MAGNETIC NORTH

Arms that move out in the dark

Platelets of skin tessellating, coiling

Around warm iron bodies, looping the ribs

Generating electric-blue punches of the heart

Your affairs are not of its concern yet they are

With your hourly coffee and cigarette,

Daily jog, weekly fuck on the kitchen

Tablet or film or book or book on the film

About the fuck on the kitchen tablet,

It hammers on like an unanswered phone

Bleeping red and trying to find the right number

To crack the birthday code, attracting positive

Things, repelling the negative ones, the compass

Doesn't always get it right, North is always moving,

Impulse is rash and erratic. Sometimes the system stops

All together. Two metal fists, the size of a heart, weighing

In the same, box it back to life, or the inanimate thing

Just gets boxed and as the Norse have it, you might

Ride in the magnetic storm with the green winged

Women of the field and the other electric matter.

WELL AQUAINTED

She sits leaning over a drink that is fizzing quietly

Her head is covered with a navy blue shawl

Incongruous red light hits her in the dark room

So the drape is black

She wears a tight white skirt and this is turned red

Her slip shoes are very pretty in a congruent red

She becomes aware of my gaze

And raises the hem of her red skirt

With the shadow of an arm and hand

Beneath the skirt she exposes her red leg-bones

I do not need to see her face to know her

I imagine she knows me well

COLOUR WORSHIP

You come to the colour cult worshiping

At the cradle of their toilet bowl spews

This sect directs ‘Now this is the new black, this is blue’

And achoo achoo, they blush sunsets and

Other ignored hews, your breath upon them

Changing them too.

HOW I KEEP THE HOURS

Submitted to The Poetry Foundation for Poetry magazine 2011

YOU DO NOT REMEMBER HIM RIGHT

The halls of mirror you use

Break off in the eye

And crunch at a blink

Only the sound of cracked branch,

Underfoot endures

At a lingering touch

The reflection ripples

And bends and all is lost

But the colour of the man

And that burnt smell

Of bacon remains

Then, to pull out the shard

Or cup the quivering pool

And to look upon that

With a keen and tight scope

And, there! There he is, the

Country-boy come caveman

Caught shimmering in the dew

Of the bracken floor

A black navy coat

Hunting dry twig for his

Miniature teepee

To be set to flame

And render the animal flesh

Breakfast

WINTER SUN

Submitted to The Poetry Foundation for Poetry magazine 2011

ELIAH HAS CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ETHER

‘GETTIN OUT’ Eliah wrote on the inside wall

Carving words in on the hot red internal

‘People talk too much, cars R too loud,

The phone don’t stop ringing so I ask no one to call’

‘Well all these voices poppin out my solar plexus

My lord, you burnt me like you meant to hex us

I promise I only listened to Miller once

About no. 40 in the white strands of Nexus’

A god then or maybe V said

‘Man, you think you so clever

Reedin and cunjurin stuff from the ether;

Surchin furr trooth n

Tying all those preddy string together

Don’t think I don’t see you lay up in bed

Wrestling with the infinite that’s all supposèd

In the rites of becoming learnèd

For while you are not looking boy,

This world gonna punch you

In the backo your thick head’

COLD ANTS

What we have done

I do not know

But Mr North Wind

Must be content

With the sacrifice

As now, blessèd and riled

He pulls the threads from his moustache

And casts the white hairs down

To form alpine temples

Structures that bare no mark of man

He sucks the udders of his Fresian wives

And squirts the mouthfuls into his bottle

Labelled London, Friday morning

The cogs of politics

The wheels of economics

Grind their teeth

And chatter inanely in cold cloud

Tom calls from a toboggan and says

‘I am as happy as the groom

On a 10 tier wedding cake’

And he sleds away from his spouse

I am content in my high-rise

To watch the ants from my window

Hobble in the cracks

Of the smashed wet porcelain below

THINGS LEFT HANGING

Submission sent for Sentinel Literary Quarterly competition 2011

DISRUPTIONS

Our tenement block sits

A black tooth

Pressed by the invisible tongues

Of the salivating icewind

I knock-knock on my neighbours

He’s not in and so to the next door

The balding woman says a fusebox

Caught fire so back to bed.

Groping around in a cluttered drawer

I find a yellow wind-up torch made to look like a chicken

Something is wrong and it does not work

I open the curtains

Eyes still hairy from sleep- I moonwatch

The coin flicker between two points

Like a child in the leather front seat

Playing with the headlight bar

At my feet your coat lies

Huddled like a body

And I crumple my mindmap

And return to close the jaws of sleep

ADVICE FOR CHILDREN

What was a cavern and deep

Will be pressed shut by the earth

What was long and hard (no - not that)

(Well, maybe that too)

Will make you crude but stronger for doing it

A man once said,

‘A poem is like pulling out the telephone receiver

And plugging your hand right in’

And it is like that, only there is no dial tone

What is as simple as the worm

Will bite away at you for days

What cannot stand on its own two feet

Should be sat down with until it can

& perhaps given a drink, especially if drunk

When a man shouts, when he pummels

His fist into his palm and knuckle-cracks

He is only pushing around the thin air

Noone’s forcing you to breathe in

Time is running out but it is a slow jogger

And the weight of the world

Can be put down

On a piece of plain A4 paper

MOUNTED FOXHEADS

Most foxheads are curs

See them: mounted,

Lining the green walls of hedgerows

Then, there was one

Walked with its orange wirebrush nose

Next to me down down the wet road

To the local shop for a 75cl whiskey

Nostrum for the oncome of evening

We were tracking but our matter

Was cold clay in our skull cups

‘A lot of people wish they were you’

I say and the concentrated apple-form eyes

Shift and glaze and almost roll at the words

The ears prick to the powerline’s hum

I’m going to write an article on

Whether too much hair clogs the brain

With that, the cub coughs a bezoar

ADVENT OF GLUTS

Cold carrion for dinner

Bonescraps your brother

Would still fight you for

Even, dare I say, murder?

Hunger, like anger, insatiable

Till corked

Your wife, who took photos

Of her arse on the photocopier

Who sent them out as Christmas cards

Saying 'this year will be the last -

There still is time' in the snowhills

Of night you look

There, black / white, time is still.

Your granddad, who missed the word of god

But received a letter

When the evergreen came through

The post mouth and burst into greedy flame

He said to nobody, and so to everybody

'God sticks angels like olives'

By the charred body on the woodend, it looks

More like marsh-mallows

Then the two new cousins at the table -

Foodfighting talk like all of your kin

Over the last of the crust

'It was with great reluctance that I gave you that rib'

She could not say the same for the apple

IN THE FIELD

The car rolled across the yellow field

Pushed over by an unseen baler

It skidded, stopped on its head

It coughed black fluid and smoked

Two crawled from the car

Worming about the field

Trying not to dry up under the close sun

Trying to remember what a straight line is

And then to follow it

They walked on all fours

And inhaled flies at sunset

And this happened for a series of days

Until they came across an apple tree

In warm night they gorged on blue fruit and grew

By moonlight, their shadows stretching,

The pain of pushing against the world

Spines clicking into place and then peace

Two bone towers coiled inside flesh

They surveyed the field, a small garden

Hairy wires were eating the car

Hands cracked with dirt they held

And walked out of the field

HOW IT IS DONE

Firstly, one has to hollow out the snake

Twist a blade into its end and blow the green trumpet

The red noise is loud but is only a short blast

Keep it alive and angry by feeding the snake itself

Till it can stomach no more

Then, cast it like a light rod with lighter line

Cast it behind you as far back as you can remember

The snakehead will bite hard and gulp

Pull tight and keep the column taut

Put your lips to the hole and suck

On the blending tide of what has been done and what was never

Done but the 2 open lids of the rolling snake-eyes knows the answer

To its own venom and it will tell you in its own innards and your

Own insides what needs to be done and just how to blend the two

When the act is over, one begins again

This time, cast heavier and not so long

Or fill the blade hole with moss

Crouch and release into tall grass

Back away and be wary of reprisal for

The serpent now has two heads

THE CURTAINS CALL

Submitted to The Poetry Foundation for Poetry magazine 2011

NAPOLEON'S WALLPAPER

‘He asked for cyanide pills -

Said he wanted to die like Napoleon’

Women

Hidden

Behind a lick of paint

Incredible, 40 and looking like a new born

But men,

What are we to do?

Faces like cracked floorboards

Skin like throwaway love poems

Brows furrowed by overzealous farmers:

There is no getting old gracefully

Beauticians can only suggest

Painting the mirrors a baby-blue

A wise man once said

Well, something but I’ve forgotten

I could not get past his

Balding crown of ugliness

I guess there’s nothing for it

Just lock ourselves away

Like His Imperial Highness

And watch and wait

As the red paint dries

EVERYTHING IS TIGHTENING

The air spits on the windows:

And paper light enters, but it's

Too opaque to look in or out

The black wrought iron gate

Is locked with the cement of snail-paths

Dense foliage holds visitors

At dagger point, bracken clutches heels

That’s if the sly ice does not take them on other journeys first

I have a thick woollen jumper and lamb in the freezer

I have jars of honey and the guilt of shattered bees

I have stocks of bread and wine

Ensam, Strindberg. Ensam and the rest.

A toast to winter: to a calm loneliness

THE GUESTS

Two glass eyes married

To a bricked brain

‘You wanna see what’s inside my stomach?’

Gladly not, gladly not

But like a child, it shows it anyway

Atriums lined with po-faced clots

Bleeding the bar by the pint or pail

Brown ales, clear gins, golden whiskeys

Furs and leather and silk and sweat

Child: ‘There is money here and a bad smell’

Above us I can feel the eyes

Of the fetid green swamp birds

Tipped to swoop and carry you off

To their Bluebeard room 69s

Pigs in blankets, this jealousy and fear

Looking apparently uncomfortable

You take me outside to learn

To breathe again and we watch

The sea bash its head against the rocks

You said ‘If I could only direct the comets’

If only.

A MIDDLE GROUND

Here, just off –

Centre

Look into the wood cider vat

Where the circles of sun and moon

Shimmer together.

They almost merge

Almost, but they don’t

If you dip your cup

They get closer, but they still don't merge.

There’s that slice of blue between.

Then, that afternoon night at dusk,

The neighbour's seagreen cow

Stuck its head in

And lapped its way to death

Not a bad way to go but

What can we take from it

Except confusion, it's just

Off - centre

LOVE'S POLYMATH

I hear the clicking at night,

She is working me out

On her bone abacus

‘If O be the sum of our days

And H be the days by which we have lived –

OH: should we divide

Or multiply?’

I hear the waves on the tight

Morning air

She is playing around

On her sinew harp

‘Get up, get up and see

What startled the cock,

What made him crow’

I hear the scratch of the graphite

The silver nails blunting

In the afternoon sun

She is making a map

Charting our courses

‘I will not be victim to external forces

No wind, I won’t follow your damn blow

You and me, we’re making plans

We’re going to get to where we want to go’

AN ENGENDERING

Submitted to The Poetry Foundation for Poetry magazine 2011

BIRD SHIT

To you I grit my teeth:

All the dove breeders

Writing out production lines of babies

Bleached to keep them white and male

All the shaven intellects

Man: where is your beard?

Woman: you do not need those glasses.

You faux-alchemists

Pretending insipid words

To be drinkable gold

Let Abraxas kick in your holies

Then it hits me

And I break off my pointing finger,

All the horror is

Not in the dark passages

Not in the bomb suits

But as the ducks on the shallow riverbed

Trapped and choked on reeds

Beaks stabbing murk, down there –

There is no up or down

I saw their brown bones when they

Dredged the blue lagoon,

I watched in horror and

I wondered what else

Never made it out

NAUGHTS

Cough, cough and splutter

Push up, out of the coal-dark,

Gutter behind my eyes

I can’t see it but I can feel it go:

The ocean of semiotic fluid

Leaking over the pillow

Teeth clenched: still they chatter

Lips dry and tattered and pressed

I bind a bent cigarette to them

And on lighting the tunnel’s end

The dregs of dream are sucked

Into the burning funnel

Alarm clock blinkers a red 8:88,

Have I moved beyond myself?

Crashed through time’s gates?

Into oblivion or limbo:

The terminal of Ouroboro?

I feel I have gone from man

To slime - the span of something

To nothing, oh shit

Ex nihilo nihil fit

CARD TOWERS

The cranes are at it again, necking

Overhead, do they think we cannot see them?

Picking up blue pallets & dusting

Off the fresh powder snow

Dropping one, it falling and thumping

On the fresh powder snow

At a woman’s feet – cursing,

Her fist held up to the indifferent cloud

That would have made a photograph

Or a graph, how many people

Deathed, murdered, killed

Yearly from heavenly bodies

In the making and unmaking

Of the towers of cards

DRINKING GAMES

Submission sent for Sentinel Literary Quarterly competition 2011

CHECKING OUT

It likes to read poems

That reed like poetry

And snd like poetry

So must be poems

Cookie-cutter pentameter

Finds this one

Half-baked or overdone

Some exotic spice is tried

But it burns the tongue

Too far removed from mother

It likes to read poems

With lines complex as labyrinths

Only there’s no thread to cinch

Just allusions to more mazes

Tower blocks of mazes

Upon mazes upon mazes

Wow,

Now it’s thoroughly lost

Which way should it go?

You were full of ideas once man

You were pregnant with ideas once woman

You were bouncing ideas off the walls boy

Now you sleep with your systems

To the quiet hum of the computer

All is in order, the spleens are vetted

All

Checks out

YOUNG SMOKE AND OLD FIRES

Submission for Mayor of Enfield's First Poetry Competition 2011

THE MANY FOUNTAINS OF YOUTH

The child climbs inside

And sucks on neon tubes

So, remains a child

The teenager plugs himself in

And bites onto the wire

So, remains a teen

Someone brought a gun to school

Show and Tell

Lucklee it did no talking

With all the gods now slayed

Who needs to imagine, anything,

At all

About our heads the walls are rising

Like smog-clad castles to the sky

STONE EGGS

Something is happening

Someone from the New Age says

‘Listen to the stones’

And you’ve 50 thou

With their heads on the ground

And another fifty thou

Gathered round the radio

Hoping a song

From forty years ago

Is coming on

I pay no attention

I’m with Mum with eggs

In the pan in the kitchen

Watching as they reduce

From a life of difference

To the same taste of eggs

Something was happening

It’s probably not no more

WAKE

Wake

Try and shake the thousand beetles from my skull

The ticking is still metallic so

They’ve not made it to the deepest part

They scatter like stagehands on the opening of the curtains.

Someone left pressed apple sap in the fridge

It no longer belongs to them & my throat gulps down

The cloudy sugar pulp.

I flick the switch, the bulb faintly buzzes

Someone is coughing and hacking

Against our shared wall

The spider in the bath is making for an escape

But has been there for days

Craft my hand

Into the shape

Of a dead spider

And pick up the small black thing

Turn my hand over

And we watch each other

A million eyes like frothy water

On my simple two poached eggs

Right, we watch one another

As time coughs up its sticky strands,

Sends them out across the Earth

And patiently awaits the insect

And man's vibrations

SIGUN

Inside the window

I was looking out of

An immense body of liquid was dropping

Upon the dark grey concrete

Sebastian, being a Norseman

And quietly sitting next to me

Made me consider the street a snake

Writhing and coiling and seething

As Loki took sweet poisoned revenge.

I had the icicle of a tissue up my nose

As my head was leaking out onto the tablecloth

Wait, this all being true; did I

Think the street a serpent? This is England

One does not talk of the weather

So knowing this, I talk of gods;

Of monsters?

Now there are faces

Outside the window

A pretty one,

One might call a goddess,

Her hands coiled around her eyes

Looking in

MY CURRENT RESIDENCE

This tenement block seems to sag

So must have been made by sagging people

It is ugly too

And boring to look at

And I think well people don’t choose how their children look

But this is not a child

This is an idea, clothed

And it is clothed in red bars

And freckled orange brick

Maybe the sagging people do not exist

That this edifice was made by a calculator

And a book of regulations, ticking each other’s boxes

Squirting cheap and low numbers into one another

Until this monster poured forth from whatever

Womb or egg a calculator and book of regulations

Might conceive something from.

This idea is ridiculous, but it is clothed

In the mind and I would much rather have something

Ridiculous in mind,

Than this sagging and ugly and boring building

A SEMINAR WITH ELIAH (50)

Oh Eliah you old heff -

Coming in with stale beer breath,

That I could abide.

But, I have to chastise

You spittin flies eggs across the room

When you oughta be clearing up the place.

Ess pesh when One glob stuck to my face

And hatched. I was bright orange with anger.

Crystallised in shuddering amber

‘I’m gonna come out and say it,

I know you all have been thinking it,

Poetry is better than fiction’

Ooooh you piece of shit, said internal diction

And I repeated ‘Piece of shit’

Under my breath a bit;

Curse words wasted and impotent

On such beings caught in the moment

You are better than this Eliah

Donut be one of those eye-fliers

I can see the buttons on the waistband

Of your blue jeans are not hand-in-hand,

I can see the buttons on your brown shirt

Donut see eye-to-eye but (I blurt),

To the poet’s mouth, that talk is empty

And to the poem’s ears, twice as deadly

You’re supposed to be threading, not cutting ties

Just look at those black boxes neath the class’s eyes:

All the creatives here brought their own bags

Don’t fill them with more shit.

PRIOR TO SHAVING

Shot through the city

Pushing red faced in dad’s coat

John’s shoes

Held together with duct tape

Remember: the old man

‘Yes, I can understand skateboarding,

Carving on a piece of wood shaving,

It’s all so much more natural than cars or bikes’

Ha! Mr old hippie still gets my goat

Pulls its woolly beard

Jumping curbs, people, stairs

Sometimes there were no wheels

Beneath the board, skidding air

And breaking slender bones:

Both wrists, I still have

A piece of bone floating round there

I’ll show you sometime

Back then,

There was a sure music

To the grind

THE BARN OWLS

They stand and gawp

The twits in twos

Beaks sharp &

Ready to bash in the brains

Of mice and lesser men

Their necks rotate on axles

The big eyes stare you down

As they sit up in churches,

In the lofts of banks

And other high up places

Clenching the beams

Curled claws that might

Come through letterboxes

And unhook the latch from the door

If they do not want you

To know they are there

You will not know

But listen for the sound of the wings

When they beat

You know something is up

Above and will be coming down.

EDGES

At work

My eyes had gone white

My pupils had gone

My irises were pale

They said ‘You need to get the edge back’

Like a sword in the fire?

Like the end of a ruler?

The brink of your seat

Before falling off and

Making an arse of yourself?

Now it was their turn to stare blankly

‘You need to get your edge back’

Fucking edges

I’ll put snakes in my shoes

Deplete your coffee supplies

‘Heaven cannot run W/O coffee’

‘Well, Hell cannot run without beer’

I shimmer at my perimeters

My presence swallows space

You go sit at sea with your edges

I’ll be that shadow lurking beneath the boat

A horror of some proportions

Fucking edges

I’ll put snakes in your shoes.

A HUNT

His eyes were bandaged

And he was kept in a darkened room

I would bring him his liquid dinner

‘I have enemies’ the dark said

Putting the white bowl

You would not know was white

On the table, I made to leave,

‘I will outlive them all’

And I left.

Sometimes the radio was on

Sometimes he liked Sibelius

I did not know what this was

As I overhead someone say it

I asked him once, I said

‘I heard you like Sibelius’

My voice went out into the dark

As if there were no walls

It went out and did not return

I did not think he was there

Until he turned on the radio

A transmission

From space to limbo

One night in a storm

He did go

But I was not there to see it

It happened the same:

They called out to him

In the dark

And he did not return the call.

Joshua said he flicked the switch

And from lack of use

No light did come on.

They opened the curtains

And by the light of the moon

Hunted for him

They found the bandages alright.

THREE O

Washed up

On the muddy shore

Of 3 O Morning

Your body next to me

Like 15 woodpigeons

I grope for you

They fly out the open window

I am left with a coo

ELIAH RIDING BRAINWAVES

Thou hast committed—
Precipitation: but that was in another country,
And besides, the drench is dead.
The Dew In Malta.

His story is not what he thought

(Thinks Eliah with his forked tongue

Cooking his brain in a quart

Of oil and in, a handful of fingers he flung)

History is no story but image

(He’s working it now, spooning an idea

Giving that mind a good massage

Making pancetta panacea)

Yes, yes, a chest of old photos

Unlocked in word, image and video

Caught and coloured by the eye

Called and given cadence in the ear

Felt and fingered by both

(Got it now, he get the flow:

Eliah can see the flux

Old, Mod and Po-Mo

No centrepoint, no crux!)

Just when you think you got the damn rhythm

The archaeologist falls into an anomaly:

An anachronism,

Like archimedes

Chilling in a Jacuzzi

The centuries,

Have rendered history : artistry

poetry & photography,

Bathwater.

HER WINDOW

Did she paint

Her window

Blue

So to appear

At the bottom of ocean

Or in the sky above?

There is a fault

That permits

A small eye

Of the black night

In

DOWN & DEEP

Sitting on the silver jetty of the girdered plateau

We’re told ‘fall backward and you’re right in’

I lean back and it’s as if some Higher Power

Picked up the landscape and turned it on its head

I’m flipped & falling into another, bluer world

Pushing myself up the weeded rope

Lead feathers in my pockets

Pulling me deeper into dark blue space

Fish, these small & hungry aquatic birds

Grow larger and larger and become planetary

And I am unsure whether I am orbiting Neptune

Or Neptune is looping round me

The water has formed a fist

And crushes my paper head

I hold my fingers across my nose and blow.

A Napolean Wrasse moves towards me

The thing stares me out with its flat gigantic eye

Warm and unwavering, its skin bashed in

By some celestial silversmith,

A clever blue moon.

I am given a velvety black cock

Down under, called a sea cucumber

It passes through my hands

And onto the ocean bed

This is unlike what I expected

There is not one jot of fear in me

It is as quiet as a carpeted bathroom

And feeling cleansed,

I do not want to leave

A HAZING

I remember a party at 5AM

A lie: I don’t remember the party

Try and think of something to recall

Blue wallpaper, though that could have been me

Looking out the window,

Nope, no entry point there.

Aha! In hand, there was a 50cl bottle of nondescript

Whiskey maybe brandy maybe both

Remembered.

There were several red-eyes talking quietly

Listening in half to the first birdsong, the

Leaving bell. Remembered.

A slack-breasted girl inhaling something

From a small brown jar and the

Smell of hospital wards, she said

‘It makes my head feel like a hot balloon,’

Sounds rewarding. Remembered.

Someone by my side peering into a mirror

The face, I do not recollect, it is like looking

Into a rippling pool by torchlight.

‘With these huge bags under my eyes, you would

Expect them to be packing and leaving for good’

‘Quoting Milton?’ I got no response

Maybe it was Milton – I wonder if blind,

He would have done a better job

Of constructing this scene

Of golden drink and blue settings

And parties

At 5AM.

HOME LESS

Submission for Mayor of Enfield's First Poetry Competition 2011

ORPHEI

Does any man

Strum or bang or finger

Only for himself?

I would not say so.

I would not like to say so.

The Chinese Lanterns are sent

Up and up in an inferno

To some phantom Euridi

The NASA blips and beeps are sent

Out and out through the infernal coldblack

To some alien Euridi

Trying to shudder the sky & turn some heads

(If indeed the stuff out there has a head to turn)

But turning nonetheless

Turning out rather than turning in

There’s a hell of a lot of turning in

That tears a man in two.

We were made to

Make waves and get caught in the flow, also.

But what’s the meaning there? What is being the point?

Well, what’s the point on the beak of a bird

When it makes its morning, evening anon cry?

The birds are full of problems, feathered problems

And they tell the world. I don’t understand it

But they tell the world anyway. Maybe some bird,

Some Eurydice

Understands it and answers.

So, does any man

Strum or bang or finger

For only himself?

A CHAT ABOUT TREES

"men and women are these trees with huge roots

like willow trees

and they get inside you and work in strong and deep

and then sometimes the tree dies

and there is never really any way to get them out, the dead tree just sits in there

and festers

and it makes looking at other trees, alive ones, painful

so what you have to do is let another tree take seed,

and sure it's not going to be the same, because the other tree still has those huge thick roots inside you

but the other tree grows into that and takes those roots, those roots that were dead and are attached to memories and pleasure and stuff

and it makes them its own

sometimes that tree doesn't grow properly, so you just keep on searching for another tree, not necessarily better, but different, maybe an oak or a beech or a maple

and they obviously bring strange and different fruit

like a maple, you can have maple syrup and pancakes

or horse-chestnuts, for eating or for conquering,

and you start to see that there are many different types of tree, but still see that they are all one tree - trees"

ANCESTRAL HOME

Like a dog

Sniffing around the arse of an old companion

I return to see if the smell is still the same

No, it’s not

BURSTS OF ORANGE

He gets himself out of bed by saying

‘Today I am not myself’

He walks through the wet city

Not seeing the city,

Seeing the orange grove,

A glass of iced lemon tea in his hand

Someone asks him a question;

He hears.

- ‘Can we pick what we like?’

- ‘As long as it is ripe & bright

And for the plucking’

- ‘Where would you suggest?’

- ‘There, see how the sun seems

To the favour the spot? That is not the light

But the flesh of brighter oranges

And the brighter the rind

The better the taste’

He walks through the grove

Back to where he started from

He lays his head and thinks

‘Yes, today I was myself’

FROM ELIAH'S CHEST COMES A NOISE LIKE A CHAINSAW

OI over here!

Bring the cold water

This man is a hot head

His eyes are baked eggs

He has a scar like a bacon rasher

From banging his head

On the grey roof

Several times a year

He keeps on shaking his head

In fits of ecstasy and the opposite

So fast he’s developed a Janus face

Flecked molten spittle daubs the walls

You could try and decipher it

I wouldn’t.

He can’t seem to get a break

His line is un-

Broken

At the centre of his forest,

On the heath

The woman in him

Is bleeding a lamb

But being at the centre

The lamb does not die

But bleeds and bleeds

And the red forest soaks it up

The carnivorous red forest

Pulsates harder and faster

Like the wings of a flying ant

Accelerating toward something;

Just don’t know what

(No son, you can’t ask the woman

She would stick you twice as fast)

HEY we asked for water over here

This man is smacking his dry lips &

Those lips are curled over his teeth,

Inside that fleshy O is a black hole.

If he implodes guys,

Where do you think he’s going to go?

If he goes, we'll be going too.

THE OLD DAYS ARE GETTING OLDER

Submission for Mayor of Enfield's First Poetry Competition 2011

THE TELEPHONE PROWLER

Sitting in the dark in my ivory tower

The telephone prowler, telephone prowler

Who is calling you at an ungodly hour?

The telephone prowler, it’s the telephone prowler

I’m the wrongest of numbers

Waking you

From the sweetest of slumbers

Mmm get home from work

I got that sweet deep hunger

I’m coming down the line

I don’t make cold calls baby

It’s the hottest of them all

And I’m coming down the line

Who is going to make your whole day sour?

Yeah, the telephone prowler, the telephone prowler

Your ear, my tongue softly does devour

The unseen tongue of the telephone prowler

For some of you I’m the closest thing

You’ve got to a friend

And when that phone rings, yeah

It’s about time you comprehend

I’m the voice for the modern age

You've nothing of worth to say

I pick up the receiver and take to the stage

We're actors, hot blooded actors

I think my heavy breathing does convey

I shake shiver and moan

Don't dare hang up the telephone.

I shake I shiver and I moan

Don't you dare hang up the telephone.