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
Opening poem from my second collect, "scratch" (2013), trying to express the frustration and disgust with life in a provincial town ringed by sink estates and worshipping at the altar of consumerism