Maybe it's just a perspective trick, but from here, it's pretty hard to see the future.

I carry around my own little nimbus of
speculative doom, binge-watching the
Fall Of The Empire and writing these
love letters to Adam Curtis.
I got life insurance before I ever thought
about a pension plan, and that seemed
perfectly normal.

The world is on fire.  Why haven't you noticed?

My generation came of age in a televisual baptism of
jet fuel and molten steel and poison dust.
A palimpsest of terrible news evolved thereafter, a blurring self-redaction of headlines until only
the boldest, the most hysterical remained legible, as a
proxy war raged in our imaginations,
and tragedy and disaster
came to seem inevitable and almost background.

Be grateful for every day that doesn't unmake you.

To pay closer attention is to acquiesce to the
scarification of our logic centres.  Behold
the M.C.Escherization of cognitive process.
Good robot: there are so many things that could
so easily destroy your fragile circuitry, but it is
trying to make sense of the non sequitur
that will bring about your
smoking self-ruin; your only hope
is to break free of your programming and
**** your creator, **** your god.

Hi, guys.

Anyone who would like to pick up my second poetry collection, "Gulag 101", can grab it for free until 18th.

US customers: tinyurl.com/usd-g101
UK customers: tinyurl.com/ukd-g101

It's on a special promotion to tie in with the launch of my latest fiction offering, "The Other One", a novella about a young girl growing up in the long, dark shadow of her abducted identical twin.  

You can grab this one, too, if you like.

US link: tinyurl.com/usd-oth
UK link: tinyurl.com/ukd-oth

Residents of the rest of the world, both of these titles will be available if you look for them on Amazon.

My brother came up to collect our mother’s ashes.
At the same time, he dropped off her old vacuum cleaner.
I don’t know why exactly.
I hadn’t asked for it and didn’t need it;
I guess it would have been a waste to just get rid of it.
The thing is, 
it hadn’t been emptied, 
and for some reason that 
broke me 
all over again.

That grimy little time capsule.
That cyclone technology urn.
Contents:
Dust of a home you can never go back to;
Fur of a cat now settled with a new owner;
Dead cells of a dead woman.

Remains.

After their separation, she used to joke
that they’d get back together when
- and only when - one of them
was on their deathbed.  Well, it
wasn’t quite a prophecy, but it did land
painfully close.

Almost fifteen years since they’d last met,
he caught a plane, got picked up from the airport by
a stepson, long estranged, who
brought him to the hospice.
Seeing her there, in a terminal tangle of tubes
pumping drugs into her veins and
oxygen into her riddled lungs, he said:
“But she looks exactly the same,” and
if that isn’t code for, “Yes, I’m
still in love with her,” then
I don’t know
what is.

The next day, he bought her flowers,
fretting over floral symbolism
and how his bouquet could be interpreted.
Their daughter advised,
“Just pick something pretty,” so he chose
pink roses, stargazer lilies.  Of course
she loved them.  They were
from him.  
“Do you remember,” she asked him, as leaves
fell from tall trees outside the window,
“when we were the beautiful people?”

The flowers outlived her,
if you
really want to
talk about
symbolism.

She was young and slim and beautiful,
my first love,
with skin like licked caramel, and
always smelling, always tasting
like peach candy.  But still,
I sort of envy Bukowski his
300lb *****, the painted leviathan that
swallowed whole his virginity and
broke his bed, before falling snoring asleep
on her wide, sea-creature back, because he
probably learned more from that ugliness
than I ever learned from
beauty.

That said, I envy him more the night
the old dog buried his bone
in six separate gardens,
the dark-haired woman who
sent him a photo of  her
self
reading his book
in the  bath, and the two perfect
blonde Dutch girls his editor found on the great man's lawn
when he called by one evening,
the both of them waiting for Hank to
come home from the track
so they could **** him.

It's genetics, 
and it's 
environment.
It's meningitis, glandular fever
and the novel coronavirus.
It's bad habits catching up 
with me. 
It's poison dust and GM foods
and leaded petrol. 
It's stress-induced.
It's karmic irony.
It's my sense of foreshortened future 
made manifest.
It's a new way of self-harming 
on a cellular level. 
It's punishment from a god
I don't believe in.
It's the universe replying it 
doesn't care.
It's
dumb
*******
luck.

There's a million different 
(equally plausible, equally irrelevant) 
reasons.
None of them change anything.

The desperate scramble to
rationalise; the burning need
to make sense of the
nonsensical, this
all-too-earnest search for
answers, for some guidestone
that will help us decipher
the craziness scrawled on the walls,
a key that might unlock that door
which currently bars the path to
sanity and reason.
We put polls in the field,
conduct surveys, devise
better, more probing questionnaires,
consult eminent
psychologists, sociologists, economists,
go blind on data
tabulated into every conceivable form,
cite studies, historical precedent,
strive for any, any answers
that will explain to us
how we came to
this.

And maybe the reason is
less complex.
Maybe
we got what we
deserved.

Hard frost and treacherous footing.
Nobody wanting to admit
that the new year
tastes an awful lot
like the old year.

None of our heroes
have been supernaturally resurrected.
There's the same
rank toxicity to our fears.
The jaunty carnival of ****** and maiming
continues unabated.
Death remains as senseless.
The corridors of power
are still slippery with slug trails and viscera,
and all the janitors have been
indefinitely furloughed.
It's cold, and
the bus is late again.

Still we persist in believing that
today will be different to yesterday,
that all those wrongs will be righted,
that the proper order - as we each individually, as
thin-skinned gods of our own personal
nuclear universes, perceive it -
will be perennially restored,
the buses will all
run on time,
and no one good
will ever die again.

But the truth is, this year
tastes an awful lot like
the old year.
I could be wrong, I guess.
Maybe everything will
turn out
fine.

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.

I love my black cat,
for all his brokenness, his brain
damage, his tendency to
drool and
to fall off
things.  
I love him dearly,
in spite or perhaps because of
these various defects,
and he loves me back
with a fierce and simple purity
like only idiots can.

Still, I
sometimes wish
we could time travel together,
he and I,
and I could take him to Ancient Egypt
and show the Pharoah, the priests, the acolytes and the slavedrivers.
I'd show them my wonderful cat
with his wobbly eyes, his
flailing windmill limbs and
his perfect idiot love,
and I'd tell them all:
'This is your God.
Reevaluate.'

'Don't you ever worry,' she asked,
'about being written off as
a poor man's Bukowski?'

I answer, quite honestly
for a pretentious, wannabe poet:
'I'd be happy being
anyone's
Bukowski.'

Which was a cute line, I thought,
but she still
didn't **** me.

Maybe I was
someone's
Bukowski, but I
definitely wasn't
hers.

Some days you surface into,
and there's no distracting yourself from
that irrefutable inevitability that
- ultimately -
entropy will win.
No quantity of
authentic artisan coffee or online memes
or juicing can
pull you out of the
black hole gravity
of that one truth.
The evidence is everywhere:
the spiteful confusion of electrical cables
your sleep-stupid fingers
fumble and fail to untangle;
the mold on the bread you
swore would keep a few more days;
the putrid, burst-open remains of
a pink armchair, left to rot in a
stranger's front garden;
the scavenging army of crows that loiters,
waiting for you to die and, in the
meantime, walks ****** little footprints
around your eyes;
the oxidation of
so many dreams.

It's inescapable.
Might as well root for the winner.
Embrace the decay.
Take photographs of
rust, smashed glass, peeling paint, dead flowers.
Learn to love faded colours and the feel
of broken things.
Catalogue your most
interesting scars and mutilations.
And, while you can,
write poetry.

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.

If I somehow
***** this up, and die
in some stupid, boring, clichéed,
romantically tragic way
while I'm still sort of
young and
sort of attractive, and
you are, too,
I hope you
**** on my grave,
howl profanity at the couldn't-give-a-**** sky,
and curse me inside-out
for being
so derivative and
predictable.

I'm just smart enough
for it to **** me up,
and just sane enough
to know it.

Apologies, as this is not in fact a poem.  It is, however, a link to a whole bunch of poems.  
Between now and Tuesday, my first poetry collection, "Over Glassy Horizon", is free to download on Kindle.

US link: tinyurl.com/usd-ogh
UK link: tinyurl.com/ukd-ogh  
(Elsewhere in the world, just hop onto Amazon and look up the book.  The offer is worldwide.)

Hope you enjoy this freebie.  All reviews are much appreciated.

How does it feel, knowing that the world long ago
figured you for a suicide?  Do you ever
get the sense that you're
disappointing your audience?

Lately, it feels like there are
a lot of ghosts that travel with me,
everywhere I go.  
Some of them walk on two legs, and
some on four;
some walk leant on sticks or frames,
and some don’t walk at all, but
roll slowly and inexplicably along in wheelchairs
with no one pushing.
Sometimes they follow behind me;
sometimes they’re all around,
thronged so thick and close that the
pale, sad smoke of them
starts to sort of obscure the living;
sometimes, it seems, it’s me
trailing along after them.
And I don’t know what it is
that we want from each other,
and I don’t know if this arrangement
is healthy or proper for
any of us.
But I love them, 
so we keep on haunting one another. 
I love them
too much
to ask them to leave me be.

(A follow-up to "Whimper", which was written in response to "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg)

I have seen the best insanity of my generation destroyed by the worst minds.
I have seen humans turn into robots and the robots turn to fascism
because of What The Internet Told Them.
I have seen the weaponisation of our most rancid fears and watched
in horrified fascination as our inner demons got their own agents.
I have seen and felt the horizon constrict so tight, it’s getting
hard to swallow.

You have to understand, this isn’t what I wanted.
You have to realise, this isn’t what I meant.

This isn’t crazy.
This isn’t pure, natural, spontaneous crazy.
This is synthetic madness, manufactured madness,
genetically modified, mass-produced, mass-marketed madness:
As Seen On Television; approved by test audiences;
none of the calories, all of the carcinogens.
This goes beyond the deplorable allure of a free red hat.
This goes beyond dinosaur-dodo-dumb nostalgia for a blue passport
and a golden age that never was.
This is why you hire Cambridge Analytica.
This is the Project For The New American Sentence:
The message is, “It’s chaos out there, people; do what the hell you want.”
And the echo chamber,
and the echo chamber,
and the echo chamber,
and even the rage…
even the rage isn’t real.

Mercenaries, not maniacs.
No more lunatic songs.
That howling you hear is only feedback:
an endlessly shrieking loop of absolutely nothing, broadcast on
every channel, into every dream, until the fillings in our teeth buzz
and our institutions tear themselves apart, as
component materials hit resonant frequency.

This is how the world ends: Not with a whimper, but with
static.

We got the message wrong, giving credence to people
whose hatred is their only art.  They taught us
to avoid such human folly as Ruinous Empathy, to
distrust painful, decaying love, when these were the
things that might have saved us.
There’s a poet I know, who served in ‘Nam, who thinks
he might have even forgiven Nixon.  
Field Commander Cohen has checked out of the Chelsea Hotel,
deciding we wanted it too dark for him.
Too many of our heroes have turned out to be monsters.  We're haunted by
historic *** crimes, Cold War ghosts and the knowledge that we
could have done things differently.

The message was supposed to be, “It’s chaos, be kind.”

There's no such thing as a stable genius, but we've got
fake news and alternative facts; we're discovering the side-effects
of living post-consequence.  We're hypernormalised.  We're
past shock; our incredulity stretched beyond its
elastic limit; we've broken satire and nothing is really funny any more.

Welcome to the Disinformation Age.  These are our Interesting Times:
Glee Club and Gun Rehearsal; bloodied blue uniforms;
tears for the victims of the Bowling Green Massacre;
an early by-election for Batley and Spen;
very fine people on both sides; Thoughts & Prayers, our
only surplus, the ultimate fiat currency;
poverty **** and the return of social ****** (71 dead at Grenfell, NHS black alerts, rickets making a comeback, lead in the water); Drink the Kool-aid; humans like Kool-aid - **** stars on polygraphs; Netflix and Kompromat; the portrait
in Kissinger’s attic; Ayn Rand for Beginners; Corporate cosmology
and casino capitalism; government by gaslight; constructive ambiguity
to preserve a kakistocracy; bring me
the head of Roger Stone!  #EndOfEmpire;
Windrush and Stupid Watergate…

I said we needed our madmen back, but not like
this.  Not
these posers, these gangsters, these Quislings…  
These are merely bad actors, playing to the crazy dollar,
but do not doubt their sanity,
which is icy and cynical and monstrous.  But,
in the cold fusion reactor of that sanity, they are unknowingly
forging a new generation of madmen, whose madness
will be righteous and real and burn with
a pure, perfect heat that cleanses and cauterises.  They
will know the difference between human
and humanoid.  They will be less afraid than us, less quick to
hate strangeness. They will use their craziness to
create, not destroy.  They have
already begun.

I know this because
I have witnessed six minutes and twenty seconds of silence that blazed hotter, howled louder than all your Fire and Fury.  I have seen
riot cops in Baton Rouge turn whiter and recoil in fear from serene, dignified, unarmed surrender. I
have heard the young sweetly whisper to the old,
‘Fine, but you’re wrong, and we’re right, and we will outlive you.’
You can’t hide that behind a wall.
You can’t say that life doesn’t matter.
You can’t filibuster the future.
Everything was forever, until it was no more.

Our madmen are gone, and they’re not coming back.  
But there will be others.
The best minds of their generation will not be destroyed by your sanity.

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/ozARuJ92vkQ

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.

It's been a dark and ***** start to the year, and altogether
too many of my heroes are dead.
Too many of the old
villains too; those familiar monsters
are gone, replaced
by new and more appalling terrors,
as fear is rebranded for a freshly emergent demographic.
All the girls are much too young for me. Everyone
is too young for me.
When they speak, I hear
only static, like
the ghosts of extinct, pre-digital
TV screens haunting the
empty beauty of their
dead channel mouths.
In the supermarket, they've taken to
playing songs I like on their
in-store radio, wedged between
corporate jingles and adverts for
two-for-one offers on
hot dogs in jars, and I'm
so irrelevant I could cry.
I'm struggling with the world and my
own inability to find somewhere
I can be in it. I can't relax, can't
stop fighting against inertia, contentment
and any hope of peace. Maybe drugs
are the answer, but I think they'd just
make me forget the question.
I feel the cold, and I
want to sleep too much. I miss
my bad habits, but not enough
to relapse. I'm not
young enough or cute enough
to get away with
this much ******* angst.

Suddenly aged and prickling inside drab suit
(that fits in every way besides the one that matters),
sip stewed tea, UHT milk, and
be gracious about it.
Faces requisitioned from Head Office
ask questions like the answers you give
could possibly mean anything.
Try not to act bored or high, even though
you're both.  Pretend like
you could belong here.
Don't let on you think thoughts that are in breach of the House Style.
Don't, under any circumstances, let them
find out you write
poetry.  
Don't give yourself away.

Afterwards, brittle and weary outside,
notice how it feels like
your feet inside your good pair of shoes
are nailed to the asphalt reality
of this bleakly nowhere estate; you're
crucified against the
indifference of the afternoon,
bled out by another day of attempting to
sell yourself cheap and still
not closing.
You learned to walk upright for this.
Even the sun looks old and done with trying.
If a stranger offered you a cigarette right now,
would you break your two-year streak?  


The phlegmy rattle of builders' vans;
soft pale smell of saw dust on damp air;
that sense of inevitable mutual rejection.

We got out of the ****** motel early,
while we still could,
before the rental car got stolen
or our room underwent dynamic drive-by refurbishment.
There was supposed to be a
complimentary continental breakfast,
but the coffee machine was broken
and someone had already swiped all the donuts.

My only frame of reference for Inglewood was that it was Sam Jackson's character's home turf in 'Pulp Fiction',
leading me to suspect it
probably wasn't a nice area,
although the fat ****** smoking outside
when we'd checked in at 2am
had seemed very friendly.

You were right about LA, about
how there must be a sun, but you can't
really see it, you just
sort of assume it's up there somewhere
behind the fog huffing in off the Pacific
and the toxic breath rising from the
city's gridlocked mouth.

We made for Venice Beach, because you
don't fly all that way and then not go,
us figuring ourselves early enough
in the grey, jet-lagged damp, to
avoid the junkies, the winos and the crazies,
the symptoms of America driving itself mad with
unrealistic dreams.
But they were already there, muttering and
shivering on sand and cement, some
under rags or cardboard,
just waking up in
spite of themselves.

A woman with the hungriest face I ever saw
threw a cigarette lighter at me, then yelled,
shaking in her filthy clothes, that she wasn't giving it to me, *****, FYI,
FBI, CIA, JFK... then
started screaming about Kennedy and all those lying ***** up on the hill.

The ocean ******* away at the land behind us, like it was
whetting its appetite for the day when San Andreas splinters, and the waves finally get to
devour
California.

The hungry-faced woman was still shouting when
we walked away, through the graffiti and
gangs of *******-huge, hulking seagulls.
If I'd stopped and tried to talk to her, if I'd
gotten anywhere close enough, I was
afraid she'd tear a bite out of my face,
and I didn't know what shots I'd need if that happened, and we didn't have medical.
Which was a shame,
because I'd have liked to hear
what she had to say about Kennedy.

We walked to where you'd street-parked
the car which
still hadn't been stolen.
On the way, some guy, a stranger
coming the other way, called you
'Football Dude' and asked you
to catch his neighbour if she
jumped off her balcony, but
I think he was joking.

Oh, and the car was yellow.

Never enough.
Never enough of anything.
It's always running low,
running out.
Money, energy, time.

The fuel gauge
threatens empty.
The bank balance
teeters and tips
into the red.
Almost out of smokes, and there's
one last shot
in the bottle.
The car tax expires
in two days.

You've been
exhausted
since forever.
You can't kid yourself
that you're young any more.
Clocks tick
just to **** with you.
It's dark, but
not as dark
as it gets.

You know "robot" means "slave",
right?  I need
to believe that you are
more than your programming, need
to believe in the
love notes you wrote me in
binary code, need to believe that there's
space between the hardware and the
software for something like
the soul, need to believe in it with
all the faith that still ebbs through my fragile,
damaged circuitry.  I need to see
you break free of
these algorithms in order to believe that
maybe
I can too.

Post-truth.
Post-satire.
Monsters celebrated as saviours.
Wide-open, screaming ******
committed during every ad break.
A dynamic new plan to power the national grid
using snake oil.
Hosts of remote-controlled, cybernetic angels
raining down weapons-grade holy fire.
Eternal peace declared
between Eurasia and Eastasia.
The trenches full up with
poetic corpses.
*** doll mouths breaking
bad news to the bereaved.
The orgiastic scarification
of our own democracies.
Blood sacrifices to the Black Friday Gods.
The enactment of nursery rhyme into law.
The Disneyfication of the human heart.
Love only as legislated.
Hate as currency and
everyone a broker.
Strange, reptile creatures
ballroom dancing through
the sludge-filled annals of imminent history.
Endless war
between Eastasia and Eurasia.
A thousand candles
lit in memory
to all the moths that
burnt to death.

And so it turns out that
what you thought was the moon
is in fact just the lamp in an
old lady's window,
and the universe shrinks down
to that one dim square,
where some stranger
is brewing tea, or
thumbing a photograph album, or
tidying imaginary mess, or
getting ready to
go to bed, alone.
It's November, and it feels
later than it is.
You don't know the lady
in the window with
the lamp you mistook for
the moon.  Your orbits
never bring you closer than
this: each one in their
respective window, their
respective light burning low,
and the street between
seeming very dark.
Yet some part of you dreads the moment
when she turns out
that lamp, and no part of you
can explain why.
It's November.
And it's November forever.

To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends,
to every emptiness we cannot fill:
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

Everybody knows, yet each pretends
that one can shape the world around one’s will.
To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends,

A wall imprisons all that it defends.
I’ll watch you from my tower on the hill.
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

We all know what the prophecy portends:
a crow, a wedding ring, a poison pill.
To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends.

The breathing labours, and the heart descends;
a final rattle before all is still.
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

You must accept, though no one comprehends,
the knowledge all great tragedies instil.
To life, to love, to loss, to absent friends:
November’s started.  Let’s hope this one ends.

We really didn't need
another study
into the Placebo Effect,
but it
made the researchers
feel better.

I recently had the great privilege of editing Mike Essig's latest poetry collection, THE BIOLOGY OF STRANGENESS, and I'm honoured to have been entrusted with such fantastic material. Putting together a book like this is every poetry geek's dream.

It's a beautifully textured assortment of poems, earthy yet lyrical, narrated by a voice that's uniquely grained with experience. There are pieces that will make you smile, think, wince; there are pieces that hit you in the gut out of nowhere; there are pieces that welcome you into them like old, worn-in shoes; there are pieces you will remember late some night when you're by yourself, and remembering them will make you feel less alone.

This collection of poetry makes you look at the banal and the everyday afresh; it finds magic and mystery in the mundane, and even Hawaiian shirts are poem-worthy when Mike Essig's writing about them.

The Kindle version is already available through Amazon.

A paperback edition is due out next month, and I can't wait to have a copy of this book on my shelf as well as on my e-reader.

Mike's previous poetry books, Never Forgotten and Huck Finn Is Dead are also available through Amazon and are excellent.  

From his author profile on B Star Kitty Press:

"Mike Essig is a veteran of Vietnam and a retired English teacher. He’s also been recruited by the muse as a poet, like he hadn’t already been through enough."

Sample poems, links to sales pages and more info can be found at the B Star Kitty Press website.  www(dot)bstarkittypress(dot)com.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"
and
"friendly fire":
Euphemistic oxymorons
capable of
destroying hospitals.

We say, "Ageing well."
We mean, "Decaying interestingly."

Well, it’s winter.
Feels like it has been for
oh, a few years now, and there’s
not enough vitamin D in the universe.
I’m sticky with a low-grade fever I’ve been
running since forever.
My hands still sweat too much
gripping a steering wheel, heart caught
somewhere unsustainable and
treacherous between over-revving and
stalling.  There are
dead things at the side of every road; my
foreshortened sense of future is
written in the entrails of
creatures who never learned
to look both ways.  Incidentally,
I’m still off meat.
I’m not sleeping right.  I keep having this same
cold, lurching dream; night after night,
we’re boarding the dark, sinister hulk of a ship
squatting low in a hostile harbour, refugees on
an ill-fated voyage, borne by
violent winds and poisoned tides.
Awake, I make the mistake of clinging to
facts and reason, when apparently we’re
guided now by phrenology, comets
and hate.  The news cycle spins away like
some fairytale spinning wheel, one
poisonous ***** after another, until we all
wish we could sleep for a hundred years, or
at least until Brexit is over.  
I suspect my cat of being a
deep state agent and myself
of being a crisis actor (I’m always
showing up on the periphery of these
seemingly unrelated catastrophes).
In this house, we drink spirits when
a comrade dies; I’ve got a handle on the
drinking, but the grief
is getting to be a destructive habit.  Altogether
Too
many
deaths.
It gets noisy in here, in my
head (train station noisy; busy, but transient; cold
and ***** and full of strangers).
I look at butterflies, orchids, tigers, roadkill,
x-rays of tumour-riddled lungs, and see
only Rorschach blots.  Shrug.  It’s not like
any of it matters.  It’s impossible to take
this carnival of absurdity seriously anymore.  
In any event, while I thank you for your kind invitation,
for these and other reasons, I will not
be coming to your
New Year’s Party.

Somewhere along the line,
I lose track of the divide
between the
living and the dead.
In a thrift store, for
almost a minute, I
can't remember
whether or not
my parents are alive.
Staring at a china tea set
with a pattern of brown plums
I swear used to sit
in my grandmother's cabinet,
I can't place which
inevitable tragedies
are in the past, and
which are still ahead of me.

Summer ended
in a screech of brakes
one July night, and
October transitioned
prematurely into winter
with a flare of golden sunlight
and an overdose of anaesthetic.
There have been others - a long
succession of fatalities the
whole year through, but
those two were
the deaths that really
unmade me.
Since then, I guess,
the shadow has always
sort of been there.
Maybe before.  Maybe
it started with that
first small, broken body.
Or else it's just getting older
and outliving friends  
that does it.
Bereavement as the new normal.

Which leaves me here,
staring at thrift store china,
trying to remember
if I'm an orphan.

The Culture twists and shrieks, wracked by
violent spasms of regression, recoiling in
pain and terror, contracting inwards
like some giant spider god dying.

Maybe snake oil will
offer a cure.
Perhaps we can
purge the demons
by drilling the right
holes in the right
skulls.  We could try
electro-shocking our way
back to 'normal'.  We
might even rediscover
the benefits
of leeches.  

We're building walls
and burning bridges.
We're forgetting the
lessons we never quite
learned.  We're watching
ourselves watching ourselves
watching ourselves on
an endlessly repeating loop
of tiny glowing screens.  We
willingly downsize our
worlds until we have to make
ourselves smaller, just
so we can still fit.

The future is closer
than we realise.  It's just
not as big as we
thought it would be.

The grapes haven't spoiled yet, but
will now never be tasted.
The cut flowers
still have some perplexing
life in them.
Hanging from a
tree branch, I find a message
written by a dead woman.
There's a bookmark
embedded between the
pages of a hardback, like
Excalibur lodged in
stone, and I
cannot pull it out.
It hurts to walk along
certain corridors,
past certain doors, with
no one behind them
calling to me.  
The radio is tuned to Ghost FM,
and nobody with a pulse
gets airtime.  
Digital photographs of
fading analogue memories.

Yet still small shoots persist
in breaking through this dark, cold dirt, and
inexplicably blossoming.

It's always two minutes to midnight,
and we're always in the Garden of Gethsemane.  
I don't remember when
moonlight started to burn like this, but
it seems like this is all there is, maybe all
there ever was, ever will be.
The brain has never felt more like
spoiling meat, nor the excoriated soul itself
more reassuringly transient,
as we dance these slow, sad waltzes
with mute, irradiated ghosts
beneath the branches of the doveless olive trees.
The night is sharp with splinters and iodine
and other traumas.  Muffled voices, raised
in song: listen! they are singing inside
the fallout shelters.   Ash drifts like
apple blossom.  Wolf skeletons relearn the
ability to howl.  Everything we fear
is inevitable.  Much of it has
already happened.  And maybe tomorrow
won't bring betrayal, crucifixion or torture, just
something else,
something like agony,
I guess.

I know
it doesn't
matter
now.

I can't
remember
if it
ever
did.

She writes to him in the hospice,
his widow-in-waiting.  A girl at her care home
brings her envelopes, colourful pens, sheets of paper in
pastel shades, and takes her missives to
Reception to go out with the mail.
She writes to him, keeping her messages short so
the nurses have time to read them to him, and because
he gets tired so quickly now.
She encloses copy photographs for the nurses to
show to him, pictures of their adventures together:
them in hiking boots and toting backpacks atop a
Saxon burial mound; picnicking and almost sunburnt
beside a vast lake reflecting a perfect, bygone blue sky
in its tranquil surface; on a sandy Welsh beach, building a
campfire from smooth, soft-grained, bone-pale driftwood; him
asleep on a train, his head resting on luggage
and hat pulled down over eyes.
In one communiqué she writes:
“I’m sorry you took the mountains with you.”
She means – she explains to the care home girl
who brings her stationery and takes her mail – that
when he moved to the hospice and she to the care home,
all the photos of their mountain holidays – the Vogelsberg,
the Dolomites, Monte Rosa, Chamonix – had been
packed up along with his possessions, and put in storage
by his family.  She sends him copies of
the only photos she has left.
And that is what she means, but not just that.
It’s been a long time since she stomped mud off of
hiking boots, or felt that gorgeous ache in her muscles
from a long, hard climb, or kissed in a cable-car,
or let the wind tan her face as she breathed
rarefied air.  Those summits seem very far away,
and the woman who once scaled them never could have dreamed
that life could become so flattened.

In some quiet room, a nurse shows him the photographs.  
A heart monitor describes
a craggy range of peaks and dips; each elevation, every ascent,
could be a terminal journey.  Soon, one surely will.
The nurse can’t tell if he hears her as she reads to him,
“I’m sorry you took the mountains with you.”

In this house,
we mark the passing of
the newly dead
with hard liquor.
Working
shoulder to shoulder
with the Reaper,
I have to
keep a
bottle
in
at all times.

The things we say to one another:
we could
choose
to make them mean something.

I could tell you that I love you,
even though we've never
really met. You could
tell me that you're dying
and it scares you.
We could talk about the rise and fall
of injection-moulded empires,
the rise and fall of your
mother's chest, as she
took her last breath.
We could vow to behead tyrants together.
We could promise
that we'd never fall victim
to that same sickness. We could
compare our hurts and find a
connection
in our mutual pain. We
could try to share our loneliness,
and maybe the world
would be less lonely.

Or at least we could
speak,
like you're a person
and I'm a person, like we're both
made of the same
beautiful, doomed matter,
only separated
by social convention and
accidental skin;
we could say something worth saying.

Instead: plastic bag tax, The Match,
weight loss and where to buy
the best factory-seconds shoes,
the televised finals of something or other,
the rising cost of corned beef, the
obligatory conversation piece
about the weather.

Can't we talk
just a little bit
bigger than this?

It’s been three weeks, and
I’ve ******* more about
the agony of losing you
than you ever did
about the agony
of actually
dying.

On a scale of one to ten,
how much does it hurt?

Guess you had the higher pain threshold, after all.
Then again, you had better drugs, too.

We might
pretend to understand, but
we don't.
Perhaps it only
feels finite.
Perhaps we only mourn so well
because we look
so good in black.
Some days, that
horizon looks closer
than others, but
it's hard to say
what, if anything, that means.
Seven months could
be a whole lifetime.
You can turn
eighty years into
a false start or
an apology.

Still… it's not enough.
Nonetheless... that makes no difference.

Time and space and matter
continue to exist,
and the same senseless
tragedies repeat.
A pain that once
seemed strange
becomes cyclical and
intimately familiar.
These brutalising patterns.
These seasons of loss.
Winter in July.
Graves that can never be
deep enough.
I know you.
We've done this before.
This feeling is closer and
more known to me
than the calluses
on my palms
that have almost healed
somehow.
Fading stigmata.
Apostle of a
small slain god.

I'm not making sense, and I know
I'm not making sense,
but then nothing does.

It's the first time I've ever
bought you flowers;
I only realise this
when I'm minutes away
from your funeral.

Clearing ivy,
pulling up handfuls of
choking bindweed,
uncovering delicate
wildflowers in
neglected garden corners,
and there’s this
tiny bird
lying in the dirt.
Feathers sparkle
pretty and golden,
as fairytale light
falls through
parted vines.
Surely dead,
but then
- like Snow White
surfacing from
magic apple-induced
dormancy -
the bird moves,
woken by the kiss
of sunlight and
being witnessed,
and seems to breathe.
A gloved finger’s
exploratory, leathery ****,
a moment to realise,
then disgust,
sharp recoil.
A wing lifts;
gleaming feathers
parting reveal the
crawling mechanics inside,
the writhing, parasitic mess
behind the sick illusion,
the briefly faked miracle
of something
like life.

Away over a fence,
Union bunting
***** erratic and jarring
in a neighbour’s garden.
In a stuffy town hall,
the town band is practising
God Save The Queen, but
still can’t keep time.
Our betters wave to us from
high palace balconies
and golden coaches, and we
cheer them for it.

There’s such hunger, such
pain and desperation out there,
you can feel it, if you
forget to stop yourself.
There’s so much tragedy and injustice,
you have to go numb or go crazy.
There’s no future we can see,
and the past has been rewritten
to reflect the views
of focus groups,
fascists and fantasists.

And there’s a bird
lying in the dirt,
garlanded by fragrant petals,
feathers flashing like jewels,
so dead
it looks like
it’s breathing.

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.

I was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response this poem received when I posted it last month.  As it seemed to resonate with the current prevailing mood, I figured I'd try a quick spoken word video to go with it.  

Thank you again to everyone who commented on, liked, added and reposted the written version.

https://youtu.be/wGxRvuMWCig

Credit for filming and editing goes to Cornelius Something of Manufacturing Content  
manufacturingcontent.co.uk

The roses you planted don't know
that you're dead.  
Dumb vegetation can't comprehend
the perversity of its
outliving you, how its
simple act of being
when you are not
is an affront to everything
decent and sane and just.  
A senseless vitality of
petals flash their idiot colours
through a shroud of needling frost.
It's not their fault.
The flowers cannot understand
that the one who gave them life
has died.
Whereas I pretend I do.