The bombs fall over Kiev.
Silence! Snow ashes.
Uncomfortable muzzle as it
Settles on Moscow.

The bombs fall over Kiev.

Clanking, chewing the fat.
Bumbling Boris huffs and puffs
As he fingers his ear and fumbles
His pants out of his mouth crack.

The bombs fall over Kiev.

Babies cry, smothered by fear.
Old Joe struggles to forsake his afternoon nap,
While old “Mac” Donald continues to quack and be a quack.
Fittingly synonymous with a sharp burst of wind.

The bombs fall over Kiev.

And yet the skies are silent.
The West whip out their dic-Boom-Boom-tionaries
And stumble and grumble over the worth of human life.
They danced this dance quite recently,
But there’s always room for cha-cha-cha
And grinding out a lower price.
The clock ticks louder – BOOM, BOOM BOOM,
But only for the powerless.

And the bombs fall over Kiev.

Pow! Bang! Bang! That small, old man
In his big red house plays with his toy soldiers,
And his toy towns,
And doesn’t half throw it all out of the pram.
Butlers and maids scramble
To make sense of the nonsense
And the egg on their faces just for you.
Incoherent ramblings of a paltry rich fool.
And yet that’s the sound of the world flying by,
The sound of the world’s greatest tool:
The grasping hands of paltry rich fools.

And the bombs fall over Kiev.
And Palestine. And Yemen.
And the dinosaurs still make a mean cocktail.
And it’s all so ****** predictable.

Exasperated gasps…
The rest of us just look goggle-eyed,
And hashtag flags, and thoughts and prayers,
And throw our paltry money wondering when
It all became so helpless, and why
We still pay for the merry-go-round
When it’s so completely broken.
We scramble to put back our fallen teeth
And kick our brothers to the curb for shelter
Under a wet, cardboard box –
(If you fold it over it provides more cover from the rain,
But the benefit of boxes, of course,
Is that they can completely fit over your head.
The noise is easier to drown out in the dark.)

And the bombs still fall over Kiev.
In broken hospitals and apartment blocks
And schools and churches
Hearts thunder,
And brave Ukrainians hear the noise
And the silence.

Pandemic
I.
Staring at the empty screens
Of all our ineptitudes,
Our demons whetting whistles,
Our joints atrophied.

Staring at the walls –
Surely not the news.
Can’t bear to look at a mirror anymore.
There’s something deeply unpleasant
Growling back.

Or the pub across the street with its
Christmas lights burning,
And the bar dark as the world was at night
Before we killed it with our fire.

II.
A million hours and a million monkeys
With half-baked ideas and reddening eyes
All trying to pen the next dime novel:
Pandemonium or Apocalypse Today,
Praying pulp doesn’t pulp before being read or read about
By the tired eyes and hands counting
Cheddar and pages and hours,
Until we all clock out.

My contribution to a dying ocean of death –
At least that’s what Bo reckoned
(Among many others drowning)
Is a journey through childhood
And wannabe streams of King and ‘cuntry.’

The old post-colonial riddle:
Can we be sorry for what we’ve done?
Endless masks thrown to the ground
Amongst self-respect and science and what
Used to be described as thought and thinking.
At least that’s what we kid ourselves.

Civilisation was never particularly civil.

III.
Start making the tin foil hats –
We won’t be leaving the house anytime soon.
We’ve a television series to finish scribing –
Eight years down and surely eight more to go.
There’s a four-hour silent French movie to watch
And what about your vegan friend –
Who hasn’t finished his journey to salvation yet?

There’s an endless stream of distractions to go:
You’ve read twenty-five books so far –
And it’s just gone July.
There’s an endless stream of desperation
And an endless stream of angst
And an endless stream of nothing
And death is just the beginning
Of
Your
Nothing.

And as the bard rightly charged:
“Here ain’t no place for dolls like you and me.
Everybody’s on a barge
Floating down the endless stream of great TV.”

So among the burning, we find a seat,
Nestle into that newly worn spot on the couch
And pretend we’re not there.

A woman is like a summer's day.
No. A woman is like snow.
No.
A woman is like a woman.
She is not an object standing in the way.
She is not a thing
Placed on this Earth for men
To worship or disrespect
Or idealise or infantise
Or use to project fantasies
Or disappointments.

A woman is simply a woman,
But, when you meet the right one
And you tend to get things
Poetically-done,
Then you often feel the desperate urge
To write down how she makes you feel
And shout about her to the world
And compare her to everything.
Except other women.
They don't like that.

And who would have thought
That it would be here?
Sandwiched into a backseat
Between a sleeping Chinese man
And a dear friend,
Behind a sleeping couple
Lovingly caught in a snoozy embrace
In a cramped Chinese bus
Amidst a bustling buzzing Beijing
As the sun seeped through
A smoggy winter's sky.

Who would have thought
That it would be here?
Being soothed by her playlist -
A sort of modern mix-tape
Full of love and thought
And desperate longing
And lust, more love
And the most intimate
Of gestures.

Who could have thought
That it would be here?
Here, where an epiphany forms,
Against a sea of weather-beaten, weary and reddened faces,
That my darling, sweet Isabelle
Is made of ******* poetry.

When I was a child, on Grafton Street,
My brother and I used to pop bubbles.
We also built great cities and bases,
Arenas of Jenga, where soldiers did battle.

These creations were places of retreat
To escape from childhood pain and troubles.
Now we wear our masks instead of our faces
And herd ourselves onto trains like cattle.

It's hard to pinpoint when the dream truly dies -
The suicide rates will not be televised,
But be assured that your job is distracting
You from your lack of power, hope, and truth.

We live in our own little bubbles of lies,
And now know that life's not as advertised.
You might think that I'm overreacting
Until you have lost all sight of your youth

And all that is left are dogs chasing bones -
Are we anything more than just monkeys with phones
Searching for comfort and love in our loneliness?

Now there's a fine thing.
I looked out my window
And there was the sun,
And it had a fine glow
That made the land sing
As it went to sleep.
It struck the distant sea,
As it was made to do
Before the stars awake,
And the moon began to make
The beauty of the blue
Bring out the best in me,
Reminding me of you.

It seems a while since Jesus died.
Not that I believe in the chap,
But if he were magically real, I'd
Think he'd be appalled at all this crap.

It seems a while since laundries reigned
And women were shamed and sent away,
But, alas, we've lost as much as gained
As men control our fate today.

It seems a while since Markievicz fought,
But still didn't suffer the fate of men.
Different powers today have sold and bought,
But it's power the same as it was then.

It seems a while since rampant abuse -
We thought they'd run out of kids to **** -
Of course, I'm joking, there's always an excuse
To **** and ruck and then not look.

This Easter let's bow our heads and pray
And think about our moral code.
Just kidding, there's ***** on Good Friday -
We'll be hung-over as we erode.

Sitting in the sun,
Watching old movies,
The Australian heat
Washes up against my feet.
The dog shakes off the afternoon
And snoozes by the couch
And all our troubles melt away
Like the ice cream now resting
In our stomachs.
Sweet peace,
The ignorance of it all.
Only at the cost of our minds
Do we chase our tails and sunbathe
On the crisp autumn grass.

And so, my Tweet Verse reaches its sad conclusion.
My characters, though they double in size,
Are fed to the wind,
And a new chapter begins.

‪Dancing salsa in a cave‬
‪Makes it harder to behave, ‬
‪But it's easier to repeat‬
‪Your footsteps in the Cuban heat‬
‪With kisses, as I feel brave.‬

Poetry shouldn't be sipped with a fine wine
on a late Sunday afternoon,
It should be crunched;
Snorted off a ****** late on a Saturday morning,
Because we don't dine when we're content,
But when we desperately crave food.

Poetry should be grimy
like we feel,
Powerful, like we're not,
And stuffed to the brim with sustenance.
And love.
Love is perhaps the most important ingredient.
Love is the difference between someone
who likes pizza and has been to Italy,
And someone who read about them both once
on a takeaway menu, which happened to drop
in through the letterbox.

This isn't poetry. But she ******* is.

‪Even though I fear that I'll never see you again,‬
‪That your memory of me will fade into the wind,‬
‪My determination; my love for you resists.‬

‪Desperately failing to forget you.‬
‪It's hard to look forward to ‬
‪The blue Cuban seas as they part‬
‪When you're a Caribbean sunset in my heart‬

‪I poured my words into a letter,‬
‪Made sure I got every drop -‬
‪That was the easy part -‬
‪Saying how you make me feel.‬
‪The hard part is waiting‬

You have to respect a woman's decision to hate you.
Even if that woman is the one of your dreams.
You'll probably spend the rest of your life
Loving the ghost that briefly drifted by.
It might be a lot shorter than average,
But by god, what a way to go -
Death by love.
I can only hope she's happy...
Eventually. I know it's not a short-term fix.
I can only hope that she is happy, eventually.
As long as my renewed depression
Has a purpose then I can have some comfort.
An uncomfortable exchange, but, all being said,
If she'd come to me and upfront asked me:
"Can I give you my depression in exchange
For some temporary contentment?"
Then I would have agreed.
Who could deny that beautiful soul anything she wanted?
I can only hope that she is happy.
I think I need help
But I'm oh so very scared.

You have deprived me of sentence constructions.
I want the world to stop
Belle and Sebastian ringing in my ears
Again, again, again
Not singing, not music, just ringing
Like a bomb exploded too close.
Pink hair, cute glasses, cuter smile
Desperation and drowning
Losing you bit by bit,
First it was the desire to stop talking
Then it was blocking Facebook messages
Then it was whatsapp
Then it was now seemingly deleting Facebook.
I can't decide if you hate me or
If you are calling out for help and I
Can do nothing.
I didn't think I had loved you or known you long enough
For you to hate me.
I'm helplessly following you down a dark
Dark dark dark dark dark dark
Path.
Words are not making sense and gibberish
I'm just struggling to write through the tears
AND I NEED YOU... my oxygen
It's all I have left in my soul.
What's left if you love a ghost
But to **** yourself?

It is of this poet's opinion,
That if a poet was to write
Eleven pages worth of poetry
For one heart-breaking woman,
She must be important.

Today I walked to the pier
And I stared into the water
And I wrote and I wrote
I wrote nothings and everythings
And I let some tears out
And I reflected and I laughed a bit
And I had a good old think back
Over everything
Over and over again
And I was afraid that if I stopped writing
I would dive in and swim
Until I couldn't swim anymore
And maybe the water was a much more
Fitting death than a leap
From a tall library window
Or one feet first in front of a train
But I'm about to finish writing
And despite all my failures
And disappointments
There's something faint
Telling me to keep going
And I don't know what's worse:
That I don't know what it is,
Or that I so desperately want it to *******.

Retaking the same steps,
Searching for meaning,
Searching for something -
Something more in the memories,
Something more in the feelings
That you made me feel.
Hearing the waves by the restaurant,
On the pier.
Feeling the power of the breeze,
And the cold.
This time I don't have your arm,
Your body to keep warm,
And I think that makes it
The coldest it could be.

Missing:

Thomas Newlove
Male, 25 years old, 6'5", slim,

Last seen in September with an unknown female.
If found, please return to her:
Victim doesn't learn from his mistakes.

Today I watched a man go into the sea to swim with his dog.
The urge to drown myself was perhaps the strongest it's ever been.
It scares me

‪Do what others need.‬
‪Bury yourself in work.‬
‪Brush until you bleed.‬
‪Drink until you're numb.‬
‪Cry until you're shattered.‬
‪Then sleep may come.‬

I need to write to stop my head from exploding,
I need to ooze before I scream out loud,
I need to pour my heart out before eroding,
Falling and disappearing in a cloud.

The day was long, and body, brain were aching,
The train was slow, and sleep a welcome craze,
But then I saw her face, and started shaking,
And life became a devastating haze.

She walked right past beside her caring mother,
And didn't say a word or look my way,
I'd do anything to call her my lover
But couldn't know what possibly to say.

I hadn't seen her for a month or more,
For she abandoned all communication
To cure depression, she shut my door,
And left me holding my own devastation.

I'm back at home but don't know how I got here.
I called her but it just confirmed my fears.
She blocked me and I just need to know that she's okay
And that there is a light at the end of the tunnel
Because her depression came sneaking up behind me
And asked if mine would come out and play
And it said yes but only if you drink more
And consider thoughts of dying more seriously this time
And hey look there's the *** we bought
And hey, you're right, you justified my fears
And hey, if she's happy you'd **** yourself just to know
And hey, if not, ******* hell you so desperately want to help
And hey, if you can't, you'd ******* die trying
And hey, I guess this *** is saltier than most
And hey, I guess this does confirm my fears
That the *** goes down as roughly as the tears.

‪The loneliness I feel without you‬
‪Stifles like a hug that lasts too long‬
‪On a hot day - Hell, I would do‬
‪Anything for you to hug me that way‬

‪If I can look at the smashed bottles and see the green glass shards illuminate your beauty on the streets, can't you find some beauty in me?‬

‪Would Romeo and Juliet be any less tragic if, instead of them dying, they could just never see each other again? Just asking for a friend...‬

‪Every night I cry myself to sleep,‬
‪Feeling your body comfort me.‬
‪My phantom limb, ‬
‪You were never there,‬
‪Yet every night I die in your arms.‬

‪"Storm's a-coming,"‬
‪As is the nightmare I'd almost forgotten:‬
‪The windows rattling,‬
‪And that godawful wind howling‬
‪At the boy who did wrong.‬

‪Revisiting the campus of my broken dreams,‬
‪And the ghost of my failure:‬
‪You, my love, who works among the trees‬
‪Of my heart's wood, are lost‬

Im drowning myself in work
To stop drowning thinking of you.
Of course, it doesn't work,
But neither does drowning my sorrows
With dark Cuban ***,
When all I can think about
Is how I used to drown in your eyes.
It's hurricane season
And all I can feel is flooding.

‪Deprivation of physical contact is the purest form of loneliness. Since you've been gone I cannot feel anything but deprivation. I need air.‬

‪It's impossible to find another dream girl ‬
Now that you're gone,
Because it's been almost a month
And I still can't get any ******* sleep.

‪You're a hot stove from which I got burnt‬
And scars remain,
But they were never wasted,

'Cause although some say I've never learnt,
You don't remember the pain
When it's the best meal you've ever tasted.

‪"Gráinne, I love you," into the wind.‬
‪When you are drowning, you can't hear as well. ‬
‪It is funny the things you forget when you're in love.‬

‪There is only so much of your heart‬
‪You can pour before it is just empty,‬
‪And everything you have given‬
‪Just trickles slowly down the drain.‬

‪There's no such thing as a happy ending, ‬
‪Only happy chapters soon to cease.‬
‪Even Romeo had brief perfection,‬
‪Before they changed his scene.‬

‪Finding solace in fondly-remembered films used to be enough. Now they are just a reminder that nothing is the same since you broke my heart.‬

How am I supposed to cope,
When even the morning sky
Conspires against me?

How do I have a hope,
When over the morning hill
Your pink marshmallow hair
Echoes through the firmament
Of my days?

How am I supposed to cope,
When I can't count the ways
In which you make my heart sing?
My heart ache?
It's more than I can take.

I don't know what it meant,
But a bird with wounded wing
Stumbled through the air
And wobbled towards the train tracks to die.
Well... maybe that's a lie.
I do.

‪If I had to pick one moment to keep,‬
‪It would be that night when I walked you home ‬
‪And we kissed and were anxious ‬
‪But you seemed so happy.‬

Depression is having a completely normal day,
Equipped with teacher's mask and a jovial eccentricity
To keep the students bubbling,
Only to leave the train station and catch a glimpse
Of a girl with pink hair -
And just for a few seconds you think it's her,
And she's with somebody else.
Not ditching you for her own mental health,
But ditching you because you're not worthy
(Which is true.)
Ditching you because you couldn't be trusted.
Ditching you because you did something wrong.
And the thirty minute walk home
Seems to take forever longer,
And your stomach pounds and aches
And scrambles to be free of your body.
It craves her like every other part of you -
Your aching brain, your aching hands,
Your aching, aching heart.
You get home and you just want the world to
Swallow you up -
"There's a letter for you."
Maybe it's the citizenship,
Maybe today I catch a break,
An escape from the feelings of emptiness
Pounding my head.
An escape from the feelings of heartbreak,
The anxious catacombs of my brain
Poisoning my beating heart.
Your graduate account is being terminated.
From November you will pay bank charges.
Completely inconsequential.
Not a lot of money.
Why did I start drinking
And why can I not stop crying?

‪In a world full of darkness and monsters,‬
‪Is it too much for a man to ask‬
‪To be saved by a princess‬
‪(And perhaps her loyal army of puppies)?‬

‪Who'd have thought that pink hair‬
‪Was actually cotton candy -‬
‪I tasted her on my tongue,‬
‪And then she disappeared,‬
‪And now my stomach hurts.‬

‪To her, the I love yous were cheap.‬
‪To him they were heart and soul.‬
‪He misunderstood why she didn't believe‬
‪That she's what made him whole.‬

Happiness can be bought.
One rises, one falls.
Children starve, blood is spilt and wars are fought
Over what shade of cream adorns our walls

Some days he wore his teacher's mask,
It was his little trick
To disguise himself from students
When feeling rather sick.

He put it on and just like that
He wore the biggest smile -
He laughed and joked and taught them well,
At least for a little while.

The problem with the teacher's mask
Was that it wouldn't go.
He needed it when feeling down
And that was always so.

He wore it when he'd woken up
On the wrong side of the bed.
He wore it when he wasn't feeling
Quite right in the head.

He wore it when he fell in love
And broke his feeble heart.
He wore it when his friend had died
And his life was torn apart.

He wore it for so very long
He soon forgot his face.
He soon forgot his misery.
He kept it in its place.

He kept it for so very long.
It was a masquerade
So perfect that nobody could
Have seen through the charade.

And then that fateful day arrived:
He wrote that, "If they ask,
When rope is found around my neck,
I wore my teacher's mask."

It's being cancelled before it's time.
It's getting drunk off a glass of wine.

It's a full moon through clouds of pollution.
It's talk, talk, talk and no revolution.

It's no result and all anticipation.
It's ******* your own imagination.

It's eating without satisfaction.
It's science with no chain reaction.

It's getting some and wanting more.
It's asked for I.D. at a liquor store.

It's getting old and wanting more.
It's hoping, praying that there is more.

It's dying before you read the end.
It's living for a life pretend.

It's a half-full take on an empty cup.
It's slitting wrists and waking up.

It's falling in love over and over again without a real sense of hope about the future or a true grasp of why you are here and what it all means and why the world works in such a backwards way and why they all lied to us and why they all have such lovely smiles and lovely eyes (and dynamite tastes and senses of humour) and why I was mixed together in such a way that I would have about twenty one solid years before I ceased to function as a healthy human being.
It's just -

‪The world is a confusing place‬
‪And uniting those lost souls‬
‪Is left to poor Sofia,‬
‪And the pink underwear‬
‪That comforts Scarlett's cheeks...‬

This is an ode to love,
But there is no subject to this love,
This is an empty ode,
A coffin with the corpse long-decayed,
A debt that was never owed,
A terror unafraid.

This is to Donnie, the ****-Kid.
I have so much love to give.
This is to my muse,
But not about anyone in particular.
It's only Audrey I amuse
When dancing with vernacular.

She's what gives me motivation,
But is not the subject of my affection.
My subject is desire itself -
An emptiness which must be filled,
A yearning for a book upon my shelf,
Happiness that simply can't be willed.

This is an ode to love,
But you should know right now
That I cannot love human beings,
I can only love ideas,
And they both fall through my fingers to the tune
Of coarse sand on a lazy afternoon.

As dreamers we are oft to make-believe,
Escaping the banality of time,
Stories of noble royals that we weave
Into the fabric of this very rhyme:

For we three do descend from kings of old
And queens who conquered all of their domain
And live our royal lives burdened with gold
And bound to royal living we remain.

Royal maidens of Portugal and France
With butlers who they keep in line with whips.
While one insists they entertain with dance
The other one decrees "Let them eat chips!"

I just observe, dream, and write what cannot be
Who says Punto's can't belong to royalty?

I'm writing with my tool right now,
And although it sounds hard and fun,
Unless one plays with metaphors,
The words are not going to come...