Clouds drift atop the stimulus of life
– mindlessly numb voyeurs –
blindly present,
yet,
vaporously absent from blame.

I watch in retort
as you blunder
over causeways
of stammering lies,
hurtling weathered blows
from your
mournfully
tarnished
mouth.

The sound alone
asphyxiates me
and I would rather it hurry
than disable my
regal silence
with the screeching noise
of your
thunderously
garbled
deception.

I fear to perish early –
dread my soul be drowned
and led astray.
Deceased
I can’t commit myself
to be the best I can display.
I’d like to grow in wisdom
lest my life be worth its end today.

But with dismay
I grow archaic
resentful of my future fate.
I can’t expire starved and needy –
I want to ‘have’
not live to ‘hate’.

Before the end
I’ll search for more:
another route
a higher state.
Then I can pass
become the past
succumb to death
become sedate.

Desiring this
I’ll set a plan to vanish happy:
die fulfilled.
In a deed
I’ll write these words
consumed with grace –
my burden killed.

I’ll live a life of glory now
enshrined in love
that’s mine to build.
And when my mortal skin is shed
I’ll know it’s something I have willed.

In the peak of a moment
– at the very point of desirous recognition –
one exists in the present
only to fade into the stillness of
hungry impression;
to fade into the memory
of what might never be again.

Temptation, one’s new master of control.

If I starved myself of food
I would never feel empty
because someone
with a taste for beauty
made you delicious.

Your sweet promise
coats me like a varnish,
wrapping my sticky desires
in an airless
human
skin-tight
vault.

Fatally sealed,
this timeless wait in madness,
this paused intent
of craftsmanship

one unstepped
frozen
foot ahead

contains me like a parasite,
and I, far from drowning,
hibernate within;
mirages of possibility,
seeming eons of time

– bereft of touch –

pass me by, imprisoned.

But wide awake alone,
insane,
inside this vacuumed husk,
I quench my heart

– reflection –

while my hunger,
still un-fed,
provides the popcorn
and the trailers
to the feature film
that scratches at my
fading,
timeless,
statuesque,
and stunted soul.

I wait (believing)

baited and entombed,

for the next civilisation
to unbury me

and recreate a reason
for my being here
that parallels an excuse
for their own.

Standing here
I stood my ground
floating
closer
than the distance

Further
than ‘ahead’ I saw
me
fighting for resistance

Fast
unmoving
– not alone –
with only me
I stayed

Fumbling
– screaming loud –
to hear it:

. . . silence . . .

yet I disobeyed

Cocooned in air and
muffled
by these fitful gulps
I dared not breathe I
marked out time
in vacant space
I owned – yet
not yet: not for me

Thinking hard
I cleared my mind
– illusioned, lost –
yet
memories traced

Would I
(should not) leave
I’d try

The where?
Just ‘some’
to
ANY place

Words I’ve left unsaid
collect like tombs inside my mind,
resting wide awake
without a sound
to pass the time.

Blind beneath the surface
losing purpose, long repressed,
my words now sleep, unspoken,
lacking passion,
unexpressed.

Just outside my reach
my words are hidden, cast from light;
without a voice to feed them
they recoil beyond my sight.

Depleted words
– malnourished –
thin with hunger while they grieve
and when my lips re-open,
they, destroyed, refuse to leave.

Resigned, my words inside
have lost their courage,
weak, deformed;
destined once for freedom,
now detained alone,
they mourn.

These broken words whose author
still retains the will to thrive
return instead to thought form
in an effort to survive.

In fluent tears,
these wordly souls
– admirers from my past –
expire rolling from my eyes
to fare me well at last.

And left with me,
a silence,
for my naked void to dress –
the lingerie of alphabets
strewn high upon my chest.

Each branch
of my life-giving tree
provides a path
my heart can follow,
where its direction
and connecting purpose
lead outward
– always –
to infinite beauty;
to a scope beyond that
which its blind roots
and captured leaves
can only dream exists

By I passed you
like a tornado
on a quiet day
sweeping you
into the jumble
of my world.
I watched
as you floated
– unaware –
in a void
of confusion.

Sticky
and sweet
the fingers
of love
that travel down
in tingles:
a liquid storm
in nothing but
a rush of fire

Wet
and discrete
the lips of heaven
that smother
and capture with haste;
a halo so wide
that not even
lust
could quickly retire

I soaked myself
in your pleasure:

sounds,
dripping like images
from your lips

No sooner had I drained you
and filled myself
than your half expired
body came alive

and, I,
already bloated,
asked for more

Every second we touch
leads us closer
to separation.

I would rather watch
for there is no end
in sight
to this vision.

Something
in my damaged whisper
from within begins to roar
and your secrets
– as I shake –
fly far from where you left them

I watch
vocals shredded
limp and newly sane
as they tumble
– like a silent movie –
into the back pockets
of sweet revenge

If I were the ice
and you were the sun
I would
drip
until there was nothing left of me
but a reflection of you
in my puddle.

burning
these eyes
fear what I see

– incomplete poetry –

a part of you
unfinished
yet alive
becomes lost again

half written
this Frankenesque fate
seals your mystery

locked within
a writer’s typed notes
– and unaware –
I sense you feel
the end
once more
encroaching

It is here
in this bottle-necked existence, locked
into days captioned by ticks and tocks,
where time resides in each of us
until it stops,
rotating the same hands
inside the same third dimensional clock;

it is here
where every breath exhaled is a universal kiss –
it is simply one moment and
the space in between this
that binds together our journeys, which,
as uniquely defined as we feel each is,
are all chapters of the same book
we write to reminisce,
primed and pained with the same theme we
create to self-exist,
scrawled by the same pencil, held
by the same hands as we persist…
each of us artists
with the same precise and leather-bound twist

It is here
where we long for real purpose or true faith –
to believe that something
‘other’,
external,
or
majestic
awaits…
but in nothing we trust
yet, cry blame for our fate –
each a different monologue of the same hate;
the same distracting soul state;
the same periodic and prolific bait –
God would not want us, at any rate

It is here
in darkness, arms around each other’s back
that war hangs overhead in stasis,
circling, cycling on a track and
wearing thin our patience
while it leaks like yolk from all our cracks
(we watch it drip indifferently as we huddle tight within our pack)
S
I
L
E
N
T
L
Y
preparing
for the next surprise attack:
we, like wolves, insane
and seeing red with every flash –
our lonely pain inciting hunger,
our deep abyss as black

It is here
in this cosmic explosion,
and it is now just as it was then,
that peace is nought but a tragic parody
of the dreams of passing men,
and nothing changes but the theatre of stars
in lines, in queues, end to end,
enemy to friend to
ENEMY
for decades once again,
consuming pain like greed as our bellies all distend,
living every angle of the lie like it is money we MUST spend,
the broken tales of each of us
portending, true, our end;
dangling one more burden
like a dog-tag for a past we’ve penned
at rest beneath a headstone
in a yard of human bookends

I have lost
you: lost myself
in the search
to find us both.

Time: a purpose
built for frolic and fancy;
an infinite seduction
so exquisite
that it’s yet to be considered to exist;
a burden so nameless
that life abandons it
almost upon inception.

It was like
you were something
I should not permit myself to see
but the ****** I make no apologies
for becoming
stripped you down to bare flesh
fully clothed
while I peeked between the slats
of fact and fancy.

sometimes
mistakes are forever
and regret is the undercoat
that primes your life

perhaps foolishly
it might seem calmer
(karma)
on the surface
to forget the original dream
than to colour it over with
shades of new intention
when all you want to do
is bleed the red out of your eyes
until the copper rusts your face
and runs finally clear;
a dried salty ash,
the only pock-marked
stain on your ****** canvas

the minimalist collector
your highest bidder

I have, once more,
jailed my vision,
splicing diamond-cut thoughts with this
cross-bred and violently bleeding doubt that
feeds from the stomach and shreds the sanest of minds

It is here this rampant indecision
squawks in wordless tongue,
lashing its disposable fancies
(arrow-tipped precision)
at my shaking core,
bowels emptying
alongside any creative thoughts of semblance

All that is left to bear witness: a sweaty palm or two
– and silence –
as the webbing of my fingers um and ah
hovering, like midnight fireflies
over the speech-impeded womb
of my QWERTY keys

And, inside, I hear laughter

You could be made of
the fanciest yarn that
binds forever
your empty space
and you would still
knit me a reason
to love everything
you were actually not

my fingers
trace your outline;
every
hardened wave
and liquid curve
the perfect shape
to precisely enclose
my rapturous heart

each of us
as insane
as the other
– you, more so than I –
we both repeat
at once

It slips,
this new surrender,
past the rusted locks
and caution signs
and crumbling roads
of cul-de-sacs
and vacant lots
and open tracks
to freedom;
where conundrums play
and secrets huddle
and bodies lie
and youth decays,
retired past expired days

Engraved in time,
cocoons and shells
and nests are hung
and quartered for a chance at love;
the way ahead,
receding,
half behind
and part enslaved
(a mask of promise worn from birth to lucid grave)

And,
like an avalanche,
it falls in quick pursuit,
this multiverse of
filthy guise
– of liquid paths and dangerous eyes –
and ruby coloured blushing cheeks;
where every lover’s
heart of sponge or stone
descends to meet . . .
heating,
for another touch
beneath the fraying sheets

And all the while
in rush and glory,
time,
******* moments
as it passes, flies away –
manifest instead as flesh,
(again)
with wings that only beat
to re-transcend
and scar
and mend in
pounding,
swollen,
rhythms,
c
l
a
w
i
n
g
for the warmth of smothered distance:
roaring
for a welcome end

So,

spaced between
the tics
and tocs
of darting pain
and thrusting *****,
of ***** aroused, abused, and shamed,
a silence, near, deploys again
the ever caged
and emptied song
and lusting shame
of mouths and tongues,
inclining, fast at last
to go
from whence it came
to soak the mind
and strip the soul
and blur the lines
of time and toll,
buried,
in surrender, whole

the life
on which we thrive
is so small
amongst the larger
landscape
of a picture
that tells a thousand words

the life
we so treasure
becomes a whisper
of nothing more
than a dream
in the lives
of those
who are dying

the life
we are
the life
we can’t see
is contained
in an egg shell
and it’s mother
is the womb
of all mothers
from the wife
in which we live
called life

Bear witness
for in this river of flesh
I carry souls ashore
where countless numbers of
babes become men
become monsters and then
become thrustly
and greedy
and desperately famished
of reason but too fat with ease, and
too brittle and fractured
of heart and of sense
and, thus, absent of care
to repent or ascend
but instead,
so depend on their
wafer-thin skin to protect
their descent
into watery storms,
– into tangles of nets –
– into womanly curves –
and the blue, blue eyes of breasted streams,
ungodly fresh sin,
and purposeless dreams

Bear witness

as I birth these farmers of filth
as they strangle the earth
while I patiently wade in
the knee-high abuse
and the ocean of seed
to stand watch by their graves
where the no-longer-babes
– the sailors and cowards
and ******* that dribble –
are caught in a wave
of stone and soil ripple,
– are anchored and drowned –
without sight, nor intent,
but the passage of life
for a time
– once less lived –
due the freedom
I selflessly lost
but to generously
give

Bear witness:
I swell with the waters of life
– the mother and wife –
for an endless such blight;
yet, still, I exist, swept aside,
and, despite.

Belittle me
and like a singularity
I will become dense
and invisible
and drop from your space

I will gravitate
inside my own world
(my owned world)
– my mass, not yours –
and use my volume
to prove your theory
is full of holes

– black holes –

that only carry purpose
like a stain
that can’t be washed
from its own fabric

Come lay with me
so that I
with any luck at all
pass into the night
– yours, being the last face
I shall ever desire to see.

Opinions
are an
****** onion:
they sting
they burn
but they taste
oh so
delicious
on your tongue
when you speak them

Bit by bit I’ll build you
until you forget you have no form

Dream by dream I’ll make you
as I pour your cold to warm

I’ll catch you in my blooming petals;
soft, the ground, my arms will be

Piece by piece I’ll fill you
yet, in truth, you’re filling me

Night and day I’ll ripen you
and grow you where you stand

Strong and proud I’ll mould you
while, in truth, it’s by your hand

Time will pass in moments
long in pause, and in-between…

yes…

My thoughts alone might write you
but, in truth, this need writes me

This night carries me,
blinded,
in the back pocket
of ***** minds and
shabby dreams where I
flat,
and molded,
press against this folded denim,
warm and splayed with
arms outstretched,
longing,
for another day; but

what if I turn my head
to over-peek the top
of these fraying jeans,
instead,
grasping threads
to keep me still within its seams
– will the exhilaration
of watching where I’ve
just this moment been
allow me inspiration
asleep awake, to boldly look,
clinging to the back end of
these thoughts that write me,
penned in ink,
like a pre-determined book?

Perhaps I should just
– winded –
forward face,
ignoring the sour stench
of this unmoving,
walking,
waking race,
stalking through the darkness
in a covered veil
at quiet pace,
destabilising future steps,
accepting this acquired taste,
processing my obsessive needs
and bathing clean my crumpled face
in chafing tears that fear progression,
awash, alone,
in one more nightly session.

Devoid of light,
here, ye, the theme:
this narrow, stunted, ****** depression,
the fabric of a self made bed –
this
bottomless pit of expression
unstitching dreams of fortune
as I swelter, melting hope
again,
apathetic,
white of noise,
inside my broken head.

Say no again
and you will build this love
with weakened walls
– a prison –
that stands only
to threaten my life
and topple my dreams
and crush my heart
and ignite a fire
that burns my goodness
into an eternal
rage for slow revenge

The school girls
with the messiest hair
are my daughters

The ones with the
fallen socks
and the untucked shirts

So concerned are they
with getting there
so they can come home later

That nothing but
Armageddon
can stop them in their tracks

Instead of foraging around making connections
with cables and wireless systems that
bluetooth and sync their way
into our pocket technologies
and portable screens

(tablets of which we self-prescribe
and regulate through overdose
and comatose keenings of stillness
and waking dreams)

why, instead
don’t we fool around
making connections
with others of like mind and brainwaves
instead of radiowaves and
the mastered minds of computer waves
and lift an arm and
really wave
beyond our windows to
real people
in real time
rather than peeping
like a holographic Tom through
tabs and browsing windows,
multi-tasking time in a state of mime
like it’s about to expire

(like the wireless wires will break)

and all that we’ll have is
all we can physically take
from this moment awake we call ‘life’
– a mistake.

What else is left now
in this vegetative
one man one woman state
where we live to close our eyes
and shut our minds and wait for
the modem-router to re-dial and
get our avatar back online and
our friends back into our
multi-dimensional realer-than-time
time?

Pseudonyms solving identity changes
emerge without birth
with designer non-faces, as
now that we no longer need imperfection
or meaning or privacy
or even perception
we alter ourselves to impress our connections
with whom we connect without really connecting
by hiding as one almost nearing detection
and tip-toeing straight past
concern or reflection

(invisible firewalls at our protection)

our own walls around us
with keys we can capslock,
screening ourselves from unfriended friends,
and playfully sated by charm and ‘pretends’
that will mean next to nothing
when fantasy ends.

Where ARE the connections we make
in this digital age
that we rarely turn off since
the internet craze has become a new God
that we dial to be saved
as we sacrifice friends we once made
face to face
with those we are longing to meet
as we race across networks
with hunger and haste and
with spambots and data and viruses made
to detect and infect
and reject, just for starters,
and that’s not to mention
the ads and the logins and
passwords that lock us
from somewhere far yonder
that doesn’t exist
as we grow ever fonder
of pics and of pixels and
texts of expression
– the reality of which
we could lose in a second.

You
can shut me out
all you like
but the windows
to your soul
remain wide open,
and I,
the great visionary,
can see everything
contained within
beyond them.

Every word you don’t speak
is simply one more
that I would happily wait a lifetime
in silence
to hear

this moment will slip away from me
drowning out my fears in a raft made for two
oars afloat
beyond my cramping fingers
and nothing but my shadow will be revived

We
rush recklessly forward
in awkward sentient colonies
blinded
by self preservation
and fragility
consumed
by regret
and indecision and
burdened by lust
(shadowy voyeurs that we are)
and
in unreasonable haste
by misunderstanding.

We
awake sleeping
powered
– faultlessly –
by emotion
and media:
desperate
to get ahead of change
before change changes.

We push
almost
silently alone
– forgivably selfish –
and factory bred to be unaware
of what to ignore
drowning ourselves in excuses
and reasons to find them
and
searching for peace
and harboring nothing
– absolutely nothing –
of the sort.
We survive
possessed by impression
and ruined by greed.

We launch
propelled on
and upward
finding any description that fits
to fit
calling it ‘destiny’
(the time we have left)
oblivious
that time exists
nowhere
but in the moments
that we hurry
now
(society, that is)
in droves
to pass on by.