To Bernhard and Anita, Poem in Times New Roman, on Virtual Page, A4, (2008) & People We Can Trust

To Bernhard & Anita

A sonnet sun-sent commences
As marriage vows a keepsake
To the dream you made to make

An apple in an eye in Éire
A fire lit inside a heart
The spark to ignite the start

Of something beautiful;
Immutable to the ends of an Earth
Resplendent with sonne

And the holiness and the magic
Of a love grown into an ocean
First kindled in the
Fair city o’ Dublin.


Poem in Times New Roman, on Virtual Page, A4, (2008)

Biro on cartilage, etchings in bone,
Grooves for rivering blood red depth,
Charcoal on eye, pastel on enamel,
Chalky swallows make sputum retch,
A fine dissertation material.

Stretch flesh canvas and spray urine
And faeces to stain in the vibrancy,
Colours unseen to the naked human,
Unseen to the general public except
In the museum, asylum, penitentiary.


People We Can Trust

Michael Aspel and Ross Kemp are
People we can trust.
On billboards and television,
Magazines and the internet,
Their faces omnipresent,
Their message simple and
Ubiquitous, “We’re the People
You can trust.”

Julie Walters, saving us from
The flames; Alan Hanson feeding
Our kids their greens; Kevin Keegan
Took us ’cross the road in days of auld
And now Suggs is chummy with the
Captain. Like Aspel like Kemp, all
People we can trust. Trust in Rutger Hauer
However, and Peter Kay; no nonsense.

The Wasp Priest, Synopsis of Life & I Grew a White Hair Just for You

The Wasp Priest

I watched wasps caught in a
Jam jar filled with cola today;
They fought for their lives ruthlessly;

Climbing upon one another
And drowning each other
They futilely tried to stay alive.

I felt a surge of pity for the cretins
And then felt it no more
As I realised they have no feelings;

Only sensations; that of clambering,
That of falling; and a will to life,
But no sadness when it fails them.

The jam jar filled with cola’s a paradigm
For him ‘tis for the deadly sin, avarice,
For I a simple symbol: ‘So is life.’

I would be a priest
And take the vows of celibacy,
But I have not the faith.

I would move into a monastery,
If only I wouldn’t be conning
The kindly, quiet people there.

I do not believe in God,
But I do believe in love;
The less likely of the two;

Love is that jam jar filled with
Seven dead wasps and one struggling
To remain intact, drunk on the intoxicant

Syrup of the sugar that fills our stupid hearts.
A feeling tops the sensation for us, unlike the lucky
Wasps; I realise human is the lowest form of life, thus.



Synopsis of Life

Churn … appropriate … amalgamate.
In turn … each perm … coagulates.
Process … process …progress.
Mince … pulverise … tenderise.
Bash … smash … obliterate.
Kick … punch … head-butt.
Fancy … infatuate … masturbate.
Change … forget … shrug.
Glug … inebriate … escape.
Recur … recoil … collapse.
Jilt … jade … dupe.
Number … toll … tally.
Produce … align … destroy.
Target … market … allure.
Pause … think … continue.
Dress … undress … sleep.
Birth … death … and the in-between.
Rise … fall … pray.
Dream … wake … cry.
Defend … attack … ceasefire.
Define … abstract … ridicule.
Smoke … cough … cancer.
Order … disorder … leave.
Cancel … affirm … interfere.
Crawl … walk … run.
See … block-out … react.
Write … read … illiterate.
Hesitate … heedlessness … abate.
Join … unsubscribe … abscond.
Celebrate … party … pass out.
Imbibe … insufflate … addict.
Impress … depress … duress.
Coronate … defect … abdicate.
Marry … divorce … elope.
Begin … reflect … stop.


I Grew a White Hair Just for You

Did you see their beards, white as sheets
And long as horses? Confucius and the rough
And tumblers, and gaunt Beckett’s hair and skin
As ashen as any grey day under England’s skies.
But mine; just the one.

Stranded bleached beached in auburn streets
He stands alone, albino tone, weighing the
Weight of us; wearing the waited out, the
Sweated out, bones of you v. me, semelparity;
You used to say ‘let me tie your hair in knots.’

One hair on this face is all yours; your doing,
Your construing and consuming, your ever-
Present absence, your aging and totalling,
Tolling and confalutin’, your piercing grip;
I want not to gain another for them.

A greying grappling-hook in follicular stave,
Or a whitened panoply of Penelope’s folly
Which I travel in and ravel in, because I have to,
And want to believe, in Clarence and Alabama,
Anthony and Cleopatra and ensemble…

I’ll wear those castors of castigation, and skate;
I’ve fooled in love last and consecutive retrospective
Years, but it wasn’t enumerated annums that whited
An heir to this throng; I am Mordecai; abducted colour
Spilled from awn into our air, painting life, don’t look twice.

Trauma tantalises our wishful thinking, titillating
The tilted mirror in which we’ll sheer phases of
The stages passed in white strands emanating from
Chiselled chin, pinprick dimpled crimple of hair, there,
Grown in singularity to aggregate. I am my sole mate,
But I grew a white hair just for you.

Not Long For This World, Ghostly Shallows in Gloaming Afterthought & Scars and Lines, in Black Tar and White Paint, with Filaments

Not Long for this World

Too long in this world, breathes the light.
A slow tum-tum of waves breaking above my head.
I’m not long for this world, mums the clouded eye
In Münchausen monotone as I inspect the composite
Of last days and last suppers. Eschaton, come along!
Call the Mayans and Egyptians, Hebrews and Christians.
The end is nigh, apocalypse, apocalypse; why shouldn’t
We talk about that? It’s the one fact, certainty, truth
That we have to cling to. We should feel relieved in the
Space in which we cannot manoeuvre…


Ghostly Shallows in Gloaming Afterthought

The grass is greener, when looked at from a distance;
Up close the javelined blades are intercoursed with
Marshy flatulence and hopelessness, and
Like a moth, caught in a lampshade,
You return, to that bulb that will sting again!

Tortuous orchestration a melody of silence
In the ears of one, who, moments ago
Was a part of you; now amputated
Without so much as even a drop of iodine -
A vinegary wound left open to flag in the breeze.

Over meadows of ponderous bush
An underwood of stalemate congeals
And a heart left by the side of the road
Does not pump - ‘Same as it ever was.’
The milky silence of cold nonchalance,
When we’d given so much of ourselves,
Haunts the future with sickly ghosts!


Scars and Lines, in Black Tar and White Paint, with Filaments

Every moment changes life,
The sanct air hints of times,
And the unmanned jobs shine
Ways and displays all timing the change;
The moon is twice the size of my eyes tonight
In a swamp of craters as I’m twenty-two.

Innings and outings of soldiers warring
As traffic lights regulate and, unmanned,
Keep the beauteous measures rolling, rolling,
Beating like the trumps of coffeehouse blues
Phishing our season’s illumined aluminium.
Woody Guthrie Saint, shindig popped a shot at people
At gym class peabody mark six of seven.

You can’t stab truth in the eye, it doesn’t have eyes,
If it had seen; fuck, it would know, d’ya see, boy?
Portrayed as the enemy, bleak-top, in pedestrian:
A word is worth a thousand words,
Pedestrian, pedestrian, pedestrian, that’s the word!
But! On pelican crossings those lights still flash, un-bloody-manned.

Hazel Night, Train & O, To Be

Hazel Night

The moon looks quite pleased with itself tonight;
O, this is my favourite time of year! If only I could
Share it! The window open to the last notch, looking
Out over the green deeps of garden and vibrant azure
Of sky. My sill sits me in cigarette smoke as the still
Of the air moves not a wave or wisp of it until Nature
Deems their dissemination; the hazel night: O, but to
See it reflected in your eyes!


Train

Downtrack from two-hundred beach kids,
A macerated body.

Weston-Super-Mare must wait as the young
Girl throws up on platform two,

From drinking; not from the mangled flesh
Entangled in the train’s undercarriage.

Sunday morning, a church looks on,
Over suicide and misspent youth.

A pluterperfect air stilling the eerie beginnings
Of this day of precipitance.

The myth of Sisyphus to me, onwatching;
The cause of such a fuss, to the rest.


O, To Be

O, to be Allen Ginsberg!
And not one of his minds,
In another generation.

O, to be William Wordsworth!
In the French Revolution;
Alive and young again!

O, to be Walt Whitman!
Seeing, smelling and smiling
Across America.

O, to be Daniel Bristow!
As a whole, not a half;
Would be the answer.

Een Gedicht voor Herman Gorter, in Engels, Brief Curios on Pavement and Bed-sit Composite

Een Gedicht voor Herman Gorter, in Engels

As a faery running through a Spring wood
Of seminal smells and feminine hovels;
The winged nymph with wounded feet.

As a sleeping woodbine hugs the cease wood
Of the warbler’s tree, whose song is rung
Out on morns for the grieves of the fields below.

As ploughmen hoe in rhythm and rhyme;
The soil tilled in Spirits of the Highs;
Shades and wraiths, with eidolons, appear.

As mystic old stories regale in the breeze
A light-shaft from heaven opens a cloud
And the Sunday and autumnal feeling returns.

As the villagers gaze over a valley’s galliards
Danced by the greenflies and gallflies, bluebottles
And fireflowers, a wake takes place in a public house.

As hours flow softly over the hills of a fantasia view
Four men haul a boat to the river, over which
The will o’ the wisps are playing in the dusk.

As the old walls of the old cottages begin to crumble
An old woman’s face crinkles in the sunlit afternoon;
Clay-like she looks, but not unhappy.

As the dew sets over meadows of rest spiders webs
Shoot across the land and glisten; droplets of semen
On them, pollinating unbelievable colonies.

As a widower sets the kindling to fire the chimney
Seems to speak to him, whistling words of whimsy
That bring tears to his eyes and accommodate hope.

As visitors wander into the open arms of the indigenous
Some of the older spirits make it known
That they don’t want them here, in the gloaming of night.

As silence pervades the landscape, the forest creeps in,
As if Macbeth were here to be haunted, and an old poet
Is allowed to wander the woods and ask questions every now and then.

As the bows and arrows are lifted by munchkin boys
The girls play in the moonbeams with posies and
Sit sewing daisy chains while their warriors keep guard.

As pages are slowly turned in illuminated manuscripts
The rumour mills begin to circulate the gossips of
The more secretive lives in the village; all speculation.

As the parish church opens its doors on the Sabbath day
Three ghosts always attend the gates, silently ushering
The congregation to their pews.

As cats search for little rabbits and sparrows to eat
They sharpen the claws on their paws and the teeth
In their maws, and prowl stealthily over the undergrowth.

As our imagos of yesteryear slowly wear down,
A reminder of the faith we used to keep
Is spied through the stringy leaves of the crack-willows.

As Dutch and Flemish tongues, through Flanders,
Through Belgium, intermingle; in Germany it’s quiet
In the Harz and in Heidegger’s hut; some remained mute.

As fingers yellow from tobacco the countryside;
Its canopy of sky and draped leaves, retains the wafts
And wreaths of the smoky exhalations.

As the children grow up, some get married, some have
Children of their own, some lose their way and turn to
Drink; others remain flâneurs all down the days.

As the steeple is still, as the cross on the hill remains still,
As the brick well is still, a hobbling stripling finds his way
To the ale-house and has a dop in there.

As Lent is about to start a mother of three makes chocolate
In a saucepan and tells her kids that this is the last they’re
To have of it before forty days is up.

As the mythologies of the place thicken up and gain renown
A few of the old boys sit back on deck chairs on porches
And cynically deny that the ghosts and pixies ever lived there.

As the scientists work underground to recreate the Big Bang,
And the little black holes anticipate their inception, the residents
Of one house close the shutters over the downstairs windows.

As the old poet sits on the gravel path in May time,
He follows vapour trails left by the ghosts of the unborn dead,
Miscarried from womb to tomb; smiling for the living.


Brief Curios on Pavement

The bus shelter hives melt Formica implants,
Light shining through, as air traffic control
Oscillates and countless buses depart; red, white and blue.
All the cars, all the brake lights, head lamps -
Too many nondescript entities filling dead space
As dead weight on our shoulders.

Heathrow is a purgatory; a temporary state, a death-waiting
Chamber; each LED sign offers a different destination,
But, haven’t you heard? They’re all exactly the same.
We’re on a mass one-way ticket to the slow slipping away.
I watch you, each of you, as you each walk past in slow motion,
And I see you horizontally, slowly sliding down this
Cliff face of pavement into a hell of artificial light.

I mean as little to you all as you mean to me,
Though you see me, writing, and look on curiously;
You’re like everyone else I’ve ever known; brief curios
In pavement portraits. Paint me as your latest exhibition,
I want to be of some value, somewhere along the line,
To you.

Filled with obligation; I am not modern. Sometimes
I feel I’m not even of this world, which I neglect to
Understand. But then I miss the dead faces of every
Multicultural face here; through your skins shines your skulls;
Death awaits you all. And when it comes?
- Nothing.

The world is a fear, of each other’s fears. We’re scared to leave
Others trembling; whereas if we were alone we would soon know.
It is ‘Other’ that makes us so. Scum hit, scud street, filter tip,
Crack in pavement, crystal meth, icy tarred death, dead can, windswept,
Heathen traipsing, dust bowl, shit smear, shoe scuff, pastel mural,
A directionless arrow pointing, old man puke, the cardiac arrest of
Another hopeless victim; God’s prey, suitcase, broke glass, shoe lace,

Toe cap, tyre scrape, Coke cup, glossy magazines of no words;
These words, the scattered ashes of time; all on the sideways
Pavement; Hades’ slide. We’re all walking, underlit by fake light;
Our faces illumined as if angelic; lurking in the shadows lies every
Untold deception. The bags around our eyes are larger than those we
Check in; amalgam sin. Look at this world askance; lie on your side
At the airport and watch the multitudinous dead glide ever closer
Towards realising it.


Bed-sit Composite

The lampshade melted from the ceiling and dripped on the bed
Enveloping the stalest meat laid to rot by years of disregard; he
Would have said something had he someone to say it to, the landlord
Informed the police who quickly cleared up the debris and switched off the light.
So coiled, moths invade a brain, torn in two, by hands estranged:
And glance, fortune misplaced her keys, a little lackey sucking knees;
Above Hungarian shops on small streets, running parallel in veins feeding
Superstition in a starless sky. Parcels arrived for a Mr. Snake, and they
Shook as the postman held them hesitatingly an arm’s breadth away from
Face, saved a teaspoonful of brown time before leaving the flight making
Wind turn in on itself and a roar heard sucking itself out of a blackhole.
The fighting for existence; the culling for space in Mohammed Christ’s
White wine inversions; a sector known in reputation, which to land upon
Is dustier than the fortnightly visit to Grandma’s hospice; her pale eyes
Cutting to the quick. A whisper is a rasp from the oesophagus of a haggis-old
Inner-tube. A lonely man carved a shilling’s worth of life for himself in bed-sit
Trammel; detuning an instrument all the days he went on with lax strings and
Shoelaces untied, he had sixteen spoons, a penknife and a potato-peeler; the
Television began to bore him. The drinks cabinet displayed dregs and dead
Spider’s legs scattered about blown by the extractor fan from the sewage works
Underground, a connected suffocation gave an immense and overwhelming
Temporality to the scene inside the brain that was ripped at the seams and
Plasters placed over punctures; a rubber man with soap and celluloid eyes
That squelched when blunk. The padlock fastened to the outside of his door
Had been closed; through shackle the die-cast was fed and the door nobody
Knew about. After a week crawling commenced and decomposition of the
Left ear and each iris began to close, a smokehouse pinholed foiling any
Attempt. The helplessness of a treacherous, once magnanimous, Presbyterian
Syringing its throat with sludge and backwater heroin eyes stared from the
Boarders; the many-men’s slit windows, they watched an ant collapsing,
Righting, rolling and tumbling again and again; but then it’s dead eyes
Sharpened. A shock rang out; stepping back the panel looked at watches
As if the time told the truth. This little guinea pig had swindled the delegates
And they shat themselves on the spot. The ionisation of his blood had caused
An adverse curdle that the scientists could not predict and when the entity arose
They saw in his eyes nothing, abject futility, three jurymen died on the spot.
The void stared the rest out and a hundred and forty-six years later thirteen
Web-ridden skeletons were found staring each into letterbox windows around
A small shack bed-sit amphitheatre in the middle of which laid a dead mutant,
Representing universal extinction. The nihilist’s exhumation led to the laying
Down of tools and each worker that visited walked over miles of infertile land
Into an acrasiomycete swamp, pulsating with the tolling bells of superstition,
Into which each sank not even gasping for air; in all this time one man’s beard
Grew to the length of seven British motorways; he sat upon a mountain in
Tibet and, although dead for more than a century the hair never whitened. The
Manmade mongoloid in the bed-sit crawled into the beard; half his heart still beating,
Dormant had it lain, he wrenched himself up the curtain of solace to the chin and at the top
He pulled out a pair of sheers and chopped.

Germany pt. 2, The Slowest Suicidalist, The Knot & Germany pt. 1

Germany pt. 2

Its history steeped in landscape;
Unlike England’s, as ours is abroad:
This was the wall, the boarder, the former DDR;
A land effected by its past, with beauty and tradition to outlast
International engravings on foreign buildings;
Become foreign by time, separate from their cause.

The Brocken stands proud; a quiet mound,
The epitome of Germany: a rock of ages.
The village of Weissenborn-Lüderode; such tranquil repose,
Alone in green; conifer green and evergreen green
And the weiss beer atmosphere of the proceedings:
A log sawn through together; the end of something; the beginning.

Germany sings to me in an angelic harmony;
Germany has crept slowly, and borne warmth, into an almost
Unbeating heart!


The Slowest Suicidalist

Evening in a drawer of constipation; edging as a creeper-in;
This myth is of alleviation; the truth lies in bed; is stale release
Of gaseous nausea breath sinking in the slowest suicidalist, who
Traipses the boards of the stage of the seven stages and sins of life’s
Loss. A truer dourer ditty did never emit from the unsharpened head
Of cut-into skull, of a non-sanded down jagged jut of jaw. A look
Glanced slice; a rook took Bobby Fischer for a fool after climax,
Nay, apex, and the road didn’t narrow; just ended. The end of the road;
For those that don’t; but those that did, as Leopold said: “My whole life
Passed before me, and I found it quite wretched.” Gut stinks inside us;
Insidious trawl towards inevitable blot. The lowest suicidalist is in us.
Brave van Gogh unbalanced in canals of deafening absinthism and into his
Treasured chest he bulleted for the next world. Chet Baker plummeted
From balcony to ledger and Chris Benoit hanging with the weights. Too…
But a few. A museum of felo-de-se, a felony unto self; anthemion to
Socrates who can’t be critocised, but for the world’s eyes; how they stare!
And bear down upon us, eponymous in our communal lapse; forget not
Sin! Prelapsarianism no longer within, as James made quote to note:
“Surely life… is a heavy penance for him who has, perhaps, forgotten the sin
That laid it upon him.” Sisyphus is the starer. Stalker of our path. ‘Counselor’
Centred Thompson’s page in typewritten hand and heming way, sewing plath;
Assia a shura hughes done it. Berry man, who has taken his life by his own hand;
Levi a war on self; Marc Antony’s stabs of unction and Brutus’ fall after no
Volunteer volunteered euthanasia. Dr. David Kelly on Harrowdown Hill erased;
Embedded in history in various stages of decomposition, our bodies, dead bodies,
Self-taught, taut selves, self-murdered. Marked speight in the last days in the bunker;
Bunked off Braun and Hitler; chongzhen times, Jim Jones peopled temples and Nero
Conquered Christians, killed his mother, and adoptive brother, and then, in hiding:
Forced suicide; keeps the wolf from the door; Virginia Woolf, Wolfe Tone light houses
At night, that illuminate the rocks onto which we impale. Life is Vicious. Kurt Cobain,
Hart Crane put into the heart-shaped box trinkets and snippets, little inlets in skeletal
Hannibal complexes; wrapped and entangled in a coma of dreams only Julio Venegas
Has seen. ‘Join me’ John Lee said, a feeder to the seedier aspects of psychoanalysis,
What are you a Freud of? Pilate asked: “What is truth?” Rob Pilatus replied: “A mime.”
Ian Kevin Curtis, Kurt Gödel and all the other screaming lord sutch and sutches did it.
But we, we Fischermen remain, in slow fading infamy we wait, losing our minds and souls
One sense at a time; disassembling, a vow of silence, of blindness, deafness, paralysis,
A suicide meditation; dragging our bodies through lives until degradation, inexorably,
As the slowest suicidalists; we are but alive, and past it, in the safety of a familiar unhappiness.


The Knot

Me and you
Wrapped together
In a knot
Is perfect

More so
Than the loser
I used to…

Used to being used
I used
To take advantage
Of

The knot,
To tie another ribbon
To the maypole
And dance; a slow, painful death.

Hath an auld marriage blanc
Not been told; lain out on the table
Are blueprints, intricate diagrams
Of not knotted vas deferens;

Virginally deferent
To a bowing president,
Surrendering candidacy;
Decamping.

To knot
Or not
To be?

Tie.

Draw.

Fire.

You and me
Knotted defencelessly
Is pleasingly,
An nth degree

Of perfection
In a sand dune
Of black flies
With tied legs

Held by cotton, trying
To swim in the air
Away.

But together
Shoelaces tied
Cause trips
On surreptitious tides

Ebbing,
Edging
Away
From the holiest of holies:

A holy place, a shrine, a temple
Of a divine deity
Known as ‘little Miss
Fornix’

Place me purple
Behind your eyes
As the sinking ship is deserted
By its spies.

Place me pink
In the sink
As the ship is sunk
By cannonball.

Unneutered endeavour
Unknotted together
A little
A lot
A knot.


Germany pt. 1

The quiet of this place haunts me;
A soul being sucked through an eye socket by a vacuum cleaner.
It reminds me of how lonely I am in life.
Why such an insatiable aspirant? I want, and only want,
The things I don’t/can’t have; I should be more than
Content with what I do have. Is it too much to want just
One person in this world to love me? Me, more than anyone
Else! - Or just someone who hasn’t left/won’t leave me, someone
Who I can turn to in woe and they can comfort me with
No conflict of interest; I try to be this person to people,
No one does to me; they’re all too busy - getting on with it.
What’s an atheist’s monastery; an insane asylum?
Germany does not help my unhappy heart!