you had me when you
skinned my hide—the future
and present of squiggled
intestines tilting with the
rotation of earth.

I am macho—no nighttime.
the summer constellations
throw me a bone and big crunch
as my molars snap with my
jaw.

it takes a year to go around the sun once.
it takes a trawl to fish properly.
it takes a dog to chase the brightest
star.

*Sirius.

Once more I find myself alone,

Sat, over-thinking all,

For once will my poor mind just rest,

And not for thoughts will trawl,

have you the seagulls  follow fishing boats
gently on the wind he just gently floats
looking at the nets as he begins glide
looking at the catch and the fish inside

hovering overhead waiting for a snack
waiting for the fisherman to put the small ones back
they fly in there flocks twenty maybe more
following the fishing boats  all along the shore

they make lots of noise as they begin to call
following the fishing boats as they begin to trawl.

1
in the fish market of religions
and faiths
and suppositions and declarations
and fierce revelations
much of the commerce is done
on the principle:
Who shouts loudest
and shouts longest
and shouts often-est
gets to empty the most pockets
of bewildered customers

(You always empty their minds
first)

2
You never lose in this fish market
Even the quiet ones
the ones of mild manners and timid ways
can trawl a good number
of faithful customers

3
You can sell fresh fables
or smelly old tales –
they are all good commerce

4
Of course some slap you
right in the face
with their fish:
That too seems to catch customers…

I think you stun them with one blow
and they remain stunted all their lives

The Lung.

The broken bone branches hang heavy off knuckled tree. As cold and uninviting as wrapped meat in cellophane prison cells and those sweating milk bottles left on doorsteps. Women cry with the blackbirds as day breaks, rousing their reluctant nests.
As the shadows trawl in from chicken farms and slaughterhouses, across the squalid estates and past a debt collectors party. A ***** drinks his soot like coffee and waits for another years tide to retreat. Holding pith less ambitions and unmentionable qualifications, stewardess pass, uniformed thoughts and averting faces..
The rusty playgrounds sink into the fermenting wood chips, and a plastic bag runs through the scene; only to commit suicide in the oil ribbon canal. The chemical clouds thicken into a duvet of sky whilst  arrows of a natural sun run home with tears of fear on their hot faces.
Down here the street lights flicker, and the patched uniforms drape off children sick with the flu that hit the school like a plague. Herding like cattle into the classrooms, to learn about the natural world
that is most unearthly to there reason.
Lunch bells ring from factories and the sky has drained to a sick -off white. The chip shop sells butties with no sauce nor bun, which machine like men guzzle and slurp.
The car parks lay stagnant in the distance and pigeons too fat to fly lay droppings on the bronze statue of a crying hero. As the roaring stops from the factories and high visibility coats are hung,  the sky bruises and the men fill the pubs, until wives with children hung on washing lines drag there sweat soaked frames to the table, only to indulge them in a row.
Night creeps in, bringing with it the hooded figures that flutter along the streets. Music plays from a vacant building and seems to brighten the night.
A silhouette is seen standing on the edge, watching the busses bellow run like migrating snails, filled with the elderly and too young.
Cigarettes infest the streets creating a carpet of ash and litter. The city survives, remaining grey, never blinking, never heard.

Therapy.
You've made me a walking travesty.
Always trying to trawl me treacherous.
My mind treadling to trench my trifling thoughts.
Only trickling off from the tip of my tongue,
As you're trolling my troublous trigger,
You're no friend to me.
You're only therapy.

Barry’s dead.

I saw you dying weeks ago;
An oyster shell turned empty can,
Scrumpled up and finished
By the past’s magnet attraction
In your shakey hands.
It’s just a habit now and you can hardly kick yourself.

Buckets of Grolsch:
My swash-buckling hero
Turned slosh-slurping zero once again
And shiny surfaces
Never suited you.

Scrub away at that black demon matter
With the sole white spirit
Your genius affords. A shattered socialist
Posy primrose ******;
That’s the story of your life –
All
      most
               man.

Now beneath the cowslips
And the heifer’s hooves,
Your saintly-thorny words without a roof:
But who will speak for you?
And trawl the depths
As you once did in youth?
Prizing open oysters…

I hope that where you are
Your silence brings relief.
I hope that where you are
You smell the borage breeze.
I hope that where you are
There’s ox-cheek for tea
And your carbonated past
Is carbonating in mute peace.

Tonight the argent stars
Are dulled in disbelief
Tonight the slate that you’ve carved
Is the hardest you will teach.
Tonight the tumblestones
Are falling down in grief:

For Barry’s gone to rediscover Pearl
And the beauty of her peace.

You are nothing short of iridescent.

Like the pearls the divers pluck
From the depths of the bay and
Crack open to reveal;
When set into gold and silver, they
Glisten.
As do you.

But the fishermen trawl the very same bay
With their boats and their nets,
And you are iridescent as
The milky smooth insides
Of the clams they catch—
Iridescent as the shells that they,
Hungering,
**** the meat from and
Throw back into the sea.

Another day another dollar
Don the thrown on clothes
That worn over washed feel
A face soaped look to begin the start of another start
Another trawl into the big wide world
Yet so held in as my uniform
Becomes my sin

Work the day
Sleep the night
Gone the parties
Gone the life

My dollar buys the tax mans lunch
His change may feed my family brunch
Pay the bills on borrowed time
What a life my common crimes
Twist the fate that follows me
The uniform of life and
I'm the tree

Work the day
Sleep the night
Gone the parties
Gone the life

Holiday beaches from a magazine
Feel the heat and dream the dream
Forget the island sun my son
Paradise park be only for the few
Paradise just aint my glue

Work the day
Sleep the night
Gone the parties
Gone the life

Uniform of life work your magic wand
Take me to another place
Work me to the bone
Feed my luck to the workers book
It's written till the end
Gone my map all washed from the tears of my soul
The chapters complete yet
Empty inside

The words don't come as easy anymore,
As if the very act of utterance
Has now become a chore.
Words that once slithered
From my mind and from my tongue,
Seem wrapped in insignificance.
Like the vacuous distance
Twixt our planet and our Sun.

Oh yes,
There are enough faint marks
That we can trace constellations
In the quiet of the dark.
Finding meaning that was never there,
Seduced by mediocrity
With just a pinch of natural flair.

I feel the muse has died,
The last ember of a humble
Fire,
Now fuel deprived.
So I shall trawl through the
Musings of others.
To find a spark and kindle
My lovers.
The spoken and written word,
Perhaps entwined
With a musical accord.

Perchance then? If my ego may be silent
Perhaps I could take pen again
Assault the salient!
Then if determinism agrees
I may once more feel the words
Flow through me like the breeze.
I will ink my conscience once more.
Till my mind is left adrift,
Treading water to
Distant shores.

I'll trawl the squalor, if you like,
stick blinkers on to hide the fact
that my life has so far been a charmed one.

I can conjure a face,
small, forgotten
black against a duststorm sky -
There's your poverty for you,
And yes, I was there

And sure, I smelt the days old sweat
and can remember hunger as a curiosity
The boy's name is known to me
but I won't share it

Because he was real
but I missed his reality
and I have no right to it.
***** hands notwithstanding
I was just a tourist,
a passing mote of dust
in his drought-stricken life.

I was there for me
collecting picturesque snapshots
which would inform my return
to an undeserved comfort
(but only slightly).

To say he was important,
totemic, symbolic,
is false.
I remember him, that's all -

My boys,
my clean, happy,
here-now boys
eclipse that shadow in every respect.
An honourable assertion
only in that it is true;
and a brief regret that I made no contact
flickers out before
a blaze of contentment,
a bedrock of good fortune
with little to offer
the vicarious seeker
of hard-won wisdom.

I

in the dark starvation is real.
In dark, the emesis that fills my
cheeks is a currency I soak inside, animal
coinage, the fine
bulbous talons of Sepiidae.

Savagely, pelagically
starving made me rich when
Muskrat’s claws pull apart delicate meat.
Sad Spanish blood, I would like you
to panic about what has been lost.
No body, no crime—we are all cannibals; so the muskrat ate
flesh from the dugong-heavy remora

a parallax of sorts occurs
when I cannot find my own entrails—
perhaps they are ruminating in my gut—
boiling in my optic nerve.

But–I found little boys betting quarters for eating bowels
of goat. I was small enough to fit through
playground gates so I could swing
swing in earthquakes, and portents
ride out this day on the waves—to succeed

foothills, grasses, and bath salts
by the creek. I got my quarters.
They asked me who made me as Mountain
Dew dribbled down my chest.
Infant teeth shattered my infant

fists and I did not eat divvied livers and
Victim watchers.
I wrote on
my protruding
viscera
proverbs from my ancient days


–extraordinary porch things, depleted
Phosphorus, and, on bendable limbs
I catalogued my windscraped knees.

How does one so young
become
so fed up with
hunger.

II

Starving made me easier to tie.
easier to lift.
my ancient autopsy of starvation
made me feel gutted out
like Finished
ice-cream containers.
Made me able to hold my breath for
up to six minutes—starving
made me full of Household Gods and rickety
rosaries,

small brown globular clusters,
1 arcsecond of stress
capable of aligning me
with spring-loaded washers

I pop one nut—two—
Dental Work can be a rhizome,
ordering wee-soldiers from
its tethered nodes without
lactation, laceration, infection into
my sleep-deprived throat,
Choking on bird chirps
and x-ray bursts

below the cradle where
my android sleeps. I
have named him The Alabaster.
(Synching The Alabaster.)
The Alabaster–Allie–is a kind of boat
that I have hole-punched into; like
children of the deep I have hurled
nearby rocks into its lungs.
I have wrenched crumbs of my honeymoon
sidewalk, for a beast that panics.
I would trade
the last of the dugongs
for a muskrat’s smile–
now there exists a cult for Plastic
that the spotlights started,

and in the night it will not
end with the filter feeder sinking
to the depth of the imagined water column,
spinning in the Gyre disposal.
There isn’t a colander large enough
to sift through the pejorative waste.

I knew the night would be fraught.
It makes my fusiform body necessary for
transport. Makes Monophyletic solid consumption
trucks and ACE arms reach for
well-behaved spearfish bodies.
Makes days disappear and cold
seem like simmering.
Makes staying out of sight
a trim.

And I told them,
the Fusiforms and Balusters, that
the spearfish would devour the hero who comes
from afar bearing the gift of travel–
Tully-Fisher, with his cottonseed oil
“Manufactured in USA” in
compounding pharmacies.
He made me.
And I told him:

to Tell me to trawl for something less
plastic than my second
self–that I which exists
in Mary Poppins cannons, compact
intimacies, medical and portable–

to dig within my throat, discover a nurdle
that failed to photodegrade during the the day
the Sirenia sang,
the Muskrat gnawed off his leg and hand
fed it to the remora.
III

My mouth is parched
for diagnosis of rickets, for
my un-mineralized bones.
I need RR Lyrae, Statistical π,
population “II”s
to stand in for my night.
I need Sweetened,
Spoonfuls of BB pellets and
Spoonfuls of cepheids to help
the tetany go down,

myopathic infants and
ricket Rosary symbols only work
in sacrifice–In this sense,
I have constructed a panic
architecture–Craniotabes are too
vast. Prions and viroids have seeped
through,

Infections more than dreams,
for injured muskrats who yearn for
the last real mermaid’s smile,
or tears if that would smash open
the cluttered ocean and scatter
the unwanted hosts multiplying
in my spinal fluid.

In day there is no more starvation–
the remora bring me
Libations and admire
my six pack rings mobile.
My connective obligatory.

Under my fingernails are thin
crisps that may somehow create equilibrium.
Although I nibble them regularly
I can’t always swallow.
Surrounded by a dense fog of fleas
my tongue is itching.
My teeth are scratching, scraping
away the space that will always be there.


The antique aisle at the local international
superstore is handing out shriveled
heads of past didactic patients.
But I tell them it’s not what’s there that matters
it’s what’s not there. And in my case
there’s a surplus of nothing that
I can live without.

Stolen the shawl from the shoulders of night
Slipping away with the dawn
Folding down the duvet, the new day
Stretching glossy nailed sentinels to
Rub the sleep from lashes of tell tale
Dreams that took mundanity into
Fine wine and rich red realms

Fresh out of tactics to ring in favours
The sheets depart my limbs and
Water connects skin on skin
Fluffy spurs washed away clean
Spun out of secret doors into the unknown
Shoving me, nudging me, reminding me
I’m heading to reality

Tipping my head toward the warm air
The continuing whirring of its mechanism
Vibrates my follicles and lends me in the
Direction of humanity, the peacock
Plume doused and preened into shape
I begin the trawl of closet colour
Of mood matching, of image portrayal

Set for the external clock to tick
I trust myself that wheels upon tarmac
Will hold me to my destination
Releasing me safe and sound to the
Jaws of business, its never ending
Narcissism purchasing my daily bread

Released from the bind **** of
Incongruence, sheltering under the
Safe shell of my emerging reality
It comforts my bones, grazing me with
Honesty and genuine intuition that
Hope isn’t baron or depleted
Grandeur awaits me and I am true
To my facing stare.....reflecting

They crawl along the streets like zombies:
Heads cowed over Androids and iPhones.
Busily pressing buttons,
Risking life and limb
As they cross the road.

It reminds me of “Star Trek Next Generation”
When young Wesley and the rest
Were hypnotised
By some alien “game”.

Sometimes they sit in huddles,
Messaging one another
Or playing, yes,
An addictive game.

All lost in a dream world
On Facebook or Twitter-Chat Whatever.
Soon we will no longer “fall out” with anyone:
We will “Unfriend” or “Unfollow” them.

I still prefer my laptop.
But how long before I too
Succumb to this addiction?
How long before my “Facebook Morning Splurge”
Becomes a day-long trawl?

Before I know it I will be like the others:
Lost in panic –
Frantic
Because I forgot to bring
My mobile.

Paul Butters

© PB 25\12\2017.

So many of us
beaten, heart-wrung care
we share
our hopelessness
our impotent despair
our seismic horror
mounting terror
as nations pile mistake
on fatal error
How do we act
as casualties mount
how do we hold our blighted leaders
to account

We trawl through history
and weakly portion blame
make claim on pointless claim
to show that we began this game
That this was us, and that was them
but all this does
is set the process off again
And little comfort,
stating that we cared
in lieu of just confessing
we are scared

Scared that in the loneliness of night
a sneaking voice
might say this choice was right
that self-defense
is justified
that editors and leaders
can't have lied
that evil really stalks us,
really walks our streets
plots our defeat, prepares
to hoist black flags
into the air.

It does, and always has.
The name may change
but nothing of this crisis
is so strange.
Cry anarchy, revolt
pledge blood to the republic
**** the vote
don masks and balaclavas,
meet in shade
believe this is the place
where deals are made
And soon, to fan eternal conflagration
someone will bring a god
to the equation,
proclaim a nation,
proclaim the right of judgement,
who should live
and who should die
And in the dancing flames,
raise eyes
to thank the empty,
mindless sky.

But what is worst,
among the frantic, wretched cries
is that our comfort
lets us view it with surprise
our safety, compromised
exposes this malignant myeloma -
we feel that we
should never die.
We should not suffer,
should exist
in numb, eternal safety,
empty bliss
no cold, no hunger,
conflict frowned upon
All struggle gone -
we should go on
and on
and on.

But breathe.
Feel echoes, ripples, tremors -
close frightened eyes
and just remember -
this is the road that we are always on
We found it on arrival,
leave it when we're gone
but our survival
is unhindered.
While fools break splinters
from its rugged bones,
we still lay bigger, stronger stones.

This is the world.
Love fiercely, dare
to shout in anger,
weep in care, do all you can
to help your fellow woman,
fellow man
to shatter walls, to build
together, better, wiser things
Prepare
to sacrifice, to will a world as one
and know that evil done
can be undone

Do not succumb
to cold, immobile fear
but shout, in righteous fury,
"We are here!"

It's all slipping through me again
Remind me why I exist
We trawl the seas like fingers
Remind me
God pushed his hands through the earth
And shaped us out of blood
I saw it
I saw it all
We turned the sea
And it pattered for half a century
Crackling like pig flesh
Did we burn it?
Peel it back
Come on, peel it back!
What are you, scared?
What are you?

The shade plays figures across my skin. A slow ripple of old casts, thrown off last winter festival. It’s an old game. Children gather at the riverside and watch their broken bones depart. It was like this the year before, and the year before then. It will always be like this.

Sometimes summer arrives early and I cry for days. My tears run into the wooden floor of the house. It follows the cracks and seams, soaks into red dirt, coal dust, mud. I was once here. Salt trails along aged timber, the dead corpse of forest gods.

I left early in the morning, before the dew had left the roofs. I followed an old bike trail. I listened to the silent clamour of pre-dawn. It was like a stream, the black edges of an open wound. Blood had yet to reach out, touch existence and harden.

The casts sink to the bottom of the river. The children scream and laugh, leaping through the air waving cattails. The shade shifts and I find myself awake, thirsty and without direction. I have forgotten my own name, a place without season, the sight of blossoms.

I am alone, waiting for someone. I am walking beneath thick wires humming with power. I am holding a hand, sitting atop a bus shelter, watching harbour lights diffuse the water’s surface golden.

There are two black figures now. They reach towards one another but cannot touch. To touch is to lose form. I lie staring into the absence of myself, watching petals fall on my skin. Clouds break.

It was sudden. A bright clap of electricity, before a downpour. We ran down the street, jumped through your open window and rolled onto our backs. The air was humid from the day, and without thinking I kicked the shutter down. We laughed and laughed, until our voices found themselves still, close and warm. Your cheeks flushed, breath caught on the ceiling. I kissed your neck as you unbuttoned your shirt, following the openings your fingers left.

There were days I wandered, a black whirr, a sprawl without end. My fingers would reach out until they lost feeling, and then, definition. I wish I’d been there when your body failed you. I wish I’d gathered your broken bones and dashed them against the river, but I know now, they were the only thing keeping you whole.

Some children run after their casts. They descend the mountain into a wild darkness and trawl the river bottom for their memories. They are the poorer ones. They are the ones worth knowing.

It is dark. The figures have blurred into one.

I made notes of docking posts
pointing out to murky reflections
of tourists that didn’t have time
for a souvenir mug or a picture
with a black trumpeter content with his brass,
and nothing else, blowing life into the seagull
sky, making the clouds pop and drop spray-
mist jazz, which accompanied his trumpet
with a gentle washboard scrape.
He beat his heel to the thousand pin-drops
of passerby earrings, crab sweatpant draw-
strings, and trawl nets dissolving into the sea.
Baltimore filled the margins
of a travel notebook alongside
pencil sketches of the Aquarium,
Prufrockian split claws
wrapped in algae bandages,
that homeless man weakly thumbing
through a pocket bible, the 32
cents wearing sea salt jackets,
and my cold girlfriend pulling on patron
sweaters in an art museum closet.
But it’s all a gimmick.
It’s $22 crab cakes
and paint-splatter-printed
sweatshirts that say New York
or D.C. or Everything on a Disposable
Kodak Camera.

Tired of the idea, I threw the page
over the edge, hoping to drown
it in green, but I never heard it hit
the water. I braced myself on a life
ring rack, leaned over,
and watched it settle into a natural
barge of dead leaves and orange peels
while sea foam circled
it like a bed skirt that’s only
noticed for the few seconds spent stripping
down before going to sleep
just to wake up to rain on the Royal Sonesta,
kids racing down the hall, the obligatory
alarm clock,
and the black trumpeter’s groove
four floors down.

She stood at the gravestone a shard petal
Fell cutting upon the air. It littered the floor
With tears of wine, falling and spilled on the
Found staining the memory below. She gripped
Upon its stem in a hardened stance of tears.

Her cowl draped over her soft hair in the
Scattered winds it flowed and from her
Grief did vengeance flourish. shadows
Granted form trod upon the ground.
Beauty in darkness bled upon the land.

Hooves trebled on odours that were seeping
Scent bleeding a trail on the land below.
There onyx alicorn cut into the wind tasting
The vengeance that would bleed upon there
Moment of satisfaction as shadow feed cold.

Hooves were separated, as the hunted greeted
Foe, shadows were separated and in to mist
They seeped back to the cloak. Fibres torn
From the impact and bled darkness on all
It graced upon. She felt each of there pains.

One still galloped on, ever seething in connected
Grief of its fallen parts now concentrated in its
Raging torrent of remorse. Each that had fallen its
Location bleed into the sky showing each the
Position of vengeances handle well grasped.

Rapid breath did concentrate on a veil of
Misted wisps as in site that which felled the
Love of one in shadows trawl. Now as blade
Swung for a third strike hardened by fallen
Before it glided on concentrated form.

Majestic beauty seethed in onyx fought for
What was owed in blood. It  needed to be fed
Upon its quivering movement, not sullen as
Before, for each learned from the fallen before
Swifter and fluid motion formed and flowed forth.

Her main was cleaved into oblivion as wisps
Drifted off. Hooves took on to flesh and connected
In true form. blood urged to be released as lips
Gestured forth and expelled raindrops of pain
On self and the watching earth silent below.

It clipped with its etched alicorn flesh tight
And willing to be cut upon, as tears of life
Draped ever faster she was called to this
Calling to venture into the known finishing.
In elegance she edged slowly forth unto him.

I was in a beat of another draped in essence of
Loves grip. You stole the heart that held mine
And it fell shattered into dust. I claim the right
Of loves vengeance on that which was taken
Now entombed  in eternal stones grasp.

As the last steed faded into recollection and
Joined her cowl now whole. Its horn now
A knife of blood rose thorns ready to drink.
He went to venture words but her finger
Silenced anything seeping forth.

"Love was my light and you extinguished it,

"Now darkness collects it dues on that death,

She plummeted it into his chest and it drank, as
A husk knelt before her then dust graced the
Gentle wind and she stood alone once again.

"My love as yours was stilled,

"Now they do not breath breathe,

And she hilted her dagger and once again
Stood over the stone that held silent thoughts,
And a heart that still beat but not of life anymore.

When I was young I wrote about
How therapy was always trying to trawl me treacherous
With only having gone a handful of times as a child.
Today therapy is a friend to me,
Only trying to tear my troubles from my treacherous hands
To help me understand where they come from
And where I stand.

let the sails catch the wind.
let them grow fat and full.
set out the trawl to catch the animals that look like aliens.
the wooden floorboards let out a full and satisfying sound when you rap your fists against them?
let the sun become hollow.
let the heat from it wash down madly.
and let me have a minute of your time.

stop the flood from rushing through its usual motions.
let the rudder lie still.
let the water eat  though it.
let its color darken as the day grows older.
let the light break off the water like a bottle on the sidewalk.
let it break against the edges of all - everything.
let me have a minute of your time.

watch the current switch direction.
watch the lines there in the center twist and turn.
look back toward the shore where it was a while ago.
you know, i can't see it either. can you?
give me that much at least.
it is far beyond our reach.
the day has disappeared from view.
and let me have a minute of your time.

Once a voyager of sky and sea
On Earth I left the vast majority
Of those who chose the illusion of security
Over the idea of living truly free

I have abandoned all earthly possessions
The idea of an unconventional view is my only concession
I leave behind all of my past
To voyage across a universe so vast

I know it is unlikely
That I will find the other half of me
So for now, content with myself I'll be

As I trawl this endless sea of stars
I am battle-worn and covered in scars
Speed past assaults from the asteroid belt
Which lies beyond the red planet, Mars

At the universe's cold black mercy,
It  knows of my tender vulnerability
I man this spacecraft all alone
To find another heart to call my home

I trawl the beaches of my mind,
Sifting through detritus for memories,
A single shiny bauble to add to my closet,
Overflowing with skeletons

These sands can never bury things forever,
The waves will come,
They will erode,
Nothing can stay hidden indefinitely

Tomorrow is your birthday, her birthday, his birthday.
It's thinning this suit of reddened skin. Boy-nails are never
As sharp as they need to be. Toxins don't work fast enough either.
5:00a.m. stop for premium unleaded just outside of Big Sur. Once you were in the devil in a Jaguar, leather biker jacket and a crown of gold.
Mused to be. The insides of the stomach must have claw marks by now.
Panting, misstepping, riddled with whys and whens.

Time is critical, yellow or black nail polish; signature colors. May minutes be returned and reused where aching poison ails but does not deliver. Tomorrow is your birthday and maybe you'll allow for the cleaning of ***** from your hair and the body crooked, lingering over your night-terrors with cool and wet cloths.

This is some tremendous furnace of unrecoverable agony. There is no use chasing the wheat. Into a bunker or hurrying the footsteps into the sea. Ghosts of humans trawl the flesh entombed in permanent suffering. And the men and women glue themselves to its familiarity and melancholy.
So many great hopes were **** into one hand and ******* into a folded over pillow. We are too old to have Fraggles living in our ears.
May my chest explode before tomorrow unless you would unvex the curse who devours language and desire and all these hours.