One day
Someone will invent the word for books which are beautiful and hurtful and hateful at the same time
Bibliomortem
And one day
Someone will invent the word for the taste of cheese on toast
Caseusromanorum
And one day
Someone will invent the word for being too many different things to be anything because there is no one person that you are sure you can be and no one aspiration that you’re sure you can keep
Multimendacium
And one day
Someone will invent the word for saying promises when you know you can’t keep them but want to be able to
Fenusaccipiepromissum
And one day
Someone will invent the word for the point at the end of laughter when you’ve nothing left to give and a silence still to fill
Risustrangulare
And one day
Someone will invent the cure for loneliness
Bibliomortem

Six a.m. and the morning leans
To kiss the night;
The streets are full of stars
And sleepwalking business suits

The citrus woman
With peroxide blonde hair
And peroxide blonde fingers
If she spoke I imagine it would sound
Like lemon trees and smoke
Her cigarette burns holes in the sky
But when she passes me by
She smells like the Boots Cosmetics Isle
She paints the yellowed-ivory
Of her finger-claws
With crystallised orange
To cover the nicotine stains
And maybe I think I recognise
My lemonade shampoo
And tangerine hand wash
Like a setting sun over Sicily

The beer can boy
With stuffed up hair
And a stuffed up liver
He’s grey like a November playground
Once all the children have grown
And he’s hole-punched right through
I might think he was heart-broken
And trying to see how many other lost souls
The bottoms of bottles hold
If he wasn’t here every morning
Lolling down the pavement
Like a spring stretched too far
Asking for a paper
That I’m not allowed to give
And trying to drown himself
In the pooled rain under the streetlights

The coat-and-cardie bundle
With wind-swept hair
And wind-swept grimace
Like a tornado tore up
The geography of her personality
And left it with just a bike and a death wish
And those features heaped together
Between chimney-tops and table tops
For consolation
Her feet on the pedals while her hair throttles
Because she’s unlit
Unseen, unprotected
And she rides like this morning is the last
As if she knows that skulls
Crack like eggshells sometimes
And handlebars are sometimes not in front of you.

If my Dad was here he’d see
A smoker
A drunk
A dangerous cyclist
But I see lemon zest and love hearts and black liquorish
After all I’m at home
Among these mistakes
That the morning hours make

I write poems like they are going out of fashion.

If ‘realism’ was real
Speech marks would be full of ‘likes’ and ‘*****’
And empty of punctuation.
Sentences would extinguish themselves
And flaw themselves
And slip
Mid-way.
The characters wouldn’t take it in turns
They’d be yelling across the pages
On top and entangled in each other
Like lovers.

I mislaid myself one November morning
Took three months to claw me back
Searched every corner of a blistering dark
Scoured the pavements crack by crack

Spooled the night with a microscope lens
And then rummaged under the bed
Tried to push out those other girls
Who’d instated themselves in my head

Latched myself into my writing
Handcuffed myself to my keys
Fed off the damp of my poetry-drip
Then relocated myself with ease.

04:14 and the shadows are long
A boy pressed into a rail-side bench
Raises his arms to shelter himself
From the cloudless sky
He ticks off seconds with the twitch of his left knee
And the jump of his unhinging jaw
He falls
He falls nowhere
But flat, back, motionless in his seat
Hands cocooning head like a heavy day’s work
And then digging up and pressing down
Trying to rid himself of the sounds
Which splice him like glass shards
Or screaming shrapnel
And mutilate
His view of a pretty English station
And a blue steam engine
Beaming like the moon for which it was named
04:18 and he sets himself straight
Like ***** shoelaces
Or cards on the mantelpiece
Winds a bit of string
Around his wedding finger
And croons
As a man inside a toddler
Re-wired refrains
Lick his lips like soup stains
       Pack up your troubles…
                Long way to Tipperary…
        In your old kit bag…
                                 I wonder who’s…
                My heart’s right there…
                                 Kissing her now…
         Smile, smile, smile…
And from my compartment
I watch him fade like
An ink blot from a pillow case
While a boy who looks a lot like him
Turns with purposeful avoidance
And takes the opposite view
Of a pretty English station
He soothes the angry creases
Of his forehead
Of his uniform
And smiles
Smiles
Smiles
And mutters to himself
And they said it would be over by Christmas
04:14 and the shadows are long
A boy pressed into a rail-side bench
Jogs his knees
With the obligatory poppy
His mum pushed into the zip of his winter coat
Drooping like a hangnail
He is busied and hassled
By the phone in his palm
It plays an odd kind of game
Where those who die
Are allowed to come back
And press *Retry

they lived
like the only customers at a funfair;
weeks caroselling
with swollen rise and fall,
like the horses forgot
to gallop in circles.
they had their own world
of haunted houses
and helter-skelters
but the stalls were all out
of candyfloss
and, as they slotted coins
into cork-rifles,
they shot themselves
to pieces
without winning
a single prize.