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

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