Everyone is alone

Everyone is alone.

You live in a sealed room.
There are other sealed rooms adjacent.
You can bang on the wall,
and sometimes they bang back,
but there is no door.
You can never get inside their head.

Trust is a picture that looks like a window,
but it is really a mirror.

And we must all die alone.

As your walls close in,
no-one can feel your pain.
There is no-one to pull you through.
You just diminish in a darkening.

Now a Giant Tortoise

It was a dream of the moon
flooding with blood. It
was always there,
on the other side of the air,
you, the outer inside,
it has all become you.

All the moss that grew on you.
The grey dirt and dust that
crumbles from your wrinkles,
the slow reversal of nutrition
that will blend you back
in with the rocks completely.

Marked by the pocks of the moon,
or by the descending
scales of shells:
that limpet clamped down on
your own back, it holds up a snail
on which camps a certain animalcule.

A chain of gastropods clamping down,
each upon another.
Like nothing more material, completely.
The teeth of your teeth, all grey,
the stomach of your stomach, growing,
the blood, the moon of the moon's moon's moon.

Tyrrany

I am the straining artery of life.
Arrayed on my altar-desk
are status, icon, pain,
details of humanity.

The rewards of goodness do not seek me out,
here or hereafter. My skin and bones
do not console me like your skin and bones.
I say "look at me",
and you look at me.
Conceit does not apply to history.

What man?

What man will say
he has no regrets?
What churlish man? What liar?
He has never been drunk.

What man will say
he has no regrets?
What happy man?
He has never been in love.

What man will say
he has no regrets?
That would be the first time
he ever opened his mouth.

Been away, but now I'm back.

More verbal vomit to be emitted soon.

World Out of Blame

I. The River of Death

O, the sights I saw
as I rowed, as I rowed.

Line by line,
stroke by stroke,
they drone on by.

Each day is circumscribed
by darkness and smoke.

Here they are, lined,
and highly evolved,
and hungry for human bones.

Behind barbarism's
transhuman skin,
lead bleeds from a black heart.

O, the sights and smells,
strolling the noisy bank.

I contemplate the myth of patience.
The future is inside out.

Here, wheezing asthmatic young
suck on their tumoral pipe,
waiting for their turn.

Look both ways.
The dark involatile ground
wasn't meant for the living.

Patience breathes,
by the river of death.

Time. Give me time,
and this traffic island
might combust spontaneously.


II. The Unutterable

Ignition. Automatic hate,
and the grill races to the meat.

You kill me every day.
Again and again
you throw me to the lions.

I am obstacle.
I am the sleeper.
I am disaster.
I am the animal.

I am the corpse that ruptured your bumper.
I am the fly on your windscreen.

You drove a valley through my torso.
You took a tour of my pudenda.
Your hands are clean.

I am unraveled.

Cat's eyes meet human eyes
in the union of man and machine,
a painting of eternal sorrow.

But blood drains quickly down the gutter,
and skin burns fast like rubber,
and your scream is silenced by a pillow.

I am the crash test.
You are the dummy.

I am your sacrifice
burning on the altar of freedom,
a soul on the scales,
balancing safety and liberty.
Never say it,
but there is no pointless death.
No pointless death,
but say it to nobody.

I am finite.
The lightest scratch repeated sufficiently
reduces me to splinters.


III. When the Highways Engineer Repents

Working to expand our horizons,
to bring us home.
Blameless. He takes the grim toll
for which he made allowance.
Blameless, we all
must pick peas from the fire.
No-one will ever
feel guilty enough.

The road is brought to silence at last.
The traffic cones stand authoritative.
They tell you all you need to know,
all you need to do.

But the blood on the tarmac
infects your mind, and
if you are not scared of the truth,
scared to think,
you look for witnesses.
Who was right? Who was wrong?

And yet what stones are left uncovered.

The belisha beacon blinked.
The policeman slept.
Another trip round the roundabout,
then the daylight crept away.

Why does Mother Nature
abandon us to chaos?
Perhaps in lament of decency,
perhaps in pure disgust.

A curtain falls.
It hides the innocent
eyes of the stars,
lest they see what people die for.

But the highways engineer will not repent
one second before the sun explodes,
and nor will Man
make an honest account of his work,
and nor will life on Earth
make sense to itself.

Cup of Tears

This is your cup of tears.
The porcelain was blasted
in some uncaring kiln.
Now it is brimming,
your salt and water.
Silent, still,
stirred by words.

The right words are a spell:

"You don't know how much."
"I don't know what I would do."

The right words are a spell
that draws out your tears
that surge like a season
that land in a stream
that spells:
consolation.

This cup of tears
is for your ablutions.
Infused are your absolutions.
Be candid, be free.
Face the stiff breeze
that presses, strips and cleans
and whispers:
relief.

Drink.
Don't you think
a good cry
makes the best cup of tea?

Automaton

Endurance.
A cold, harsh, oppressive existence,
where the noise
and the eyes,
in their place and in their time,
of things that you don't recognise,
incite you only to fight or to flight.

What is there for you?
The exhaustive, exclusive outcomes
of a game -
the myriad mundane choices
that chide you with possibilities -
you didn't ask to play.
You can only walk into the sunset
and bow out,
ghost of the present,
homage to the future.

The sun is disappearing quickly.
Will it be too late
to cry "enough!" and crash
against the breast of life,
beat against the ground
with trembling fists and teary eyes.
Enough.

All day, every day,
I balance my head on my neck.

Life is Anxiety

I.

Regrets are here, gnawing and growing, here, on my side, always, hanging like stone skin, dragging. I feel them under my clothes, under my blanket, their cold dead crust unsheddable. They knead my clay, my fallen flesh, made edible.

Worries are there, always, looming dark and infinite like the integers, queuing to destroy me. Worries, the backlog, the crashing tide always coming in, they stain residue on my side.

II.

Worries and regrets,
stuffing up time.
They touch where I stand.

To face or forget
these worries and regrets
is always easier said.

Stuffing up time,
they touch where I stand.
They join hands around my head.

Today I hold the mirror,
I face it and forget.
Today I clear my debt to the dead.

Cornucopia

Don’t make the feeding place
     my picnic mass grave,
you gulls of disgrace.
Dribbling butter,
spewing bile from your gutter.
Regurgitate the verbiage and stuff your face.

On rich tide gulls pick
     their desire
and leave shame crude slick
spillage of sin,
waste I get stuck in,
countless unclean rocks to lick.

It glistens on plates when they go,
     my compulsion.
I’m not hungry but hollow.
Unknown moistures,
paste unfit for vultures,
nothing my bin mouth can’t swallow.

Animals cold killed cooked
     without care,
spoils for jaws meat hooked.
Scraps garnished with guilt,
scant meaning for blood spilt,
jilts the ever hungry overlooked.

Industrial farming for a world bought
     cheaply in bulk,
the few have all and the many have naught.
Forsaken thrift,
come sit, search and sift
through the undigested food for thought.

A Picture of Nothing

An ironic life,
when all was done
to be noticed.
Irony my shield
bears me home
on shoulders
that didn’t notice:
his ascetism
was his wealth.

A mirage
of shifting soil,
parting air,
only desire
to be planted
in a landscape
where growth
and decay
are understood.

Search this cactus,
shave it closely,
watch it disappear.
Shine a light.
You will detect no
position or velocity.
Words spoken
in the void
fail to touch me

as I disappear.

Moving Day

What a load of stuff!

I am obese with bits,
accretion, things that keep me in orbit.

I can arrange it neatly on the floor
like sweeping up the dust.

I can walk away.

Memories of Summer

Sticky ice-cream fingers
on afternoons the length of a holiday,

the revenge of a smeared ant nest,
changes measured by the summer grass,

shared chips and love’s boiled egg
gone with the sun in the sea,

a tumbling fumbling romance
on a green bed of insects.

Shedding skin in the shade,
eyes squinting on the pool side.

I’ll shield them with a golden cloud
and show off my gory pink.

Windows right down to freshen
sweaty car with dry grass,

and drown out the bloody kids.
Wish I was going that way.

I want to eat with a wasp
and sleep on the coach,

and take a last glass of lemonade
on the retirement home garden.

Too brief, too long,
too hot, too many people.

Too few worth remembering:
the summers that measure our winters.

Sky Fishing

In windproof Mac standing
over proposal of line and net
laid before the office of wind,
with a flick of conductor’s arms,
he casts up his emblem
to compete in the market of logos.

When clouds spread
he can eclipse the sun,
stand in its umbra,
become a mystic.

When the clouds gather we see
the great outdoors is a great indoors,
where the walls never touch the ceiling.
One room where we waste the fits of our lives
reaching never high enough
with a gossamer thread waving on the floor.

A wasted life is a crime
punished by death and boredom.
Crashing clouds begin to weep and
he stands braced, welded to the reigns.
Watch with admiration
the insouciant sky fisherman
who hangs up on life,
and flies a kite in a storm.

Number 21, Upstairs Flat

Three reasons to go insane that cannot
hear my thoughts, so I suffer. The quietly
cracking cornerstone I am that had you
only been someone else, housebroken
and shown concern over the bills, the
dishes, the niggles that sum to torture, I
might live as happily. Instead I am ash
circulating inside a diseased skull.

This ecological disaster is my polite
chagrin, your detergent deterrent. Furry
growths, off-black water standing rancid
where the sink should be, pneumatic
pounding sounding like music but shite:
our bestiary of pollution. In this beggar’s
mansion a freegan could live in opulence
on the food that wasn’t good enough.

It started like fireworks on Remembrance
Day; shamed in sympathy I withdrew to
my role as your A to Z. Mate, you try to
talk, I part with a dictionary response. If I
had the power of speech I would let you
know how you don’t care, you don’t think,
you don’t seem to know that life is hard,
why, why, why are you always there?

He is sitting in the dark wearing earplugs.
His hands are rigid on the guitar that
belongs to his first victim, who arrives
home after a night out, climbs the stairs,
exposes the back of his skull...

A striking morning echoes with the
contrast of silence, and I am the first to
arise from where I am loved: I dream as a
virtuoso on a versatile instrument, playing
a lullaby’s concussion with violent
percussion. Rest in peace is a hazy thrill
and too brief: here their shrieking
playtime makes me claustrophobic.

Like a villain in a private comic, I
pronounce your death in my head:
prepare to meet the landlord in the sky,
we have exhausted every curtain, time to
take the rubbish out etcetera. Maybe I
envy you, being unburdened by guilt or
empathy. Maybe you envy me too for my
ability to sleep through anything.

His second victim had prepared a line of
ketamine in the kitchen. After the party,
he found it, alone, and with quick stoney
purpose clutching caustic drain cleaning
powder the dope was duped...

Days are fragile when my food plans are
ruined by missing eggs, a culture of mould
on the sideboard, that phlegmy smoker’s
cough so disgusting; irritating to the day
you burn us down. Surely you noticed the
humour in our vapid meetings dying, the
walls between us multiplying and the
central heating boiler always firing?

He thought he was dreaming that night of
strange terror when she set off the fire
alarm. He wasn’t, and now, adrenaline
pumping reality in, the darkness shrinking,
blind spot diminishing, stark consciousness

is filling his hands outstretched throttling:
there the ragdoll victim with real eyes, he
understands but too late, stands in fear of
dreams that come true, standing still with
nothing to love but alone at last with hate.

I am a broken bottle, jags exposed at last.
It’s quiet now and therefore worse. Every
day my neighbour slams his door without
thought and the way the walls smell is
getting to me. There is a voice that almost
coincides with the movement of my lips.
It is plaintive and obnoxious. I avoid
mirrors for unknown angry days.

They found four bodies.

The Poverty of the Light Touch

I will not chew the idle fat,
yet nor will I sink my teeth much
into the more substantial,
the more circumstantial joint.
I will not overt a point of view without sufficient vetting.
I will not break the trust of a confidant.
I will not seal the fate,
with a decisive statement,
of a verbal criminal.
Nothing playful, witty or derisive,
nothing just or in jest shall pass my lips unless it must.
I will utter neither truths, nor lies.
I might say something along the lines of
“It’s just another day of the year, my dear.”
It might be perverse, or imprecise,
but it won’t be funny, or wise,
and I might talk but I will never converse.

I will make no poison, nor honey.
I will never lose much money from my purse.
No golden sunny day
will be worth less to me
than avarice or cupidity.
Never my name on the rich list
with full-fisted liquidity and capital gain,
which no fear of the rain shall have me hide.
I will not profit from pain,
yet I will surfeit neither pride nor fame,
and I will claim no salvage misplaced by the tide.
I will have nothing to waste.

I will impress no-one with my taste in music,
blaring from my car
with the wind in my hair,
no roof to put down or hood to pop-up.
I will neither cruise, stop, pick-up nor drop-off.
I will never be serviced at a pit stop.
I will not feel pity for the critter’s
no-hope last hop under full-beam glare,
and I will not care like it matters after being cut up.
I will not fail my test once, twice, thrice;
I will never have my licence torn up,
or be sent down contrite and in tatters,
or fob off a cop with unspecified bribes
as he writes up the wrecked lives
resulting from my write-off.

I will never be discontent or dissatisfied
by the meek sigh of a female “yes”.
I will never make love with a bride,
and no princess smiling sweetly
by my side will make my day.
I will not ache with desire
for the parting of thigh jaws.
My heart will not pause
at the sound of a fake,
or rake in irksome ire
over every feigned spasm.
Shame gnaws and burns a nervous fire
that no coital mistake will help me unlearn.
I will never break up and make up,
and I will burden no woman with my flaws.

No man made laws will I breach or uphold.
I will never take up a cause.
No bold steed will lead me to battle
and leave me lying in a field
for god or country.
I will not die for greed
or the lying prattle
of a false avuncular overlord
rattling his self serving war sword.

I will never be set aflame with rage
by the decision of a man in black
to blow a whistle, or not.
I will never be offended by the price of a shit haircut.
I will not quit smoking,
then start again,
then quit again.
I will never confess, nor be forgiven.
I will make no contribution.
I will not raise a child to die,
and in their eyes behold the recognition
and blame for life’s dubious propagation.
I will regret nothing
until the day I die.
I will talk with no stranger along the way.
I will always be safe,
but my life is in danger.

Memorial Bench

The park at night stirs with
fearful rustling in the trees.
Bats and foxes and no love
for the young single mother
make rest hard here.

Here the chill breeze gives life
to a bit of white litter.
It carouses with the leaves
in a place that in daylight
doesn’t glisten.

A seat of honour
for the name it bears
was chosen for this place.
It is not appreciated
by the passers-by by day or by
the name the years passed by,
but if you sit still here
in a moment of dark reflection,
your gaze is directed by its facing
and attentive eyes
catch dragonflies
by the timeless pond
and consider daffodils
at various stages of their lives,
and the dead patron
feels close by,
on the breath of the night air
as nature wearily sighs.

Terror of the Night

Frequently,

you came to rest as day broke.
Frequently you failed to rest
and as day closed you awoke:

you awoke and the nightmare continued.

What devil’s tongue rests on your lips,
spits as love sends hands to shake
in desperate exorcism, but:

will they wake you or will you break?

Tonight,

nothing about anything makes any sense.
Tonight you will possess
ev'ry thing of the nothing
the day represents.

You’ll sleep when you know it’s all alright.

Pierce your lips, induce your trance
with profane sticks of sick incense.
You burn with the hunger of nonsense,
your lips permit but the burning lance.

Two smokes,

constantly on the go.
Two subconscious smacks
could bring you back but would you know?

A little Catholic fire, in ashtray, smoulders.

Your unflowing tears make
cheeks dry and hostile.
Hope bears the burden of
the emotional sterile.

Temporarily,

your brain gets stuck between gears.
Eternally
your prisoner brain is stuck between ears,

captive behind prison window eyes,
eyes glazed on both sides
can’t evade the evil face
of arbitrary arbitrators
in that insanitary place.

Fervently,

you refuse solace in that place.
Furtively you steal away
but as you break they match your pace

then when you’ve run the lonely race
which you only lose if you win,
you discover life and begin.

But life was lost when you ran wild,
your mistakes born within.

You lost it:

a trinket to confirm affection.
When they find you,
how will they know your cause of affliction
without your wristband’s history of passion?

Your single-purpose hands
are otherwise effete.
Trembling, useless,
they only admit defeat.