Nod to Spleen

I know a lot about life,
things, and stuff
so when they question
the credence
of my knowing
I get angry and have to
spit. Then feel
better that they don’t
know how much
I know about who
they are, and remember
they know nothing
of me and what
I know about
them, things, and stuff.

No snow so go.

Letters from the past tell me things,
thoughts,
snippets of truth from other men:
“There is no snow in Hollywood, there is no rain in California.”
Some chap once said,
as I thought of clouds and planes and the
the beating,
burning dream
of the endless American sun.

The Disconsolate of the Land

Buried basements of the free-butveryexpensive-world behind heavy hung doors, rusting industrial bolts and locks, dripping alleyways linking subterranean darkness, mystery flickering in networks, a lack in linking that never reconnects. The body of darkness, the spirit of the dirt. The soil of turmoil, the filth of the earth. Semen in children’s hair. Urine in cups. Mouthgagging relations to silence family discussion. Terrorists shopping in supermarkets, posting love letters, smiling in the sun; how we shock, they are just like us. We snap and kill, crimes of passion, the desperate hate of endless loss. All in the name of love. We sit and watch the grotty hovals that blister and brim, spilling out with symbols of uadaltered, universal sin. We forget before we found the hole in which Sadam lived, above ground in light is where he, we, me, sipped from the rim of that diet-coke icon global tin or considered in passing which tooth paste would give us the Hollywood ‘ching,’ that plastic smile of shining white. Human, all too human, the philosopher would say when we try to make the distinction between them and us. We must remember that it is we who have plotted the points along that axis of evil, we who absent mindedly forget the lies behind this axis of diesel. And so they hide underground, the tribals fleeing from genocide, the infecting rape of the other side, contaminating and splicing traditional blood lines. Fugitives, the bankrupt, the destitute. Because towers of gleaming New York can never understand the psychological materialism of secret gentrified desire. The desperation of the wretched. The west can never understand the freedom of difference born in thought that bubbles in night-blooming foam from back-bedrooms, from cellars down steps, from the illegality of squats, where mental masturbation reawakens the pleasures of the soul and the skin. Because when beautiful Narcissus stare eyed that dark pool mirror, only a dollar sign stared back at him. We glue eye the TV screens watching the protruding bellies of famine, the shining bling of poverty glittering under the African sun. With eyes that are really more flies, than eyes, they look back at us: “oh dear oh dear...awfulawful” Aren’t we glad that this isn’t us? There are no glimmers of hope on the dry desert sand, just the coruscating sparkle of millions of swollen abdomens, writhing reflections of the burning midday heat. Meanwhile, lazy, laggard, indolent hicks plug porcine bodies into the inorganic grey of the machine. Living out lives in the glowing radiation of LCD lucidity with tortilla chips spilling from between folds of corpulent skin. Shielded from the world behind the windshields of carbon spouting automobiles how can they know the ache of bitter anguish, the violent throb of misery, the helpless throes of despair? How can you ever know the hopelessness of the world when your feet never feel the dust and the heat of the naked earth, feel the cracks in its skin, feel where the poison is seeping, working its way in.

It seems that the only thing keeping us from our sense of human responsibility is the vacuous shallows of our cultural superfluity.

p.s. i well like fashion.

Back step

Just off my way
your way, high way,
dawn light bounces softly over glasses
and the eyes of awakening cars
light up in kindness
they spill out sideways
underfoot of lifted limb
helping me find my way
back home, stepping in.

There are only the wanted, the wanting, the assiduous, and the exhausted.

Crestfallen

when I was young I thought doctors had all the answers
the inalienable truth found in the figures of mathematics
or the authorial voice of school science text books
that, in which I could depend
in the same way they would say
Mothers always knew best, in the end

but these are only of the past
not of our collective history
but of a childhood
lived universally
when the sun shone brighter and the days were longer
and the big questions only had
small answers
to sate inquisitive hunger

now I fall down in the potholes of mystery
barely keeping my head above ground
whilst the trenches and chasms that litter history
mean that truth is somewhere buried in the sand.
when I turn to my mother all I see is someone older
a façade of age where wrinkles map out years
and those lines never drawn out in knowledge,
fail to mark x in axiom’s discovery tears

I can see doubt in glinting eyes,
that maternal sparkle that never lies
but can neither tell the truth
so I sit on the steps of perception
and wait
for fading parental precepts
to pass under itching feet.

Act Your Age

Ours is an age
in which the combined wealth of the world’s
550 billionaires
exceeds that of the
3 billion humans
who constitute the planet’s poorest 50%

Ours is an age
When number crunching means money
and not lives
when giga-mergers and nano-second transnationalisms
mean baked beans are 10 pence more
than we can afford

Ours is an age
where a light shines ever brighter on a small spot
and the rest is left in total darkness
screaming
unseen and unheard
shuddering under our shadow

Ours is an age
where if you stop looking and get used to not seeing
then things will start to disappear
out of sight,
gone out of mind.

Ours is an age
where you can just fly away
on a global voyeur tour
but there is no real plan to get us out of here
no plan to see what living really means.

Its obvious, the semblance, when they get caught in the streetlights or the beams of the speeding car headlights. They reveal at night, the façade like the intuitive insight of x-ray machines that radiate a clinical white light in hospital wards, showing the bones, the flesh, but never the soul. The latter is something that remains to be seen, and will forever remain unseen by the eyes of us, but only by the drives of others. It will be illuminated, in personal action, written in lights above innumerable heads like the fluorescent strips that hang over grotty east end fish bars. ‘Open’ and waiting to be filled with hunger. Souls are not dissimilar, as it seems they are, figuratively, either open to us or closed to us. They will either let you in or shut you out. Some will be open to information, to points of view, to feelings or thoughts, to affectations and to passions and yet other minds will be locked shut, like a solid impenetrable nut, impossible to crack.

Grate-ful

You take my mind off
with miniature cheeses
that case of self doubt
And, the recurrence of
the other
falls by the wayside.

Whiteout

The sound of snow is deafening. The constant buzz of a silent bright white hum that fills the air like the hideous crunching of a white-noise-snow-storm from an out of tune television set. I want to lay down naked in it until my body melts in numbness so that I will no longer feel anything anymore. Maybe it would freeze everything still so I would be able to just lie unmoving, unerring, buried in the moment for a little while. I want a brain freeze. A temporary overnight sub zero stasis before my thoughts turn into sludge that people will walk upon in the morning. Everything is up in the air, flaking away, and all I can do is wait for it to settle.

Coin your thought.

I hide my thoughts underneath the freezer
or between sofa cushions
like old dull coins
waiting under me
to be spent

or old pens leaking ink
bleeding unwritten words into fibres
stains that would squeal in preserve
of strawberry enjambment
if they could

What does a dose of glucose?

Mother used to
make marble
of pinky-orange,
more of a gradient
than a colour
really
on gleaming
silver tea spoons
or double-ended plastic
that induced
sweet infant suspension
and the request for
another tsp

Now I
like to mix
the pink Calpol
with the orange,
to make the colour of a
winter sunset
that paints
in sugary syrup
quadruple dose,
a glowing halo
that hangs
over the end
of icy days.

red volley, yellow volley

buttons and levers
switch on receivers
function and voice wait and speak in stereo
switching on and off lives and feelings left in mono
fingertip interaction forming waves that emit
beaming coded secrets of what we emote
“no ideas but in things”
ringing true, then repeating

red button
not emergency stop
"in times of crisis, we must all decide again
and again
whom we love."
they said
before flipping the
are you sure you really want to push this?
plastic safety cover
and extending a shaking digit
to ignite ominous glow,
a christmas wink
on the dash board of
god’s cold-war control panel.

Missing you miss your train.

You picked up the one way ticket

From inside your wallet

And you put your hands too far away

From the small of my back

I told myself that I wouldn’t look. That I wouldn’t open my eyes and see the hands that I held behind the glass.

So I wouldn’t remember, in the future, the past moment, forever replaying the drop and fall of the fingers and the opening of the doors and then klink closing again.

You were on track, on time to take a different track. The train takes you where it wants to because it has all the power of steel and all the gleam of lacquer. It learnt to roll before it could crawl. I don’t think they would have been proud though, the Tophats I mean, there is no way of letting off steam when you run on electricity.

Everyone sat. Apart from those who stood. I didn’t know which was better so I just ran.

I couldn’t know how you left. Whether you nearly smiled, or had goodbye eyes, or whether you sat in a window seat or an aisle seat or silent screen window mouthed to people who don’t know you, asking whether you could sit next to them.

They wouldn’t know how you like to sit by the window and watch the trees slide their autumn leaves past your outside-to-inside blushing cheek.

When I reached the steps I sat and waited

You would come round the corner in a second

For sure

Just any second

Any second now...

Make me Quake

Curious eyes flutter under eyelids
that hold and hide excitement epicentre
chin rests on gym biceps
darkness sculpts curved devil horns,
deep muscle fault lines crowning hips.
an insatiable heat burst efflorescent
shooting through my lithosphere.
bodies rumble in tectonic collision
converging skin plate boundary
in night time cohabitation.

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel your seismic kiss
I feel a volcanic eruption
there is nothing compared to this.

Coordinated Handover

Sometimes all I need is a hand
to hold while im reading
or working
or cooking and eating
when i’m speaking
and blushing
or when i’m sleeping.
an arm around my waist
between shadowed sleepy sheeting
a digital comfort
mid night finger meeting
of links binding
ones and zeros
to keep my heart still beating
my feet from tripping
my hand to hold on
forever gripping.

Silent Accretion

I’ve come to understand that kiss
Is quite impossible but to miss
Secrete your silence from every pore
I can smell you through the walls

The phone rings.

Theres a noise in my head
There is a noise in my head

By the time you get this message..there will be silence.

The noise said.

Half eaten books litter the otherwise tidy floor. They fill me up to breaking point. I need to purge. Shout and scream words that are not mine but a dream. A feeling, a nightmare, a lucid acute terror.

Wake up, you cannot stay.

Feet beat the floor to the meat of my heart on a journey that is never traveled. I hit the ground crawling.

Books pile up and crush my chest,
I can’t breathe under the weight
Of the boots of a thousand dead men
Of a thousand poisoned voiced acumen.

Subdural hematoma bubbles and pulses words in my head spilling thick read pools of thought at my feet. Schools of thought, crimson blood red, spooling data that cannot meet.

Slump.

Total cranium collapse. Sanity in passing doffs his hat.

I’m going home.

No one can hear me but
I can still remember you.
I wait here
On the shores of the future,
For how long I don’t know.

R&R

Today, I was a boy of sleeping clocks in reverse,
time hands pulling down into slumber,
oxygen lack and thick superfluous autonomy sink my eyelids as my
mind peregrinates out the door.
Limbs slump
limp slip
lost in cotton patterns and thick polyester dream
fractured semblance
ephemeral minute
rotating hands to hide expressions on an ageless face.
It feels good to emerge from nothing,
to lie
and lay
and layoff of life.

The fall of all

Autumn days dry up too soon,
falling like burnt auburn leaves as they always do,
leaving their shriveled husks disintegrating
under piles of tangled memorial junk.
I wander home at night and get lost in the glare of streetlights
and the eyes of passing strangers
none of them knowing how I can see how they look at me,
the way my vestigial form grazes their primordial brain.

The clocks take me back an hour
To a time when I felt brighter
A time that is now weary and wild
fading in light and sound
into vapidity.
Blanched white fingers struggle with buttons and zips
Of tops and ties round scarfs that bind
Anything to hold me in, hold me together
while Frost bites at my finger tips and whispers in my ear:
‘To yield with a grace to reason,
and bow and accept the end
of a love or a season’

Running late

I love you is only
A Hollywood affectation
An otiose promise,
Figurative.
Like a cat stroked backwards
Stick your ass out
Put it on the line
Just make sure that you
Get out on time.

Café Noir

A cigarette at 5pm, a coffee a bit earlier; a group of words in the pauses of the day, followed by a sight and then a deep thought. Green tea in the morning, a glance out of the window and a prayer for another day. A kiss in the quietness, a big thai dinner on Fridays, a beer and wank to help break the routine. An unexpected hug, a casual smile, a sweaty game with colours and clothes of different tones and frowns all around the act of the actor, theatrical atmosphere as my only protector. A long hot bath and single square of dark chocolate, a Smiths record on repeat A rough casual fuck, filling a hole to fill a hole, an eternal emptiness never satiated. A cigarette again, this time at any time and a coffee to help a thought in my head to rapidly run away...

Penned In

I can’t write myself in italic ink
as the nib loses the point
the wit is never sharp enough
to spell out what I mean to be.
I can’t cut out in paper shapes
by slicing them from the page
scissored indecision means gash
is lost from bladed document.
White sheets are never deep enough
to hold my chasm thought,
they can’t absorb the dripping mess
they cant withstand the weight.

Deep Cut

cutting out is harder
than cutting around
but I’m not sure
I never am.
because it never was
what it needed to be
and what it wasn’t
was all it ever was.

Penguin Canard

I had often scowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it palpable
As I knew it would be, the dreaming spires
And pearly domes, carved cotswold stone
All reflected concisely in punted waters-
Not knowing then that Malley perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have sunk
To a meddler, thief of dead men’s thought
I had read in books that art is an infection
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In their ignorance the vision of myth. You are still
The black swan of trespass on ecliptic waters.

I hear America Spieling

your only time is an open mouth Caligula
waiting to speak its present day vernacular
the yawp shits out in laser-jet diction
singing the American experience.

your eager ears beg the confluent prick
geographical waxwork model hypodermic
multiplicity that divides in difference
in levelled term of state unites.

I hear America screaming advent carol song
vanquished thought cut by sermon tongue
lunar ticks Pandora’s box of spatial exploration
yet solemn and silent Alps never intervene.

Throw a punch

punch would flow
down open throats
from clenching fists
liquid lickety-split.

mouth would throw
punch down u-bends,
words down pharynx
cant help but spit.

Crackling clavicle.

wanting. beggars attention.
a spare kiss please;
those minutes have been missed.
count down in liquid measures
lay your livers down to rest.

I can play at waiting
dressed up in numbered outfits
adding up to equal negative--
not me. xerox attack.

then you came with your unwanted bus
drop
clavicle smash up with a bus stop
broken bones are nothing when you’re drunk.

roast dinner. sunday pig blister-bubble crackled on monday.
underwear: funday best.
forget me nots not enough, but bed knots and wound sticks-
around for the light to fade and the penny to
drop.

Rêverie

hardly keep my thoughts in line
perforation of space and time
from torn knotted shadows
to synaptic blackout
I need shelter
so I stand in the sun

a sweat, a jolt,
I wake up and find you’re gone
you’ll discover this is no dream
languid is as real as it seems
sleep images seam unstitched
morning sun melts into dust

hope is a welcome back
memory phalanx tapping on glass
winking from lights of London's stars.
umbrella’d umbra hides paused
skinny figure in the dark
face a shade of dream.

Mad as a hatter.

The quicksilvers dart around on the bath mat around my feet as I sit on the toilet in the evening. They are exactly the same colour as the grey slate floor tiles and I only notice them at night as they scuttle around in the artificial light of the overhead 100 watt bulb. I've seen three of them at one time so now have established that there must be a family residing in the cracks rather than my previous observations of only one of the little future pods. I named the first one Freddy Mercury as not only did he look like the elemental silvery seamless liquid, but he glided gracefully across the floor in a suitably metallic, robotic fashion. They are something reminiscent of the flying machine in 'Flight of the navigator', only earthbound, mute, underlined with plenty of scurrying legs and far less troublesome. I've never seen them before but now I've discovered that they all seem to be living in my bathroom.

E: Have you seen those silvery bugs in the bathroom?
Me: I know! What the fuck are they? I've never seen them before.
E: Yeah me neither, they look like mercury.
Me: Yeah they do, they kind of move like it too. I like them though.
E: Yeah me too.

I've grown quite fond of them now. I always look out for them and enjoy studying their little movements, each time trying to spot more to get the number up to four. Careful footsteps are needed as to not squash them, they are obviously endangered or something as i've never seen or heard about them before, and just like fish, I know bugs. Maybe they are trying to repopulate from the safety that my bathroom sanctuary offers, or maybe they can only survive here as the slate tiles provide the right exact shade of grey that is needed to match their silvery backs and give them the perfect camouflage habitat. Ive tried googling them to no avail.
All I really know about them is that I am glad they are there.