Horsed

That, that little spinner,
ooooooooh, yep. AH!
Flick it up over that there fence.
The spiny fence, a fence of arms.
Sweeping in at me like a beating wave,
tackle tackle, twist tall,
competitive eh?
Sweep!
Chew them.
Arrange your fingers in the dough of persistence
Lick lapper.

Lost
Fickle
Headboard
Dark

Roaming lift.

my there there fire comet

Silence fire comet!
You speak too much.
Burning an enchanting riff through my bones,
Always shaking, bucking my balls with a flat whip of panic.
A panic of no immediacy.
We used to wait.
We used to wait for it.
Now we bawl and screech through life's alleys,
Blind shortcuts full of ravens and bloodless jewels.

Or you could spend your dimes on a mouth organ and a banjo,
Buy a wooden sea-craft from a fisherman in Samoa and
Drift like a salt-drugged troubadour through wispy waves,
Singing like a newly haloed hell-hound while gulping fresh pineapple.
This would be one slice of our imagination.
This would be a place to die.

Pretend its over. Pretend it hasn't begun.
Pretend there's no prime el presidente swimming in gold.
No tortured children.
No fear.

Or you could capture your imagination in a net of hope and feed it to your soul.
Your withering, dithering, slime-filth slithering soul,
Which would spark up like a fire comet and electrify everything,
Sear everything with fierce hope and rally it to the children,
And arm them with knives of corn sheathed in cow's butter.
Butter that drips down their fingers and fertilises the whooping earth
Until it creaks with progress and loses its nerve.

But the earth is not on fire,
There's no need to evacuate.

Mumble Mire

But outside the lifestyle was a memory,
Haunting like a black eye on your mother.

It lasted longer than the tree line,
Which fell as the air got thicker.
Tumbling into soft thief knots
Once the giants drew their curtains
And the guardians awoke.

Footfalls, sidesteps, crept iron gates,
A forgetful onion’s only escape.
From a frigid dawn behind the ash,
Grey twigs shade better than a looking glass.

Where the bramble hatch drips
And the stairwells swelter,
Unwrap what you cherish from those
Ear-raped-a-ringed thrushes.

For they were no one,
And no one made it
It was just there,
Un-escaped.
Like a sawn off tree trunk
Sprouting the maggots of the enemy.

Irony Sunlight

The irony of sunlight is its apparent hope
But it can shed light on things too clear
It penetrates, and stops you from living
Because everything that has eyes can see you
If they please, which they rarely do, but our mind
Can’t show us that

There is an optimum amount of light, too much
Paralyses, like a thousand icy knives pointed at
Every soft mound of skin, no one moves,
They creep around the edges, shift past the spotlights
Not the green-lime spotlights of the stage, no, those
Hide their menace with sweet piñatas
These are the spotlights of concentration camps
They blind their victims, they would be more
Welcomed dimmed, filtered with soft whispers
Of encouragement

Oh! That radiator warmth of the sun, the persistent glare
Like cooling choral voices in cloister walls,
Might be a cure
Dim them down, please, my hands are shaking
Please dim them down

The Flaccid Beast

The flaccid beast’s a warlock, who crunches brittle lungs
Papyrus sheath, marshmallow head and a consequential tongue

Rustling in a narrow boat, a cement-mixed tube of dirt
Lobster-licked with spit cells, a half-pencil’s worth of hurt

It may become a twosome, or a sniffed soliloquy
Or perhaps unfinished business, left crooked by a tree

The scent of no tomorrow, the fear of things to come
Blunt razorblade, a blockage, twixt forefinger and thumb

Not food, nor drink nor sustenance, no vitamins, no lust
To fill the time, to compromise, till comfort turns to dust


I first arranged to meet with Ron, in the pines behind the house
Stolen, violent, tittering, soft ash for the fat woodlouse

From there my friends continued, while I fell another route
But I knew that Ron would chase me, forever resolute

So now and then we meet again, him ruffled in his maker’s palm
I ask to chat, as he spits ‘yes’ back, we kiss sickly into calm

But when it’s over, smouldering, I feel a thud of doubt
My carelessness, frivolity, me mirroring a lout!

It’s not the damage, or the image, that renders me a fool
Just the sense, that it adds nothing, a raindrop in a pool


The swinging arms of a rushing clock swim past me in my sleep
Hot suns soar through the ocean sky; electrons on a science sheet

Drum beats quicken ghastly out of time, sweat pesters my temple dents
When it’s not productive, slice it, crush it and scald it from the battlements

There’s a pile in my mind of the things that I’ve done, wrangled, cowering
Each whisper, angle, witch-wanded master, wooed and empowering

I think of my progeny’s padding foot, scraping the screens of my grave
My petrified fingers frozen loose, a last sketch at the mouth of the cave

My meetings with Ron, the flaccid beast, won’t de-tile my final proof
But each encounter, steals a much needed hour, of my fiddling up on the roof

The Futility of Progress

'But he didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.' Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Cyclone Silent

Oh, my, cyclone silent,
Sick cyclamen arrest.
Blond bob-tail flower
Or butter creep
Soft confidence and jest.

Shatter this cymbal, sugar cream
Death-poignancy, wet nest
A graveyard's pallet,
Volcano-ing
Brushed black with
Pleasure rest

Yep, just over there

And there's a notion, that balance is the key.
Yet that word is as ethereal as love
What line, between intuition
And reason?

Words on a page
Voices from our mouths
Never an inner silence; always a fizzing fear

Feeling steady is unready, adrenaline, unclear
Options are the goals of man
But two feet step apart, and we wonder who's inane

Not polished, not free
Bound in a flesh shroud
Stretching for our sea

Shard of Cynic Thrash

'The most beautiful and the most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead'
Albert Einstein

I will see freedom

Freedom that does not come from independence or submission

Freedom that does not come from words or ideas

Freedom that does not come from love

I will see freedom not through my eyes

Not through my heart.

It will be a freedom that is inescapable and complete

It will flatly connected to nothing

It will feel like nothing has ever happened, without any wish that it had

Everything that cares to acknowledge its existence will see this freedom

And so will everything else

All my feeling is a result of looking forward to this freedom

So, inevitably, this freedom will come.

Hidden in a spiral world of spinning angles
Flat, horrific, stuck
No-one could breath but no-one wanted to
Caught drowned for simplicity
Sticky, sticky wriggle
Choked thick on a fiddle
All games have been forgotten
Plastic and metal do not breed well.

Whirlwind Collection

Broken ocean, where you stand,
On riverbeds, beside the sand
Live homes divided, swept aside
By miracles, of bloated tide

Catastrophic, innocent
Disconnected, finger-pink
Above the mines, above the borders
Soft, settled, sweet Pan lost the orders

***

O round world,
Sphere me as you twinkle
Elevate, elucidate and
Toss me in your shingle

O washed stone,
Saphhire-diamond mingle
Cleanse me in your swell,
Toss me in your shingle

O mucky dust,
Gallon-gloop a tingle
Dry a plaster on my eyes and
Toss me in your shingle

***

Broken diamond
How did you brake?
When the haste of your speed
Thrust the froth of your wake

Tip-toeing behind him
A loony-tune gloom
The cost of your price
Not a bust, not a boom

Explosion electric
The fabric wears thin
When gold rubs on money
And sparks break within

Totalitarian
Wisped softly aside
The hush of your quiet
The drag of your tide