Deep weather
Rough chopped rocks sunk in the sand
Of St.Ives.
Hostile invitations for a childhood party
Where Joshua so loved
then missed his grandad.
Rock and rain pools
December ****, in August limpid.
An adolescent's stomping ground of
Skunk and cider
Where first Lucy kissed,
And felt age inside her.
And a Pensioners painting,
Anna remembered a figure
On those black rocks
All those years before,
That could help her across no more.

The town on the hill.
Bewitching, twitching, still,
Windows hammered on to cold homes -
Bridesmaids, Flings, exiles,
Remembered, loved in the married bed
back home.

And the girl that I love so much,
Sits across the beach
Sinked in to my sand like
The alba washing coal on the beach
After all these years.
And the girl I worry about so much.
Sits across the room sinked in sand,
Hammering love in my chest.
Rocks, coal and home.

Hold fast old junk, the goings good for a while.
As on the groaning deck the stamps and calls,
Won't mar the sun on sail and board.
Clenching hard to the deck, I fall asleep on my face
As, though sodden and sand bitten, I'm warm.
But sleep, even hard won, is never easy on a ship
As whispers from the blackest heart
Of the liquid beneath creep through my nose
And soak my brain in the salt of everything hidden below.
Cut on hard, old junk. The goings good for a while.

And though my eyes are closed mad dancers stir
In dreams that are wrought deep down and
hammered ungodly by the pressure of depth.
Once balmy oceans boil and froth,
Until they simmer the flesh, my countenance away
Til' just bare bones are left alone
and i'm left alone to pay.

In dreams of the rotten slave with stones in his shoes,
In dreams of the leviathan's grave, ragged with hagfish
In dreams of the nymph with her perfect **** and parted lips.
Who looks me dead in the eye.
Fish tailed, a filthy promise of a lie.
Theres the skeletons of the Indianapolis,
Atlantis as a garden of my bones that no one knows.

Jerking back awake, the stars have hit the sky.
The sea, now a black mirror, rolls slowly on,
As impenetrable as it ever was.
We see these things then let the sun
Burn them away and cut on.
And we remember what pressure does to the fish
That live in the deepest parts of the sea.
How they're disfigured.
But no matter how far submerged
the demented whips will crack again.
Unforgotten, insatiable,
so deep down in the dark.

As the darkness outside invades the room,
And the duvet is pulled round our shoulders
I'll push myself into your back
To reassure you of how I'm feeling.
I'll sweat through the night
With your small body fitting
Like a square peg in a round hole
Next to mine.

The phone rings:
It doesn't work anymore.

Diazepam, Red wine, 6:30am, hip replacement,
Plunger, television, boxes of photos, carslberg, peroni,

The flush is broken on the toilet.
I've sat for 15 minutes.

Examination, xbox, unemployment, skunk,
Washing machine, dishwasher, dryer.

It's raining, Old towel and bucket
under the hole in the roof

Cat food, cod liver oil, mould, 8:45pm,
3pm, appointments, 12pm.
Laptop, silence, phone calls,
Toilet, bucket, bleach,
Oven cleaner, kitchen roll, dirt, carpet,
Television, Hoover,

There’s a factory child, ragbone and alone.
Sleeping in between one mill and the next.
Used to toil and clamour, inferno and hammer.
Mother and master.    
A slump-rat, slithering down the gulp, forgotten
As another factory child
And I’ll do my best to ignore her –
But her shadows still stretch the air
Belched and huffed,
the little bones that burned.

The brush of your arm
And in my ribcage is
a purple evening with battering rain
in a dank flooded slum with open sewers
where we’re clenched under corrugated iron,
together but so, so alone -  

It’s a rain prayer answered with a tsunami.

What a stupid thing is touch.