Quaint crumbling yellow tower blocks. Heaps of trash and traffic choked streets.
Geckos smiling sweetly on the wall. Cockroaches and rats in the background. Two children. One mischievous toddler and one innocent baby. My wife in the distance looking away. A middle aged Asian man drinking, scolded by is wife and mother in law.
My wife in the distance looking away. A middle aged Asian man drinking, scolded by is wife and mother in law.
School aged children laughing and crying.
A laptop in a lonely dark room. Piles and piles of prescription drugs: tramadol , codeine, ******, ritalin. Tubes of corticosteroid and moisturizer creams.


Jolly fat men in their 30s drinking bia hoi, smoking endless cigs. A rock band plays to an inebriated crowd.


Sunlit mountains. Limestone karsts. Emerald rice fields on straight flat roads heading on forever with a fat sunset overseeing the lazy water buffalo wallowing.
The faces of old friends growing hazy.

A gaggle of women, enraged or sobbing.
School aged children laughing and crying.

A heavy lidded eye dropping a tear into a panic stricken and bloodshot one

Aeroplanes heading over the vast sea. My late middle aged parents smiling stupidly.
Various friends smile
A girl looks on with pity, flanked by a hard faced man in a polo shirt.

Why am i waiting
To feel something
Like when I was young
Thoughts and memories
Accumulate inside my head
But still my heart is numb

I feel anguish
And sometimes I might feel some pride
But it's only surface deep
I watch my actions
As though I'm watching someone else
Making mistakes on repeat

Every day I'm
going through the motions
It's all work and it's no play
And when I find the time
To catch up with my old friends
I've got nothing to say.

Neural pathways
Digging grooves inside my brain
Habits getting more entrenched.
Mounting addictions.
I must resist this limbic friction
but I just don't have the strength.

When did my horizons
become so narrow?
Ambitions have slipped out of sight
The future is empty
Just body clinging onto soul
Going gentle into night.

When the newscaster, he preaches for a war abroad with drones,
And why battle-hardened soldiers must shoot children armed with stones,
They say "Genocide? apartheid? No! That's just the way things go."
The union makes us strong.

When you've waited four more years and now finally you can vote,
And you've leafed through manifestos that your favourite party wrote,
They're now in power, but you're just as powerless and broke.
The union makes us strong.

The seas they are a-rising and the temperature's so high,
That the forests are a-blazing and we know precisely why,
Billionaires build bunkers, leave the rest of us to die.
Oh the union makes us strong.

In distant mines and sweatshops our country reaps rewards,
The wheels of commerce greased by blood of poor people abroad,
But we'd rather see their boats capsize than make it to our shores.
The union makes us strong.

In misery you've toiled and with anger you have burned,
For security and comfort and some meaning, you have yearned;
If all this has made you hopeless, then forget all you have learned!
For the union makes us strong.

By now you are a skeptic of the ideology,
That says serfdom and consumption's all there is for you and me,
The hope that felt like weakness, now's a stark necessity
'Cos the union makes us strong.

Divorce


this time
was
its your side im gonna take
dont you worry mat
Im here for you unconditionally
i know you loved her
right until the bitter end
]right until your dignity was stretched out
over hot coals
over diamand like a fool
like an utter ****
you interoreted all of those negative sigals
all thise silent nigths in
avoivind the future
avoidung anythign
anythignthat might comr too close to the truth
the crippling trouch
that this time
in all the hundreds of milions of times
that this **** goes doewn
with romance]
and excitedment
and everything that for a bruief moment justifies alll yhr fuckign ****
that neurosis
the moments of utter indifference
when th difference betweeen crossing th road safely
and intentuionally hurling yourslef between the wheen of an oncoming lorry
grinding up the bones
tintoa insensate human patty
the reason you syou do the right thing
the sane thing
is fleeting moments like these were for a momnt at a time
we can acsend beyond the ordinary constrainsts ot every fuckign thing
and once that was you. Yuo were the thing that gave meaning to the shallow dochotoy between work and friend
. everyone wants something from you
sobut you stood apart from the din
the unholly din
of the forces pulling in operate directions

The next room
I want to Take you into the next Room
Share cynical laughs at their expense
And make a toast to we, the privileged few
And share backhanded compliments

****** your shoes upon somebody elses bed
knock all their possessions on the floor
throw caution to the wind and live the youth you never dared
kiss me till my lips are sore

The bands you loved before the world caught up
they never did improve upon their first
now fading from collective consciousness
cos every album just gets worse

Give me something sweeter than oxygen
from a time when this was all brand new
I'm just trying to feel without thinking
this is too good to be true

Give me something that can satisfy
Give me joy that won't disappear before my eyes
give me something I can taste that isn't ashes on my tongue
instant gratification never took so long

We sigh in mock despair now without hope
Having watched Everything We Love's demise,
And the sacred cows all twitch with BSE now
From the culture they cannibalised

Keep It Light, Keep it light
Keep it light for ****'s sake,
for ****'s sake keep it light

Keep it light, just keep talking about the weather
Don't look directly at the objects weighing on your mind
Identify the myriad peripheral minutiae
And save this sombre revelation for another place and time.

Keep it bright, cos I'm in need of some comic relief
No need to need to state the fact that things are really ******
So keep those stinking bandages wound up nice and tight
Everybody can see but they're just trying not to look

If You're lonely?
Well We're all lonely.
and if you're You're tired
Well so am I.
You wish you had more time to waste
In ways more fitting to your taste
You wish you didn't mind it.
Living life as you find it.

Don't think your the only one who sees the yawning void
Beneath this hideousness and decay
and whilst you cook up artful ways to try and make us see it
All we're tryna do is look away
All we want to do it look away

Keep it light, just keep that unthinking tongue moving
You and I both know there's nothing much to say
Keep doubling those negatives, don't stop your glottle.
Just enjoy the act in of itself, and the keep silences at bay

Don't invite, comparison's between each petty grievance.
Make sacred the fail-safe that disconnects them all.
Tell yourself there's more to this than sum of it's parts.
Keep on counting up the bricks but disregard the wall.

Keep it in, don't think you insights make you special
The self-aware will all still share the bullet-headed's fate?
Vibrate the air with sickly cares if you want to.
none of your pretty words will ever hold any weight.

This moment, this juddering dread.
Its purely circumstantial
and it will pass
One explosive act, drunk on adrenaline I chose to be strong
for once
and Now I look where it has got me
“you did the honorable thing” they will say.
And they will be right
“for the first time in living memory”
They will add.

Scooping up the layers of ugly truths that coat this place
these walls, today, this life
like so much finely powdered snow
like so much asbestos...
easy to ignore. But never forgetten.

I wash them out out of my eyes each morning
And start my day.
Dismissing them as mere dirt.
I empty my pockets and find them there,
They are under my fingernails.
A taste in my mouth.
The parts per million build up inexorably .
I will sicken and die.
You are kind. You try to help.

But you are wrong.
Soon you are contaminated. Sickened.
This failure to do what's right
provides the background white noise to waking life
The scratching and chittering of the conscience
Like rattling pipes, Like rats in the walls
disturb sleep
you see the powdered snow
Innocently.
Trying to clear it up
hands cracked
Thinner, weary
Uncomprehending and trance-like. You have felt the sunlight dim.
You have gazed into the abyss to long…

“It's time to talk about this” you say
I resist, deny all knowledge, stare out with detatched wonder
at the swirling blizzard
of toxic flakes
That blows in through the open window.
You begin to talk about this

I cough out a weak joke,
splutter some excuses. Polluting the air with benign untruths.
Which settle in heaps about the place like finely powdered snow.
Your face it streaked with tears.
I scoop up the snow, now discolored by age and filth,
Compress it, hard like a diamond
Your face is streaked with tears
Your eyes, your ears, your pores are open,
At least you are brave enough to feel something.
You face is streaked with tears.
Your eyes bright with the still-hot fire of life, are desperate to meet mine.

Downcast, I shrink from them
Merely distracted, not happy, not sad
Solemnly kneading the crystals of poison snow in my palms...
Bent Double, wrenched inwards  in an agony of unfeeling calculation.
The task is beyond my Jellied spine.
You are pleading for me.
The man, the ******* man
To make the decision.

Somewhere beneath the layers of carcinogens an old voice, rendered unfamiliar by time is crying out.
I listen.

Unsteady. Drunk on adrenaline. I take aim.
Doubled up. Wincing. God only knows what how you felt when it hit.
When the full weight of these months of accumulated deliberation
and guilt
and truth
made contact, with the face I have kissed a thousands times before.
And now here a quiver, judder
a lame and broken invalid
I first time I made a decision.
“You did the right thing” they will say.
I pray that it's the last time.