Green Room

These glorified screws hold the crooked wood
together with the sanctity of childbirth.
Fingers of pale mistrust pick at poisoned strings,
out of time, and the sound is only self-worth.

Each note digs, seeking a deeper ocean
than the one in the stomach,
falling down a mountain, eyes redder
than merlot, dropping a stitch.

The frequency of the inevitable, approaching day,
which won’t be made harmless by the purest voice,
is stronger than Japanese rot-weed roots
binding us to a single choice.

If it could be fixed it would be a crystal palace
by now, but rot sinks deeper than unmeant chords.
A romantic dream still coats the walls
with warmth, but white-wash peels in uniform.

Chase another dream if you can find one
that doesn’t tickle like a feathered shiv,
but we’re miles from the racetrack
and the gutters don’t support, they give.

These geriatric parasites love their ideas
and impart them as obstacles to fashion,
igniting the world with a damp design
more flawed than a radio, jaded as an anthem.

The tragedy of transgression when it works
is that it doesn’t work, or didn’t for us.
So shut down the pumps, mop up
the drip trays, let’s not make a fuss.

Just remember that moment, fleeting as smoke,
when you meant each and every line.
We’re all culpable for this
turn off the lights. It’s time.

December 25th

They carved a joint on Christmas day,
all of this has happened before,
the knife slipping in that same old way
but that’s not what the crow saw.

Aphasia led the toast to be abandoned,
the story repeated again and again,
the incision was made by someone
and outside no snow, only rain.

Some of the gifts never got wrapped,
all of this has happened before,
the glittering crackers remained in-tact
and the wreath wilted black on the door.

They rolled a joint on Christmas eve
as the crow tapped its beak on the glass,
the wind pushed its feathers into stiff peaks,
the moon wandered wardenly past.

The knife slid through a rift in time,
all of this has happened before,
that certain way the night magnifies
was more than the crow could ignore.

What if December didn’t fall
as the crow tapped its beak on the glass?
What if we got the continuity wrong
and that was what caused the crash?

They carved a joint on Christmas day,
all of this has happened before,
the tinselled tree sighed with the weight of an age
but that’s not what the crow saw.

The crow sat up by the chimney
tearing page after page from a book,
they fell like snow, leaf after leaf
if anyone had cared to look.

The knife slid through a rift in time,
all of this has happened before,
from mistletoe and wine to Auld Lang Syne
but that’s not what the crow saw.

Orphic Dreams

Just look at those once sturdy now shaking hands,
they vibrate like a child clutching a secret
which scratches at the chest as coarse as sand.

The Orphic journey, which just had to be
undertaken, has delivered only regret
and fingers which flicker as a memory.

And then, though rare as unsad eyes, comes sleep
and a dream of Thomas checking hands.
He shakes his head, “Your soul’s not in your feet.”

Of course you shake your head and digits back
“I don’t believe in you” you cry as you fall to land,
wishing only to breathe again and wake from the black.

Stay strong through the wind, with your eyes askance,
don’t give them a thought, not a second glance.

Royal Tender (a punt for the poet laureateship)

A truth dirtier than a nine-bob-note
is that we all crave our majesty’s face
multiplied and pressed tight
up against our thighs.

Coin after coin plunked in close to the crotch
with the jingling ecstasy of bed-springs,
or paper crumple-creased
as tissues soiled and greased.

We don’t much care which profile’s nestled there,
the young and thin, or the slight double chin
provided she’s replenished
again and again.

ditch, | the poetry that matters

ditch, | the poetry that matters

3 New Poems Published in Ditch Magazine

Eletriptan (Why We Can't Own a Gun)

Line

Cuts

available at:
http://www.ditchpoetry.com/stevenash.htm

Sad Jack (A Halloween Poem)

Sad Jack, no shadow, he lopes through the streets
his pockets brimming with cross-salted bread.
All around he hears the auditors of his dreams,
the night magnifies the price on his head.

Poor Jack once tricked the devil, had him stuck
in a tree, and now the underworld’s blocked.
With Lucifer one should not try his luck
and through Peter heaven’s gates can be locked.

The judgement of a single long-dead saint
cursed miserly Jack to the borderland
of a weeping sky and always dead day,
his only protection a hand-carved lamp.

His fear tugs his wrist like a child’s fingers,
dragging him onward further from the light.
Only the subtle, cold, orange embers
through the lamp's grinning face disturb the night.

Sad Jack prays one day he may reach a place
where an ocean of whispering shades unfurls,
and then he can finally finish his race,
breath a sigh, then dive and drown with the world.

Snag

The rakings of a strange

comedy,

in the making of a skewed

tree,

squirm in its every limb

and leaf.

A faintness of the arteries bound

in knotted alleys.

There’s nothing like the power of a good

costume,

like sawdust to stir the blood,

better than any daydream.

To be hidden from a world

of light

and stand in a communion

of quiet.

Taking the Long Way Home (in memory of Kelly Roxanne)

Sitting on sand spread too thin over rock
I watch our old friends as they clash with the waves.
They perch crouched and glistening only to fall
from their boards, then from the water they break
upwards into sky, taking deep gulps of the day.
They are so far; they look so small.

If you were here we’d embarrass them all,
digging for fraggles whilst they showed their moves.
The entire beach would be your playground and no stares
could stop you dancing, or singing back the gulls calls.
They raise beckoning waves in arcs and loops,
send pleas to join them upwards as flares.

But I’ve got to write a paragraph,
picking at the years with a fingernail
hoping for just a little blood; like when you
said you couldn’t find poetry in Sylvia Plath;
the only real poems were fairytales;
that no one wrote anything new.

Tonight we’ll fill the coastline with your songs,
with lies, with stories, with beer-skewed memories
and tomorrow we’ll follow the shoreline’s foam,
just as you and I always did after those long
nights playing dives, huddled against the breeze,
always taking the long way home.

Piggy

First pig and second pig cowered inside
knowing the bailiffs would be coming that night.
Young Straw and Sticks read the notice and cried,
“But hasn’t Bricks heard about renter’s rights?”

In truth they knew that their rights had been spent
(over six months since Bricks had seen rent,
rizlas and pizza boxes coated the floor.)
Loud as a gunshot – a knock at the door.

“Little pigs, little pigs, you’d best let me in.
I own the hairs on your chubby chin chins.
Brothers you’ve only yourselves to blame.”
“No, one more week bro – my compensation claim!”

“I’ve tried to be nice but have it your way,
if mum could see you wasters she’d be so ashamed.
The boys’ll be around later today.”
In silence, they thought of mum – turned to sausage last May.

After a couple of hours the knock came at last
“Little pigs, little pigs, open up it’s CAB.”
Straw leapt to his trotters “Sticks we’re saved!
Citizen’s advice must’ve sorted my claim.”

Without further pause Straw rushed to the porch
and turned the handle to find only wolves at the door.
“We’re Collects After Bacon. You got your bruv’s cash?”
The beast strode in giving his teeth a good gnash.

Sadly the little piggies were irredeemably poor
so the wolves settled up at the butcher’s next door.

Garden (commissioned by the Derbyshire County Council)

“I’m wondering if I can make any sense of the daffodils”
(George Szirtes)

Remember when we were barely shoots and would listen
to dad rue the slimy holes in his lettuce and lamb’s lugs?
Not gardening fans ourselves back then
we’d always side with the slugs.

There’s something different now about the spring
and the glad faces of daffodils mark the change,
with the drowsy blur of butterflies
and sunflowers crowned with flame.

Each petal is an eyelid opening dreamily
like a newborn fresh from the black,
they gaze at you in unison asking questions
you long to ask them right back.

Or when autumn’s in the chair and the garden
undresses to the apparel of its birth,
only to wait for snow, blossoms dropped as
benedictions on the shivering earth.

And when the top soil seems suddenly foreign
or faced with a loss I can’t comprehend
it’s to the garden I find myself turning
constantly in the end.

Myth (First published in Word Salad's Haiku Ramblings -Fall 2009 Vol 1ii & Word Salad Magazine - Vol XV iii)http://wordsaladpoetrymagazine.com/Haiku/

Ink black as scented
oil, dries fast and hard coating
truth in tight cocoons

Infinite Rooms, Covered in Dust

Infinite rooms, covered in dust
Infinite rooms, covered in dust.

The house stands an abandoned skull
broad, black windows staring into nothing
of nothing,
door always open a gaping mouth
toothless as a crone.

Infinite rooms, covered in dust
Infinite rooms, covered in dust.

Leaves lifeless in suicidal yellows and browns
carpet the hallways, like walking on cereal
or the bones
of dead birds. All life a memory after
a single great blaze.

Infinite rooms, covered in dust
Infinite rooms, covered in dust.

The Boat Bottler

The hours he devoted, each matchstick
a benediction,
to the construction of that ship
no one else was to touch,
innumerable.

With each passing year the ship would grow, a new match
for every line which
built up and outwards in cross-hatches
across his face,
immeasurable.

The proposed port at the ship’s commencement:
a vacant bottle
of scotch, stood expectant in the corner
of the shed, too small now
to accommodate.

The masts were raised in the silent celebrity
of broken spiders
and steadily emergent bales of dust.
The older pieces – deck and hull –
unnoticed

began to strain beneath the heft of their descendants
until one by one
they strained free of the matured glue
cracking like bones
arthritic.

One day they found him expired at the bench,
hands clawed on the table,
unlaunched vessel nowhere to be seen,
only the bottle filled up with matches
innumerable.

The B.F.V. or My Vampire's a Poodle (a response to another writing challenge)

My vampire’s now basically a poodle.
There once was a time that he’d tear folks apart,
devour throat after throat with a lust so dreadful.

Those fangs - mountain-peaks straining to part
clear horizons of flesh allowing the crisp, red
of dawn to leak from the sun's plump heart.

Now he wakes me with affectionate licks on the forehead,
sits loyal, patient, panting for our moonlit trips
to the park, and of course to be fed.

He used to stalk the streets for girls to menace in his grip,
now they queue up to faun over his glittering coat
while he sits passively grinning, cherry aid round his lips.

It makes you wonder where did all those great monsters go?
Orlak, Varney, Carmilla, I'd even settle for Lestat.
Bringing my slippers is domestication beyond a joke.

You want something vicious? You're better off with a cat.

No One Knew

No one ever knew it was us who turned
the field to ash.
The summer not long smothered, the leaves still
crackling with warmth.
We latticed our petrol-scented fingers,
with their tree climb
chipped nails, together and crouched as shadows
lost in shadows.

The scuff of a match now pauses my pulse.
The ignition
hiss mirrored the blaze you bore within. I
vaguely burning,
a moth beating a window, a hunger
terrible for flames.

We ensured that night never grew too dark.
The inferno,
as though we’d caused the sun to crash to Earth,
died in a breath.
Then, the sirens, the chaos of flashing
lights, the torches,
the heat of your cheek pressed into mine, the air
unbreathable.

At the reunion I slipped to the field –
now parched houses -
and nursed a cigarette. When I returned
I asked about
the girl who claimed never to eat or sleep;
asked about you…

Acropolis Island

When your bottle finally yawned itself up onto my shore
I found the seal already broken
The ink had been smudged into Pollocked
abstraction
become a puzzle.

There are ledges all over this island, sleeping brethren of the
walls back in the city, each one an
acropolis of creatures reaching out
in thirst kept from the
void by faith alone.

Through the bleeding ink your words opened their throats and screamed
still, howling for release from the depths
of an aqua-green mile, a kaleidoscopic S.O.S
red letter day
but the seal – broken.

Remember that man? He said his name was Slate
the week before it had been Michael.
Each day I’d pass the body perfectly right-angled to the wall,
one hand cradling a beaten paperback
the other speculating the yo-yo of a faithful dog’s ribs.

Someone must have read your message first and let the painted
pleading into his or her ears and eyes.
They’ve probably responded and you’re rescued
so I’ll stay here
with your message.

If I had a memory of that first meeting with Michael
it has salamandered off into the clutter
leaving only the certainty
of his offence at the proffer of coins;
that tomorrow he will be recast with a new name;
and that if his ballast form should vacate
the wall would crumble
and the city would cave
with it.

My First Car

It tasted sour, the warm blood which crept from my nose,
and as I lolled it around on my tongue it throbbed
outwards like gelatin until my mouth was clogged;
too full to cry out toward my house in case the blood
should unburden itself of my body for good.
I'd pushed, silently, the wheeled plastic gift, then lifted it
in those too-thin arms down the porch stairs. Cheeks hot with guilt,
feet naked as newborns to muffle each siren scream
of the steps. And my chest was tight from the
cobwebs frost's spiders always weaved in my lungs, what valuable
breath they let leak unfurled into dancing silverfish.
Nothing prepared for the breathless crush of night once I'd left that crest.
The earth, as it will, rushed past until my first car betrayed our tryst,
my lips returned the concrete's kiss and I haven't driven since.

Pass Me Your Ears (Haiku for Kelly)

Friend, pass me your ears

upon a platter. I'll chew

only what I must.

After (Short-story published in Reflection's Edge Magazine August 2009)

Here's the web-link:
http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/2009/08/after/

Odd Socks (a response to a writing challenge)

There's an insistent vanity in this pair of odd socks
tinselled on the line after a tussle on the breeze,
the arterial red of one defines the other's meek pink;
as dog defines cat;
as the stem holds its breath;
as the flame crowns the match.
Each official form now must have its replica
everything a duplicate in all but the colour.

Undermining the reality of the Thin White Duke's stare
is all in the perception of the pupil's smudged lens,
but the pulses which push our fragile filters off-centre
can be rendered, or counted, or worn over again;
like a table adorned with both a red and white wine
or the defective wing-beats of the perfect half-rhyme.

Ring Master (first published in Word Salad-Summer 2009)

The corpse-
painted cheek
of the ring
master
says it all,

flaking in soft
scabs
from just
beneath his
squint red eye,

like frail leaves
from a
cabbage head
once rot
has set in.

When he tries
a smile
the gorges of
his face
push deeper

inviting you in,
like a modern
day
Hannibal

who just can't
resist
that next
descent in
to darkness,

braving
exhaustion,
white-out, a
corpse paint
avalanche.

"Ladies and
gentlemen!"
He calls, and
on come
the elephants.

Feathers

Last night a bird fell in through the
window - wings wilted.

A feathered flash of confetti
thrown - jubilant - dropped - used.

It fit like an apology
so snug in my palm,

its arias long finished.
Its eyes marble-dead,

show violence remembers me.
A feather lets go

as though I'd plucked a yellow leaf
in the wrong season.

Its beak, cracked like the cut lips of a
nihilist, shimmers

and now its guns are safe under
its coat where they'll stay.

4 a.m.

Four winds blow obstinate across the high
street shops
whipping the stony purple flowers of
detritus
into the 4 a.m. absence of widowed
streets.
Each window, clothed in black hood
and propriety.
“You cannot come here” they whisper
batting
their mascara’d lashes in not un-becoming
desperation.

All this will change in a few unbuttoning
Hours
and then their nakedness will be
swarmed upon
by bulging Proci in Odyssean
absence.
The frail luminosity of cobweb grace
will be gone,
leaving only a harvest of dreadful
endurance.

Prophecy in Paint

The buildings are indifferent, but here
the bricks, dove-weak, buckling beneath

the suckling midnight horizon,
offer up a prophecy

of a painted world laboured into
existence by a canned refuge.

The ring road, a belt stretched to tear
by its burden of colours once-clear,

is a gastric band of faded
tattoos. The trees wilt to its weakness.

The moon winces and shrinks behind
a flotsam of cloud to mask its face.

In the lunar absence panthers descend
in shadow masses dancing on silent

claws. And the last of the gouache scarring
is drained away as an abscess.

When the city is reunited
with the light of day, insistent, predicted,

the catch of sun will redden skins
but not ignite strong enough to cleanse.

"Just Noise"

The lull, like a gap in a film reel,
gets you everytime.
Before the real opening kicks in
with the attrocious
beauty of a building shrinking into
explosive charges.
Each prayer-meant note is cauterised
to a chord of lime.

Then it's downhill, not a drag - a plunge
headlong, terrified,
no need to be told: "Keep arms inside
the car at all times."
Eyelids clenched into arrows, as though
they could solder-fix
you into this world and not let you
slip into the abyss

you want to touch. And when it's over
you skip it back,
not to relive (you recall your friend
the bald, fat, buddhist);
not because the room is empty without
or complete with the track;
just to get another high fi
glimpse at the abyss.

Narnia Magpie

In the wardrobe, through the wardrobe and out the other side
You’ll find no witch, no lion there but the twitching mane
of a fight.

The sand, in stealthy gangs, sweeps soundless between the streets
The awkward stalks of cameras and press-packs sprout through the cracks
of every path,

but their paradise is never shared and their paintings not revealed.
The prickly blanket of deceit, a hoary marital vale won’t let us see; and we
are not there.

We are here, and so is this magpie and I’m no ornithologist
but until this moment I had not known that their wings could be so
shocked with blue.

Final Memoriam

And that my hold on life would break… (Tennyson – In Memoriam)

The elegiac words have failed.
------The phrases in aggressive occupation
------have broken page after page’s defences,
windows – broken, crazy doors – unbarred.

A magnificent seven,
------the perfect source for my kinds’ consignment,
------reveal the emptiness of the dormant
image, as a sheet leavened

before the question: “Is this
------him?” Perhaps once it was someone.
------And even then no words would come,
and even now they waver.

Because you were compelled to move on
------and I, passive, could do nothing, did nothing,
------because the sun cannot assuage its loneliness
amid thousands of other stars

and one day will snap and desperately
------drag us to its breast for a moment of warmth
------before it is done, because the elegiac words
have failed, for you I will write no more.

When We Fall

She Sang to Us (a ghazal for Debjani Chatterjee)

She sang to us a current tune hewn from ancient song.
She sang of serpents and elephants with wings and Surya’s blazing song.

She breathed a poem, as life, in to a bottle
but the glass broke out into song

Its three splintered shards settled as visions on the shore
of Shakti, Lakshmi and artful Saraswati singing her sacred song.

She descended with Orpheus through the depths with a trumpet
to invigorate the dead’s constant song.

Still she paints history with wild amber strokes
turning its ruined palisades into song.

She illuminates the chaos strewn at our feet
the creosote crystals of Shahrazad’s song.

She weaves the crystals into fragments coils fragments to words
then charms them upwards as serpents to song.

Because she was and is and will be that woman,
ever shall these walls hum her song.

Want if you will

This part (of the story)
could be cut.

A boy with his lips
to a keyhole
A friend with his head
on one side
A child fighting air
for a marble
A dog-collar waiting
to dry.

The principle actor
is quitting
The script-writer
doesn't know why
The director is fucking
the starlet
Her father is waiting
outside.

The boy's given up
on the keyhole
The producer says
"Want if you will."
The child plunges after
the marble
and sinks as his lungs
fill with silt.

Slant Wings

The plane won't fly

because its wings are

slant.



A little boy

has seen it but he

can't



let himself say,

because he knows they

won't



believe a boy

anyway.

The Town Vanished

The town has gone
but there's no cry of victory.
If the war has been won
there's no beautiful boned youth
atop the ashes with a flag of red or black.
So how could we know?

How could we know
whose side to defect to?
The pigeons, in new hats of snow,
look as bewildered as the few
who still fade in and out of the peripheries
resting their faiths.

There is a fly, born into
this day. This is the only day
it will know. It's blue
translucent splay
of wings is a lens through which the concrete
blurs into a fog-lined canopy strong enough
to hold back the corpus of years.

Insole

The central pattern
against which
the broken cobbles
of experience
can be mapped is this
shoe.

The whole thing
is dominated
by a single abyss
and
it is the important
factor.

Without it
there wouldn't be
my shoe.
Without the rest, teetering
around it,
there wouldn't be...

And I could use an
odour-eater.

"Epistemologically Speaking"

he says grandly, opening his halloumi

arms

as though he's throwing open the doors

to the Harrod's sale calling:

"All must be sold!"



The bulge of happiness our blank faces

inspires

in his already offensively protruding cheeks

is twisted but hypnotic.

How much flesh can a face hold?

Cake

It's not all hand
rolled cubans
and cake
though.

This mender of
roads reminds
with each
breath

that what passed here
today, an-
other
year,

won't pass again
in the same
plum blessed
air.

The next revol-
ution will
quicken
its

bristles and whip
matter of
grey up
to

our paths to slow
colour our
lychee
eyes

just a little.
A little
more stale.
Who

saw him truly
alive then?
Who saw
him?

-ing

Having no name
would be a Kinchyaku
curse.

Not wearisome
in the sense of following
advice

from those accomplished
mortarboarded billboards when
they say:

"Avoid." The ease
of ignorance doesn't
apply.

Having no name
we know the robin's secret
cousin

enjoys the freedom
of invisibility darting
between

the catacomb hedgerows,
its song above our
frequency.

Having no name
we know
of
having
no name.

Commissioning Chaos

It was less than a
hundred years ago
that He accidentally
commissioned chaos,
and now the resurrection men and women
have come.

Lanterns held low, cigarettes
cupped in firefly palms.
The point man – a
high rise silhouette
against a moon shrunk to gibbous in his
presence –

raises a black flag and
turns. “What day is this?”
His voice, clear as
digital, his lips
masked by a scarf teased up to the
nostrils.

The brook of seething
heads murmurs back,
whispers twist into the
clatter of tools,
a shovel, a pick axe, a brick (old habits I guess), brought to
harvest.

The wood, snug beneath
the crust of age is
exhumed lightly by
so many hands.
The point man lifts his clean fingers. “Raise your
lanterns!”

A few follow the
command cutting the
quarry with hieroglyphs
of light and ushering
the shadows away into the wounds.
The rest

drop their tools
or turn away
faltering in turns
as though they know those bones will burn
their eyes.

Eviction

There is a widow's walk where she could stand
and pine amidst the consilatory

fingers of rain tap tap tapping her mind,
but her will now extends only to the

cigarettes laying in politician
plumpness waiting for her clammy fingers

to deliver them to the threshold of
her flaked lips, and be drawn into the damp

destiny of the calcified branches
of her lungs. She won't go up to the walk

because she is no more a widow than
the flame that touches her latest solace.

But that doesn't make the weight that pins her,
bricks on her shoulders, concrete in her gut,

any less real. The weight keeps her from the
post, which spews incessant from the outside,

from the phone, that quit shrieking weeks before,
and keeps her lips from opening when the

ones without faces, the ones curtained in
smoke say, "Sorry, there's nothin' we can do."

Wild Fire (Published at The Smoking Book April 09 - http://thesmokingbook.blogspot.com/ )

She carried the fire in her pockets
and tapped shards of magma
like cigarette ash onto the passing trees.

She was beautiful and courteous
to the other scholars of nature.
She’d make space for the squirrels,
twitching like tweakers, to pass unobstructed;
she’d lift the hedgehogs, doleful as skin-poppers,
over the screeching train tracks.

But her face was dark and mournful
even when she lifted her blazing palms
to rub her leaking eyes,
to caress the hissing trees.

Hair cropped by fire,
they stand black and naked now
damned sentinels wreathed in shame.

She has gone, dragging the sun down
beneath horizon’s brittle crust,
its final cry turning the cloud
into a sprawling bruise, as the
sunlight gently bleeds away
into night’s quilted pockets.

Sky

The boss leers down in
suit of regulation grey
signalling today we’ll
be pissed on with delegation;

the toxic spray will bounce
in orange sparks from our
shoulders onto one another’s

and I’m a smiling Juju doll
beckoning the needles.

Sure, when he’s wearing
his shiny blue number
it’s like the resentment's
been wrung from him,
drained as pus from a junk
abscess at a clinic on meth day.

But on those days I can’t slip on
my heavy leather jacket
and bless my own vanity
that
at least I
outshine him.

January 22nd 2008 (Published in Ouroboros Review 2009)

"Your world seems as far away as my mind" (Jenny Cook)

I
Not that morning, the morning
after – the tomorrow as it were –first
there comes the waking, ignorant
as a creature still asleep in a tree cut down.

Then, following a shuffle through
the detritus of spent party poppers,
the name and face leaps onto the
buzzing screen. The room smells of rain.

Locking the door the morning dark requires
stiff fingers to fish for a phone to guide the key.
What used to be lighters are now mobile phones
that's simply the way it is.

II

Still enduring Class A hang-
over from a declassified night
stumble amidst the rain-cleansed grasses
as the solemn dew curdles to a thick soup.

The headache is painless so split
a fifth of absinthe or worse. Clapping crowd
ready; lift the heavy guitar
(more axe than ever) and pause on the stairs.

The stage awash with a week's worth of sweat;
one pair of eyes - filled with the knowledge of what
happened - equally glazed beneath the orange
glow issued forth from plastic palms aloft.

What used to be lighters are now mobile phones
that's simply the way it is.

III

That night seeking the familiar
comfort of popcorn perfume and dark
a performance to turn away academy eyes
and though they look now it is no less deserved.

Each of us, breath held, longs to be
nothing but him as he slides, with the
fibre-optic elegance his
talent allows, into anyone but himself.

Guaranteed is the award for the mimic
that gets to show the world his young chess moves
in the inevitable biopic being
fought over pre-script in studio depths.

What used to be lighters are now mobile phones
that’s just the way it is.

Adrift (as published in London Grip March 09)

There are no fish that swim here
in this mire dark green and viscous.
He always felt at peace in the water
and even now he remembers
how he would toss in a stone
and watch his face tear away with the ripples.

When the wind drops and the sun rises, lazy as lost spirits,
the coffin – a boat for the dead –
is anchored and tranquil
wreathed in tendrils and reeds
somewhere beneath the surface, crystallised with light,
out beyond the storm, beyond reach.

That Winter the bay froze
as his body turned with the sky from dusted
pink dawn into a bruised blue-green dusk,
all warmth and light drawn away like miners pulled
from their tunnels in subtle shifts.
But still he may return
like the others.

Every single one of them
a ghost-limb of the bay
as though the water forgets
to keep what it claims.

The Ghosts of York

We are the ghosts of York and we are real.
You may have altered names of streets and walls
but, when all those avenues fill with night
and the certainty you are not alone
ignites a feeble fire behind your eyes,
know that we're here and have nightmares to share.

The modern world will fall away to share
its demon-filled underbelly and real
face teeming with vengeful shadows. Our eyes
peer out from your ancient defending walls,
always reminding you're never alone
on cobbles after dark, in bed at night.

Sometimes we'll sing sweet to lay soft the night,
encourage you coldly to open - share
your dreams - when they're gone you'll be more alone
than ever. We gave this city its real
name when twilight peeled back and clothed the walls.
We've always been here just beyond your eyes.

We probe the faint laughlines tugging your eyes,
we poke the myriad cobbles in night-
stained shimmer, skitter into the cracked walls.
We hold dear our reputation for shared
vengeance. When our false light bleeds into real
mist those faint murmurs speak to you alone.

Our transience is why you leave us alone.
There will come a time when we'll matter; eyes
will widen, wreaths will burn and the real
dance of ash and ember thrilled into night
will paint dozens of blue-flamed torches shared
between your shadows cast up against the walls.

Dusk lingers in the window frames, on walls
the gleaming colours of autumn darken alone
and hint at the creeping of spring. We share
the turning with you, watching through your eyes.
It tastes clearer through your fear of the night.
We are the ghosts of York and we are real.

We are as real as you and these grand walls
that blanket you at night when you're alone
were built for our eyes and we don't like to share.

Lion and Unicorn on a Train (Published in the Cartier Street Review April 09)

Lion – Unicorn – Kafka - Murakami
Through the mud-flecked window
the world struggles for air beneath
the asphyxiating cushion of snow.
The train tilts through an impulsive hollow,
an old lady falls and a young man catches her.
The tendons of his arm strain
like the veins of red and blue wires
fixed with adhesive faith into
a life-support machine, chugging onward
with its lonely beep toward the edge of the world
where the land’s lungs open
as free as fresh snowflakes.

Straight outta Ripon et al

Measured in the capitulation of memories
its miles shrink to moments forgotten;
unavailable despite the faded snapshots
of a happy boy with a punctured red ball.

A childhood forged through the stutter of
army barracks recedes further with each
flash of sepia, like a schizophrenic slowly
digested by his own creation.

There were colourful streamers and blinking lights,
a scatter of loyal pets with bright eyes;
their names interchangeable as brands of cars
a new one for each picture a new one for each place.

And there was a boy who briefly absconded
after being caught trying to make a broken bird fly.
Its cold form tossed upward over and over
its wing an arch eyebrow cut into the sky.

Aeneas

The line of many stepping in line but
lacking the form of uniformity
is slowed from its march
like a tear of blood from a fresh graze
as it dries into clot
by one small figure who crouches
in the sand to look

at what remains of a beetle. The creature
still black, still whole under the desert sun
is missing only that which made it
It. Now splayed and flat beneath
an empty gold cylinder twice its length.
Its load long-since cannoned out, the hollow
burden has proved too much to bear.

The line of many resumes its shuffle
around and beyond the boy and his beetle;
the beetle and its treasure; the treasure and its
memory; and his father, who cradles his daughter
(the boy’s baby sister) to his dry breast,
and his wish that he had a second arm
to lift his son

or the strength to lie to his son and not
make him share the yoke of his grief.
Before shuffling on at his father’s knee
the boy scoops the fusion of beetle and metal
in his palm to shield it from the sun;
from the sand; from the many feet;
from
...................a
.......final
.................................lapse
..in ..................to
...........................................formlessness.

A Band Named Homer - II

Penny, fingers curled in loops of blonde made black,
is listening to music – music of the depths. She tries
to penetrate the discord but
to her it is dense as midnight
The midnight he sailed through
to leave her blinking on the shore.

She cannot pick out his voice amidst the grind
of static - a machine on the cusp of explosion.
Even his face has ebbed, his real face
Not the gurning cartoon with wild hair,
the lovechild of a cockerel and a cabbage,
that letches from the album sleeve.

Waiting with a fragile cryo-patience
listening to these lullabies that wound – waiting.
A cry ruptures the night time
through the plastic speaker upturned,
She raises herself and stretches tall creaking like an oak
to draw her acorn close in the lighthouse flush of the moon.

A Band Named Homer - I

On stage alight a band called Homer
named for that jaundiced cartoon father,
Their ignorance discarded the irony of sorts
the song the crowd called for:
"Trojan Horse! Trojan Horse!"
What the songs painted through the din who could tell?
Landscapes of ash and the emptiness of hell?
Were words once soiled by society made pure
when scraped through the larynx of this green haired creature?
Was it art standing against emptiness
or brief transitory brightness?
The lead-singer cast in luminous haze
snarls his incantations, retunes his languid shapes.
But his eyes are vague as horizons through mist,
His voice an inconstant wind with no sail to lift.

Someone was crying, a lone protestor unheard but standing straight
against the violence
The guitarist turns his tear-streaked face - instruments of inwardness
begin and end in silence

Waiting for Lucy

“Her eyes are closed and the rain stings as it hits her eyelids.” A friend gifted me that line once, but without a context it seemed destined to fester with the dust of my dreams until forgotten. But now, through the storm on the cragged edge of a Scarborough cliff, I see her. Her eyes are indeed closed but I’m unsure that the rain stings her eyelids, before it drips from her damp-darkened lashes, for she does not flinch. She is one with the soil, which quickens at her feet and with the wind, which whips her hair around her porcelain cheeks, and with the last light of the day as it blends with the mist into the sky into the sea. I cannot unsettle her. I can just watch.

Another figure, struggles hunched and breathless to the crest of the cliff. He has seen her and I know without looking for the detail of his face exactly what he is thinking. He sees a woman standing solitary, at the precipice of nothing, in conditions not found on postcards and thinks something must have occurred earlier in the day.

“Are you okay Miss?” He calls and, though I saw him open his wide, middle-aged mouth, the intrusion of his voice almost makes me drop my pen.

If she hears him above the swirl of wind and rain she pays no heed.

Her footwear, more appropriate for charging across vast planes of baked, golden sand in a Wild West movie, have sunk into the mire but if this concerns her she doesn’t show it. As she stands erect in the elements, the skirts of her coat blown about her, she is a vision of Nehalennia or perhaps, with that slight sigh in the corner of her eyes (a detail which always gives the impression of sadness somewhere deep inside even when she lights the world, by allowing it to glimpse her smile) Tin Han. Perhaps she is choosing the fate of the sailors invisible out in the backwaters of forever; either calling them to safety or guiding them to painful demise on the clot of sea-sharpened rocks below – though of course neither occurs.

“Maybe you should come away from the edge there Miss.” He calls, louder this time, determined to be heard above the roar of the night-time cliff. Determined to tear her from the roar of the night-time cliff.

She knows he is there and she knows he will never understand that the waves will never weigh as heavy as time. The moon, though just a small, white smudge, offers enough light, sparking off each shard of rain, to show that she remains resolute. He is determined to tear her away from here. He is determined to tear her from me.

“What are you doing out here Miss?”

And finally she surrenders to the stranger’s persistence and turns her sopping head, still bouncing with rain, a little in his direction. Her mouth she opens but her eyes she keeps tightly shut as if opening them would allow the way that she sees the world to fall out and give her away.

“I’m waiting for lucidity.” She offers weakly in one long, exasperated breath, but she is accompanied by a crack of thunder in a pitch-perfect harmony.
“Oh I wouldn’t fret too much Miss,” The stranger calls back. “That Lucy’s probably just runnin’ a bit late.”

And finally she lets her smile conquer her glistening face. She opens her eyes and turns back to the sea.