Hole

amidst this company of billowed ghosts

the echo bed of swollen heads belies

a gory hail of rain chined inspiration

for my chiselled host and

hides cathedral vaulted cuts

of the deepest time

where darkness speaks

in resonant rhyme

and breath affords a gaudy boast

yet dies upon the budding lime

belly crawled while underneath

the aven’s insolent draught

or razor sliced upon it’s cusp

of undesired attraction

no hiding place from sightless haste

or haven in forsaken sound

for once your light extinguishes

that fear which breeds in ageless seams

won't presume yourself invisible

while in the company of billowed ghosts

tallulah zeitlos

from now to then and back again

in time; to see

all promise of epiphany roll down between

the cracks that hold you in

such favoured light

your pictures beg to be inhaled

their snapped relief

and Dietrich air of futures trapped in avenues

sing silvered shadows deftly

drawn of umber hued schönheit

© Paul Sands 2013

Curiouser & Curioser

as the dew dropped tulip two-steps over my tongue

so a pubic slaughter of moonbeams and drag queens

leaves so little space in-between the longing

hung, low slung, below the eaves of this curious abode

where pregnant questions await the gaunt relief

of a crucified thief who has chosen his flavour

so sure the house has fallen on the queen of the east

love thy neighbour with the curtains tightly closed

I’ll take all the time I need to be me

but spend so little of it while cheap beauty costs so much

blue in the face of an airless address

every berry ripe hue caulked in a glassy vacuum of it’s own

at an age where it’s easier to count your broken teeth

than piss in the street please

scream down every avenue as your retinue has a propensity to carrion

never too slow to encourage a fatal stupidity

this flesh walking, free, in the air

is so far from that and stands as echo? shadow?  indentured

to the soil and from there who knows whence?

who cares?

my attention you can barely call a span

as it rarely makes the other side of any a stream of consciousness

no song can bridge the collapse or plot the route from a to b

never mind the x y and...what was it again?

so I sit at quarter past ten and hear an echo of the prodigal 

ponder which way my thoughts have run

dancing for the gallows pride wild with Oscar in his Gaol

...zed

now with the fowl roasting and vegetables on the boil

I leave the radio on, to read Lear to the kitchen walls

Policy

the trickle down poetics

coiffed, varnished, double dipped,

lay waste the oubliette of empathy

no balm, no salve

shall expel the foreign body that

thorns it’s path in the digital red apnoea

of each choked fallen promise

as they steal your desecrated breath

your lips are still moving

your lips are still moving even

as your face turns blue

while patience gets sicker

your patient dies bled clean of

ceramic reservoirs leeched and

cupped to a brink of clear relief

where each rating scores higher

dried tears bottled and fried

do little and smaller still

the hiding place for those who always

had another sweater

doctor?

We Chose Hooks

remember 

those nights

we placed hooks in our eyes?

waiting in our sleep

to catch the darting lies

that swam inside our heads

do you remember 

those nights?

we should have walked

the chrome stacked streets

that rolled like silver eels

where stub ends sailed on tarry keels

in that vanishing space between 

the night clubs gaudy hush

and necessities capital morning rush

before the coffee, 

before the bread,

before the morning headlines scream

but we chose hooks

do you remember?

Sack

guilty biology draws the

crimes and rhymes through dangerous times

though this winter sketch of pallid raiments,

the sad sack of retiring flesh,

erases the lines of entry with sharp regret

and in doubt of the wealth of its worth

instead watches the cat and the spider sat

each the other side of glass

she in a snug disdain

her in a frenzy of knitting pins

Maps

I find myself dissecting maps

my fingers trace the cut-out lines

of roads, of streets, of cul-de-sacs

but I pause before a puddle

of rendered fat and hold that hymnal sheet

for the surgical light that rips

the gelate dream that is Scunthorpe

and I can see you reading the other side

through the oily stain that hides Pontefract

it’s so nice to hear us sing together