"halogen" poems
six lanes
in a sight line
past the cedar shims
and trim tempered insert
past the washed mural
and water stained tiles
covered eyes
fight for focus
over cork strung ties
and dark distant bridges
foot crawlers on lemon pegs
teaming
under clouded halogen light
dreamers contend
in a variation of chant
(throwing it off in a
drawl sequence)
a glimpse of the guard
and warm towel assignment
forge comforting relief
in a task filled day
Dec 2, 2016
Dec 2, 2016 at 9:17 PM UTC
A halogen glow
Condensation drips
Winter pressing on the glass
This tired bus rolls on
Bring me home once more.
Dec 29, 2017
Dec 29, 2017 at 5:33 PM UTC
The comic convention
has cardboard cutouts of
all of the main characters of
Harry Potter.
Harry,
Ron,
Hermione,
etc.
All motionless in a river of people,
glossy but worn down,
bathed in cold white halogen.
And one by one,
the cosplayers—
the Harrys
Rons
Hermiones,
etc.
Have their pictures taken
with the cutouts,
one cardboard cutout cut out
and replaced with a real human being.
Being human, we
crave companionship,
fear solitude,
crave solitude,
fear companionship.
We try to avoid becoming cardboard
cutouts of ourselves, but sometimes
a retreat into inanimacy
is what the animus needs.
The cosplayers continue to shuffle forward in line
each waiting to pose for a selfie. Each
politely smiling at the living Harry Potter characters around them,
but not striking up a conversation.
Aug 3, 2014
Aug 3, 2014 at 8:35 PM UTC
Something about the woven leather
Reminds me of sandals you once wore,
In the garden enjoying the sun.
Your shorts and that old cotton vest
the one that was probably once white,
but Nanny wasn't around to do your whites anymore,
and so it grew greyer as your hair grew whiter.
The sun's rays danced through the waves of your hair
and into the garden,
Filling it with light, shining down upon plastic flowers planted among coloured stones.
Smells of stale cakes from bargain stalls and the sugar from flat lemonade in murky cups wafted out the back door and clashed with that overpowering cooking smell as you sat in your sun lounger and baked yourself in vegetable oil, cooking your Irish skin to a crisp!
The flower patterns of your walls in the garden and cast iron patio furniture,
The plastic mat that covered the carpet and always managed to trip us,
The halogen heater in the parlour and blanket on your knees,
The clumps of bullseye sweets in your locker and Quality Street tin of empty wrappers,
The damp and stale smells of the kitchen in your care,
The holy pictures and moving Jesus on the stairs,
The bath marbles we loved to play with and how they'd smash upon collision,
And the pink, silk quilt that enveloped your bed,
They're all pieces in the mosaic that illustrates your memory now and they'll never be broken.
I've glued them so tightly together it's as strong as your jaw!
Your jaw, always known to make eyes water when you'd turn during a goodbye kiss on your cheek and crush our noses! Even when we tried to approach with caution! But oh what anyone of us wouldn't give to feel that again, just to say goodbye and think we'd be over to the Bluebell to see you again.
So now I sit and look at the woven leather on my sandals and remember all the details, all the memories that are woven together to make you. Sometimes I wish I could click the heels together.
Bluebell
Bluebell
Bluebell
And be back in that garden, once more.
Sep 20, 2016
Sep 20, 2016 at 5:41 AM UTC
Once, far away, Andalusia of time.
Was I, this dreamer, this student of crime.
Devouring textbooks with a gluttonous glee.
Of masters I conversed with, with lives like movies.
FBI-profilers, psychopathologists.
Faces carved from paleo-lithic stone.
The hearts of sailors betrayed by Triton.
Their ill-fitting suits an anarchists cry.
Oh blessed hearts long since buried in the plots,
of victims whose killers would never see man’s courts.
Who knew the world and hoped to teach I,
this fresh young prey with a predator’s eye.
This fresh young prey with a predator’s eye.
Sat I with the masters, in those secret little rooms
where the dead are shuffled to have chosen for them a grave.
And it’s never more real than when the beast sits still.
In the agonising ordinary glow of the halogen buzz
that shines on guilty and innocent alike.
To reduce us all to such pathetic things.
That if not for the debt, this creature’s crimes
one could pity being on such obscene display.
If it were not known to me, in great detail
the river of misery and depravity he had left in his wake.
As a mugshot robs the aura, so too the well lit room.
And I understood why it took a much colder mind.
As even though I possessed all the faculties which
could follow and track and trap the prey;
the predator must also ****
And being in those secret little rooms
I knew I could not see it through.
I left it to those stronger than I
and leave my mark through other designs.
Dec 26, 2015
Dec 26, 2015 at 9:17 PM UTC
A sea of gasoline's,
Grace of novelties,
Cars and halogen,
Social disease,
Manufactured dreams,
Scream on screens,
They glean from all living things,
Fight,
Take,
Hide,
Such a contumacious existence,
Results in an animistic decline,
All things that once made us strong,
Oblivion has made a meal of them,
I walk around this town,
I see the colors,
I watch the scenes,
Fight,
Take,
Hide,
I live in a world without a heart,
But machines keep it breathing,
And it has many sons,
Crowned with clockworks maturation,
Am I the last one beating?
I don't tick,
Not like them,
I just watch men bite one another necks from the steps of the front door,
They call me the queen of the creaking floorboards,
Fight,
Take,
Hide,
I have matchstick eyes,
I twist fires with my fingertips,
All of these people made of wood,
They are like smoke to me,
I breathe slices into them with teeth that have no number,
I am December,
I fight,
Take,
Hide
May 12, 2013
May 12, 2013 at 1:26 PM UTC
It's 3AM.
I sit in my room with nothing but the glow of a single
halogen
lamp.
All around me is darkness.
I stare,
coldly,
into the abyss of the space around me,
heated only by
the lamp.
For a second, I wonder.
I wonder about
the lamp.
How it fends off the darkness.
How it radiates a glow into an empty room.
How it doesn't do, or think;
how it just 'is'.
I wonder what it all means,
and I wonder why it matters.
Then, I just sit.
Aug 31, 2010
Aug 31, 2010 at 6:52 PM UTC
Retail-hunter gatherers pick
clean processed bones, digging graves
with their shiny teeth, studious in
their reveries as they drone
past worlds dumped in the thresher;
the trucked-in fields of film-wrapped
gore splayed lustily before the managers
wound tight in Machiavellian design.
A shepherd herds his flock of
wreathed iron back to its pen, its
skeletal tangle lit in riotous gold by
swords flung from lambent eyes of
pre-dawn’s shunting chariots
Cages shunt and bobble like tugboats
chugging stoic up swimming pool lanes
of nondescript tile, cheered on by shouting
colours to float through archipelagos of
paper towel and chocolate blocks past
the vegemite diaspora, and the arctic
wastelands cased in sliding glass fields of
perfect steady storms as wraiths baked in halogen
ask silent questions of the silverbeet, while
Lana Del Ray’s voice falls like
nightshade—slutty and serene—coating
shelf stackers in a Piaf sadness as the
shelves reach their arms out for more.
The check out chick hatches
a sense of déjà vu as carrots
and biscuits drone towards her
mind berEFT of any twitching
sense of POSsibility that wised
up and flew this leering coop and
deep in her catalogue of grey folds
something stillborn and waxen is
perched on gleaming steel, reeling
out her guts like cassette tape with jerky
nightmare arms and laughing like a
banker watching ***** films, mornings
dull cerise an invocation through
auto-jaws as she bursts out to warble
with magpies in car park’s climbing fire.
Jul 25, 2013
Jul 25, 2013 at 9:23 PM UTC
o halogen light with CD
and cassette holder
how your ribs they envelop
a promise of symphony
as you stand tall and straight
like a guard at the gate
you relieve all my troubles
with your blinding light bubbles
you brighten my day
keep the shadows away
though your color is lightless
you make me so nightless
your a wiry lifeline
steals perception of time
how quick the hours fly by
i'll never know
top of your glow
to the tip of my toe
your electric insides
could frizzle the tides
and your mental effect...
well...
it gives me good rides
May 6, 2015
May 6, 2015 at 9:11 AM UTC
In a hologram
I am the man you would like me to be
not real
but you see
it is me,
so
why do you want to know
who that I am?
but the man that's an image
a man you would pillage
and keep for your own.
Pictures that grow up and slow up,then show up just who that you are
an image that's far too inconstant
a solent
a side by the sea
aside from you and me and the oceans that we see
there is only a halogen lamp which tramps out these scenes and in the inbetweens of our dreams
I will be forever
the screens on the doors of the more that you want, and the more that we need,
the more we will seed the cameras with film.
and developed could it be
that we see so much more?
Aug 13, 2013
Aug 13, 2013 at 10:17 AM UTC
A drugstore pallid in waning light, always illuminated in halogen halos.
I am earless with music.
Black metal loud in clanging sets and blows-
foreshadowing the smell of cleaning solution,
air freshener and the outside
sweet at my back
all steeped deep in the rip roaring undertone torrent of cigarette smoke
blended with cheap perfume until I cannot tell the difference.
There is a limp familiarity to the underlying odor
born partially of personal encounter and-
nestled in the hive mind of social experience.
A distillation of regret and remorse,
of lonely,
of irrelevance;
this black hole swallows my voice the way of my ears,
eaten by rust.
Four cans of beans,
kidneys,
in cans squeezed without any power against sagging swells
melting into other curves
and I swerve close and around guiltily,
noting you only as the source of this pungent spring.
You are smiling apologies
ignorant of my apparent inhumanity-
blind to my selfish hands..
Pinioning belly flesh,
flattening,
reaching
and gaining attendance from a better man
retrieving every dropped can.
I’m retreating,
shaken,
tense to alternatively slacken.
My sweat slippery palms with whitened red sharp fingers feel foreign
and I am surrounded by razors then shaving cream,
moving from shampoo to conditioner,
the whole store is infected with smell.
Staring at nail clippers/snipers clipping touch smooth sooth my tense mind-
don’t look
**don’t
look**
I can sense little else but dread
drawing closer
you are now crouched so close I’m gagging,
taken forcefully-swept away in an olfactory flood
roiling in rot,
currents of solitude exude from your smiling sullen appearance when I turn to you
fumbling
with my electric ears,
surfacing
in a breath of Amish silence
broken with simple request
and I want to scream at you that I am not a man to ask opinions of
that it does not matter what fake nails she glues to her body
that she is excluded and I don’t know why.
I choose swirls of cream suspended within watery milk,
over childish lady bugs framed by yellow
or dots of red alternating to black,
an epitaph to a lifelike effigy.
Dec 10, 2010
Dec 10, 2010 at 1:42 AM UTC
Cyber! Neon green, pinks,
Hair like vivid spotlights
At nightclubs, darting, sharp,
Strong-willed and persistent,
Piercing through the pale skin
Laid thinly over fog.
Shock-shock! If anarchy
Is popular, what does
It mean to rebel? Rave
Lights beam through the system
Like tracer rounds! The punks
Spin like halogen bulbs.
Steel! Plenty of plastic.
Enough to rebuild the
Eccentric walls of their
Flashy nightclubs. Above,
Sophisticated chains
Spin and drag over meat;
Pointless. A simple sort
Of mechanisation.
The music, the plastic,
The hair dye; all of it
Spits to the contrary,
Such anarchists are they.
Dec 5, 2018
Dec 5, 2018 at 5:42 AM UTC
There’s an offering of change
Vitamin pills and get rich schemes
Selling a better life
A shot of paradise
In a series of halogen bulbs
All the tunnels lead to Mexico
The hidden hand on demand
Working off in the shadows
Maybe they’re hiding in plain sight
Just a crazy thought that crossed my mind
Now I’m holding out for truth
Amongst the sedatives
Now everything I see
Is played out on a broken touch screen
And now the ship is sunk
Let’s get down to the bar
I need to see the sun come up
before I start to come down
Johnny was a head-case man
All the things they did to him
And when the rich men left
And when he finally slept
He’d sleep for an hour or two
In a punch-drunk afternoon
All of the chemicals
Working off in the shadows
It’s no wonder he took his life
Just a crazy thought that crossed my mind
Now I’m holding out for truth
Amongst the sedatives
Now everything I see
Is played out on a broken touch screen
And now the ship is sunk
Let’s get down to the bar
I need to see the sun
Come up before I start to come down
Mar 15, 2018
Mar 15, 2018 at 10:40 AM UTC
She was like art still and silent
Beauty in the water, like a mirror
The essence of her shone from the
Halogen lights above.
She was like a picture, motionless
But still, her brushstrokes were
Grace upon skin, her moment
Was in this place, pictures taken
Of her pose of her posture frozen
in this place.
She was a beauty in the bath tub,
Her face in this lake of red, hiding
The deed, buried in temped water,
No longer pure, tainted by a final
Motion, claiming a last breath.
She was a beauty of refined allure,
But now her crimson glistened, refracted
Upon the light shining down a rainbow
Of shaded reds now greets all through
The heaven white doors.
She is the bath tub beauty now dead..
Mar 17, 2015
Mar 17, 2015 at 6:46 PM UTC
They say your lost at sea
lost at sea within my dreams
hard to reach
hard to touch from where im from
completely out of reach
they say youve come back for another try
the say youve walked and now your down
they said youve been there
open arms
wide looking eye
waiting for the chance to come by
this chemical equation
of covalent bonds mixing in heat
magnetic shifts pull us here
binding energy across the room
is buffered by the prides dream
but what catalyst my love
can ignite such desire
its reaching critical mass
about to start a nuclear disaster
its as if i have turn into a halogen
reacting to the site of you
coming into the room
the insoluble pride of my desire
is boiling to a point
i might return
but to you its as if
my face
was a line spectrum only showing
certain things
the potential energy
bursting
esxstasy
Mar 18, 2013
Mar 18, 2013 at 8:07 PM UTC
Increase The Pace (Side A)
Rhythmic pulsations invade comatose receptors
Lingering in the thick summer smog
The onset of tribulation commences-
Increase the pace.
Reverb ripples through
Hot wet lungs,
Love and Hate
The beats resonate...
Scared vinyl skips:
Repeating visions of angst,
Violent red chords
Rolling off shredded steel strings,
Acting as mania’s fingers…
Feet trapped in rebel rubber soles
Draw on littered concrete floors
Lonely like before
Noble souls abandoned this
Scene of raunchy rust,
gravity grabbing
as our wrists touch.
Increase The Pace (Side B)
Rush to Eden-
Greeted by harsh halogen
Bleach, eating out your sinuses,
water swirls as it slithers
round the basin
heavy door mutes the static,
holding back waves of thick smoke.
Blood shot eyes soothed
By branded potions,
Clarity cleanses
Dismembered demons
Crazed revelations infect the night no more
Forced silence seeps into aching eardrums
Breath forced from lungs
Adolescent epiphanies
Swirls down the drain,
Flying around chrome chains
Dust worn as protection
Drips into the sewers,
Flushed away
Forced silence reigns true
Voice of the bass-line
Forgotten anew.
Nov 6, 2013
Nov 6, 2013 at 5:39 PM UTC
beyond the lighted city
past the festive crowd
beneath the melancholic halogen
outside the shut doors and windows
upon a lane paved with garbage
amid an air stenched with *****
between two wooden wheels
head resting on holed rexine
arms limply down from heaven
feet embracing the dirt
sleeps another night
from the ashes of day
dreaming just enough
to muscle
another
morn.
Oct 22, 2015
Oct 22, 2015 at 12:14 PM UTC
Willie sat by the side of
the river in a philosophical
mood under a weeping willow.
Midway, between the two
banks, was a small island
only paddling distance away.
Debris from a previous flood
had accumulated on the low
foliage of an uprooted tree.
A funnel of cold air from the
ten arch bridge made a wind
sock of a plastic net nitrate bag.
In all his time, Willie had never
ventured on to this little islet,
even wondered if he should flag it.
Off with the shoes, rolled up the
legs of his trousers and slowly he
negotiated his way over the stones.
On exploring the land mass, which
was an isthmus of a mere ten square
meters, he decided to return to land.
Just before his disembarkation, he
noticed a large denominational euro
note caught in the gills of a dead fish.
Eureka Eureka money and food all
in the one catch (was his thought as
he made his way back).
The sodden state of the 100 euro note
was what guided ******* wise decision
to take it, as was, to the local Credit Union.
In the queue whilst waiting for a vacant
teller, everyone was admiring *******
dead fish.
Eventually, at the desk, and known to
those working therein, a 100 euro note
was not his norm and created suspicion.
After tendering the note attached to the
Trout, that had apparently been fowl
hooked up the river by Johnny Logan,
The lady behind the desk called for the
manager, who immediately held the note
up to the halogen fraud lamp.
Willie had never encountered anything like
this when he made a 5 euro deposit once a
month to his savings account.
He enquired of the manager as to why he
was holding his fish and 100 euro note up
against the bright light.
The manager responded, “ It is the policy of
all banking systems to check high denominational
notes for visible water marks “ !!
Sep 5, 2018
Sep 5, 2018 at 4:01 AM UTC
You told me that you were too wide-eyed for flirting at parties. I agreed. Thought of your eyes. How they reflect starlight. Depths so unfathomable that nothing shallow can survive. You breathe truth but trust nothing. I don’t understand how the two coexist.
The boy down the street celebrates “Darwin Day.” Calls himself a humanist. Proud-wearing his secularism. On his sleeve. I laugh at him. Don’t answer his knocking. Philosophy taken too far is no better than religion.
A woman buys apples and four rolls of toilet paper. Tells me: the only difference between a poet and the rest of the world is, poets tell jokes and leave out the punch line.
You take an astronomy class. Start sleeping under the stars. We sit on the balcony. You smoke Kamel Reds from Russia. Imported. Talking of matter and halogen. You claim the moon to be a mirror. You can tell how the sun shines if you look at the moon reflecting its light.
Jun 12, 2011
Jun 12, 2011 at 6:12 PM UTC
I saw him,
under
halogen haze
never days
a child I thought
no, a man,
tiny, with
a quick gait
trying
to outrun
fate
or an imagined
pit bull
always,
a white
football helmet
he wore
always,
he waved,
but always
he was mute
once,
I was
close enough
to see his face,
a smile
behind which lay
a secret
no modern
alchemy could
make him forget
a code
no white coat God
could decipher
a Mona Lisa smile
when I was expecting
a Munch scream
why the helmet
from what
was he fearing
assault--the asphalt?
stones cast from
the heavens
he saw only
under cover
of night?
I heard his mother died;
then he disappeared
perhaps she yet
laced his shoes
before his nocturnal
sojourns
and strapped
the helmet on
his head
I look for
him, and
other night
walkers, though
his once upon
a time is
memory
Aug 19, 2018
Aug 19, 2018 at 11:28 PM UTC
Black leather elf boots
Leggings
Cheetah print mini-skirt
Suede short coat
Too long in the sleeves
Someone's sweater with
A hole under the arm
One thumbprint sized bruise on my neck
Make-up frozen, clumped in the night air
Within my cone of oasis
From the halogen above
My breath mingles with the
Bile colored light
Smelling like Newports and tooth decay
I hug my self for warmth and
Shuffle foot to foot
Comforted only by the
Bulge in my boots
Representing the last few hours work
I clutch my purse tight
My toolbox
Not hammers or wrenches but
Tools of my trade
Baby wipes, sanitizer, tampons, and condoms
I hear a car slowing
Harsh redness of brake lights
Bloodies the vacant buildings
I lean toward the
Lowered window wondering
Will I continue to
Be the predator or
Fall tonight as prey
Mar 8, 2015
Mar 8, 2015 at 7:58 PM UTC
We could tuck ourselves in a crevice,
between a wall
and view the stones
for what they really are.
Let the light loom over us,
shade us from the heat;
The warmth of a halogen bulb
highlighting the street.
And it’s there we’d kiss,
and spark cigarettes,
and forget why we came here,
and let no one in, let alone near,
and we’d have a private joke,
like small font liner notes,
and for that two minutes,
(more work for the coffee mule)
we would overlook the important
stuff, for
that’s what it is,
another 70, at best, years
of toil and fluff.
*This tableaux love affair
will be omitted in years to come,
filed under the ‘lusts that resulted in
no fun, that night’ folder
in the great green cabinet of bills,
bills, bills again invoices.*
Feb 5, 2013
Feb 5, 2013 at 2:37 PM UTC
Indigo is the gaunt damp face of the still-born messiah.
With crude-oil cappillary flush like mottled blush
On Treblinka cheek bones.
On cold steel autopsy table, It's topsy turvy shrine,
A halogen lamp halo hums and sways
Over It's holy rolling head.
Unsavory savior, the pundit spared It's pageant.
With blackhole pupils pierced and seeping
Vitreol fluid like the weeping Virgin's tears,
Carving termite trails in their wake.
It trembles, gasps, and quakes
With the knowledge of futility.
All that was and all that will
Successively unsuccessfully.
A parade of steel tables on blood spattered conveyer belt,
Pulled to the symphony of six billion bellowed pleas for salvation,
Through tattered curtains to uncertainty.
Mar 16, 2010
Mar 16, 2010 at 4:09 PM UTC
the orb of light is my destiny.
in my dark valley
escape is a blind flight
on the moonless night
when heavy lies the fog on wing
neath misty sky crickets sing
beckons me the halogen
come embrace forget pain.
**be afraid not of the one recourse
come what may fly to the source
soak in the fire of the drizzled night
life is precious with death on sight.**
caught in wire stuck on fence
dying this night makes only sense
i fall like rains and at last free
the orb of light is my destiny.
May 20, 2015
May 20, 2015 at 10:21 AM UTC