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


No comments:

Post a Comment