This is not a new day, this is a day gone bad, rotting and stinking like putrid death, but repackaged, perfumed, and sold like cheap ***, for dimes or a sense of certainty or just company,

Surrounded and Alone-
The essence of city life

Out of windows, dusty, and brushing cotton flakes out of hair
In a cold room there is so much to do, like breathing,
Running hesitant tongue over stoic teeth,
Why use it? When communication is fraught with shipwrecking maelstroms of miss-understanding, miss- understood and miss-interpreted

                                   -heavy headphone armour on,
Check.

But what is sung is wrong, pursued by romantics old and new, this modern age is fractured and cannot be seen by a mirror unbroken, while comedy halls are bursting at the seams with self deprecation and I laugh at everything I don’t understand, and don’t understand why I laugh but-

But I’m fond of morbid irony: is it possible to commit suicide accidentally?

I ask the Eternal Cockroach as it salvages waste and it rolls its Eternal eyes at miss-placed Inconsequence. It rolls its eyes and sees the bottom of my shoe and ***** off to cockroach Hell or Heaven while the crushed and oozing carcass stains my sole.

And I don’t care if I asked a question or wanted an answer or, in the end, what I got at all.

Forget the bridge; I’m flying over this-

A poem, played out on stark eyebrows and two fine forehead lines, then quirked, ruining a long lamentation’s worth of time, to say nothing of the ruminating circle, the square that fits in it, those fine fired diplomatic lines, deluxe and then depraved and then forgetting what that means.

If anything at all

A New Year I don’t know what to do with, an old expectation I still harbour, though here ships can only be wrecked and left unrepaired save for chewing gum and spit.

Baby faced innocence wrinkles faster than hands in tepid bathwater; here,
Skin crawls with the tactile hallucinations of a spider’s breath; evaporating

The words, which are always contested even by themselves, that remain seated on a reluctant tongue, everywhere, where echoes of watercolour paint and bolognaise sauce compete for existential poetic perfection, here,

There, on cracked amber shores, ancient icons and ancient dramatic dreams, tumbled shreds of history textbooks and photographs combine into nostalgia, ready to catch a hot wave and jump into another word-

The essence of speech, like bread and potatoes, is starchy blandness- the plaster base of meaning, waiting for the frieze,

Really, it’s a tasteless memory that supports the world in its frame, in its seams, and cracks before it compromises-

I do not compromise, not because I am the best but because I fall apart without myself, and any compromise will mean death and that arduous reinvention of the smile, the hand, to wield pens and stroke guitar strings and make gear changes and fidget with hair and with fingers express urgent ideas in the shape of air,

Here,

The hollow house has already been burnt out, but an X was marked, so let’s ruminate around it still, and still before we pounce

On anything that gleams, anything that shines; hunt with snout in trough for lost treasure, those things that gleam and shine-but it’s a hoax

As fox masked bourgeois wolves run behind backs and pinch backsides and pick pockets. Steal pocket lint and ticket stubs and laugh, waving miss-fortune in faces, equally lost in the search for the words of missed discontent, but with money and our pocket lint and ticket stubs to forget it-

Until it just stops: Reach out, and bash them on the head- or start a civil war, it’s not always a choice, but now it yours-

To swing lavish hips in the garbage of history, or not

Don’t want or need to know what made this: put up a sign for the archaeologists of the future: don’t dig here, nothing worthwhile here, take the trowels and brushes and theories of Diffusion or Constructed Hegemonic Discourse (though Gordon Childe may stay for Tea, tea, that most holy incarnation of caffeine)

And go.

There’s nothing that one could want here that isn’t already known; when weeping, when looking in a hotel bathroom mirror and pulling at hair and eye sockets in mad disorientated frustration-
So,

I’ll be East of Eden, looking for East of Ordinary (if anyone cares) dropping and rescuing causes like pebbles and shells on foreign shores,

Sure, I don’t know what to think, but I’ll feel it anyway,

Spitting in open mouths next to ancestral verse, no reverence for irreverent history or this,
these narrow doorways and double standards are doing heads in;

shrink it, trim this mental overgrowth, neo-liberalise this stress, just privatise it all, and it becomes

Decrepit disconnections, miss-spelled and miss-meant; missing a lucid neologism and marvelling at its absent meaning. See, all there was to believe in was a circle pit that spun forever and insistent chords and the increasing pressure that ended in a broken nose;
                                                who knows?

Revelation: maybe I quirked that eyebrow, and disbelief simulated stimulating dreams-

I’ve seen promises made out of diamonds, wood, gold, amber, spit, so don’t ask me to repeat myself or this, to diagnose or understand it-

I’m sick with everything I cannot count or count on, things accidentally found and purposefully misplaced. I could lie and it would probably mean the same thing anyway,

See, there’s nothing new to see, to this or me,

This is not a new day, but one wasted in a cold room.