it's been an age since I've been here - now;
there's a long slice of clay-minded toddler sleeping fitfully against my leg
there's an older version of us staring out from the duel mirrors in the morning
somehow we got old, the meet at 20 thing seems a long-distance joke -
do those thin beautiful people have any idea how good they have it?
I've lived back here long enough for this country to drain me of hope, to
extinguish the quiet, personal joy I used to feel in my work -
and make it oil slick with doubt and festering ideas about being owed
some form of respect, as if the product of my entire education was a burning
need to have more and more badges...
I cant say it's been easy - being swallowed into 'dad' when I was only just me again.
What they don't tell you as they hand that mewling bundle of joy straight into your heart is that you are
forever and always compelled to compare, internally, eternally - yourself as 'Dad' to your Dad as Father.
Every bump, every 'What?!' chopped out of clenched jaws is an bat-echo wingbeat of him, stalking through you son's childhood, your ghost at his feast...
How to exorcise that is a project of a deep inner calm that eludes me - you can't fix yourself on no sleep and tendril-debt and a hard tumour of hatred for the life you let yourself lose.
You've only contempt for yourself. Even amongst the joy, even amongst the triumph - there it is...
what did you give up boy? what did you give up?

I knew I'd meet you

Something in the way she moves

I've still the ring you gave me one day in Leicester Square
twisting on my finger, an anxious rabbits-foot charm to
ward off the full-forward doubts pressing out my brow
There is this place, where you and I and everyone we've lost lived once,
a kind of greyed-out sleeting paradise where I played in snow
and got shit-faced terror drunk and slid baggies of
high white knights under tables in Music Theatre bars, filed with starlets and
queens and curious boys with lyrical memories and then there are
quiet Southern sunsets and Oliver and sadness and spag-bol hearths to take care of me
I'm sorry it's been so long between poems, I've been -
pre-occupied with rebuilding a kind of triumph here as if to fill in for those
slate-grey early days that seemed to me more the best of this little self than any other
and I miss them, and I miss you friend but I've some oh so adventurous delights here now, broad-patterned and bright, they're the new victory, she lying here now, her hand gently on my stomach (where no one gets to touch) and as she breathes so do I, oh so do I and so I stay

if i could press the crêpe sweet sweep where your eyes meet your tongue i would

Can you say you miss a place like a lover?

Then if then I can say the Thames wends its way through my waking, 

and even the thought of a Heath roll ramble brings high hearts to my beating soul, 

some drunk Camden shit-camera red-stripe abandon fills 

the clavicle I left on Finchley rd when I scrambled so far north 

I forgot my poppy-seed inebriate scares and left 

that hated Dollis Hill-scape, all mold walls and 10quid whiskey but 

I found - tucked in Hampstead woodlands, between rabbit forts and acid

Break up trips - some part of that ancient deep and beating place that was then if for me

A scene engineered to let you slip between it

Winging along a rush-walled city, sliding and sloughing and seeking

My own related anatomy