my mother's arms were infallible,
the priest's glare, omniscient;
the revolting concept of a cigarette.

I remember all of the useless things.
The rings around my grandfather's eyes
on the only occasion I saw him cry.
Kissing Rebecca on the lips,
cementing our love with tree sap
and the promise of an endless summer.
I remember the first time I felt sad
without having a reason to be so.

I remember the shine of the room
when I took pills for the first time;
the incorrigible thirst for water
and the racing confessions that followed.
I remember how it felt,
the first time I trapped someone in a poem;
how easy it was to forget them
once reduced to words and half-truths.

Rock bottom is fantastic for perspective.

I don't want to work for you,
fake a smile in this costume,
I don't want another day
of a boring job and ****** pay.

And I don't believe in G-d,
no TV expert or demagogue,
promising a different way,
it's the same formulaic play.

So I twist in sheets and walk around
to escape all of these household sounds,
the news is spouting war again,
I close my eyes and count to ten...

...And I wait for some change to come.
Your patient ***, your siren song.
Are you maladjusted too?
And do I have a chance with you?

Because I slip a pill to fall asleep-
nothing else will work for me,
I've tried everything there is
to cure me from this restlessness.

They **** the many to save the few,
they decimate all that we knew
about what it means to be free;
doctoring our history.

And I don't want to be the one
to bring you down or mess you up,
I just want some peace to come,
no broken streets, no fallen bombs...

...Is this all there is?
Pockets of momentary bliss?
I just close my eyes and think of you;
my drunken words,
your ocean blue.

I'll close my eyes, my mind, my tomb;
if I could have a chance with you.

What would you write about me?

He chains black coffee and cigarettes,
knocking ash into last night's beer bottles
whilst Tom Waits is yowling from the stereo.
The Sunday morning is bright-white
like the bleached kitchen counters
that spread in uniform fashion
across the neighbourhood.
The window blinds him with the brilliance
of daylight, after staring too long at the screen.
Another chance to make a go at living,
but with the opportunity
of squandering it all the same.

Conscious that he was standing in his boxer shorts
and more so for the inevitable morning *******,
he checked for humanoid shapes in the allotments;
no Peeping Toms or curtain-twitchers,
only carcasses of Sunflowers
charred by November
and forming a Tunguskan fence.
In his incomplete state of a half-grown beard
and lack of full-time employment,
he found it quite impossible to think
that he was the present day culmination
of all humanity's endeavours.

Save for a relentless talent of self-destruction
and a penchant for giving oral ***,
he had long given up on a remarkable life,
instead savouring the aesthetic of smoke
curling by an open window,
or else watching the squirrels renovate their homes
to the patterns of the seasons.
A strain of survivors lead to his existence
but it didn't steel him in the slightest;
the most energetic thing he had done all week
was to kick a dog-chewed tennis ball
across the park in disgust at his life.

He kept a chart of happiness tacked to the wall
but he was always too depressed to fill it in.
Instead, there were books to be stared at
from their shelves, women to be thought of
but never spoken to;
a windowsill to lean against
and feel at one with the Earth.
Despite the cruelty of self-imposed detainment,
he had come to find a solace in stillness;
to slow his days to a glacial pace
with tense, quivering yoga poses,
and a disdain for daytime television.

During this hiatus for living he had finally
stopped biting the skin around his nails
to the point his fingers would bleed.
He was a man with a myriad of bad habits
and an maltreated disease,
but now the world was crashing around him
whilst he stood in the sidelines
as a disinterested spectator.
He has no stake in the outcome
of endless war and lottery tickets;
only the next collection of honest words,
and to where they might lead him.