BOYS OF PREY

We watch you from the undergrowth cloaked in hedge

The toads and us staring out with swollen black eyes

Teeth sunk deep into the soft mud to slow our breath

You steer your body toward the window and cannon

Down the ivy past the wasps nest balling black words

Beneath your breath to keep cloaked past the open oriels

Your mother father zedding like hungry minotaurs

Eyetie has the bikes ready you jump on and we race

The black boned night to the maw of Monk’s cave

And sit and drunk slitting the bellies of oranges

Loading lawbreaker words on our jaws

The flatness of the fens carried the owlsounds

And echolocations of invisible bats to our grotto

We quietened and supped on a bottle of thick clearness

Groggy we woke the dawn and beat the temper home

GROWING FLESH

Swallowing word after word

Mouthing tasting the image

Whether it is to my liking

Whether I can afford

Pasting down in a notebook

The flimsy bones of memory

Hold a mossy skull to my face

I see my own dark wide eyes

A greased patch beneath the switch

Of the light in the family home

From all the times too short to reach

I press but the room remains in shade

The oak in the garden leans

Toward my palms I search

For the rusted nails I planted

But never reached the brow

I am sweating now and heavy

Too much flesh on the word

It is cooler up there in the top

My shoes talk on the nails

Squealing as I begin to climb

NIGHT PARADE

The night open as a broken shell

Boots is snoring in my ear mumbling

Dream song stuck deep in sleeps thicket

Light hunts in packs across the roof

I fight the pillow with head butt

And cursewords but the night

Open as a broken shell

So it is out into concrete oceans

And dark grass overlands

The sycamores moan lonely

The roots trip and grab my shins

Wanting company of blood

Branches vie for view but the night

Open as a broken shell

The country fair is in the park

The carousel still as a playdead snake

The big wheel still as the Earth

The lights of the caravans snuffed

And the gypsies are asleep with their blades

Locked the windows yawn but the night

Open as a broken shell

The slow bleed of cars run the road

The orange lamps burn in the metal

The streetsigns are cloaked in dark

The cars must be on the search for home

Words have no place here only the slush

Of cars and the hollow cracked steps

Open as a broken shell

TROUBLEMAKER

You do not miss the trick

The machine gargles and spits

Boring boring bored

Excavating the future paralysed

In its boredom, a biro pen

Clear plastic with blue vein

Like a hundred billion other

Gold tipped river writers

Doing sum, mindlessly

Studying Shakespeare

Stuck up noses with heads

Slammed against the table

But you do not miss the trick

This one pen is one pen is

Limitless in its singularity

You said it as the sleight

And it has taken me

A hundred billion pens

To understand what this means

This one among the many

A Trouble

Maker

CAT WITH WOMAN

It mews at her like she is mother

The claws snick out for a gouge

The red ball of knit a rat’s tail or bird

Innard dangles in front of all six of our eyes

She giggles as he pounces butts the wall

His black paw by her marked pale hand

His midnight coat swells with a hiss

He is looking to catch now

Becomes what he is now

Has his killface on now

He snaps leaps and snatches the chord

His tail tight cracking like a scorpion

He chews his prey she claps with glee

And gets up to stir our red soup

GUT FEELING

He takes it right down to his guts

A man plucking bone dust right from the air

Making bodies with words like blood bags

Red birds bursting on stained glass windows

I was told to stay away I got so close

I could smell the words on his lips

All the things he was considering

And did not have the time to say

Angry fingers dancing by his sides

Like mad advisors his eyes were eggs

Crackling with the blood birds popping forth

His nose twitched like a beak

Not to be tied down by anyone

Not to be tied down by anything

To anything lest he pours his guts

A CHAIN OF FLOWERS

The winged screech of the lion’s ear

The stabbed heart of the chrysanthe

After a series of walks to work you see

None have the time to smell the flowers

Let alone write about the smell of flowers

Let alone read the writing on the smell of flowers

The rudeness of the cyclamen

The burst cloud of the hollyhock

The smell of flowers is known only

To the young with their soft noses blown off

To the old who plot and potter away their days

The stabbed heart of the crocus

The broken stone of the lotus

THE RISING MOUNTS

Deep in the bar

A curse coiled round a pint glass

Cool & bitter the words sink

The embalming fluid is up

In the mouth and gone

ah wark the dag n cannot

wark where ah was

The 6 ringed Olympus of business

Of high sport boiled down war

The hardhats with concrete soul

Luminescent in their glowing coats

Mindful steel on the growing mound

They own the nightwatch

They say who come who go

You might argue but god knows

You get more trouble than it worth

And what do god know anyway

Was he too a victim to progress?

London of old swampland

All heat and force on the ley lines

Melted green glass brown wire water

The rings rust and the colour fade

Shallow grow the valleys

We ascend

CONSIDERING ORANGES

I sleep heavy I dream light

Where the pillow feathers

Poke around inside the head

Quill stuff you’ve never heard

There is a lot of merging

The human form expands moves

Into things, like a ride in the astral

Plane or the thought of being dead

For example

Take an orange

I push myself into it

And the sun flares the plume

Of the evening snow on the valley

The shivering black trees

The forest is all aflame

The parrot finch headbutts

A ripe rosehip, the juice dripping

Off the beak and back onto

The bright glowing orb

Sweet citrus nectar on a coal dark day

The bus stops short and the juice

Spits forward onto the white shirt in front

Of a suited man, grimaces says nothing

Grandmother with the gold ochre scissors

Snipping away, tending her Lion’s Ear

The fog of cataract clearing and now

Focussed and hard like apricot stones

Citrus light

The orange

I come up out of it

The ink wet pillow feathers moult

Spiral down inside the head

I sleep heavy

I dream light

WEATHERLORE

Doctors with steeplejack fingers

Running up his broken wrists

Snapped forward like crowfeet

Blueblack and swollen tight

They nimbly fixed up

Bone weathervanes

He could tell you arm raised

When the rains are coming

The joint packed like a full church

So close to the wet earthy dead

The priest’s wet jesus breath

Mumbling the old myths:

The cows are sitting in the churchyard

The dogs out are moving like madness

Can you smell the rising glade and bog?

The storm is coming, the bones know

A PIANO DESCENDS

A piano descends

Like a lovers hand

Down the spine

Going lower lower

Off the boards

Into the nether regions

The hand runs off down the street

Like a criminal fleeing the devil in him

Holing up in radios

Clotting in drains

Caught in the corner of eyes

Frantically on the keys

Spelling out the majors

Missing the minors

Up the evergreens on spots

The sun has never shed

Racing the stampeding lichen

That washes green over the skulls

Of the streetwalkers and nightfoxes

Consumes us one and all

SHAVED PARTS

Breath clean as a flute

A circular breathing one’s

Organic instrument

Can not is not ever

Stopped or tuned out

A song sans extension

A tough flute tough

Like a gun sharp as knives

A song the sum of its parts

Shaved in its parts

Imparted splutterings

The poem, the song:

Farts cough shit n all

DEEP IN THE RIVER

Hawk planted stands in the river

Moon plotted smashed into shard

Light sticks to the tree like paint

You can look deep in the river

Lose depth lose the you in the you

A vain child watching the mirror

You can look deeper wet nose

Face hawk tree moon merge

As shapes move like a heavy sound

Dripping dark beneath the surface

A WESTERN IDEA

And staring at the world

Like a kid with a toy gun

Infinite bullets and a keen eye

Nothing moves without my accord

Good enough with a knife too

To cut the neck of the sun

And send it zooming

Into oblivion

The kid’s face tanned brown

With the smatterings of blood

The grey blandness in breakfast

A stranger rides into town

COIN EYES

Pale hermits studying

Deep hermeneutics

Strangers to the moon

Getting drunk on word

High on the tide of colour

Paint with help from drugs

And drunk and drawn labia

Oh loved if I had a penny

For every time I have had

And have forgotten this feeling

I’d be crushed beneath the weight

A penny for those who never had it

The earth would break its belt

And fall into the Styx

Well, at least we could

All pay the old boatman

Riding the river of copper

Touring with life's sea shanti

Plugging the bottom with our poles

Like the wet lanes of Venice

YELLOW LIPS

Rolls is sitting drinking coffee

Sitting reading a big blue book

He’s got mustard on his lips

And no one has dared tell him

He’s got yellow lips like clowns

And his eyes, these dark squinting

Telescopes seem very very clever

Until you look at his yellow lips -

Then he’s a clown with a blue book

TREE CLIMBING

He rounds the oak rotates it in his head

The potter’s lathe jiggering on its roots

He gets the tough oak known

All the various nooks and holds

The sun caught in the green bower

An unreachable skinless fruit

He nods and launches himself

At the whorled trunk his foot catches

The squirrel hole and he is up

Gravity grabs and misses he is up

Each limb extends to his

Each branch shakes his palms

Nails encased in dark husk

His hand skin turns to bark

He is a stiff crow in its nest

He sheds his old gods and death fear

They drop like oak apples to rot on earth

He surveys the flatlands

Spinning on the wood wheel

His eyes are terracotta suns

HOMEMADE PLUMS

She is blue white blue white

In a Breton shirt feeling herself

Without touching herself

In the early morning breeze

The old crow moans above her head

A black alarm clock always on

She reads her book

Reads a line and looks at the field

Reads a line and looks at the field

Drinks her gin to take the swelling down

The undulating field that breathes

Like a spotless plum filled with worms

It is not until you take the first bite

Then you know and can tell