I wonder what it feels like
To be unwritten -- a thought
An idea striving to be inscribed
To be something that never was
And probably never will be.

I wonder about their fate.
Do they leave for another mind
Devoid of creativity or otherwise
Or stay there, eternally waiting
Locked-up in imagination limbo?

Are they just there, sitting
In the cold corners of my mind
Stuck midway between the sulci
Wilting into imagiary nothingness
Or struggling to become a reality?

What makes a thought complete?
Are they sewn up together in threads
Of liquor and crazed insobriety,
Patched up with deathless dreams
For the sake of being written?

I wonder what if feels like
To be written and yet incomplete
The half-thoughts on paper
Mixed up with other half-thoughts
In an indecipherable jumble

Maybe that's what I'm lacking
New beginnings, laughter, love,
Happy endings, there's a limit
To what experience allows me
To write or, to an extent, feign.

I speak for the voices left behind
The voices of long slewn ideas
Placed at the back of my mind
Ideas long crushed beneath
Countless writer's blocks

But they live on, they haunt me
In my waking, they still do
Like long forgotten feelings
And the fleeting personas
I never want to go back to.

After all, they were me,
These thoughts and ideas,
Or at least part of me,
For that one instance.
I wonder.

She'd walked to work at sundown  
When the blue dissolved to evening              
Past the roadside vendors cooking fires,
Not yet bright enough for deepening                
The outline of the factory-house
Where night-time shifts were gathering          
'Round the early evening cooking scents,
Boiled rice, and bread and lentils
Carried on the twilight breezes with  
A light refrain that mentioned
The hunger in her mid-riff
And the mild persistent headache
At the urgent anxious anger that
Her fears and hopes resembled.
And the nagging hopeless worry
That the money wouldn't stretch.

Treading lightly, sandals slapping
In a rhythm never blindly
To be misconstrued as anything
But a walk to work, and quietly.
One hand clutching at her sari,
Coughing mutely through her head-shawl
Barely breathing through the mocking
Of the jeering tuk-tuk drivers
Past the dust cloud covered concrete
With the reek of sun-soaked diesel
And the mouthing finger-thrusting
And humiliating cat-calls
That permeate her modesty
And her sense of self-retrieval
With a fierce determination
That the future must be faced

She'd felt the first forced tremble
In the walls and floors beneath her
And the slowly sliding shifting
Of her sewing, soiled machine
As it cannoned past the T-shirts
Through the carefully folded blouses
And toppled from the table top
To smash against the floorboards
When the building crumpled inwards
And the chaos and the screaming
Chased the panic to the exits
Down the staircase to the ground.
Then the ceiling at the center of the
Wide, high whitened work room
Caved in with crash and cursing
As the lighting dimmed and died

Now, far above she hears the cadence                    
Through the gauze of dimming clarity              
Fire truck sirens moan hysteria
Within the tinnitus of silence                
Tumbled past the dust caked boulders
Of the colorless construction                            
Prostrated down below
In the humid darkened stillness.
Trapped and jammed into the spaces
Where the falling floors had forced her.          
Where the grinding groaning echoes
Of the debris and the torture                        
Close her throat to swells of  panic
For her mother and her daughter              
In the two-roomed cardboard shanty
Miles above and hours away

Barely conscious, breathing lightly
Through the dust and reek of faeces
Thinking of her crowded back-room
Where she'd bathed her infant daughter
In the tin-roofed cardboard shanty
By the stinking standing water
And where her husband’s insobriety
Nightly terminates in snoring
After shouting and the swearing
And occasional forbearance
When her mother’s stifled terror
Terminates in tempers risings
And the all pervading violence
That resolves in resignation
And completes the shaming sequence
By the act of copulation

In the wreckage work continues
Where the rescue teams are scrabbling
In the arms of their dilemma
To keep searching or accepting
That the paradox of seeing and then again
Believing in the hopeless expectations
That some persons can be found
Far below and hours away
The burning thirst has found her
Past the pain of her right shoulder
And the numbness in her legs.
The acrid smoke that holds her  
Transfixed in shallow coughing
While the sari starts to smolder
To the agony of breathing
As she hoarsely tries to scream

In a conference room in London
In the tautly tensioned Aerons
Women smooth their sculpted short skirts
As the slicked-down young supplier
Holds a T-shirt for inspection
To the murmured confirmation
Of the busy buoyant buyers
That the pricing must be right.
Miles above and hours away
Six degree's of separation
Form a loosely joined connection
Out of mind and out of sight.
One by one the vendor cooking fires
Turn to embers and to ashes
While miles below and far away
Comes the dying of the light.

I didn't have the guts to be a rebel
All the counterculture called at me
Asking me to join
In living rooms with Goodwill couches
Owned by a friend of a friend of a friend
They reached out to me
Hands and hearts so open that they couldn't stop bleeding
Asking me to join them
To make what I felt
To do what I wanted
Regardless of whatever the rules said.
They asked me,

Passing the tokens of a shared insobriety
That sought out the essential truth beneath
A thousand and one layers of culture and biology and social pressure
That only ever manages to turn diamonds into coal

I don't have the testicular fortitude to forsake the gifts of my birthright
My middle-class hope
Of a sliver of land beholden to an HOA
Of a wife who loves me kind of and children that will hold me to an anachronistic social standard that will leave me wanting
But it could be mine
It could be a world of my own making
With love and joy and plenty
And the mediocrity and turmoil
That is essential to life whether it is good or bad
It could be mine

The true face of the world is violent
And life struggles unconditionally to enact it's will on a world
That has extinguished more species than are alive

We are mayflies in the cosmos waxing and waning
And no one cares
And no one guarantees that I will eat tomorrow
Let alone find love
Or persist in the presence of my ancestors.

I don't have the ***** to wager my little bits of happiness
Even if there is a slim chance to change a million minds or more
Call me a coward
Call me a pragmatist
In a century call me dead
Right now you can call me mostly happy
And I don't know if there is anything better

I don't know if I want to live anymore.
To be or not to be, to see and not be seen;
those hermit eyes can see right through me.
And I feel ignored, passed over, strung out
on the wicked surface of a thousand liquid crystal screens,
on the lips of paltry kisses forgotten.  

I don't know if I want to live anymore
he says with a troglodyte twang
grappling crippled finger bones the keys of ivory sang,
dried, cracked lips with tight reed slicks the river bank.

And I am insane for being sane in an insane world.
Friendless, I feel forlorn, and like so many others,
self-reflection terrifies me more than death. Boredom,
on the border between depression and peace, between suicide and meditation.

Teetering on the edge of the abysmal,
fortunes fool animates an impetuous illusion:
the act of insignificance, the play of powerlessness.
May I die with insobriety, but in life, in spirit, inspiration.

Love is a poisonous needle
Which stabs you deep in the heart
And takes all your thoughts
Into this holy void
Where neither can you reach
Nor your lover.

Love is a vacant chair
But, my friend
Don't try to fill it here
For it's soon going to end

Love is a a silent lullaby
So let it stay quiet
Don't make a sound
And gently pass,
Or else you'll wake up the hound
Who stays with you alas.

Love is an addictive vine
It lets your heart be filled
With all those useless unsolved riddles
Like a piece of cotton twilled.

Love is insobriety
You forget how to live.
It snatches away your tranquility
For you're engaged to someone
With all the fake promises.

Love is a starless night,
With only one star shining,
Shining so bright
Ignoring to drift away from your mind
You lose everything,
You lose your sight.

Love is a void,
Don't let yourself get trapped
In its holy fierceness
Because it's going to slap
******* your face,
Rubbing all the lines
Your palms have ever traced.

Love is something
I can't understand
Lead me the way
Or let alone stand
Watch the lovers dance
Under the winds of autumn
Watch the lovers prance
Prance away in their separate ways
And watch them realise
That there're no more gay
In parting their own ways.

Love is a thoughtless beginning
But it soon ends
With all your thoughts pondering
In your sober inward eye
You wake up from your peaceful sleep
And you see that love has stolen
All you've ever had
And now everything's broken.

my throat
is completely
parched but
i can't stop
smoking your
every word

and i'm
trying to stay
sober but
i keep
getting
intoxicated
with your
kisses

you are
every form of
substance abuse

and in this
state of
insobriety
all i see is
a conundrum of
hallucinations,
hazy forms
of your
perfect face

i have been
warned of
your side
effects yet
i can't get
over this
addiction
made up of
glassy eyes
pink cheeks
bruised skin
and the
perfected smirk

let me
get wasted
on the sight
of your
chapped lips

inject me
with sinful
lust and
pure love

because i
beg for you
to let me
overdose on
you

to feel you
piercing bones
and killing cells

i want my
thin veins
burning
and my
little lungs
gasping and
choking on
the residues
of your
smoke  

i am so
drunk on
you
that i feel
the hangover
hitting already

make this
moment last
a little longer
please

don't let
the morning
come and
take away
the joys of
being wasted
and replace
it with the
pounding
realization of
your absence

Some people come and go in our lives without incident, while others leave an indelible mark. H was one without compromise - and quite often without humility, displaying flaws so apparent on a single meeting that he may as well have had them printed on a t-shirt or pamphleted around the area wherever he went to avoid anyone having to discover just what a heinous ******* he really was.

Conversely, he was also the most unfailingly generous person I’ve ever known when it came to noticing the actual or potential for good in others. A complete dichotomy of one seemingly split down the middle, irreconcilable in so many ways.

H also made me laugh like no-one else and some of the stupid things he did continue to. One evening, he decided he wanted a chicken club sandwich from the Oakley Court Hotel (famous as the exterior for the Frank N. Furter castle from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’). It soon became apparent that absolutely NOTHING but this particular sandwich would do.

The hotel wasn’t far from H’s house, but neither of us could drive owing to having been revoltingly drunk since lunchtime, so we called a taxi and took a Tupperware box with us.

On arriving at the hotel, making it very clear the taxi driver should wait for us, we stumbled into the bar, ordered a round and requested chicken club sandwiches to go. The barman stared at us as though we were from another planet.

‘You are guests at the hotel’? he enquired, through narrowed eyes.

‘No,’ said H, ‘We have recently arrived from Uranus and would like to sample your earth food’.

That attitude, I asserted, wasn’t going to get us club sandwiches on any day of the week.

‘I apologise for my butler,’ I said, ‘He’s just got out of prison and his manners have lapsed. Please could we have two rounds of your delicious chicken club sandwiches’? Proffering the Tupperware to prove we didn’t intend to stay after slamming back the ***** tonics we’d just ordered, I added: ‘We’ve brought our own box’.

The barman wasn’t having any of it. ‘We do not bring food to the bar after nine pm’, he intoned. H checked his watch, which he never remembered to wind. ‘It’s only just gone nine’, he argued, then gestured, foolishly to the clock on the wall behind the bar that showed half past ten.

‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ replied the barman, clearly being nothing of the sort and having recognised our insobriety the moment we’d entered the bar. ‘No food served in the bar after nine pm’.

‘But we don’t want it served in the bar’, said H. ‘We just want it placed into our lunchbox here’. Snatching the Tupperware from my hands, he looked around, presumably for the door to the kitchen. ‘Would it help if I just popped along to the kitchen myself and asked them’?

The barman shrieked with a sort of strangled cry ‘Uh, sir, NO’. He regained composure, attempting, no doubt to tamp down the fear of whatever mayhem might ensue when this ****** idiot got punched by the chef for appearing in his kitchen demanding takeaway sandwiches.

Unperturbed, H pressed on. ‘If we were residents, would that make a difference’?

The barman pushed our drinks, reluctantly, towards us. ‘You would call room service, Sir’.

H shot me a look. ‘No’. I said, firmly, ‘We’re not getting a room just to order chicken club sandwiches, that’s ridiculous’.

‘Is it’? asked H, seeking definitive clarification.

‘Yes’, I said, ‘That would make a chicken club sandwich, like, three hundred pounds’.

H considered this for moment. ‘Be a ******* good sandwich for three hundred quid though, right’?

Querously, H negotiated for a full ten minutes with the seemingly immoveable stance of the barman, and had now begun addressing him by the name on his badge. ‘Kurt, what’s the reasoning for not serving food in the bar after nine o’clock? Give me something I can work with’.

Pondering for a moment, Kurt had the good grace to fully consider the question. ‘Because lots of non-residents use the bar after nine pm’, he gestured to the empty room behind us, ‘The kitchen does not have full staff at this time and could not handle all the orders from the bar as well as room service. Bar patrons would see the sandwiches and want them too’.

H made the face that meant Kurt’s perfectly reasonable logic was about to be ****** sky-high.

‘Kurt’, he began, ‘How many patrons are in the bar this evening’?

Kurt blinked, like a mouse asked where the cat is. He even looked around as though there may have been patrons hiding behind curtains or under tables. ‘Just… the two of you, Sir’.

H leaned over the bar, looking left to right in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Just the two of us’, he said, ‘And we’re not going to tell anyone if you ask the kitchen to make us chicken club sandwiches. Scouts honour’, he finished, attempting a salute and smacking himself in the eye.

Kurt looked defeated. He was already reaching for the phone to call the kitchen.

‘On one condition’, he said, ‘You must sit around the corner where no-one can see you’.

‘Kurt, my man,’ said H, ‘I’ll sit on a ******* spike if necessary’.

Two hours and two bottles of sauvignon blanc later, we realised the taxi was still waiting on the drive outside.

As it turns out chicken club sandwiches do cost nearly three hundred pounds after all.