Glassy eyed and
Lost in utilitarian cities
With a low-yielding love
And a useless imagination
With the bad art
And the public transport seat pattern blues

It's ok to smile once in a while
it can sometimes make you laugh
it kind of just feels good to do it
It's ok to think of life as a joke in these moments
because you need a good joke to laugh
at
this
****

Big words
Don't make for big feelings

I am by the sea
And I have left behind
A girl too good for me
And the sea swells to my libido
As it crashes on the earth
And bruises the sky
And you could write a masterpiece here
Or you could just try to forget

Every morning
I shoot through miles of tunnel
In a rattling tram
And people have forgotten how to look out of the window
At the fleeting lights
Which highlight
The graffiti
Which highlight
The primordial urge to create
Which has morphed
From the cave paintings of bison
To territorial pissings
Of equal splendour

People try to avoid eye contact
Look at their shoes
And everyone wears a shade of blue or brown
Blandly coupled with something black
But I stare at the tortured faces
Dominated by Moloch
Who is slowly branching his tendrils around my ankles
And I try to guess their stories

Midnight seeps
Through
And one man is between his sheets
With something stirring beneath the pleats
And he wrestles his dusty memories
He relives and reviles them
And why is the night so dark?
And why does it make us damage ourselves?

My friend has a stain in his **** bowl
And it's a bit disgusting
But at least it gives you something to aim for
And it's always good to have something to aim for
Even if it is just a stain
In a **** bowl

World that's not real
Love.
Love that's not real enough for me.

Hollow sound
Distant voice
Tense strings

Love that's not real enough for me.

Resonant chimes
Brooding bass
Drawn out *****

Thank you Gloria Ann Taylor

I remember through the haze of Hong Thong and Thai stick
Our sterile love
In that shabby hotel
Our stubble
Like Velcro

And I don't remember much else
Wasting away on my own here in Paris

Drum Gold
Is my tobacco
It has character
And I had a girl once
Who liked Cutters Choice
And I told her it had more additives
And that it burnt hotter
And that Drum Gold had more character
And we spent nights exploring each other's bodies
And smoking Drum Gold
Which she adopted
But that ended
Like all good things
And I've forgotten a lot of those spent nights
And now she smokes Golden Virginia

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal reaching upwards
The water wars
The great migrations
The barbarity of a thousand roving clans
The infertility
And the old used as meat
Had made love a distant memory to those remaining
But tumbling over scraps
Navigating through shards
Gnawing at withered roots
Lapping at acrid streams
We went on
All we had done was hope better

Outside I have no influence
People are born where they shouldn't be
Objects of consumption end up in gutters
Chemicals that will slowly erode me
Are put in the drinking water
A handshake seals the fate of some low lying town
Which is to be flooded for hydroelectricity
The chaos creates a fjord with a great variety of fish
Until catfish take over and an algae that wasn't meant to leave a laboratory in Italy takes over and makes the water toxic
People wrestle with notions that no one else will understand and that none of the many world dialects can express
Dogs **** where they shouldn't
And it is only a dim reprieve in a cavernous darkness that I know the order of my shampoo bottles
Or that a weeks worth of muesli lies in one of my cupboards
Or that my scarf hangs on that chair by the door
And yet the landlord
Is a vulture
That is trying to take
This last scrap of rotting meat
Away from me

They say
Have common sense
Be perceptive and analytical
Be careful
Be reasonable
Be moderate
But a deficiency of all those
Is love

Don't think about how it makes you feel
And then use the most powerful words you know to portray it
Don't write a line, then use rhymezone to fit in with your ******* couplets
Don't use the flowery words of dead poets
Thus
Glimmer
Hope
Love
I've seen these rearranged a thousand times
Fruitlessly
Write it how it is
If it is beautiful
Then so will be the thing you write
It is the only way

The Melting ***
Is a fallacy
It's more like mixing sand and water
One always sinks to the bottom
Usually the one that there is the least of

Thinking about painless deaths
but decide to go out
on a flimsy bike
pointed nowhere instead
If some ******* is going to get me
it won't be me

I wish we could cut past the platitudes
And speak la langue franche
You and me
Cut past the trivialities
And get to the core
Great men have been there
Mapping 9 levels to the inferno
Or drawing solitude
But we put on pedestals
All those who divert our attention
From the core
And elevate to the rank of gods
The salesmen of longevity and eternal youth
But you and me
I think that tonight
We could chip at the terrifying core

I don’t know about those pastoral scenes
Those bucolic and primordial endless greens
Unspoilt trees and murmuring streams
I know the concrete and the pavement
Uneven cobblestones with cracks in them
With dandelions growing through
Only sometimes

I love the later more
I’m in love with the concrete behemoths
The back alleys of life
The gnarled bouncers (unreciprocally)
The curious glimpses at weathered flyers on the floor
I love the sterile street lights and the worn faces ILLUMINATED by them
The ushers and hustlers and cautious taxis
The drunk geniuses
The night-swimmers
The nudists
The opinionated
Etc

Yet life whittles down these loves for that of the
Calculable
The
Regimented
And
Controllable
Etc

A small butterfly
In Victoria station
No one notices

You're going to die
But there's a list of the 30 best cat selfies on buzzfeed
Something is going on in Ukraine, or is it Venezuela?
But it's ok...
Sherlock is back on
And you haven't finished Game of Thrones yet
God is a twisted sadist if he exists at all
But you have some notifications on Facebook
Don't think,
Just pick up the phone and play Flappy Bird
Let the feelies get to those thoughts that creep in

The revolution wasn't televised
It was tweeted
And its auto-tune remix went viral the next day

The blues is hot on my heels
But if I keep travelling it stays a step behind
And if I drink and smoke it hides in the shadows
And sometimes when I listen to music
It invades me
And finds a good spot
And sits comfortably
For a while
But then it finds me again
Because man is made to suffer

There's only one kind of normal
But infinite types of weird

Kids in states
In estates

I'm doing good now
Settled down
With wifi
A phone
A house
A good amount of food
I've stopped smoking
And taken up jogging again
And there is no one on my horizon

But I can't ******* write

I want to fade away
like Faye Dunaway

Sitting in room 203
And can't sleep
Sitting upright
Staring at the door
With unfocused eyes
Imaging true love on the other side
For so long
That I can almost picture it
I edge towards the door
Just in case
Turn the handle
And sear it

Smoke bursts through
And crackling flames invade the room
I choke on the fumes
The hotel is on fire
I guess I was right

I Love my baby
But my baby is bi
She loves me too
And girls on the side

I dont know what made her
Live through this dichotomy
Maybe it's her DNA
Or maybe society

There are drugs
And the shadow of divinity is scattered
By an unwelcome daybreak creeping into the room
Revealing lechery in our eyes
Everyone's voicing their ultimate truth
And yards if soul unfurl
As we distance ourselves from god
And words fail
All watched over
By the retreating darkness
And the wrinkled reality revealed

I feel no kinship with gay culture
Yet I am a *******
I feel no kinship with the heterosexuals either
Yet I lust after unhinged limbs in the dead of night
And I look for a concrete self
In unobtainable categories
That allure and allude me
And 300 people have been sentenced to death in Egypt
But I'm thinking about where my **** goes
And writing poetry about it

These French keyboards
Have the n's and m's all mixed up
And you end up typing
Facebook.con
I like these French keyboards

As I dip my rod
In a vat of excrement
I wonder
What made me
like this?

I remember through the haze of Hong Thong and Thai Stick
Our sterile love
In that shabby hotel
In Chiang Mai
Our stubble
Like Velcro
And I don't remember much else
Wasting away
Here
It's funny how you forget things
It's also crushingly sad

Too many people write about love
without being right about love
Full of
yet tight on their love
Spewing
an echo of flowery 19th century poetry
When the real love
is a point of view
It's looking back on that girl you hated 5 years back
with a new eye
It could just be a cat purring in your lap
It could be a warm fireplace
or a ******* you gave in Chiang Mai
It could be the ocean
or it could be that time when you collapsed in a gutter in New Orleans
and you lay in the trash
but looked up at the stars

Somewhere in the path of my life
That noise in my head got tuned down
I started getting good nights sleep
I started to be able to concentrate
And control moods better
Started being on time for things
And I started eating couscous salads
And other things middle aged Guardian readers eat
The epitome of adjusted

Then you came along
And the noise in my head came back
And I lost all those things
But it's ok
It turns out the noise in my head
Was music

Soul-mates come from hollywood
I know better than to love
It is as real as money
And when the banks burn
and people ask what was real
fingers will point in all directions
indicating nothing

I roll up
and lubricate my thoughts
they spiel
the sky crashes down
and the furniture is shaking now
the bed is jettisoned
the outside whispers
nonthreateningly  
a perfection forms

One man on a mattress
out there
is a utopia

The man who had all the time in the world
For whom the clocks stopped ticking
Didn't know what to do with himself
And soon enough
Not an amount of time you can measure
But soon enough
He prayed for death
And to have less time

The baby
Who was born with all knowledge in his head
Went straight for the razor
And cut this whole thing short

Didn't want to make a splash
In those days when we were
Strapped for cash
And we lay indolently
Took things intravenously

Don't want to make a splash
As I skip stones on your lake
But If I leave a wake
Then baby ride the waves I make

I knew you well
And I can picture you right now
On your own
In your room
With only your beauty
And be pretty sure that you are just there
On your own
With only your beauty to keep you company
*****
And writhing miserably
Sometimes
But not mostly
And I'd have liked you without your beauty
But you are there now
On your own
With only your beauty
But your beauty was nothing in the end
Really

I lost myself between your limbs
But found myself in your smile

When you go from being a producer to a consumer
everybody knows
you’re going to have to dance to the producers beat
you
CONSUME
education
you
CONSUME
your
individual style
you
CONSUME
yourself
because you are
a brand

Alone on a mattress
Next to my ideal love
That one in the head
(S)he's a shape shifter
And always fits in neatly
With my lunacy

Lacklove and manless in Moloch
Vile ******* in Moloch
Moloch
In whom I set disinherited
Dispirited
Listing to Arvo Pärt
As civilisations wax and wane around me
As towers are raised to the sky
Left to rot
Then lived in
As the furnaces of the world whirr on incandescently
And as I try to use long words to make it all seem better
And as words finally fail

Oh god
If you are up there
You better have a good explanation
As to why I need to *******
To get to sleep every night
And why
You put those things in my dreams
And why
Good people die and **** get rich
And why
You created beautiful people
To laugh at subnormals
It all seems quite unfair

Send me a blonde
And we'll call it quits ey

In the cold dead of space
The voyager one
Floating forth
With dark was the night
By Blind Willie Johnson
Engraved onto a gold plated disk
In its belly
So fitting

Something interesting happened today
I stitched the pansexual symbol
To the back of my denim jacket
And went into town
Most people didn't get it
But a few did
And their jaws hit the ground
And that made it worth it

The moon is half full tonight
My spleen is twice as big tonight
And in my horniness
I hope for a nondescript passerby
To knock on my door
And wrestle the sadness away with me
No questions asked
But no one comes
And I wonder how many others feel so hopeless tonight

"I want to write the last banned book"
You used to say
And you bullied people with your words
Your ability for words
Your way with words
But you never read the silent people
Who couldn't find the words
That you used so liberally
You never tried to translate their
Solitude and turmoil
And you ended up writing
Some of the many
Forgotten
Strings of words

You may win the rat race
But you will still be a rat

A mess of thighs and hair and love
We ******
For the same reason
That kids throw rocks at the sea