Hyena

What the hyena cannot kill it shall steal
Tallied on the glass walls of our toil
Their bounty cultivated from the nothing we now possess
And the bodies which must fall once the winter bites
We must become as lions that rise and grip the throat of this thieving class

(aɪˈdəʊlɒn)

now those eidolic dread horses have scarred your slumber, passed 9, passed 10,  and even your furniture has silent, open mouthed, nightmares over the too soon dead, dead school friends who never ended their crossings and see, see, she stoops, in shroud  ghastly knelt as in prayer but you can’t see, see through the tricks  of light that scream “she is there”, your crumpling chest  boiling as the bones in your legs subside while those, without body,  cross the empty room, no need to surmise that which lies bereft and restless may yet have something to say and you are the luckless soul who lives upon their byway and now,  now the voices, the voices start, those grody sounds, that won’t stop, stop your heart, beneath the floor, within the walls, the precedent for dull footfalls calling, calling to us one by one with no clear sight of saint or villain a spectral round of hide and seek directed by a floorboards creak each time we search there’s nothing, nothing there, but of this guest we’re so aware, who was first, it or us, we can’t be sure, sure it wasn’t brought  from distant shores, for it never raised its head or voice before, before that gift from land of Vlad was carried over our threshold and ushered in something, something cold,  the bearer of an ancient fear something as of yet unclear, or are we in thrall of phantoms more explainable  

This is a combination and refinement of what were two seperate poems, previously published, to make by far a more satisfying whole. I believe it more convingly captures some of the fear and panic I was trying to convey and should be read in a breathless manner as if you were living in a world that was entirely scripted by Samuel Beckett

A Review of my Collection "scratch"

As it seems to have been passed over in the publication of choice I'm taking the liberty of posting the review of my collection scratch, by the wonderful MulletProofPoet:

Scratch
Paul Sands

Sadly, these days, many poetry collections often come with a free side order of smart-arse, either that or they’re brimming with their own (usually misplaced) level of confidence, which gathers like dust upon their best selling, yet largely unread pages. Nottingham born Paul Sands though, with his second collection Scratch, hands us something altogether more solid, more real. This is poetry with its gloves off, an angled worldview, knocked off kilter by its own sense of disappointment and redeeming ability to spot obscured signs of beauty through rusted iron railings and filthy broken windows.
Lines like ‘pull your shoulders off guard/a silent sob sewn with angry years/asphyxiated by tea as the lizards feebly grope the summer’s eyes’ quickly assure us that there is a talent here which is so honed, so skilled, yet so down to earth, so grubby, that it’s less like reading a book and more like walking through an abandoned underpass whose walls are lined with piss and William Blake graffiti. Great stuff.

Squib

Rigid truths and squared guarantees
Texture this boy
His morseled fantasies
The graceless torrent of impotent gods
Wary as the wasp on the chameleon's
Trapeze tongue
For even as the microscope remains
Boxed, in cotton, in woollen peace
Rags may still record
Fidelity's soiled tapestry...
Once stung the swollen speech
Of reason's soured and thickened song
Bastards the condensed apprenticeship
Fields a howling, childish drove where
Dreams so quickly cloud to sheep
I could so easily...shhhh
You shall not impeach me for the rhymes
That I declined

In Need of a Revamp

May need to roll this place into the garage and give it a good service

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