On my skin I wear the bands of shielded sun.
Commitment to the heart makes this skin colour run.
With one liberal hand, I tear down these branches being hung,
to shower in yellowed leaf confetti.

These forest roots ran like hair line skull fractures,
under canopies blooming red from the sunlight rapture
and now these trees leave their taller brothers to fall as ashes,
with ivy on my ankles, stifling hope up to my chin.

Living memories, my forest sheltered, scrambled for home;
small pretty beasts, unrefined, breathing caricatures with bones.
Screaming they beg for attention, inattentive to this situation as a whole.
Our own view is all we can consider.

This house of cards built on paper-cuts, from the trees before.
I'm now growing wiser to my winter freeze and your summer thaw.
I need all of these things I hate about me, and they can never be ignored;
a psychological pre-disposition, the only one I can afford.

A country lane, which eats animals, earrings and experiences,
winds in spools around the oat-house and follows the broken wall.

My sister’s bottle green jeep made waves along the hedges,
she shook out her hairband and the conversations of the evening.

An owl asks on all sides, and would seem to answer himself as
the field barracuda, the vast wide eye for the minnow-mouse.

She put a pearl in the bushes, dangling spit-like,
an orb, a moon-berry, full and dead forever.
She drove faster, as the english night slowed down,
down by the where the willow covers the road sign.
She killed a badger,
as if they had both lost something here.

Sun-cooked,
crisp at the curling edges
he’s a dark patch, like a fixed pothole.
his bones tested her michelins in the morning
again, glassy eyed, stillened,
retroflective and blind to the shimmering shadow of flies
rising up through his skin like a spirit.

But both her ears are full.

From the very far dark, deep and beating black,
there’s ghost breath, and blue light after,
where I un-broke myself,
next morning.
I’m under, curled to a pupil
of the bed’s eye,
so I blink the dream out.

Asleep, plants are respiring,
and the loam of their dream
is lifting, thinner.
Then the real interrupts,
erupting as a day,
and shimmering back again.
Like the shore that shares it’s time
between sand and ocean.

A fully open cup
fills up in the moment,
wherein that infinite shrinks,
and the universe grows backwards,
backwards Into,
cold coffee and dog ends.

Strange that.
It's not a nocturne,
It's an echoe of a day,
It's a memory of a memory,
It's a remora on reality.

Strange that.
why when last night,
my ashtray was full of stars.
The clock infinitely deepens
the memory of the dream.

But it’s there,
only just there.
That maybe, perhaps, dreaming of us,
somewhere in the brightest time of the night,
somewhere in sleep,
in the inbetween spaces,
somewhere there,
we left ourselves in mermaid’s purses.

Mind of mine, you alien child.
I spoon-fed you for many years.
I pretended it was a plane in some cases
and the things you spat out
I fed to you again.

Mind of mine, you shadow of a melody.
Homeless drifter on the A41
with a 5 stringed guitar and no common sense.
Begging for a shoelace to tie on
whilst you go hungry.

Mind of mine, you nervous gun clip.
You know you’re unloaded
so your barrel droops like a snowdrop.
No hippie can put a flower in you.
and your shakes are breaking my wrist.

Mind of mine, you scar butterfly-collector.
Snatching red admirals with a chameleon tongue
and when you stitch them in
their red eyes close on dusty wings.
I know you’re lying when you can’t feel a thing.

Mind of mine, You’re a ****** full of love
and a belly full of drugs.
Positive negative flip, as love is in electrics
and you’re still such a bad liar
to tell me it’s anything else.

Mind of mine,
I can be such a bad parent to you
and an even worse child.

To you i would give the passion of the sun
and the shine provoked from simmered grass
and if the moonlight was not safe from your eye,
it's buttermilk glow i would surely pluck down.
To you i would give the midnight chimney smoke
that sillouette on the sky putting cobbles underfoot.
Take my taste of salt as sea white mer-men come
a breeze in the laughter of workmen's homecoming.
I give the feeling when swallowed by field flax
pinpricks of cotton, i'd lay you down bare-skinned.
You empty the film on my flesh camera,
I keep the removal cuts.

Two sparks of glass dancing on the currents
like two feathers with silk stiffened by salt.
Broken bottles to the midnight seascape sent
unsteady as whispers, sharp as the cold.
I’d drift as part of chandelier like rain
be the anglerfishes’ luminous snare
to tresses of jellyfish dresses vain
as the smooth face reflecting there.
On the plateau the sand will frost our smiles
smoothing those edges to a bent jigsaw piece.
This cold Desert of ebb raked sands and fells
from the bottle’s great birth into the sea.
Making blood fire by joining sparks by hand
as others join stones in returning to sand.

The message is simple, the delivery hard,
even as his eyes cut holes for it to enter.
White rims that flash, like beasts that spar
Natural strobes flicker, to thicken the black center.
When intent is replied with padded knuckle intent
Ungraceful, his neck turns past comforts vector.
I turn away to close a window from the storm.

Thought pathways like drunken footprints stepped
but a spark in the cloud of numbness replies.
My clenched thumb releases his bicep
And the arthritic cogs inside us violently un-subside.
Those muscle strings in my handwriting
to the letter the red bull replies,
but rain breaks my gaze to the window.

Knuckles like bruised alps in formation;
the boy’s got blood lightning in his eyes,
And so have I. ***** in the sockets I’m pushing on,
to revel in colors of my ****** mind’s sky.
I hurt myself to try telling that one ****** idea.
Tasting the punch, spitting iron, my Boxer I despise.
The classic writer’s hand ache makes me relinquish my pen.

Those axons, which lead to nothing,
they have now reached it.
Flayed to the winds.
The eye’s blinds closed completely.
In darkness, rasping breath resounding
and the lungs like strained gluttons for life
are clearly mocking the hearts desperate beating.

I put the pen horizontal to the desk.
It possesses all the use of a dead man’s organs.

But the sway, rains sweat from hair down to skin,
Then to polish the padded domes of pain.
When flesh rolls like thunder, bones crack like lightning.
His legs, my pen and both our minds are jarred from this refrain.
And upon the strike,
I’ll polish words and pad their meaning,
Punch the reader,
And enjoy the force that they contain.

Jew harp, Plath hearted, dream seamstress
who sits in the dark.
Who made me live here.
In a small room inside my head, little dictator
and I lit this place with music, just for you
Where all sounds but songs are dead-headed
Just before they bloom.

Totalitarian angel, rage-filled fragile smoke
who censored my tower of Babel.  
Who tamed my very rivers of song
to breathe the moon-tones as vapor, until as a sun  
you’d rise to scar these rivers, every single one
wherever you find them, with your face.
No matter how they run.

Paranoid animal with an understandable
aversion to caress and kinetic poetry.
Damsel who births her own dragons
like the fertility of hell, again and again.
Life and love belong to the monsters
the monsters you make of them
but all of them I’d befriend.

and I wonder.

I could chew my pen hand off
snared coyote.

I could swallow my tongue
dancing to dead note barks.

I could visually inhale that sun.
Take in all I can.
To get the eyelid ink spots.
The branded silhouettes
busying my eyes as I sleep
each night as I sleep.

Without this allergy to identity
you could turn this world backwards in me.
That hell of a snow-globe you hold
if only you knew what kind of world you controlled.

Was the death star
a death sun to the planet closest?
if so, i'm one.

As the light made islands on the water,
ethereal bubbles frozen with warmth,
tucking tired beaks beneath wings, pigeons saunter,
into sleep, on tesselated petals, going forth.
That summer aura which sparks from you and thrums
moving dials to a sanguine solstace in me.
Hitting cold skin, the blood rush is autumn;
cathartic capillary trees with loose fingers and red leaves
and in these veins speeds my guttural london estuaries,
to syncopate their tide beats with yours.
Those mediterranean wine filled arteries
will encompass my imperfections to pearls.
From my idealist sonnets hearts you come
fixed on air, a changeable paint that can't run.

Like newborn fern fronds you unfolded your words
cut with castanet syllables peppered in.
Sentences ushered on as pacified herds
breathed out plumes, rippled fire, wind-thinned.
I then learned a beauty untamed, is a beauty rare.
Those eyes indeed are coffee dewdrops pierced by sun.
Those lips are pronounced like unbroken waves that tear,
on the cusp of unspoken words braced for freedom.
Core bright, i see the rose through the street's ornaments.
From the slight rise of your nose to those angular cheekbones,
further a picture of stunning complex arrangement;
identity of locked cogs, in you, are the pieces of home.
Islands on the canal of time; forever moments un-faded.
We aren't seen in a new light without becoming more illuminated.

I asked the love inside me
to sleep but not to die.
To fly like swallows at sea,
give me peace,
but please,
be homesick.

I asked the love inside me
to relent it’s doping up
like an Indian Luna
discarding the moon
for daylight.

I asked would it be stoic,
Drown the sun for just a day
and hang dark over street-signs
that have anagrams of her name
or point to wherever she sleeps.

I asked the love inside me
to keep the love-bites
in my capillaries
lest they phosphoresce
like the backs of cuttlefish.

I asked would it be patient
to shine them later,
as inkblots, reminding me
of what the softness
of her lips can do.

I asked the love inside me
to remember and not to hope.
Keep our room everlasting
alight with music,
and like my love,
my own.

there’s lipstick kissed filter tips
and roaches made from textbooks
littering the ash-hardened carpet.
The lift of bra strings over collarbone
tracing a mole
meeting like the Saone and Rhone there.
Hungover afternoons
where the heat stays asleep in the air
circulating with our radiance
as if our hearts fill the whole space.
The time moves glacially
like we’re children
having nothing to compare it with
but the length of hair
and the states of cliff faces.
Two stillborns
meeting in the afterlife.

The first time
and the last time
and all the love in between
is alive.

I don’t want a sunbeam
give that to Jesus.
Don’t bother me with purity,
don’t let me make shadows
out of you.

I don’t want a butterfly
batting along on the wind.
The wind of my word,
on the gale of my opinion.

I don’t want a pearl,
something that needs to be made.
Made from gritty sand, held close,
and pressurised round and edgeless.

I don’t want a rose
called what I want it to be,
cut where I want it to be,
on my lapel, for when it makes me look best.

I don’t want conversations like schizophrenia.
If you want me to be able to explain you in four lines,
I don’t want you.

.
                                                Enough is not enough
                                                     I want too much.

                                                      “Excuse me sir
                                           you haven’t paid too much.
                                                  I gave you too much
                                               and you ate everything.
                                        I need to throw away something
                                                 and the bin’s spilling."

"I drove too many footsteps
past too many throwaways
too many pylons
water towers
possum-eaten polystyrene cups
Mcdonalds
Mcdonalds
Mcdonalds
camel boxes
and walkers
with socks as hard as coffins.”

                                             Enough is not enough
                                                  I want too much.

A harsh wind kisses my fingers into sleeping.
Blurring the movement on the toggles of an anorak,
But my eyes dart quick, oiled and fleeting,
searching for my beloved old salt, looking back.
Funny, how in those footprints,
the piercing night that bites the ears and cries
can feel as soft as sheets
washed in the light of the moon, pulled by the tide.

this darkness which surrounds us.
it makes the world one of thrashing silhouettes
And as the earth breathes in gusts
It gives calmness to a mind, to comfortably forget
this, lulled swoon of nature pulsating hits
the windows, we can't help to be animated.
we cannot be closed to it, cannot obscure it
the call of the waves that past fishermen created.

pausing, that sun-baked, sinuous arm rose
and peering through his cigarette smoke specters.
the steam of my own breathing, softly froze
As the sky illuminated my weary lenses.
the theatre of sky before us fight light polluted filling
My mind left wandering like waking sleep.
These gladiators of light bleed ochre from shining artillery,
Their particles drifting into the night's sea, so deep.
Sparks spat by suns lie suspended above me
held like dew in nets of celestial string.
as the sunlight comes peering through these
the intensity in a pinprick, unearthly passion within.
lancing the sky too are spears of my dreaming
as neon cobras strike and churn to flee.
these heaven-borne beings carving visual song
Cutting luminescent pathways into my memory.

The soundless iron giant is now still as a caryatid.
Holding me before that blacksmith showered light.
an artist plucks flaming dewdrops from the wind
illuminating my foray into this night.
I sensed a small piece of gene pierce his yang
a black taint to his overall brightness.
In my black yin a spark from him i hang
and I'm proud of the infections we posses.
As he narrates this landscape, he narrates himself.
a new side to a shape I felt I knew.
As far into feelings as his masculine paradigm delved
like a square’s seventh face, always hidden from view.

Little dormouse,
nun trying leather,
desperately cleans up her stigmata.
I hear you whisper prayers,
I see you twitch to stop yourself
to sign the cross
and I feel your foreign fear.

Little dormouse,
can you only muster
a half-riot, a part-furore?
Do you need a bit of blasphemy
to wash in dirtily
in order to be forgiven again?
And know, When you’re an angel,
floating up to live with the lullabyes,
will you grip your shoes
with your little toes?

Little dormouse,
moving your lips slow,
to look better to the snake.
To be new-born, translucent
In the half-light.
Such sanguine wine,
your flesh and your offer is.
The drugs and our pleasure
the pressure of our nature,
which we will not bow to.

Little dormouse
wants a bad habit,
not a good man.
Wants to understand,
things forbidden to think.
Wants an unhealthy metaphor,
not enough,
she wants to want more.
Under smiles,
there's proof the world is anything,
you’ll find whatever you look for,
but not the love.

I can still remember the weather, it was your weather, as the whole day was yours as well.  

You called me Tuesday lunchtime. I tell you this so you might know who I am. I expect you call many people on a Tuesday lunchtime so I am nothing special to you. The cup-a-soup chicken dust was in the mug and particles were floating about in the light. The kettle flip was down and the water was just at that bit, post bubbling before the flip kicks up again to show it’s done. Butter out and open, ready and still messy with crumbs like some cross section of limestone showing its history. I could smell the toast was nearly toasted too. Everything was coming to a head, even the clock was crawling close to the exact hour. All these processes were funneling back together into one task, like streams regrouping in a river. I was focussing hard enough that I could feel seconds, and that is when you called.

“Hello, is this Mr. Innes-Jones?”
You said it in one of those recycled voices, and that hurt. I could already see your eyes in my head, I'm a fast visualiser, but with the way that you spoke, scripted, I couldn’t see any life in them. I could see your finger wrapping and unwrapping itself in the phone chord and I could smell complimentary coffee on your breath.

“Speaking,” I said, muting the television, cutting the talk show’s announcement short as to who the father is. He put his head in his hands and the woman opposite stood shouting and pointing downwards at him like a dictator, which, on this program, usually means he, is in fact, partaking in the wonderful adventure of parenthood.

“Are you the homeowner Mr. Innes-Jones?” God, if you could only call me Andy. If only you could say my name as if you were asking me what’s in the fridge, or telling me to move my legs so you could get in close on the couch. I know it’s two syllables but it’s still not too difficult a name to say and in my wildest dreams, sigh.

“Yes, I am and call me… tell me what this call is in regards to.” I’m sorry to be so rude and direct, it still kills me that I may have cut some of your voice from my life by getting straight to the point but I realised it was far too forward for us to be on a first name basis, when, to you, I’m a stranger. I was like a car that swerves and then has to control itself. You could hang up any moment and lose a sales deal, but I could lose you.

“Of course sir.” Sir is worse than Mr. Innes-Jones.

“My name’s Christine.” Christine. You said something else afterward about solar panels but I was still stuck there. Stuck there wondering whether you looked like your name, as some people do, or if you transcended it and it paled in comparison to you, just like when a star is named a number. Christine. Maybe your parents are people of faith and their conservatism in your upbringing has given you a bashful streak. Might you turn in your rotating office chair and blush in the face of a wink or a half smile? Are you a Tina in the world off of the phone? Or Chris? this is important, what is it about you which might influence people in that decision.

I focused back into your voice. I could always leave wondering for later. I’d most likely have my whole life to wonder and knowing how the memory would fade, how I would eventually have to fill it in with my substandard vision of your voice, tone, and intonation, I couldn’t let any more of you slip into static, the hum of space.

“Might you be the homeowner sir?”

“Yes, I am indeed” I wanted to ask the question back and delude myself that this was a conversation and not an interrogation, but I didn’t. The saddest three words right there.

“And you make the decisions there, correct?” “Yes, certainly do.” I’m sure that women like a man of the house, our house, though I doubt your imagination was working as hard as mine. I was still finding it hard not fall into it.

My silenced program finished on the television and you went into my electric bill. The women in the adverts disappointedly displayed their appliances, fell off ladders, came in suits to save people who did, and a myriad of other things, but they all spoke in your voice, spoke to me. Some were called Tina, some called Chris, depending on which name suited their faces. It was funny, I felt that I slightly loved all of them, in different ways, as they attempted to be you. Like this woman with the wonder-mop for example. She had a checkered shirt, and despite still being quite pretty, time had separated her jowls slightly from her chin, so I decided on the more androgynous name Chris for her, Chrissy at best, she has a life away from wonder-mops. She doesn’t spend her days in perfect lighting demonstrating to her husband and kids how, however hard you shake the thing, it still retains it’s liquid. Though I expect she probably gets one for free. I hope she does, they look quite good.

“Sir? Sir?” Chris on screen tells me, like some kind of backward echo getting louder and more real. I gave you my attention back and bear in mind I always will.  “Sorry?” “I said, are there any large trees nearby your house that may obscure sunlight to the panels?” “No.” “Any tall properties nearby to the same effect, sir?” “Can’t say so.” In my mind you were asking me for something in that way that wives do, establishing with a series of questions that there’s no real reason why we can’t have solar panels, so why don’t we. A really subtle supplication, and I played along and allowed it, just for you. I kept it to myself that I live in a basement apartment and the only light I get is when no one is walking over the grate above the front window.

From grey plaster dwellin’s they come to us
fer enough sun t’ melt their lollies but
after sun-burnt migrations, some remain
as they can choose our shacks fer their castles
and their spawn breaks the spines on each weaver
and fer their red-faced fuss ‘e is broken.

The ‘ermit crab too takes ‘is leave broken.
The ‘ome ‘e made now closed to all of us
Not passed by ta’ooed ‘ands o' net weavers.
The painted shells still litter these streets but
suited slugs paint gray on our small castles
till only mockin’ shades of age remain.

“Shave off, *******’ll pick till none o’ yer remain”
screamed mad John as relaters “fixed ‘im” broken
into some plastic ‘ouse from ‘is castle.
‘ow ‘e used t’ tell those old tales to us
'o the deep places and the things there but
they ‘ad ‘im by the gills, poor old weaver.

Spines down, in nets made by ‘is own weavin.
we did it to ourselves, we can’t remain
Wi’ nets o’ money, o’ *****, o’ smokes, but
black flags still fly, bein’ bent never broken.
Cross-bone attractions will be left as us
‘eld by those who took away our castles

Stormin’ beaches to kick down our castles
the sandy ‘oles and ‘ides of those weavers.
Sellin’ our anger like lug, dear to us
cast from the sea of us that will remain
‘ook lipped, ring-eared, ink-stained and not broken
nothin’ t’ be fixed and no-one changed but

In come those nets, I ‘aint been caught yet but
that gray, that London gray sweeps my castle
away where the concrete can’t be broken
t’ reach lug beneath dried surface weavers
as gulls break beaks t’ peck at the remains.
yes, we’ll eat each-other if they take us.

Take enough of us, and leave shell castles
no ‘ands to ‘old jolly Rodgers and sing
‘appily swear, or dance on tables but
**** that.

And when I take in this air
The wind mirrors
The currents underneath me.
We're made of the same
Un-cut-able energy.

These under-waves that breathe
In Blooming aneurisms,
Like a great heart
Caught in the rhythm of the moon
And it's steady eyelid.

We are but capsules of this movement
On loan from the ocean.
Void-mother, salt nirvana
Breathing alongside us
And through our many faces.

Deep, hungry, all consuming black,
As the only affront to the abyss.
Her maelstrom-stomach
Now spitting wood and bottles
At the shore.

Before the inversion of her,
Loosening her keen grip on life
She settled to exist in scars
Pounding rhythm into the shore
And singing in many voices.

That masculine sun
Holding her flat, rejecting advancements,
Falls in their dance
And cannot cover her turning.
He flees the storms.

She swallows electric
Giving light to the deeper life
The great glowing thuds returned
She’s waking hearts to contain a fury,
She's making music into movement into us.

And from the movements,
Bubbles take the warmth up
Past the gaze of colossal ones
Living their lives as silhouettes.

Past caryatids in the black,
With curious eyes,
Holding up sponge-lined trenches
Threaded with eels.

Past the sand bed stretches
Thick with silt-eating things
Relishing the mud
That rises on the corners of rocks.

Past a plaice's eye
Which Crawls across his face,
In his short puberty,
Looking for dangerous shadows.

Delicate bubbles turn
Their pressured skins
Up through water currents,
To come burst at my feet,

And in the millionth morning
That comes into its opening
I am rocked like a child
In the movement I’m made of.
So I can just look forward
At the sun-blink.

While we are all just atom snowmen,
sometimes I have to be
the arsonist of your emotions.
To make the atomic bits, flick out, vibrate
in order to light this ether atmosphere,
see what you really are,
to give me that warm feeling inside.

Sometimes I have to be
the stone that breaks your window.
The irreversible souring your view,
of your perfect, affectionate, color.
I take a breath of your summer field
and forests and farms  
and exhale it as winter, deadwood and cold air,
your horses all un-made,
into glue, cat food, and violin bows.

Sometimes I have to be
A spiked cocktail.
Sipped on in words
finding again better, that familiar sweetness
but finding yourself, not yourself, anymore.
All just because you left your love wanting
alone on the side of a bar
and I found it.  

Sometimes I have to be
that step you don’t expect at night.
Of course I’ll act like an accident,
letting the idea slip through
a gas leak flooding the room
silently, imperceptibly, changing things,
I’m good enough you will never know it,
and it’s you who’ll spark it.

Sometimes I have to be
father of the utilized disease.
A cough gives it birth,
a bark and a hack makes it airborne
incorporates a bacteria culture into yours.
This DNA affixed of word nucleotides,
embedded in the head of a virus
which will, just sometimes, exponentially, continually,
manipulate.

The Censorship decides for you.
It pre-emptively gives you the eyes of a boy;
A boy who is done with his *******.
When those sweetly unclean pleasure swings
turn to simple actions in all clarity.
It makes that denied apple rot backwards
and in some cases rise to the tree above reach.
Lest you forget we made the wrong choice once before.
So you fall to the fiery shame of the nation
as where procreation surely belongs;
to the maelstrom of breathing sins
And good company.
Where never the G word is uttered
to enter your head.

But to those who like to hear dangerously
I give the public
The last letters of the last four lines to you
Before censorship has completely won
For any reader who wants to hear it.

My queen of the spider’s flies awaits me,
To tame my black iron horses of blood.
A mistress of the finite she will be,
A whisperer to dead hearts drowned with love.
Into the dead mans pupil I lead her,
Across ocean floor deserts for our right,
Fishing for men, luminescent and fair
And My darkness will not reflect her light.
I am ashes to which she is the spark.
Sowing her lands a path down in dead grass.
Strangle fresh air for its freshness, this land I’ll mark,
I’ll declare my love in the fear that she’ll pass,
But for all my passion’s flames on her tears,
She is but steam, just out of grasp gossameres.

Happened to me on a street corner
on either a late night or an early morning.
It took a wallet full of cider, a charity of spirits,
a shared packet of ****** and the smell of glue.
Not the cheap stuff, the glue for models,
and they look alright, right? right man?

The night left me outside my head, with my thoughts,
I had a handful of anti-headaches.
We nearly bled out last time we admitted all our mistakes,
my friend, who always ends a night with a head
on my shoulder, snotting up my collar,
hiccuping up frag grenades,
**** and apologies.

He chews his cud at her.
She blows her cigarette smoke at him.
The equilibrium is uncomfortable but scenic.
The eyes of the walls stained yellow long ago
and every room feels like every room they've ever been in.

He rubs his shirt neck on his nose.
She flicks her last molar irritated.
a broken radiator works overtime, wheezing.
Holes in the bread, where she cut away the mould,
the food's still cold, but, for this, he'll eat it.

He never loved her personality.
She never loved his face.
Both of them knew, for this, they'd never leave them.
She says "I do ******* love you you know",
as she smoked her last blow.
He says "I'd love another cup of tea dear".

Our rabbit tails flicker
on the edge of the heat-rush
like making love,
a viciously tender blush.
Here we are, Running,
from useful death;
our needed kindnesses.

Nature’s necessary provocation,
starts the ride,
ensuring death for an ensuing life.
Our blood is fast and heated,
releases and builds the tension,
in ligaments, Quick enough
but strobing the scut.

We are also the foxes
and so forwards we must follow it,
just as the time follows
the seeping wisps on the horizon
of the un-risen sun.
Come live with us and dine,
so we may die, when we need to.

There is a reason for your greed.
Follow those sparking tails
pinpointing life
in the living grasses.
Smell the heat
through the dewy stems
and be what must be done.

Feed your children of every description
to end, a forgotten bone milestone
but with endless input.
Become the prey of your own actions.
The grass takes your meat,
fluffs it up with sun,
for the rabbits
each and every time, it’s time to.

We are in the ungodly hour again,
that sixty-minute stretch,
embedded in the nighttime,
of undisputed stillness.
A fracture of the evening
occupied by deep breaths
and oddly-human silhouettes.

The town butcher spends overtime
breaking bones, working
on the swine, and counting  
the progression of the night
by the swinging bodies.
They’re cold and sinuous
but he likes their company.

The town preacher wastes time
as he knows to pace himself
by half hour intervals,
squeezed between nightcaps.
In every period he remembers
slightly less that, a boy
is to be buried by the morning.

The town beggar walks towards nowhere,
he blows an alcohol breath
into his clasped hands
like resuscitating a needy mouth.  
from his ceiling-less living space,
he looks into black windows
just like we would look out of them.

The town dealer is on nothing
living back some hours he lost
Inside his head, looking, from a distance
through his eye sockets.
Now he’s on a strange sobriety and with a text,
the Londonese and the hood come back up.

In the ungodly hour,
no storm makes an eye around me.
In an un-pretty always, things just happen
to fill the timeless time.
We all assure ourselves
we’re all alone.

At this age he chews his steak with a knife,
Safely outside his body the little crescents come down,
These many red smiles that he holds in his hand.
He likes her cooking overtly sanguine now.
This added barbarity to make up for his caution
as he shows off to the crows on the fence.

Meanwhile she mutters like cautious clapping;
Voice muffled by her Cupid’s bow, turned down with age
and she only speaks little irritating truths.
French tips awkwardly grip a tin she washes out.
She drops it often with the weight of tomato-ed water
and she winces at every wince he makes.

Now the pages of their days are reflections of the cover.
To all those crows at the window
who notice her nails and his appetite
as much as they notice each other.
Dreaming of the past is for the old and the second choices
but what if they each got that one that got away.
(Return to top)

Phyyt phoo, two aqueous lenses peeling through, the oxygen layers.
Pupils turn as they unfold, hungrier for light behind burnt sand barriers.
The switchboard like a carnivorous plant field independently moves points
And compacted, segmented panels respond like exoskeletal joints
There come the staccato screams of steam one at a time, puff, lining the door  
Capsule, contaminated with air, is cleaned when the beetles wing lifts the floor
The boy I was, offers a raised thumb from the ground, science disciple
With Helium fission equations on a sheet hanging from a bible.
My eyes behind a visor open slowly, it’s time to take control
Still tears slowly lift from my face like a violin bow rising to sing low
Now in a place where time means nothing I can’t regret a thing
I just wish this clinical empty cold on all, to take the warmth that lies bring
With Creaking myofibril strings so imperfect in this black vacuum dream
I shake the hand of god; with polystyrene gloves as his work is so unclean.

Talk to me about flowers and fires.
The orchids
of our collected youths
are bleeding into rose water
and being smashed into books.
For a little look
like a picture stretched under a slide
hiding, elfin to run back away from us.

In the hearth of us we wonder
what the charcoal will draw next.
Sticks on the banks of the styx
In it’s flicking midst
I can almost see
the little beat-less heart
in the center of the cherry.
It’s like it’s still held still in pursed lips.

In a falling little flame
accidently spilling it.

Out in Saturday mornings.
Out of school
so sliding in our nose rings.
Skiving by lying
with fist rubbed eyeballs.
The swell,
Then the classic sweetness
of the re-sleep.

Marker pen graffiti.
Feeling like elitists
because we don’t like elitists.
Defeatist is in right now, love's yet a fable.
(Planets are *****) on physics tables,
and writings on my hands,
but **** it man,
I won’t remember them, anyway.

Blurry nameless kisses
tasting like French lager,
or is that me?
Bellybutton shots.
Love at a coin toss
or against a brick wall was at it's best.
But there’s room for two
in this tent full of burn-holes.

Iron maiden.
never paid but
in microphone coldness
on the lips.
Lifted on the fix.
Giving the week in a night
and taking the night for a week,
with velocity.

Headbanger’s neck on
the pen-bottle ****, being used,
being used up.
Swimming against the river.
Golden Virginia,
Sobranies in the bus shelter.
And as the day's screen goes over
we still kept the bonfire
running in the rain.

That's what talks to me.
I'm laying back,
but moving forwards,
involuntarily.

Her form is a one-way mirror aimed at hate.
Our truth is of a beauty waiting
this small unstable set, glacial pure dewrop,
unrippled to the wind to which she's always braced.
Features from her face protrude, and are held strong
but so diminutive soft and smooth to the air
and trickling gypsy tresses fall at these cheeks.
Swaying together as hair-like feather veins,
so threadbare, stopping on her upturned lip ridge.
A red capillary wave carrying rouge,
so often now to be splashed under those cheeks.
All so often now those eyes catch me.
Hue of deep sleeping, enough to lose the awake.
every blink closed my airways. So i gasp
at the rising of those two black suns.
Her truth is what se sees in us however.
The glass cracks like mercury lightning with the attack,
she turns the mirror, to see herself in it's back.

We wrote our names on the beach in animal bones
as a vivisection, on our love.
there, she’s whispering into shells
into their Fibonaccian, trumpeted, dresses
and full-cheeked into a razor clam flute.
I, too, gave my blood to grease our domestica
and hung names on stars over the nighttime sea
always accompanied as I were
with the shark-eye, death, of her looks.

We dressed up the walls of home in black and pinstripe,
filled the place up with lit and lightless places,
Shadowboxed, shadowfucked, and silently argued.
Spent hours inside, laying floorboards
and then laying on them
to stare at the sodium lights
and discuss the inkblots on our eyes.
We vivisected our lives,
and splashed it on the walls
and carved it into the carpets.

We set alight to christmas trees
when the kids were sleeping upstairs.
We dressed in each-other’s reddening horror
and answered the door.
Valentines day was full of bone bouquets,  
the gripper rods grew through the carpet
so on them we danced.
I prayed for the first time in the first year
and every one hit me subesquently
like I was its anvil.

I should have gone to war.
Because it makes forever shorter
things can only happen right now.

I watched everything in our domestica,
like when the static moved off the television
and played on the window
gutting me of my escape.
The smiles hung on our faces like lupus,
We had people round,
we cooked and coughed and choked
And their faces peeked round from the doorframe
and laughed.

The domestica lives
only to be a bit of fun,
but in the very same span of time
that decided to **** the birds on my windowsill
and my children’s love for me
and my dexterity.
We’ve happened to the whole world too
I promise you, my love,
my little hospice fire,
my flat tire at night at nowhere,
the lie you recognise means it’s over,
A field of a thousand three-leaved clovers,
the brightest night when you’re hiding,
your heart attack on holiday,
your bloodstained bed sheet
And sleep, whilst outside
the sleet and snow makes every emergency
harder to get to, and still the morning
much more beautiful.
I, you, we happened.

“Hello”
“Hello, and you are?”
“I am here, you can tell that by the fact that you can’t see anything behind me”
“Looks like we’re both just occupying space”
“Always”
“Why do you wear that suit? When I see men in suits all I see is a collection of different proportioned black and white shapes and I imagine they want to wear masks”
“Most people like to show off even how ordinary they are, of course when the suit comes off we all like to be kooky and different, but who isn’t these days”
“You sound like an office man”
“You seem like a Rachel”
“No”
“The red ring of lipstick round your glass and the way your shoe points nuzzle each other makes me picture that name”
“I don’t look like my name, like a celebrity or a country or something”
“Can I have your name?”
“Only for a second”
“I wanted something which was yours, even if for just a second”
“You didn’t ask to see my face and that is much more personal to me than a name which I imagine I share with many other people”
“Probably the same as your earrings”
“What’s your name?”
“I took it off for this evening, it didn’t go well with my suit.”

.                                                              

                                                               ­   "The wind rustles the forget-me-nots
                                                                ­      In the many balcony flower boxes
                                                           ­                       And so the shrieks of foxes
                                                                ­                               lose their distance."

She’s inside,
finding her bearings.
Fiddling her earrings
around.
******* cardamom pods
White.
And smoking licorice black cigarettes
Her lips faintly popping as the smoke escapes,

                                                       ­   Pop,

And reflecting how she’s been
As lucky as lavender isn’t.

                                                         ­         "the wind sharpens the beach dunes
                                                           ­                    flutters my tangerine towel,"

                                                      Po­p, pop,

                                                           ­        "fills my little girl's glitter-gel shoes"

No,

                                                    ­      Pop

She rubs it out before she sets it down,
sharpening her eraser.
Settling her glass
no chaser.

Her cigarette smokes on its own in the ashtray
a straight grey line caught in the breezes
from the door frame and under the floorboards,
like a seismograph recording of a dancer’s hips
or like any sound man could ever consider making,
escaping up to heaven from the tip of Babel.

She takes back her black ***
Before any more paper evaporates.

                                                          -Lig­ht-
                                                         Pop, pop

Her poems are great shipping tanker oil spills
of vowels,
hoping the reader feels their lips
mouthing kisses along with it.

                                                            ­  Pop

                                                          ­                           "no one ever really tastes
                                                                ­                          one another on theirs,
                                                                ­                                                or saliva,
                                                         ­                                                       so weak
                                                            ­                                     weak as the smell
                                                                ­                                  of potent *****."

Now the wind's at the window,
disturbing a spider
abseiling slowly
and inevitably
as falling snow

                                                           ­    Pop

into the ashtray.
A lifetime of weary acceptance of tragedy.


                                                      ­       -Stub-

In the mind of the girl i love,
i will be that guy she liked to kiss once,
and that's enough.
It's enough to know,
that one second frame of her life
was entirely infected with my colour.
It's enough to know,
that those two brown oculi turned to find me.
Perhaps they blindly guessed in my absence.
It's enough to know,
that i breathed in her passion sighs,
the hot winds before the storm subsided.

And when i am a taste far since removed
under layers on her tongue.
She will be still alight in my most
lonliest moments to remain;
like this line, and lights floating on the stream.

I handed my spare Arthur Miller book over
like custody in the early days
and it's enough to know
my sentiment was captured.
Refreshed by the page turn breaths,
but it's enough to know to pain me
that she will probably need refreshing.

“Come 'n see ‘em
Come 'n see ‘em”
Comes a shout
made Whispered by years.
Weaseled through shoulders
as I do, to meet
an Equilibrium.
“See wot I caught boys”
From deepest London, “great dark sea boys.”
Curiosity baited and displayed.
come see a show of inversion.

Now, my monsters.
We are more than fascinated
by all their fingers and their unwritten skin.
Clean-shaven faces cleared of rings and pins
there are no chain links in their ears.
We palm read faces here
lifeline scars and portholes
like a moonscape hung with silvers
creased by the visiting sun
and those pink fleshy penholders
never received any Iodine.

So they lie, just like sardines
in line, below water-jars.
Naturally packaged, for you
in business suits of scales.
Stops at the neck
where the knife comes in
as a sweet partition
where the eyes are set.
Above the hook
so they can’t even see it.
Look, look, at the consumables

How disappointing.
They lose the beauty of their shoals.
One jigsaw piece, I’ve seen before
which gasps and gasps.
Poured on the rocks
As we look down
on the equilibrium.
They look up
at our differences.

The dogs and the men
they bleed into the fields today.
The primal is protected with tradition
for the blood magistrate and bared teeth.
For the hoards,
who’s cider ice lollies dribble into tweed.
Snuffed Wellys suffocating in Jempson’s bags
pressing their crescent moons
into ****.

Iris flash, fast peristalsis of air
on both ends of the trumpet today.
Screaming brass.
War only requires one note remember.
One long note
orchestrated by children’s fingers
lifted to the butchery song
releasing the blood-cell men;
the forest’s traitorous antigens.

They are there to nit-pick the trees.
A mercy killing, without a wall.
They should have had a wall
and they tell me
my morals are sickly.
My sensibility is held up with gum.
So pound that war drum.
We’ll bite the backs, tear the scruff
like some death mother to them.

For the runners and the watchers
olympics needed prey aspects
to keep it going.
Teach your children to need that itch.
To save each and every Sunday school *****
from her husband’s boredom
and her children’s boredom
and all the things you notice when you can live and eat
this side of your living seat.

We’re falling with a company of clouds
part of that old storm of stardust debris
Focusing through that needle’s eye to mound
On the other hourglass chamber till you breathe.
A first breath that makes the pages unfurl,
white as a newborn’s pearly clear sclera
when they’re unveiled to the light-driven world
Pages follow sun and moon together.
Every word from stranger and lover sets
hungry ink to seep and sink in lines.  
Axons string the page as memory nets
caught words wrinkling, till they fill black to the spine.
Then as the body unstitches to the winds
the mind writes in white on pages within.

She looks
me in the eyes,
for just a moment,
as if it helped her to say
“I am only going to date you
if you just go to confession first.”
I think she wants me
to clean my soul
before I shave my chin
for her.

I unlatch
the wooden grate
and feel what it’s like
to look through the holes
of an Irish potato sack.
It’s the kind of guilt you feel
not having enough
******* for the recycling,
again.

He accepts
my quiet words,
Metabolizing them,
into fuel to keep nodding,
and I think of that stolen ******
in the back pocket
of my Sunday best,
between the fabrics,
and pressed by the polished wood.

Back to the sack insides
still, he wants to know,
the anatomy of my soul.
He wants to trace the outlines
of my spiritual blood vessels
all the way to my spiritual
heart, tucked behind spiritual
lungs. So he asks,
when I’ll come again.
I’ll need another two dates,
for the three date rule, to apply,
I think.

I can hear the baby quail,
they’re telling me, from in the hay bales
and chirping like little frogs.
While they themselves
**** back their bog pockets,
bloom, press the weak wood, and leak to me.
The trickle-slap pipistrelle
in subito notes, that hit and fall,
that explain to me so frantically.
crooning to me so mutually
and between themselves,
like organs pumping air into each other.

The birds sail on it over fields
relying on the attitude of the night,
feeling out its hot rushes.
In sensory geography,
dependent on a mood of its own.
In an ocean, emancipated from the moon.
The sky-lung, plays its shivering reeds
Where the spores, the sycamore, shattering
in crochets, quavers, in minims,  
on any mistral score
are mooring till but a touch of direction.
It hears all of what my fingers feel. 


It tastes all of which my eyes are witless.
The asp in the verge tasting me
with undulating flick of forked tongue
in aromatic echolocation,
both received and given by all.
The curious noses of foxes
between the furious foxglove
sifting out the berries of effort,
of strain and sweat in fur
haunting out from the stems.
There they find the scared,
shouting in the language of the animal.

And when the colours leave the flowers with the day  
the night is painted in flavoursome air.
The night which licks at your ear,
the night that chatters amongst itself,
sonic charybdis,
whirling in the moth-light.
The dark side of the earth
is facing me.

In her room
The only eyes belong to posters
And they never change.
She feels somewhere overhead
A plane shattering clouds
And then feels smaller
And more circular.

Clothes touched all of her like a predator
And she curls inside them.
Standing she let her feet feel the noise
Inside the carpet from downstairs.
The shouts that hit against her,
As rain explodes on the windshield,
Again and yet, again.

She even swears quietly
When she swears in her head,
Just like now.
The mouse gets squeezed with love,
A furry grenade,
And it gets smaller than before
Swiveling, pin-less.

It squeaked in reflex
And she didn’t stop holding on.
Not till there were two
Sets of fingernails in her palm
Neat impressions of waves,
On a child’s bedroom wall
And everything stopped moving

And everything was the same.
She expected to shake
The loose stones in her gut
And for the power of the ******
To scratch her,
like an itching match.
There was still nothing interesting.

There was nothing interesting in ten years
And now she wants to drape her love on you.
Like a mother with a sweatshirt,
Against your shoulders,
Trying to match your eyes.
Trying to remember hurting in them.