The Dread Letter Office

2020-02-21T20:56:00.004Z

It would be a conceit to believe that any of this is relevant…
Perhaps these are merely random words spat forth by misfiring synapses in the organic computer of an alter-ego too big to believe it has nothing to say; or too far gone to give a shit.
After all, life continues (for now); children are born; politicians evade the truth; nations rise and fall (as do sea levels) and the world lurches on regardless of the words that gather electronic rust on these flickering pages.

The Dread Letter Office management takes no responsibility for personal interpretation of these lines.
(Since when did management take responsibility for anything?)

Read ‘em and weep.

2020-02-20T14:47:00.008Z

The Book of Samothrace ~ Barry Windsor-Smith

Ancient Sound ~ Paul Klee

Untitled ~ Zdzislaw Beksinski

Cover for CoCo ~ Oscar Chichoni

Dragon's Pleasure ~ Jacek Yerka

Aftershocks Predated

2011-10-12T16:01:00.002+01:00

Your house was so empty
No weather forecast
Wind-blown and wood-grain
The dust stung your eyes
The walls wore a veneer
Too tender to last

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s warm heart
Where all was anchored
In the bay of chance

Your words were so empty
No summer clear skies
Wound down the stairs
To the vault of the past
Padlocked and airtight
With time-waxen lies

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s white lies
That sailed on the waters
To an unknown shore

Your eyes are the windows
To nobody’s soul
But lighthouses that guide
This loser back home
Shed of the lies
That we still have not told

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s soft tongue
Where the word was the music
In the ear of sea

Your smile is the stitching
On the morning’s warm hem
Lip-marked the rim
Of a coffee-cup cold
Sub-static hum
From which the future must stem

Ode to the memory of your mamma’s high laugh
Echoing round the houses
Of another world

August 2011

Pimping The Inverse

2011-10-12T16:00:00.002+01:00

The moon turns to illuminate
My impatient wait
For the imp of the perverse
Who [typically] turns up late

August 2011

Mutant Variations

2011-10-12T15:59:00.000+01:00

from eerie of concrete
through slow-time
and dead-heart release
i watch the monolith breathe
all creaking earthquake weather
and crackling pigskin pucker
soft down the decades
to the school of hard knocks
subtle in the infinite
cut to the bone
and i ask the sky
am i here all alone?

from this eerie concrete
echo slow release
and dread heart disease
i watch you sleeping breathe
all wet willed weather defined
and financially hogtied
to the crackling decades
at the school of soft options
infinitely subtitled
censorious
and i ask the sky
am i here all alone?

August 2011

Vertigo

2011-10-12T15:57:00.001+01:00

Late summer spiders
Span sedate this Sunday dream
Catch the feted flies
Of muted minutes in-between

Tuck them in goodnight
In beds of gardens green
And hollow out
The future’s opaque screen

Late summer spiders
Across the garden green
Skittle skate Sunday late
The future’s hollow scream

August 2011

Boneyard

2011-10-12T15:55:00.001+01:00

Confined to the head and vain under glass, I wish I could trust that my armour would last; hold up against the onslaught of days where each piece of knowledge is a chip or a fall from somebody’s definition of grace.

Keep a cool head they all say, keep your heart off your sleeve - but the trumpets that blow aren’t mine (I can’t blow ‘em) filled as I am with resentful self-doubt perverse and purgatorial – keep your cards to your chest and your eyes on the prize, keep your own council in the kingdom of lies.

Confined to the headland, beacon windows, frosted glass, the reef bares its teeth to unsuspecting hull while the keeper of light causes the coastline to cast its good eye to the night and wonders what the tide will cast up on morning’s return.

July 2011

Tread Water

2011-10-12T15:54:00.000+01:00

I might swim to a country beyond the imagination
If I had the inclination
But I don’t so I won’t
Since the imagination
Will always remain a more palatable destination

July 2011

The Chairman

2011-10-12T15:53:00.001+01:00

And I won’t wag this tailless dog
That named itself boredom
As a child who pulls the legs off a frog
And finds no room to store them
In the box that’s labelled ‘Acceptable’

After Berryman, via Iggy Pop

July 2011

Dancehall Daze

2011-10-12T15:50:00.002+01:00

Down at the water’s edge translating visions to flesh
Down by the river carrying dreams out to sea
Down by the water’s bright edge
Where the half-dead men dance
A sad and faltering fandango
With the ghosts of my vanity

Whisper don’t waken the beasts of my childhood
Whisper those secrets in vacuum night hollow
Whisper my dull wishes
In the hall’s half-shell echo
As if dances with dead men
Will capture my sanity

June 2011

Runner Bean

2011-10-12T15:48:00.001+01:00

In a dream of Sunday
Warm on freckled shoulders
The boy that I once was
Runs like only
He can run in dreams
Weightless in the onshore breeze
That tastes of salted spit
And highway diesel
And leaves him on the homeward path
Away from all that reason
His thoughts are a ploughed field
Seeded with tomorrows mistakes

June 2011

Everybody Hates a Rhyming Poem

2011-10-12T15:47:00.000+01:00

[especially a rhyming love poem]

He sang her down the night tattoo
She said he taste like paper glue
Danced tonight the obligatory mambo
Two they went where only one go
They kissed the sky’s bright spat display
Swam the road to Mandalay
And when the night up-lit the trees
They rose through light in slow degrees
To touch the wind upon the brow
To drink the night in the here and now
To go beyond the morning news
That lines them up like polished shoes
To go beyond the shallow flake
That fakes the day with wedding cake
To see behind these blinking eyes
To blow the night in a feast of sighs

June 2011

Everybody Hates a Love Poem

2011-10-12T15:44:00.002+01:00

Love is, to a large extent, a calling
To the dawning of every coming day
To the twisting turning on the way
To the waking the aching and the dismay
That must hold you to its breast
To count the heartbeats there

Love is, in many ways, a surrender
Of selfishness to the moment
Of days to an ideal
Of thoughts that wander too close
to the edge of the day
Of the body’s new beginnings

Love is, in all instances, a dream
That pours you your next drink
That paints the skylight stars
That holds you to your word
In the wooden afternoon
And refuses to be woken

June 2011

24 Frames per Second

2011-09-19T07:21:00.000+01:00

like a runner in black and white
french new wave cool
your feet treadmill cobbled street
your heart seeks to beat
in dreams we run like heroes
the ground beneath our feet
nothing in our heads
hollywood
I hear you whisper freedom

May 2011

I, Robot

2011-09-19T07:19:00.001+01:00

To bow at your epi-centre
Where aftershocks and premonitions abound
To kiss the day we met
With ever increasing detail defined
To run my hands
Across the years that span the taste of you
To be enclosed
To be encased
As if all that waits in tomorrow’s hallway
Can wait a little longer

... By Any Other Name

2011-09-19T07:18:00.000+01:00

Love is a temple
In glare of the sun
Your gaze is a razor
a phaser set to stun
Sacrificial beauty
In the passing of days
Beauty no less
In zigzag heat haze
Transient intransigent
Dewdrop on rose
Misled by the need
Meaning to suppose
Love is a temple
In the glare of the sun
Your gaze is a caress
A ghost on the run

May 2011

A Pyramid of Needs

2011-09-19T07:16:00.001+01:00

As the sky fell down on the sleeping town
Where they slept in enclosed arms
He dreamed of her and she of he
As if the world had deemed them charmed

As the sky fell down on the dreaming town
All motion-stop and coronal flame
He dreamed she dreamed of him alone
In a world washed free of shame

As the sky fell down on this shanty town
Where the sleepers rattle nightly
She dreamed he kept her safe from harm
In an embrace not taken lightly

April 2011

Henna

2011-09-19T07:15:00.002+01:00

She dances a pagan ritual seduction
Through halls that echo a ghost tattoo
Blue aura hosts the introduction
To a world unnamed; an alien view

He drinks her down like perfumed smoke
Savouring the head reaction
He pays the price and wears the yoke
Tastes her name in warm transaction

She takes his offering, thin and fleeting
Files it with the wilting roses
Sets him up for an executive meeting
On an oversized bed of poses

And gazing into the void created
He wonders if he’s gone too far
To ever have this love back-dated
or breach the cores of distant stars

March 2011

Synaptic Radiation (Burn Baby Burn)

2011-09-19T07:14:00.000+01:00

Here at locustheart where they take your shadow and shave its edges just enough
to take you by surprise.
Like when you pass between two streetlamps and the second shadow rushes to pass from behind you
to in front of you.
Here the cold and crawling skin that radiates from the base of your skull and intensifies
with its own awareness.
Like the fear of being alone in an empty cave where unseen lives seem to leer
from the umbra of your fire.
Here is where you begin and here is where you end.

March 2011

Air Guitar

2011-09-19T07:11:00.001+01:00

Those grains of sand that reshape my face
Under the direction of these trade winds
Do so without intention or regret
For the weather is not a malevolent tool
At the hand of some divine purpose
But a blind force tied to those mechanical laws
To which each atom is bound

Japan, New Zealand, Pompeii

March 2011

You Have Been Warned

2011-09-19T07:10:00.002+01:00

Sometimes time presses heavy on the moment
Like all the weight of the body as it concentrates itself into the tip of a stiletto heel
These are the times when it is good to walk barefoot

Sometimes the light can erase a whole layer of skin
Like a chemical breeze gyrating through a forest of locusts
These are the times when it is advisable to wear shoes

Sometime the tide will bring in the fresh salt of mourning
Like a wrenching arm in garage changing wheel
These are the times it is best to lie still

Sometimes the day will be filled with war
Like green algae on a pond full of eels
These are the times to make waves

March 2011

Spider

2011-05-23T12:30:00.002+01:00

Come to my head
In the fury of the rain
In the patterns here defined
As the wood reveals its grain

Come to my thoughts
In the bustle of the train
Nobody here reports
To their automated husks of pain

Come to my arms
Embrace that knows its bounds
Give more that the words reveal
Take more than these echoed sounds

Come to my heart
In the kingdom of my chest
Beats a hollow thud were it but
For the things that we invest

Come to my hands
That which cannot be bought
That whose price is far beyond
The lies that we are taught

Come to the moment
Come to the day
Come to the party
Well…come to the fray

March 2011

Nadir Telescope

2011-03-02T15:42:00.001Z

I open my eyes to the riots on the street
Up through hope where the highways meet
The fabric of my life torn and incomplete
The cards arrayed at my shackled feet

These men in the city showing only the whites of their eyes
These abuses of power with the proliferation of spies
These children of privilege abusing with lies
These contrails distant roar that dissect the skies

These voices here raised in the disintegration of days
These fences these foils these isolationist ways
These faces on the street whose anxiety betrays
These somnambulant feet that negotiate the maze

These memories of rain on parched lips sky raised
These fields of ochre pattern cracked and overgrazed
These wells and rivers all but memory erased
These feet of clay this sad malaise

I close my eyes and let it slip away
Down through hope where corners fray
The fabric of my life with thoughts in disarray
And the cards will fall just where they may

February 2011

Existence is Elsewhere

2011-03-02T15:41:00.002Z

She ran him down to alien town
Where he helped her build the moon
Draped in a golden buttoned gown
His time had come too soon

And all she knew and all she had
She owed to Che Guevara
And those amber days in Leningrad
That named her Cait O’Mara

She ran him down with ill intent
For the accumulated fate
He’d pushed her way from armour rent
By the act of being late

Late for school and late for learning
Late for heading home
Late to feel the need for turning
Away from pastures known

She ran him down in pale blue shark
That she’d bought from André Breton
Arrived before the dawning dark
and hoped that they would get it on

February 2011

A Single Frame from a Foreign Film

2011-03-02T15:40:00.002Z

He saw her on the skywalk
She looked so pale and thin
He tracked her down through alien town
But she would not let him in

And all those clues nailed up like shoes
Upon a wall of wooden doubt
Wouldn’t do to shake the blues
Nor turn her inside out

The lock she stole from wonderland
Served it’s purpose well
Kept him on the back foot
But served not rumours to dispel

Rumours whispered in the skywells
And shouted down the night
That her heart was cold her purpose cruel
That they ever had the right

To judge her by actions perceived
With gloating eyes that peered
Through the wrong end of the telescope
Through magazines revered

He saw her on the skyway
His camera bit the night
White on black up-lit looking down
Her soul had taken flight

His office strewn with litter-news
He smoked her down his eyes
Her seed a high-lit lover's lip
Whose whisper shouted “lies”

And stood behind that lock
A life in disarray
Where cell-lit walls would stutter
“There are other ways to pay”

Pay in paper. Dressed up as gold
From the of shadows on your shelf
A price that can’t be satisfied
By photos of yourself

He saw her from the skybridge
Awaiting chalk outline
His camera jammed between his teeth
In a moment he would define

As the moment of his wonder
Where all futures did depart
The thin edge of the wedge
A stake right through his heart

But behind her on the billboard
The sky is always blue
Perhaps a puffy cloud
For authenticity to imbue

February 2011

Bite the Hand

2011-03-02T15:39:00.001Z

Storm against
The bars of your cage steel
Like the teeth of snarling dogs
Tethered to your schooling

You are not
Fodder for the warring steel
A docked tail of snarling dog
Tethered to your schooling

Powerless
Against the razor steel
Raised hackles of snarling dog
Tethered to your schooling

Rise up
Twist the bars of your cage steel
Red eyed rage of snarling dog
Tethered to your schooling

You are
The key to the caged steel
Muzzle for a snarling dog
Tethered to your schooling

Free
To destroy your cage
To steel against the leash
Tethered to your schooling

February 2011

Whom The Gods Notice

2011-03-02T15:37:00.002Z

Looking up at the violence
That fuels the afternoon sky
Lifts the girl who started running
On the day she learned to walk
After they replaced her withered limbs
With articulate steel
That spoke to her of horizons
Wider than the smile
Adorning her tear-stained face
Spoke of loss and rumour
In tones approaching light
And left a trail of ghost dust
Pixel fine in bas-relief
For following detectives hired
By exoskeletal surgeons
To track down the steel legs
Of the girl who started running
The day she learned to walk

January 2011

Dust

2011-03-02T15:35:00.003Z

I don’t want you slipping away
Like dust on the lip of counters grey
Conducting business concrete creep
I'll blow with the wind that bids me pay

I can feel you slipping away
Can’t hold on to what I’ve broken
Like all those toys and radios
That didn’t answer to what I'd spoken

Twenty years cannot erode
Like paint that peels the days away
Marks me down as also-ran or raconteur
Time will stand my colours to display

Twenty years cannot erode
Nor lighten the unspoken burden
That lies between us uncertain
A weight that creaks the blowing curtain

Twenty years slipping away
Like dew on the lip of morning fey
These crystalline thoughts cannot endure
The interactive onslaught of today

January 2011

Metal Guru

2011-03-02T15:34:00.002Z

A diesel engine throbs in the blackness of morning silence
Fumes hit the buttons that transport you through time
To another morning in another life on the other side of the world

Polarised filings of past endeavour viewed through the prism of age
Filigree flavours remembered on perfumed timelines
Lubricate the cusp of the wave called now

The cold bites your mind through the soles of your boots
The morning is a sacrificial anode for your future self
A fact that cannot ally your shivering nor still your racing heart

Polaroid snapshots viewed through panes of obscured glass
These fragile anchors hold you fast against the maelstrom
The present keeps moving intangible mercurial metallic

Voices chant in the blackness of morning solitude
Mist hangs low in the field below the high school
Everything tastes of yesterday

December 2010

This is Not a Haiku

2011-03-02T15:33:00.000Z

Black days lived in the light of change
Watch the empire fall in
upon its cardboard ramparts

December 2010

Skeleton Key

2010-12-15T12:20:00.003Z

Morning dressed herself in black
Opened the door to the sun
With a key pressed in a bar of soap

Mourning dressed herself in amber
Closed the door on all before her
Bolted with catechism and holy water

The bars of my cage leave a shadow permanent
Across the bridge of my nose
My mouth describes a downward arc
To spark the star between my eyes

Morning rose in waves of amber
Cold against the doors of dawn
A key to impress a bar of soap

Mourning rose in waves of black
No key for tomorrow’s doors
Unquenched by catechism or holy water

November 2010

The Infinity Blues

2010-12-15T12:18:00.003Z

Ochre crumbs the opening lines
Brick dust moss-split spawn on the air
Find crevice purchase
Sub-divide
Real estate real estate
Revolution
Grown in increments of infinity
Poised
For the downfall
of the empire of man

November 2010

Woodchip

2010-12-15T12:17:00.001Z

Leeching hope from homeland to heartland
High on contrail soup in stratospheric headband
I don’t walk I sublimate
Apostle and apostate
Walk the golem heights thus armed
Tug at conscience totem charms
Hung from ears and necks like beads
Shake like frost and rattling seed

If I was coming for you
it would be on leopard’s back
Not for me that girded steel
or this comfort hack

And dogs would howl for mistress moon
Halfway headless anger spent too soon
The wolf at the door framework and pelt
Now it comes to hunger felt
To night patrols and blue-lit curfew
Pubs n clubs numb to curse you
Ready for the waiting queue
Whose faces masked wood to glue

October 2010

Dissolve/Rewind

2010-12-05T11:17:00.001Z

Look into my eyes scarecrow
Buttons bright burning hedgerow
Talk to me of crow and raven
Magpie mind and turncoat haven

Let me fly far away from there
Where buildings lean and people stare
Leave behind all memory
Of the daily killing spree

October 2010

Carnival Rides

2010-12-05T11:14:00.002Z

Follow the grave and shallow American model
Shadow cast catwalk cardboard and fragile
Raise a glass to the acolyte sky
Painted golden sunset
Pay entrance fee at exit turnstile

Questions grave for the shallow American model
May serve to surrender to the alien heart
Measure the distance between us
And the dust on our fingers
Pay the ransom agreed from the start

Dig a grave for the shallow American model
Profit now and pay with tomorrow
Raise your eyes to see above
Your sad soft shoe shuffle
Pay the guilt fee in charity sorrow

September 2010

Hypotenuse

2010-12-05T11:11:00.003Z

The cat curled like an inverted question mark.
The tree offered her shelter from the just-started rain.
She watched me watching from the yellow window.
My face a question she had no intention of answering.

September 2010

Sand in the Gears of Tomorrow

2010-11-11T20:45:00.002Z

As words escape down alleyways
I hum a tune half-remembered
Rising from sandy seabed memory disturbed
All mannerisms and salt encrusted poses
For a man who has no failings

From canyon corners caverns caves
Echo back a second out of time
From hotel room fake fjord walls
Loaded lullabies of nostalgia and regret
Presupposing a yet unmade bed

Chords established ingrained and entrenched
When struck will vibrate through time
To afternoon rooms sunlit and stagnant
Postcards from a past
Folded stitched hem embroidered

September 2010

Rosary

2010-11-11T20:43:00.001Z

Garland your sky with florid visions
Stations of the double-cross
Raise your hem show the incisions
Stitched with the hair of a horse

Spread your arms you junkshop Jesus
Crucified post-pixel priest
Declare your aphorism-cobbled thesis
The glory of a short-term lease

On hemstitched heels misunderstood
Your winged words ascend
Notching grooves on wooden heads
With nails not made to mend

Sundial

2010-08-16T08:40:00.001+01:00

Love cuts a new rung
On the ladder of swords
The trees steal the green
Right out of the lawn

Rain washes blood
From the ladder of swords
The trees bow their branches
Submission to mourn

And as the sun kills the moon
Climbs the ladder of swords
The trees throw their shadows
The morning to scorn

August 2010

You are a Waterfall

2010-08-16T08:39:00.001+01:00

I taste your love upon my lips
Touch your heart your fingertips
Words that ride the moon’s eclipse
In wishes spent on Freudian slips

You hold me up against the light
Key my soul screwed shut tight
Send me out to face the fight
Take my sleep in falling night

July 2010

Title from "Us Ones In Between" by Sunset Rubdown
You are a waterfall
waiting inside a well
You are a wrecking ball
Before the building fell
And every lightning rod
Has got to watch the storm cloud come.

Paternity's Blade

2010-08-16T08:38:00.002+01:00

The door is an aperture for the lens of his passing
Drinking the day from a rose-coloured glass
The photos of babies between dust bound covers
Weighted now in their teenage years
He hears the radio’s echo in the kitchen sinking
Wonders the knife edge of persistent memory

July 2010

Fore gone Conclusions

2010-08-16T08:36:00.003+01:00

And your spine will tingle in anticipation of the diplomacy of our knives
And your bombs will fall in the vacuum of newsworthy items
Take your stance your sword-hand extended
Take your cut from alms amended
We are not men
We are agents of reaction
We are not women
We are the eve of destruction
Take our cut from ledgers amended
Take our stance sword edge lovingly tended
And your bombs will bring you to your knees on the late late news
And your spinal cord severed by the diplomacy of our knives

July 2010

Sublimation

2010-08-16T08:35:00.001+01:00

I hear you stumble on the stair
Pocking the surface of my tune
I love you for your particular flair
For leaving the room too soon

July 2010

Blind Man Zoo

2010-08-16T08:34:00.001+01:00

I press my hands between my knees, for fear my thoughts fly free; describing heartbeat’s rise and fall; paint my name upon the wall.
On knees I rest bisected chin, smile a smile, a cheapskate grin. My life could press between these pages – open, fold, cardboard stages.

I free my hands 'tween porcelain thighs; canvas stretched to expose details - a touch-up job on azure skies.
Ill adept and pistol-whipped, I rushed toward the prize, scratching itch and war-wound glitch, the walls imbed with nails.

I fly my hand across my face to break the tension surface, hoping yet to taste the wind, the flowers that unearth us.
I dip into the great divide between the day and the daylight; while up above the tree-line sky where needle threads the camel’s eye, wings the thought that no-one bought: I am cyclops sans an eye.

June 2010

I Know You; You are Cherokee

2010-08-16T08:32:00.003+01:00

The moon is the fulcrum
About which I revolve
One constant landmark
In the night bus window view
My words without receipt
Emit no music
They are:
- No carrier for a moral
- No words to the wise
But intent on the cockle
Of your waiting ear
A virus to spread

The sun is the pivot
About which we all swing
The seasons rearrange
The yesterdays we idly consign
To pixels on an electronic page
Dependant on so small a thought:
It’s working now unnoticed
Why should it stop working?

I am the centre of what I know
A seemingly stable atom
In an unstable concept
I am dust on the face of time
Shouting as loud as I can

June 2010

The title for this piece of mindfuck is spoken by the Cherokee lift/elevator attendant to Albert Einstein (who has just had the general theory of relativity explained to him by Marilyn Monroe) in Nicolas Roeg's "Insignificance"
Einstein responds by professing his understanding of the Cherokee belief that wherever you are, there too is the centre of the universe

Gold Tooth

2010-06-05T07:57:00.004+01:00

In ivy corner ghost walled garden
The gold in his mouth flashes
Sunlight filtered down through green
Drumbeat beast-heart ashes

Take his crystal charms for ransom
Check your pulse rate feathered falter
Kiss his jaw and stroke his cancer
Set fickle flesh on fiery altar

Caged complex walled in steel
Convex switches silver bullet sails
Courts his smile his dragon breath
Scratches dust on rust-bit nails

Left behind his ghost walled gardens
By roots of routes hard to define
His touch too touched to find a way home
His ideas curdle your thoughts unwind

Now dragon breath into your ear
A perfumed paradox denotes
Touches corners countersigns
Prescribes the perfect antidote

May 2010

The Establishment Blues

2010-06-05T07:57:00.003+01:00

Under the lights of service stations
Lubrications machinations
Molded scolded held to ransom
Strung up on the credit transom
Yellow lit and petrol fuelled
The lonely crowd is massed and ruled

Conned to act both the cow and milkmaid
Daily dosed with swine-flu kool-aid
Doped and duped and dipped in treacle
Sprayed encased in matters fecal

So pour your self into the night
Make sure that your song is right
Kick out the jams and pyramid scams
They're only statues wrought by bowing hands
don’t let the morning’s national commands
Override your heart’s subversive plans

A Response to the UK General Election
May 2010

Windmills

2010-06-05T07:54:00.001+01:00

Death by a thousand cuts
Put to sword the prince of cups
Ripples in your amoebic puddle
May never touch the outward moving sides

But paddling yet with every pore
Hoping to never see the impeding shore
His armour rent from inward rust
His weapons out of date

Columns of statistical chemistry
React to the horseman’s sad decline
Track his fall across weathered palms
Where life-lines run in parallel

Here the coconut oil for carnival stalls
A bikini beach for atom souls forgot
Here the diet of food for thought
Leaves silhouettes of everything that I’m not

April 2010

Timberline

2010-06-05T07:53:00.002+01:00

Out there where the statues gaze out at newsreels.
In here where my chest is a cage for ideals
Out there where the wolves howl at the queues
In here where my spine is for keyboard reviews
Out there at the oil-enriched acid-etch dude-ranch

Here where the truth is the heart of the lie
Where conspiracies race for the courage to fly
Here where go-getters do what they’re told
Where ideology stops and is melted for gold

In here where the square peg fits in a round black hole
Out there the where the planets conspire to dissolve
In here where the bells have been pealing forever
Out there where sirens call ships to the river
In here with the hollow statue carved out of flesh

April 2010

The Hook From Which You're Hung

2010-06-05T07:48:00.000+01:00

You are no vessel for your charms;
their high flying feather frightened
by the beach shell-cockled ear
From the ragged ends of arms display
cascade the broken synapse
that reconnect in dark array

Now apple cores for your mind’s eye,
lizard skin and red dust devils
while wind cold-cirrus paints the sky
Reduced to wandering dishevelled
in chequered cardigan and tie,
sadly worn to seed and furrow levelled

And on your dream-teeth whitened
the taste of salt dissolved
on a breath of windswept tear

April 2010

Launching From The Blindside

2010-06-05T07:46:00.000+01:00

There are no tooth marks on my blindside
They attack me from the front
These ghosts,
these cartographers mapping
the coastline of my way
Through arctic sandwich layers
Through forest nose and tongue
To the desktop of my wandering
To the taste of yesterday

April 2010

You Taste of Moonlight

2010-04-04T11:40:00.001+01:00

As I tiptoe across the lake’s meniscus
Leave ringing trails of ripple tides
Falling birds will feather reason’s edges
And bells peal waves that reach the other side

And with feet of clay I mould myself
A fable cast in porcelain

While burning bonfires on the beach of soapbox dreams
Windmill stator winding armature inducing
Voltage in a cortex fold
Sparks will fly into the night defined

And heaving heart to stem the rising satellite
I plough the stars to fit you in

As I rest my head on hope’s meniscus
Surrender daily to the rising tides
Kiting birds will define my reason’s edges
And silent bells transport me to the other side

And Unsurprised I find myself
Alone in a long story cut short

While windmills burn on beaches far removed from dreams
Electric current finds no path to earth
Buzzing in my teeth
Undefined, Unconnected to the reeling stars

And tasting night upon my tangled tongue
I swim to you in water waved in light

December 2009

Black is Burned

2010-04-04T10:04:00.000+01:00

The crow descends in silhouette
Trees scratch his name against the dawn
While last year’s leaves as yet un-swept
Declare the day in whispered scorn

And from my thoughts hang twisted kites
Which steal the night unhinge the locks
Their fingers search out every tumbler
Their tails jump-start the mourning clocks

His silhouette descends through boiling clouds
Calls my name across the dawn
The flock mark my passing and check my pace
I pick my beak with talon thorn

Breath condenses words from steam
Balloon thoughts here too soon dispersed
This music feeds my fever dream
Leaves me walking paths well versed

March 2010

Non Sequiturs for Un-pruned Roses

2010-04-04T10:00:00.000+01:00

This groove and tongue tirade
Channelling some chic samurai
In pitched battle teevee dreams
At the edge of a fashioned world

Runs with the blood
Of a thousand slain poppies
In the veins of some velvet morning
And the children of an arcane moon

Ultraviolet waves once crashed
Upon the keys of your skeletal coast
Derailing trains of Cartesian thought
Leaving poison pens impatiently poised

Now this machine with morose-ghost standards
Tastes your tender edge, your acid etch
And whispers a secret two-step
Into the dancehalls of your inner ear

And the stones once placed upon your eyes
Make holes in a papier-mâché mask
Send ripples through the mind’s catacomb
And echo in the face of an alien son

March 2010

A Thousand Miles and I'm Getting There Too Soon

2010-04-04T09:58:00.000+01:00

I am a one-way street
Traffic combs my hair-shirt hackles
You are the ghost highway
Where horsemen headless rattle shackles

I am the vampyr moon
Eye teeth arch behind plastic lip-gloss
You are the Aztec sun
Cooled to rage by empyre and cross

I am the evolving ape-man
Chisel-tooth necklace and sharpened stone
You are the will of the forest
Breathing light and decaying bone

I am the padded cell
Danger contagious no lace in my shoe
Decorate your walls in calligraphy

You are a two-way mirror
Quicksilver for the passing through
Of light and lacklustre astrology

You are the will of the forest
Fetid rotting insect moon
I am the evolving ape-man
Lost his mind, found his voice too soon

You are the Aztec sun
Stone trees silhouette the reeling stars
I am the vampyr moon
Blood 'n' guts nightclubs, singles bars

You are the ghost highway
Blue lights flash against your will
I am a one-way street
This glass city flows but I stand still

February 2010

Title from “I’ve Been Let Down” by Mazzy Star
"Catch a train on a silver afternoon
A thousand miles and I’m getting there too soon
Take me there when I should be going home
Tell me why I’m still feelin' all alone"

The Persistence of Memory

2010-04-04T09:55:00.000+01:00

Where are the rusted keys that wind these crooked clocks
Where time lies stalled in pools of solder cooling
And tepid waters rise to overflow these worried locks?

Who times these tides of plankton that ebb your eyelid shore
And overflow to traverse your cheek describing
A platinum arc that crowns slo-mo in dusty parquet floor?

What wisdom lies in teardrops teeming with galaxies of thought
Myriad objections, obscure and off-the-wall
Declaring null the gospel saints you wish you'd never bought?

Why cast oblique reference to that second-hand for hours
Whisper 'wait' then holler "all aboard"
When bound for heights but hellbound sent, equipped with earthly powers

February 2010

Cold Heart, Warm Hands

2010-02-13T16:35:00.003Z

Seems I slept through the lucid dreaming
My symbols clashed with those fields of rain
I was overburdening and unrevealing
I never got the rules of the game

You stayed up all night demanding
That the morning bring another day
Bought yourself some time by stealing
Futures from the underlay

Now I sleep through the great undermining
Of all I once stood for and all I now know
I am not the soul worth mining
No room here for seeds to sow

You work nightshift on nursery rhymes
Rather than to face the day
When all your work-wise clocking times
Leave your heart with nought to say

I’ll sleep through this numb acceptance
Of every mirror shard and hardwood shaving
Slipped from the foundry to factory fence
I’ll not scold them for misbehaving

You won’t sleep on this luxury bed
Stuffed with reminders and counterfeit notes
Lost to the garbage that'll fill your head
With promises, escape-routes and antidotes

February 2010

The Subterraneans

2010-02-13T16:34:00.002Z

These children of the ancient tribes
Their cards dealt to the wheel
Ride the subway to oblivion
And tell you how to feel

Shaken by these earthquake days
Where there's nothing left to need
My unforgiving thinking ghosts
Have all but gone to seed

Reduced to the haunting hallways
In those sketches of the past
Allowed to surface daily
childhood flavours that won't last

Reduced to night sky watching
In a whole another time
Reduced to speaking Russian
On the rose-red central line

These predictions of a coming war
And tense truth-tax evasions
Piss in the halls of justice
Stall trains between the stations

They don’t question fast-track changes
To the languid laws of convention
Not in the ink mouths of the media
Nor a shortened span of attention

So down your football sedative
Take away the world’s hard edge
Pretend that you don't know me
The thin end of the wedge

February 2010

Pond Life

2010-01-31T09:22:00.002Z

Looking up at plankton dust filtered
Through the gills of the moon’s sting rays
The algae asks:
“What you gonna do with these dreams?”
While the hooks in my skin
Barbed and unbaited
Conspire with the ice, (a true glass ceiling)
To hold me fast in a watery stasis

January 2010

Soloista!

2010-01-31T09:20:00.001Z

Nobody knows you at the centre of the crowd
Your tattooed fingerprints
The weapons in your head
You can walk through this city an invisible man
Without touching another mind
Behind masks of brittle iron
You carry all your collected dreams autumn blue
In pockets winter deep
Coiled for the spring
And your footsteps scuff flint against incendiary stone
To light the fuse
For summer's expansion

January 2010

Bell Jar

2010-01-31T09:18:00.001Z

The watcher holds his orbit tight
Spins up there in meat satellite
Cables snap to drag the clouds
Curtains drench the numbing crowds

He takes my blood my budding horns
Says there’s is no beauty in a rose without thorns
And the ghosts that flee his haunted look
Pass through walls of unread books

Cradling Cats he calls the night
Presumes himself neither wrong nor right
While fashioning hooks to end these lines
With knives and spoons and bent fork tines

January 2010

The Air Under Desire's Wings

2010-01-09T20:14:00.001Z

When he lay you down in a field of fallen feathers
While comets swam across the ballroom of your womb
You lay tongue-tangled in a myriad of possibilities

Colours collide with clouds beneath the arch of your closed eyes
Sending searching words reeling their meaning to find
Messages secreted between your world and his

When you cushioned him from the falling ground
And the circling wings unthinking threw no shadow
He gave no thought to future paths converging

In the ritual flight of meeting minds to nothingness
Each flower blooms to form an individual face
In the writhing of the cascading meadow

When you lift your eyes to touch the constellations
That swirl in the palette of his eye
He gives you the night, a filigree promise

But it is you
You who will need to lay claim to the morning

Reflections in the Eye of the Storm

2010-01-09T20:12:00.001Z

I am.

At the core of this construct, this cultural effigy; there unwinds a clockwork heart whose spring was once wound then key tossed to smelter.

And the duration of unwinding is spent conforming to the carbon-based copy; shuffling blueprints deduced from the rules of the universe.

And corroded crumbs of wisdom taped to ticking cog-wheel whirr, count off the days in shades of rust and rot.

And rust itself is a poor conductor for all these construct sub-routines; rot a scarecrow foot at the corner of a crystallised cornea.

So this construct collides with its world, denies what is offered up as truth; strives to break free from the ties so carefully soldered in construction.

And had I not these construct eyes and ears for input to overload, I’d walk this path graveward with all the automaton-grace of patriot.

And on that walk I would pass beneath the waving flags whose bloodstained weave reflects the thin vain veneer that the operating system requires us to revere.

I am not.

Theory Holds Water

2009-12-13T20:06:00.000Z

Here at my window where the new world holds sway
Meagre food threads ache on the cusp of my day
Here where the future has become a fag end
Burnt knuckle yellow dead letters un-penned

Groundwater looms in the crook of the night
Rising without wings without death’s appetite
Rushes its run through the streets of my dreams
Stitches to render from these foolhardy schemes

Here where I wrap your bones in sweet flowers
Gravity’s low hopes now rotting fruit hours
Here where I sentence these strings of words free
Shake the world silent they fall from dead trees

My heart rendered cruel in a coal black estate
Windmills that vane the cold night’s old debate
Whirling the skyline despite the vain cries
Of the nearly dead idiot-voiced lords of the flies

Here at desk of the real estate moon
Waxing gibbous candle waning too soon
Here where the last of my tears now break ranks
Trapped voices freed from green dolphin tanks

November 2009

As I Stood at Twilight Edge

2009-11-28T09:09:00.002Z

I took the long road out to the edge
Nobody told me
It would be shorter coming back
Nobody mentioned the rows of headstones
Like footprints in the snow
Nobody told me
My spacesuit wasn’t designed
For this outdoor life
So will I set these still-lives free?
Send them home for moon and me?
And will I have the eyes to see
That seeing in itself won’t set me free?
These jigsaw pieces form the skeleton key
To oxidised locks time encrusted
Bone chests contain
Somnambulist compositions
The awful weigh of pages torn
Freehand from sentiment’s thesaurus
Oh ghosts of chrysalis husk
Why regret the winged release?
Why hold forth in waves of light
The night that holds me yet?
This rigor, this mortal skyward finger
Of a past that holds no purchase
For the fisted digits that patient tap
A Morse code catechism -
An almanac of wasted days
On wooden top crematorium
Dust from smokestack skyward sent
Messages sketched in sand
Await approaching tide
Nobody told me
It would be shorter coming back

November 2009

Sleepwalker

2009-11-28T09:08:00.001Z

In dust
She tiptoes past the library
Where dictionaries decay
Words becoming silverfish

By night
In the throws of fever dreaming
She swallows up the town
And all its sleeping secrets

Blue clouds
Obscure the millions weeping
While tasting bitter regret
Her dreams ascend to grace
Afraid of waking monsters

By day
She walks the paving patterns
Tastes the heat haze rising
Vomits up the fragile night

In dust
Her footsteps break the seals
Of letters never delivered
To the mothers of dead children

November 2009

Trans-Actions

2009-11-22T08:32:00.002Z

If the words of my heart
By Tesla coils or otherwise
Induce
A reaction in you
In the core of your flame

Then I am made more
In Beardsley curlicue or otherwise
Embellished
Tattooed tongue-tied
In the core of your flame

November 2009

Ape X

2009-11-22T08:31:00.001Z

This gleaning ape, wide awake to all he thinks he feels
Dead to romance tied to voyeurism
Questions carved in passing, biting at his heels

This scheming ape that treasures all his broken things
Rusted toys and tarnished optimism
Severed locks of amber hair and tattered apron strings

This dreaming ape, fast asleep behind the steering wheel
Cushioned in his private symbolism
Answers cast in caste encased in hurtling steel

November 2009

Leviathan

2009-11-13T20:47:00.002Z

Now to the mast
Lashed and moon-lit arrested
I tag these notches on my bones
Count the rings of petals flower fallen
She loves me
She loves me not
She…
Not in floral wrath or knotted ropes of rain
Or councils keen where never king shall reign
But through leaves of painted pages
Spines all gone now confined to cages
These ribs of steelwork hull enrole
The sheets that sail unsure on titan seas
Rivet-gunned the rope-trick to my soul
And sent your thoughts to me
To bid me lift my eyes above the waves
And sail upon the reef’s knife edge
Index link my fingers to the stars
Orion, Orion, Arcturus
Tack and turn into the biting wind
Knife the surface tension now to find
Leviathan slumbers neath my cleaving keel

November 2009

Limbic Phantoms/Phantom Limbs

2009-11-07T19:38:00.001Z

And constellations reel their predictive matrices
Above the myriad minds in sleep set free
Hydrad haunts the slate roof skyline
Full moon feral the calling of her ancestral mothers
To set the world to rights
In increments of feathers

And dreams of stars and swirling galaxies of peace
Compose great symphonies in ether mist
Individual notes picked out insemiotic
And thread together necklaces for ancestral mothers
To set the world to rights
In jigsaw pieces pondered

And falling yet through floors of splintered silence
Mind meanderers spread their mattress arms
Embrace the morning rituals unthought
And wide-eyed wash away the fears of ancestral mothers
To set the world to rights
In menial tasks of civil duty

November 2009

Idiot's Attic

2009-11-01T20:26:00.000Z

I’m running these numbers
For the pharmaceutical gods
For the children of the fog
And the depression dealers
With manic concessions
Oppressed between pages
And comedic impressions

I’m asking all these questions
Of my hair-shirt headstone
Of your left-hand life-line
Whose tooth-marks are these?
Pocking vampire moon sorrows
With Frankenstein craters
And werewolf tomorrows

I’m sweeping this pathway
For the time-traveller’s hushpuppies
For the pink-gummed piranhas
and ragged-tooth hippies
Arriving in warm ignorance
At the academy of lies

And the carnivores advance
In the shade of Mount Venus
Where they prey on the meek
Where they drown in the fountain
Of love’s fevered reprieve
Or entwine in the stitches
Of a heart-encrusted sleeve

I’m taking these steps
For the counting of paces
For the wolf at the door
Through streets yellow leaf-littered
Where un-drowned litters of orange cats stray
Mew at the gates of plastic institutions
Where the manufacturers of truth hold sway

I’m pulling out a chair
At the breakfast of horrors
At the pages of lies where the ink never dries
But I gag on the meal
Force-fed without ethics
Paranoid fantasies
Dead minds for the hack
Morning doorways cluttered
Outlined and arrayed
...in a 100 shades of black

October 2009

The Bridge

2009-10-20T21:06:00.002+01:00

Their hems collect the diamond dew
Their eyes reflect moonlight
Their toenails red tread the tired trail
Their footprints collect the silver seeping

Combing grass and looking glass
Dark shapes lift the bodies from the night
Customarily bled to leave no mark upon us
Save council crocodile weeping

When falling did they become
Open mouths the voice of constellations
Gyroscoping above their hair halos
Disarrayed by terminal velocity?

Nobody dreamed this firth of amber water
Where swirling sun submerging hisses
A hundred years of human sweat
To sever strangers’ kisses

This is written for the two lassies who jumped off the Erskine Bridge last week.
I had considered linking to some of the news stories but the hackneyed phrases, finger pointing and self serving insensitivity of it all leaves me unable to justify giving them credibility.
Georgia Rowe and Neve Lafferty deserved more than the ignorance offered up to them by the system.

October 2009

Bigmouth

2009-10-20T21:05:00.002+01:00

You spoke your mind one time too many
Upset the applecart of accepted views
They stole your shadow
While the sun was in your eyes
Crept away to stitch it to the moon
Her ashen face now presents itself nightly
To the side of you that you cannot see

October 2009

Don't Give It Away

2009-10-04T11:48:00.001+01:00

Like fingertips finding the barely perceivable textured marks on the underside of the cards you’ve been dealt, you will worry the scars of your previous defeats and embarrassments though avenues of time to eddy in alleyways of concern before spewing out upon the doorstep of tomorrow with your heart in your hands and your dreams turning like unpicked fruit on the vine.

Like fingertips finding the corners of newspaper pages, you will turn the leaves of the night in a dream of bright new tomorrows and awaken to the headlines of another false dawn where the words are arranged to extract from your heart the essence of hope; the air from your lungs, the silver from your spine and the awe from your smile.

Like fingertips finding the lips of your lover in the murmuring half-light between days and desire, you will follow the contours familiar and new to shine light in the eyes of passing street lights and under the closed doors of tomorrow where the world waits impervious, impassive – knowing you will have to pass it on your way.

Like fingertips finding the knots on the rope used for sounding the depths where the estuary of now meets the ocean of tomorrow, you will measure the past as your ballast and hope love will be your sails before the wind that will blow you between reefs and regattas to the coastlines of dreams and the salt on your tongue.

Like fingertips leaving their mark on the glass where your breath has condensed during a road-trip to forever in a childhood memory, you will grasp at the images once so easily lived but now haunting your heart with the rust of regret, scenes that demand that you construct a machine capable of travelling in time.

Disquiet

2009-09-19T11:12:00.001+01:00

Falling inward I taste the sun
And swallow whole hook line and sinker
Evaporation takes the beads of light
So long enjoyed as wisdom

The dogs of autumn chase the dust
And bark at cattle passing
I taste the air and smooth my hair
And cast my limbo shadow

Being not bound by duties base
Nor visions of heaven scented
This dragon’s breath peels the paint
That the centuries cast upon

The face of a nation’s plunders
Legitimised lobotomised pseudo-serene
Stripped to skulls in pyramid piles
Here or there or somewhere in-between

Head and claws for ant empires to anger
Surround impound and set in stone
Worship a past too clean for comfort
Where eyes upraised a fantasy deluded

But who am I to pass these pints
Of blood and bone and ether
I who have no pedestal to stand in stone
Nor right the height to claim

And falling from this fever dream
I find my mouth is full of feathers
You hold me close and kiss my throat
And name me chicken killer

September 2009

Counter Clock Wise

2009-09-08T09:28:00.001+01:00

I know a girl from inner space
She walks a path against the camber
And lightning raced across her face
Illuminating eyes of amber

I drew her face in cutout shapes
And radio waves delayed, unreal
Loops and reels from demo tapes
Define the way I feel

About the girl from inner space
Whose smile could melt my heart
And dignify the human race
Without recourse to art

I love her now – I loved her when
I dreamt her face in colour
The moon in wax to guide my pen
My heart my head my lover

September 2009

Violence

2009-09-08T09:27:00.002+01:00

Talk to me -
Of a mercurial heart melancholy and much maligned
Ribcage muscled and intricately designed
With filigree fibres intricately connecting
Where searching blades would go dissecting

Talk to me -
In mechanised hums and angular tunes that echo numb
Through anvil hammer cochlea and drum
Pigment paint and carefully coloured dye
Wormhole maze the apple of your eye

Talk to me -
In tangle tongues tied up in cat-gut calligraphy
We will tightened tender ropes knotted to set you free
Pay the boatman pay the finder’s fee
Tell me what your long stares see

September 2009

The Centre is Missing

2009-09-01T13:13:00.000+01:00

Here is a line of tongue rust wire scarecrow tangled
In a dream field sunset ochre barbed and acutely angled
To catch the horizontal beams of cold sunlight falling
Into the vault of senseless days of winter calling

Here your footsteps tattoo tread the silence shattered
Your thoughts hang air lung ragged exhale tattered
Writ their lines on open graves but failed to save the world
From apologists and scientologists with crooked fingers curled

Here your kisses to my pursed lips cross black stitched
All thoughts of silver flight wing clipped fever ditched
Prohibiting escape to a dictionary of ripped loose words
Corralled lacklustre with the gut-wrench grass-graze herds

Here all talk of lungs and tongues will be declared taboo
Baited breath and sotto-voice will be the deserving end of you
Spine and stitch and binding sucked from all your treasured books
All pages, leaves, harlequin sleeves and unbaited guitar hooks

Here force-fed with belief deceit and loose atomic grief
Scarred by visions fetid, fecund - brutal beyond belief
Stitched into your vertebrae to hang on hooks of hate
All the pretty horrors of a species too close to late

August 2009

Crosseyed & Painless

2009-09-01T13:11:00.001+01:00

And walking in the light of a world three times removed
My shadow hand sows stars upon the dark and tilled earth grooved

A new sky display with counterpoint suns and clouds of disbelief
Seeds the day with rust’s perfume peppered by time the thief

I breathe this poison in, arrest it in my sunken chest
There to germinate into the path that suits me best

And pausing briefly I pour myself another cup of someday
To sweeten yet the open chests of birds laid out in black array

All button eyed and feather frayed and risen from the dead

August 2009

Lodger

2009-09-01T13:10:00.001+01:00

In this attic room, confined and defined
by the chequerboard light from a disinterested moon
I fake my confessions in blue ink
From a pen that has known no mercy
Save the warmth of my hand

Heads roll past in the street resigned
In the guillotine glow from a disinterested moon
Never to rise tread water or sink
But set free by a cold act of mercy
Sketched outlines by my mercenary hand

On the factory floor where hate is redesigned
To fester in the cauldron of a disinterested moon
Checked and signed in octopus ink
Set free by a heart that knows no mercy
Save the touch of my severed hand

So to this attic room I am confined
Limited in thought and deed by the iron in an idiot moon
Under which I was born to think
That the world will offer no mercy
To the director of this ink-stained hand

August 2009

Science Fiction

2009-09-01T13:09:00.000+01:00

Perhaps we could fly
If evolution would design the intelligent wings
Perhaps we would spend more time
Thinking about what to believe
If we weren’t so easily distracted
By death’s flickering fire shadows
Cast on these plastic cave walls
Perhaps our cynical circuits will short out on the horizon
When lightning takes the path of least resistance
Perhaps we don’t seek to live
In a landscape void of windmills
Or any other such folly
Should the iron in our blood
Be arranged by magnetic fields
To face in one chosen direction?
This democracy is a barren land
Where all is known and risk-free
Encased, cocooned in a tyranny of safety?
You can keep your talk of arrows
Time or cupid sent -
I don’t care about the numbers
I don’t want to hear another corporate apology
I don’t speak your language
I don’t want to wear those logos
I refuse to live in fear
I won’t buy your software upgrade
I don’t want to feel the numbness

August 2009

Soul Ransom

2009-09-01T13:08:00.001+01:00

Hostage-takers hang out on the avenue
Watching for that tell-tale spark
Between who you are and how they see you
They will capture your essence, Photoshop your scars
Place you in light filled room
Open for display in a celebrity-shaped vase

While encased in a block of solid metal alloy
The source of all your words
Takes comfort from the illusionary ploy
Executed by agents bereft of worthwhile portfolio
But versed in the black arts
Of extracting the meaning from all that you know

And all that you see on this lost horizon
Is the jagged coast of yesterday
Where pirates’ coves of dark surmising
Fly ripped black flags of skull and bones
Call to ships of memory
In voices dredged from erogenous zones

Places where the tide line glows plankton rich
In sentences fashioned from soap
While competitors legs upturned kick from the spirit ditch
No license required to catch these crustaceans
Not for the net-work-king
These trains don’t stop at low-rent stations

So pay the ransom, meet them in the alleyway
Watched by ignored CCTV
And don’t pretend you have a thing to say
Your voice transcended by cash machines
Isn’t nearly strong enough
To break through the patina of plastic dreams

August 2009

The Icarus in My Blood

2009-08-09T09:11:00.000+01:00

The wind bites my teeth here on the eyrie edge
Soldiers march in time below
A multi-legged organism designed to destroy
A world that doesn’t wait for thought
To reach escape velocity

I will fly from the eyrie with the wind in my teeth
Shit on the soldiers below
Their legs march a lie to the edge of the world
And the world doesn’t think to wait
For escape from our vociferous reach

So clip my wings O Daedalus, here on the eyrie’s edge
Bar my flight from murder below
Walk my legs back to the mouth of the labyrinth
Where the world won’t wait for my thoughts
To escape and reach a velocity…

…capable of reaching the sun

July 2009

Perfume on the Wind

2009-08-09T09:09:00.000+01:00

Minutes –
As peeling paint demands the clock hand sweep at the pace of glass melting
Hours –
That stretch the shadows across the stepping stones of calendar pages
Days –
Named for gods who absconded late their powers lost to man
Months –
That fly through perfumed halls of future planning
Seasons -
For Trees that shrug the leaves of summer lately turned to rust
Years –
Where changes accumulate in increments of perceived wisdom
Decades -
Foundations bloom on dirt paths tread by the phantoms of my youth
A lifetime -
And petals fail to decorate the core so long left its own beauty to assert

July 2007

Stepping Stones Gather Moss

2009-08-02T11:05:00.000+01:00

She dances in the red dust devilling
Fans the embers’ moonward spiral
And on her charmed ankles glimmer
The swords of dead tomorrows
The flags of anarchists
And the hopes of lonely children

She dances at the blue ice gathering
Kicks the deck-chair habit
And at her chained waist gleam
The knives of sleeping winter
The banners of idealists
And the fears of gun

She dances on the velvet light flickering
Dusts the moon with ember spirals
And in her eyes green glisten
The pinwheel stars' lost light
The rags of heathen prophets
And the dreams of aging poets

July 2009

Subverse

2009-08-02T11:04:00.001+01:00

The revolution awaits the man in the guerrilla suit
The ink slowly dries on the pamphlets in his car-boot
And the trunks on the troop of room-filling elephants
Trumpet to the tune of philosophical irrelevance

The dealer checks his cell-phone for the international markets
Crosses the killing floor shoe-leather whispering on carpet
Smiles in the knowledge he will get what he’s due
Guns the engine to chrome on his bee-em-double-yew

In the shrubbery disguised as a man in a black suit
Crouching sunglass, earpiece and stylish jackboot
Lurks the agent of change with an eye on the prize
Who parades in a bikini made for a woman half her size

The agent employs tech-tricks to read the invoices
Of the ill-clad sun-bather who’s considering her choices
Between deckchair debauchy and slick sun-lounger
While concrete in half-life decays all around her

Condensation collects behind guerrilla suit eyes
Cell phone erupts between pin-striped thighs

The agent responds to his earpiece whispering imponderous
Licks the tip of his pistol with lizard tongue lugubrious
And with rounds made of darkness by an empire in decline
Blows the chrome-lustre off some of that Teutonic shine

And I watch, a furtive sparrow, from these waiting-waste wings
Wondering if it’s worth bothering to pull down the curtain strings

July 2009

Fillet Weld

2009-08-02T11:03:00.002+01:00

Kept the world at bay
With a short-leash chain hyena grinning
Set my shutter to time-delay
And wound the tape back to the beginning

Told ordinary tales of arbitrary heart-breaking
Blew eons against the chalk cliffs of selfish solitude
On legs of starfish urchin arachnid aching
Ghosts came in angry waves of varying amplitude

Set full-sailed armadas of sinking ships
To mount anxious attacks on Cartesian windmills
Arabesques of thoughtless Freudian slips
And weld bluntly Occam’s analytical skills

On passengers bedecked like kings and tsars
Whose keels scraped reef beneath powder plot noses
And gazes cast outward to behold the stars
In a splintered and petal-strewn bed of poses

July 2009

Interstitial Musculature

2009-07-19T13:37:00.000+01:00

And as I become, delicately unravelling, that monster with butterfly wings
And a dragonfly heart
Whose smile crooked-toothed reveals that cracked truth webbed
Between the bones of my ribs
And the air in my lungs
And from whence a hypocrite swore oath of allegiance
To nothing
Save the idea; the fabricated framework of love

July 2009

Secrets

2009-07-19T13:36:00.000+01:00

In a room full of night
Where hostages take soundings
On the drawing of the light

Whatever happened to your perfectly formed beliefs,
Or the gold-leaf arguments encased in lawyers’ briefs?
Were you bitten by the monsters in this distant colony
Did you let them steal your heart for wanting to be free?

Did you watch the age of enlightenment
Give way to discontent
In advertising loyalty and corporate assent?

Whatever happened to all those Technicolor days between
The opening of your eyes from Disney’s monochrome dream
And the arrival of these lodgers with their skeleton keys
Who access your secret attic rooms with knowing eyes that see

Your broken childhood toys
The ones you held most dear
Broken by the fragile hand of all your adult joys

July 2007

Still a Searcher, Must Ride the Dark Horse

2009-07-04T15:23:00.003+01:00

I am the colours behind your eyelids
Sunshine daydream chiaroscuro
The optic fibrous gangliac Ovid
Night-time vigil of all you don’t know

I am the silence between the drum-beats
Sucking the air through ossicular chain
The eighth nerve objects to your musical sheets
Demanding an altogether different refrain

I am the word on the tip of your tongue
The thoughts that climb your ladder legs
And salivating savour every rung
Like a fire walker treading broken eggs

I am in the space between these words
Filling the halls so long deserted
By players and dealers of the six of swords
Crossing the water with faces averted

June 2009
Title from Neil Young's Tell Me Why

Dot-Matrix Landscape Passing

2009-07-04T15:21:00.003+01:00

Down the path of least assistance by angled dust eroded
A spiral copper leaf marks the myriad march of days
A ghost house warped in grain and knuckle knot exploded
Shimmers in the migraine zigzag hollow heat haze

Travelling back I kick the dust and grit my wooden teeth
Crooked cross-eyed apple-cored this confession confidential
Waits on bended knee presenting a glass-blown wedding wreath
Angled upward aged acid-etched and accidental

I cross the sentinel line of nostalgic date-palms sweet
Passed dust bowl dreams and muddied memories of rain
Where our names entwine in a clichéd heart-shaped treat
Beneath sap and bark concealed the gesture yet remains

And drawing pins on maps and brochures chart the lines
Of journeys on from illuminated first date palm-sweat
Through isobars, borderlines, battles beat and harder times
To precious paired fruit cello-embraced in baby bassinette

June 2009

Plainsong

2009-07-03T19:08:00.001+01:00

The ferryman’s voice echoes in the mist
The waiting crowd gathers into a fist
Sheltering in the lee of the boathouse A-frame
Wrapped in a collective cloak of guilt and shame
Faces etched in copper and ferrous ache wrought
From judgement day to the lacklustre lessons taught
By the brass handles on the black casket shrouded
In a flag of fabricated lies by prejudice clouded

And Lucifer stands alone to one side
Unable to join the crowd nursing hurt pride
For who would listen to this ill-bred bearer of light?
What profits afforded for those who own the night?
To send forth those who have everything to lose
Those with hearts misled and unwilling to choose
Between the devil you know and the psychotic crews
Whose camouflage hides more than the magician’s cues

Poppies red blemish the chests of the mourners
Symbolism no measure for the world’s dirty corners
Where the cards are discarded hidden in plain view
Invisible to the many, a winning hand for the few
So the ferryman’s pole cuts an arrow in cold water
For departed marked crosses in the field of the slaughter
The crowd’s fist is torn by the falling widow’s cry
The mist knits a veil that blends with the sky

June 2009

Earth Mover

2009-07-03T19:07:00.001+01:00

The system carves your souls by halves
To feed the rotting tree

Then dredges the lakes of all debate
To starve the rising sea

Of pyramid schemes where dolphins dream
An alternate reality

While talking heads feed your dread
And tell you that you’re free

But who am I to toll your pealing primate bell
Decry your sea-horse trading man-ray splinter cell?

Your thumbs in showers of dust might just as easy fall
Into my hands that wring un-sung the beauty of it all

And mercury rising sharply in your fiercely treasured chest
Foretells a change of heavy heart that beats you to the test

That measures hope and lengths of rope for a hundred years of tears
With clockwork cranks from deep think-tanks the grit in all your gears

Those talking heads that feed your dread
May never get to see

These pyramid scenes and dolphin dreams
Where heart and mind agree

That dredging lakes and eco-debates
Won’t stop the rising sea

from carving deep canyons of sleep
the words trapped in the tree

June 2009

Catenary

2009-06-07T16:30:00.001+01:00

Perched like music on transmission lines
Electro-magnetic halos no entry feather signs
Silhouetted in sunflower with linseed eyes
Painted by madmen on the cusp of the sky

Who glide on the wind look down and defy
Gravity’s rainbow and high nested cries
Who soar down seeking de-appled worms
Wisps of light the circling season’s terns

Who nest to digest the lessons of the day
To Sing and to spawn, enlist and obey
The songs of the sunset the loss of the light
Mortality creeps on paving at night

Rooks move in straight lines while sparrows fall
No one to notice, no hunter to call
A head and a tail a heart for cat’s-paw
Blood no quench for this ill-tempered core

Feed me no lies on the arc of your dive
Feathering falling calculated to arrive
On branch fractal fragile sing a fluted refrain
All love’s tomorrows your perch to regain

June 2009

Isthmus Crypticus

2009-06-04T21:34:00.000+01:00

Your scarecrow legs rise from grain husk dusted shoes
Laces long gone to the pyramid of empirical needs
Or perhaps confiscated by caring state officials
Corn teeth rattle in the face of the interrogating wind
Hand-hurled insults at the dunes’ feverish knife edges
Sand-blasting skin burnt umber and amber return
Confessions fall unbidden from the lip of the storm
Strangers loom rigging in the azure haze horizon

And the prow of their boat hits the wet sand silent
Beneath the crash of the waves on the sentinel reef
Smuggled bouquets of seaweed and dead coral swinging
On the arm of this parabolic and pissed-off muse
Whose head full of haloes and hard-on dead-lines
Demands to be rescued from the sleeping undergrowth
The grey cursed sky and serrated shoreline agree
To split the difference while flesh still remains

Here on the headland of hate stick-scratched in the sand
Hallowed ground is hailed slandered and deranged
Hermit crabs scuttle on the dotted line foaming
Detailed design for the sea’s edge stitch hemmed

No scared crows or sacred cows to tin the morning hope
No kidding crop circling alien ambivalent and aching
The cultivation of need hangs on the arm of the thrasher
A child gazes up at your hook-and-eye tweed-chested jacket
You hiss through those teeth scaring pale moon face
Breathless as stitches entwined in a forgotten blue day
Your hands hold nothing but the waters of time
Bartering days between hell and high waterline

For who would till this barren and saline finger
What woodenhead cryptic and contrary soul
With driftwood face and charcoal eyes
Fleshed from the nightmares of children and dogs
Would populate this isthmus of buried memories
Rotten and raw with the taste of love lost
In the sand that blows from a waning moon
A pedigree for the damned, the sowing too soon?

May 2008

Pucker Up and Kiss the Asphalt

2009-05-16T08:40:00.001+01:00

In the end these are only words
Arranged to obey an apparent reason
Pixel spit on electronic paper
Rising and falling with modal season

I don’t speak for the herded masses
Content to eat the status quo
I can’t wear those optimistic glasses
I’ll take my meals down below

In the selfish cellar of self-delusion
Where I have come to grow old
Wrapped in the glory of cold seclusion
Finger strikes between key and mould

Spew forth algorithms ill-defined
Non-inclusive and bitter sweet
Won’t show the way to any mind
Won’t paint the lines upon the street

Thankful for the malcontents and ill-adepts
Those who, like me, cannot conform
To the lie that’s left on the morning steps
The paper mask that’s called the norm

All Meals are Brutal to the Eaten

2009-05-09T13:18:00.000+01:00

Looking up the mouse decrees
There’s enough for you and me
The owl declines to nod assent
Knowing soon he’s due the rent
On futures based on clear blue sky
On dividends from cherry pie
He picks his beak with razor talon
Calculates the miles per gallon
Checks the angles by degrees
Then mouse (protesting) does he seize

Being an oblique response to the fucking farce that is "the credit crunch"

April 2009

Galaxies & Stars

2009-05-09T13:11:00.000+01:00

A kiss in a ghost room, fingertip skin glisten
The clock in the hall counts its gears
Shadows adjacent with ears to wall listen
Take notes in a book made from wasted years

Secrets construct a room made of flowers
Oblivious of the clock and its ignorant hours
They fall trough the air their bodies remain
The taste of the world, the core of the flame

He lifts up the curtain that swallows the sun
She breathes from the heart of the stars’ aqualung
He kneels at her alter his life to confess
She worships the hem of her self undressed

The veins of gold that run through her heart
Preclude all lovers who forget their part
In the ballroom daze of bedroom dreams
Where well-planned lives fall apart at the seams

His fingers fumble her mourning buttons
Pulls a thread of stitched-back patterns
On the lip of tomorrow his mark to render
Soul kisses fade made infinitely tender

By glissando pearl on powder cheek
By the red rising tide a beach to seek
By dew drop drained from tongue to finger
By the monsoon delta where memories linger

These ghosts relegate their cares to debates
On the relevance of analytical thinking
The universe vibrates in little earthquakes
Light discharges through stars unblinking

April 2009

Pixel Dust

2009-04-25T09:50:00.000+01:00

Her father blew the family home
The fish tank hit the lawn alone
Little Pixel hit the road
A devil suit to share the load
She made it to the underpass
Every breath became her last
Colours rained on every flower
A gift a curse the witching hour
She grew to love the road itself
Fed herself from library shelf
Met herself the perfect other
Children came to call her mother
Now Pixel’s fish tank holds no water
Lizards’ home the past has taught her
Not to take a chance repeating
Her father’s life so hard and fleeting

April 2009

Definitive Gaze

2009-04-24T15:32:00.001+01:00

She shuns the views of Sigmund Freud
She rests her gaze upon the void
And gazing back the void agrees
That all is measured in degrees
Around the point when she was turned
And marked her height upon the door
Realised she was no more
Than the lessons earned
In shades of grief
And light relief
And in the smiles of children passing

April 2009