Monday 10 December 2012

Sack


guilty biology draws the
crimes and rhymes through dangerous times
though this winter sketch of pallid raiments,
the sad sack of retiring flesh,
erases the lines of entry with sharp regret
and in doubt of the wealth of its worth
instead watches the cat and the spider sat
each the other side of glass
she in a snug disdain
her in a frenzy of knitting pins

Maps


I find myself dissecting maps
my fingers trace the cut-out lines
of roads, of streets, of cul-de-sacs
but I pause before a puddle
of rendered fat and hold that hymnal sheet
for the surgical light that rips
the gelate dream that is Scunthorpe
and I can see you reading the other side
through the oily stain that hides Pontefract
it’s so nice to hear us sing together

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Chapel Beach

the  narrow stepped couched dunes,
doused in a chiffon mist that lies in wait
for the unwary winged hopper or crawling louse,
offer the way to our saline convention where
I wave at the sea
and count a full seven
before it greets me, reciprocally,
with zealous rips and a curling lip I haven’t seen before
on this blandest of the eastern boards
and it roars with laughter as it swallows my children
but they scream right back:
come on
wetter, faster
and I Cnut, Cnut turn away
each foaming beer roller as they open the way
for my dancing stones to bounce straight back
and join the litter of forfeit limbs and hollowed homes
akin to sun baked chimera skulls of mythical birds,
as mermaids words curse their ever lost purses
through an outfall cough where their bronchial diamonds wink
before they shatter amidst the footpads that follow
the Red Bull and rag dolls the ink branded brazen and bacon sizzlers,
in the thrall of the sky’s apex predator, with their vermillion blush 
of a madmans rush to the final dance 
as their dogs birth their orphan logs to remind me
just where we remain

Saturday 11 August 2012

Problematic


past practiced
and presented imperfect to the point of
proficient mediocrity
police advise do not approach
but I have an offer I’d like to broach
shoot on sight and remove the blight

Friday 10 August 2012

Spirit

We laughed, we grimaced and then we cried.
The flame was lit and some would have we marched in step
But were we just postponing our miseries for two weeks
We will still be poor and we’ll still have our wars come Monday morn
So until then the world can get along without us just fine
We’ll pick up the cudgels once more on the 13th, let’s say, around 9?


Thursday 28 June 2012

When a Heart Truly Breaks

I was scared. Sweating scared. Lip stinging scared. An irregular pulsar in my overstuffed cavity offered a less than precise signal, two-two time minus one, again and then again, and all inside chose to rise in unison and grip my desiccated throat. My fingers hovered but I dared not move. The continuation of this vessel in the balance and yet I still wrestled with pride an a fear of wasting people’s time. To call or not to call is the very pressing question as my elbow cushions pins and a hollowing glacier carved my gut. In my head I’m running checks, each twist each twinge each creak each pain is it fresh or a legacy. As fear begets panic I cough and thump my chest. Should my breath be quite this short? Two digits pressed on sinistral wrist trying to gauge normality amidst the alarm all I feel is too fast, too fast and then nothing it keeps missing yet none around seem to sense, don’t read the gaping orbs and snapping talk as ought but  censure and huff away with my chest sending mixed signals to the world and me as the ice cascades down my spine then subsides. Oh yes I was very scared.   And the doctors and the nurses tell me everything is ok, but send me on my way with a script that tells a different story:   that crux, ripped and torn, showed a way past manifold beats of egress, gateways of choice, whether whimpered snuffed filament or spiteful fuse that refuses to blow I just needed to join the dots to reveal the route to my mortal harbour   And the very next day? Life continued with no regard, didn’t look over its shoulder to see if I was keeping up, left me instead to ponder:   in a hot, rude, black shod silver kiln where a heart believes it has been truly broken, inferior and ventricular, the first bars of that September song strike open a sudden realization of December too soon   I cannot lead the cheer for the assassin’s bleed but ask they lay their blades at rest until the closing breath has fled cracking blackening tendrils are ready grown along the wires on the map of underpinned organs and split my rolling eyes   yes I see rocks and scraped dirt under that angular peninsular of steel and glass not as valedictory obituary but shallow graves awaiting the pretty little girls their sub-strated gate to immortal perfection   their eternal smiles of garnered youth masking a ghastly grimaced truth yet they’ll remain, forever, so beautiful while I have left it too late and will just fade in a grey scale buried between the help wanted and used cars   Bottled and coddled, a frightened stasis took control and suddenly I felt old and guilty and I remembered my mother and I feared an unwelcome reunion.   deep in dominion of the dying, between the second and third heart congesting hours, I looked into the darkest glass naked , dishevelled  and daring to ask for answers I thought I deserved expecting no reply but knowing that bub black beast sees me now and for me alone will reserve and release through execrable  years of fearful, fitful non-sleep its furious horror And now here I sit and sweat on a doctor’s discretion, knowing not whether I can swing from the trees or should simply drop to my knees in surrendered execration.   this changeling walks, still scared to run, along furred boulevards of evasion, greater or luckier still, squeezed tighter than the urban rush in his breast yet still he craves those complex folds of pleasure and sees through the eyes of a fool seeking cleaner rapture

Wednesday 20 June 2012

Upon Holding My Book

set between two covers
your name tattooed upon their spine
those words writ fine upon a bed of white
become a different beast
and breathe a fiercer light

Thursday 14 June 2012

Poetry Book Available Now

Reflections and observations from a year in the life of a relatively sane, yet still angry, not so young man 

My first book of poetry available

Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Poetry AD..HD

sometimes you inscribe just too many words,
for me,
maybe if each stung like a hornets ire
or sang like the strings on Apollo’s lyre
then I might reach the most gratifying of go.ls
bur umm affreer…mwahmwahmwahmwah

Moveable Malediction

through the cracks in my jaw save my profanity in a jar
that my tongue may burn your ears, wherever you are
what a wondrous device though not necessarily nice
but if you wanted to share you could offer a slice
of your own

The Mid-Month Keening

drinking the floor bruised dirt that’s offered up as bean
the sandwiches made of what’s left in-between
the drying stains in the fridge
rice with rice and more rice again and if we're lucky
the tiniest scrapings from a salmonellic hen
no shamanic insight in these growling quarters
just do what you must to feed your daughter
and you can wait with your starch fed padding
you’re only job is to look after that youngling

Monday 4 June 2012

Little Deer

I dreamed of Frida Kahlo
yo era ella amante
pure, paupered prince to her primal queen
yet still I hollowed a carnal niche into the midst
of one perdurable, lurid  noche de los muertos
where I fingered the lachrymose from her lacerations
and counted prurient  time in a piercing nine of
perennial persecution then wore her pelt
to lay me down in her sanguinary glow

Sunday 3 June 2012

Traitor's Gait

schadenfreude
I can't deny it
and to steal a riff from Morrissey
the rain is pouring down
in this half-hearted town
and the union flags
are the first to drown
in a bucket full of apathy

Thursday 31 May 2012

Be The Death Of Me

this changeling walks, still scared to run,
along furred boulevards of evasion,
great or maybe lucky,
squeezed tighter than the urban rush in his breast
yet still he craves those complex folds of pleasure
and sees through the eyes of a fool seeking
cleaner rapture

Wednesday 30 May 2012

Map of my Heart

that crux, ripped and torn, shows a way
past manifold beats of egress,
gateways of choice,
whether whimpered snuffed filament
or spiteful fuse that refuses to blow
just join the dots to reveal the route to your mortal harbour


Tuesday 29 May 2012

Rude Awakening

in a hot, rude, black shod silver kiln
where a heart has been truly broken,
inferior and ventricular,
the first bars of that September song strike open
a sudden reality of December too soon

I cannot lead the cheer for the assassins bleed
but ask they lay their blades at rest until
the closing breath has fled
cracking blackening tendrils are ready grown
along the wires on the map of underpinned organs
and split my rolling eyes

yes I see rocks and scraped dirt
under that angular peninsular of steel and glass
not as valedictory obituary
but shallow graves awaiting the pretty little girls
their sub-strated gate to immortal perfection

eternal smiles of bottled youth masking
a ghastly grimaced truth yet they remain, forever, so beautiful
while I have missed my chance and will just fade
in a grey scale buried between the help wanted
and used cars

Sunday 27 May 2012

Simplistic Heart

I once thought I was ready for the Labrador walks
the Sunday bevy and the gardening talks
for flannel jackets and Hunter boots
Pimms on the lawn and grown up pursuits

but guess what?
I’m not

I still burn with anger at a world of plenty
that leaves it’s children dying hungry
so until as a race we stop worshiping money
fuck your coiffed lawns and polite society

May Queens

deep mined grainy mountains rise
shaking then baked in a May sun
pyramids of dominion
whence the dynastic debutantes emerge
cellophane winglets crisp and primed
for picayune suitors, who bear no corsage,
eager to rise, wave upon colonial wave,
though only the hale will taste love on the wing
before the withered drop

Friday 25 May 2012

Right

I struggle to write
how I struggle to write
then I dream all night
how I’d put it right

Call Yourself An Artist Man?

when words drop like petals in spring
or fruit in fall sometimes picked,
briefly savoured but nothing more,
what next  Moon? June?
for fucks sakes pass the sugared spoon
that I may cook myself a swoon away
from these cloying clichés
I should ink these words into my flesh
carve a blue belief not surrender to the barbed relief
of a working wage dangled before my eyes
but the mouth’s of babes and their damned truth
emasculate all I bring to bare
today better maybe to zip it away than wrestle naked
with the less than paronymous
for at the blind tasting of a lifetimes struggle
how shocking will it be when the mask is lifted 
and the parochial font is revealed to be me

Thursday 24 May 2012

Mutually Assured

note here the proliferation

we are in the midst of an arms race
each face screwed with word creation
in fear that each other holds more verse
or worse the attention of a rapt population

I have my own case with codes and keys
and, for the glory of my revolution,
I’m not afraid to use them

Bad Medicine

yellowed by indecent light
found hawking snake oil in thin slices
amongst the dialectic devices and a little below the belt
advice but with your face sugared smooth,
iced Pierrot white, it’s time for us to make a move
though I should mention my scorn for the circus fool
and my cruelty fuelled twists of hate

Wednesday 23 May 2012

Sleeping Bad

the world died
we waited, hands in knots, and
the sun turned black
in a cell stilling rush

we were gone

then we were back

muted shadows and muffled bones
under a semitone sun
and I asked does my consciousness
need this vessel

banausic conveyance for an
eternal immaterial
or is all I am lost
to bacterial digestion

Tuesday 22 May 2012

Travels

I went to Kenya and saw an elephant
just the one
in Illinois I saw opossum and skunk
just the once too
though I often smelt their roadside demise
there I never saw a Bear in blue
but I was happy to meet a Bull
while in Amsterdam
I saw not a mouse nor even the squeak
of a shrew

Warm

my limbs return to liquidity
as I leopard lounge
though not today atop the trees
but beneath a sun that lampreys
it’s heat upon my skin

Sterling

while coyote paused and pondered plunder
silver fox, on silent pads, sailed
over man-deep snow in the stolen
glow of a confederate moon, stopped,
listened and dove,
a coruscate shower in the candied quilt,
while, shivered deep below,
a smaller light snuffed out in a lurid flow

something died
but none cried
they’d seen it all before
on their panoramic wall

Growl

the bear shaved off his winter coat
lumbered out of his slumbersome subterrane
and was just a man again

I Like Small Tits

that band of brothers, sisters, mothers
and some others
bounce upon burgeoning branches
a soft feathered fusillade of bickering tits
which trill and twitch and bewitch
me sat under their fizzing tree

The Summer Awakes?

there were fireworks last night
that chased away the straggling grey
of a spring that never started

and this morning in the summer’s stretching yawn
every sparrow, uni-named,
sat outside my window at four

and sweet they called each other
“Jim Jim Jim”
though my cats just see their breakfast order

Saturday 19 May 2012

Sound


Jo on my shoulder he has my ear
picking out worms, putting in pearls
but he goads
“run!” he caws and in a harebrained haste
I race
faster than the flash flicker fire of neon engagement
I beat my chronic heart across the room
but did not wait and left it pounding
against slatted ivory walls,
those brittle buttresses of my soon to be
archaeology, and in the same instant I am far away yet
yet rooted, indentured, carbon draff
and Jo values the worth of his investment
and he gnaws

Friday 18 May 2012

Burning Questions


pinioned beneath a
red, dog bloating sun
I got the dead blog blues

and so a paraffin pissed paroxysm
of slavering plasma provides my rejoinder
for as the inky nouns  and blackened verbs
rise like startled ravens they chase
cauterized garlands of thought
beyond my veneration

but do not mourn
there was no enlightenment there
no Damascan  route from A to Believe

Tuesday 15 May 2012

Sirens


always the two tone lament speeding
to the feckless , the reckless, the lifeless
the unsung stars of this racy blue movie
playing in relief off my walls

quotidian fodder for the networked pornography
of ignominy and tribulation

every passing comes this way
you want to go faster? but was the screaming
worth this final joyless ride

Monday 14 May 2012

Touched By A Hand Not God

have you ever felt that rush, the tessellated touch
of an automatically written block a
brush with something hidden, yet so gripping,
five finger burned wristing, unable to arrest
the spillage of verbs jacked like a hammer
until warm pools draw the cracks,
the canals of Mars inverted,
a cardinal flush onto the splintered weave of flax

Autoerotic


it is in the sac of every young man’s rhyme
broken down hymns to rent the heart torn hymen
or the softer tissue of their inclination
the violent cradling of a head so lovingly cracked
and a greed for the emptiness of  a hard delivery
but a hope that with growth we one day leave
the licentious lagoon of moral penury
until then don’t forget to breathe

Silencio

there is no obligation for me to write

far better my counsel held
than words so strained and trite
than a half centenarian forced fingering
self inflicted wounds to reveal a callow blight

yet here I am again



Saturday 12 May 2012

Roamin’


be my Yoko, passionista,
intravenous burned brown celluloid injector
crowning, howling, screaming blood-letter
leech wife barfly brittle boned philosopher

Riffing The Rim


facing a ten point deduction
for conduct unbecoming
I place my attention deficit on re-order
just so I don’t forget yet
smothered in the scrim of my Hogarthian hood
every chipped tooth blue scriptured face
proffers passage to a poisonous but
tantalising hook

to write the junk must I taste the junk?

peddled or paddled for a sweeter flight
this avenue never taken,
hedonic ingress unwalked, unwanted
yet still wondered
could such deep surrender be so corybantic
to allow the most intimate of plunder?

Thursday 10 May 2012

Stop Telling Tales


in the airless, guileless, black cat bunker night
I find myself lying, refracting the past

though, from this distance, through the splintered prism of my memory,
can I do anything else

(breathe,
be still,
breathe)

so I  indulge a fibrillated, perverse unbellishment of my youth
that guns, like spring rain off a tin roof, through my graphite fingers

were my cock as alert as my mind in these wasting hours
these words could not be with you now

the uncomfortably rounded ageing feline, supine, at my side
would instead re-discover the byzantine curve in her spine

and a muse would be lost, drowned in a torrent of autumnal
localised weather

Small Mercies (Are Relative)


the collar on my jacket is frayed
but I have clothes on my back

(just)

the packaging is white with green print
but I have food in my belly

(of sorts)

the soles talk and leak when I walk
but I have boots on my feet

(for now)

so I’m OK

(I suppose)

Tuesday 8 May 2012

Tourist Trail

these fingers may taste of chicken
cupped and feathered ignoble in a
fizzling slow rare light
street wet not from rain

no

more indulgent my shame
in a corner where the rats cut a dash in Hugo Boss
as happy to pick your pocket as your bones

in the sweating fist of night
or the blast of this mad dog’s febrile noon
for  what kind of  Englishman do your knees bleed?
not this bullshit breed mongrel whore’s child with
every lesion pledged to his flag of convenience?

Monday 7 May 2012

Bibliotheque

I find myself
in your bordello of borrowed browsing
that place where every fantasy you may indulge

suffer my fingers to skim and caress,
my eyes to ravish your swoops and whirls,
sniff out the marrowfat of your spine,

and if you please me I may take you home
for a more private audience

Sunday 6 May 2012

Green Hell


today I remember
remember how I hated the exaction
the parental muster to horticultural action
but half a season of rain blamed lame neglected reason
leaves no choice but to confront the architectural iceberg
of green of which five times more remains below, unseen

today I cursed
cursed the songbird it’s jollity for
as of now nature is the enemy
and ears plugged drawn closer to yet unknown pleasures
I seek to make a wasteland of this verdant plague
with sinew and steel I will see the earth subdued

Smash


the orbital presage of a whistling witch
goads me to medicate a peace of distraction
instead I choose to detonate
wake every word I read & write
force the inquisition of some fevered worth
or at least free the world of my selfish weight
rage unleashed that 28 days walking cant assuage
that fist shattered clown on the royal blue wall
laughed once too often, not any more, his
splintered face erased in a freefall of stucco tears
and for what it’s worth 
I do feel better

Flight Cancelled?


empty wires pining
émigrés from the warm south
late spring arrival

Saturday 5 May 2012

Rock


backwards at coming forwards
need the confidence of a winner
like someone playing with a man called Edward
at rock paper scissors

Thursday 3 May 2012

White Flag


if you don’t want to know the result look away
now

surrendered at the point all faith in the future died
look closely into that box of impoverished ambition

find my aspic flesh stretched, pinned and mounted.
the centrepiece of a dystopian diorama

and see amaurotic orbs rolled like unshelled eggs
with all pressures now a welcome zero where

nerves that have danced their final spastic coda
iterate no more their maddening din

Tuesday 1 May 2012

& Sweet


succinct
such a wonderful word
not often enough
applied to ink

Monday 30 April 2012

Philosophy



no "an" or "ist" or "im"

just me

or better

we

Binary Function


is there a lesson in the numbness?
ponder the simplest aspect of life
1 you’re on
0 you’re gone
an answer that lies within two numbers

God Is Barista!


through the high muddy hills it did percolate
and now furious in frothing spate
becomes steaming surge like milky coffee
stirred darker, thicker, by spoonless eddy

For The Love of Two Sisters


I left you
though I still loved you
I still crave the  morning jolt
shared with your sister,
who to this day still makes love to me,
the twin kick in the head
every nerve opened to your poisonous
intrusion
breakfast of champions
sweet ‘tine and bean

Shelter

the rain drums his fingers impatiently
along the length of a blue dusting lung busting puckered roof
and licks at the wire veined and splintered glass
of this concrete nest for surly youth

nowhere better than this Park Drive smokeasy
for the bad boys who always do their best,
after words of mockery and a quart of cider
to cop a feel of the big girl’s breasts

Sunday 29 April 2012

Old Boy About Town

so beardy me has left the room
and time is tight to straighten out
tidy up and re-emerge
indulge my every modish urge
button every collar down
yer thinking fella’s yob around town
eight hole Doc’s laced tight and tasty
I’m ready to fight with words that rhyme
…sometimes

Muddle Go Anywhere


in the oubliette of my conscience
good intentions lay forsaken
but every word that I write
I swear is the Goebbels truth
and though they may fall on deaf beards
I will demand that Occam shaves them

Hit Me


this grind breathes a fist
of sublime roast allure

as the Nicaraguan Black Bull
surrenders it’s fat cojones

to the blade and the forced steam
now fixed and dilated

but still only grooving at 70bpm
I feel so very disco

Saturday 28 April 2012

Gummage

the flag wears a spij-speckle
of guaran islands
slab secure and fast
against the April wash
an eternal fossilised chaw
that resists the fiercest chemical blast

Friday 27 April 2012

New Moon Rising

lost and lonely within England’s mountain green
god bothering needles and blunts
no longer draw the crowds as flat screened
pharmacological rapture, the trinity of
caffeination, medication and confrontation,
lead a once pious nation through a precocious dream
though maybe Allah yet sees here his
Jerusalem and leads his children
upon England’s land of crescent green

Thursday 26 April 2012

An Illusion

the comatose draw fish
from the wet behind their ears

rich pickings then for the magician
with close up chemistry, a catalyzed cipher
washing clean a piscine display of resistance

one day the sleepers may awaken and
wonder who emptied the basins of their silver
but for now  remain content in glassy diversion

Wholly Appropriate

1965
London
Ginsberg extols Albert
and a millenary hebdomad
to fuck him up the asshole
the records are not clear on
whether Albert chose to pass
I was not yet four

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Ruined

beggared in a taunted wasteland
eyes long emptied remain steeped in a jaundice

unable to reflect the encirclement of upright steel
and thus cowered beneath this youthful flaunting

she finds herself now wimpled by a creeping green
where her walls bleed a jealous neglect,

a fish flaked façade of dandruff drips and
grumbling brickworks that wear a long moss

like the fibrous stubble of an aged maid's shins
bristled in a polyrhythmic wind

Tuesday 24 April 2012

Mess


the gated eye bars your way from a truth
that could find such a homecoming queer so
take what you can, while you still may,
these days of sand cannot long bear

the slovenly precepts of a needful rake
withered away from the heedless suckling,
of this every day badly drawn breath, an oblique
yet fearful contrary cuckolding

Minty Fresh Death


she brought home a friend
as is her furry want
by  the end of her play
it was cold, wet and bent
she can’t see the claw flawed logic
of why she’s wearing a bell
and that such a feather fang mixture
can never end well
so she brought home another
some kind of goodwill token
but within half an hour
that was completely broken

For Cornelia

the escarpments may crumble
while feeding the sea of glass, brick and bone

but they sing their story in 4:4(million) time
a slow lament for man dethroned

though in a blinked hundred year reunion
of stolen, moulded, kiln begat marl

a rolled orbicular boiled and burnished delivery
lies offered for a woman’s resurrective art

Monday 23 April 2012

The Silent Voices Sing Their Songs

hear them

those chattering squid in this low domed realm
where none, but one voice should reign supreme

amidst the vowel and mutter of the betraying line
a feral somnambulant sub-bourbon din

broken rhymes and half dulled whines
in a two fingered forfeit to a misjudged hint

that must keep this muddied crime equidistant
to the arcing theorem of sequenced chords

and the sleepless stipend of stalled persistence
clawed back from the vault of ill formed thoughts

Saturday 21 April 2012

Untitled (open to suggestions)

but for a dowried wager
would this possession ever have compiled
so sweet a digest of redemption
while yet lost under the carnal veil
of a blood petalled  bowery?

Fe2O3.nH2O

bulla pocked and vagabond
smoke away what few vagrant days remain
though your shallow cut still cleaves the hardest waves
this herniated lunge of stiff progress cannot belay
that fetid call of aged ptomaine
beneath  the brine toothed bouillon

Thursday 19 April 2012

Here

how much attention does this whore seek?
fracked and sluiced to release
every kind of juice that spills
from pores palm greased
with the patina of slovenly verse
paupered by the diminished returns
of a creased core
what is the call?

The Rain Will Cleanse

come downpour
unleash your jotting scribe to
to cast the showery runes of fables untried,
forge scripts along our droughty lanes
and songs for all that yet remain
or wash away those pages brown,
whelm witness to our temporal sway

Monday 16 April 2012

Dry

how eagerly the earth swallows
each drop of these April showers,

such a thrilling treacled tickle
through the hardy efflorescence,

for she has such a winter thirst

Sunday 15 April 2012

Let Loose Those Hibernal Shackles


this spring morning,
summer’s aperitif,
was today served on the rocks,
shaken and stirred

Saturday 14 April 2012

Will You Face Down That Final Moment?

the world's machinations were
never geared to the correct ratio,
(a) certain or otherwise, for
tin tacked onto the piggy-backed
dialectic that will follow you to the grave
is one final lost argument after the rage
from your tear basted heart burst
of fearful regret and convictions reneged

Thursday 12 April 2012

A Good Read

I love to own books

but so much more than that
I adore it when those
indexed tables of content
are turned

and books possess me

Wednesday 11 April 2012

When They Die In Their Sleep It Scares You Half To Death

deep in dominion of the dying, between
the second and third heart congesting hours,
look into the darkest glass
naked , dishevelled and dare to ask
for answers you think you deserve
expect no reply but know
that bub black beast sees you now
and for you alone will reserve and release
through execrable years of fearful, fitful non-sleep
its furious horror

For All Man’s Glory He Is Nothing But Dust

dropped

behind the golden masked
rocked star, 60,000 000 ton ego of
trumpet blowing soul diggers

remains a parchment skinned
carapace
no more no less

in four months time I will be fifty
a full half century
if I remain that lucky

Gene, I, Us?

what is the alchemy that urges one (wo)man’s words
to sail and rise while another's barely crawl?
that lightning bottled virtuosity where one can
converse directly with the gods while us others,
with abstruse art but happy to play tongues,
say little at all

Tuesday 10 April 2012

Shotgun

was it ever for love
or a marriage of biology?
her country daddy played
a Smith and Wesson serenade
that kinda focused the mind
in somewhat of a hurry

Monday 9 April 2012

Beware of Trains

it lies separate
that canvas, that shock of skin,
with pained frozen grimace
worn as eternal etched surprise
from an instant of agony
the kinetic consequence
of unsurrendered steel against
brittle hegemony

it flaps apart
a hundred yards hence
from spine and viscera
that bound it as one
with fibrous tendons splayed
in vain like stretching fingers
desperate to reclaim
foolishly shed raiments

Gunther

his capillary butterflies,
freed from the cocooned tomb
of morbid flesh, render
filigreed plastics
exposing, deeper than naked,
more than you may wish

Thursday 5 April 2012

To Your Health

no everyday magic visible
in these last days of the weak
every veining tied off pulse
beset by the beast
with only the viable offered
purchased grace
a cold calculus of collusion
to fell this fabulous folly
so what hope for a mongrel nation
that chooses never to wake
from the amaurotic thrall of capital

Wednesday 4 April 2012

So Much More For That Much Less

between my ribs quiver
darting fishes of doubt
fed upon calloused liver
through this malty drought
where an urgent voice demands
death to the little comfort in which I reside
and leaves no choice but
that I contemplate domesticide

The Hum Inside

challenger deep
finger plugged ears beg
be still
yet hear the comfort of engines turning
every echoed sibilating pump
and sinewy creak
despite my ought for silent running

Monday 2 April 2012

Vitrum

in a world of higher function
what becomes of this single channel recipient
body blue mustard leaf and semen bled
wild in uprising and slow to fall?

but that they must when days of calling
demand the youngest blood
and in fields of madder slaughter
weld upon them earthly hood

Fire-Ships

be silent

listen

in that quiet moment

reflect

am I a friendship?

or a fire-ship
slipping unnoticed
into your quiet mooring
a glowing rage rendering gaseous
the coals of your knowing
no dream forging tapestries of smoke rise
from this incandescence
just a searing grip around your throat
scorched bacon blue

Singular Sound

there is no silence
hated constant companion
this whistling devil

Thursday 29 March 2012

Doppler

with the moon, once more, taking a chance on the ocean,
I feel the shift as we converge
pitched on the crest of such fluid a motion
but observe your arrival only after you are heard

Tuesday 27 March 2012

I Can Do Anything You Can Do…

at the sub-atomic level
I’m just as good as you
its when we zoom out further
that it tends to go askew

Man Flew, If You Only Knew

with a dense fog of phlegm in my head
I know I’m swimming against the tide
about as well as a cormorant sings,
despite the slippery fish he may bring,
so my words have decided to snivel and hide
crumpled and curbed in this crusty bed

Sunday 25 March 2012

On The First Day Of (British) Summer Time…

£30 down

70 miles to run

east

eastward

urged by the shiny beats from the grimy patois street
through a condensing sea that
molecular bonds can’t quite complete
towards a Castle Rising
though those I see have largely fallen
and past purple scented fields of bees
until finally I stand full east on gritty strand
with drying pollyped fingers, feather fanned
escapees from the molloscular grasp
of breaker frosted bull nosed rings
while under the sun and over tide
fulmars ride Arial’s warm spirited spire
but pockets full of stones weigh me down
beneath the fractured pressage of blood blistered rocks,
the rusty witnesses to a hundred suicides

Saturday 24 March 2012

Blue Clues

the childfaced strangler
has the keys to the piggy bank
for his chinless and rapacious friends

springs loose his plans of destitution
to the north to the east and to the west,
but never to the south

and walks in the shoes of those
who condemned the children
of hardy, black dusted faces
to a living death of flea powdered veins

Castaway

this tension, polythene over my face,
delivers the N O2 Ar CO2 sis of a
catalysed drowning
one that washes the sleaze of
my peripatetic fervour clean beyond
the meandered way and grants
the stainless haven I would wish for you

I Breathe Through My Eyes And I See

the bouncing soles of the air I wear cushion me
over the orange, herring bone street
but cannot resist the insecticidal compulsion
of the green and white purgatory
where the neatly stacked wash of fluorescence
makes oven ready your heaven
amid the threnodial thrum of
a hundred syncopated Siemens

but today the doctor digs in his heels
and I invoke my sanity clause,
that get the fuck out of Dodge joker,
my salvation from the bourgeois diversion
we’ve come to call living
thus withdrawn I wait to emerge
into the moist blanket of a fresher dawn
that bears a promise of littoral warmth

Thursday 22 March 2012

The Pig Society

all selling, or telling
forgot about the gelling together
of aught that matters

till we tipped past the point
of diminished returns to ruminate
on what a rich man earns

and caponised the germ
of all that once promised
in a swinish lust to fill our own pockets

Monday 19 March 2012

A Spring In The Step

within a yawning rise he marches,
my long black twin, in the vicinity of a vernal sun
behind, beside and up front
as I wander through an aria electric with sex
where the happily played beg
“can we nest in your beard, as the trees are still bare?”
and my umbral brother offers all free lodging
and they chirrup and chide till I bid them
show patience for today the air is gorged
with expectancy and every bud seems to drip
of the latest vintage delicacy
so I whistle the branches and they shiver
and stoop and collect their dropped vestments
while offering green shoots
which declare “open for new residents”

Sunday 18 March 2012

Swallowed Up

I hear them
but will never know them

swamped amidst the miasma,
that rushes through my daily thoughts,
is every word I have not spoken

most will drown before their birth

Friday 16 March 2012

Homo-P

my name is Pall
and eye am homophonic

their, aye said it
its a saw point two many
butt knot won witch
eye am willing two address
weather yew are worried
buy it’s affect ore knot

I yam the same inn barmy
climbs among a meadow full of flours
ore inn fowl whether
wear eye sale atop the raging seize
until the final bell is wrung

the maw yew tell mi
the less aye will care
caul me awl the names yew like
eye am aloud my principals
and yew will knot lesson them

Thursday 15 March 2012

Web Slinger

a single white feather,
ensnared in the orb
of a dew polished weft ,
bears startling cruor freckles

was it’s owner lassoed from the sky
and dragged to a grisly ruin?

Mortal Steps

what shall I leave?

the weight of my footfall
upon this earth cast
solid in a memory of something
more sound than fury?

or will it’s print diminish,
amidst the breadth of a single wave,
washed clean away by the lowest tide?

Platanus I

achenial planets, yet unspawned,
suspended, seemingly strangled,
by an indurate umbilical bind

sway in the breath of this nascent spring
like the forsaken fossilised baubles,
of a Christmas you chose to forget

Wednesday 14 March 2012

Twine

we could talk about this all night long
but when it all becomes unravelled
in a buttery vanilla rope
and you rhapsodize in bubbles
as my face is flushed
by your success
it is soonest time for viscid sleep
that limpet locked requited rest

Tuesday 13 March 2012

It Happened

after the deposit
what wonder explains
the chaotic symmetry of the direct hit
that poetic delivery
sluiced prose lit upwards
in a cold shivered split
of exposed anatomy

Monday 12 March 2012

Fukushima

staggered by a blow
six hundred million times more
fierce than the first time

a delivered sun
bloomed upon and scorched her loam
with untold shadows

no wave of fire though
now as then so many souls
vanished from the earth

and the swallowed star
made by man extracts the same
deadly half-life toll

Saturday 10 March 2012

How It Was Can It Ever Be

stubbed out Friday nights
renewed in a golden rush
of fermented light

So What?

it is said that class doesn't matter
but I have class
and it works for a living
so it matters a lot
to me

Today Was A Good Day

tonight my grown up little girl came home
just for the weekend
and we
as a family of five have sat
and we have drunk
and we have eaten
and we have laughed together
but we have not argued
though between us we have
plenty of reasons to be angry
we have kicked back
and flicked a collective fuck you to the world
and that makes today one of the best days

Thursday 8 March 2012

Venez Avec Moi

smooth as oysters lips
your barraged ocean falls on
salted fingertips

Mountebank

my innards
laid out, divined,
bloodless cold tripe
that cast no insight
on your or my plight
these maladroit
broadcasts naught
but considered shite

drama of the here and now
in as many acts
as you can swallow
just breathless gasping
in the vacuum-packed plastic
of this necrotic head

Cicada

I remember you
such peaceful neighbours
through three
skin peeling summers of
day-singing whistling leaves
though you never gave us anything to see
but almond flavoured husks

Schism

you see god
in each shaft of light arcing between the clouds
I see physics
burning through superstition's cloying shroud

Sunday 4 March 2012

It Never Rains


as you drown in the kerbside mere
heart spiking as you watch
your lover float away
so each raindrop that rebounds
in vain effort to reconvene with the sky
must remain ditchbound

Saturday 3 March 2012

My Life, My Water

have three fingers
ever been put to better use
than to gauge the earthy
honeyed measure of you?

I was nearly lost
to your deep southern cousin
as I counted the years
to the longest full dozen

twelve summers apart
as your spirit imbued
but now rest on my tongue
your glen born dew

A Question for Mr Grahame

when the ducks in the brook
do their “up tails all”
is there ever an occasion where
they simply forward roll?

Thursday 1 March 2012

Red Rocked The Greenery

upon this small envelope,
ankle deep in loam finery
beneath the quietly distracted smile
of a sky well versed in the art of
the brush off,
clockwork commuter bullets rattle
the air amidst a ruinous karma
of bloodied leek robber’s form and fur
llwynog’s surrogate retribution,
my foxy proxy,
brought down on this Tyddewi bore
here I crossed paths with mediæval toad,
as I travailed in a sea of worm and broken crocks,
I could tell he was because of the hat he wore
but he didn’t have much to say…
so rude

Your Honour

tonight I bleed a deviant intramural
spring wash along ten brittle channels
jammed into veiny eyes shocked wide
at pulsing cinnabar spread on the script
where I draw the foul ledger of charges laid
squarely against me though I answer yet
every one singularly in third person text
as witness to my own prosecution
but at every objection I perjure myself
so must stomach the sentence and practice the tense

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Alcyone

o’er foul turbid beck skims
oblate azurite blowsy of breast
burnished grace not fouled by touch

yet teases tensile feculent kisses
from smoky glass hogbacks
found suddenly galvanised
by emergent spring breath

Monday 27 February 2012

Break It All Down, Throw It All Away

deconstruct all that surrounds
the wired stone brocade
pull the sharps free
one by a little
and sometimes more
than you can bear
then wait for the mule moon
to emerge from around the
curve of the stairs

Sleep Not

espresso to the power of more
137 BPM
dilate fired pools of
smouldered blackness wider
than the vena to my cava
four chambered ode
to a candled burn
twice at the middle
and each vivified end

Sunday 26 February 2012

Clean Lines

I drew my bath to boiling brim
well, I traced it
then I coloured it in

This Song The Sirens Sing

bring your anarchy
showered as you spit broken
dead mariners teeth

relinquished in thrall
to the sturm und drang timber
rocked and wracked foreshore

blister and seethe the
bone and living stone trim of
your merciless stew

but deliver me,
swaddled in your kelpen locks,
safe to harbour home

Walking In The Valedictorian Vale

twitching violet fingers
split the sides of
a vague but violently lazy sky
cleaving a Röntgen exposure
through the backs of my eyes
the briefest flash of a way
though before my mind can claim
even pyrrhic domain I am consumed
by a tarry cloak and in a split decision
choose to choke down the last cereous breath
and spit in the eye of faith while
the skies remain full
I will sleep the longest till I
start awake to the 4-4 beat
that will sound your vanishing

Monday 20 February 2012

All That Befell

rolling deep
does forever feels like this?
exposed as the sluiced
workings of an oily machine
shatter sliced by an unwelcome
digitalis sheen
hollering yellowed halo
crawls and mauls over briared
glassy blaze
don’t breathe
don’t breathe
just swallow whole
the harrowing
plasma of this ravenous
trial of flies
between the quivering pap
and thunder struck
drummer boy battery
bring forth
your urgent portent of sinistral fire
leave me cooked
consumed cold coal
lumpen root
clocked
stopped
wet fish iced and clean
of skin
nailed down
beyond even a mothers eyes

Sunday 19 February 2012

Where Did You Get That Hat?

scabby knee'd
but kings of the wild frontier
where Jim Bowie led us
with raccoon crowned splendour

round our way though
things were a little more frugal
the look de rigueur
squashed cotton tail

Pardon?

I thought I heard you say
she was only daft on one side
so I kept my more serious face
that way inclined

Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out To Get You

I feel the absurdity
of my anger
when every animal
I chance to encounter
seems prepped
and trained by Disney

Loose Lips (and Fingertips)

traverse this web of claws
spring-loaded for your peril
none it seems not tied
twixt and twined
by broken lunar blister
or astringent finking tendril

Saturday 18 February 2012

Run

these long scarlet frocks
only prove to show
that the English class war has
a way yet to go
though I hazard, at the risk
of your hoots of derision,
bold llwynog fares better
with the hounds
of tradition
than the high calibre teeth
of rifled munitions

I Pulled The Pin And Let It Go

moping heart surgery
across the pages
a Stendhal squall in pastel
my three legged
Portland rabbit’s luck
set it to race
ocean to freeze poor
little fuck couldn’t taste
past the secondary
squeeze of metered
ologies broadened from
south to now then
cooling ground and
about this high were
it to stand in a puddle right
up to it’s bevelled
bluff

Old Man

the waxy man
with a head of startled hemp turns
his key and shoulder hunched
protective shawl against
the spate stares sightless
miles right through me
inside out, front to back,
scuffles, rattling, townwardly

Friday 17 February 2012

Cast

too much on the page
while the dead are still singing
wind must beg caution

A Pinch Of Childhood

speaking officially
I was from a broken home
misbegotten spawn
half loved twice reviled
fatherless but not rudderless
home wild happy child

penknives matches
nettle thrush scratches
broken maybe but I had
Airfix to mend it

pedal a metal
a ring a roses more Nurburg
than plague but the same
bite and bruises

with a war wound inherited
that hole in my belly
uncles that teased
and a diet of jelly

my first ten years
I just ran and I ranged
given again
I’d ask nothing be changed

broken?
fuck yes but I love
omelettes

© Paul Sands February 17, 2012

Untitled

fleshless fingers
of a wintered birch
gnarl a carpal tunnel
to the council's moon

Thursday 16 February 2012

up Up UP

I am seeking
a marvel of words
rhyme and metaphor so full of wonder
they will claw and split your head asunder
until I find them though
I’ll have to polish turds

Night Time Is The Fight Time

listen all you ragged dolls
to the midnight chimes run
rifled spirits slake a claim
to the rattling lights of your
basal vein plugged
and filled to boiling brim
vinegar, piss
and burning vim quivered
hammer ten fingers wound
redeemed for one look
in most market towns

Wednesday 15 February 2012

A Fever of Separation

I find myself
at the mercy of a wet
Kirilian bloom where
crackling stone acorns are strewn
to join a pyretic line twixt
the Trent and the Severn
and split the difference between
your hell and my heaven

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Yummy

with this mushroom
I thee dead
and take you
to my mossy bed

when rosy
is the fungal head
try a little
cake instead

Exposed

silent winter slides clean through powdered soda dell
where I present vetruvian me
in arboreal frame, skeletal, covered
my core brisk, black from hoar-bitten lover's tokens
while amnesic sun overlooks heedless
my perverse perihelion

Monday 13 February 2012

I’m Not Going Anywhere

awake?
have I emerged
from one more
ctrl alt delete
of haphazard sleep
into the habitual
diurnal

I wont meet
the day
but stare the world
down
blink
and have my play
in a green residual
retinal echo

Saturday 11 February 2012

Winter Low

Vetr’s razor
besets
with twin edged slice
cruel breath hones
the diamond bite

while Sumarr’s ghost
hangs enervate witness
to kerfs so pure
that draw human flesh
bloodless

Head Money

poor jimming spadger
a ha’penny on your head
from a taste for grain

fly into my house
and between the two of us
but one can remain

Ice

ripped and torn
every drop
awakes into a dawn
rimy transformed
crystalline
butterfly atoms befriended
for an ephemeral stay
with new bonds
until the solar spray
of jigsaw rainbow
reconstructed
returns you to the slumber
of a gurgling river bed
or retailored
once more
to feathery hammock
in the high azure

Friday 10 February 2012

The Flight Of The White Trash Can

seagulls scrap and skreel
over morsels discarded
by genteel and boor

no inequity
in commission to cloy the
ever open maw

Thursday 9 February 2012

True Romance

true romantic?

do not kid yourself

commercially coerced
you have been told
so therefore you observe

mechanical gestures
from your panicked heart
deliver the automatic dictate
of a hallmark card

Billow

bare on Ægir’s marl
nine skerry-brides fan ashore
sharp brackish kisses

Beside

I crave
the solar bite
of a day
too long spent
at the beck
of the
North Sea’s
song

days
where the
word
sandwich
takes on new
meaning
and your egg
full of grit
leaves your stomach
keening

Our Nation's Malaise

the source
of our woes
now clear
as air

we no longer
wear our
socks
in pairs

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Spray

"it's all too much"
I heard her pray
"but can I really
end it this way?
if I hold my breath
and count to eleven
will I wake to find
myself in heaven?"

Tuesday 7 February 2012

A Funeral


penguins
on snow
huddled below a brume
that strikes the mood
for greatcoats
and choked throats

straining
worn smiles
some which have travelled
thousands of miles
for one last farewell

amidst
a vague
recognition of blood
thought forgotten
come final arrival of
bloom strewn package
naught but box of memories

after
prim words
from a man who was stranger
and hard fought tears
from one who was closer
a gathering, of sorts,
in a homelier fug where

shared
hollow compacts
offer not to leave it so long
and on a happier footing
but I know we shall wait
for death to gather us anon

raw
amongst the realisation
through silent homeward slide
that with one more
struck from the account
your position moves up
while the spotlight swings around