To see art as a way of life, to see it like the blood running through your veins.
To see creating like eating or drinking, creating passions for people to remember.

Will it be worth it? Will it be worth it to be passionate every day,
Even if people won’t see you, cause you’re not in a movie. You’re not seen.

That is not what passion is about. It isn’t about how many people will know you were, Passionate.

beggared on this taunted key
her eyes, benighted, smashed and hollowed,
no longer descry the encirclement
of strapping glass and steel

thus cowered beneath such plumb hauteur,
she finds herself now wimpled in
a creeping green
while her walls bleed of a jealous neglect

where flaked façade like dandruff drips
and grumbling brick works effloresce,
into her winter’s final stupor
there she rancorously slips

for who could love her now?

those weeds grown long around her feet?

yet still we look

through the fog
through the trees
through the dearth of honey bees to where
the dewdrops sit, like sugared spit,
upon this old maid’s bristled lip

I knocked the black
door knocker
on Janice's nan's door
and her nan answered

and said
o hello Benedict
Janice can't come out
she let the canary out

and we had
a hell of  a job
getting it back
in the cage again

so I'm keeping her in
I was going
to tan her backside
but I thought

keeping her in
was more
of a punishment
on a day like this

o right
I said
looking at Nan's eyes
and her greying hair

and unsmiling face
but you can come in
and see her
for a few minutes

shame that you
have to be
without her though
so she walked

back up the passage
and into the sitting room
where Janice
was sitting on a settee

looking disgruntled
it's Benedict
come to see you
he is only staying

for a few minutes
so don't think
you can go out
because you can't

Janice nodded
and looked tearful
and her nan walked off
into the kitchen

I didn't mean
to let the bird out
I just opened
the cage door

to get it to stand
on my finger
but it flew out
and it to ages

to catch it again
and Nan was so angry
that she was
on the border

of giving a smacking
but then she thought
keeping me in
was more

of a punishment
so here I am
on a lovely warm day
sorry about that

I said
where are you going?
she asked
I was going to Jail Park

on the swings and slide
I said  
I see
she said

looking at me sadly
what have you got
in the bag?
I opened the bag

it's that Robin Hood book
I bought it
in that junk shop
on the New Kent Road

she held it
and opened it up
and looked
at the words

and  pictures
maybe next time
I can be
your Maid Marian

to your Robin Hood
she said
yes
I said

looking
at the canary
in its cage
that'd be good.

shadows slow

to the point where only the wine matters

they stop and watch awhile wondering,
"today"?
perpetual Sundays denounce tomorrow across a fictional bridge,
constricting as a pulmonary sigh, though even the laziest of walks would suffice to sluice a cleaner way

but I jaw the sky from where I lay, expect that it should change into a major key,

corroborate my sickest dreams and mimic mouthed mischief



and I lie in many more ways
dreary under the prescription of nervous attendance


beyond the arctic eye, the blue skied sighs
stare through the Artex topography of childhood
behind the curtains patterned with glimpsed bears,

at best,
at worst the horror of a dead childhood friend

amongst the machine drawn memories
a path beyond the puddled neon jigsaws might lead me

to a closed set where the gentlemanly objects of debauched and thrilled robberies decline

while stretched behind the soft reach of a silken knee,

a nyloned thigh
the plainest lips pose the riddle

that entertains your pity
yet ***** all hope of a shy siege and leave me hints

in kiss shaped welts,

roses smeared like lipstick misses,
somehow innocent in the routine of predicament
then parcelled into dreams of hyena logic

I am of a mind
that, in winter, the oxygen levels
decline as the trees hunch
like upturned, diseased lungs
breathless and malign

(Me) With hair of cotton candy & bird's nests
(You) Sticks for legs
(Me) Pieces of glass in my knee cap
                   in the curve of my cheek
(You) Bleeding heart, it's getting all over
                                the carpet

Holding you close with your lips against mine, is an ecstasy i haven't felt in a while.

This valley, belly and backboned
a blanket of snow - stitched and gone
textured trees, willows wind blown
here where an early moon heaven still hovers
here amid the last smoking sky of cold
a chirping of morning birds unfolds
singing a gleeful goodbye to the moon night
winging before the sunrise
the blooming of daffodil springtime
and too, wisteria tangled vines will climb
reach for the calm of violet skies.