Towers burn and
the graves give up
their dead.  
Biblical science.
Too hot to protest about
climate change.
Good Friday ghosts
clank chains in Westminster.
Lady Liberty's ****
fondled by tiny orange hands.
Nail bombs, acid and
vehicular homicide.
Armed police guarding Starbucks.
The vanishing hope of
finding a cure, or
even getting a doctor’s appointment.
Bees disappearing and
rivers running dry.
Refugees vilified, oligarchs welcome.
Fox playing
the most gorgeous HD footage
of The End Of Days.
Rage and no rage.
Fake news and alternative facts.
The criminalisation
of irony.
Inevitable Quisling betrayal.
Nihilism as a punchline.

Time to birth yourself
from the
Womb of the Echo Chamber,
maybe?
Please stop trying to pretend
that anything about this
is normal.

Brew tragedy tea
and drink without
tasting it.
Keep checking the meaning of
'forever',
in case it's been redefined
in less absolute terms.
Shiver through the heatwave and watch
the colour bleed out of the summer.
Dig a hole that won't be deep enough.
Shower off the crazy sweat and grave dirt
and pretend like maybe
you'll do the dishes.
Rupture your inner workings
as you scream at the universe
for ******* up so badly.
Lapse into the cold, sterile embrace
of catatonia, grateful
to feel nothing for a while.
Cry so long and so hard you forget
why you're crying,
then remember and cry
longer and harder.
Try brokering a deal with fate's
Appeals Department: offer
your organs, your eyesight,
however many years off your life,
to get him back.
Search for meaning and find none.
Rage against the perversity of it all.
Howl that death shouldn't feel derivative.
Remind yourself that this
isn't just a sick joke.
Hate Elisabeth Kübler-Ross for being right
and yourself for being so generically human.
Realise how little
knowing helps.
Reacquaint yourself with anhedonia.
Try not to hate the blue sky
or the birds who have returned
to sing in his back garden.

Whenever I
find myself
back on the Mainland,
there'll be at least
three, four,
maybe
half a dozen
silently heart-stopping
little moments
when I
see someone who
might just
be who you
are now.

Eyes reluctantly open.
Almost daylight.
Panicky cockroach scuttle
inside my skull.
A gutful of wasps
and the imagined ticking
of a very real clock.
Never been a morning person,
but this is something else.
Vague chest pains in the
watery sun.  An inconsequential
aching sort of roughly
where my heart should be.
*****, used fly paper sky and
every in-drawn breath saturated
with chemicals and
not really trying.

Considering the possibility
I might drop dead any second.
Shrug.
It seems unlikely that
the morning
will prove so
interesting.

Believing you're in love
does not excuse all the
stupid, ******-up **** you do
to punish her for not
loving you.  You're
not entitled to
romantic reciprocity, no matter
what a lifetime of
bad movies and TV may
have taught you, and
your love was ******* to
begin with, as evidenced by
its sublimation into hate
at the moment she
- as gently as possible -
rejects you.
Believing you're in love
does not justify
any of your
stupid, ******-up behaviour:
a **** move
is still a
**** move.

The sick part is, for the
longest time, you'll be the one
who'll feel wounded, and
she'll be the one who'll
feel guilty.  She'll
eventually learn better.  
You probably never will.

Heavy clouds threaten the
bankrupt horizon like
bad book reviews.
The bottom line looms
ugly and final
under everything.
There's no money
in trying to be
a decent human being.
Evil makes good
investments, amasses
a robust stock portfolio.
Getting by is
hard enough.
Any day now,
those *******
will find a way
to tax sunlight.

The rain follows me as
I walk uphill.  Ahead of me, it's
bright and dry, but the rain
keeps pace perfectly, falling
only on the backs of my shoulders, and
somehow,
this is not a metaphor.

There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.
I am an aberration, as you know.
I never promised you a villanelle.

You cannot trap the ocean in a shell.
You feed the roses blood to make them grow.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.

It does get bumpy on this carousel.
The ride is all extremes of high and low.
I never promised you a villanelle.

I was the aberration, you could tell.
I ******* my neuroses in a bow.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.

I think it's safe to say you know me well
in all my many masks, but even so
I never promised you a villanelle.

Let me pin my ragged heart to your lapel.
If it's truly what you need, I'll let you go.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.
I never promised you a villanelle.