Night bus
And the pug nosed guy in the suit over there
Staring me down
Is a thousand broken dreams
And the young girl down there
Who looks weird
But my kind of weird
Is a thousand unexplored
And the ***** with the cap trying to finish off his crossword
Is Gil Scott-Heron
And no one sits next to me as I spill my poison through the keypad into a cracked screen

Didn't want to make a splash
In those days when we were
Strapped for cash
And we lay indolently
Took things intravenously

Don't want to make a splash
As I skip stones on your lake
But If I leave a wake
Then baby ride the waves I make

Outside I have no influence
People are born where they shouldn't be
Objects of consumption end up in gutters
Chemicals that will slowly erode me
Are put in the drinking water
A handshake seals the fate of some low lying town
Which is to be flooded for hydroelectricity
The chaos creates a fjord with a great variety of fish
Until catfish take over and an algae that wasn't meant to leave a laboratory in Italy takes over and makes the water toxic
People wrestle with notions that no one else will understand and that none of the many world dialects can express
Dogs **** where they shouldn't
And it is only a dim reprieve in a cavernous darkness that I know the order of my shampoo bottles
Or that a weeks worth of muesli lies in one of my cupboards
Or that my scarf hangs on that chair by the door
And yet the landlord
Is a vulture
That is trying to take
This last scrap of rotting meat
Away from me

I lost myself between your limbs
But found myself in your smile

As I puff
And and **** sadly
On carbon monoxide,
Nicotine
And
5000 others
I think of Nixon, Maggie
And other incarnations of the devil
And realise
That in the end
Time
Is the greatest dicator

A small butterfly
In Victoria station
No one notices

No sleep and I take my dark eyes to the streets
and the membrane separating the subconscious is weak
People become angels and demons
Screeching metro wheels are symphony orchestras
and emotions bump, collide and vibrate like particles in boiling water
No sleep but it's going to be a good day

I'm doing good now
Settled down
With wifi
A phone
A house
A good amount of food
I've stopped smoking
And taken up jogging again
And there is no one on my horizon

But I can't ******* write

As I dip my rod
In a vat of excrement
I wonder
What made me
like this?

Kids in states
In estates

My foot
on the small of your back
Your lips
at the foot of my ****
We rise
and fall
together

Ever since you left me
I can see ends built into beginnings
Everywhere
You ******

World that's not real
Love.
Love that's not real enough for me.

Hollow sound
Distant voice
Tense strings

Love that's not real enough for me.

Resonant chimes
Brooding bass
Drawn out *****

Thank you Gloria Ann Taylor

It's ok to smile once in a while
it can sometimes make you laugh
it kind of just feels good to do it
It's ok to think of life as a joke in these moments
because you need a good joke to laugh
at
this
****

Last night you saw past my front
And we connected
Eye to eye
Arms around torsos
Tongue in cheek
(My tongue in your cheek)
Right there
Revelling in the stupid jeers
And cartoon smirks
Unified
As one
Just like they sell it it the **** movies and flowery poetry

Except this didn't really happen
Because I am here on my own
Thinking that death isn't that bad after all
It's the approach
That's terrifying

I want to fade away
like Faye Dunaway

Glassy eyed and
Lost in utilitarian cities
With a low-yielding love
And a useless imagination
With the bad art
And the public transport seat pattern blues

I wish we could cut past the platitudes
And speak la langue franche
You and me
Cut past the trivialities
And get to the core
Great men have been there
Mapping 9 levels to the inferno
Or drawing solitude
But we put on pedestals
All those who divert our attention
From the core
And elevate to the rank of gods
The salesmen of longevity and eternal youth
But you and me
I think that tonight
We could chip at the terrifying core

Something interesting happened today
I stitched the pansexual symbol
To the back of my denim jacket
And went into town
Most people didn't get it
But a few did
And their jaws hit the ground
And that made it worth it

You're going to die
But there's a list of the 30 best cat selfies on buzzfeed
Something is going on in Ukraine, or is it Venezuela?
But it's ok...
Sherlock is back on
And you haven't finished Game of Thrones yet
God is a twisted sadist if he exists at all
But you have some notifications on Facebook
Don't think,
Just pick up the phone and play Flappy Bird
Let the feelies get to those thoughts that creep in

The revolution wasn't televised
It was tweeted
And its auto-tune remix went viral the next day

Alone on a mattress
Next to my ideal love
That one in the head
(S)he's a shape shifter
And always fits in neatly
With my lunacy

Let's transcend this sad world baby
Just you and me
Past the sidewalks
And shrinking patches of green
And ministry of sound compilations
And the weight of infinity on our backs
As we circle one of the 300 billions stars in our galaxy
In a universe of 170 billion galaxies
Just you me and a mattress baby
That's all we need

We stood infront of each other
Ripping off chunks of flesh
Mixed with matted hair
We gouged eyes
Struck bone
Tore strips of skin
As pools formed at our feet
And kept going
Clawing at cartiledge
Pulling at intestines
Until we got to the core
And we were both bare
That was our love

Drum Gold
Is my tobacco
It has character
And I had a girl once
Who liked Cutters Choice
And I told her it had more additives
And that it burnt hotter
And that Drum Gold had more character
And we spent nights exploring each other's bodies
And smoking Drum Gold
Which she adopted
But that ended
Like all good things
And I've forgotten a lot of those spent nights
And now she smokes Golden Virginia

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal reaching upwards
The water wars
The great migrations
The barbarity of a thousand roving clans
The infertility
And the old used as meat
Had made love a distant memory to those remaining
But tumbling over scraps
Navigating through shards
Gnawing at withered roots
Lapping at acrid streams
We went on
All we had done was hope better

It's hard to know when to call it a night
It might never be
But hold me
Let's see

I am tired of the Americans chasing their opaque neon dream
I am tired of well tailored speeches justifying wars
I am tired of the dusty remnants of a roman lie striking fear into the hearts of many
and an absent god forcing his framework on an apathetic world
and I am tired
I am tired of constipated museums
and the few dictating the sonic landscape of the many
I am tired of horse meat scandals and frenzies over crashed planes
and I am tired
I am tired of globalisation being an auction for the lowest human rights
rather than being
wasabi peas at Tescos
And sleep is the cowardly death
of the feelies and TVs of the world

If you want to cross a sea
Sink

I am an extension of some primal will to survive
But something bigger in here
Is asking
Why

Lacklove and manless in Moloch
Vile ******* in Moloch
Moloch
In whom I set disinherited
Dispirited
Listing to Arvo Pärt
As civilisations wax and wane around me
As towers are raised to the sky
Left to rot
Then lived in
As the furnaces of the world whirr on incandescently
And as I try to use long words to make it all seem better
And as words finally fail

I saw the germ seed of civilisation
In the metro today
Between Châtelet and St. Michel
It was stuffy
And the ones already in
Made it hard for others to get in
We formed a barricade
Made it look more stuffy
Than it was
Then tutted
Or rolled eyes when others tried to get in
There was a brotherhood
Even though all we had shared
Was the journey
Between Châtelet and St. Michel

I don’t know about those pastoral scenes
Those bucolic and primordial endless greens
Unspoilt trees and murmuring streams
I know the concrete and the pavement
Uneven cobblestones with cracks in them
With dandelions growing through
Only sometimes

I love the later more
I’m in love with the concrete behemoths
The back alleys of life
The gnarled bouncers (unreciprocally)
The curious glimpses at weathered flyers on the floor
I love the sterile street lights and the worn faces ILLUMINATED by them
The ushers and hustlers and cautious taxis
The drunk geniuses
The night-swimmers
The nudists
The opinionated
Etc

Yet life whittles down these loves for that of the
Calculable
The
Regimented
And
Controllable
Etc

Midnight seeps
Through
And one man is between his sheets
With something stirring beneath the pleats
And he wrestles his dusty memories
He relives and reviles them
And why is the night so dark?
And why does it make us damage ourselves?

There are drugs
And the shadow of divinity is scattered
By an unwelcome daybreak creeping into the room
Revealing lechery in our eyes
Everyone's voicing their ultimate truth
And yards if soul unfurl
As we distance ourselves from god
And words fail
All watched over
By the retreating darkness
And the wrinkled reality revealed

I remember through the haze of Hong Thong and Thai Stick
Our sterile love
In that shabby hotel
In Chiang Mai
Our stubble
Like Velcro
And I don't remember much else
Wasting away
Here
It's funny how you forget things
It's also crushingly sad

On monday
I will have to brush shoulders
with artless people
in an artless world
but for now
I have Songs from a Room
and Dave Bixby
and the stumbling hours of a Sunday afternoon

As the black girl in front of me leans into the window
I wish I had a camera
Her reflection is forming a double exposure
Of her sad eyes
On a background of fleeting metro lights
Next to me some girl gets slapped
And is then restrained by an old man as she claws after her attacker
There are two Japanese tourists
They seem disappointed
Some guy is staring at me
And tries to nod a bit when I look back
There is also this kid with pale white hands
Half asleep and hiccuping into his lap
Looks like he might throw up at any moment
And in the midst of all the arbitrary existence
I'm sat looking at the sad black girls reflection
And a kind of perfection forms

Life is like the M25
Circular and eternal
Covered in tarmac
With little skid marks
And Little Chefs
Life isn't really like the M25
Nothing is really like anything

Thinking about painless deaths
but decide to go out
on a flimsy bike
pointed nowhere instead
If some ******* is going to get me
it won't be me

A mess of thighs and hair and love
We ******
For the same reason
That kids throw rocks at the sea

Big words
Don't make for big feelings

You may win the rat race
But you will still be a rat

Too many people write about love
without being right about love
Full of
yet tight on their love
Spewing
an echo of flowery 19th century poetry
When the real love
is a point of view
It's looking back on that girl you hated 5 years back
with a new eye
It could just be a cat purring in your lap
It could be a warm fireplace
or a ******* you gave in Chiang Mai
It could be the ocean
or it could be that time when you collapsed in a gutter in New Orleans
and you lay in the trash
but looked up at the stars

I'm unhealthy, badly
You see..
Rotting, sadly
And I'd take you back
Gladly

I used to turn up late
I used to take the long way home
I used to stay up in ecstasy or agony until the first lights of day
But I woke up today and found myself trapped
By the 6:45 alarm
By a bowl of Musli
By brushing my molars
By the No. 27 bus
By my desk chair
Colleagues
Targets
And slowly you smile
And nod
As they take you away
From yourself
Somehow

There was a saint at the bar last night
He wore a battered shirt
And had uneven stubble
He cradled his beers
Peeling the labels off out of boredom
If you looked closely you could see the early signs of a receding hair line
And bags under his eyes
All he had said in three days
Was "beer" and "thanks"
He didn't look like a saint
And no one went home with him that night
And he ate 50 aspirin
And he wasn't at the bar the next day
Or the next
But he was a saint

These French keyboards
Have the n's and m's all mixed up
And you end up typing
Facebook.con
I like these French keyboards

Just the dull sighing of cars
As they float by my window
Projecting trailing shadows across the wall
Just the pale gleam of the moon
As it barely lights up the earth
And just a small man
In his bed
Seeing this
Hearing this
In this
But incapable of grappling with this
And what this is

I remember through the haze of Hong Thong and Thai stick
Our sterile love
In that shabby hotel
Our stubble
Like Velcro

And I don't remember much else
Wasting away on my own here in Paris

In the cold dead of space
The voyager one
Floating forth
With dark was the night
By Blind Willie Johnson
Engraved onto a gold plated disk
In its belly
So fitting