England will shake
And Great Britain will break.
Blows to the head, from the heart
Is what’s torn us apart.
Divided we stand,
With no outstretched hand.
United no more
With fear at the core.

She is playing with fossils and Lego figures
But is then made to play with dolls to convince
The other kids that
She is not a lesbian.
She is 7.
She is forced to pay tax on tampons
Because they are not as essential as,
Say,
Jaffa Cakes.
She is 12.
Now of age, she is promised to the son of a family friend.
Traded like cattle or a crop, but should be grateful that she is wanted.
She is 13.
She is sending nudes to an older boy
Because she has been told that that is the only way
Of showing love and commitment.
She is 14.
She wears a fake wedding band in public
To stop strangers asking her out.
She needs evidence, because her word isn’t enough
She is 15.
She is picking her A Levels
but shies away from Tech, Computing and Physics
because she thinks girls are not taken seriously in those fields.
She is 16.
She learns that strangers shouting and whistling from a van or scaffold
Is a compliment and she should be grateful for the attention.
She is 17.
She is called either ‘one of the lads’ or a ‘****’ for having more male friends than female.
When the word they were looking for is ‘friend’.
She is 18.
She uses earphones as armour
Against men in the gym who insist
On interrupting her session, to show her how to lift the weights ‘properly’.
She is 19.
She is required to wear makeup and heels to work
Because they are the basis of a hard-working employee.
She is 21.
She easily confuses male kind-heartedness with seduction
Because meeting friendly men without an agenda is so unfamiliar to her.
She is 22.
She is asked about family-planning by her employers. She fears that if she speaks out about the discrimination, her contract will be terminated.
She is 23.
She is told the gender pay gap is a myth
When she knows that her male colleagues are paid more for the same work.
She decides to remain quiet.
She is 26.
She is called ‘bossy’ and ‘sassy’
When leading a small team with confidence.
She now notices that those words are specially reserved for women.
She is 28.
She is unmarried and therefore the family joke.
The sponge that has no choice but to absorb
All the comments on her character.
She is 35.
She finds herself pregnant and is unsure whether there will be a job for her if she goes through with the pregnancy.
She is 36.
She decides to become a stay-at-home mother in order to not miss her baby’s growth.
She is called ‘lazy’, ‘backwards’ and ‘a disgrace to feminism’.
She is 37.
She goes back to work and now replaces her partner as the main breadwinner.
She is now a threat to male egos everywhere.
She is 39.
She is overqualified for the job role
But females over a certain age are neither commercially or aesthetically desirable in this industry.
She is 42.
The timeline ends here because
She is tired
After finally realising that
A woman dies soon after she is born.
SHE IS SOMEONE’s daughter
SHE IS SOMEONE’s mother
SHE IS SOMEONE’s sister
SHE IS SOMEONE's grandmother
SHE IS SOMEONE’s girlfriend
SHE IS SOMEONE’s wife
SHE IS. SOMEONE.

Like Hitchcock would have said:

Let's go out
On dark waters
Too deep
Because that's where all of you perverts want to go anyway
You don't care about happiness in fairy land where it's raining flowers
You want AIDS, ADHD, narcolepsy, funerals, junkies, alcoholics, ***, ****, ******, brothels, snipers, war veterans, drugs, criminals, motorcycles, accidents, models, size queens, gypsies, hairy hung cops, shemales, ****, ******, robbery, space aliens, punk, romance, opera, revenge...
And probably some splatter and gore on the side
No problem
What do you want to know?
I have no secrets

My name is Chris
I avoid obvious rhymes
and give you just the rancid;

'We feel you have not been communicating
effectively as an employee'
poet.

So to you I said 'I'm ill'
'Care to spill?' she hisses.
'Yes' I said

My names the one burning brightly up there in the corner of the room,
'Prince and King Godber'
bearing wooden sign carved by the passion of a Norse god,
a bearded  dwarf on a throne.

She responds;
simple, ******, surreal metaphors notwithstanding I ain't slept...
Small ****? Na ****, but let's not go into it tonight,
naked.

In her dreams he's laid with a woman, wept weeping eyes, distant stare, destroyer of hope, Eastern European,a broken painter cheating,
but he didn't know till it was too late.

The Sun became black
The full moon became blood
the great mountain ran with fire

Pain. Passion, Nighttime.

'Do what thou Wilt' says the bald man and shrugs, setting a bomb off in the 20th century.

I did, I do, I do - boom boom. no one laughs.

She shouts angrily Fool, Coward, Prince
Why don't you just come dance outside
stroke away those cobwebs in your hair

so I did, ripped the cobwebs out
screamed outside, bashed my head
on concrete, tried to **** myself
once, maybe twice,
contemplated more.

Like Virginia my hidden idol. My sister in censured pain.

Knees bashed, half-cut in dead of night screaming **** this
provincial slaughterhouse, this cherryhouse
of the half dead / half ******,
merry go round and round, like Kereouc,
but twice as merry, and that's saying something.

Come and bathe yourself in my immortal ****, she bleats
'look it up in your encyclopedia of shames'
you'll just find a picture of a woman.

It's intoned meaning
It's poems,
lips tell tales,
tell them then. I dare yer to tell em.
Scream them from rooftops.

screaming eyes aglow, burning Blake fire
poet looks down with lizard eyes
you remind me of me Mum naked.
Puke. Puke, ***** on the doormat.

Violence in words,
this language is obscene
and that is why
he said she said
is gonna **** us.

Already has.

**** it, fancy overdosing yourself on abilify tonight poet?
Not a plan. Not a plan. Don't go out drowning
yourself in alcohol or life, not tonight, not tonight.
Just never.

i.
did you know Thomas Jefferson rewrote the bible during his presidency? he gutted the passages, crucified the scripture. he cut out the mystic, the magic. turned Jesus into a man, a mortal, a shepard who knew how to herd his words into an ordered flock at the nape of a hill.

ii.
did you know every time i speak i feel atoms splitting in my chest? i hear the crack of a whip in the croak of my voice. i swallow sharp shards of broken conversations, they leave long scratches down my throat. sometimes i like to see how long i can go without speaking. everyday the soreness grows.

iii.
did you know during the black plague people killed black cats believing they were omens, harbingers of death? as if petulance is a spell spat from the yawning mouth of Hecate. believing this they killed with claws forged from rusted steel and hisses of spit flying from tongues like unholy sling shots, the townspeople’s gums black with sickness. the line between believing and being true is a lot thinner than one is lead to think. the skeptics say there is power in sight, the blind know the ebb and flow of ghosts.

iv.
did you know i used to eat meat? i used to **** red juice from fat steak, let it run down my chin in a steady stream, used to savor the crunch of wishbone and smash of teeth, the grinding of molars. i stopped when i turned seventeen and realized i was an animal too.

v.
did you know during human sacrifice the Mayans would hold a still beating heart up to the sun? let the red turn gold in the afternoon, decay to dust in the morning while mothers mourned. there is beauty in the macabre, there is truth. there is blood and salt and heavy breath. the human heart is only the size of the human fist. a thick, heavy handed fist pushed into my mouth and used as a gag. i would gladly offer the Mayans my heart, gladly splay myself on the alter, wait for the sun, only the Mayans died in 2012 with the rest of me.

it is july
and the stars refuse to break the sky.
the clouds are thick and
heavy with rain
and there is a pain in my chest.
the kind you have to push through,
the kind you have to shatter
with a baseball bat.
i am tired of taking baseball bats to my chest.
tired of all this glass.
the shards at my feet glitter like gold.
these are the broken pieces of me
i have shed like
feathers from my angel wings.
this poem is just another shard.
another pin in the voodoo doll.
another cry for help,
if you can call this sniveling a cry.

it has been five years
and im still the same sapling
i was when i was thirteen.
when will i grow?
theres a dead tree in my journal.
it will never again take root.
i remember plucking it from the garden
like it was nothing more
than a rose.
can you plant a rose bush
in a garden of glass?
i want my body to be a green house.
i want to grow.
i want lilies in my fingertips,
four o'clocks in my eyes.
forget-me-nots and sunflowers,
tulips, petunias.
maybe a cactus or two.
just because im beautiful doesnt mean
i have to lose my bite.

it is july
and the fireflies are like stars
dancing on the earth.
theres a pain in my chest.
a dull ache,
a memory.
i am tired of taking baseball bats to my chest.
tired of writing this poem.

I'm walking for a coffee rush, enough that
a surge of caffeine will blow this wall
off this writer's block and all these dammed-up
thoughts will spill and issue forth-unimpeded.
I bought coffee,read some poetry-some bad poems
some good, surveyed the area for other customers
a man with a boa constrictor scarf
and a woman glued to her computer, job searching
while her Pomeranian roams the cafe.
This is my habit, I buy coffee, read poems, talk
to strangers at a coffee shop, somehow it works.
This coffee buzz doesn't quite stimulate me
enough, the threshold is short of the spark
and the spark refuses to ignite.
I ask for another coffee. The barista accepts.
I take the coffee and sit
down and read before taking off to see a movie.
As I sit back to my spot.
The barista is taping me on their phone,
laughing with a regular customer.
They assume I'm crazy, because I walked
a mile from the cold in what appears to be  
a fur trapper costume from the 1800s.  
I easily shrug off their laughter, other people laughing
at you only confirms that you're alive.

I walk 2000 feet to the theater. I am a resolved man, no
one's laughter can deter me. I think to myself,
"the greatest struggle for me as an individual is to
forget that other people exist, and realize that, I as an
individual am- I have to convince myself of my own
solipsism, that I have a right to be who I am, how
I present myself, that is my responsibility and my tragedy,
both my madness and my health.

I walk into the theater vibrating
with coffee jitters-am I in the right mind,
the right state to sit through a whole movie
by myself? The movie is great, I feel like I understand
more than I should, some part feels more raw than
the others-I should watch it again. It's message: America is living
beyond its means, some people profit, others
slide past unpunished, the common citizen bears the burden
of Wall Street's obsessive gambling problem.
A familiar story to me, does anyone
intend to pay their debts in America-do I?