The clouds whirl around horns of the gate.
The blush of the morning is tangerine
and gold. The blossoming chorus from the bay
for now is just silence, fog and a silver lining.
The cinema bulbs are flickering out.

There is Coca-Cola in my soul.
There is anguish in my bones.
Luxury paid for the tightness of my skin
and an artifice of love.
It blew away like dry grass.

I think God is a librarian,
crumbs in his beard, fingerprinted specs.
Cataloguing the hours I spent on my knees
his matinée idol, his evening sandcastle,
stones applauding his work in the Cali tide.

What can he do to me?
Witchdoctors can forecast rain from my guts.
A poor wading bird can fish me up
and photograph my corpse iconic like Evelyn Hale,
but that 'man' can do nothing…

I see the Island rising from the mist
like it’s throwing off its coat.
I’m like the birdman, in my way.
I’ll be remembered
flying.  

Perhaps I can even make it magnificent?
The boys on the boat will talk over their beers
of that triple tuck swan dive,
the acrobat, a harlequin that tumbled
like a shadow on the rising sun

Kamikaze, I Samauri!
The war drum beats, on, on but I’m done.
l am in the eye of the storm.
I am the harbinger, the horseman -
And the universe is a ball in my hands.

I made you up, I’ll rub you out.
The sky is holding the Sun and the Moon.
5am. Circling gulls. Harikiri.
Machinery rings upwards through the girders.
Equinox.  Tomorrow is untouchable.

As the waves fall on stony shore
the sword just sits there,
blunting in the washing sea-foam.

England’s winds carry the sand
from England’s rock to the grazes
on our ankles, our feet and hands.
They from the toes of Cornwall to
rocky Dunnet head
will our courage forward
through the first crawl on cam-corder,
to the last drop to earth.

‘We all began at the seaside’

Though days are gone, we linger
snaking through London with those southern scrubbers,
those diamond white men,
the Caribbean accents, the Guajarati, the Jews -
‘A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better one’
- we all patter round Oxford Circus and
climb aboard the number 9 bus.

‘Who so pulleth out this sword is trueborn King of all Britain’

And we watch the waves fall.

‘Hold very tight’

It’s there behind our ray-ban’s, our fake ray-ban’s,
their halcyon glint.
It’s the same secret, not one of us can keep -
Under the setting sun between
England's canals and sheep
the living live, cry and sleep.

-

It was London and my mother that
raised the muscles in my thighs to look firmly planted
and my face to look resolute when turned to the sun.
It was my mother and London.
They grew me up to look like I could pull out
Excaliber.

‘Lay me down trepanner man, but take the stories with you, if you can’.

So I, always King Arthur,
not a yank, not from Roehampton’s towers,
or Peckham. Not Tintagel, or Camelot,
escaped on an eddie to Manchester,
to bury stories with distance
and stare at cobwebs after rain.

'I’ll hear easy music, find out it’s easy, man.'    

But in Manchester’s plastic, in Manchester’s rain
It ran all the same.
Of a blunting blade, I dreamt,
until the Phrenologist came
and I asked him if I was torn up by London grit,
London loves and London’s spit.
But he said no,
no matter where you go
there’s just one secret that you’ll never keep
Under the setting sun between
England's canals and sheep
the living live, cry and sleep.

-

The sword just sits there,
honest as a dog.

And the sun has more secrets than any man on earth.

my shadow scuttles through the suburbs,
the seaside, the city, sideways like a crab.
The sandy cuts on my toes, ankles and knees
are bleakly investigated by a fly.

Has anyone sat at the round table?

It’s out of reach of my skinny wrists.

Lash me to a pole and wait for the Avalon tide
to slowly roll my English soul.

I better keep on living.
All stories, tears and sleep.
We are all just the living secret,
that not one of us can keep.

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.

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.

Nestled
in a gyroscope
of allotment, haybail and heath
is the scenery of
my solemn country.
The skyrise, hollows. the
dripping
fat of the land.

The cities have boomed
and they're beautiful.
Like open roses they're
garlands of wire,
pylons and street-lights.
A thorny crown
on a girl in a nightclub. They're
blistering
they drink, kiss and drink.

And all the while
we live with whispers
splashed like
blood in a gutter.
As murmurs
pumped
through the strip-lit veins
of an office block.
Its a life where
prayers
are mist on train windows.

When we walk
we check our
reflection in car windows
and we're beautiful
we run
our hands
through our hair
knowing
we were babies born with
horns for this.

When we ride
its over
railroad boneyards,
the sleepers are
metal teeth locked in
asymmetrical laughter
at everything
at everyone
at nothing.

The skies are a
psychosis of sunlight, clouds,
vapour trails,
it's heaven
and
we're bent at the alter,
our shadow on
the crypt
has horns.

The river wrestles on, furrowed by light bulbs.
The iron song of the evening bathes the air in
London's homeward beating hearts.
A world of leather and troubles, not of one's own.
The summer moon is a dim lamp
as we walk from Kew Bridge to yours.

Quietness clings to you so unnatural.
It's rattled your breath, like a spectre's hands
have tipped black medicine down your throat or
A devil's tongue, wet with mockery,
has kissed away daylights fervent laughter
and left your mind to move on silence.

Under this train crash crescendo – the world is too much
so I make balm from my words,
that I shake out like polaroids of times
we felt worth remembering.
Yet, a monkey rattling a cage, my lullaby falls deaf
and your lungs sit still, heavy.

We walk on like stuffed dolls, for all our beauty
just passengers in the night's school bag and
I'm left to think of the Thames as the great, grey, mother of us.
How it forged what we have, set in motion our hearts
to be tugged shallow, wrenched deep with the tide.
We were born in it's ritual, bound, heaving in sync.

And the caustic moonlight gives us nothing to rein,
In the silence you shine like beaten copper and my grain is the
hammer. Each lilt of your body begs me to love and to know  
What spills from your mind
when you cant scream and cant cry.
What do you have without words?

I want you to have me -
because you are the words.
That I write everyday.
And the reason that makes me
want to remember
that I'm feeling this way.