In 2008, the British Home Office lost the data of 84,000 English and Welsh prisoners. Catastrophic events can follow on from the humblest of beginnings, in this instance the data was downloaded to a memory stick by Home Office Consultants and subsequently lost.

He was not involved, nor in any way was he linked to it. Nevertheless, he feared these types of occurrences and built his life around guarding against them. He subscribed to the business maxim ‘’How you do anything is how you do everything’’. He approached all facets of his life with a fanatical fastidiousness. He lived an almost monastic life dedicated to the eradication of risk and error. Life, as most people know, can throw up its own unpredictable events. Any conceivable eventuality can transpire. As he finally choked on the apple, he didn’t quite have time to think of the horrendous banality of his end.

A reddened messianic figure babbling inwardly,

A drunken guardian shining a petulant light

Doomed gymnasts performing blasé sequences in wainscoted rooms of unverifiable vintage

Half gassed pigeons circumnavigating the vestibules of burning trains,

A white noise amphitheater in the kingdom of heaven, an audience of oxygen impoverished capitulates heir thoracic ducts screaming,

Delirious children stalking sickened cats, Their feline ***** dripping from their mouths

My skull gassed and pliant Government of the absolved

Some half baked dubious ******* that I wrote on a train headed in the direction of Kortrijk:


''An endless stream of not arseds to hang your ***** washing on/Ya forebearers are all mutts, your pallbearers will be too/You are a kazzoo blowing *******, an idiot's tac nightmare/seen two or three of your alleged family members puffing their chests out down the backtrack, propa knackas/Ya ma is very particular, your sister is as cold as a fortnight in the briar dene (although a fine dancer when she sets her mind to it/
Getting older or more toxic? Shushhhh, be kind/started hearing normans and lennys settling betting slips while I'm on the netty/dettol and despair- the golden duo made good/I'll be bed ridden in time for christmas- flannel pyjamas and sentimentality/heard your kid slagging uz & saw demons in the mist on the windee (window, *******)/cutting my losses/tobogganing hopes/
the left side of my chest is 85 the last weeks/the streets in Brussels speak to me and are canny this time of year/I am not a francophone by predilection/making a secret pact with the universe not to mourn its passing/Every social situation is becoming like a casino for *******/Starting to feel a little bit more Panzram than Ghandi/Flanders is flat cos someone trod on it while under the drink/I might have fitted better into a bygone era- a bewildering lack of manual skills- what came first the dial up internet in your ma's back room or my cack handedness/Don't have owt to tell anyone anymore, don't give two shites nevermind one/Your step brother watches hollyoaks and eats ****** snacks while your step sister hums songs of unknown origin''.
A bumbling idiot's invented history of tyneside:
''I saw 3 cats attack a pigeon in heaton park as bobby thompson, aka the little waster, danced suggestively with the setting sun, a serviette tucked down his front to catch his dinner....................mike neville cried in the dark, while suckling away at a glass tizer bottle from the arcade chippy in whitley bay, that day there was no news on tyneside......T Dan Smith liked a snack as much as the next man...but what he really liked was to drink a pint of water everytime the clock struck 36- that way he could **** the toon into oblivion at his own behest or the behest of occult forces.....I found Gazza, shellsuited, eating a child's portion of cod and chips in St Paul's church yard, in his ruddyu red hand was a 6 pack of socks from winners (the flagship store). Abandoned between his feet were 50 notebooks from the fisherman's mission.....don't get me started on sting''.

I will make windows from your daydreams,
Assemble your loved ones,
By a body of water,
Hideous is dust to me,
There is a swank and a swerve to your
Outward ways,
He thought about this too,
Never much of a god,
A vessel for fragility,
Make plans of glass,
Raindrops anxious of the coming,
Stretched out and white.
Moments are dismembered,
Filled in with beating hearts and then racing away,

Your heaped whispers are soundtracking my hobbling days. Not all of your words landed so softly.

All creviced and doomed in places,
Everything under the blinking stars,
Blood neighbours,
It doesn't take millions,
To drool a river into existence,

Sometimes I feel like a dust-mite,
time will badly use me independent of my courage,
all of the moths I have ever seen are shadows contained,
A fine memorial for the nothing man,
layers upon layers if those layers could speak
caught tongues, blabbered words,
there is no way to be certain of anything but the weeping,
a collective of the unseen
I would like to cover everything in pre-emptive gauze,
prevention is the best cure for ruin,
shrouding my words in illusion.