Category Archives: poetry

More of the Same

Leave a reply

A dark Soho street or wherever there’s some red light
Basement drinking wine bars with charming waiters
Conversation and red blood flowing in the town’s
Ghost rivers that drown below the pavements but really
I mean the moonlight and the yellow street lamps and
You taking me to a place telling me what wines to buy
Sometimes I just want to be a girl a woman like the way
They said like romance and broken hearts unwanted
Pregnancies I just want your voice in my ears and you
In front of me in your subtle way and smelling the wine
That has been in your mouth and looking up and down

I digress

A harsh reality that unfolds like out of a song the wine
Dragging us away into some den of iniquity by which
We mean a side street with the lights out and the tall
Men in the street with their air of knives feeding drunk
Me for which you will be required to pay because
I’m your lady and knives and later we walk through
Endless bunker corridors of a block of flats of rooms
In this safety on this rough blue carpet in your sweet bed
The look in your eyes you understood what’s in me
You saw me and liked me you knew me and gave me up
For shame and that’s all there is it is now ended and
I’m not alone but I’m not with you and I want you
Sometimes but otherwise it’s just more of the same

Booze

Leave a reply

I’m drowning or
floating badly
beneath the water swim shoals
depression booze seratonin screens
above the water like an iceberg
the booze also looms promising
sanctuary when my fingers touch
the cold island they freeze to it then
slip and burn as I plunge back below

You don’t notice the dawn if you sleep

Leave a reply

The orange or red rising thru blue night
And how it chases dreams away from
Tired eyes you can’t see how it wakes
In you when you don’t want to raise your
Head from a pillow or low shoulders
These birds with their necessary beauty
Like a carefully chosen alarm ringtone
But better and how the night lights of
Your room dim in the coming day the
Wifi box once so bright or broken party
Fake candles or candles or lava lamps
How a morning saliva gathers in your
Mouth like the sun is meat like the day
Is flesh and how eyes ache to behold
Such wonders after a whole world of
Day and night gone by yes under the
Right circumstances dawn feels like
You’ve lived too long and refuse to stop.

She cut loose over the copse

Leave a reply

The morning bird:
Singing into the fog of early dew, cutting the dull
Dank clouds with velvet wings, sharp as knives.
I watch her between the long, easy breaths of branches
And their leafy veils, following her flight through
A tunnel of clear dry air until all begins to soak
With mourning tears whilst the fields and woodland
Stir, and somewhere I catch her mounted by a fairy,
Driven down underneath the roots to elven kingdoms.

I drop into my puddle of lost veils: here below,
Where the leaves are sweet with fire colours.
They stare out from their spines. They crackle
Like rotted twigs in the wind, or tiny bones.



This is the Place I go to When I do not Want to Understand

Leave a reply

I don’t have a clear picture today. There’s a lino kitchen floor like beige wood. It feels as though the window is open but it’s the fridge, vapour pouring out like in the movies going to see the man who makes eyes. I curl up inside. I am on the lino floor, legs splayed like a funnel. Something is pouring into me. My shoulders rest on the kitchen drawers, my arms lazily reach out for booze that isn’t there. Somewhere in the room things have spilled. I hear rollerbladers outside. I see an evening near Christmas; looking up at the Moon, I imagine making a window box with her as she tells me I will never make a window box with her. The flowers become orchids and die. The dull thud of thick glass knocking on my head, the dull thud of golden liquids, the dull thud of red wine bleeding makes rhythms across the scene, permeating the cold monochrome and beige, my splayed body thuds. Maybe I let it out in a sonorific, a grating, a breadknife to saw it. This is the place I go to when I do not want to understand.

A man for all seasons

Leave a reply

First there was a grey room and colour of midnight
And the same beer he would drink for the next nine years
With different stickers – I never heard him complain –
I liked him immediately this spectator reading his books
It was apparent there were lots of conversations we’d never have
So there I was cleaning the dishes which he must’ve understood
The blue sky rolling over London in that bland tall way
A bath of air a soap in the mouth
It was inevitable that he would be the Leader which was good
I remarked on it
He fights like a mad soldier on an island
With real passion with zeal
This plan he has – this coming to fruition as inevitable as the trees –
A fateful man like this
Unshaken by trenches he was a poet also
That when this heart was broken further I knew – plate and magma –
Someone who pulses like the world is to be trusted or at least enjoyed
Of course speaks of absolute laws adrift thru whirlpools and spires
We dropped bombs on Kings Cross in our youth – a time passed –
Now he is to me an Atlas and bears the weight of great friends
Legends spoke around the hall as cups clash where heroes meet
Not quite as he imagined and yet the plan is enacted.

farewell the bottle

Leave a reply

Off-blue wall light and standing lamps that don’t stand
A single magazine on the table advertising crochet
The abyssal antechamber hangs off an endless
The kind of corridor you find in pyramids
Or don’t find
We waited for nothing and then someone came
To announce it was ready and read about crochet
Instruments could not play or work
A wide room, a single flower pot and hotel bedsheets
I walked over to his vacancy
The stillness does not end so I walk to the soft head
I kiss his blue lips that are blue like strange lipstick
I push my tongue into his cold mouth
His beard has not grown back to tickle my nose
He is dead and we all seem to know
So we leave the flesh on the bones to rot a little
Before the flames
The pyramid makers did not understand.

We Are the Dead

Leave a reply

We are the dead
Short days ago we lived
And scraped life off the concrete

Our children draw pictures of
Flowers in crayon and the daisies grow
By the gutters in the heat

Your boot crushed our neck
As you opined on the beauty and equality
Of the natural order in concrete

No-one wants to see our body

The blood washes away like rain
As you scrub your shoes
On the welcome mat

Watch the blinding light as theatre

Leave a reply

Those movements in shimmer and
Flicker and the glow like plot rolled
Into actor and spread across the eye
Shut eyes too tired to turn away or
While blinking scorch a hole through
This play this life this appreciation
Of light too bold in its purpose but
It’s warm still warm in the dark feel
Light that you cannot see hear light
And the burning be a part of some
Madness or illumination there is a
Fear of the dark not unwelcoming but
Invisible the base fear of unknown
And this is how some stare at the sun
Into blindness to try and see beauty
Again

I know the end will come which

Leave a reply

Makes a mess of my soul’s
Bedroom all littered with bottles
And half-filled condoms bleeding out
Lying on the stained carpet this heart
Crying or staring at the ceiling wide
Empty sight of understanding
Mortality does strange things to a mind

And acceptance the slow process of
Cleaning the room and the sound of glass
Smashing glass in the bin the cold
Or encrusted feel of these
Some industrial carpet cleaner
And a comfortable night’s sleep before
The shops open again