My best friend's ex
What can I tell you?
Well she was an ex model
In her own way quite exotic
But a bit of an exhibitionist
A bit too excitable
Sometimes even explosive.
Her jokes we're always at his expense
With thinly veiled references to ****** experimentation
Even after they were exclusive
And she was so full of excuses.
Of course her tastes were too expensive
I tried to warn him but it was like he was on an expedition
To explore her excesses
And then as expected
His expiration
Love became executioner
The fire was extinguished
He became expendable.
Don't look at me.

So for modern man
It's 200,000 years
And counting.
The Universe is 13.8
Billion years old
And its 200 billion
Galaxies are 120 billion
Light years across
But don't go looking
For life out there
There isn't any
We are the first
And only
We are the experiment
The clinical trial.

First light around the hard
Edges of the curtains
It's a soft play day
Rolling in a ball of sunrise
To bounce to you
And to you.
It's easy to catch it,
It's not a test
And when you do
Squeeze it gently
Make a wish
Before you pass it on
Nothing heavy
Keep it light
Keep it sunlight
And we can keep playing
Until the moonlight
Calls it a day
For children know how
To beat the doom and gloom
The grown ups have made
For themselves.

There will be good times

And there will be bad times

We're having the time of our lives.

It's out there
Or maybe it's in here already
Waiting on a door handle
In a hello
In the air I breathe
I breathe
That is my right
I will breathe if I want to.
Except it doesn't know patience
It doesn't know anything
It doesn't have anything
But the need to exist
And if it kills me
Or itself, it will just shrug.
The worst kind of enemy.
So I take it back to a room
With curtains and a bed
I am allowed that much
And bread and water
Left by someone ouside my door
I hear their feet hurrying away
The world is moving away from me.
And all night and the next day
For as long as it takes
My hands will be around its throat
And its around mine
As we stare into each others' bulging eyes
Me, remembering life
It, trying to imagine survival
And suddenly it does know something
That I am all it's got.
And in the morning
Shapes file quietly into the room
And I start to recognize faces.
They prise my fingers away
From around the rotting corpse's neck
Then kick it under the bed
You did it, they say.
You won.
This time.

There is a chill in the air
Time to dust off
My battered old coat
The one I wore when I saw
You, really saw you
In all your majesty
In all your finery
In all the regal splendour
Of your soul
When you walked with me for a while
And that was just the start of it
Through rain and sleet and snow
You name it, we walked through it
No ****.
Those were the golden miles.
And in the pocket when you first
Held my hand on a frosty evening
I found some loose change
And a sweet wrapper
And a scrap of hope
Rolled up in a scrap of love
In a scrap of paper
A note to self
It reads something like this
It wasn't meant to end like this.

The time travellers are always there
But will only be visible to our earthly eyes
At the end times.
Which feels like now.
Until the lights change
We are a captive audience
But the seven trumpets
Sound more like pneumatic drills.
Why did we come this way?
Weren't the signs clear enough?
We could have gone a longer way round
Even risked getting lost.
Are we going to be here forever?
They shake their heads
Grin at our impatience
Knowing none of this really matters
If they can't fill in
The hole in the sky.