I
a flicker of warm light
and your face is all that I see.
Thunderclouds are silenced,
burned away and
my chest is left open to
our place under the opal sky.
The light is our soft romance
and our candlelit meal for two...

II
'Spiritui Sancto'
A Benedictine Monk
alone in
cold stone chambers sees
an ascending soul,
holy company,
a solitary light in all the
emptiness.
'Sed libera nos a malo'

III
Scorch-marks
drip
love - bites
drip
but please don't stop...
drip
In his lust,
Mould moments of my skin
and keep them
forever.

V
'Waxy fingertips!'
'Put that down,
PUT THAT DOWN!'
Mum told us
If you play with fire
you're going to get burned.

V
30 miles
they say
is the mathematical distance
you can see a flame in the dark

VI
This is the symbol of our nation.
'Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit'
This nine branched lamp symbolizes that our Israel.
has courage, those may be their Qassam rockets,
but those are our sirens.
and that humming you hear is our drones
over their heads.

VII
buuuuzzzzzzzzzz
What enchanting light...
zzzzzzzzz
what God are you? Oh
zzzzzzzzzzzz
wondrous beauty
zzzzz
what magic do you hold, what glory...
zzzzzzzzzz
come closer str.....

VIII
What died so I could read?
The tallow is a pig
the squealing embers
fat pig.

IX
here comes the candle to light you to bed,
And I curled, vulnerable to the shapes in the window
with my feet creeping further under the duvet.
The shadows were melted, cut, distorted on
my bedroom walls.
A primal evil will danced by the light of the flame
until I shut my eyes so tight,
that I slept it away.
here comes the chopper to chop off your head.

X
'No Jennifer, I just feel candlelight just adds a certain

ambiancé

to a room

No?'

XI
'Quickly, before it turns septic.'
'This wont hurt boy'
'The fire, pass the fire'
'Quarterise it quick or he won't last long'
'bite down hard my lad, bite down hard'
'AHHHHHRRRGGGGHHHH'

XII
Children hurtle down,
a Bombay slum to hear that.
'King Rama has returned,
light his path!'
The open sewers adorned in Ghee lamps
find such intense beauty as each quivering flame,
although so fragile, breathes the story
of the power of human spirit
unshakable against overwhelming odds.
*'The King of Ayodhya
Has Returned
Show his path for the Festival of Light!'

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,

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.

A Stirring biomass, a grim river
Garrotted by mud and each rusted carcass
Dumped over the slow years -
'And we saw the metal of a woman,
A frothy corruption, naked and open,
we prised her from the mire, and saw the city
through the eyes of the sewer,'
The Lady from sludge,
your toady skin broke
as you flopped, nymph-like on board

Caved-in by the tumbling sky,
And air like leather. Dry in the throat.
The sweating walls spun his head,
And the cogs whirred to fast
To bite back. Space and time-blind,
He turns to the sepia city.
Like new life,
ready for the fall of man.

Through the river of time elapsed,
Churning up memory.
And there's the glitz, the cracking lips.
that bet on goodness.
'I remember being a girl - and my mother -
smiling but never sad -
I waited for her every morning'.

The forgotten root scratches out life
Underneath vast and forgotten hangers.
The lungs of the city shed their skin
To keep pace with the smog.
See what we all don't know.
And live where we all can't see.
He led her to a room with broken windows
and one swinging bulb,
She wasn't scared.

Dank Amazon.
the roots are wires,
sprawling for grip for the sulking trees
In the great ape eco-system
'I'm a cruel joke, don't you see?'
As her eyes slowly rolled.
'I'm sorry'
As her fists unclenched
'Im Sorry'
As her knees went limp
'I'm Sorry'

Belted by un-silent night
And below gridlocks of light
An I.C.1 male is being chased
By screaming vans, run rabbit
Down the hole and off you go.
And the hiss of 'one eight seven,
one eight seven' from the radio,
is scoring his run - as the pools on the floor,
neon-flashed burst open
in a booted shatter.

'And the time went by,
And I looked at your form
And I looked at your cuts
And you are the river
And one of its secrets, un-watered'.

The moon dangled hard through the city
and the moth-lamps hummed discord with the wetness.
The dripping stars like accidents in spilt milk,
waited for a mop.

Walking home I hallucinated men
coiled up with the smoke-stacks.
They pressed through the brickwork and
as shadows flickered in the street-light.

Though my torch cut them down like saplings
and the moon ripped off their heads like scarecrows,
each man was a sermon,
a vastness straining the borders of sight.

A tailored uselessness hung there arms,
waspish currents tore from their mouths.
Starlings turned on their cross-wind,
as messengers of some sleeveless silence.

The moonlight fell on them like whorls,
like hurricane petals, hostile
were the shopsigns, they moved backhandedly.
The gulls raged. The crows filled silence they left.

The shadows all danced to the back of my head.
And when I turned they were gone.
I'm plucking for life and a body.
That shrinks the world to their size.

Crooked bones, coal, steel,
clanking and deafened with laboured breath,
that heaves up and hacks out as we crawl
and ache and sort and hunch and collect our
black diamonds, as we mine down,
down the rocks and the darkness until we can erupt into the sun
like worms haggard with dust and rot and breathe. Again.
As each vertebra recoils from being wound tight.

We are the pit.
The ancient shapes in the Davey lamp
chiselled from the coal itself.
And the song in our voice
is hammers and dynamite.
We will be here,
always,
under your feet.

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.

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.

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.

Time Volume: 1
I’m eating up the hours
one by one.
Blink.
Click.
Blink.
another screen,
more non-words
Blink.
Click.
Just letters.
Click
9000 more words
blink
and more time.
Click.
To be forgotten.


Learning to forget
The melting *** cast a boy and I ran outside,
A slime soaked goblin, a monster from the pit
Lobbing clods of mud at a harmonic sky
Whirring with dragonflies and lolloping bees.

Sun and rain prepared a day on a different earth
Where there was life in the monkey puzzles,
And scuttling battle grounds that
hid hundred-handers beneath concrete slabs.  
Gravel churned up tiny black dragons,
rotten logs, fortresses of tiny fiends.

I had a sword in my hand, I was noble.
Defender of the realm, scourge until tea,
The hero of worlds
everyone else couldn’t see.


Time volume 2**
Excalibur was stuck fast
When the new branches fell
Click.
the tips of my fingers are beginning to rot.
Blink.
Click.
If only I could
blink
stop the second
click
See the world behind glass.
blink
and dance out of time.
Click.
This snow globe,
Is not the Antarctic.


Artificiality in Imagination
Turning my back on time and space with
Bottled brains, ***** mist, powdered thought
I chiselled into old pathways.
I carved a silk road through synapse and nerve
to return to my monsters.

I saw a sickness of colouration
A lynx effect for the sky
tearing punkish streaks into the atmosphere
that were quickly blinked away.
Sunspots, cloudbursts, tussocks, grass,
Paper squares, green, red, purple, pink, blue,
pungent smoke, bugs, ripples, shivers,
polka dots and blank spots.
A storm-cloudy stomach.

The perspective of a head plastered to the soil again
saw thing for what they were,
a tiny amazon thought lost to rationality.
My heart thumped for a fear and joy
in a way forgotten by time.


Time Volume 3
Why is it called wasted when it is time well spent?
Click.
my god, my eyes hurt.
Click.
Just 9000 more words.
Click.
What would I give for a pretty girl sat under a tree.  
Click.
search * (pretty girl sat under tree)
Click.
She’s hot.
Click.
So is she.
Click.
… could always.
Click.
don’t be stupid.
Click.
Just 9000 more words.


Fantasy for a Counterpoint
I questioned what’s real when she blinked at me
and stopped existing  when she closed her eyes.
No one taught us to write in blood,
Tattoo our names into each other’s skin,
Leaving claw marks for the world not to see.

Whatever you drew was Van Gough
Whatever you said was Keats,
Whatever bruise you left was Tyson’s.

The outer layers of or skin are dead,
It’s funny whatever you touch on a person,
Is already dead.

Just before our love got lost
I noticed a thread break away from the braid
Around your head,
a small incongruity,
That made your hair a mess.

Love became what it was when you said you were
‘as constant as the northern star’,
And I replied, ‘yes - always in the dark’.


Time Volume 4
This is progress for my sake,
Just in time.
Blink.
Time is money.
Click
Time flies.
Blink
A stich in time
Click
This is a paradigm of nothing time.
Click
I’ve got so much time.
Click
And so little time to waste.
Blink
I’m a long time dead.


Hope for a handful of dust
Eventually I will while away these lonely hours.

What black rocks stir while we sleep?
What prayers rumble still, among old stones?
Do they speak the eternal city and glow civilised blue -
Or burn timeless black?

Does the probing ivy find us out
And the blunt head of a worm investigate
our most intimate parts?

Or does a spectre rise from the soil
To live under children’s beds?

When is the point that death
Becomes something breath-taking -
And the brook, my brown blood,
The dead leaves my skin,

Is it fantasy
to put something
where nothing should be?

The soft earth will **** me in
And give my brittle bones
To worms and crows
What stirs beneath the stones,
may always be worms and crows

In here a groan rises as a mist,
a guttural prayer
in coughed blood.
The candlelight whispers
an unutterable secret
on every rafter.

Heaving over
his leaden spine
he wonders when does death become
something breathtaking.

And not a voyage back somewhere he knows,
as he thinks
to a picture
of England

that bore him a son and wife
And every Friday night at the Red Lion
And darts and a pint.
And his rifle.

He saw god once in his child
and once in a French field hospital
as a man with metal red spit
lain on his back.

Winter has coaxed
its radiator enduced
ether
and the time has come
for colds, snot
and sinuses.
Blackness
gathers us
to our tangerine
oasis - and
living room
televisions.

I left,
to walk through the
winter city.
I saw
empty car parks and
Christmas lights,
and thought London
was dying.

A fox grappled
with a tesco's
plastic bag.

I walked through
a winter forest.
I saw creepers
on gravestones
and
Victorian gore
settled into the earth.

I put my ear to the ground
to hear the worms
eating dead bodies
and all the while
the stars turned
overhead
like a millers wheel.

In title it dangles.
A portentous root-vegetable.
Aggressive in its promise.
Domestic in allure.

Swelling is unavoidable.
It comes with a gut.
It comes with a harness
and a wrinkling leather belt.

I’m growling, more bear-like.
Vascular, blooded in cocktails
of babies, phone-calls, a raise.
More love, less time.

Nails are yellow-er
Weather-beaten, careworn.
It comes with her
Unconditional resignation

Poor girl, to a man, to me,
Poor boy, with skin like eggshell.
Perennial givers -
‘We must take what we want.’

I look at the back of my hand,
see if I know it
knuckles like rock, touch
light as a feather.

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.

The still English heat,
The ***** promise of July the 1st
Leaves the grass a mottled yellow
And the dappled shade of the purple birch
Almost holy.
Specks of precise and glittering pollen
Rest upon beds of browning foxgloves.
Cats are left collapsed,
Blissed out, lulled into dreams
of this motionless sun shining forever.

I feel your hands in my stomach
And I'm hungry for your grip
As the hot sky only ripens
My daydreams of your laugh.
The thick scent of withering hyacinth
Is the curve of your back,
the taste of your sweat.

A stain of certainty is baked in
By July the 1st.
Novocain for my infected English heart.
Whispering the start of a love that will be
kicking leaves through October
And sharing warmth through December.

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.

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.

Your noon blue eyes catch the open horizon.
Moss green and hedgerow, we lie as the
sun bursts, exploding from behind your body.
Thin cotton whispers off your thigh,
our voices are woven into the sound of the reeds.
The thin air quivers a shoal of oak leaves
breathless, the grass is spun to gold.

I

The pistons rusted, the furnace grew cold and
I lost you at the coal face.

The cat had got it

and the rest was just noise

II

We left the strong-men, that mean looking lion.
We pushed back the linoleum ***** of a smaller tent,
liking the rubber on our hands.

I’m after the fortune-teller telling me
on the slopes of The Bones, she will say yes.

The tent was cloaked in this rotten perfume.
So smokey, you couldn’t see your hand for your fist.
I was dealt the Queen of Pentacles,
her the Hanged Man.
I watched her nose reflect in the crystal ball.

III

I watched a ghost
depart the dunking stool -
a soul disintegrate
from a Romany curse.

I was dizzied by the strike of a lampshade.
those shoulders I stood on
Were yours.

I rocked as your body was taken away.

IV

The storyteller had the world on his back!
Half Atlas, half time-snail, he was
Sticky with aphorism.

We listened to his TED Talk and when he left
the soil was fertile with prayer…

But nothing grew
til the sweat of the shovel-man
granted the earth some water.

V

Acceptance.
The attendant sprits
Spoke wisdom in
basic steps.
‘One thing at a time’
A stone cracked.
‘One thing at a time’
An Aegean Daemon watched,
A genie whispered…
‘One thing at a time’

VI

‘We’re putty.’
-Sarah stood up in class, obnoxiously-
‘Forged in volcanos, capsules of perfect evolution.
We’re of earth, of mud and rainforest and canyon.
Of the same stuff as moons, the sparkles
across a twilight ocean, the particles
caught in sunbeams. We’re the dust that worked.
We moved towards this... this beautiful complexity.
And you can be anything.’

VII

I drew a smile in lipstick
Across the face in the mirror

VIII

Sewing Machines.
dumpf dumpf dumf
Carolina’s hands.
working the tender silk.
Dumf, dumpf, dumpf,

IX

Ella’s lips around his *****.
David thrusted like a Spartan.
she comes
loudly.

X

I trust, honestly,
I trust what I see with my own two eyes.
I see us infected by Delhi Belly,
the muck from Gangees is flooding the Seine,
the Hudson the Thames.
It’s like the third morning
After one day of snow.
My father’s father
Has been forgotten. 

XI

Brian awoke on another Wednesday
gratefully ******* his gums.
Unlike in his dream
he still had his pearly whites.

XII

The dogwood fire licks his face.
Sunrise through the dense Bitterroot and
Wakan-Tanka.
Breath.
‘There is no separation,
Us and the river.’

I looked into the wisemans face.
Lined.
But all I wanted was to sketch an outline,
and step in to the silhouette of
Someone else.

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.

Pushing through the tourists
the sounds and scents of a bazaar
flood my body,
until I wake up to find it's all a dream.

What madness.

I've pulled away from my bed,
dug my fingernails into the corners of my eyes
and bitten my nails to the dull news that its
12 o'clock and even the ******* trucks have
left their skidmarks on the road behind.

While a yawn fights the tightness in the joins
of my lips i'm embraced by a slow numbness
that's familiar.

It's the rough teeth of another hangover
immune to colgate.
Its another day of shame hanging to my forehead,
sighing a tired ******* to moisturiser.

In the mirror I look like the anti-man and
I feel I should ask
if a gorgon once stared into the same mirror
and left just a stone behind.

I look myself in the anti-man's eyes
and we listen to our mantra -

Be a human.
Cast out the magic
in your fingertips.
Let the dust fly out
and become the Midas
of glitter.

Be a man and beat
the job market, stiffen up
To this pantomime and
through your black eyes  
blink back the sweat
of every empty promise you've ever made .

Be a girl and
dress like you want to
in bodycon and heels.
Lets the long hair fall
down your back
and believe you're pretty.

Please be something,
because I won't I wake up tomorrow
and find its all a dream

I'm just an animal boy.

I  feel the cold granite of my skin.

Un-belonging
Undressed from teenage rhythm.
It’s a yearning for
The lost birds

Whose wings you rode
In talkless flight,
Til the silence got thicker
And woke up

Under the acupuncturist’s shadow.
And it needled it’s point as
Chinese wisdom, or as a well-meaning homeopath.
It dawdled all the same.

And you’re all sat right there.
Submurged. Happy as reflections.
Like an underwater photograph,
Mermaid’s song, gargles

Like the frog in my throat.
Almost Bauhaus, Picasso,
Almost watercolour, a mockingbird’s
Impression of a rock.

It was just
Undiagnosed sickness and I’m
Wading slowly into the sea with
my parents stones in my pocket.

We found a rock looking out over the river
And sat there until the sun went down.

Little bear, tell me our love isn’t bound
by ancient sadness, interred and bland.
Tell me that like this twilight, this brown water, this red sky,
we roll in the world’s performing heartbeat
and clasp life in our childish hands.

Look at me. Our touch is calligraphy.
And we transcribe uniqueness in each other’s skin.
We deliberate on dug out tattoos,
climbing ivy and on pruning the dead-heads,
hallucinating our springtime as scars.

We live like the reeds, the Thames willow
plunged in the pavement drinking at mud.
We turn like the catkins, the knotted branches and
ducks lined in a row. We’re tidal, in a flux
demanded by a drill sergeant moon.

This is a vision of permanence at night
and this vast imagination is an echo.
We perch upon each other,
like sparrows upon the fences of history
Roots in your dress. Your lips sowing.

Nations are being re-sketched by our pencils,
so many have died for a line in the sand.
She’s heard the screech of the *****, the robin’s call to arms
but chooses the sunrise, to roll with the seasons.
In springtime together we reap the hay, its grows again.

I
Here I am, drinking in my local bar.
There's a sadness in the air,
Relaxed,
Aged with the whiskey.
Cheaper.
Guy Fawkes night fireworks
are some forgotten war,
Flash bangs,
We're all in the trenches
Fighting
What exists in the smudged
Moonlight
And ages with the whiskey.

II
I've quit my job -
I hate these walls
I hate the brick dust that sits
Like an ash cloud.
Keep spinning
Catherine wheels, rocket cases
Fall from grace and tell me
Did I love these friends?
Let me hold you
My
Shallow
imprints in the mud.

III
Am I just hungover from
Halloween?
It's macabre.
Melodrama
full of the rich scent of rotting
Dead leaves,
And what the dead leave
Costumes, an ecstasy of
wanting to be watched
touching myself.

IV
I hope they know I love them.

The crows scatter, straw rips through my shirt.
With just one act of violence you can see into my heart, it's
Dog-eared. Life is wire and wood. Old cords, a crucifix.

Is this vigil so lonely?

My days maybe short but they are blessed by sunshine
and starlight. I stand guard over the lunar fields,
of an eternal summer. The cracked earth is yellow,
un-ravaged by sleet and cold.

I may live here stuffed, but I can watch the clambering roots
heave from the soil like shipwrecked men rescued.
I can watch their desperate wells form from wicker earth
and gasp with water, sloshing dirt and clay to a molten relief.

I may stand stock and pelted by time
but I can watch the field mouse nest,
Such quivering babies, curled and blind emerge
and embark on the bravest of lives.

But even so, 
despite what i can see, 
I once got caught in phantom flight,
and forgot how still I was.
Because I was the crows,
lifted,
though my feet were still
just wood
nailed to the dirt.  

When I was toppled and the harvest was done,
I looked up and the moon was
grieving.

I nicknamed you. Kichimoto.

After a demon, radioactive, samurai hypno-bunny.
I think it's why I'm falling in love with you.

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 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.

I
Little bear

My Red Indian girl
approaches with
Sun waves behind her.
Rays broken on
wheat sheaf, brown
pollen flies, dither,
vulture on cut poppy heads.

Hands gently brush
bull rush, torches
of an ancient fire
That burns, that burns
the curling hearts of ferns.

‘I want to meet you there
My love,
Who stares
at the sky
like a
Sun flower.'

II

Scorched earth

The holy fire
that licks from your
Irish mouth. The
Catholic words,
that spill from your
holy spirit.
Hang in the air
like ragged linen
on a ***** child.

‘My empty boy,
Let me slip my hands
Under your gas mask
And kiss the chlorine from your mouth,’

III

We are the Sun Warriors

when we're together.

strung out,
drugged up,
lovers of light,
lovers of the summer
Drought and bubble mud.

‘I want, I want
our stitched up hearts.
And when we’re gone, please let us lie
In a heathen space
and find our heaven in the sky.’

IV

The Sun

That ****** spot,
Blinks.
Gods eye though
screamed at
gives no reply.    

That ****** spot
blinks
in a empty sky
I opened my heart to god
and heard you reply.

'Dave, I'm afraid.'

'I'm afraid Dave'

We heard the monolith
drone - the time was up.
we needed to evolve from
apes.

Artificial intelligence
made me loose track of what was alive.

But it hurt
how HAL sang until he was
Disconnected.

'I still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.'

In a stirring river,
Garrotted by mud and each rusted carcass
dumped over the slow years -
The dredgers cut down
And saw the metal of a woman,
A frothy corruption, naked, open.
They prized her from the mire and saw the city
through the eyes of the sewer.

The Lady from the Thames.
Her skin broke when she flopped on board.
-

Caved in by the tumbling sky
and the air, dry like leather,
Caught in his throat.
The Kilburn high-rise walls peeled like fingers
and the cogs clicked to fast to bite back.
He turned to the sepia city
like new life
And looked for her.

River of time elapsed
churning up memory
Each gallon lurches grit and rot.
trolley and corpse shudder
Forward, backward.
Teasing in smashed bottle

She was young once.
Looked just like her mum.
'What a muddy little angel you are,
What a muddy little angel you are.'
Til the glitz, the cracking lips
bet on kindness.
'I remember being a girl -
I waited for my mother every morning -
She was smiling and never sad.'

The sunken root scratches for life
Underneath vast, forgotten hangers.
The widow maker sheds her bark
and keep pace with the smog.
Sees what we all don't know.
Lives where we all can't see.
In a squealing Kings cross they met,
He led her to a room with broken windows
and one swinging bulb,
She wasn't scared.

Dank Amazon.
The roots intertwine with wires
sprawling grip for sulking glass tress.
'I'm a cruel joke don't you see?'
As her eyes slowly rolled
'I'm sorry'
As her fist unclenched
'It sorry'
As her knees went limp
'I'm sorry'.

Belted up, un-silent night
Screeching myre, gridlocked light,
He left her in the silt
And to the sound of screaming vans,
Runs rabbit down the hole
The hiss 187, 187 from the radio.
Alive in neon puddles that shatter
Under his pounding feet.
-

It was her who the dredgers found and
As looked to her form and
As they looked to her cuts
They thought that
She was the river.
Just another smashed bottle,
Un-watered.

Trudging along, a weary man feels the molten earth **** him in
and take the stress away from another footstep .
The soaking sun and broad horizon are the insurmountables
And its neither hot nor cold, on this mud road, just long.
Over peaks, troughs and snow and storm.
On rain through desert, on plain and thunder.
Anno dommini and after.
The shade from trees planted on the road and the fruit they bare.
Respite, but will be picked and rot.
And the earth will **** him in. One footstep at a time.

When you capture a pinprick of light
And let it glitter in your hand
the seconds you can keep it burning
Are so much more precious
than
       what
comes
        after.

After months spent counting raindrops
On two panes of glass,
We met in a twisted café
full of young women
And I swallowed my tongue.
and hoped I could listen
To you talk
of the ropes round your hands
When all I needed was time.
of your dreams and your plans.
When I
      just
wasn't
       Fine.

I saw you cycle away.
The silhouette of you, black under streetlight.
Is my dreams every day.
       Yet a part of me knew
It was just
   a silhouette
     of you.
And id spent far too long
      chasing shadows.

The ghost of a dying flame is
Smoke that exists for a second.
    But it explodes into
          something
  Brighter.

There was this pupae
living in my mouth.
It grew into a chrysalis.
Turned to mush then
reconstructed in a shell.
When it comes out
will it be a butterfly?
Or will it be more like
The Silence of the Lambs.

The river wrestles on with
light-bulb's furrow
and the iron song of the evening
bathing the air in life.
I feel London's homeward
beating
hearts.

The summer moon is a dim lamp
as we walk from Kew Bridge to yours.

Though the quiet
hangs off you so unnaturally.
It's rattled your breath,
left your mind to move on silence.

I also know how world can be too much,
but unlike you I cope with my words,
that I use as photographs
of times when when I felt
there were feelings worth remembering.

still we walk and
I think of the Thames as a
great, grey, mother of us.
How it forged what we have,
set in motion our hearts.

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.

I stuck to my chair.
James Stewart, Rear Window.
Curtain twitching.

Then Grace Kelly swanned in
In that unbelievable dress.
And Hitchcock made a cameo
As a fat man.

So I turned away from the window
And started watching you.

The furrows are drying
in a woodlouse summer.
Each quiet year proves
they were inexpertly dug.

Empty eye sockets
the flowerbeds shrivel
and each tulip bulb is just
a useless *******.

Earthworks crumble into riverbanks,
the defective rock
dances bed-ward.
The clay browns the water.

In the dusty corridors of sunlight
we are the balled up
little hedgehog
late for the earthworm

and the screen-saver, bouncing
but never touching the corner.
I’ve sat dumb and still as
words dwindle on a screen.

Somewhere else hands delve
into crowns of sticky, soaked poppy.
Wet and soft they stink
of sugar.

Liberated calves with
liberated hoofs gambol in mud
and rough tongues
curl on apple picking fingers.

Slugs glisten
With fairy-tale arrogance.
Happy and fat in a giant’s
vegetable patch.

Somewhere else the smell of low-tide
isn’t a crusting of salt,
seagulls, ******* and
a reminder of torpid shallows

but profound ovulation.
Nesting puffins, shearwaters,
an ocean view cottage.
Shepard’s peachy sky.

Summer is willing. Keep calm.
Count her freckles.
I’ve walked through the forest
seen hearts in trees.

Bark grows, gold stars roll
and the guileless acolyte,
not hungry but dry
bends over a keyboard

and counts an orchard’s
wealth in slushy apples.
Mud and sand on the carpet.
Eyes sticky and red. Not black.

What comes after?

I caught brilliant light in my hand
Are seconds it shone more precious
than what comes after?

           'Will I be rich?
               Will I be poor?
                 You can't fall further
                   Than flat on the floor'

I held her hand,
I held her.
I gave everything I had
I held her.
I loved like nothing before.
I held her.
I would have given the world but
I held her
back.

               'In Yorkshire they ask
              Where there's muck there's brass
           But what's brass coated in such
        A volume of muck.'

What comes after?

I'm lucky I found some sunshine.
Some brilliant light.

              Heaven knows
                Where it goes.
                  
The ghost of a flame
Exists
For a second

I hope it explodes
Into something
Bigger.

We share a dim squint at eat each other
interrupted, rudely by your phone
I slither my hand down your chest,
rub you til the snooze alarm.

Our legs, once locked together
ungratefully untangle as I roll left
you roll right.
I make tea as you shower.

As you pick the dust from my eyes
and I complain,
the morning's hysteria hits us
and everything's funny.
And you're so beautiful.

Lying back I watch you dress
smoothing down your top,
wriggling into jeans.
When you're done,
I'll pull you back down,
undo all the hard work.
And ******* before you leave.

'You looking at me?'

I knew she was.
There was no secret in those dull cow eyes
So I went in armed
and shot her through the heart.

Like Travis Buckle
I came out a hero?

Father left a sword and a lamb, like only he can,
They hang on a wall like nothing at all.
Like they were nothing at all, just things on a wall.

The boy with a pen, in a hollowed out crypt, he sits.
He doesn't know when he plucked his first gray.
He sits there all day. With nothing to say.

The lines on her crown penciled by her frown
'The world moved much faster today,'
I say, 'did the world move much faster today.'

Stones leave beautiful news, we leave you some dust,
And even great columns all crack, like the small of a back.
we leave you some dust.

The Sunflowers drop seeds like their heavy and sick.
They're picked over by crows, then sprout over bones,
That found out forevers a trick.

Will the world look so beautiful again
as sunset through a broken window?

With greasy hands I try
to capture youth as
a leech with a camera.

Will the light fall on her face, like it did
in the festival - like it did
when her eyes caught the sun.

I don’t like myself when I’m awake.

I, in the absence of dreams where the coaster spins
and the smell of sugared doughnuts lingers,
was the sweaty hands in hers.
Wet knees, wet boxers, wet grass
Backs to the sunset and skyline high on
plasterboard roofs, spotted chimneys. The fire and
the smell, the screech of the tubetrain -
the squirm from the darkness.
Gravel tracks, picking away the small stones
from pinkish tramlines on her thighs.
The tightness of her skirt on her knees, glitter eyed,
blush eyes, fosters cans stamped in the bush,
Bad ****, every bad smell-
the light we see is
plugholed but free from the sewer.
Sewered but free in the ocean.

Love bottler, the skinny fingered
Love bottler. I stamped on the cans.

I don’t like myself when I’m awake.
Dreaming the sickness of my thoughts.
Memory-sick, it hurts til it doesn’t.

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.