it’s windy i think,
at least the windows are rattling.

the men in hard hats,
yellow motes off in the distance
and their jackets the colour
of poison,

they scale the façade
of the contralateral building.

they’re speaking, yelling,
probably catcalling, singing
their ugly songs on cherry pickers
like some crowned nest
of wagtails.

it’s early i think,
though the lights are always on.

they’re fluorescent, staining,
unflattering colouration, rinse
your skin to poverty,
to jaundice.

i’m here because of pills
i’m here because school is out,
i’m here because i’m tired
and i’m here because of you.

flowers sit at the side,
already dry upon purchase.

gifted awkwardly;
do we give flowers to a man?
a boy in sheets, foolish drunkard,
balloons with helium
to lift my spirits.

its lonely i think,
though it’s filled with people.

wristcutter, lupus, chemo
all thrown into one.
we’re what’s left post-production,
left to sit in an outlet store;

buy me for half-price
or else half an hour of company.

i’m the young one,
nurses scan me with motherly eyes,
the radiator warmth,
their rounded bosoms,
‘you remind me of someone’.

at twelve to three, she washes me,
asks me to lift my *****
so she can get at the two-day grime
of indolence.

it’s sad here i think,
at least the television is boring.

daytime ghosts and broken families
make my bedsheets gain weight;
even the balloon sags
in heavy misery,
nothing is mine.

sleep comes in fits
and starts in blankness.

it ends with my questioning
of where the dream began
and where hope had perished.

you haven’t come,
i knew that you wouldn't.

it’s hard to blame you,
what with my post-use pinings
long after you’d given up
and the way i act familiar
after treating you like a stranger.

i long to leave here,
so much the windows are rattling.

i’m here because i am
i’m here because of my job,
i’m here because i’m tired
i’m tired because of you.

You took me to the Mekong River,
handing my documents over the border,
to the temple of the left-handed Buddha,
in the hope it would all make sense.

You took me to the brink of a stolen calamity,
you stayed with me in poetry; my eventual insanity.
You kept me with your golden voice,
you kept me with your wit.

You lost me with your genius;
how you discarded it.

You drove me to a calling that I could not fulfill,
just make statuettes from the ash that lines my windowsill.
Call it art, or call it a longing,
call it that animal burn for some kind of belonging.

You were a father, you called off the saints,
you cooled my tongue, my off-white yogi;
taught me these songs of pain, these songs of love
were meant to be sung by everyone.

Not the clever mind, nor the metronome heart
that keeps time with this life, that keeps pace from the start,
but for the stumbling folk, the slow off the blocks,
the maladjusted, the criminal; those who only see dark.

That this chip on my shoulder is a flute in which to sing,
that each failure I live, is a story I should bring
to the table of life, to the feast of recovery,
for every impatient soul with a hunger for discovery.

Each broken chord is a chance to sound alive,
amongst the crackle of the static, there is another side.
Another wasteland companion, another strangled voice,
that amongst all this hopelessness; we always have a choice.

To bend or to break in the shatter of our soul,
sometimes the glass must be half-empty in order to feel whole.
That some convenience pleasure is not always enough,
sometimes we must bear the burden;
sometimes we must hang tough.

Because the words will come, the sun will rise,
amongst the debris of yesterday, there is another side.
You took me to the temple and on bended knee I pray,
that I could lift a suicide, with just the words I say.

Closed eyes
to the fountain of youth,
to higher hopes
and new reality.
I claim spirit,
but give mind,
in fact give all
my scattered self,
in the hope some poor *******
sorts through.

Winter's guise,
I flicker off-white images
of galaxy and twine,
of breath mints and wine,
of sorry dancers
with broken heels,
reinvented wheels,
and augmented rhyme.

Light comes
and I storm it with cold,
I storm it with pens
and whiskey lies.
I storm it with science,
and I storm it with God,
I storm it with the golfers
and playboys,
about to tee-off.
I storm it with hate,
with the promise of pay,
my unrequited love
of Saturday.

And with wind came age,
came the steady hand
and furrowed brow
of sleet-strewn rain
and growing pain.
Of doubt. A bout
of flu,
a touch of death
and funds withdrew.
No more the kiddie
in the window,
aww-ing at sound,
the colour of air,
the steam of kettle,
forgiving snare,
life's poison-treats
and poison-poisons.
Un poisson hors de l'eau,
still - I'll thank you
for your time
and bad French,
old guru.

Still to shift in
this physical prison.
A prism of light,
of partial solidity,
of unending uncertainty;
a multitude misunderstanding itself.
It claims to the borders
and it clings to the bed,
it holds true to thought,
and all the worries
in my troubled head.
They descend,
never end,
in a crescendo,
a caterwaul
of mistreated sound,
dog in the pound,
and waistlines round.

Thigh gaps
and mind-the-gaps,
signposts and brochures
for the short-lived living.
They pester my mind,
interference, crackle,
prattle and rattle
of mediocre wisdoms,
of borrowed idioms
for bulimic bones
and broken homes.
They tailor my mind,
cuts and seams
of needless pleas,
for order in chaos
and blueprints
for blind entries.
All to settle the stomach,
to settle the plot
to settle this fever
that burns so hot.

Old-film stills
to the fountain of youth,
belligerent fist of tears,
for forgotten woes,
for sweaty prose
and swollen leaves.
Yellow birds and
old lime trees,
dear Suzanne
and her poetry,
about thorns in the side
and turning tides
of tambourine men,
and helter-skelter girls
turning empires
of simple love
and worthy sin,
to English tea
and to profit again.

She turns the tide
in a lover's brawl,
in winter's shawl
and Hollywood ball.
Sings Hallelujah
to the wonderful world,
to the shot girl's tips
and crazy catcalls.
To the Pink Moons
and old jazz tunes,
to the orange peel
and plastic sand dunes.
To Parisian men
and Las Vegas girls,
to twirls of meat,
and ballet shoes,
to the smoking student
and his heavy blues,
to the loss of art
in the modern street,
to busker beats
and sausage meats,
of coffee fumes
and white man dreams.

And we're entertained.
Oh boy, we're entertained!
Entertained at a rate of knots,
tangled headphones,
tangled minds,
tangled tales
of truth confined.
Television makes everything real,
it flavours life,
spices the story,
feel, kneel, heal the plight
of the Navy Seal,
invading land,
invading minds,
invading dreams
of love unconfined.
We're entertained
at the point of feeling sick,
of parrot-joy
and marketing intent.

We speak in circles
and we speak in phrase,
we speak in unending drivel,
of quote, motto and haze.
Haze of meaning,
and haze of depth,
of fortressed country
and insoluble debt.
We speak in telephones,
they speak on the bus,
they speak in the ghettos,
the nightclubs,
the churches,
the underpass
and they spill from the gut.
Whilst we torture ourselves
in the new-found freedom,
of living within
and not to the kingdom.

The kingdom of choice,
of self-salvation,
of astral self,
and meditation.
Of origin's tale,
of Earth-life passed,
of intelligence squared,
and foolishness fable.
Of infinity realised,
of time altogether,
of solidity-illusion
and falseness of summer.
Of warmth in the winter,
of red in the sky,
of collective catharsis,
a universal sigh.
A sigh for relief,
and a sign of mercy,
a plea for conception,
a gift for the future,
and humanity's redemption.

You were the bowl of oranges.
Lilac skin and a blue heart
On your sleeve.
The lights and colours that erupt
In stars behind closed eyes:
I saw you even when I drank myself blind.

You were the solution of words
Once all the chemicals lost their kick.
The Truth was out there,
We stayed inside sheltered routines
Which blacked out the skies,
Cast a ceiling on our dreams.

You were the Earthly phenomena
That kept me from drifting to the stars.
The coastline in my breath,
On my tongue - to everyone.
You were the name my friends
Were tired of hearing;
The name I cannot forget.

You were red wine;
On my lips and on your dress.
You were... Late-night farewells,
You were the sun salutation,
The birth of a nation
That could blossom into colour in my mind.

You were beautiful in the cloud forests,
Astral depths: we never had to speak.
What age did we reach
Before that daydream started to ache?

You were the faded fantasy
That I held like sand in my hands.
When we kissed I would tremble,
I would lose a little more of you.

You were sad singers.
Old souls that tread the line of their sanity
In fine-point precision;
You were the art that coursed my veins
When surrounded by grey food, grey rooms, grey walls.

You were the messenger with an olive leaf, a blue feather;
A signpost for dry land. You were the panic button
That would take me to the safe place in my mind.
You were the way I said ‘I love you’
In a voice that was finally mine.
You were my lighthouse in the distance
And all the words I cannot find.

Felt gospels, locally hand-stitched, hang from the necks
Of the white stone columns. Seven in total.
Wandering eyes have read them all a hundred times.
Each one belongs to a name and number.
The mass assemble on the ground floor.
The circle tiers are near-empty,
They keep their coats on.
I wonder if they are closer to G-d.
The bald island only visible to them,
The vicar’s pure white hair.
Pews are formidable with adults, Sunday best,
A silence dark with giggles, the stained glass
Shone a rainbow of torture, ******,
And I did not know what we were all there for.

Christ hung beneath a turquoise sun, kaleidoscopic agony
Etched on his straight white face. You could play a tune
On his ribs. The vicar stood bored at the platform;
glory in monotone.

Finally, we rose to song.

The adults stood tall, autogenic. I became lost in corn stalks,
Wind of reverence, spirit, mass delusion.
Everyone seems to sway. Some close their eyes. A few
Hold a hand to the sky. A grown man is dancing in the main aisle.
He is making a mockery of himself
And the adults do not stop him. Do not scald him
Or tell him to keep quiet.
The grown man seems to notice no one.
I wonder if he is the closest to G-d.

Water near-boils in black pipes, the wind outside
Seems to find its way to my chest. I choke myself.
Leave our scarves on the burning metal.
No instrumentation! Menace. I mime the words.
Cut my eye teeth climbing garage roofs,
Stole a turnip from Mr. Sutton’s patch -
The air is too holy here. Hypnotic. I cannot breathe.
A football shirt. A pair of jeans. The singing stops.
Prayer begins. The vicar drones, we answer back.
Repeat after me, repeat after me. He is talking
About next week, the order of service,
His out-of-hours devotion, our spiritual homework.
Dismissed, the mass push angrily to the doors.
Quick to their cars,
We always stayed behind. Slow, slow.

My parents led me to the pulpit. The vicar was smiling,
My name was on his list. I wondered if I was getting
The eighth felt gospel..
“You are to be confirmed.”
“Okay.”
I did not know what confirmed meant.
I did not know what submergence was.
The vicar took my hands. I puzzled at his dog collar,
His snap-necklace. My parents stood in the periphery,
The cheap seats; a happy occupation,
A successful operation.

I was to be new again.

“...and let the Holy Spirit pass through Edward,
And help to guide him through inevitable trials.”

My arms were shaking like a tuning peg.
I was a filament, quivering, giving myself away,
Flashbulb memories of disgrace. He must know.
“That’s the spirit of the Lord inside of you,
That’s why you are shaking.
It is working brilliantly.”
The vicar put his palm to my forehead.
Pores magnified, barbs descended from his nostrils,
His overgrown eyebrows. His holiness. His age.
He did not smile with his eyes.

I was handed back to my parents.
They looked pleased with themselves. Did I pass the test?
I looked up.
The ceiling was impassable.
There had been no breakthrough.

Drove past the hospital. Asleep in the passenger seat.
Surgery on my soul. Clean, clean.
There was static on the radio.
The shaking had stopped.

I feel his eyes on me
Whenever I cross the room.
It is mostly when there are others
Present and we must share ourselves,
Expended over people

And places. The spaces
Before we fall into our wine stained
Non-marital bed. The grape blood reminds me
Of my own. On my own, fledgling ******* and acne,
Elaborately false *******

Where I would never have my fill.

A child-man I forgot.
Or remember only as a token,
Cardboard textured orange peel
In a breast pocket never worn. I forget
Most everyone

Now that he is
In my life. He obliterates
All else like light pollution.
Not of fluorescent neon or slogans
But an exploding star

That dims all else
In my peripheries. I am
Diminished also in his love,
Both wholesomely and then in a sense
Where I lose my ‘I’.

It is in his shadow
Where I live. Small comet
Hidden in the black of velvet,
Licked by the spit of his flames
That scald me

And bathe me
In equal measure.

I am more than this
I know. Or guess. His tailor hands
Though, are efficient and caring. They
Do not create me, but he threads himself
Into my sides

And drops a stitch
Only to adulate the rhythm
When he enters me. When he enters me
I become burgeoned and full and blood fills
The rusted roadways

That shine blue
Through my pasty prism.
He finishes. A gloom fills me. Not
A gloom, more of a nothing and he is
An obliterated star once more

And I his aftermath.
He has killed me with a kindness,
A ghost only when witnessed, kissed.
I have long since forgotten whether I have
Been taken prisoner

Or gave myself up.

The sunflower is drunk. Fork stuck
In the soil, like roots. It holds the
Skinny ******* in place. How tall
Would you be, if your spine did not

Droop over itself? Did your mother not
Tell you to hold your shoulders up straight?

Still you have scared me since infancy.
Your lanky demeanour, God’s scarecrow.
Upright in the field or against my Grandfather’s
Brick wall. Creeping up in the days.

You grow.

Oh, Cyclops! Your eye it scours
Me. Fixes me with a Martian stare,
Orwellian and deprived, though
Decorated with a halo. Your flower

A startling diagram of creation.
The big bang, black pupil, dark heat
And brown to flames, fans and galaxies.
My heartbeat is a speck somewhere,

I know it.

Sunflower, the awkward arbiter. The
Unknowable in your eye, always watching
But never watched. Your centre burnt like
Charcoal, inescapable void. Don’t take me.

Please, don’t swallow me.

If I struggle with the answer
For the price of these beers,
Please let me get on by,
For it’s a wonder I’m still here.

We’re swarming through headlights
As we make our way through town,
The women fix their heels and lipstick,
Whilst the streets fill up with sound.

And I can’t think about tomorrow
Over the loudness of my shirt,
An imitation of new Hawaii:
Throw a rainbow over hurt.

Yet still I say ‘thank you’
As you throw up in my face,
Then I’ll pour you another *****;
Everything can be replaced.

I have laid claim to the Tyne Bridge - it is my home.
You can keep the streets, the shops, the bars
Share them between you
But please
Let me have the bridge for myself.

The bottle green arch of Newcastle,
And the stew of water that runs beneath
The sheer drop of air between them,
Lightly salted by the sea.

It is but the only childish affectation
To follow me and hold true
Through the contaminant of temporality.
Just please, let me keep it.

I shed the skin of adolescence
And left my school tie at home
When I made the journey North.

I arrived expecting transcendence
But instead I received the unwanted gift of the present.
From the clamour of Manhattan,
To the desolation of New Mexico and Peru,
The present will forever be the most effective ammunition
In shattering the stained glass of the world’s wonders.

I know this from the beauty of memories.
Those wonderful fragmented images of childhood
That so efficiently cut out the hours of exceeding boredom,
And the tedium inflicted by the men in suits.

And the future,
The future of flying ships,
The mining of the moon
And downloadable pizza.
But we know in truth, when we arrive
There will still be lawyers
And adverts,
Beggars on the street
And apostrophe’s used incorrectly.

I digress.

Let me return to the Tyne Bridge
My bridge on the Quayside.
For despite the bird ****
And the playboys that trundle over it day after day,
It stands defiant over deep waters,
Daring to cheat death
Or vice versa.

World of code;

riddle,
and a brand new
language.
I hold you close my
dear, as you stumble on through the dark night,
this knowledge
is hastening to bring my demise.
You sit within my pentameter,
so where did
I lose my peaceful mind?
I'm still struggling with poetry, in finding art
amongst the burdens of the street. You're applying sunscreen
to your back and shoulders, and then
you're basking in the heat of my astral beach.
I'm stranded here
alone now,
sending my postcards
to nowhere at all, I have grown tired
of this mere existence,
of fading in the city sprawl.
Now Mathematics
is the language of the universe,
and will speak for
centuries to come,
gravity making sense
out of chaos, and will talk forever over
the atomic bomb.
I'm learning
my sums again darling, I'm going back
to a clean state of mind, hoping to discover
an answer, to why I'm

constantly falling
behind. When I find the equation I will
call you, and profess them unto the stars,
a love never lost
in
translation, a love where you'll always be the source.

I was born for Nebraska
I was born for the Massif Central
I was born for the mountain top shrine
with nothing but the music of nature
to distract me
I was born for the weekly news
on some sleepy island in the Pacific
I was born for Covent Garden
The Pangea of Culture
New Orleans trumpets;
the flamenco player
twisting lime into his drink
I was born for the cotton fields
I was born for the salt marsh
for the tug-boat all out of fresh water
I was born for the Ganges
I was born in the shadow of the Hajj
I was born for the G-dless land
of Death Valley
the streets of Harlem
I was born into the spirit
of old Afghanistan
I was born on the false strings
of liberated women-

I was born on a stage of puppets
a backdrop of Glaswegian tenements
or of fjords unvisited
beside Scandinavian seas
I was born for Rugby Cement
I was born to be fixed in place
This wandering mind
These restless legs
I was born with a travelling soul
in a town where I can barely walk

My sweetheart once told me
about the passing of the moon,
how it takes an age to burn so bright,
then gone away too soon.

My father once told me
about the whisper of the wind,
how ghosts are soldiers left to die,
in brutal war's rescind.

My shaman once told me
about collective memory loss,
how it takes an age to build a kingdom,
which swiftly turns to moss.

My teacher once told me
about coincidental beauty,
how love is found in patient bliss
and custodial duty.

My pen-pal once told me
about how all of life is work,
how you must toil, toil, toil the fields,
only to end up hurt.

My mother once told me
about the truth found on the coast,
how in landlocked state, she buried thought
and missed my father the most.

My blackout friend once told me
how he re-invented sin,
how truth is but an echo of thought
and great delusion's twin.

The news anchor once told me
about the falling of the towers,
how brothers fell under the mythic spell
of dehumanising powers.

My electrician once told me
about the sounds of abandonment,
how a million memories within the halls,
are now but histories spent.

My garden gnome once told me
about God within the weather,
how we traded in moonlit ponds
for car seats made of leather.

My psychologist once told me
about living with depression,
how it takes an age to face the day
and a second for night's oppression.

My failed love agreed with this
as she turned to walk away,
and for all the words I'd written down,
I had nothing left to say.

A toadstool is swelling
inside my limbic system.
Spores sweat amongst tissue cavities,
dining out on grey matter,
until they force me
to stay in bed through the day.

What a thing it would be.
Depression as a fungus.
A mildewed mind as damp sets in,
the trumpet player
with athletes foot,
casting out the air-borne blues.

Misfortunes follow one another
along straits of fate,
as if sadness were a colony itself.
I want to take a pill
to **** the mushroom
that plumes over my head.

You can only diagnose
through words and symbols,
only treat once you set down your pen
and hold the hand
of a patient lover,
of the savant drinking at the bar.

For now I will let air in
through the open window,
watch the dreamcatcher sway
and hang like a tarantula
over the stars and crescents,
spilling out over my bed.

When I close my eyes
I hear the ocean in distant traffic,
sounding as waves when rolling by the door.
I will drown in seawater
and hallucinate a scene
of happiness.

Of a place for a poet's retreat.

I never asked you to undress
You wrote yourself into my life
your punished, caffeine heart
became a cuckold
amongst the yarn I spun
You spoke to me
but my words were meant for everyone
You spoke to me
but my words were meant for anyone
but you

Every era that has ever been
Has engaged in the auto-dissection
Of their yellowing underbellys.

Yes, every generation has predicted
that the end is nigh,
That god is on their side;
But the devil has a crowbar
And is busting out of the basement.

Each decade is a mimicry of the last.
Different fashions, same trends
And always, with a fool on the hill.

A lonely steel harmonica can pierce the airwaves
Across space and time,
Through the grooves and crackles
To enthral an audience,
And to beguile that every generation
Into believing in their autonomy,
Their solitude,
With a fate independent of all those centuries past.

Through every disembodied spew of Dylan lyrics,
Or the corporeal and common alienation
Sympathised in every Wilde reference,
Comes the same fury at the chaos of a world
That is no more than indifferent at the plight of the people it houses.

Indeed,
Every generation has sought to either
Cure the ills of the Earth;
Or else set lighter fluid to the lot.

This stretches back to the first blood-spattered edition of the Bible,
And further, much further.
To all of the captains,
The heroes,
The anti-heroes,
The road gritter,
The malevolent dictator,
The schoolteacher,
The emancipated woman
And the borderline feminist.
To every young child who is reluctant to take the spotlight,
Or look you in the eye,
Ask questions, or speak out.
For every one of those who at some point were labelled
‘maladjusted’.

And so the Pharaohs and Caesars are all but gone now,
Replaced by the big-wigs,
The fat-cats,
The purple hearted,
The playboys -
The men in suits.
But they are all the same.

The same behind the decadence of
A solid gold sarcophagus
Or an Armani pair of shades.
They all built their empire on shifting sands.

And so we will all kick and scream
To our own tone and our own time
At the indignity of the world.
At our bespoke knowledge
To deal with all inconvenience
But that which privates the preclusion
Of any and all major slaughters of justice.

As for that young child,
With the lack of eye contact -
And all that he will become:
He will sit. And he will type.

He will type until his words fall beyond that
Of the spiralling noises inside his mind
And blossom into something pure and ugly and beautiful.
He will sit and he will write

To forget.

When did loneliness in a crowded room become a goal?
Eavesdropping on inspiration; indolence.
Like my art, pockets of brilliance are found
in the wreckage of a market town
with nothing left to sell. All those discordant
ideals of escape and of nothingness.
Still waiting for that ***** of light
which must always break through.

Isolation becomes a component of personality;
a need for space in overpopulated surroundings.
Like my art, pockets of living
congregate in moments torn from the clock face,
in lines of laughter and grief; the five o'clock champagne.
All that revel in maladjustment,
all who laugh at death,
those who had given up on The Lie.

When did my life reduce to words and symbols;
stealing poetry from the street-preacher's leaflets?
Like my art, pockets of reason
form amongst the senselessness of meaning;
how love sits different on every tongue,
how wine hits sweetly only in the need to run.
I have grown tired of running away,
this stalwart need for acceptance.
A want for a panic room,
a need to fall to pieces, undisturbed.

The crowds flock to protest the new recipe,
as thousands die in the city of Jakarta.
Even as the tulip fields promise diversity,
another whitewashed wall appears
by the old laundrette.

I cannot understand sanity in a world so crazy.
Police barricade the homeless
and set the rapists free.
Each jewellery room is iron-gated,
whilst hospitals turn to soup kitchens.

There is no app to save us from human folly,
no special offer on compassion, or a trial period
for higher states of mind. Eyes are bleeding
by TV screens, as all expectations
are lowered to the high-rise.

Where comes politics in Democracy's atrophy?
Voter apathy, faceless names
and blood-lined tycoons fill the news.
They are saying “nothing will change,”
whilst promising the world.

Pain has ruined my mind
to the point I can only meet
Pleasure behind Pain's back.

The world is fast and reckless
Like a stampede of beasts and
Teenage ***.

We traded smog
For the roar of the city and
I am then reminded of my mobile life
Before atrophy set like plaster
In my bones.

Similarly, I lived above a bar,
And the roar of the crowds
Was compensated for
By the free drinks I would receive
To placate me,
To deafen me.

I remember heading out to the office
Already half-cut
Even before the banks had opened.

I remember everybody walking,
Not because the roads were too crammed,
But because it was so.

It was so, it was so,
And now that excuse is just not good enough
Anymore.

Neither am I.

I still walk the streets
And stop by outside windows.
It takes me a little longer these days
To read the signs and labels,
The mating rituals of the merchants;
Buy me, buy me, buy me!

They remind me of the girls I see these days,
The ones who live in semi-agony,
Lactic acid in their muscles and
A lack of sugar in their blood.

The way they walk so consciously nonchalant,
Impostered hair dragging in the wind,
Just living for the double takes
As they pass the men in the streets.

Nobody courts anymore.
Hands are held far too easily
And intimacy seems to me to have become
Just another commodity.

I remember my sweetheart.
The years we lived in absences,
Sleeping between lies and compromises
And lying awake at night,
Our bodies spent as our cheeks sunk into our pillows.
Our eyes staring past the darkness of the room
And beyond to something, somewhere,
Far from where we found our lives had laid.

I remember her so well, my dear coffee bean.
How desperate the years were
When we were apart,
Living out our lives and
Exchanging platitudes for company
In our loveless marriages.

I remember how bitterly disappointed I was,
To be bounded to the forever decreasing circles
I had to move within each day.
And I remember, so exquisitely remember,
The day I broke from them.

And we met.
We met over letters,
Recited by our eyes and written by the hands
Of our desires. Oh, the saliva of the stamp
Bringing us to a closeness
That was unbounded by geography.

These days,
Nobody understands the thrill of the postbox
And the dependent trust
You had to invest into the postman.

Nobody.

The welcome mat is now nothing
But a place to wipe the **** from your shoes
And to kick the bills away
From your footfalls.

It was once a pigeon hole,
An inbox and a faceless meeting point
For all of your dearest allies.

How I recall the excitement of the morning,
My sleep thinned to prepare for the slap of papers
And the return of my silent darling’s words.

Yes, today that has all gone
And so has she.

How I miss you, my dear
And the snort of your laughter.
How I miss counting out your imperfections;
Each another reason to love you
And to love you more.

Now that you are gone my darling,
My life is little more than an emptied school
In the endless weeks of summer.

I lie in wait, coffee bean,
For each time you appear, a phantasm
In my day. I wait for those special moments
Where I assume you will be sitting there,
Ageing with irrefutable brilliance
In the chair you so stubbornly frequented
Every day of our retirement.

I’ll take the hit that comes with it.
I’ll accept the come-down
When I enter the room
And realise
That you are even less than a ghost,

A passing thought
That decays instantly in the air.

And the air darling,
The air is filled with noise in these streets.
Do you remember when you and I would stop
And listen to the busker by the bridge?

I do.

I think he is gone too now,
Though sometimes I still hear his music
As I pass above the river.

Now, I live on in near-silence.
It has been weeks since I last spoke to somebody
Who did not rush me through my sentences.
And so I’m learning the patterns of today
And instead bow my sad head
And just pay up for my goods.

I avoid home mostly.
It is okay once I am inside it,
But it is the returning that I am afraid of.

So I mostly walk the streets,
The same route each day,
Until darkness or hunger delivers me,
Confused at my door.

I stumble lethargically to the television set,
The one we bought together for our first apartment,
Do you remember?

I turn it on quickly to **** the breathless silence.

Now, whenever I do get to talk to somebody,
I feel my eyes blur to tears
For some inexplicable reason.
Oh! The ache in my guts

How often I must swallow panic
And all of those pills that do not work.
Instead they just fog my mind
And distort all of the anchors
And features in my life.

Even the television will shout at me.
Everything I watch is an advert,
And the news is getting uglier with each day.
Sometimes I will turn on the radio,
But music isn’t music anymore.

And so I’ve learnt to read above
The din of gameshows and the gunshots
From dramas full of anger and devoid
Of love.

I’ve learnt to read again,
As we did together in the warmth
Of the crackles that interceded
The crooners that used to play through the grooves
That my life is once again set between.

At times I feel I am the only reader left in the world.
That all authors write for myself,
Vying for my attentions.

Nobody reads anymore.

Though the depravity between us
Made our love all the more sublime,
I must admit I regret those absent, wasted years.

How wonderful it would be now,
To see your features mixed with mine
And hidden behind the faces of our children.

I would give all that I am,
Which admittedly is not much anymore,
To be able to see the pigments in your eyes
Again, in whichever form they took.

How I would kiss our daughter’s hands
If they resembled your’s.

How I would weep into the shoulders of our son,
If he resembled your heart.

And so now my darling,
I wander these thoughtless paths like a machine.
And though I look out at the opulence
Of the city streets, I am instead
Just walking through a memory,
Or some old doctored flicker show,
Where I cut out all of the ugliness
And leave just us.

The cloud settles over the moor.
Scottish peaks and thistle
darkened to shadow;
voids within voids.

A sheet, a film
of papyrus copper
plays reality.
It approaches the single paned window,
the abandoned outhouse.

It is deserted here;
one-and-a-half living souls
‘cross the entire landscape.

The story is in the air,
the tension toiling my innards,
scaling my arms to gooseflesh
and my mind to trepidation.

She’s here.

She is here and at the window.

Please, I hope, please
let it be a billowing of plastic
caught in the wind, movements
stifled by a telegraph pole
or some other cursed sign of company.

Occluding mass, she hesitates
by the window, I daren’t look,
but she is there all the same,
wailing achingly silent for reprieve.

I know why she is here.
I see it:

Thick rope. Crude, unrelenting knots,
I feel them press, cut with friction
into my wrists, twine like snakes,
devoiding me of life

one eternal day after another.
He prowls the door from time to time,
I fear it but it’s all that I have
save for the songs of the Tree Sparrows
that warm the winter.

He comes in to shed light to the room,
brings bread and milk, sometimes fruit.
More often than not he brings just himself,
presses me to the cold floor,

tries to make me feel something real,
demands my artificial praise.
He climaxes quickly, fills me with life, he says,
clutches my ***** hair, wracked with lice
and pregnant with the renewed hope

of his mercy.

None coming, I’m returned to my holster,
a stool upon an opened barrel,
I leave my messes behind,
the stench rising between my legs

and surrounding my senses,
until all of my life is nothing more
than excrement. Recycled, lived once
and then forevermore.

I live in my mind. Only the single-paned
window in this outhouse
offering an alternative;
most usually slate grey skies
and a barrage of hail upon the tin roof.

Outside of the window, I know
that life is something else. No books,
no words, no love, no music;
yet the weak Scottish light still
pierces the glass,

light always finds a way.

And then one day or one passage of time,
it matters not,
my hero, my villain, my father,
came to me no more.

I rejoiced. I rejoiced in my starvation,
the waste of my muscle,
the overflow of the toilet bowl,
skin reddened and bruised and eaten.

No one would come, if indeed there was anyone at all,
I knew that.

So I waited for death,
as death had waited for me.
We greeted each other as friends,
archaic pen-pals, acquainted at last,

I embraced his touch,
felt more life in death than life
had ever cared to bestow.

I kissed death on the lips,
told him of my long-sought desire for him.
He turned, a glint of silver,

and I found myself
on the other side of the single paned window.

Looking in, I saw only my regret.
The stool, the barrel, the waste
that had strewn the floor,
had surmised my life.

It was a sight unfit to un-see,
and so I stood in my perfect sanctuary,
never turned to look and face the light,
and instead stayed only to lament.

And so now I look into the old outhouse,
decades of decay improve its sight.
Old moss gathers over the fingernail marks
that I had carved so desperately
into the flooring.

Forevermore I stare upon my regrets,
forevermore I opaque myself
in half-existent smoke,
tapping on the window.

Upon this I look, a deep plunge of horror;
my heart freezes in frame,
upon a young woman’s face,
no more than fourteen years.

It is locked in a scream, a sense of despair,
eternal and rite, forever in shame.
A life lived in terror, naught but a tirade
of brutish **** and desperate privation.

We lock eyes for a moment,
enough proof thus,
that there is life beyond misery,
if one cares to look.

My inner child,

Recently I have found myself crawling through those hazy archives of my past, when it was only you and the dirt on those endless afternoons. And I wonder to myself how much of these memories truly exist and how many blanks I may have filled in along the way. I try to formulate a hypothesis on this but my mind is preoccupied with the image of the mound of soil at the back of the garden. The one our sister swore was a buried lion – a truth you swallowed so readily. Since then you have moved house and dug a grave for the lion yourself, only this one was your best friend.

We have drifted you and I. I rarely see you. Sometimes in the midst of pills and drink I swear we cross paths but soon my heart thuds heavily and I do my best to just keep my feet and then you’re gone. I am now just a composite of lessons learnt and punishments served. A sum of all the times I broke a heart, failed a class and tripped on a stone. I look ahead to adulthood – I know we never believed we’d get there - we never needed to, but here we are. I don’t wear a suit, I don’t drive a car and I have no money. Beards don’t suit me and as things stand, it is unlikely I will become Batman. I would tell you that we’re not a failure – that I’m not a failure but the world tells us differently. We need a real career.

It is a tired cliché admittedly, but I do miss your innocence – your boundless inquisition into everything about you. The incessant inquisition still remains, but the plague of indoctrination-education and the scorn on your school friends soon puts up borders in your mind. You soon realise which questions are stupid, even if they are right to be asked. Cleverness soon becomes more than being able to tie your shoes. You must be strong, you must be brave, you must be ruthless.

I think back to how much we loved our mother and how it hurts now, to see her ignorance and her emotional frailty for all that it is. The day when your mother becomes human is truthfully one of the most frightening days to experience. Still, for you, those wonderful April shower mornings in the park are a refuge. Feast on those sandwiches, huddle together under the shelter of the slide and listen placidly to the rain hit the metal. Do not think for a moment of what needs to be done or what has been done. Live in the present before you get lost the cogs of causation.

Learn to fall in love. Not just with people but with animals. With words, with pictures, with colours and tones. Textures, sounds and imagery. Please never lose the wonder of lying in the grass and seeing a separate world. I know you don’t understand beauty, perhaps because you are beauty within itself. Perhaps only I can understand beauty because mine has been lost through these fatherless years of self-effacing thoughts and relentless hangovers. Perhaps it is only now that I grasp for beauty, in order to claw back some of what I have lost. Just to taste it again.

I wont keep you for much longer. I know you need to run and yell and play until the sun falls. I simply wanted to tell you that I love you. You are what I love about me, despite what may have been lost in the classrooms. I know now that I should get my head out of the screen and cast my eyes beyond my bank balance, so that I can see you in the distance and greet you as a friend. My old friend. I hope I get to see more of you after writing this, because I miss you and my brain is sometimes just so loud and I think you might be the only thing to quieten it. I am going to fall into bed and sleep dreamlessly under the covers now. If nothing else, I promise you that as you grow older, you will look forward to bed time!

Yours in complete awe,

A very confused person.

The skin at the bed of her nails shone, tight.
Forever healing, windows that rattle
With the changing of her moods.
Love was a locket, an heirloom
That insisted its presence
Upon her bedside table.
She could turn out every light
And it would still be there.
Steady metronome,
Lifeless thud,
Invasive thought.

The carpet gathered artefacts from late night walks.
Bad habits clung to the walls.
No pillow talk, only muffled strings,
Failed symphonies,
Conversations three years old:
Memories that play Chinese whispers
Across the faces in the ceiling.
Irregularity of breath,
Sleep comes, clothed in Zopiclone;
A mind that never rests.

Narcosis in the morning,
Nausea over dried toast,
Sweet flamenco on the radio,
But there is nothing to calm her bones.

The red wine cast last night’s shadow,
Hollow in the eyes, first hit of daylight,
First hit of nicotine
To prove she is still alive.
Anxiety: the ball and chain,
Always dragging her behind.
Living as a ghost,
The people at the bus-stop stare,
The traffic, the signs, the passers-by,
The doldrums in the headlines,
The rain upon her window;
The heart attack and vine.

Prescription pills in the afternoon
To get her through the day,
Until she can get her fix,
Have her fill,
And finally hide away.

The high-street parade comes alive after dark,
Lanterns on the lake, the fish-bowl
Of a small town, familiar tongues that roll;
Memorised anecdotes across the ashtray,
The lipstick on her teeth.
Clumsy in victory, each stumble confined
To look as if she has walked through life
Without ever missing a stride.

There is nowhere to breathe
But in the solitude of her insanity.
She paints the walls
To the colours of her moods:

Grey in the long, long winter,
Blue in the onset of June.

Today is your birthday, spindle-top maid.
Another year of desolate bridges.
Bridges by us, once believed to be true,
now laid to rest in mineralised brine.

Though my desires have long since faded,
small town streets will forever sing your name,
calling, calling, for youth and infant love.
Time may have set, but as with Giza stone

you lay in evidence of what has been.
And now, in years progressed, I tend to this,
my page. Some hungover apology,
for cruelness, that in ignorance, I wreaked.

For, though in my life there is ugliness,
and evil now apparent in this world;
I have learnt through experience, virtue
of kindness, of careful tread upon land.

Oh, mother of Horus, and Christian slave,
you bought me devotion in time of aid.
I'm calling, calling, in meekness undue,
for your sandstone likeness to hold in place.

With time comes erosion, African wind,
to scorch at the kindness, held to your breast.
So, in fear of forced blindness, cynical
waste; I mumble in this dirt-kissed prayer.

God of knowledge, oh God of braying flock,
bring to me your scripture, word of Thoth.
All so I can deliver, all so I
can sing; this tuneless ode of my redress,

this humbled hope for spring.

My fingers cannot scale a melody
or take a rule across lands, to the sea
and back again. My fingers have never
pressed these strings into sounds worthwhile,
nor have they ever held a person's hand
and not felt utterly incapable of human touch.
These fingers know only strength in binding;
in fidget and rhyme, as I try to structure confusion
into something marketable. If nothing else though,
these fingers can roll a mean joint, and hold a
beer bottle so precisely to these lips.

The screen is a madhouse
of body-building, ego-boosting,
and bad gig recordings.

I see her bronzing in the beach,
applying lotion and laughing
with a new friend.

I'm still stuck in the snow,
watching her skirt in the breeze.
I chain coffee in the morning

to counter sobriety,
to show that I know her more
than just by the light of the moon.

In sunglasses, we'll meet somewhere
neutral; an escape route to run
if the patient becomes lunatic again.

She'll administer the pill
from her pockets to ensure I'll flat-line
through her absences,

and then resurrect when she's lost her
appetite. Far away from this
selfish depression, I dream

of us painting a wall. Nothing dies
when it is made into memory;
nothing lives without your early morning call.

To bed I took, in habitual slumber,
cursive prayers die at my cynical tongue,
all pinned badges of the day cast-off
to the floor, only for my sorry soles to
impale upon, come morn. ‘Come morn!
I called, to the chasted walls;
‘come morn!’ I sang,
hoping to fill the thinned curtains
with a filter of light.

In oil paints, old dreams coloured themselves
in patient, kaleidoscopic hues. Though
withered of form, they delight in me,
promise to deliver in utero joys,
connection to the Great Mother;
all that was lost in the fall.
The fall of man,
so gravely reported, and so
limiting to humankind.

I fell. I fell to sleep as Romans did peace.
With grudge, with dissonance; mind-silence apparent
only upon the death of the day.
With stubborn regard, my ears tarried in vigil,
I awoke to each pine of the hallway,
each tremor of heart, pulse of thought,
and Lord of sound.
‘Come death!’ I sighed,
to my life’s rushing blackness,
‘come death!’ I cried, to my stars.

In cannabis, I attune, only to calm;
to bask in the light of some meadow-less dawn,
and in pains, I pray only for dullen thoughts,
to poison my days in some indolent mess.
And of Ávila, Teresa
shelters my mind. She comes to me
in sorry demise.
‘My child,’ she calls, voice echoed since,
‘fellow child,’ she pines, entrusted sphinx.

Spawn of Thebes, she riddles through centuries,
all panicked pores, all sickening spirals,
forgotten in the present, all-eternal.
A shepherd am I, amongst my thoughts,
she calls thus that I am not my mind,
rather, a chosen observer,
the sum-of-parts;
to be confused not upon the
idiocratics, more, ‘what is.’

A lowing at my window, she calls unto me
in reverberated tongue, nutritious tone,
a cyclone of holistic power.
Bright glimmer of light, she calls once more, ‘my child!’,
she cries, ‘my fellow child of the Lord!
Please, rain unto me your sorry state,
lack of appetite,
cooling plate. Oh, you that live so solemnly,
you who knows not of the arbour of life.’

I call not in terror and I call not in my fright,
upon the window, that ghostly glimmer,
she heals the walls in half-light, swimming
in opal reflections of ripples and chimes.
And, she is calling for beauty,
she is singing unto me,
‘come morn!’ she weeps,
‘come morn, and with it, the tidings,
of your blessed life to be!’

Stumbling, I trip over the apparition’s words,
she speaks not in life’s shadows and sinister plot,
but only in those that speak like a God.
In the awful haze of light-polluted skies,
auspicious streets and government plot,
her prophecies fair, but yet
not practical.
‘Come now!’ I say, in no hope, ‘come
now,’ I say, an adult.

‘There’s no space for me here in this lifetime,
there’s no soil for my roots to embed,
in painful years past, I’ve been in sorrow,
and I’ll be expecting them in all the years, hence.
So what, if I’ll join the army,
or some other capricious,
malicious intent?
All tributaries lead to the river,
as all humans to their torturement.’

Teresa, she radiated with colours,
and Amy, who lived within my chest,
they called out as one in my silence,
as a union, a conquest of the childhood mind,
to abolish the present tense.
As one, they sang unto me,
They sang, ‘be born!’
under the moonlit streets, ‘be born
to all that you are, and ever you could be!’

And from this dream I came out in denial.
From this dream, I appeared to awake. I awoke
to the song of the starlings, and to
the precious pleasure of life’s augment.
With this groggy thought I’ll admit that,
in separation I fell apart,
I call, ‘come out!
‘come out and greet me!
Old Eden, my eternal womb.
The union of mankind and nature,

and the union of our pasts combined.’

A rose.
A rose for you, dear reader
Who has stumbled upon my words.

I’d give you another my sweetheart,
But my expectations weren’t too high
You see,
And so I bought just the one
And kept the change for me.

A hug,
A hug for my dear reader,
They all come for free,
An embrace of my gratitude
For your praise at my mediocrity.

I’d hold you for longer, my robin,
I’d keep myself warm at your breast
But you see,
But my shyness outweighs my love,
And most definitely my generosity.

What’s left?
What’s left for my dear reader?
Who has stumbled upon my words,

My voice can not scale the chorus,
So let me write you a verse.

Blister packs  and Auld Lang Syne,
the rain-dance in the rain-forests
where no one keeps time;
the maypole, the bar stool,
the sunstroke pilgrimage;
the Superbowl commercial,
the secret raiding of the fridge-
all conforming to some routine
of half-comfortable bliss;
we stumble blindly through
our blueprint futures-
we borrow our happiness.

The truth is out there
if you look within:
the circadian rhythm,
the central nervous system;
the clamour of your mind
in the face of chronic stress.
The Lenders are out
in the crowds now,
with their placards of high-interest
amongst the indifference
of the street-meat vendors,
the numbered tables at the bar;
we spoil ourselves in the reach
of the so near's;
that we forsake all of the so far's.

Well, I'll sail away
on this effortless sea,
from fortune and fame
and celebrity.

Off to a world,
where all is in place,
where God is a friend
and all doubt is erased,

off to a world,
where scars turn to skin,
where all passion is pure
and hostility, sin.

Off to a world,
where the coastlines will be,
where discovery lasts
for all eternity,

that's where I'll sail away,
to the motionless sea,
to the bringer of 'I'
and all infinity.

There's a direct link
between your time spent writing
and your love for cats.

Flies swarm when the floodlights come on.
They **** and they fight, live and die.
In the space of an hour
turf becomes a bed of glass wings-
none are left
straining for the light.
It looks like a mass suicide.
Eggs hatch in the sweat of night.
Tachycardic at birth,
one brief exultation
enough to still the lung,
nullify the heart.
Yawn out of existence,
bullfrogs croak miserably
as bodies fall from the sky.
You ask me why I cannot sleep-
I saw a thousand deaths tonight.

I fell in love with a superstition.
She kept crystals at her bedside
to ward off wraiths and bailiffs,
selling friendship bracelets to
strangers on the internet whilst
keeping family in her prayers.

She would wander the fields
of **** and sunflower seeds,
howling at the moon without
another soul to converse with;
obsessive-compulsive murmurs
of a Hail Mary and incantations.

Potions of ayahuasca and sugar
brewed on the hob in the kitchen,
fridge magnets full of idioms and
passages from the Book of Psalms.
By the fire sat a pristine tin cauldron
with the price-tag still left on it.

Broomsticks were mounted on the wall
like lazy guitars or executed deer.
No photographs, only proud trinkets
and yoga mats; a crucifix hung over
every doorway, whilst she had learned
to cross her legs from all men and pain.

She laid me down on the bed
with a hungry sleight of hand
to show me her favourite trick;
I saw the marks on her arms
before she came alive in the dark,
and by the daylight - she had gone.

If all is lost to fire tomorrow,
I shall remember life as this:
that my saving grace in life's decisions,
were those moments spent smoking
and watching the weeds break through
the whitewashed wall.

Stood, ill-assured,
On the other side of the classroom.
Shirt pressed, 5.a.m shadow,
Shoes black as sleepless hollows.
The waning attention of wandering minds,
Hearts strung to a breaking point
They believe will relent with age.
One decade, the fence.
I want to reach over and teach them
“I am not okay.”

Spent the evening walking nowhere streets
dodging horns and sirens of hungry motorbike taxis.
It was a parade of street-food vendors,
security guards half asleep by bottles of whiskey.
Every woman I passed was beautiful,
laid their *** on the numbered tables
as off-hand as their mobile phone, their purse;
their bored men. Each one had their toenails painted,
wore short skirts and vest tops in the stifling heat.
The best of them wore tight dresses of black or red
and ate their food in the same studious manner
I imagined they would take to the zip of my jeans.

Could feel the sweat roll down my back
kicking gravel out my sandals every ten strides.
The playboys rev their motorbikes
as if it were a talent they had been working on,
a kind of siren song to tempt the free women.
Each one is on the lookout for a bargain.
Each one streaks past to some indiscernible point
where they will bury themselves amongst
the massage parlours, karaoke bars, and short-stay hotels;
Each one a straight-up brothel once you make it through the doors.
I feel too awkward in this ******* town to order a sandwich
let alone try out my second language to ask for a cheap *******.

Every foreigner here had some kind of breakdown.
Some kind of complex that drew them like a moth to flame
to some place where white skin is enough to feign riches,
stimulate desire and place you amongst better men.
We steal a living for a year or two of forever blue skies.
We eat good food and toast ourselves every evening
with cold lager and palm leaf cigarettes.
We cannot read a word in these humid streets
where every single building holds a portrait of the King.
Spent the evening with my shadow, both alive in the night
beneath the heady aroma of cooking oil and street-food spice,
both hurting to become, both slipping out of sight.

None of this is preconceived.
Lesson One came in the knowing
That no animal, angel, or adult
Has any knowing at all.

Life never attains ideals.
There’s a sand-grained image of you:
“How did you manage sunburn in Great Yarmouth?”
The pain now forgotten as anecdote.

She left me a gift bag
of coconut oil, expensive shampoo,
instant noodles, and bug spray.

Focus slips as she
presses her face to the bus window,
staring out at a town
she will never see again.

She believed the town was a prison
until I taught her
how to ride a motorbike.

Dodging ***-holes and stray dogs,
I clung for my life,
primed for purgatory-
whilst she screamed love ballads

at the top of her lungs,
believing that if she drove fast enough
she could make up for the time she had lost.

As ghosts appear
along the country roads of Kalasin,
the drumlins will be
a mere sequence of pixels

and Chinese whisper memories.
I smoke, lean on bad habits
across the fence of solitude I built

so meticulously by hand.
Another night spent drunk
under the stars – alone.
Desire spikes a fever in hindsight,

thoughts stray to her upper thighs,
blue eyes, and untouched lips.
I wonder whether reaching out

for somebody in the dark
would have been enough
to abate our bespoke
and desperate loneliness.

She left me as another moment
I let slip through my fingers.
A life-time spent

wringing my hands.

The three of us sat on the disused, plastic patio chairs. Their white facade had faded into a malformed sort of grey, with grazes of mud and collected rainwater erosion further condemning them. We were blind drunk after three-and-a-half beers that were tempered with lemonade. The dreary five a.m. dawn threatens daylight, bringing an end to the party. In a few years’ time we’d be here again; coming down off drugs and talking about missed chances.

Tom and Amy are in my parent’s room, as we whisper conspiracy theories about his impotence, in the light of our lonely morning vigil. I barely remember what else was said, after we spoke of *** and love, and of our life beyond home. “There has to be something more, somewhere…” we would all insist. Yet, one by one, we have turned to shrugs, and those left to insist, do not.

What I do recall is the coffee (I never drank the stuff then) and dry crackers. As the sun came to rise and patterned the skies, we had seen one day slide into the next; we aged brilliantly in a moment. I stared out at the Rugby field just beyond the overgrown allotments; you could only make it out by the floodlights that towered over the trees. I knew then, of where I had always been, yet knew not where I needed to go.

I still don’t.

The waitress sends signals in neon code,
through Christmas illuminations stretching across
the car-park, and straight into my ***** orange.

She laughs through awkward platitudes,
and all the beards that comment on her skirt.
She's working to make a living,
somewhere down the line.

I watch as she scribbles poetry on old receipts,
eyes glossing over the ketchup stains,
and into the passing of the moment.

I hope that she is writing of escape;
of better times and better sleep.
She will smash the glass ceiling,
and save us from the greenhouse effect.

Baritone singers lure her into art,
into the promise of soft-hearted men
with a resilient chest.

The waitress waits for a signal
to restart her life. There will be flares
on the horizon, there will be new lovers
leaning on their cars in the sun.

She will finally get to sit.
She will thank the waiter for her drink.

I have discovered the sober sunrise.
No longer the bringer of pill-drawn sleep
or the sick brightness of morning
as I walk home via cigarette butts
and misleading signs.

Who am I, to walk amongst the living,
after all the times I have died?

I saw myself at the end of the world;
strategic scar on my upper left wrist,
the extension cord and the lower branch
of the Tree of Life.

The taste of cheap red has become a phantasm;
salted mirage of clean streams and reservoirs
in the backdrop of dry land.

Now only cigarettes or accidental love can **** me.
I have discovered the sober sunrise
but have no idea what to do with it.

Now the working day got me blue again
and the taxman takes all profit from my sanity,
lining the pockets of the rich in this top-heavy system.
I fell to the delusion that the left is always right
in this fight for centralised power,
but now the working day got me blue again,
and I'm tired of watching the news at ten.
I'm tired of seeing the human race **** each other,
so I turn off the television, and I try to live again.

Try to live past that working day,
past the need to keep artifacts from yesterdays
that can never effect the here and now.
Try to live past the event horizon,
the Great Electron in the sky;
the awful weight of uncertain futures-
but the working day got me blue again,
and those twelve hour shifts **** my strength
before I can punch through the wall that separates
you and I, from the happiness we earned,
the tears we cried.

The working day got me blue again,
and I've been quitting smoking for five years now,
But bad habits accumulate when you have no time
to file all the information that passes your way-
like dust across a construction site, when they promised
things would change. Though I've been breathing since birth,
I still turn to cigarettes as if they were the only thing that will calm me
in this sea of high expectations, sugar and caffeine; an isolated reality.
The working day got me blue again
and only music seems to talk above timesheets
and all those titles given to fools that you must obey.

I try to live past this humdrum panic,
this commonplace, day-to-day emergency.
I have been waiting for the paramedics,
for a team of experts or an expert lover
to frame all my fears into words, into diagnoses,
into myths and fallacies that tell me everything will be okay.
Everything will be okay, despite the finger on the button,
despite the chaos in my brain.
The working day got me blue again,

the working day got me blue,
and so all I can think of to do is to
fall into the grooves, into the static sheet of familiar melodies
on midnight walks, only my headphones and a cloud of smoke
to keep me company. The constuction site is always under new management,
the disabled are always ****** over by the government,
and its a surprise the fire service can still afford the price of running water-
double the price of Coca-Cola, and all the sheeps left to the slaughter.

I try to live past the bitterness that kills invisibly
like Carbon Monoxide; a fog, a cataract, that occludes the vision
so steadily, so incrementally,
that you cannot see the Scrooge in you,
until you find yourself alone in your room,
when only yesterdays remain, tattoo on your skin
in a series of callouses, of scars; photographs of guilt or all those better lives
lived by better men. Better women: better blades of grass and ameoba.
We stare into our phones in some punch-drunk hypnosis,
glowering at the world that distracts us from distraction.

The working day got me blue again,
and so I fall into a retreat. Into a fox-hole of self-delusion,
of puppetry in the world through my ugly words
and solemn verse; as if being clever with my tongue,
as if being cursive at the microphone is enough to save the world-
or at least, to save myself. You see, I've been a beacon of poor mental health,
I've been a victim of my own crimes for too long,
but the working day got me blue again, and before I find that strength
to punch that wall, or to make a change,
the working day got me blue again,
the working day got me blue again.

I try to live past the elevator jazz, as I stand on hold
for a company that would just as quickly drop me,
despite the smiles on their logos, despite their slogans of delight.
The lights went out a while ago,
and so I'll work another weekend,
I'll fix up my future pay, I'll sing sadly into my guitar
after a twelve hour shift, my ode, my unrequited love,
my poetry for Saturday.
You see, the working day got me blue again
and though I've spent my time saving up,
putting in the hours to fill my cup,
the working day got me blue again,
the working day got me down.

Soft-shoe across the dance-floor
at your granddaughter's wedding.
You swallow an anti-inflammatory
with your double whiskey,
and feign living again
until you begin to convince yourself.

You told the college boys not to tell
on you, when they saw you smoking
**** in the old folk's home.
In return you would
throw back their ball
every time it would come past the fence.

“A lifetime is all that you can make it”
was you mantra for living when you died.
From then on I tried to look for
the sunlight in a distant fog of stars.
I looked to capture a moment of permanence,
to remember your name
beyond the need for time at all.

Your sleepy scent,

Knotted hair.

You are the ineffable advent

Of each of my days.

I started leaving the door open for you.
I started to write and live honestly.
Endless nights spent chasing
another song of defeat
across the ashtray
forgetting my own words:

you can create art out of suffering;
you should never create suffering for art.

I started waiting for you.
I started to notice the decline of my moods
coincided with sublime precision to your
tail-lights in the distance.
Half-drunk
I had forgotten my own words:

suffering may be borne out of love;
love should not be borne out of suffering.

I started leaving the door open for you.
I started to expose each sleepless night
and commonplace hangover
as a symptom of a malady
and not a way of life.
You helped me to recall

peace arrives once the war has ended.
For peace, you do not have to fight.

I have found a place to stay tonight
beyond the quartet of violence, cancer, debt,
and ***** field. Beyond translucent light,
crushed snail shell, and entertainment.

I'll die a thousand deaths in dares tonight,
popping dreams like candy in my mouth.
See the light before your hear the crackle;
a vinyl sky of firework sound.

The Zopiclone will send me off to sleep.
Come tidal wave, come vague inspiration,
come the bringer of tomorrow's Cash Cow Queen,
the next ghost-written, Cigar Smoking King.

I have no time to narrate upon existence.
I am only here to learn how it is to die.
There is a taste of dementia in tepid tea leaves,
load me with sugar, only far away from here.

The poet will run off with the pen-pal.
The egg will hatch inside the slaughterhouse.
And I have forgotten how it is
to ****.

My voice falls limp,
carried reluctantly
across synapse-space,
landing upon the deaf brick
and insulation. Even this,
this inanimate audience
breathes fog of indifference,
into the speech
I call my song.

They trace shapes,
doodles and musings.
Anything to amuse above
these listless words,
this dead-pan circuitry
of sound, of chorus,
of rote strings, broken chord
and the misery of
unachieved catharsis.

Still, in humble melody,
I mumble through another verse,
fingers rolling in bands of
forever, walking up and
down the root notes,
as if scales were naught but
a busy mind, stilling orbit,
thawing memories
in the motion of music.

I have been the crying drunk in the hotel lobby,
The mosquito bite in the thin white sheets.
I have been the monsoon rain in the tropical heat;
I have been everything you said I could never be.

On the streets of dust I can eat my fill,
No more clouded eyes, no more ash-filled windowsill.
No more patient wait for my timely death,
No more passing glance; no more loneliness.

I will find my place with this foreign tongue,
On the precipice I write my immigrant song.
This culture shock makes me feel alive,
It kick-starts my heart; I finally turned the tide.

I finally made my peace in this call for arms,
In this incessant storm, I could feel the calm.
Could feel it loosen my bones,
That age-old ache, that I kissed on the mouth,
That I tried to replace

With every chemical within my reach,
With every pill or lie
That passed through my teeth.
I have been the crying drunk,
I have been the victim, too long.
I sit still and breathe.
I write my immigrant song.

Well my baby's blue
Almost all the time
She's a broken soul
Can't go out alone at night
And her tattoos
And her sweeter side
And all her bad advice
Under the neon lights

I've been broken down
I've been split in two
If I go straight with you
I'll be searching
For your face tonight

But if fates allow
If fates allow
Then we'll collide
Under the neon lights

If fates allow
There'll champagne
And endless wine
There'll be broken glass
In the morning
But we won't mind

Because we'll be sleeping late
We'll be wide-eyed
You'll be coming down
I know you'll be coming down
After the neon lights

After
The neon lights

Well I sold my soul
For a melody
I've sunk my teeth into
Every half-strung tragedy
And all these childish tantrums
Darling, they don't work on me

But you're most beautiful
Under the neon lights
Under the neon lights
Under the neon lights

For seven-eighths of each day

I long for those instantaneous moments of

Unbridled joy.

I bid so long to Marianne

As I hear the full bubble of wine

And welcome Suzanne

And the fullness of her moistened lips.



Oh, if the eyes are portals to the soul,

Then the throat must positively be the vessel

To all that soothes the thunder

and causes our souls to shudder

In the watery pits of our gut.



These toxic tonics that we hold

Betwixt our baneful id,

And our most pathetic of egos.



This lamb that tames the lion,

Purple hearted with paranoia

and a lack of trust to rival even the most barbarous

Of governments.



**** me or don’t.

Perhaps the only mark of solace in this life

Is to be stabbed in the front

And to avoid the hustling of the scheming lovers

Behind the roman blinds of your devotion.



Set fire to Marianne.

You can lay with Suzanne

But don’t share a smoke with her.

Because she will take.

And take.

Take.

T.