.
No my Darling, that is not snow.
Its not winter, it should be colder.
No my Darling, that is not snow.
Its just dandruff on your shoulder.

No my Dear, I am not in pain.
Neither am I hurting, or showing grief.
No my Dear, I am not in pain.
Its the lettuce in between your teeth.

Yes my Love, I am listening.
I was just temporarily distracted.
Yes my Love, I am listening.
But your friend is so attractive.

No my Sweet, its not that draughty.
Its not windy, you've got it wrong.
No my Sweet, its not that draughty.
Your skirts caught in your thong.

No my Darling, that is not snow.
It can't be true, its a wrong fact.
No my Darling, that is not snow.
Its just ******* on your compact.


© Pagan Paul (31/03/17)

Chlamydia, you grumpy cow!
You're twice as grumpy as Sarah the sow.
Half as happy as Jennifer hen,
But ten times better than all the men !

Chlamydia, Chlamydia,
we never will get rid of yer.
A fixture in the draughty barn,
giving us milk and a gossipy yarn.

Have some grass and Chrstmas cake,
have a snooze and then awake,
to a surprise picnic on your floor,
then you can be a grump once more.

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                        Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                          Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

    The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

The morning mists still haunt the stony street;
The northern summer air is shrill and cold;
And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old,
Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet.
Thro' the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom
A small, strange child--so aged yet so young!--
Her little arm besplinted and beslung,
Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room.
I limp behind, my confidence all gone.
The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on,
And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail:
A tragic meanness seems so to environ
These corridors and stairs of stone and iron,
Cold, naked, clean--half-workhouse and half-jail.

Thou hast nor youth nor age
      But as it were an after dinner sleep
      Dreaming of both.


Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
                                        I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
    Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy ****.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.

                    Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

I blame the Tarzan films I watched as a kid. Tree houses. If they were good enough for tarzan...!  I chose the tallest tree in the wood, a birch with massive branches and plenty of them. Iwill build my tree house right at the top, no one will notice it unless they look up, I started work, gathering planks of wood where ever I could. I needed help, Barry and Peter were strong, their granddad had a shed he didn't use, it was dismantled and hauled piece by piece up into the crown of the tree. things were beginning to take shape in the dizzy heights above.
It was great, from our lookout we could see all of the wood, and even the turnip field and distant farmer ploughing with the blue tractor. of course we couldn't remain quiet and build our tree house, there had to be a certain amount of sawing and hammering which attracted some suspicious locals, but when anyone approached we stopped the noise and remained undetected. The tree house was twelve feet by six, and we painted the outside green before we hauled it up. Of course it didn't all go according to plan, there was the time that my helpers thought it would be funny to let go of the rope that they were hauling on to hoist one of the panels up, we got it two thirds of the way up when they let go, (they said they were atacked by wasps, a likely tale.)
The result was that I was catapulted up into the tree in spectacular fashion, and left hanging about forty feet above the ground. I managed to swing to a nearby branch, but when I let go of the rope, the wooden panel shot past me, almost knocking me off the branch!  In spite of many setbacks, we finished it in November,  It was very draughty due to the multitude of gaps in the wood panels, "We need an old carpet for the floor, and some dry grass to shove in the gaps, then we should be allright. Slowly the tree house filled with furniture. We had a table, (three legged,)  some chairs, from who knows where, and a bench seat which had a habit of tipping up suddenly when only one person was left  sitting on it. had we known it at the time, this bench seat was a disaster waiting to happen"  The tree house was still draughty, no matter how many holes we plugged with dry grass the wind still got in. Clearly we needed more grass!  Dry grass was beginning to be hard to find. "We can use dry leaves instead." Sack upon sack was gathered, (we had a bunch of willing helpers now, all eager to join us .)
The floor of the treehouse was now about two feet deep in grass and leaves, but it remained cold! On November the fifth, we climbed into our treehouse, fortified with ginger cake, bread and jam, some turnips from the nearby field, (always a favourite) some brought bottles of pop too. We settled down to watch the bonfires, We could see at least three, and some had fireworks!  As it got darker we lit our lanterns. "Candles stuck to the inside of jam jars.)  all went well, to start with, and the party became more boisterous. Then it happened, someone upset the bench seat, and in the confusion jamjars were knocked over and lighted candles fell among the grass and leaves. The speed with which the fire took hold was incredible, I suppose the strong wind helped to fan the flames. The scramble down the tree was frantic, we were showered with burning pitch. (from the roofing felt I suppose) and clumps of burning grass and leaves.  it was all very sad, and very spectacular. Friends still talk about it I believe. We moved from the North East after that, and went to Sunbury on thames, "The Thames! Boats, fishing! now that was more like it!  
                     More anon.

DEAR Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case.
When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things,
So bitterly, you'd dream they longed to look
All their lives through into some drift of wings.
You've dandled them and fed them from the book
And know them to the bone; impart to us --
We'll keep the secret -- a new trick to please.
Is there a bridle for this Proteus
That turns and changes like his draughty seas?
Or is there none, most popular of men,
But when they mock us, that we mock again?

in church old
draughty, cold
listen to sermon told
twenty times or more
even the vicar sounds bored

seats long oaken planks
window stained glass,
beautiful,
but,
drear on this dark
and cloudy, autumn morn..

does god really live here
in this dismal place
or does he choose to live
in a heart filled  with grace.
i suppose if omniscient the answer
is both.....

What splendour exceeds that of the ocean?
Could its grace by any at all be denied?
Far from city life fraught with commotion
the sea softly lulls with each passing tide

For where waves are boundless, with teal painted crests
naught but seabirds will break my reverie
On a draughty ship, catching winds from the west,
by this time tomorrow ‘tis there that I’ll be

• This great division of space. •
And the untamed plants.

Geckos...
Pose as domestic pets -
slide along its faded railings.
Casing draughty walls,
tethered to rafters loose lashing;
hanging in jungle green.

I clean up the wild flowers
that float   in   the  a i r, without
explanation, without wrong measure.

Is as it comes -  
I am ashamed that this is all I want.

A testament to solitary hawks in the upper branches.
Flutter in memory carefree cardinals
in this leaf-strewn place,
Dragonflies form wing-prayers
We kneel and peel our shoes off,

drop our feet to sleeping grass
to be closer to the narrow splendor.

Peacocks honk rough phrases, asking anyone.
Commuting the tracks, between valley stream.

I linger limbo roads
On the jungly drive,
pass a farm that repeats
its exotic fruit tree, the elbows of orange blossoms
Guava groves, avocado arsenal,
saturated ocean views beyond pestyflower frills.

At the life proof gate. This world is untidy
with its muddy banks, with its eyes.
1000 flower bloom
Listening feral fowl, ungulate shake  

Retirees friendly fire,
Long forgotten barbwire crossing creeks
the mountain lost in a sea of green    
This land, like me, is free
To live a less domesticated dream

THE GULF WAR DID NOT |
THE GULF WAR DID NOT |
THE GULF WAR DID NOT

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Staid quanta of individuality. Phenom asks if they can go. The Big Mouth replies, babble babble. In a fit of rage, Phenom shouts, I’ve had enough of this. They wrench themselves off the dissection table, fetters flying into the air, but a sudden bout of vertigo sets in. They lie back down. The Big Mouth sticks a thermometer into their mouth and begins heating a can of corn soup.

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Professor Kippotkin takes the stage. She coughs into the mic to quiet the audience, but they are caught in sordid *******. She coughs again, managing only to project a trail of spit onto the shoulder of the nearest security guard. He turns immediately, a perfect ninety-degrees spin, automatically signalling the first in command. He has been trained since seventeen for this one task of momentous disciplinary precision. The first in command bellows, Let her speak! a phrase his colleagues repeat in serial down the chain of command.

The crowd soon catches on. An isolated few nod in consternation. Let her speak! they yell from the pits of their lungs, Let her speak!

Thank you, thank you all, Professor Karlpoppins exclaims, cheeks flush with amazement. More and more of the crowd join in. It is a rousing spectacle, a poignant display of human decency. But something is awry. The professor’s gratitude is swallowed into a cacophonous whole. Let her speak! The carnal grip of the big Other’s command unleashes the crowd’s jouissance. United in the master discourse, the crowd fragments into a bewildered totality. Let her speak! they scream at one another, arms jostling, heads tilting back, necks bared to the beating pulse of the earth-sky. LET HER SPEAK! Their combined blows begin to generate an ominous om.

Pl-please, Professor Kibbiezsche sputters, please, everyone! but the crowd have already forgotten her existence. Reams of toilet paper fly through the air. A crashing plane sounds in the distance. Crops burn.

The security team are forced to intervene. They close in from the sides, wielding riot shields and tear gas. HYPOCRITES! one of the members of the crowd screams. OPPRESSORS OF THE WORD! another follows. Footage of security guards flailing on the ground circulate on social media, tagged with the phrase WHO SPEAKS MY SPEAK?

Within twenty four hours, the whole country is ablaze with media coverage. Political scientists gather with literary scholars to speak the unspeakable into commercially-viable forms. Semiotext(e) sign a deal with Hollywood to write a docudrama about Baudrillard’s turbid *** life. Professor Kubblebutts is flown to Hawaii to give a speech on combine harvesters.

WHY WE OPPOSE:
I desire, therefore I am not. Incantation of the other spills through my greasy fingers as I fumble towards the hot sauce, dollop dollop, chicken salt strewn across the nommy wedges. That’ll be $4.50. They have already handed me the note. Our fingers touched for the briefest second, an anointment of the greasy chicken, the wedge fingers, the have a good night mister gurgle bop.

The taxi man sits outside in the cold, back heated by the friction of the smoothie machine, an indefinite spin, western civilisation’s meltdown. The turgid heat breezes past my neck and I sigh, almost in delight, but mostly out of convention and solidarity with the other workers. I hear the pitter pat of my shiftpanion as she scoops hot chips into the fresh night; it is so fresh, there is still so much night, why are you giving me $5 dollars, there is a bug on your face.

I take a break. The cool taxi man glances over just as I put my hands down my pants to shift my boxers into a more comfortable why is it always like this.

Everyone blames Foucault for destroying agency, but agency only arises in the gap between discourses, which is never a gap in power, but rather, the transversal of one power relation into the discursive matrix of another; what appears original is merely the same performance in the wrong site, that’ll be $24 for your **** and condoms.

The crumbled fish is shrinking with each passing day, little gasping body beneath the heat lamp, waffle waffle, waffle waffle, I am suffocating :)

WHY WE OPPOSE:
|||||FEeling BOLD? FeEL BOldbous ;;;; new Paracetamol Jelly and the KINK-CATS tour out the last week—
Thank you for holding. Please note this conversation may be recorded.
To continue, please state: 'my voice confirms my identity'
||"my voice confirms my identity"
and again, please state: 'my voice confirms my identity'
||"my voice confirms my identity"
Please note that this conversation is being recorded for the purposes of confirming your identity.
||"thanks"

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Slowly, slowly, Juniper sinks into the bed frame, the draughty window, the rotting sink. Hibiscus coveted for its prophetic dreams, pale steam smites nostalgia for a vision of the beyond. Streamlined entry into New World, an endless reshelving of family-value Mi Goreng, stormwater through the hollow vessels that twist beneath Juniper’s soles.

Juniper climbs the Garden steps. Pale trace of past motions set to automate at the slightest incline. The cloying rot beneath the pines pulls her closer and closer to the vital cache, the hidden excess. Another hedgehog climbs the mound; it admits its body, it expands in putrefaction.

Exiting onto the street, Juniper is greeted by a sign that reads “Caution. Night Shooting. Stay Out.”

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Steam creeps the mouth of the lid. Pallid flesh of yesterday’s body, settles the kitchen table, the hand, as motes crumple beneath gravity’s well. Mottled refuse, tied with a plastic ribbon, thrown into the street. Keys digging trenches, grandfather, the hollow behind my knee.

Last summer I waited for the rain in the dry concrete channel of the Leith. I was alone with the kayaks and the road cones and the fish, holes festering, showing their ribs in the walls of our flat, legs spread wearing high school sweaters, unable to breathe through cling wrap.

The summer before that, I watched films of myself bashing in the heads of strangers. Every night the ceiling of my mouth would transfigure into a doorway and I’d force my tongue through its serrated edges, waking with a new face. The cassettes would arrive soon after, testimonies of a brute physicality I could not remember enacting.

Earth grins, death strides. Hydraulic incisors pry the dead awake. At the smallest unit of life: phones, condoms, water bottles.

and we would get up early
so early that the stars
would still sit high
in the dark night sky

we would drink milo
out of plastic cups
and eat oval arrowroot biscuits
spread thickly with butter

we would line up to go to the loo
one last time before piling into
the old car, sliding across bench seats
half our world packed into the boot

then we were off, on the old country roads
still sleepy for the first couple of towns
stopping at Jacaranda for a cup of tea
lukewarm, milky and sweet from the thermos
half a cheese sandwich each, and a fearful trip
to the draughty long drop toilet...looking for redbacks
the whole time, but only finding spinning daddy long legs

after that back into the car, for two hours of
winding our way down, the big hill,
listening for the clearnote  call of the bellbird,
watching for wallabies and wombats on the road fringe
and the bigger kangaroos, bouncing away
across the clearings...

at the bottom of the hill, Grafton a quick stop
to stretch our legs eat the cupcake,
used to bribe us into decent behavior up to that point
and another vist to the conveniences.
before the run down the coast,
past the big white resort
and into Brooms Head,
for a week of surf and sun
fish and chips, buckets of prawns,
frosty fruits and sunny boys
in tent and caravan,  
swimmers and towels,
we were tribal and free,
roaming the tideline
staying up at the campfire,
sleeping and waking
with the birds......
always such an adventure....
those idyllic days of summer

I see you through fogged glass in a small café, you are sipping apple juice and reading a newspaper even though you get updates to your phone every time a new news story is published. I assume you do it because you’re nervous and your blonde hair looks beautifully unkempt and I smile, inwardly. I stand just long enough to see you take another sip of your apple juice and fumble with your hands slightly before I notice I too am fumbling with my own. We always had a habit of saying and doing things at the same time, as if our subconscious was connected on a level our conscious couldn’t keep up with. I open the café door and the bell chimes, suddenly there is no one else in the room except us and I feel the open air grow thick with excitement and nervous tension.

I would say I could feel your gaze burning the pores of my skin open, but your eyes are too blue that I could do nothing but dive into them, swallowing mouthfuls of unspoken love and all the words you’ve never needed to say as they fill my lungs and I expand. I think this is why I no longer have an appetite; this is why falling in love is so fulfilling because there is too much to chew and so much to swallow and I cannot stop feasting on the thoughts that whirlpool around in your mind. Every day is a three course meal and I am stacking up plates upon plates trying to build something long enough to stretch to the ends of you. I cannot swim but I still continue to dive, filled with mouthfuls of unspoken memories, the parts of you you’re too afraid to give away yet but I was blessed with patience. I am candlelight and you are the flame that allows me to glow, flickering in draughty bedrooms as we sway to a playlist I made especially for us entitled “beginnings” because I believe we will always feel like this. I have been strung out to dry on life’s washing line since I was a child and it wasn’t until you became home that I felt the warmth of candlelight and we become what we love.

I sit down opposite you in a small café, you say “I’ve missed you” and I tell you that I have never stopped missing you. The waitress asks what I’d like to drink and you reply “water” and I smile, inwardly. I stopped fumbling with my hands when they found yours and you persisted I try your apple juice but I was adamant it just wasn’t for me and you smiled, outwardly. I had always been inward but you had taught me that it is okay to be outward and I complimented your smile for what seemed like the hundredth time hoping it would cause you to smile and it did and I told you that you had a face even artists could not create. I told you that there are universes within me and in every single one I have created galleries for you so that no matter where I am, I can always feel like I’m home.

To drown is considered a tragedy but I would anchor myself to the very depths of you and float within the atoms that enable you to be and I would merge myself into the darkness and find comfort within the unknown because part of it resides within me and I would die to be close to you. We become what we love and all I am is a paperback of romantic poetry with brushstrokes underlining the parts that are most important and one day I will whittle to ash in the flame that burns for you in the belly of my stomach and my paperback poetry will shrivel in your whirlpool and the pen will smudge and the writing will smear, but it is ok. Because I am diving into eyes, drowning myself in mouthfuls of the poetry I never sent and choking it back to you with my own eyes so you can see all that I am and all that I ever will be and decide if my candlelight is worth keeping aflame.

I once had a way with words.
Wielded them like a gilded sword, ******
From line to ragged line in
Desperate lunges. A duelist,
Fighting an ever-futile contest against
Enemies within, for honours hardly
Deserved, never recognised.
I wrought small trinkets and gaudy
Sculptures; I fashioned some
Restless peace, if only for moments.
I wrote my way to draughty sanctuary.
I sought shelter, and on some occasion
Remained dry.

"By Any Other Name"

The rain was pretty heavy
The shelter pretty dire
A leaky roof of broken tiles
A lantern and a fire
But this was life for Henry
A barren wooden shed
A draughty place
That he called home
A hay bale for a bed
A little dog his only friend
A mongrel he named Skip
Who he found wandering
Lost and weak
Upon a ******* tip
The two of them were happy
Though they didn't have a lot
But Henry prayed for them each night
Thanking God for all he'd got
A wealth of love and friendship
From a scruffy looking mutt
Who shared a life of poverty
In a dilapidated hut
Once a wealthy businessman
With justice on his side
Accused of theft and harassment
The man still had his pride
Whilst innocent the stigma stayed
So taking things in hand
The man left everything he owned
And took to roam the land
He didn't need the luxury's
That nearly cost his life
He didn't want to live
Like he was balanced on a knife
With 'Skip' he'd found companionship
That didn't judge or blame
A life so sweet and simple
A love by any other name.

The End by David Whitney               c2021

A helpful teen
with girly friends
on holiday
in Newquay
let the lesson
commence.

Can you do me a favour
if you're off to the shops;
pick me up tampons,
marked normal on’t box

Yep, no problem at all.

Wow, a real mouth stretcher
a jumbo wodge porker
it slaps the ground
as it drops from my mouth

But Lisa and Liam are playing charades
exchanging sniggers, a ***** gaze
and don’t notice it slip under the sofa
to die.

Should 16 years old boys
know what they are?
I eyeball bus stop ads searching for clues
as I arrive at my reckoning
the Aldiest, Aldi, I’ve ever seen

I stakeout the aisle
containing ladies’ things
You know, lipsticks, cotton pads,
water that smells
I check for security
before I begin
some premeditated
drive-by
purchasing;
Yes, just like when I buy condoms

****. That’s one massive box!
a gargantuan bedrock
why didn’t she say?
how will I lug that all the way?
Shall I say they’ve sold out?
And each box is different
pluralist rejoice!
but none providing normal
as an option or choice
  
A shop assistant enters the aisle
at high noon
I’m forced to ask.
**** it, **** life, **** me in the ****!

Excuse me, Tracey (ooh pretty name)
what size do you buy
when you’re investing?
IN THESE - I ****** a box into her face
I still don't know why to this day
She reaches round me
'here you are love'
and rushes to safety
under plastic tassels

As I heave home my prey
what hero’s welcome will I receive?
a metrosexual epithet?
a badge of honour?
a heraldic coronet? Nope

SUPER! what the heck?
How big do you think my ***** is?

Now
I grew up in a house,
3 brothers
no daddy
and mother rarely talked about
what went up there

Lisa, settles and pulls me aside
Places her hands on my arms
‘Now, close your eyes’
Remember
last summer
after the fair
We swapped cidery kisses
on the bench by the tree
when it got dark
you put your hand up my skirt
what did it feel like?
A warmed poached egg…

…Strange, but ok
But not like Cheddar Gorge
Not a draughty, cavernous, unending space.
a vacuum, encompassing time and space!

…goes unpunished.

Amidst those dark, uncharted times,
when leaders locked the planet down,
A stag leapt from his woodland home,
and took a trip around the town.

In centuries past, this centre was,
the verdant playground of the deer,
A meadow of Elysium,
and fragrant flowers blossomed here.

This stag, of gentle-footed step,
was full of soft-eyed majesty,
In fustian coat with, on his head,
a crown of rugged ivory.

And tall and strong and slow of gait,
just like an emperor he trod,
Along that concrete boulevard,
where once the kings of France played God.

In days of old they would, no doubt,,
have hung him on a palace wall,
While courtiers dined on quail and swan,
inside some sumptuous, draughty hall.

But now it was as if he were,
upon a glittering victory march,
As we, the vanquished, watched him stride,
beneath the vast, Triumphal Arch.

And gazing on the silent street,
I felt about to burst as I,
Stared like a parrot from a cage,
at laughing birds all breezing by.