we'll agree then,
you can't rhyme orange
but perhaps maybe
we could arrange
to use instead
mandarin
that or possibly
tangerine

Once I knew a spider
wore Doc Martens on his feet,
eight holes on eight hairy legs
he wasn't too discrete.

He rode a lengthy shadow
while he stomped around the floor
this micro “muy macho”
unabashedly cocksure

I trapped him in a glass one night
And told him at the door
“My wife she doesn't like you
don’t you come around no more”

But spiders rarely listen
and ignoring my request
next evening he returned once more
our octo-booted guest

the collar on my jacket is frayed
but I have clothes on my back

(just)

the packaging is white with green print
but I have food in my belly

(of sorts)

the soles talk and leak when I walk
but I have boots on my feet

(for now)

so I’m OK

(I suppose)

***** deep into the Smart Price ™ life
this man, his daughters, his son and his wife
where all their food comes at discounted price
expired meat and rationed heat
sweepings and fat wrapped in plastic

the walk was wholly unexpected, but it was easy
leaving the town where the forward leaning walkers
were the slowest thinking talkers steeped in sugary urgency,
and all the way we **** giltterballs and Skittles

each schoolboy used to know the saw
laid deep in tracts of Danish lore

Forkbeards pious son and heir
Cnut the great, konungr,

his throne set to the boiling awe
somewhere along a Hampshire shore

but was it somewhat further north
he faced down scorned Ægir’s bore

his person kissed by Trisantona
upon her banks at Gainsborough

what the hyena cannot ****

it will steal

tallied on the gritted walls of our toil

their bounty cultivated from the nothing we now possess

and the bodies which must fall once their winter bites

no time left to wail and gnash

we must become as lions that rise

and grip the throat of this thieving class

I dreamed of Frida Kahlo
"yo era ella amante"
pure, paupered prince to her primal queen
yet still I hollowed a carnal niche into the midst
of one perdurable, lurid " noche de los muertos"
and fingered the lachrymose from her lacerations
counting prurient  time in a piercing nine of
perennial persecution before I wore her pelt
to lay me down in her sanguinary glow

the air seized it’s chance today screaming
“**** me!”
and every seed burst
obligingly in a torrent of stars and silken hope
yet a mere quarter hence
the deciduous mantle will slip, dowager dry and lentigo browned,
to dance tiny pirouettes with devils of dust & grit
amongst a litter of sepia confetti as summer’s rusted brides fall
their contract fulfilled

i) up the stairs
red scarves and tight skirts
loose slacks and grey shirts
my how the landscape has changed
I can’t say that I love to be dipped into this *** of pretty
where the lipstick liner queens supreme
and the coffee is brewed to mitigate the colostomy retch
so I try a yellowed paper backed beat
but it held nothing to the shoebox diorama
of national care
where the alphabetised gates of ingress
more or less double as departure lounge
for the broken and spent where their god
might sit them on fashionably backed chairs
for the percentile of misplace repairs
or is it me that smells of warm ****?

ii) down the travelator
a troll lives under the MRI,
moved on from the bridge by the gruffest of beards,
now working externally of the fable
beneath the table of the magnetic eye

friends of friends and an **** of mutuality
every one ripe for the ******* until we greedily
eat our own tails

I find myself running low on chemistry

with so little reaction left inside of me
the water around the plug hole no longer spins,
it only falls

architectural wounds
cannot heal beneath this razor’s murderous haste
while the cognisant weak and a capella apes deform
the silent comedy of a shared space

once straight tempers and scorpion kindness highball
an unhappy taste, leaving who to speak
for the ordinary host?

the functionaries’ short practice
infects the martyr’s hurried hair
between the principal route and the settling irons

this grind breathes a fist
of sublime roast allure
as the Nicaraguan Black Bull

surrenders it’s fat cojones
to the blade and the forced steam
fixes me, dilated,
but still only grooving at 70bpm

I feel so very disco

no more rush for the factory gates

or bleary welcomes after whistle led race

no longer the shouts of “what shift you on mate?”

and befuddled replies “earlies, no, lates!”

the comforting throng of familial mass

at the end of each day that held no disgrace

when a days hard work meant a days earned pay

something they somehow forgot to replace

as our livelihoods fled to cheaper climes

and our citadels of labour fell rotting, debased

unshackled hearts
are easily lost
as they wander
in a haphazard dance of
bewildered wonder

doppio espresso
and 100mg of ℞ potassium
bring the equilibrium
I have been advised
against
long enough
for the insect hum to become
coherent and show me
a pathway to the moon
but in its miserly light
I can’t tell
if it’s half empty or full

as I looked at your photograph,
and couldn’t be sure,

I was actually ready
for you to be

a boy and all that
brought with it

until I stood
naked in front of the mirror

camera in hand
and saw

a foolish charade
for I am not an attractive man

the hope of flesh betrayed
before me

mapping my every
dream, decayed

achenial planets,
yet un-spawned,
suspended, seemingly strangled,
by an indurate umbilical bind,
sway in the breath of this nascent spring
forsaken fossilised baubles,
from a Christmas you’d rather not
be reminded of

and while their skin breathes our dirt
I write my words on their
parchment leaves and rips
of litter, to leave
scattered for the rats
who live in the shade,
to read
at their leisure

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 mouthed beer breathed approbation
at the invited wonder of your sister's sweatered *******
the tableau set then,
for such delicious beginnings and shaky revisions,
once I  left the "look but do not touch" misgivings
amongst the litter of a thousand such instructions

I borrowed that hazel eyed angel for a night
rescued from drowning in a clear bottled wasp trap
the fattened marital photo was covered,
alternating friends corrected and reassigned
their alibis and frightened lies
while heaven was briefly in our sights

and we shook and screamed the clearing of our names
from every future Christmas list

and yet

clearance comes only once inventory becomes stale
and folds around your wintered house,
offers no plan to buy or stamp a route to someplace else

slow submissions rattle my pen
this is no season for love and there is no reason to begin
other than there, in the shadows, where portraits breed desire

and while mirrors shall dream of falling
I am not through looking yet
for while fun and feuds begin with *******
an ending always screams attention

remember those  nights
we   placed hooks  in  our  eyes?

waiting in our  sleep
to catch  the  white tailed lies
that  swam inside our bed

do  you  remember those nights?

we   should, instead,  have  walked
the  chrome stacked  streets
that  rolled like silver  eels
amongst stub ends
sailing on tarry  keels

in that  vanishing space between
the  night -clubs gaudy  hush
and  a  needful capital morning rush

before the  coffee,
before the  bread,
before the  morning headlines
but  we   chose  hooks

do  you  remember?

proscribed extra-curious carnality be gone, begin, become the
exigent immersion of a prescribed insertion, deep genetics
within this drowning pool, drooled and tooled. now cruel
jewel, for this dowsing fool, offer up a different inheritance,
draw wider tracks of innate capture, let mortal culpability
sail white whaled, high tailed, to a communal land of
neutral precept not constrained by dictate neuter. one click,
**** temptation, flavoured Russian,  *** Asian. first though
herbal, fruitful,  extension. such friendship investment, one
****-k sensation, new phone, who phone, ***** moan,
iFone©, fear & gear. solutions are here, hear? with 1 or
more I full, sim-pull, sinful maybe? snout deep, cracked
badger’s honey kink, snake in ‘n’ baking ‘n’ shaken sac,
quick, whip crack a flay, today? the way you wear those
ankles so well that far back, a la mode, cherry high pie
and cream, no sweet reluctance of bristling itch, searching
eye ******* incontinent twitch from mondo trespassed
hush-pushed niche.

the caffeine and preservatives served me ill
and now the air is clear enough to hear
an echo of those angina beats

the rhythm of compressed time
where mild maturity becomes entwined
in curious calamity,

cut down, boxed up,
for all to see the choke hold
slip the sterling buckle

its teeth around your stubbled throat
and nylon stained constricted waste the
filthy lack of alibi

yesterday i found a bumblebee on the ground

I thought it dead  but it’s legs wrapped

around the the gently pressed twig

and I picked and placed it on a sunny shelf

and left it tiny sugared pools to ease it back to health

at first it drank yet before the evening fell

its legs were still and its husk a dried lament

today the bye-ways and sky ways were busy, busy, buzzy

life carried on

have I been here before,
the variations of anywhere
framing the limits of waking within a wretched humility?

am I become one of the blown boys, those dear, dear boys
and their desolate, punctual, martyrdom,
or a resolute extra in a post-mortem smack fug

at ease to fester with my wounded, skyward muttering,
where even fake flowers offer injury?

I

easily shaken by bleary imaginings as obdurate
as a politicians dancing lips which, if they are moving,
must be lying,

rather crave the ocean's incoherent, uncorked, yawn
its contorted salutation an easy answer to the hardest ask

skinny dipping on sopping silk

a cold pooling of lunar refraction

steeps our summer drowsing

ghostly fish, lustrous slivers,

skip across tumid fleshy belly

where I kiss that soft arousing

lip traced phantom trails

follow silver shimmering wandering avenue

to a mellifluent mossy dowsing
-

Curious be as remembered be
I, a fellow
And oh what a way to go
Flag frozen feet surrendered
as the Maine Lobster in culinary throes
hard-on steeped, Word steamed
Virus glasses spread across lap

offense may be caused so look away now
--
--
--
--
--
still here? OK then

I am both ****
and philanderer, in word and deed
I once found Jesus
just so that I might **** a girl
lucky that my hypocrisy was perishable
I still smell of that earlier me than you might remember
when I was filthy in my wishfulness
the sharp torture of a tissued sceptre
left me embarrassed in a honey dipped daydream
where factional contributions turned wine into water
and revenants convened before the solvent sunset
of my eccentric heartbeat

we swam naked in the sea
for hours
and hours
and later
in the dunes my lips
tricked a sweet pearl
from the singly balanced cradle
deep within those oyster spilt hips
“you taste of samphire”
I gasped
“listen
could you keep a secret
while the ocean foam stings
your throat?”

punctuality suckles a speedy affiliation
with wakeful limbs, christened of an inferior exception
some days I might touch upon a suitably plain persistence
through a righteous soliloquy,
an instance, steeped in harmonic fear,
where music can no longer buy sleep but ****** gestures imagine a time
when oxygen will not consent but leave my lungs,
scabbed,
torn
then will come the difficult hello
for whisky rarely clears the mind
of smoky memories in slowed down time
more so while you still live in the hole
I drank into the side of my jaw
eternity
it seems so vague,
spacious yet thimble sized
whilst nature frowns,
cured,
withered and ferrous
noting the unobserved,
even as the militant dynamic
of every unendurable star fingers forever

rejected in life

and so in death

and so in life
I would have shed no tears

had I not loved you still

there is no statute of limitations
on a broken heart

I would not refuse to *******.
not on a mere ethical technicality
a cursed dialectic sheared and far less pretty
than the contents of your *******
smooth as oysters lips from where your barraged ocean
falls on salty fingertips

you shall bathe in this warm artifice of my adoration
and be my play waif,
my relief from the wristed finesse
that I have become so used to

and I shall take you away from this place
where the chill of a boneless glass sustains
the shadows and fog of a self-financed ******
and Eurydice might still be expected to rise
from beneath a carpet of stone blossom

but in the sober morning a killer may raise
the bones of dead eyebrows and watch the moping steam
evanesce from the wet heart bed
bled full of drowning lungs,
the mangled target of perspective reduced
to something so blessed

The kinda words where nobody blushes
The kinda sleep where nobody breathes
The kinda *** where nobody touches
The kinda nights where everyone leaves

This kinda life
This kinda love
This kinda wondering “is this enough?”

nights like these
when you recoil from my touch
revulsion scored deep
excuse dog-eared primed ready to go
at page 53

I fear  

that I will never again enjoy
the needful tender embrace
of a woman while I am sill able
to offer back anything less than chaste

and in some lugubrious future
if taken to task about some
or other transgression past
your accusatory “why?” requires one simple reply
“do you really need to ask?”

wear the badge, suitor, bristling poet,
chloroform content on a surge of the old heroism,
but you could do nothing to save her back in the then
your benevolent shock impotent in hindsight
and what ungovernable intent holds sway at this time?

can the intellectual blast paint a way for a homecoming
where accused dignity might finally sleep without
the within of a star shaped wound
to emerge from behind the deep cover of an aging photograph
whence your soul's shadow smiled like a lazy fern
and the energetic child out braved the shocked Adonis

there is an undeniable whereto as your fingers blow bubbles
washed by the whether or not to further
a gentleman shall always keep his secrets passed the obituary relish
forever a disciple to his pondered heart while
the narrow prophet can only bridle at an opened conscience

while keeping the adultery at arms-length,
a good four thousand miles hence, but leaving so little space
that science cannot detect a gap,
hope is stretched across a salty segregation
whose surface offers mirror to us each
and furnishes a briny indulgence
once the barriers of taste end at our fingertips

yet, still, every morning, my **** will stink of yesterday’s bad decisions

I  am  no philosopher
I  am  Paul  from  The Meadows
pulled skinny  poor from the  shadows to put  a  deal of fat  on his bones

so  how  did   I  end  up   here?
what penalty did   I  accrue?

taking the  ten  point deduction for  conduct unbecoming
I  place my  attention  deficit on re-order that I  don’t  yet  forget

smothered  in the  scrim of this  Hogarthian hood every  chip toothed  blue   scriptured face
proffers  passage to a  poisonous but tantalising hook

to write the  junk  must I  taste the junk?

peddled or paddled for  a  sweeter  flight this  avenue never  taken,
hedonic ingress  unwalked,  unwanted yet  still wondered
could such  deep surrender  be   so  sweet to  allow the  most  intimate  of plunder?

am I  Dante?
corralled   around  the  streets
of a  society that  shows no compromise amongst  the  dying embers  of fallen  enterprise

eternal  damnable gyres around a  ****** **** pyre
of concrete,  glass  and  broken  humanity

with    each    uttered    breath    a    cold      cocktail    of profanity

the  bouncing soles of the  air  I  wear  may ease  me over  the  gummed archipelagos
flag  spij-speckle  guaran islands slab secure and  fast
against  the  counselled wash an  eternal  fossilised chaw
that  resists  the  fiercest chemical blast

lost in this  sea    I  cannot  be   but shaken  by the  waxy  man  with his  head  of startled  hemp and  coterie  of cracked  carbon
as  he breaches the  domestic brink

turning a key, his shoulders  hunched  in protective  shawl against

the  spittled spate
he stares  back through me
for  sightless  miles insides out,  front  to rear, then  scuffles, rattling,  townwardly

cannot resist  the  insecticidal compulsion of the  green  and  white purgatory
where  the  neatly  stacked  wash  of fluorescence makes  oven ready  your  heaven
amid the  threnodial thrum  of
a  hundred syncopated Siemens

following  that   shuffling   cortege  of  the   bussed  in dead and  dying
I  am dutiful, altar  bound, avowed and  accursed the  host with the  ghosts in this  haunted  mall lost  and  lonely  within  England’s  mountain  green
it  is no longer the  god   bothering needles and  blunts that    draw the crowds
as  flat  screened pharmacological rapture,
that  trinity  of distilled, medicated caffeination

lead   a   once   pious   nation   through   a   precocious dream

maybe Allah yet  sees  here  his
Jerusalem  and  leads his children
upon  England’s  land  of  crescent  green

We should step into the lonely o'clock
To play games beneath the ruptured lamps
Where every drunk can offer an undeniable
Explanation, or convert a lie to invention
And your smile can be heard as an intense myth
Imported in its agitated recognition

I’m tired
tired of trying to be strong
of not being allowed fall
on the ground and cry
for as long as
I need
working and living
with those who are thinking
everything that’s wrong is so right
leaving me to look forward to
alcoholism and depression
in no particular order
the powerless letters I carve glow in inappropriate spaces
withered clouds humming a fluttered contribution to naught
I wear a jacket, once loose and hungry, begging for release
from the corrective lumbering of my contrived conceit
this is not the girl I was looking for but
this is the girl that I found
my tumbledown baby
waiting to drown
beneath my warm butter breath
a half sunken death
of drunken larceny
and all the while I am growing
out of the conventions of relationship
the paper smoothed, green,
drink and drugs exercised
in a push for contaminated revenue
maybe this is why
the coffee tastes like **** today
and all I write are
three white wisps
the smile wiped off a blue faced sky
ignored by the Berghaus couples
matched down to their laces
each distraction disguises the bestiary that is civilisation, ironically splashed upon an earth that, like me,
has no interest, that grows bored waiting
for the next great extinction
the helium has already had enough, every party breath inhaled in jest lost to space forever,
it won't be back could I un-dream it all
I would, in less than the spurt of my heart,
and wrap it all in the bloodied rags of
your disgraceful god

italic Sundays run with a poisonous doubt

a wronged wash in the what might have been

where we fidget like fleas on a rabbits hide

and verses drafted in the cross stitched sky

cannot disguise the well-practiced curses

with the pre-packed presumption of lilies

and static

abstract amongst the sheets

your limbs offer a confusion of choice

where context is lost

besides the arch and coil

of a tenderised neck

and that secret I shall whisper

into your ear?

two pronouns and a verb

you shall not remember

until the crystalline dew draws you clear

that it might be revealed in the heat of noon

or within the cold puddles of a rubicund swoon

as my fingers fund delight

from your long-drawn frown

at 3AM the taste makes sense
your flavour gently
formless, yet;
clap inwards, roam safely now

for, two weeks gone, August died
once the sky mill's lights came crashing down
a sunless ****** ably refined by the opulent gunshot
whence your neck, once slim as a bottle's kiln poured plume,
yielded crackling splinters and a bully ragged tie

how quickly the lips of entrapment ****** your memory
the venerable address of a cruel decay, corked
and crucified over willow wrought applause

the unsecured dregs of my dreams drag themselves,
desecrated, yet still breathing, into
a barren sensibility of service
to so sadistic a cheer

you identify yourself as a counterpoint to heat
burning tissues and tighter crosses,
laid across your stretched stomach
while the flirt aperture fades to a crumbed splice

I agreed to outlive my extinction
so long as you willed a heaven fish wriggle free
from the pressed seawater and shrink my temptation

and that beast, like every other, had a treasonous heart
once it knew the single human truth, the martyrs glee for murderous poetry,
where biology cascades dominion
into the thrice strangled terror of life

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?

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?

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

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

I fail at sleeping



in a show of unconditional accusation, the reproachful slander of your hereafter,

amongst the placid hours,

I try to be the grand man, but I shake too much

unhinged by the overreach of my skeletal height

much to the delight of every unskilled whistler



tough love and rougher hate interprets the shuddering motions, as my left hand lingers

over a possibility where dreams might bring

freshly ****** flesh and afternoon tea



I barter with **** and borrow into strained relationships

awaiting the unfounded precedence of my childish brain’s

blinked silhouettes burning themselves out



crumpled and brewed, and even while tempest soaked, charcoals outnumber my pasteled ambition

this distinct morbidity, by which I call my life, lacking

in that level of consistency

that spire sponsored screams might bring



for despite the consequences of ambient respectability,

reckless maturity brings terror to the aisles

and grave duels in the carefully measured medium

of the margins



and the starving are no longer a postulate amongst the rummaged toil

but the impotent sickness of a painters earthy delivery

counterfeit conjecture hung in the resentful stench

that remains too good

for the likes of you and I

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

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

in three lines expect
not the minutiae of life
fill the gaps yourself

nowadays they  have  to pinch the  ends

of their  cigarettes  before they  cross the  threshold no longer allowed to  herd  the  crumbling swarms of ash  across  the  gingham veldt


outside the  window, on the  pavement,    lies a  bible and  the  radio declares their  readiness  is high
seems like a  good   night to let the  smokers in and warm around a  last  embered light


on the  table I  browse  the  “priest“ they  called him

in the  centrefold, deep in the  heart,  a  flyer,

man’s  journey  into christ,

I  guess  we’ll   find out  soon enough the  veracity  of the divine



but until the  young-un  and the  white horse riders have  decided who can  ****  the  highest
leave us  to the  daily diary  and  its  tales  of

days  of ******* each  other’s  husbands and  wives



I  bought a  Dylan Thomas book one the  way  home, from the  junk  shop,
when I  got it  back  I  saw blood   on the  back cover

I  licked my  finger  to  wipe it  off but  she  said  “no!
you  fool“

sure  it  carried  the  plague of some cursed lover



I  plagiarise myself

a  drink  is most definitely in order

the  tawny  coolness tock tick toxic keen  as  the sharpest  dissection
and  then  you can  find me   not just  like everybody else but  just  like

everybody  else,  lying, hemi-hydrate,  below  the bridled  tension

of  life’s  meniscus

I write my words on
parchment leaves and rips
of litter, left
scattered for the rats
to read
at their leisure