now those eidolic dread horses have scarred your slumber, passed 9, passed 10,  and even your furniture has silent, open mouthed, nightmares over the too soon dead, dead school friends who never ended their crossings, and see, see, she stoops, in shroud  ghastly knelt as in prayer, but you can’t see, see through the tricks  of light that scream “she is there”, your crumpling chest  boiling as the bones in your legs subside while those, without body,  cross the empty room, no need to surmise that which lies bereft and restless may yet have something to say and you, you are the luckless soul who lives upon their byway and now,  now the voices, the voices start, those grody sounds, that won’t stop, stop your heart, beneath the floor, within the walls, the precedent for dull footfalls calling, calling to us one by one with no clear sight of saint or villain, a spectral round of hide and seek, directed by a floorboards creak, each time we search there’s nothing, nothing there, but of this guest we’re so aware, who was first, it or us, we can’t be sure, sure it wasn’t brought  from distant shores, for it never raised its head or voice before, before that gift from land of Vlad was carried over our threshold and ushered in something, something cold,  the bearer of an ancient fear, something as of yet unclear, or are we in thrall of phantoms more explainable  


This is a combination and refinement of what were two separate poems, previously published, to make by far a more satisfying whole. I believe it more convincingly captures some of the fear and panic I was trying to convey and should be read in a breathless manner as if you were living in a world that was entirely scripted by Samuel Beckett

your every argument held together by the glue
from a thousand children's bones and
the mercy box lies empty of anything but
your celebratory cigars
yesterday should wear a disguise
to hide its shameless joy
yet markets the efficacy of its deceit
with paroled butchery
even as today bullets freshen the neighbourhood

the act of now is the charcoal bloomed eyes
gun dead through the, NO! the no holds barred
the dials of a solid *******
and charcoal in turn will sublimate the sun
for its drone tucked brethren, NO! no crowns
or breast for the committed smirk or ersatz worth
and dying grants a detached view
an eager cut of prettiness directed
where blue melts belief
and white your teeth

and this is the easiest, NO! the gathering
shells from the beach, the streets, underneath the sheets
stepped through the brethren tuned around
in living colour, NO! dying horror on subscription
credit accrued where credit due
and shall we leave it seventy two now the ratings
start to falter?

I roll in stolen moments
no deep contemplative hours avail me
an immovable watch, snatched and dashed by phone
or lipstick honed prose shopping for scandal
I am
the broken hands of faith offering naught but a vagrant malediction
where, but for a few chatty fists further, they remain below the none
in the unbound knots of shallow ruin
black
boxed
and cut into catastrophe
a unified cleave of impoverished woe

“immoveable?” say I

“I may chance sleep if it were in the hands of one beyond where ill goaded geometry is gone
Immaterial
come already danced, implacable
and I were vitreous to their bacterial digestion”

such chatty cracks may answer above their unleashed wish but…  

“but what?”

…but the chiral sun lies on its back smoking those hooves which have waited all day
the eternal don’t offer  faith in my diorama
so I own them
my own
my own scars that burn nicely enough
without your fire to iterate the bones

a few more herniated throats might join us yet
for a conveniently flagged final rebuke
each with a semi-toned profanity
as precocious coda
aged and offered with ******* down your maddening throat

picking up, if I may, where I left off yesterday,
before you so rudely walked away
or was it a year or so before?

I remain bored with these gods
twice removed from the approval ratings
their open mouthed statute holds no limitation
to my ambition
let me see those waves which are racked beyond recall
much like your neck should be
through jawed ears and briny tongue
a muffled centrepiece fetid
save for recalcitrant  sinew

I shall be the sky in which your virtuoso limbs must swing
swing
spastic in their envoi

now, serpent spat, pin-grinned, how is this sleep pain in the mirrored wide-why?

I remembered all the bottles that filled his lungs and
the final one which emptied them
that then beside the frenzied trumpet and passive hammer
of mechanically rendered breath,
a time of ill regret and cancelled bets
yet still he found the strength to ******* in the bathroom stall
and beat you indigo once he was through
and discharged
out of the green peopled doors
the satisfied ink of presumed secrecy made him bold
even as the sediment besieged his tissued demise
and I despised
even as I craved my own relief between your purple thighs
while we shared a thousand smokes between lips
that spared no wetted patient medicine
yet never locked in battle
and then he died
and you cried and
you cried and
you cried and
I knew you had lied to me

The clouds grow plump as they eat what is left of the afternoon sky and, while I search for a girl with marrowfat eyes, bid their shadows roll up the sunshine; place it on the shelf until tomorrow, and in that husky flatness, where solids briefly hide their faces, I recognise the garlic which hangs in my kitchen window is no such thing, but a ghost, a dusty deceit, a cosmopolitan boast of no culinary use.
Yet in a different light, a bluer site, I find a girl with naught but a single hair sprouting from her for’ead, to which she attached a flashing light, for fishing in the dead of night, and her cats’ love her all the more for it, dinner and a show, so there I dropped a cloth, a piece of which longed to be a clock, in need of sound and being, and all the while that it pleaded, the coffee maker gasped for its own attention