There was a sort of whizzer boy,
The tinker blinker clinker boy,
With gears and knobs and springs abound,
A head full of thoughts and gears that go round.

He liked to paint and make and build,
For every craft, yes, he was skilled.
“Working hard but with time to play?
Why, that’s my favorite kind of today!”

But what made him different, you see...
He was always quite metallic-y,
And when it was his time for bed,
He charged his battery, and turned off his head.

our dying kiss
two babies were born
with flying wings

Sometimes reading my pages over
I dream I live inside a Poem.
Where my skin has memories, and
My honesty is the framework of bones.

Sometimes my words become candles
Scenting every room with their rhymes -
Music ripples through alphabetical shadows
Walls are a graffiti of favourite lines.

Friends face-time to comfort me,
Some send messages of their love.
Every full stop and pause is a fingerprint,
Actually speaking out loud is an event.

Every room of me is a verse metaphor
Each thought though unfinished endures
Walking from door to door searching
The way out is the way in I'm sure.

Tommy Randell - 11th March 2021.

The end of the cigarette
Burns off spaghetti strings,
While one eye is on the soup.
My shoes, which by the way
Are on my feet,
Swizzle and spin
As the thermometer bursts
From the heat of the kitchen.
The stars can be seen
Through the roof,
As the freezer lets off steam,
And I reach into my pocket
And pull out a rock,
Which I crush with my bare hands.

some of the dryness will bleach from pithing
your noetic strands and the rest, a ****
prinked rind deluded.

i dip cupped hands into the lowlands, scraping
fractal mold flakes captioned, answers in light
crowded lenses.

cubic rift, that, i will toss adoration engines,
in the end, the goddess of substance will
not react.

not retrace, not the rift. mortaled caper,
inflection of the flats, grinded
reactions. grinding thoughts
grounded.

scribbled to-dos spreading forth, immurdered.
tokenized spice cabinets, enter rift
refuge. the caper collapses on molar-novas,
solar lepidoptera folding in your hair.

the sweat-between-us hive. the separatist mind.
salt mines alarm us, a subject deepened
between two gestures. have you the stratum
of intention?

germinal grains, embryonic clock tower -
mineral lies don timescales
tucked in our hereafter mattress.

i will deathlessly dry with a towel
unless i’m showering with it, a full commit
to the status kiss.

[after all that, you still love me,
in the bedlam trees the choral key,
the old oak door embroidery
are pieces of me scattered (spelled) naturally.]

i like how the clouds come down, pick up my spit, then leave. are they hiring? every time i fail, i draw a chicken with a mini mindflayer crawling under its naked skin. some day they might look convincing enough to be seized by the authorities. a kid got the best of me when i was five trading cards for the real deal. don’t stop smelling the cheese, i said to the maze rat.

i like how the competition keeps me on my toes. are they tiring? every time i fail, i pick a name from a hat and mentally execute all those people. some day they might be convinced to drop dead. a bird got the best of me when the birch called us the real deal. the walls aren’t closing in, i said to the maze rat.

i like how my rorshach lungs are little Kara Walker demons in dresses silhouetted when they turn the x-rays upside down. am i expiring? every time i fail, i inhale, bring it in, until i feel wing-clipped and start coughing tar snot. hive mind got the best of me, the rules of engaging reality come with a coronary deal. the little beats are meaning something, i said to the maze rat.

i like how i have two temples, and each one gets a special drill bit from my spirit. am i unwiring? every time i fail, there’s a countdown that starts and drops to absolutely nothing then leaves. knowing got the best of me, a cinematic coronation for the mediocre is the reel deal. they never stop watching, i said to the maze rat.

i like how the am-i questions get the best of me in a real deal, i said to the maze rat

it was a kiss with coyote’s embouchure, with the river’s casket, with gelified venom, with the apron’s appetite, with compact distortion around portable lip cuffs, with trite lies liquified, with mud clumps in mercury clasps, with spit woven theses, with unwound ovoid wellsprings, with sun-hidden shadows, with the frayed nighttime squish, with closeted hand dice tossed, with chance in the fistfuls, with detuned static and bellyaching bramble, with losing yourself, with entropic dissociation, with fleeting tokens, with sayonara stamps, with honey pumping nozzles, with inside out stratus veins, with the pain of history tucked in the trail fringe, in the pebbles kicked outward, with fried abandon, with seatless balconies, with the touch of an insect unexpected while straddling a brick wall with electric grout, with eyelashes trimed by the wind, with patterns passed, with breathless shapes and shaping dimensions, without the taste of lavender or the mosquito’s lonely thirst, with time passing, with time passing, with time passing, without passing time, with the sky dumping elected dead bodies, with spoonfuls of miracles, with starvation kicking, with moon swells forgetting the fomite sea, with weather inside, with dry mouth drawer memories, with omens and herrings with teeth and tongue.

The untenable darkness connected us;
a language of alienation
native to our inspirations,
twisted.
Swirling, we took residence
in untapped soil,
imposing a culture of transformation
aligned with radical forms of exploration:
a bounding endeavour to the Mother Sun.

Everything that was
breathes through this moment,
this present,
and what will be
is stuck there,
forever.