Interest Only

all square within the confines

of the cask conditioned discothèque

from without my fitful anti-sleep

came the wasps 

and creeping hands 

that spidered across the ceiling and floor

unsure of the etiquette for trembling

delirium

yet, for three pages, I was

in the clear, gone, beyond the provincial

boots of leaden grit, though by the fourth

the interest had waned even while that 

was all that remained

Mutuality

friends of friends and an orgy of mutuality

every one ripe for the fucking until we greedily

eat our own tails 

I find myself running low on chemistry 

with so little reaction left inside of me

the water around the plug hole no longer spins, 

it only falls

written in the dirt

this autumn morning

winter’s aperitif

is served on the rocks

shaken and stirring

come downpour now

unleash your jotting scribe and

cast the showery runes of fables untried

forge scripts along our droughty lanes

of songs for all that yet remain

or wash away those pages brown,

whelm witness to our temporal sway

we’ll listen to the eager earth

as she swallows every dripping word

of this crisp & chilled September cleansing,

for she has such a slumberous summer thirst

shelter ’76 (redux)

the rain drums his fingers impatiently

along the length of a blue dusting lung busting puckered roof

and fingers the gaps where once there was glass

wire veined, designed to resist

a boot, a fist a flick of the wristy bone

trebuchet yet now carpeting this concrete nest

of surly youth in a crystal expression of boys

when they are bored

nowhere better then than this Park Drive smokeasy

for the bad ones who will always try their best,

after mocking words and a quart of cider,

to cop a feel of the big bird’s breasts

Special Delivery

will your choices
look so appealing
once the ripped rattle of surgical hit or miss
draws the sweet stench of bloody failure?

you shouting the case of expectancy
and justice for all, along and behind
the pipeline, convinces none but the fool

all the things you know
all the hydra sown

don't let the facts stand in the way
of a good campaign
we’ll all smile for the camera sat at 15,000 feet
and take our death to go

shelter '81

every evening

without fail

I would watch

from my third floor

neon, Freon, digital eyrie

as he scraped his arse along the street

shuffling, scuffing the rags that passed for raiment

ripping the empty legs further each night

as the chorus of inebriate fighters,

noses swollen veined plums,

caroused and cajoled his every

gravelled slide

while throwing punches, and each other, can in hand

at passing cars

his limbs, of wood and plastic,

would arrive later

under police escort

old world problems under the new world’s

hardened, refrigerated glaze

every evening

without fail

until the day he didn’t

buddy can you spare?

you’re cold, button up,

batten down the hatched glass

these mean talking ghosts offer

little anonymity to the  marrowfat

of shoulder high memories

sister in all but time

an “a star” in the morning

yet the many delights,

ours but for the cleansed eyes

and thighs, came as you sounded

memory in your truth’s thunder

blackened through evidence

guilty by my whence exchanged

I command the devil’s songs but

am I just faded delight?

“swing more” she demands, washed

guilty thrice through her heels

and laced heart and slumber now standing

in strength washed on a once

cracked spit drawn open mouthed

and verdict free

poured closer to the two hole cluster

the depth of a friendship must fight back

lyrically

Scratch - Sample

The first poem from my newest collection scratch, which can be purchased from lulu for just £5.99

no philosophy

I am no philosopher

I am Paul from The Meadows

pulled skinny poor from the shadows

to put a deal of fat on his bones

so how did I end up here?

what penalty did I accrue?

taking the ten point deduction

for conduct unbecoming

I place my attention deficit on re-order

that I don’t yet forget

smothered in the scrim of this Hogarthian hood

every chip toothed 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 sweet

to allow the most intimate of plunder?

am I Dante?

corralled  around the streets

of a society that shows no compromise

amongst the dying embers of fallen enterprise

eternal damnable gyres

around a fucked shit pyre

of concrete, glass and broken humanity

with each uttered breath a cold cocktail of profanity

the bouncing soles of the air I wear may ease me

over the gummed archipelagos 

flag spij-speckle guaran islands

slab secure and fast

against the counselled wash

an eternal fossilised chaw

that resists the fiercest chemical blast

lost in this sea  I cannot be but shaken by

the waxy man with his head of startled hemp

and coterie of cracked carbon

as he breaches the domestic brink

turning a key, his

shoulders hunched in

protective shawl against

the spittled spate

he stares back through me

for sightless miles insides out, front to rear,

then scuffles, rattling, townwardly

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

following that shuffling cortege of the bussed in dead and dying

I am dutiful, altar bound, avowed and accursed

the host with the ghosts in this haunted mall

lost and lonely within England’s mountain green

it is no longer the god bothering needles and blunts

that  draw the crowds

as flat screened pharmacological rapture,

that trinity of distilled, medicated caffeination

lead a once pious nation through a precocious dream

maybe Allah yet sees here his

Jerusalem and leads his children

upon England’s land of crescent green

Scratch

New collection available now..grab it while you can, it may be put to death


Buy scratch by Paul Sands from Lulu

Good Morning, Good Morning

this house is awakening
It yawns and stretches its
aged bones, as last night’s ghosts scurry
home, with the copper blood running
warm through worm pricked floors
I lie,like you, while you lie,
like me, under the nights warm stink
and the claw and the purr
of the cat’s half lidded lazy gaze
as the foundations shake with each
passingrace of 18 wheel freight
the breakfast chorus is missing,
presumed drowned,
so this morning demands a virtuoso performance
“how do you want your eggs my dearest,
square or round?” too early for her
to answer a question quite so profound
“still inside a bird please” whispers the cat

Quietly, I

quietly, quietly sat a lie

arms outstretched

palms staked to the fierce eye

observing within

as, first, flesh mottles

closer still to see without

while blister

vermilion doubts

one apiece of each

seized mortal engine

dripped of framed wax

placed in a filleted whole

gas pored

for a hungry earth

this is all I wish today

let each word die in a dusty throat

a melt that no tears will slake

I want away

Joanne Elizabeth

published in Forward Poetry Near & Far anthology October 2012

Joanne Elizabeth waits.

Beneath a powder blasted
cornflower welkin,
washed by a summer zephyr’s
saline kiss,
she waits.

Atop her rubber footed
iron bed,
on the sand and pebbles
amidst the tidal spume
and detritus
she watches.

A brusque, oily breathed
airborne flotilla,
the sky's very own
flotsam and jetsam,
gyre and gripe
and tarry.

The ocean
is ready now
as garrulous salvos wuther
up peaks and troughs,
and churn the beryl
into muddy soup.

And now there are men,
in a flurry
of flavous oilskins,
who rough house
Joanne Elizabeth
stolidly asea.

Edged mindfully into
the grubby moil
she bucks atop
each tumbling crest
and turns her back
on Neptunes cache

Those brine zested swabs
set fair to the wind
and pitch her alee
once more through the surge
but Joanne Elizabeth
testily abjures

Rebuffed , repulsed
and firmly aground
the mariners surrender
their petulant mount
and humbly drudge
ashore

They stand
forbearingly in the face of
a caustic mizzle
steadfast  gaze
a  good league distant

“No fish today”

Bone

god said “there’s a bone in my soup”

and spat it out

and for many years it crawled

before it learned to stand

and it said “I will make you now a fresh bowl,

from my family’s blood”

MQ-9

seen through the columns of rising smoke

the intention couldn't be clearer

while the tattooed roads wear the organic stains

as footholds for a memory of fallen phosphor rain

yet more caustic the harvest we reap

from the drone grown crone wept bones

even as the stone groves grow over the dead hope of

the pebble eyed children in their dreamless sleep

suffer the children our selfish gains

our bloody games

always the children

Itchy

each night I sleep

entwined in the comfortable branches

of a mossy oak

by day I play

among the lissom saplings

and wonder

how far I might still bend

mild frenzy

they lined up

in their smart suits and executive hair

outside the foundation stone

of a nations ruin ready to eulogise

to heap praise upon a legacy

of division

the traffic slowed

and the tempers frayed in a burg

where there is never enough

most had left by 8PM

save one expecting maybe

a ghost?

returning at the earliest light

most had moved into town

I popped my head inside a truck and said

"she's still dead you know"

one yet remains

awaiting the stone to roll back

my wife, the daughter of a miner,

council bread and margarine raised,

nods, obligingly, at the checkout

as she scans the customers cloying praise

"its nice about the flowers isn’t it"

“yes” she replies “they look great on my fireplace”

she reads people writing

the miners were greedy and she spits

"tell that to those with emphysema,

white knuckle and crippled joints

go stand by the graves of the hundreds that died

better still come here and say it to my face"

revolution runs better on stolen gasoline

every curtain will be stolen from

entitlement

each grain of dirt will raise

it’s raucous voice above

and over manners

while atoms bond

air will ignite for

blood is fuel enough

as gravity exists

believable in it’s force

secure each ideal

under fire from

truthful lies repeated

within freedom’s

monopoly of slaves

these days shall soon decay

and time shall re-cast

the farce of history

lest we stand...

light-up and run

© Paul Sands 2013

i’m working dammit

on the promise of a viscous promiscuity

I would normally shoot first, clean the mess later, ensure no witness survives

in the middleweek each slatternly evening should be bedded early

recently, though, the inclination of a night is to drink

coffee?

right! right! right!

read and write and write and ride a hundred of your dirty looks

in an all night steaming just to thumb fuck the irresistible where

god granted good sense is disavowed

christ my mind tonight where hasn’t it been

a  rattling mess

from the petty penury of the millennium’s silent bells

through a razored grift of oyster shells

via  packet steamed voyage that will never be

and I’m screaming

“why can’t you be my Yoko, passionista,

intravenous burned brown celluloid injector

crowning, howling, screaming blood-letter

leech wife barfly spittle shined philosopher”

instead there waits a world to be shared

by just her and me

wings clipped by vows and golden bands

buried under the demands of continence

the peripatetic spur sundered

marrow spoon hollowed and forsaken in the soured grass

where lost co-ordinates of days of grace and grand escapes

offer no cue for slagged ambulant dreams

laid to rest in choked and over worked seams

disappointment is spread so thickly over the sailcloth of expectations

while deep within these tubes lies a germ of posterity

and its beetle glinting crawlspace

spits an imagined this

move

change the frequency, your smoke is staining my ears

move

remain though the matter of my subject

you and your forced finger self-inflicted wounds

if my words don't flow the knives come out

my hands may form a loving fist for the needful dough

I could carve a new you and I have just the tool

but she, already dead, chides

“count your breaths, count your blessings”

which begs me to ask is there too much on the page?

while the dead are still singing the wind must always

beg caution

how much attention does this whore seek?

fracked and sluiced to the point of release

where every kind of juice spills

from pores palm greased

with the patina of slovenly verse

paupered by the diminished returns

of a creased core

what is the call?

I stay, a frog in a pan, of course

warning  shy of every hopeful morning

and in a' very short space of wine'

it will be love again

a visit

I went to visit my mother this morning

and ask her if she had any ideas

at first I couldn’t find her amidst the rows of pheasants calling

the timber testaments swayed & shivered bare

each quondam cortex as crisp as the next

so there I sat awaiting a warmer air

once found though she had nothing to offer

and I gave nothing back

save anger

at the appearance of a mis-dated plaque

far better then to merely watch

four spot shadows along the foundations of the stream

mimic skaters spinning a springtime dream

and a passing frog paused with a question in his throat

so I took out my pen and paper that I might write notes

his words weren’t for me either

what crisis?

nowadays they have to pinch the ends

of their cigarettes before they cross the threshold

no longer allowed to herd the crumbling swarms

of ash across the gingham veldt

outside the window, on the pavement,  lies a bible

and the radio declares their readiness is high

seems like a good night to let the smokers

in and warm around a last embered light

on the table I browse the “priest“ they called him

in the centrefold, deep in the heart, a flyer,

man’s journey into christ,

I guess we’ll find out soon enough the veracity of the divine

but until the young-un and the white horse riders

have decided who can piss the highest

leave us to the daily diary and its tales of

days of fucking each other’s husbands and wives

I bought a Dylan Thomas book one the way home,

from the junk shop,

when I got it back I saw blood on the back cover

I licked my finger to wipe it off but she said “no! you fool“

sure it carried the plague of some cursed lover

I plagiarise myself

a drink is most definitely in order

the tawny coolness tock tick toxic keen as the

sharpest dissection

and then you can find me not just like everybody else but just like

everybody else lying hemi-hydrate below the bridled tension

of life’s meniscus

Cleansing The Orphanage With Fire & Prayer

i. (the entrance lobby)

continue

take five, not to tradition, yet die to keep poor, poor kitty strimming

fragmented , as perhaps are, rosebuds that fall in the manner which

sweat tracks roll, dammed, oiled but not waived, by a picture without words

I would be yourself, centred, and shoes should share my nylon net

musk mined, imaginary time and black yellow black deep, I think,

incredibly deep, the dead and their way of dealing with me last night

but that wife thumbed impulsion, as I searched from my emerging host, kept her hands, my head, in the sand, truth forever buried

is that five? thine pen? your hands, your hands

right and left take, another restless candied hit , burred and buried

of desperation in a needful fill

did a fuzzy baby mention white?

you still have my 50 life painted fears to tell

but do follow, rent fuck my hand selected for your shapely bellowed patient

to send this, the right cunt, such dirty remains

I care that by part chance, part hazardous fool, this soft doubt allows further flow

a song, so briefly, tears our happy years

kills what little sweet talk, so toxic to flesh, and lays down

my timeless dreaming that your attention becomes brutality

we worshipped a five patent wood but thumbed, yes thumbed, a low heat solution, crawled somatic within a terrible oblivion until,YELP! your shoes, so?

not the mortal rolling between attention, or “let me in” paint,

you’re the cracks and they could burn while I'm subprime

words that bridge become reality in my other decreasing trend, baby I can be a popular solution? as your heart would like to die by a thousand

paper friends

dissemination, broken of long suspension, should be held in silken cuts

an occupation bathed and lubricated for my attention

performed behaviour sports sorry shoes  on the stairs where

painted hands explored, freshly bathed, this wee-kitty outrage yesterday, where you sent all my divining, allowing a pestal deep happy of a sort to sleep on your own ass and eat of  such a complicated rigid bearing

it did not hurt and found me taking to hidden legs

still brittle though, my troubled friend, that the sum of all this access

scales six kitten to every five easily vociferate rosebuds and  further

junk that I don't share while my last step flays shocked, flawed and meat beware we could never waggle dance a 2.35 to 1

let corals wrinkle around my nagging less equally rolled shins

on a gentle bridge of what next for those quiet arches?

divine what I want or all I freshly have

yes me ,really, a final me in my hands to repent, liquid

 

ii. (climbing the stairs)

sensing the disappointment in this trembling

my fingers composted and corpsed possibilities

though resolved not my burning, when, desire to share your butterfly

lit the damn coffee, and shaped a quick ardour to

guile your quiet wakefulness with years of hips

it cannot be told how, once full tainted and tortured

into the happened wraith stain, your avenued rhythm lost

my final blackened ash or caught my rain removed, sweet demand, to unleash no story but shitty animal settlement

that remains the hard thing

about forbidden company and dense predatory sin

best grown while telling of serious wealth

shine each night and play write delicate lace sometimes with explosive, attacks while ever pious the lips moan warm

in forcing the rightness of my active promise before we young, guardians of symphony, rain away all truth

my what have we formed; nailed one sometime fallen thought in the one hundred stripes that every heart may bite

it’s hard, hard, so no longer explanation could drenched my today after that someone revered beyond proximity to this body played the tough game

two beats gone with nothing fertile smooth

then I'm exploding as chickens bring loops but with 40 words that my heart

can’t tell my arms, torn from now and best to write,

grown in this barren greed they played in a suit, my love, in there all day

I fall so far, warm and playground happy, to roost words

silver in the airless rash full of planted company, moist between, with only something small for you… but I'm a delicate brush

could that this be better placed in an oft kissed bloodline once over?

I lied and lies here grip of the sky, embrace it fool, open it all you terrified blight, I am not so much to stroke, though reach, while drinking from memory, the curvature of a spine which never brings entitlement herein

shadows give what was dreamed, not to my energy, whilst

slides and dissolute verse are eager ground for the good, honourable ghost

content into those hips, leaning one hundred to the left, each poor year opened as pulses in a lonely garden

my collapsing horror, once disguised to allow such a need to stay

is the delicate tissue, should you want her to she will but tell

nothing of pecked sweet souls in the reduced quickness

of the locker made story, lithium by passion

with still no easier way to mature this, I move, is vital, as neither buds, summered by your ass or impatience are the last to write,

the finely met works where we know verses so cupped that guarantee

were they drunk, somehow, the pain would shed fair hearts

wearing tales for walking truths around generations which, once recanted,  seem poetic enough for wendy to throw her lips at

lit cold with virtue in a hellish chill

iii. (the fire is lit)

seeping hair moves, the aegis stops and, when dug, the summons combined to remind old I of disembodied slices with gnashings of friendly

distant & icy the now troubled coronet opens an embrace

believers are often in thrall of ephemeral reality

! ask, who are history in modern, not fooling, lo-fi games

something simple of raven wife will saw their deep gate to the free titans

this should be cause enough for part in the race

gateway to the no tears chequered hole, a charming glade that,

through distance, prohibits a balefire lisp loosed on lips

repent fools from brier and dusk of my heart , if this dirty hole can be that

the real attention is more than my uncertain grace was

you cried as I, dynamic in the stone drawn forget, would always earth the enemy

but we, daisy-chained via despoiled hasty lapped meal, freshened the affiliation of the wind and guarded kisses replaced the words, that

were never quite there, with leaves that never met each human soul

cast away from fresh forgetfulness

I the node to a tended sexuality, licentious with a glass silver jaw,

wish to write on somewhere else, the you that it thinks I mean we are

in teeth and wines the moon forbids entry

who then amongst the high suffered should

be so deeply rooted to the song of our stairs distinction?

note each countered open argument caught by tragedy, placed calls and

offered increased, powdered, abandon honestly from heaven’s keep

where, in spite of the uniquely despised sail, the solution of beauty sits careless in your fog

bag this resolute heart, forever turned of the bottle, it laughed

really?

I can pop her wife they have a while located something looking real

but averse to  touch, an entry smooth and venerable sometimes welcomes into their shady house a windy now gathered awake quartered

into resting spirit roots

I disagree with life on the openness of an awful kiss

when loyalty must it should station in the cerebral

but a kiss? so you wind-up

once although cold and easy the quiet agents ship’s have little of my garlanded nerve

with never relics to the sink of thought or sleep of shine

blow good people, lay weeds, but not a in loyalty of decline

discard the rock-docking of questionable thinks

iv. (each bed is burning)

face it, any place that I can has gone

glass threatens hair and love damages the offer of this spring

hazard, now, to keep as gang this cheese with no fingers

and shrug in the midst of all that girl’s little grown confidence

where you are me should be

bears those shackles even as september hares

consumerist spit, no new world perdition in your picture, brings

solid state truth crashing through like the  pollywog racket of human existence

you, corrosive whisper, further this truth we twisted so she and I of

rooted fears dig me a word and why? here are our thorned dilemma

are you the mote feeler? a truth written exuberance

filled of head hope too far? liar

all our yours broke, they of the kernel

that show my garden breath, in timbered weight floating

how bronzed to broach the nettled truth in the show of my garden breath

gone to dust every true word, and oh to a solitude, while I answer

question the measured fact,  who abhors to lie beside brittled, wonders

why do I feel? tracking the sighs I have my shadow to show the done deal

the skeleton things, the defied, offer some comfort now acting

into eternity their eyes relentless in the canopied rhizome

this is why I pitch penitence over the cliff it was difficult

because

she was ginger, by singular admission, more than every eye full

in a gazebo find headed zeal and behind the strips are two ruinous piles

the dogma of every single hair on your altered truth

on, on, if the hands below truth deny attention

does all their research feel like mourning? why sunrise?

I'm looking men, no cause ever pushed forward washed of it’s why

I did the high delicate armor me, I would, I’m told in jumps if

you cant find fatal weakness for age to choose, then die

shot clean while asking for conversation, learning

my precious side revealed truth deep stitched

above clear stares and lover’s slides now

kill count through a chill of would be stars and world shame

I can say “free sacrifice! roll-up! take space in autumn me!”

in disregard of any swallowed openness unfathomable

when worn with the touch removed form a good girl

born to be hit

the sky fears the universal house mistakenly responsible for trauma

sends bat eared children sleep thrown with an empty lodger

I need to prove appreciative bonds of th physically repaired, ready to story,

to guard against this sweet daughter double ignored and burned

find in one unasked purchase much truth once noticed in fire

but the girl just said “with blood people should I need to prick the distorted?”

could we ever feel what was yours masked within their wealth?

the unequal loping of a mis-addressed or buried world

who would time the wire which breathing revealed twisted in

a decaying sorry smile where innocence is warned by rigid links

that all truth is abstract upon inspection of the many outputs

with a tendency to leave the gloves firmly on, not dropped as consequence

but girl even now you could love me, not guiltily, not as beaten doll

even a broken bird weighs as much as it’s shrouded taste and a

tender sweet cover reads a story long filtered from dirt to remain

just as a quiet year collapses its apricot ears and my night

half warmed to my head steals the treasure of all it’s lost contours

v. (every child is dead)

“bring me the head of a radio wife” screams an obligation to breathe out

my foolish issue as a man, pamper proof in 49 states, self steering

until june 22 trials today to kill me with the pearl dropped on open used breasts

in hot withdrawl  you could be drawn as woman from the guilty pleasure of my secret of bosom

and anger burns within our keep, blue/red,  I was penetration?

this doubt cuts pastures clean where three before betrayed the dark assembly’s way

wait but never befriend the spring twisted rest in the port of this dog

a glut agape which looks to be my difference between the lumps of stars

draw skyline from below alone I guess in me and in dragon

envy the unfortunate insect drawn deep to the capital of our assumption

bend the rubble, august 31, and ,in sleep ,surrogate brother

good luck so close to the rain of such mighty a burden

there is forever in the end,  dirt sits less lonely than rock yet

each litters the sublime peaks welding a writhed relief before the sunrise

glows on and cheers america so coupled with love in any quirky clutch

she knows which way every light runs the blood all men would die to bring her

while we remain under contract she is right but built around

the dream don’t deny the powerful slip that holds the cinnamon ropes

so happy as a man who among cold hands can represent when

even the lost sense feels warming to the wash of your body at valleys trove

such with the dun ban girl carnal large as the blood went viral

jacked those flaming curls into a fool set formation on a bed ready made

to evade the jurisdiction of how to guides and angry wives

but her delicacy laid stripped of more than hope had accepted.

keep it long or short man but after the head the one day lie grows

ready prepared in the thought preventive, diseased in decline

this explains the black tide man and the foaming hood that fills your lung

so, drowning, drink the deep tyranny of a lonely breath at a bar raised

feed the recital of each hardened glowering girl alike

july was my certainty of a sweat in summer

guilty wines cast for you me in a gordian ice lain putrid cradle

your awakening crackles the always wrinkles, rockets the plunder

of bespattered hearts that despise the sweetest fans

mouth your sun against the sky and scale each salmon opportunity

delicious in the rarity of knowing today I wish dead my treasured stole

as idle claret drives a quivered shard flint and candle scarred

while knowing the secret of a delicious deliquescence