I feel like the storm's passed
The battle's over, and
we just have to wait for the flowers to grow back out of the explosion craters.
We'll see if they grow back nicely
or if the lead poisons them from the soil upwards.

Do you love the flowers?
Will you water them when they need it?
If it doesn't rain for a week or so, they might need watering
and they'll always, always need sunshine

That was the best banana of my life.
The skin was thin and brown and weak.
It peeled away, bark off a copper birch.
The flesh was white, light and fluffy
Cotton wool and candyfloss
sweet like candyfloss but I'm glad it was a banana because I don't like too much sugar in the morning

I like sitting by the river
The white noise
The constant running
The seamless flow
Floating
Music of wildlife
Stones smoothed and softened by timeless, endless current
The water reflects the world.
The sun and the trees and the reeds and the rocks
are all mirrored in the warbling surface
which carries the lightest twigs
and absorbs the heaviest timber.
Waves break easily against any obstacle, yet continue to glide eternally downstream
For water is delicate, but the river never stops.
One seagull stands proudly on a lone rock in the middle of the river and glares upstream, its breast glowing white and its tail flowing grey.
Fish flit in and out of sight.
The creatures of the river are as sleek as their watery habitat.
The tiniest bubble floats over the water in front of me and bursts.
Even that tiny bubble left ripples on the surface of the mighty river, humble, ageless and alive.

What's the smallest living being on earth?
a graduate of music school
First class degree won with some leeway
but that can't pay for my MOT, no way
four hundred and thirty seven quid and 26p to pay
for new suspension ball joints and wishbone, wiper blades and an emission test pass grade
and now my car has scraped a "pass with defects"
I hope someone made a wish as the old bone cracked
as they took it to the tip with the entire contents of my bank account
I wish I was back home again, scared to answer the phone again
but now every phone call I'm praying for a gig.  

For nine grand a year I wonder how well she would do in the next few tests
if she'd have a long career ahead after a short rest or if she would still be run into the ground,
one day kicking the bucket at 90 miles an hour on the M4 back to Cardiff; I recently found
she won't quite make it to one hundred.
One hundred miles an hour!
Such power, so close, but no cigars for me any more - I can't even afford to smoke rollies.
When I'm seventy I'll start again
whether I want to or not, I need that one lifetime guarantee.
If I make it to seventy.
Hopefully boredom, rejection and ******* aren't causes of early mortality.

What are you meant to do today
Sit quietly and enjoy the view, to pay
your dues and wait patiently for improvement
while so many ants scuttle on by,
Talking and biting and lighting cigarettes
and I lie in my bed and I fret
about all the things that don't matter
like why are we here?

Who are you meant to be, and
what's the purpose behind your story?
Weak poetry makes the world go round.
That and people not getting enough sleep.
I can't remember who I was or who I am going to be.
I'm the one that won't make it
because I'm the one without a dream,
like my father before me,
no passion, no cool,
no fashion, just school and work and pension funds
stepping up each rung of the ladder
but you fall off and dunno what to do
because now the whole ******* ladder's fallen on top of you.
Weak poetry makes the world go round
and lonely singers in lonely bars
with their hands on their hearts and their eyes on the stars
because it's a star that makes the earth go round.
Magnets and the sun or something like that
Dinosaurs and satellites and bureaucrats
and peace and war and what's for dinner tonight and all of that
and none of that matters.

I don't know where I'm going with this
I'm waiting and writing until I can get ******,
when I run out of antibiotics
and have successfully quit the deathsticks
85 per cent of throat cancer is caused by smoking
but so was 85 per cent of my good moods
so now I have to choose if I'd rather be happy and die
or live long and sigh and cry after every meal.
Eat and breathe and believe
that weak poetry makes the world go round
because I'm full of it.
I'm full of **** but at least I'm full of something.

Dwelling, I feel forlorn.
I mourn for the lost thoughts
escaping like breath from the corner of your mouth when you stifle a yawn in the sun.
I think for the bottles of beer
lost at sea,
cold but empty, liquor drunk and lost, your bottle stands sentry,
proudly holding a message as it bobs over waves,
it sails for the marooned it's trying to save.
Inside, a note.
Outside, the glass reflects the clouds as it floats beneath them.
I sit with the marooned in the sun and watch the clouds -
shapes like animals, worlds in the sky glimpsed for a moment and lost -
melting away like frost in the sun.
I think for myself as I lounge.
Like frost in the sun, I melt into the ground and it cradles me,
shape of my body pressed in the sand.
Soon to be washed away,
with these thoughts dwelling in the sun, I stifle a yawn, and I open another beer.

I'm a pendulum
Slowly swinging one way and another.
Always destined to be opposite,
Always almost touching one extreme or the another.
I long for the dull thud of metal on wood.
I remember as a child playing with the brass pendulum of my parents' clock. Interfering.

I'm a cuckoo cuckoo.
In my cuckoo clock.
Popping in and out.
Hidden inside or on full, crude display,
Chirping away,
But never will I not be the other,
In time.

I am the weather,
My own seasons,
A planet orbiting its sun,
Ever-changing, always running,
Spinning, dizzying, ever busying Myself but never getting to the sun.
Never knowing true dark or true light,
Only the insistent tick tock of day and night.
Regimented, regular dawns and dusks.
Waiting for the next change of scene
Wondering what it would mean to reach the sun,
Wanting to let the cuckoo break loose of its small, wooden case.

too many fingers in too many pies
so far apart my body is torn trying to reach them all
and now I am dead

Uninvited visitor
Black-eyed burglar
Shadow dweller
Nimble sprinter
Able contortionist.

Cheap, common yet
Generous
disease giver
Innocent troublemaker
Thief and scrounger
Bin searcher
Test subject.

Extreme sport enthusiast of my kitchen, bedroom and balcony
Sleep depriver
Olympic diver
Racecar driver with claws for wheels.
I'm not your pit crew, so please find your meals elsewhere,
Silent sniffler.
Constant nibbler
Unwelcome visitor
Gatecrasher!
And he brought a plus one, cheeky sod.
Wherever he goes,
He's pursued always by that faithful worm.

Today I walk home alone.
This is unusual.
I look at those who pass the other way.
I hear snippets of what they say.

Three girls -
"'Cos am a student, yeah, it's like, at the front of my mind, it's always, like, money"
- on a night out.

Front of your mind? It's BACK.

I wonder what's in mine.
I've been talking to God a lot.
He gives me answers.
I've
       forgotten a lot
of the French I learned at school.
I'd try harder if I had those classes again
     now.
Would you?

Your French might be perfect.

Adieu.

You are infinitely colourful,
Touching the ground in two places.
Sometimes more,
Sometimes less.
I welled up when I saw you
and climbed a mountain
- I couldn't see you through the grey
but I was closer
You were with me
My brothers, the sheep,
Who knows how your colour,
Your beauty,
Touched their hearts,
if it lingers as it does in mine.
Rain and hail may erode, in time,
the rainbow at the back of my mind,
but they didn't on that day and they haven't since.

Yesterday the snow!
On the ground crunching like a good apple
Pasted on the trees like moss,
Painted upon each limb, some Bob Ross
Magic, white hill, white trees,
Pure sun, makes even the breeze glow!
Trees drop snow like the leaves
of last season, little by little,
and it falls to gently settle
in the back of my mind with you.

Warmth and colour,
the miracle of my summer,
Rest and play in the back of my mind
With the perfect winter's day,
Never to melt or fade into grey.

What a pity
What shame
Sand and grit
are in my teeth.

I need to know
what's in your head
I can't trust
Do you have a toothbrush?

I have one
It works well
when I use it,
and I feel good.

But my teeth get *****
more than twice a day.
Yours could too.
I would know
if ever you flashed me a smile.

I've got some cheese and onion crisps
Half a packet of strawberry bonbons
And a kitkat that might have got wet on Crinkle Crags

I can't remember
the last time I saw my grandma
Or recall ever towering above her delicate, motherly body telling her I love her.

"It wouldn't have been the same without you"
"No, it wouldn't"
"In many ways"

I wonder what my dad meant by that
He likes to talk
And say nothing at all.

Man on the train furiously widens his eyes
At the piles of suitcases spewing from the rack
And curls his lips

Keith pouts like donald trump
So do I
Maybe it's genetic

I've got my grandma's genes too
She doesn't mind if I pout like donald trump
But she never liked bruce forsyth (who died last week)

Or maybe
The week before
"I've been watching strictly"

My older brother
Pulls out of the suffocating tar pit
Something nonflammable

I wonder what he meant by it
He likes to talk
He likes to say what matters

But what matters to him
And what matters to me
Isn't what matters to him

I've got a quarter of a packet of strawberry bon bons
And a kit kat that might have got wet on Cringle Crags

I carried a lady's suitcase
Over the bridge and
Back when the platform changed

She rewarded me
With information about herself
And I am grateful for that

She helped me
As simply and easily as I helped her
She gave me a smile to keep

What mattered to her,
Funny Welsh stranger,
Mattered to me
We swapped smiles
And walked off in brand new shoes.

Winter begins to wrap her cool limbs around mine.
Age-old enchantress
Stark and pure
Dressed all in blue, silver and white,
She opens the door on summer and slowly her presence fills the place.

The trees hold clawing fingers outstretched.
Summer is slipping away.
It's time to spread your emerald shawl on the ground;
Lay a brown, orange and red carpet for our honoured guest.

Age-old enchantress
Stark and pure
She has opened the door on summer and slowly her presence is filling the place.

I'm like a bird, I want to fly away.
Wrapped in a billowing yellow silk scarf
which shines gold in the light of day.

Perched on a tree branch, face the horizon.
Hope and sunlight glimmer reflected in
each determined eye which widens.  

Ruffled feathers are my warm, windswept hair.
I will leap into the sky, stretching high
To glide through the air if I dare.
  
Music from Cape Town, a bird's song my ears
spread their wings and feel the song's lift beneath
and sing sweet as the horizon nears.

I am a  bird and as I fly away
wrapped in my billowing yellow silk scarf
I shine gold in the light of day.