Saturday 31 August 2013

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

Thursday 29 August 2013

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


Saturday 24 August 2013

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

Wednesday 21 August 2013

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


Tuesday 20 August 2013