Sir Patrick Moore's Monocles

I watched 'The Sky at Night' on BBC:
lunar oceans, year-long storms on Saturn...
Into the blinking rectangle I typed
'patrick moore monocle'. He owns three or
four. 'I never wanted to wear glasses.
I can just pop this in when I need it.'
How on earth do they stay fixed to his face,

wedged in the socket ridges of his eye?
But then, what holds this planet in the sky?
What if it's his monocles holding us
steady - some primal co-dependency
between these unearthly halos of glass
and our primitive sphere? I think we should
listen to what they are saying to us.

~

I am Sir Patrick's oldest monacle,
and have witnessed your insatiable thirst:
your thirst for knowledge to conquer your fears.

You wield the red biro of right and wrong
over children who recite Gospels of
modernity: you shake them, sift for dreams,

cleanse them of instinct, all but rigid fact -
they are blood diamonds and you bleed them white.
Your oak galleons scour the distant globes:

you are the Conquistadors of Science.
Holy Wars sets creed-scrolls ablaze upon
stakes, strikes nails through the spines of holy books.

I see lost youth, I see slaves, genocides.
I see fear of the beautiful unknown.

Can you keep a secret?

My business is forgery:
I forge a thick-proteined
armoury of steel.

I salivate for metal:
molars grind the bullet.

At night I play the scented
masseuse, oiled up, alone
with my lavender candles.

My business is forgery:

I forge a thick-proteined

armoury of steel.

fragments

youth: like sketching out
life in pencil, a fear of
ink indelible
~
down the stones I claw,
lurching on hind legs: morning
freeze on arched bare feet
~
eyeing-up queue jumps,
latching onto prosperous
currents, bleary-red
~
no harvested heat,
the duvet pulled from us in
the cold steel of night
~
the morning caress
of your kiss on my lips: a
double caffeine shot
~
my shoulders sag like
contented hammocks: she is
dispelled to my dreams
~
they trade their limbs for
poppies: the glorious men
in wasted Glory.

Provence

When thunder hollows lungs
the moment's past -
a fastened chain;
when lightning strikes the
cedar tree to puss
she's rust in my gut:
dead among the sheaves
in the wet meadow turf,
tears raining down the glass
of my reflection.

Lightning lights the leaves, Autumn fire
burns to dust;
a murdered breeze
dead upon the stump -
wings flailed, slumped
on ash.

Milk In Fridge: A Journey To Elysium

While I die
I practice being dead in the dark -
there's not much else to do here.

All around me death encroaches.
The cold stems it off
but I wish it wouldn't try to:
I am ready to separate.

Sometimes I tremor with the
shudder of something distant:
it passes right through me, then
nothing but darkness -
the waiting goes on...
(Isn't there more to life than this?)
...But the waiting goes on so long
that I tell myself I was only
imagining the tremor, and I
return to my thoughts, placid...

I don't think you'll
believe what just happened:

one moment I was
pretending to be dead,
and the next there was a
sudden peeling of suction.
I lost my balance in the
shake and sway: this was
death coming to take me away -
then the light came and drenched me.

Was it a miracle? What is a miracle?

Another quake, and a squeeze of
air, and all was dark again, and I
sloshed from side to side, slowing,
until I was still - which was when I
realised that I wasn't dead after all,
just back to waiting for death.

~

It's all gone very quiet since the light
came and went. Sometimes I wish it
hadn't come at all - there's so much
more for me to worry about now:

What was the light? Where did it come from?
How did it appear? Why did it appear?
What made it appear?

With all these questions I can't
pretend to be dead nearly as
much as I used to.
The light doesn't seem to have
affected the others - they're still here,
dying slowly. I suppose I am too,
but somehow it feels that I've
more to live for now I'm thirsty...

There's something else: when I saw the light
I knew it was light the moment I saw it.

How did I know it was light? If I
knew it was light then surely I must have
seen light before, right? Which means I've not
always been here in this dark: I came from
somewhere else... Now I think of it,
I can remember my birth - is that unusual?

'Life-giving, I was teased into the world:
I mirrored the morning moon, divine, as I
struck the bucket-basin with a splatter.
It was a wet baptism.'

Wow, that was vivid!
Did I just have an out of body experience?

Air, sky, the moon: I am the
colour of the moon. I've never
thought about what colour I am before -
I don't think it matters.
Anyway, I transcend the colour of skin.

~

'We've all become so good at
pretending we're dead that we've
forgotten how to stay alive.'
I've been meditating on this
and have had my epiphany:
I don't want to pretend anymore,
and I don't want to live
surrounded by others
who are pretending. I'm not
content with slow death, so

I'm clotting - speeding up
my end: crusting over,
churning myself into the
smell of a corpse. Please,
I don't want you feeling
sorry for me - I love the
feeling of rapid change.
The others don't seem to
understand - not yet -
but I'll have the last laugh!

I am separating: stagnant, potent.
Now there are stages of dark within the
darkness when I know nothing. I drown in
myself, clogged to the throat. Heavy, bleary
shadow... A familiar convulse of
thunder rips through my death: light has returned
at the brink: divine illumination.

Weightless, I am hoisted from my sleeping
grave - I fly the flight of bliss; I dollop
into searing heat, am stirred into my
Elysium. She takes me to her lips,
blows the kiss of death...a sudden choke, and
I am propelled, airborne, through light, towards
my destiny, laughing my final laugh.

From the Costume Rack

I am a final layer of skin: his arms
fill mine, his chest is my heartbeat - we pause
between worlds, we muster breath on the brink...

We step into the white glare: I transmute.
The forever drizzle of dust, arid
heat and blur of time; forbidden fruits seep
from divine light: the juices soak us through.

Exiting right, I feel him bleed into
shadow - death is in the slow of his stride,
his shoulders crumple. I know the sag
of lonely bodies only too well - the dull

ache of reality. He paces black
wings like a prisoner in his rib cage:
an eagle mourning the loss of its flight.

Edge of a World

He waits for me, threadbare on the costume
rack, lifeless in the bustle of fabrics.

I stand alone on the edge of a world:
a clean-cut cliff-edge above darkness - but

he is there in the mist... I seep myself
in the sweat of the lights, I breathe the dust

between thoughts. Air hangs heavy, laughter spreads
in a wave of tremors, dust hovers in

angel beams... then back to a midnight of
secrets and wires, the re-absorption of

shadow and pulse. Is this body alive?

Gangrene

the sword chose me -
she wrenched it out
with a twist and
treated the wound
with a poison.

She was an artist
who specialised in eyes - she
conjured green tear drops.

Scar

the scar is deep,
it doesn't settle -
injury lives in the scar.

raw, tender - it's raw
to the core, be careful
what you wish for.

heat rifles through the scar,
it freezes numb,
the scar is deep.

the kiss of life

the morning caress
of your kiss on my lips: a
double-caffeine shot.

The Moorgate Pret a Manger

Morning, first thing: they park up, merging
in dense, disordered lanes. A cup in hand
they drift off - few hang about - filing into

walkway traffic, through electric glass doors,
and up into turrets of juts and shards,
caffeine revving. Locked in this citadel,

the anchoring of order descends: high
tide stems. A long release breath of cushions
is sanctioned - an in-between stretch of space

where some wandering eyes dance to the crank
of speaker volume. Lunchtime, and the doors
are prised open like flood barriers. Set

free: a shoal frenzy swirls, feeds, fattens -
the top of the food chain. They carcass the shelves.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Inside, the air con is crocked; outside, the
wind is up and cups of dregs catch flight: torn
napkins wave like dying arms - or young hearts

fluttering. But the City's twice-daily
high-tide withstands it; the same spew sweeps them
in: shapes bobbing up against the till; eyes

eyeing-up queue jumps,
latching onto prosperous
currents, bleary-red.

trafalgar square

I want that day, that
afternoon city
sun, that spray on the
wind; to know your kiss

is there where I found
you, your skirt alive
on the breeze, the sky
and your eyes the same

cocktail hue of blues;
the same fresh sight of
you - before the fog's
ice, before the earth's

tilt hostaged our warmth:
no harvested heat,
the duvet pulled from us in
the cold steel of night.

sherwood road

at night you are a mysterious girl
in a nightdress of leaves tied with wire,
draped in the mist of witching hour -
lurking behind sharp corners, where

spectral shadows descend from leafless
branches: the trees' free-spirited
bareness bearing down like drunken
eyes, mascara-laden; or wild, lusty

sirens urging me onto the rocks: sharp
flexing canines buried in the hanging
gloom of cliffs. This precarious cliff-walk
home, ill-omen swirling, like Macbeth's

return. I avert my eyes from your dark
and peripheral driftings, focus on the path:
the real, solid concrete; and finally,
wonderfully, feel the door resonate

behind my head, scrape the chain
into its sheath, palm my way through hallway
fog, and with a single electric twist bring
Mediterranean light to my skin - I feel

my shoulders sag like
contented hammocks.
she is dispelled to my dreams.

haiku

down the stones I claw
lurching on hind legs, morning
freeze on arched bare feet.

Poem

Adrenaline threading through nerves like beaded
Poison slow-glistening the barbed spider's
Threads; and then the percussive surge -
That metallic plucking of those strings somewhere
Deep, hollow, resonant; fear and joy in crescendo.

It's the always-pump
Of torrential performance,
Between tears and love.

Cloud-Snuggled Girl: A Sonnet

Where speed-flitting thought fizzed behind her eyes
I strained to match and mirror, synapses
Failing in reflex-inadequacies.

The ageing breezes of Autumn return
With the reflux of spinal memory,
Cities rusting in blue toxicity.

Silver, smooth, immaculate: she lay – the
Cloud-snuggled girl in the tabernacle –
Pettled, bedded behind the pulsing veil.

The dream consigned to cobweb, it re-sparks
And infiltrates – bluey-red tinder light –
Like waking to the exeunt that night

Of shadowy movement, and the door slam,
And the protracted sense of invasion.

Sonnet

Spilt time: of course we spilled over somewhat:
It was always intended, in hindsight.
Hiatus of friction-stubble on cheek,
Our tentative finger-brushes painting –
Dilating irises linger and flux
Before the safe-clasp rediscovery.

The platform’s parting-drift: dragging boot soles
Trailing off - adhesive sight-line severed
In the gathering chomps of momentum.
The gluey-remnants of fragrance and touch
Left to the elemental shower gush
To pick and scrape away – like nesting birds.

The fear of committing to spilt time: that
Just before moment from defintion.

This Memory

Words are mere dust to This.
This.
Let music
And the gentle silence of our thoughts speak.
Speak of This.
For words are mere dust to This.
This always
This.

Spilt Time

Almost a year now. Of course we spilled over
somewhat: we always tended and intended to.
The lingering irises that day, in constant flux
of dilation; friction of young stubble on cheek;
brush of hands on Marylebone High Street, and then
the meeting and reassuring safe-clasp,
and rediscovery of lips.
Then phone calls, Manchester, the Cambridge Hotel…
but nothing seen through to conclusion, always
severed at that moment immediately before definition.
The metaphor of the parting-drift
at train Terminals: a few steps of dragging boot soles,
then the trailing off as gathered momentum breaks
the adhesive of sight line, and the gluey-remnants of touch
and fragrance are left to the elements and shower-gush
to pick away at, like nesting birds.
The fear of committing to
spilt time.

The Scar of the Shard

So many nights of ease carried
In this skull’s somewhere cavern,
But the scar of the shard I kept from her
Writhes smug,
Oiling guilt.
The blade that separated me like milk
When I needed to protect myself.

The Cloud-Snuggled Girl

Refluxes of spinal memory:
Of synaptic failure,
Inadequate mental reflex;
The strain to match and mirror
What worked behind her eyes
In speed-flitting thought.

Marvelling her
On the cloud-snuggled pedestal
Assembled and etched by me:
Engraved, embossed golden
Doors of the tabernacle, bedded, petalled,
Pulsing…

It does spark with injustice: the tinder
Lighting blue-red, burning my inner ear.
It’s an infiltration – like waking that night
To hear the exeunt of shadowy movement
And the door slam
And then nothing but a protracted sense of
Invasion, grating, tender-deep, falsifying.

Underworld

Getting up and Getting old – Metropolitan Line graffiti.


The morning ferry drifters. Drifting atoms
Through sweat-grafted tunnels – crust,
Dust, molecular particles of below air.

Stretched silence grating on matchbox
Stubble. Stillness to shudder in the monotonous
Jogs and bumps of axles and metals on jostling track.

Unsteady flicker-lighting shows black and white
Film behind x-ray eyes, fidgeting… unravelling in rolls of
Stills: decomposing thoughts, something stale and fraying.

Some eyes are rust-shut in sleep, perchance they should dream.
Dream: that forgotten state of innocence, of unsnibbed,
Unclasped freedom; of fertile grass and imaginings

Upon that mattress of springy greenness; and the scent of damp
Earth, and thoughts bred of timeless hours: oozes of tangerine juice,
And youth, and lips…. A spluttered hiss cuts across the

Commute, but soon the lazy, etched foreheads roll and pivot from neck hinges once more,
Slaves to the blustery mechanics. Some taughtened sinews seem to
Fight the buffet of steel on wheel on suspension, and the lure of

Suspended reality – straining not to succumb to the hypnotic rhythm of the
Underworld River, where oars cast ripples into cave-echo, and rock and
Haul and drag souls further up and deeper in to the resonance of darkness.

The Timeless Hour

This is the timeless hour
When the sweepers drive by;
When, in the swathe of this chrysalis
Two bodies learn to breath together
And whispers make sense of the world.

~

Those sweepers of a timeless hour,
From a bygone hour
I can't quite place.

~

Deeper in to the resonance of dark.

The Rise

Mine was the right of two, a light apiece showing dimly on the
pillow and casting its almost beams on the Micky Mouse clock on my
side of the wall. An early picture of mine: ‘The Golden Hind’ – I had
proudly rolled in elastic – lived on the chest by the door; the needle
and pine scented drawers were embalmed in life-old Times’ Sport pages, browning
on the fray. A wavering Tottenham in seventeenth – nothing changed there.

You awoke to the bee keeper’s buzz of the kitchen TV,
and enthused clunks and bells of the ripening-brown microwave;
there was always ‘four-across’ crossword chatter, scraping butter,
the dragging of protesting red-cushioned stools, crunching toast from
the rack, and then that smell from the larder: every manner of
marmalade, biscuit, rioja, cake and sell-by-date.

Quest

To slosh these toes in this rock pool,
countering the heartbeat of waves – wishing
I could douse in watercolour some
gnarled sketch-leaf, and puddle it with the
fermentation of sea-softened thought,
one step further on the wanderer’s quest.

End of the line

Sudden waking –
like plunging from Narnian water;
the sandpapery bite of his larynx
tearing me from the blur.

My eyes scanned unfamiliar
peripherals, narrowing;
my bladder remonstrated for
lack of planning.

He walked me to the exit as I
focused the cap of my right converse
along the platform’s central ridge,
feigning sobriety.

He spoke like a man in his domain,
asked where I was meant to be…
his eyes unfocused – opaque – then
settled, arriving in thought.

Jump in, jump in, he said.
Ever ridden in the front
of a train? It’s a whole
different world up here.

Transfiguring my brain to sponge,
I balanced my head on the glass in a
state of absorption – edging forwards –
a glint of moonlight on the tracks.

Homeward

Numbness fighting the frazzle,
an o’er-brimming buzz of static,
and flexing-remembrances of breath.

Limp features draped in the underworld’s
mirrored canvas; hair: rustily greased,
like cooked wood – scaly, slick; a smack
of her rose-bright lipstick in the eye of the
double-glass. Hunger and survival sense.

The first dawn when theatre-dust fell tonight,
mixing with the dew of the lights, drizzling
baptisms, accepting our trading of vows.

The split-moment came, as he said it would,
when I stood there – between thoughts –
soaking it in, with the thrill of stillness in the
epicentre.

Down from the cliffs

Drifting fog:
the deft taunt of smoky wings floating the
aquamarine: its cloudy, bluey-green iris.

Here, down from the cliffs, where the water
encroaches:
treacherous-embracing glugs, hostaging rocks.

Dawn, dusk; inhale, exhale – breathing
light on this task immemorial: time’s
artistic etching of the details.

The accident of my back on this rock:
watching the rock pools dilate,
sensing the rise and fall of the diaphragm,

tabernacled in the vastness.

The Ship

Billows of fabric gulp Odyssian breezes in the
Sails’ unfurling gasp – thrusting taught;
The pregnant air nourishing like the
Womb, and a motherly hand – buoyant;
Fingers soft-entwining ours like the
Petalled water-vines of countries oriental.

We’re an island bound,
An isle full of noises sweet murmuring on horizons,
And should we get lost in the journey’s froth –
Choking in currents, flailing in tides –
We need but to sail where the sands breath
Alive:
Trillion caramel-set diamonds crunching
Under our toes and seafaring heels;
Equilibriums levelling to the steadiness
Of Utopian sands.

And while limitless imaginings torch our way
We’ll lie flat on our backs on the
Sea-softened oak, staring beyond infinity,
As the ship follows onwards the
Constellations’ course.

The Stage

This is a place of actors
Exploring their roles;
It is a theatre where
Memory is dust:
Whatever the spotlight
Chooses to throw upon.

Her stage is that world
Between light and dark,
Where the blur cuts across
Her face; and, trying to
Connect, you venture into that
Half-way state – wading in the
Mist.

Come back to the light.

And so we become
Passengers on her train,
Chugging to a coast,
Accepting that the
Vermillion wall sign
Tells us our travelling speed –
We are not going fast.

One wouldn’t want to spend
One’s life waiting at a station –
It would get terribly dull.

Immersed in the scene
We serve up verbal images
Like hot ribenas
Or photos on a mantlepiece.

Many are lost to the fog
But a few resonate her face
Like rays of dawn.
Madrid and Ireland still stand there
Like dust, and I can feel the warmth
And rain.

UBL

“There’s been a party going on all night”.
US RAID KILLS UBL
In the bottom left ‘Fox News’ rotates like a globe;
White, yellow and red throbs a putrid frame, as
ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT streams like electric and
Cascades forever from the edges of the earth.
“Too bad we’re not gonna see him thrown off a building”.
5:27 AM ET
UBL IS KILLED AT COMPOUND
The minutes drip blood, and images circle in their
dizzying revolutions, words painting themselves on the
Ecstatic treadmill.
THE HUNT IS OVER
“They bum-rushed the White House”, beam his teeth.
OBAMA 1
OSAMA 0
And the screen clunks like a cassette
between a triumphant sea of humanity
and a charcoaled Abbotabad.
“There’s no closure from this as my son’s not gonna walk through the door”.

Reconciliation

Like the shimmering of gorse
behind evening flames,
Existence fraying like
childhood memory.

I’m pouring my eyes
upon the sea,
Painting a salt-ridge
around my boots

of gnarling leather;
Summoning the vastness
to reconcile what he
did – beneath the waves,

against the battered
sediment. It’s nice
to know the world is
soft at the edges.

Unsymmetrical

I

In those first breaths
You are unsymmetrical:
Loose sprinkles of
Mascara dust,
The constellation on
Your neck, and
One eye still asleep.

II

You are face down;
Back silent and bare:
A tousled halo fanned,
Cascading like wind-scorched
Mountain grass; head to the right,
Resting on the smooths of your wrists;
Elbows splayed like a Golden Eagle over Lochnagar.

III

Over the little corner sink,
Loose strands of hair lopping
Close to the swirl;
Smooth and exposed –
Your back the Sahara,
And sand dunes the vertebrae
Of wind-chiselled nights.

~

Out of the rock pool,
Drenched, you uncoil,
And surging to waterfalls
A tributary swells
From your eyes to your lips,
And with sensual taunts
That linger so brief
It hangs on your mouth,
Then flirts with your chin
And licks round your neck,
But slows – like the tip of the tide –
And dwells like a tongue
On your softening peak…
And you dab yourself damp.

~

A routine, before me
Devoutly glistening;
Shimmering brush strokes
Melting,
Dripping alive,
And I, tremulous as
Searing glass.

Unconditional Love

Back to the familiarity of night coaches:
Crumpled limbs, creased necks,
And the wide-eyed hours - either side of border controls.
The enforced suddenness of waking,
Blinking at the alien symbols of ticket machines,
And the taste of sleep and metro-dust -
Fumbling through darkness.

Rising from night to dawn and that first
Lungful of a new country.
Our emergence was to an unruffled Seine,
Ripe in morning glaze,
And to bridges that we passed over like echoing whispers;
And to a Notre Dame blessed with the freedom to breath:
Its desertion conjured a stirring of the places where tears are born.
The electric silence of the homeless on benches,
Toe to head like East-Indian hammocks
Creaking in the breeze, beneath branches of pink blossom.
Paris was waking like a reluctant student:
Cafés wore their doors half-open like blurry eyes;
Tables still snuggled like the lovers they intimately knew.

An unmapped zigzag to Montparnasse followed:
Through the Luxembourg jardin (tourism was leaking through the cracks)
And on to Baudelaire’s grave, where I should have stayed longer,
And will one day.

Autumnal red smeared the shutters and roofs.
The paths were alive with soil when you scuffed them,
And we listened to the musical lilt of Eluard and Verlaine.

Then back, back to a Notre Dame, submerged under teeming:
Magnificence bled with the horror only we knew.
On a sardine-coach we shuddered towards Beauvais and its airport:

Up, up.
Those briefest of moments when the onrushing world brings
Death so close to my eyes, yet life so rich in my chest -
The roaring of tarmac a modern necessity
For the experience of life.
Down, down, down.

We stepped out into Madrid heat.

Then three Parisian-esque metros screamed us
Into the night, and Sol, and Anton Martin,
The Plaza Mayor, and cobbles and tapas,
And the narrow, sloping, tributary paths;
Then midnight, and preparatory voices and chants reaching through the night:
A gentle running through of lines,
A speculative stretching of a neck,
The singer’s gargle of salt-water.
To the hostel: a cheap beer, a mixed fourteen-bed dorm,
A Brazilian girl with extraordinary opinions,
And Jimmy from Finchley –
Then eight grateful hours in a top bunk.

A sugary croissant, orange juice, and a coffee.

The ticket trembled my hand,
And seared the leather folds of my wallet.
Sun beat like a tribal drum, and
Skin resounded like hide stretched
To soak the delicious pounding.
Hello! Hello! We are the Tott’nham boys!
Hello! Hello! Bemusement halted the locals.
Cerveza began its flow to brains – everywhere.
A paella lined the stomach.
The table scorched like a pill.
Norf’ Landon was basking!
      Oh Ledley, Ledley,
      He's only got one knee,
      He's better than John Terry,
      Oh Ledley, Led-
The forehead sweat, and the icicle drips of beer.
For me, each sip of each litre was the curling of toes on caramelised sand.
The high blaze spread herself like a pregnant throbbing of dazzle and blue.
And the music of the masses:
Tottn’ham at the Bernabeu,
Ars’nal watching Emmerdale.
Veins began to float with the glorious pounding of life.
Come on you Spurs, come on you Spurs!
Like wandering Hampstead with weightless lips again.
…We are Tott’nham from the Lane!
There was so much life there. Beer dregs from the thousands
Flung in riveting throttles of spray,
And the sound… oh, the sound. From the gut,
From where tears brew,
From the furnace of carnal music:
Five, seven, ten and more thousand
In one adrenalised drench of tone and colour.
If you don’t want to know you won’t understand.

And soon we were alive on the metro.
Oh when the Spurs Go marchin' -
Into the Basilica of modernity we went – pulsing.
In the home end though.
Fear, a little.
Behind enemy lines.
Face doused in a mustering of neutrality
As my heart whacked me with musical thumping:
Heavy, breathless, riveting.
We’re old school. We’ll take care o’ ya, they nudged.
One with a cockeral stabbed into his head,
Like an ultimate sacrifice.
I felt safer.

Seeing the grass was like art:
A thick, intimidatingly pure smear of colour.
So dense a shade that the roots must have chewed to the
Bowels of the earth’s crust.
In the blur of the ninety thousand,
And the beer in my brain, I drifted…
Deep drift…
To that first game:
From the turnstiles to the stairs, to that magical needle-sharp green:
The first glimpse of the sloping turf.
Like stepping on stage, I suppose,
With that instant fizz of static,
and the sudden plunging-rush of caffeine.
Theatre. Real theatre. True thespianism. Love.

A goal, and a silence in a terrible roar.
Not him - not fu- not Emmanuel Adebayor!
Like a dartboard I felt it. Shit. Stab.
Then Crouchy saw red.
Heads hanging.
Half-time clawing on with nails and shoulder sinew.
Howling from the soul.
Two, three… Four.
The End.

My own hands seemed to have to hoist me
Like the pincers of a hammer
To the outside world.
And I sank at the foot of a turret
As the home congregation dissolved with their blessings,
And as I waited I dwelt…
Dwelt on unconditional love.

An empty journey to the hostel
Where sleep was the drowning of sorrows.

The morning blinked to two angel-sisters from
Michigan who had blown in with the night,
And who enjoyed self-deprecating humour –
Particularly the elder.
But time had an eagle’s griff around my wrist…
And I parted with only a smile.
A sugary croissant, orange juice, coffee.
Madrid melted.

We flew and landed with a
Little more of a bump, and a hollow rattling of luggage.
The air, and a coach, and silence, and thought.
The French sky knows my heart, I wrote.
It stunned me with an embroidered drapery of western gold,
And brought me closer to something.

Here I am. Twenty-two.
And following the paths of instinct.
Passion is clawing at me,
My heart is abrim,
My eyes are welling…
But all I ask for – please –
The only thing for which I ask is crystallisation.

Youth is
Like sketching out life in pencil:
A fear of ink indelible.

Thirst

“After God, Shakespeare has created most”
(Alexandre Dumas)

You illicit dealer of words,
Conjuror of hallucinogens;
You who inspire the minds of inspirers.

I am your purple-lipped devourer:
No longer the dreamer
For now I am thirsty.

Perhaps

Pungent wood infuses the night-scent –
Fresh from the downpour.
Sinews of water, wrestling metal,
Condemned on the slippery bars.
Perhaps I love you more than you love me.
And the drops well up and fall.
The sky is weeping.
My words are the sponge.

Sunday Night Among The Shards

The faithful Moon kneels down to pray.
A splintering mile of juts and shards,
Of stealthy spears and slithery glass
In ambush lies – sinister as greed.

And as, serene, she drops her head
The poisoned peaks of bladed scrapers
Thrust their readied javelins hence
And pierce her martyred pupil blind.

Bleeding throbs of the faithful Moon
Upon the metal canopy douse;
Feeding down the glassy sheen
Her blood white, her white tears.

The Lighthouse

A tragedy:
He stared from his tower of light,
Tasting salt.
When I look at the world
I see only the numbers, equations,
Formulae holding it together.
A marker-pen:
He painted them – no –

Daubed them on the glass
As the waves broke like
Vulnerable wings, beyond,
Unseen to him.
Pitiful symbols
Of a modern anti-creed.

"Youth is..."

Like sketching out
life in pencil:
A fear of ink
indelible.

St Paul's

Alone in this drowsy epicentre
In the after-silence of the bells -
The stone column an extension of my spine,
The dome the weight of my thought.

Deep in this rock is the resonance of Time,
Scope, Knowledge, the Weight of the sky and
Gravity and Dark and History’s quest: the
Searches of Souls and Intrusions of Gospels.

I listen to the wise instinct of the resonances.

The City of the Monotonous Mass

Like a fanged glass shard
Salivating in sleepy rain,
Another week drips the dregs
Of its hours like watery metal,

Throbbing a wistful glint
Before melding anew.
(The briefest respite of a praying
Ant, catching a breath in the soil).

A missed heartbeat’s silence
As The City's furnace blinks into the
Sleep of the battle wounded, drifts
Into the glide of a ghost bird.

The dreamless sleep of the
Monotonous mass, whose nights are
Warm in the replenishing charge
Of sweating machinery.

They are the crumbs of goldfish feed,
Eyes mired in x-ray-black,
Brains loaded like knotted wires,
Pulsing with digits of warm static:

Slaves to the glass shard
And the gaping abyss that will
Chew and milk them for
Their ripeness at dawn.

Winter gloom

Winter gloom set in this morning:
Doused the room in dark
As I clung to the life of my body;
Temples throbbed blue as
The alarm’s piercing laughter
Mocked me from its bookcase.

Last Train Home

One of those train compartments
From the films in grainy colour:
Through a peeling swivel latch, where
Bronzed wall-lamps trickle muffled
Gold over a congregation of eight,
And Autumnal curtains hang half-drawn.

It spells romance: these lives
Balancing on a knife-edge of mortality,
Hurtling the east-coast cliff-edges;
A storm scene, and the fanged rocks
Thrusting spray close to the rails.

He sat in this scene: a wordless adrenaline.
A stranger: her neck infused him with a scent
Of the wild, had caught him as if by sudden
Thirst. An instantly raw addiction. He craved those
Eyes abandoned to the tide; lips captivating
In their proximity; each breath of hers a narrative.

His heart revved thunder in his ribs, mad, timid:
Pressing against him like her, he dreamt.
Trembling blood, he was filled with a current
Not unlike the sea: almost launching himself on her but
Resisting – just – the taste of the sand.


The moment, he felt, was resting on this
Furlong of rails as the urban world encroached
With heightening layers of imposing grey,
And the glass welled up and wept with lungfuls
Of rain; and yet his needle sharp love: deep, swelling,
Swelled, throbbing, was bleeding him red, and

He fixed his eyes in passion: stretched, wavered,
Grasped the air, and invaded her like
Static.

This Writing:

What lies it impregnates in ink.
Broods too long on the briefest
Of mist-swum pictures that swim my head,
Shorter than static though they live.

When, despite their vague
Almost-nothingness
A well of hours is spent
Reeling them in from fog:

Enlivening them out of proportion,
Embedding them in truth
Now they cry so rigidly
From feathery wood.

Yet what truth can life yield
If one wades its streets unfocused,
Floats its days monotonous
With hardly a flinch

And when thought
Pierces the gloom,
Not try and decipher its root,
Its earth, its bark, its fruit?