MH002

solar
inebriates -
portal grabbed a friend and swing
lucifer hops
new new new
novelty wine carved on tables where
children's conspiracies to frame each other
are ringed in ink
i was i was i was
here
on any tuesday night
I knew little of that frame
wood and wheel-turned acupuncture
do-it-yourself exorcism with
allen-key dreams
linked silk, tired italian whites
starched cuff-links screaming
i'm i'm i'm
that was just the chapel
night brings moody blues
midnight sea urchins
buried ancient monoliths
timbre drains upwards
slow slow slow
and each doorway is a dirge
to knotting little beaches
and flicker-map hurricanes
little did they know
up up up
i fought wet monsters
the kraken made me late
not got a letter
not this time
it's not that sort of date
low low low
several mentions does not a title make
lithe bodies, rimmed with squish
desperation pouring and pumping
make mine a double
*breathes*
that's not an option
until some dire alpha
numerous flight brings
archway curves to
my dark door

tidal

mute
empty whiteglow alphabet
take a photo make
practice tattoos
seething on
time taught syllables and
nappy-dark stains -
chocolate water and thawed muscle
and blood from somewhere.
how didn't the dust spill,
coruscate spiral fingers
wagging dissonance at figures
to long-gone character,
attempts at grass
white picket heaps
titter titter
mine and mine and mine
weep at buds and drip lush
chemicals - photosynthesise heart's
timetable.
forget a pair, shadow packed
like gossamer tell-alls in reading
trains, flush necks red in
sunday greens
how did this work
before?
after tidal lives found tidal ways to be

After Scanlon

You’re near, precipice falls

it just occurred to me to write

while I dream of you

soft white tattoo

elongated in defence of suns

you’re my more than this

seeping about m, in

every step of out-sole

worn like skates to hard

for parquetry floors and

double-dance doors.

A man, tall black

the mountain stumbled

struck from dark stars

in iron nights

I heard him talk once

enough for seas to moan

and you to slip away

I hear him outside now,

his hand poised at the

door

A knack – deep and ringed

old like firs buried in

ruined cities

An unfinished play on

one hand – dead white

tune the other. Count

me out of goblet crusts

and sandstone fires.

mine is nothing anymore

mine is nothing before

love’s bright bursting

Sonia

When watching pornographic cinema,
One has to wonder,
how 'Young Sonia'
Gives such good head...

*after watching documentaries I;

See

Starving grimaces, all teeth and angles.
Children in men's rags cut to pieces. Women crying salt to feed a child.
Fuck the idea of any country.
This did happen.
Are simple responses sophisticated?
Necessary Complication is a fallacy of the avant garde -
I beat my breast to feel a millionth of their pain.
I strike my face to detach tears.
I am not them as much as you are not your father, sliding his bayonet into
my grand-grand mama.
How did it feel?
A duduk plays in a field filled with ruined thousand-year-old churches.
They're your ashes now.
Hold a starving child to you.
See how it feels.
It feels like genocide.

Inquisition

There's nothing to it. No easy answers. No way around the facts.
It happened. I wanted it to. I let it.
No, not all the way. Never. Not even half.
Not even that.
More or less.
No.
Like sugar soap and oil for blood.
Null. Void. A quiet desperation.
A secret terror. At myself.
My stark incapabilities.
My lesser moments.
Self-loathing and self-destruction dancing.
Firework-bangs in empty streets.
Dark hedges and secret lounge-rooms.
My empty bearded fear.
Yes.
If I was left to it.
I can't help myself. Those parts turn off.
Some parts turn on.
Most just run idle. Half-ass, half-on, half-in.
For you? Of course.
More like a bad accident.
No third-party cover.
Blood on glass and seat-belt burn smells.
More so than ever.
Cloying.
Inebriate condolence.
Drinker's guilt. Pride.
Seething dark resentment.
I am not to be trusted.
In the long run.
Sort of, more idiocy than anything.
NO.
Never again.
Sure, later.
Thank you.

Autopsy

there's photographs of it.
it's like touching up history
it's amazing, the christmas
tree much taller than her
5 foot 3 - a room and
the tiniest little ante-room,
a toilet and nothing else
in it.
Wistful for ten years,
I found you attractive.
He had no idea he'd have
to earn a living. 40 grand
is a lot of money. The
autopsy reveals how surprised
he is that people
knew him enough to
make noise.
There's an idea that people
suffer terrible trauma because
they're mentally ill.
It would be inconceivable
to think like that.
That's a belief to throw
yourself into something - it's \
a delusional state.
Normally, if you didn't have
recognition - incredibly popular -
overnight. People who are
special, over time, become
known.
He looks around when pronouncing
French - they reveled in
symbolism. A public dress
rehearsal, a public performance.
to people who see these
shows, that's it.
there's only really one.
This is where Ibsen was born.
I'm sorry.
Those two nights become a
model - almost bankrupt.
Vegas and New York to follow.
He he he.
the good times.
She stares side-long as he spins
a glass round and round.
They had no legs. Isn't that amazing.
Which bit?
'The end.'
'Oh right.'
that's what you see, the
remnants of our exploration into
things we've not known.
'Are you concrete?'

dis-inter

I buried you here again
Re-exhuming you is painful
but it's become a habit. I
take small pieces of you
with me, festering and lonely,
as I stalk the Heath,
tweed-clad and nasty in
my outrage. That's all spent
now, it's borrowed fakery that
propels me forward into dark
moors and deep inebriations.
Mine is a pit lined with best
intentions where I lay you as
needs be, into each new impression
like a child may a toy in
dirt-box dreams. I've no
recompense but digging into hard
brown earth, ripe and truffle-
filled - as a pig in swill.

But you weren't buried here or
anywhere
Fire consumed you, melted rings
accusing us all of conspiracies of
neglect and indolence - of being
too unaccustomed to your absences
and to render uncanny, your long
and strange delays.
there's an odd veracity in death
that seems to spit finality in
the face of our fragility - to
scream the coming of cessation
in our light frame as to
crumble in under the extreme
pressure of mortality.

tendencies

tend to make one part broken hearted,
sit here in Babylon and stroll hooded streets
in music shoes
There's not much to say, a quiet drift, 6 weeks in
to nothingness and doubt
Weakness in my step

Pine-Eyes

I want to find the place where old Pine-Eyes turns wood again...

Silverman

The box arrived from Social services.

There’s a photo of her, smiling flat-faced in the flash, with two men. The same photo – two men. One is tall, a small beard on his chin, perhaps to define it from his thick neck. The other, darker, his eyes close set under heavy eyebrows, stares indolently at the camera, his hand draped over her shoulder.

It’s funny that in this box, crisp and white, with its neat label ‘Florey Silverman’ should contain all of this girl.

And Somewhere a man ashes a cigarette into a sardine can.

Her mother smokes constantly, even in the hospital. It seems to define her, each furtive suck a punctuation.

Cause he’s a bastard – drag – that’s why – blow – never cared for her – drag.

Said ‘He wasn’t running a home for strays’ smoke wreathes the room, mingling with grey light.

That’s where she was going that last day – to tell him, to tell Albert what he done was wrong.

Children play on wrecked cars games of sticks and forts. Somewhere a fiddle. Stares from caravan doors.

Albert is stooped into his face, his hair pushed forward into dark-set eyes. His grey jumper stained with grease.

She was a nightmare. Threw her out. I make decisions about what is best for my community.

Where do you think it was then?

I got no idea.

Florey was a handful – she had a knack, I spose – for causing trouble.

Were Sara and Florey friends?

Yeah, I spose, all the kids were.

You better come see this.

Fetus bones? Yes, from site 1.

We have strong evidence she was pregnant. She may not have shown.

I didn’t know. She changed so much. We had another row – I didn’t know. I said ‘I’d had enough of her behaviors’

The spray is police issue.

The righteous father and the grieving son.

I encounter Robbie on the stairs. He sidles past me, I can hear him inhale - cataloguing for some later feast - my dark smells.

Malcolm, were you there? Did you do it?

I know these people, I fought their battles.

Do you know who the father of Florey’s baby was?

Stop it!

I knew he’d done it. That is why I had to act.

Shaun?

It wasn’t him.

The person who attacked him – it wasn’t my dad.

You’re wrong Liam. It was Robbie.

A bent cop doing a favour for a mate. A pregnant teen and a forbidden relationship.

She was dead for three months and no one even noticed she was gone.

Castle-maine

castle-maine turners receive

threats knotted in glass

beasts of burden stalk mangers,

spilling frankincense in mir.

ink on ribbons brings marked

velvet papers with irregular rhythms,

strokes on strokes

keeping toll with high pigeon

dreams

making make, it’s time enough

to find there’s days of

absolution built into

calendar years

creep into smithies by iron-

fire light, forge tinkers

and test-tubes

leaving only baby wraps

and evenstar dreams.

Click

Click.

Trawl. Click. Anal. Click. Search. Thumbnail porn galleries.Click.

I’m a librarian - Read that one. Seen that ass. Fuzzy sound. Bad picture. Click. Anal. Click.

Watching, some latino dude, a little too much muscle, glasses, wrist-strap. Some Brazillian chick. Always the most willing. An apartment. A discussion. An exchange.

Click. Bigger picture. Click. Sound down. I watch him pop the tip of his cock into her gape. I’m stroking my cock in time with this. But it’s her I’m watching. It’s her. I want to see her face. I want to see the pain she’s in. The discomfort. It’s the sound of fake moans that gets me harder. The sound of her pain under those false comforts. Ohh big boy. Ohhh yeah. Hurt me. Hurt me. Click. Spasm. Jizz. Spasm.

Click.

hexagonals

London, UK

New beginnings ticking dangerously in the dark.

Though apparently, these days they don’t - they vibrate.

Then it’s destroyed on a tarmac. All orange safety vests

And hollow-points.

We don’t imply ownership.

It’s not that we couldn’t,

it’s that when I see the blue flash of your eyelid -

too much make-up, too little guile -

I want to start a beat with you

There and now again.

But let’s not tell. Fall at your feet and say

rosaries till the necklace is worn through.

I’ll not pretend that a formality can cross us

but it’s something this day.

As we bounced round black-box hexagonals

and corralled chairs in dark flashing corridors

lit by laughter and cell-phone glow,

I thought of empty stops and tragic stations

where no one gives orders anymore.

Briton

Stalking through the Heath you can feel ancient Briton,

kept quivering and suppressed under concrete and hedgerows

like rabbits-feet used to ward of a Boudiccan scream or

the lashing of some dark druidic rite.

There’s not enough red-brick pieces in all the land to build a Jerusalem here –

just a fleeting deer’s tail arcing off into some half-remembered forest,

its Soul still grumbling mightily over continental castration.

There are still Pans here, despite the coat-of-arms on every sign,

dancing their way round deep corners on acorn carpets.

It’s Eldric: a sense of the Faded People,

of disinherited paganism and a near-world populated by God’s

to early dead and to easily forgotten to be real anymore.

Were they ever here? Did we invent steps in the dirt as we huddled to the hearth?

Sought more than wonder in a Stag’s nobility,

found horror in the blood of sacrificial superstition...

made our god as we would have them been not as there were once,

striding glens and moors as the heroes of a story no longer told.

By way of explaination

So this is a 'poetry blog'...

I'm uncomfortable both with the idea of poetry and of another blog filled with adolescent scrawls and self-pitying linotypes.

But we'll see. See if anyone finds it. Or if I send them here...

rusty

It’s the Disciple's turn to

walk out on loaves and fished

seeking benign solutions

to mottled-plague problems.

Time over-rules elegy and

despite this deep notation we’ll

be left with pottery and

praxis when gods come calling

in sand-storm chariots

>>>>

Tapistry as sophistry

Beatings as betterment

Corollary as carapace

Night as day

and deep moon-shine

spotlights to a patina play

>>>>>

I can’t drink this one away. Then it was

pints, now lattes does the different foam

have bearing on this current latitude or

more a circumvent rush to move

spice around dark horns and deep

insecurities. obscurity rears again seeking

to render hollow my crude attempts

at clarity – a vision dispersed between

cracks and marked un-reachable

through a twist of fate and metal

sheeting – You’re rusty again and it

shows.

beat

I wanted to see how the spiral connects to the praxis

Charlie #4

Do you think anyone talked to him?

Hunched into green leather,

his reflection gliding through national

treasure and dark forest

His body is out there, in the wilderness

And he stands, offering himself to the world

looking down

We went out and we came back, and I came back

Do you think he got a nod? A smile?

Slumping into a chair,

the whistle blowing as Central station,

all faux-monoliths, recedes into the distance

Maybe a ticket collector? Not that time of night,

just slipping out onto empty stations in cold

mountain air and taking

the long way to a hard route.

Was there a conversation then?

Some passer by, some comment on the cold,

someone reaching out?

Or did it all confirm his dark suspicion,

that this would be the only statement made

that ever left more than an impression,

in sand, in tress, through air, on rock

A deep impression

Do you think anyone talked to him?

Forensics

Toronto, Canada

It’s like coming back to a murder

the scene all taped off – the

illusion given that nothing’s altered

the familiar chill, the light, the

noise of night – a specific symphony

but it’s the little things – a

chalk-outline here, the shots

all numbered with neat yellow tags -

each totem sets off rapid-fire

associations to nights and homes

and accents, trigger hits of

eyes and smoke and bodies.

I can’t tell what’s new and old,

the sliver whisp of ‘now’ a greasy

film over played-out vision.

It’s a sepia I could do without

now – too far in – I can’t return

the re-runs and the bleed of new

colours old brass railings

with a patina deep and cold.

I’m unsure then what these fresh

hauntings have accomplished,

whether it’s served only to fuel

a rampant nostalgia or this

strange overlay, an adaptation

of a part life, has blunted the

drive to re-live past lives

and make new indentations in the snow