When you can laugh at loss
Throw ******* up to fear
Find comfort in discomfort
Normality in the odd and queer

When you're warmed by the cold
Thrilled by protracted boredom
Find patterns in the chaos
Naiveté and dignity in whoredom

When you hear a choruses in silence
Then silence in bird songs
Find love blossoming in hatred
Nothingness amongst the throngs

When you come to terms with conflict
Then make confusion from clear-sight
Find innocence in the ******
Now damsels save distressed Knights.

When you come to ease with the end
Then worship the beginning
Find nothing is real but the now
Now that you are winning

The published discarded tweet
The sunken dimple not the ****
On your back not on your feet
The shadows are the light

The clouds creep on the ground
Still hidden after being found
A deafening absence of sound
Midday becomes midnight

This screaming riot of tranquility
Molding impotence into ability
Odds on to a far flung probability
Courage born from mother fright

Lost in an unfamiliar home, deep inside a book
In the comforting glow of that lamp that stood...
Standing to attention in that gloomy nook
The words jumbled & spun on that page
So I slammed shut the book

Above me burned a coil of tungsten
Blazing bright
White
And from it
Every angle burst its miracle of light
Beams/ waves destined for far off places
But shackled by the shade
Mocked by the tasselled trim
Harnessed by the braid

My mind wanders...
It is a marvel of our age
That we choose to create lamps so bright that they need a shade
That they need to be shaded
Those lamps can't shine so bright
For without the shade the dark won't creep in and we wouldn't be aware of the night.

I step outside
Into that night
Shadows cast by the city street lights

Down that dank alley
Lives an uncelebrated man
In a tattered box with faded damp
Barely noticed
Camouflaged
To most he's just another jaded *****
If only they could see
He
They
We
Individually tailor the shade for our lamp
Privately (inside translucent shields)  we all burn bright.
Shaded by fear and notions of what's wrong and right
Right and wrong
Wrong and right
Creations of those that had the strength to fight
Not by the humbled, battered and bruised
Too shaded to raise a blazing revolutionary fist
Too fractured, hungry and confused
Afraid of the attention caused from cries for any justice
Instead
Inside my head
I imagine I have my own bed
A good book
An cosy reading chair
And a lamp standing to attention with its thousand-yard stare

Staring out to the ever rising seas

Cometh the great submerging eviction
Mass migrations fleeing war, famine & filthy camps
Oceans rise and tears fall with whispered benediction
How many of you will become degraded tramps
But we just keep insisting that it is farflung fiction
Back to my box and its faded damp

Silhouettes of four impatient horses appear on an windswept horizon.

This false paradise we live in with its twisted ergonomics?
Should we really sit and wait for the catastrophes to appear?
Surely we are collectively able to create a smarter economics?
Or is it just easier continuing to accept living in fear?
Because when all is accounted for
All the pros and cons have been weighed
What matters most
Is not the brightness of your lamp
But your choice of shade.

Bring back the wolves, nature's balance has gone astray
The ancient flowing water is carving a new way

Reds and Roes are rampant, stripping blade, stalk and leaf
Diversity is dwindling, the knife is in its sheath

Bring back the wolves, not those that shoot for "sport"
Untame mother nature with her sharpest retort

Powder, lip gloss and dilated pupils
Rolled up notes and cheap thrills
Somewhere near the beginning of the end
Your worst enemy is your best friend
It's alright, it's just a phase you're going through
In the urban sprawl it's what you've gotta do
because....
You're a crowd pleaser, out to please
begging for friends, on your knees
You're a crowd pleaser with the latest bent
pleasing friends that are just for rent
You're a crowd pleaser, a fresh appetite
with a heavy pocket that'll soon be light
...
Wake up, leave, while they laugh with you
Exit and pay yourself what you are due
Leave before your whole soul is sold
Start a new chapter before this one's old
As you leave the sparkle and the geezers
Enter stage right the fresh crowd pleasers.
...
They're a crowd pleasers, out to please
begging for friends, on their knees
They're a crowd pleasers with the latest bent
pleasing friends that are just for rent
Just crowd pleasers, they're up all night
Lines not solitude (their primary fright)

I woke up this morning

Powder, lip gloss and dilated pupils
Rolled up notes and cheap thrills
Somewhere near the beginning of the end
Your worst enemy is your best friend
It's alright, it's just a phase you're going through
In the urban sprawl it's what you've gotta do
because....
You're a crowd pleaser, out to please
begging for friends, on your knees
You're a crowd pleaser with the latest bent
pleasing friends that are just for rent
You're a crowd pleaser, a fresh appetite
with a heavy pocket that'll soon be light
...
Wake up, leave, while they laugh with you
Exit and pay yourself what you are due
Leave before your whole soul is sold
Start a new chapter before this one's old
As you leave the sparkle and the geezers
Enter stage right the fresh crowd pleasers.
...
They're a crowd pleasers, out to please
begging for friends, on their knees
They're a crowd pleasers with the latest bent
pleasing friends that are just for rent
Just crowd pleasers, they're up all night
Lines not solitude (their primary fright)

Another urn filled with ash.
Spirit steamed, left with trash.

How did that one leave so fast?
Is it worth trying to be the last?

Up turned lives for 6 weeks.
Raw, reddened salty cheeks.

Full, half then empty glass.
Oh, what a beautiful glass!

How the light breaks through it
Scattered rainbows, raised spirit.

Cheers!

His face cracked
Every wrinkle a ravine
A broad smile of marble tombstones
Rolling his sapphire ivory eyes

I'm ninety three
He chuckled...  Ninety three
Yes,  it goes fast son I'll tell you how fast
I've only as many memories as you

This jacket is anything but...




Whats in the pocket

Close to "around the bend"
Proud to call a wall a friend
Posting letters others wouldn't send
Caring too much about the triple word score.

The trend or what's trending
What the be jeepers are you befriending
Could it be any more condescending
I guess peacocks are misunderstood

Remember when you had a list
You know,  when you were not ******
When we were all Swedish "tyst"
Drums, glitter,  blood and filo fax

How did it come to this?
Writing words on a padded wall
With ****...

Was a rusty rocket engineer
With his rusty rocket science
Able to transcend the stratosphere
A master of group defiance

Armed with You Tube, Eckhart Tolle
Chomsky and an awakening population
The rusty rocket could reach its goal
Of starting to build a civilised civilisation