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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