Starlight to Casual Moths

Sandman

2011-12-14T15:07:00.003Z

Sometimes I think of the Sandman,
his plate moon face filling the space
between people’s x’s and z’s,

and wonder at the winter he inflicts
upon the appletree of my brain,
stripping the branches before

taking a flame to the trunk.
When the smoke dissipates
and the tree proclaims itself new

the Sandman’s still there, perched
on the promontory of bittergreen leaves,
a dormant venom waiting to strike.

And then everything turns to black
and these streets look alike in the dark.

Meantime Hospital

2011-12-14T13:50:00.000Z

Meantime Hospital, see the wires looping, harmless
as headphones, but the music’s a constant buzz;
and they’re attached with the lock of a kiss

to the forehead. I hope to resemble
a hyperlinked monster, snarling
like a warped branch into the tepid ward,
all roots and pale limbs.

Too much electricity
- the latest in a line of billboards down
this seven year road. I tasted electricity once.
I remember placing my tongue between those two

metal poles, that frisson of newness, the shock,
the need to do it again. Is there anything
as uplifting and disturbing as a doctor
perplexed as a mortal?

Electricity doesn’t explain
the blue tinge below the eyes,
the blackouts, the nosebleeds, the insomnia,
the constant storm.

They should ask my friends
“Too much electricity” they say,
I tasted electricity once.

Chamberlain Waits (Waiting for a Saint)

2011-12-11T21:43:00.002Z

Funny how terror stokes the semantic fires…

In a bare, dark room with a creaking chair
and a loose-lipped window
Chamberlain waits.

Tinsel worn to web idles the wreathed doorway
peppering shadows,
speculating waves.

On the highest step, at the slack-jawed door
your breath is swallowed
the world shrinks tighter.

Detritus of insects - the usual scarecrows -
a poetry of fossils
coats the snow-slicked floor.

And there in the cellar, with a raw ear to the wall,
the beggar prince
Chamberlain waits.

His voice, a wind triangulating its own sound
an impersonal consolation
scrapes at carols.

Tinselled by frost, eyes the ice-blue of emptiness,
a dilapidated, disfigured thing,
unutterably alone.

Embers hang a moment at the hollow of his throat,
a whisper: “not welcome in this place.”
The beggar prince shreds a paper crown.

In the untrimmed room with the year-dead tree
and the bear-trapped fireplace
Chamberlain waits.

1453 (after The Hagia Sophia - Istanbul)

2011-12-10T14:36:00.000Z

All that’s surface isn’t marble.

There, giddy with history,
we swept footprints of dust over the stone.
Step after step to the adhan.

The sonorous moans
soundtracked the changed constellation.
Gold gilt. Pearl domes.

Of the gunman our news said nothing.

We watched under the eye
of the Sophia, as if for a deer
to startle from cover,

whilst a seagull-squall betrayed
the Bosphorus behind us.

Soundsphere's Tunes of the Year 2011

2011-12-06T19:38:00.009Z

We pick our favourite tracks and vids here:

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.soundspheremag.com/news/94-features/2975-soundspheremagcoms-best-tracks-of-2011

Come tell us how wrong we are and make fun of my uber cheesy choice : )

Indigo Rising UK - Issue 1 available now

2011-10-23T10:21:00.005+01:00

The first issue of our brand new baby - Indigo Rising UK is now available for free download, including work from me, Steve Toase, Oz Hardwick, Miles Cain, Daniela Nunnari, David Clegg, Jem Henderson as well a host of others. Hope you enjoy the pieces we've selected.

Find it here:
http://indigorisinguk.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/issue-1.pdf
Happy reading, and send us your own work : )

Poems, Prose and Pints @ The Tap and Spile Harrogate

2011-09-16T03:19:00.002+01:00

A lovely regular event, which I've been lucky enough to be the featured artist at.

This month (Weds Sept 21st) the annoyingly talented Steve Toase will be spilling his literary beans.

Give it a try - you won't be disappointed.

Exeunt ( - ii - )

2011-08-28T17:38:00.003+01:00

(ii)
Angel M

The engine coughs itself awake
and you
hustle me away as though we’re tailed
by rabid paparazzi, or fleeing a warzone –
I bleeding, limp across your shoulders
our bulletproof General to the end.
Your face knotted into a cryptogram
which will later be doodled to ribbons
by the same windshield you whisper words,
which hurt the mouth more than the ear, into.
Mutual friends will make false testimony,
on an airless day of yellow cloudbanks,
venerating my unblemished halo,
failing the knowledge which you understood:
one of your wings raised in flight,
the other dipped in blood.

Exeunt

2011-08-28T17:14:00.004+01:00

(i)
Carving the Sky

Where were we then? I recall so much blue.
Buoyed by azure, were we sat in the sky?
There were others below us, banners, balloons.
A match? No, couldn't be - you held a knife.

You carved methodically, birthing worlds
in the bench I clung so hard to my palms ached.
Where were we? So enveloped in colour
and carnival, a nosebleed from space.

Legs, too short to reach stone, flapped like bunting,
arms grown-up enough to mime the gestures
which could cement our reputations as men:
our arcs of cigarettes, sex, and liquor.

The sun-flashes blind me to where we were,
not in the sky but, you know who you are.

Soundsphere Magazine - Issue 2

2011-07-05T10:12:00.003+01:00

"So, we enjoyed great success with issue one and had some fantastic feedback from working inside of that alternative and gothic music niche (the magazine featured Placebo and Paradise Lost, for example). Despite that, and because of it, we've moved our concept forward significantly with the new issue (due out mid-July, 2011) and have gone in a much wider direction after having the opportunity to interview some amazing bands and artists from across the great genre spectrum (thanks to all of the people who've helped us, of course - you know who you are). So, we are now covering indie, rock, metal, electronic music AND some cultural stuff too.

The bands we are dealing with in issue two include: Pendulum, Enter Shikari, Killing Joke, The Pigeon Detectives, Frank Turner, Hyro Da Hero, My Passion, Dinosaur Pile-Up, Japanese Voyeurs, Patrick Wolf, Patrick Stump (of Fall Out Boy) and Skindred. We chat to each of these world-beating acts and get the lowdown on their latest albums and up-to-date plans.

We're also promoting a lot more great local talent from in and around Yorkshire including interviews with up-and-coming Leeds electronic rockers Officers and alt-indie band Hungry Ghostsalongside informative features on York-based cultural hotspot Bang Hair Studios, audio-only iPhone app pioneers Punk Pie, Derby's rockabilly-styled fashion outlet Miss Fortune, Sheffield's Corporation and Hull's premier tattoo artist Mat Lapping (of Creative Vandals). There's also a cool competition to win some clothes from our awesome friends at US alt-electronic label FiXT Music and a label spotlight on independent industrial label Armalyte Industries alongside the usual CD reviews and listings. Phew!" - Dom Smith (editor)

The price of this magazine is £2.50 (including postage and packaging).

Order a copy below!
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

http://www.soundspheremag.com/news/48/2190

We're also stocked at the following places...
In-store
Heaven Forbid (York) Tokyo Royale (Manchester) Resurrection Records (London)
Online
Trash Vogue Records (UK) Music Non Stop (UK) FiXT Music (US)

Soulville South

2011-06-19T10:46:00.000+01:00

When I drank here
the nights were corrosive
bare-brick slick with sweat.
Maturity was tied up below the bar.
Nobody went down there
unless they were dared.
Deaf as we were on that stage
we always heard the bell chimes.
Mornings without breeze
one jacket left on a chair.
Spirits get bored
like something waiting to be born.

A long time ago you…

2011-06-18T13:56:00.001+01:00

said “Let tomorrow take care of itself.”
A sullen bark, a gravel whimper begging.
Your eyes passed in and out of cloudbanks.
I, armed with silence, rolled down the window
replacing streaked glass with sliding headlights
and the hills rippling through the horizon.

Not so long ago someone

said “Nothing travels faster than bad news.”
The words, in sharp relief, had grown like rumours
as they crouched by a bed with silver rails.
They saw your dreams of cavernous places
through the twitches and flickers of your face.

A long time from now someone

will wake to the echoscript of your lines
and the sunrise taking them by surprise.

The Hades Tanka - Written for the Rise Japan fundraiser at York St John University

2011-05-25T11:21:00.002+01:00

1. Persephone

From hotel windows
peer down past the hissing gold
and falling flame of
midnight streets to find the door
to the underworld ajar.

Night revellers stumble
through corridors hearing my
fateful song. All for
one sweet pomegranate seed
I married myself to Hell.

Forgetfulness chair
beckons each bitter winter,
but for the sight of
a ladybird ascending,
link by link, a young girls watch.

2. Orpheus

A wide green river
its bed as deep as an ache.
A head – no body –
drifts by, its ferry a lyre,
it’s mouth humming baleful songs.

I faltered away
from here, the brightly lit air
that lapped at my voice,
through the black, worm-eaten ground
to you my whirling exile.

A black labyrinth
entered, I startled ghost roads.
One descending soul
through the madness of music
to lose you a second time.

3. Eurydice

Butterflies of ash
break away in my numb palm.
The shades hiss despair,
their limits porous as web.
Smoke rises from them like wings.

I dreamt an angel
holding the name of shadow.
I forget his songs.
My memory now burned of
the ability to dream.

His hand grips my wrist,
my angel breasting the void,
entwined in passage.
But, he faltered and I was
betrayed to the emptiness.

Open Wide tenth anniversary print edition - out now

2011-05-20T13:58:00.001+01:00

This glossy paperback is filled with ninety-four pages of writing from forty-three of our favourite contributors of the last ten years.

Featuring poetry from: Rebecca Schumejda, William Taylor Jr, John Dorsey, F.N. Wright, J.J. Campbell, Adrian Manning, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, Dan Provost, John Sweet, Nathan Graziano, Idris Caffery, G. Emil Reutter, Bradley Mason Hamlin, A.D. Winans, Iris Berry, Jayne Lyn Stahl, Graham Nunn, D.B. Cox, R.C. Edrington, Lyn Lifshin, Jack Phillips Lowe, K.M. Dersley, S.A. Griffin, Jason Mashak, Arlene Ang, Debbie Kirk, justin.barrett, Heidi James, James D. Quinton, Owen Roberts, Peter Finch, Steve Urwin, Ben Barton, John G. Hall, Jessica Stilling and Glenn W. Cooper.

And fiction from: Ben Myers, Drew Gummerson, James D. Quinton, Marc Barber, Angela Morkos, Jo Mortimer, Natalia Cherjovsky and Danny Rhodes.

Indigo Rising Issue 13 - Out Now

2011-04-23T08:18:00.002+01:00

Featuring a few peices from yours truly.

Issue 13 available here:

http://www.indigorisingmagazine.com/p/irm-print-editions.htmlhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The King of Nab Hill (a stanza stones poem)

2011-04-14T16:54:00.002+01:00

'Every time I think that I'm getting old,
and gradually going to the grave,
something else happens'
(Elvis Presley)

There being a limit to the places
a supposed-to-be dead King of rock and roll
can visit, the grey-squirrel quiffed old man
slows the conspicuous pink caddie
to a purr by the beckoning stile.

A fumble of arthritic fingers
and walking frame, shades donned, trademark point
salute delivered to the aged stranger
in the wing mirror and the obscure
mission can commence its shuffling passage.

A laboured groping and the stile
(his latest groupie) is straddled, conquered,
blue suedes settle on the soft sponge of peet.
Immigrant at the threshold of green dusk
looks up, past the grass twitching with laughter,

to the crest sprinkled with turbines - sentinels
perpetually rolling their white, blind eyes.
A struggle up the brittle bracken, left hand
shaking, pelvis no longer under control,
greens and browns underfoot in cataract

permutation - an unreadable hieroglyph.
The journey seems as long as a Vegas bar tab
but the crown welcomes with the adulation
of a crowd of curlews. Wind pushes
with the virulence of an ex-wife
falsifying his hair into a fin.

Pulled deeper into the stiff rhinestoned collar
a shimmy stuttered to the shelter
of a half –fallen cairn, the weary frame
is lowered onto the sun-bleached lychen.
Hunger is found in the empty pupil

of a lone sheep, for this figure who charmed
everything except the vast nocturnal.
No longer a king, a prince, or a knave
but a child blinking myopically into
the emptiness of wild sounds
from the limitless hilltop.

New poems published by Indigo Rising

2011-03-20T15:39:00.002Z

The kind folks at Indigo Rising have picked up a few of my new pieces.

They'll be in print soon, but until then some can be found here:

http://www.indigorisingmagazine.com/2011/03/poetry-by-steve-nash-base-jump-into.html

Ars Poetica

2011-03-13T01:29:00.001Z

Some nights, below the moon’s purblind pupil,
it hits. The shade of a hushed idea,
that rustle of mice behind the plaster,
is clear and tells you how it can be stilled.

Duende igniting you open new eyes
and kindle a bird from ember to blaze;
every word necessary, in its place,
when there have been too many purple skies.

These nights you undress everything, open.
Armour cast down, thoughts lost in the steam
and tangle of suddenly needed limbs.
Whose words these are you think you know. But then

the sober morning of cold clarity,
averted eyes; another friendship ruined.

Valentine (first published by Indigo Rising)

2011-02-13T17:01:00.005Z

A single thread delights in its liberation
from the frayed tie-dye fabric,
purples faded to brown,
whilst a three-legged wolf-hound’s
eyes ache from the lead-shield
of a page on your lap.

Your walls will always read: 4a.m.
Now the ashtray smokes
your final cigarette;
its sides, paper streets the morning
after a riot, breathe
a mournful wind.

The music of a machine
on the verge of tearing
itself apart
now an acoustic guitar
hanging solo in
a broken window.

The cardigan from your grandmother
unwanted, unworn
safe in a bottom drawer,
embroidered with your voice
whispering once more:
“Let’s go outside.”

Carrying Fire

2011-02-13T16:28:00.000Z

This faux azure: a child’s rendering of sky.
Lighter than the name they gave me.
My teeth clogged with the metal of blood,
and the scent of stag night guilt.

A bile of gas gargles at my throat like truth,
but I’ve never been an answer, never will
I hold the weight of the irreplaceable.

I remember waking, the first time,
a sputter of heat and light.

Held as a lover, lied to.

The Good Book (First published by Indigo Rising)

2011-02-09T12:46:00.003Z

It physically pains the prim prune I share
the leg luxury of a tabled train space with
when her shark’s eye registers my thumb
pull at the corner of a page, then press.

Perhaps her black marbles draw out the blood
she desires at a glance, mine rather require
these ripples to remind that here
there is more to mine.

In the broken spine she observes the sum
of my generation: careless, unclean.
Perhaps she has a book awaiting her
pristine on the safety of a coffee table.

Show me a book with scars; a book that would
not wait for the sanctity of a sofa;
A book travelled, which had to be forced
into a bursting bag, pummelled into a pocket;
A book with a broken bodice shaking
its stories loose because someone had to have them.

Soundsphere's Tunes of the Year

2010-12-20T21:39:00.002Z

We pick our faves of the past twelve months here:

http://www.soundspheremag.com/news/37-culture/1810-soundspheremagcom-best-tracks-of-2010

Snow

2010-12-12T10:30:00.000Z

Today the streets are blank pages
as though the storyteller misplaced
both the inkwell and the tale.

The path leading down from the house
has faded, fallen from its bones
below a threshold of deafness.

The silver, winter chains of light
sketch vague outlines of what hides,
unable to speak, beneath.

The day shrinks to something small
and sinister. You begin to despair through
the unreadable fog at your feet.

And then you see the first December
footprints glittering like a narrative in the snow.

New Anthology

2010-12-09T22:36:00.003Z

The Book of Dreams - featuring my poem: Gran's

Old School (First published by Indigo Rising)

2010-12-07T22:23:00.003Z

- for Vinnie

Right now he’s sitting on the wrong barstool,
in the wrong pub, on the wrong side of town.
To see him now you’d think him a moping angel,
not the charmed demon, the dybbuk, he is.
He spurned our drink problem for something deeper.
It was all about the blood, nothing less.
A sudden need to know it was still there,
to make it bloom beneath, then through, the skin,
and open into falling blossom dropped
like benedictions onto the bruised floor.

You could see it there twisting,
a worm in his temple, his blood
a lake crazy with thirsty mosquitoes.
I’d forgotten how fragile the face is.

As is the fist, not that this restrained him,
rarely saving one for another day.
As night rises underneath everyone
this hit-man for the syndicate of sleep,
his face the work of a police artist,
brutal as sunlight, stares into the trap
of a mirror behind the optics, a grim
smile or perhaps just checking his teeth.
Feeling the evening, its inadequate drinkers
and strangeness (which is everything) at stake.

All that matter and anti-matter
colliding. Him? He was an old vampire.

New Short Story in Sparkbright Issue 5

2010-12-02T09:11:00.002Z

Sparkbright - run by the inimitable Emily Smith - Issue 5 includes my short fiction piece 'After'.

It can be found at the following link:

http://www.sparkbright.org/issues/issue-5-december-2010/

Steampunk article - now up at Soundsphere Magazine

2010-11-20T10:12:00.004Z

My article: Nuts, Bolts and a Big-Ass Boiler: Welcome to Steampunk
available at this link:

http://www.soundspheremag.com/news/94-features/1742-nuts-bolts-and-a-big-ass-boiler-welcome-to-steampunk

New Anthology

2010-11-05T14:16:00.002Z

The new Poetry Rivals collection - out very soon includes my piece 'Stage Play'

Fun times

POST REMOVED!

2010-10-22T20:16:00.005+01:00

Due to a server categorisation of Terrorism the previous poem posted here: "She Says She Hates Poetry" - has been removed.

Although I'm disgusted at having to remove the post it was impossible for any individual to access this site whilst the post remained active.

Base Jump (First published by Indigo Rising)

2010-10-17T22:58:00.004+01:00

“Into the black hole
go the lies I’ve told, the big ones
that certain people I love
still carry around like wounds”
(George Bilgere)

I stare hard at the knuckled white
of my fingers fixed to the scaffold.
The action man figure of an instructor,
keen to get things moving, drags out
a stock phrase from his bag of encouragements:

“Picture throwing something down there
that you’d have to go in after.”

Up here on the shoulder of a giant
my brain clings hard to the obvious.
I picture the wide, blue eyes of my girlfriend,
her mouth guppying the air as I
sacrifice her to the ache of the abyss.

GI Geoff was right I do feel lighter.
It’s so simple, I throw my neurological problem after her,
and the broken doorstep, and my dodgy knee,
and my inability to forget all those wrong things
I’ve said at just exactly the right time, like:

“No one appreciates a decent flush
like a bulimic.”

Every self indulgent line of earnest verse,
and each of the many alcohol-fuelled mistakes,
well except maybe that one,
and every itchy flake of failure,
until all that’s left is the real problem.

A lone Prometheus unbound on his rock,
and, forgetting there’s an automatic parachute
attached to my back, I finally let go.

New Anthology: Along the Iron Veins

2010-10-02T18:30:00.004+01:00

Gorgeous new anthology from Stairwell Books, featuring some wonderful poetry and prose - including a couple of pieces from myself - out now.

Please visit the link below to see more of the creative loveliness Stairwell Books has to offer:

http://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/

Open Wide Magazine Issue 24 - Out Now

2010-10-02T18:13:00.004+01:00

Featuring

Fiction: David Halliday, Curtis McGlinche, Colin Galbraith, James D Quinton and Suzanne Ushie. Poetry: Roddy Williams, Graham Nunn, Alan Britt, David Greenslade, Noel Williams, A.D. Winans, J.S. Watts, Heidi Colthup, Steve Nash, and James D Quinton. W.P. Swindon’s Diary of an Artist. Book reviews by: J.S.Watts, Michael Egan and Michèle Barzey. Interview: Writer Chika Unigwe.

Available here:

Drift

2010-09-18T14:11:00.000+01:00

We tried to call the railway tracks our home
for years of growing, bean-like – wrapping round
the rust of iron, leading, we thought, skyward.
Instead the rails filed us until blood bloomed

beneath a skin that wasn’t ours, despite
the ink and tears we scarred it with each year.
The one adhesive binding us? The door
its existence proved by a leak of light.

We stretched a little further every night
toward a glow which promised to adore
the darkness, dripping thick as sap from our
unpolished fingernails (unkempt shorelines),
a glare ajar in a smile almost cruel
pulling us always toward some new room.

ICO

2010-09-18T13:53:00.000+01:00

“And still they smiled and still the horror grew”

When one stands apart from the rest
and rises, as though on a breath
of broken steam, to a vantage
from which the world assumes vagrancy
that one constructs its own Olympus.

Olympus now, overcrowded
with criminals, windows gilded
with international courtly sheen,
blinks a myopic lighthouse beam
down to mortals sailing for rock.

The six rogue gods above us now
squabble in their separate towers
whilst we wait for the fall of dice,
or press of buttons to decide
that prayers would never be enough.

New(ish) Book

2010-08-12T12:44:00.005+01:00

Northern Type 51 - A collection of poetry and prose from Yorkshire-based writerfolks, including a couple from me, available now from Waterstones or the link below:

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/northern+co-operative+writers/northern+type/7619536/

Wanting to Go (First published by Stairwell books' Along the Iron Veins Anthology)

2010-07-18T23:25:00.001+01:00

At that point when you wanted to go,
did the brittle bracken of your brain
spare a thought to the destination?

Or maybe destination was the lure:
a traveller without wanderlust
until that travel agent snared you.

All those brochures vomited in your arms.
What option but to break out the plastic
and excavate the mouldering suitcase?

You never could turn down a trip on a train.
“Where are we going?” I’d ask, and you’d rumble:
“It doesn’t matter lad, the train knows.”

I used to think those big metal monsters
were the saddest creatures in the world
doomed always to travel their single route.

Did you think to share news of your bargain?
I could’ve been a good travelling companion.
Some nights I still think I might meet you there.

Being Judas

2010-07-06T13:09:00.003+01:00

Because in my case results are inconclusive
but seem to beckon toward the negative
I think I’ll respond to the inevitable: “Are you sure
you want one more?” with a joyful Roman five.

I’ll seek out the other moonlight dancers and thieves,
though you fear I’ll wake in a bath minus my liver
(the bandits pact not applicable to newcomers),
still I’ll turn my bleeding back on good advice.

When I accept the solace of another last cigarette
and your eyes swing an orbit in their sockets
know that I won’t be seeking forgiveness
tonight’s purple hessian is no backdrop for resolutions.

Why not join me for a game? You can pick
as long as it’s for money we won’t even have to kiss.
Canasta? Twister? I always did surprise at chess.
Either way you’ll win, leave me broke, I promise.

Tonight, delicately as you would a mandolin, cradle
your stifled swaddling of disapproval just a little
looser, and know that because there is no place
like an old friend’s floor
I could never turn down
just one more.

Open Wide Magazine issue 23 - out now

2010-07-02T16:22:00.003+01:00

New issue out today with a particularly strong poetry selection if I do say so myself, including work from: Jeffrey Alfier, Malin Bergstrom, Jennifer Cook, P. J. Hancock, Joshua Jones, Lisa Mansell, James D. Quinton, U.V.Ray, Felino A. Soriano, and Jennifer Wong.

Also - Fiction from: Alice Cuninghame, Tom Sheehan, john-patrick ayson, Toby Ross and Mark Piggott, and book and art reviews by: J.S. Watts, Steven Harris and Sophie Mayer. Interview: Poet and publisher Geoff Stevens and actor Misha Jones.

http://www.openwidemagazine.co.uk/

Download 2010 @ Sphere Magazine

2010-06-27T10:20:00.004+01:00

Recently did some reviewing for the larvely Sphere magazine.

For our verdict on a blinding weekend head here (apologies in advance to Stone Temple Pilots fans) -; )
http://spheremag.co.uk/spotlight/event/1494-event-spotlight-download-festival-2010-donnington-park-june-11-13-2010

Travel Writer

2010-06-23T09:28:00.001+01:00

That guy tucking in to the pretention
of vague hors d’oeuvre;

the one who’s wearing the black fedora
and thinks he’s pulling it off,

we reached for the last, safe, scotch egg
ended up in the conference

conversation. “Me?” He said, “I’m a travel writer,
and also a poet.”

I nearly choked on the egg he’d surrendered.
Wouldn’t your head explode?

I keep myself barricaded in solitude,
Behind walls of work, student

essays, mixed metaphors, bars of adolescent
yearning, and “must-see” DVDs.

Anything to keep me from venturing out
into all that brightness and combustion.

He looks fairly well rounded, a moon with no
extra glow, or ominous shadow.

How can such a juggle be rendered safe
in a single head?

How, when in a foreign place everything ticks
and shivers with meaning?

I’ll have to head home and batten down
my eyelids for a while.

But before the cruel elation of the final
cigarette, I’ll check the window

just to be certain that it affords a view
only as far as the next fuselage of fog.

Gangrenous Foot

2010-05-28T16:15:00.001+01:00

I know my own scent, how it offends
the crisp air into a mould of compost and wet leaves.
That’s why I’m bound in this strangle of cloth,
mummified not for my host’s health
but to stifle the olfactory assault of my green
fingers. I began as a creeping cutlet on a single
baby-chubby toe. But the pull, I’m breathed
further up every day, nutrients through roots.
I drink my way further toward the ankle.
Such a tug you’d swear he wanted this.
I remind him of his youth – the faux terror of kiss-chase,
running just a little slower, wanting to get caught.
He won’t let them remove me, so entwined are we
now, so much shared, so much corrupted flesh.

The Second Death of K.

2010-05-21T14:17:00.002+01:00

The first tore out the plug with a wrench
and she tornadoed , with a sigh,
down the gaping throat. We lost so much
water we feared she’d swept us dry.

The second she could barely be described
a bystander, too far travelled down
the pipe to turn those eyes,
round as echoes, greener than the dome

of lime that bobbed so cheerfully
in her Coronas, back to witness
the electronic protocols deem
her sentence to have been served at last.

And so we wait for the next flame
of nature, and hope we can bear it a name.

"Click"

2010-05-19T16:38:00.001+01:00

There is the click. Just once.
Not loud in itself, but the pull
of regret is deafening.

The brittle crunch of an animal receding
over a fresh page of snow follows,
its padded prints trailing repentance.

And should a hunter, raw-eyed,
heavy with the weight of a guilt
it doesn’t know, raise a weapon and fire,

the bellow of the gun’s black mouth may
scatter a thousand birds into the ink of the sky
but could never cause such a flinch

as that click.

Our Friends (for Tony)

2010-05-12T16:19:00.004+01:00

I don’t want to alarm you but recently
I’ve had the urge to write poems
about my friends.

There are levels of knowing, like the hierarchical
pyramid of new-build apartments.
There’s the expensive monarch, which lifts
open out into, right at the top.
But below, on balconies, there’s the vague certainty
of a second drop of rain.
It was here that I knew we were parts of your story
and often that was enough.

Up on the gas-lit roof that winter - so presumptuous
now they come without asking -
we lit so many lanterns and cast them into the sky
as though the stars somehow weren’t enough.
We who lay knowingly in broken glass
and venomous stings;
we who sat and silently shared grins through pierced lips
at our friends who had no silence in them.

We who wrote our mohawked commandments
to realise we were no longer frothing
over Armageddon; we who hung as rags
from guitar strings; we who trotted
out silence in three-four time. Put the camera down
and then perhaps I’ll renounce
the use of that lying pupil of a period at the end
of everything I write.

New Article on a Great New Site

2010-04-27T12:48:00.005+01:00

A great new site dedicated to the wonderful games we used to love in our younger years has gone live today - set up by the inimitable Craig Shaw.

The site, and my piece, can be located here:

http://www.thebob-omb.com/once-we-were-anarchists

Please check out THE BOB-OMB.COM

Open Wide Magazine issue 22 - Now online

2010-04-01T14:05:00.006+01:00

Open Wide Magazine issue 22 is now online

Including -
Fiction: William Falo, Rhys Milsom, Jared Booth¸ Zdravka Evtimova, Trace Sheridan and James D. Quinton.
Poetry: Andrew Pidoux, Geoff Stevens, Howie Good, Michael Egan, Michael Pedersen, Peter Branson, Borbála Faragó and James D. Quinton.
W.P. Swindon’s 'Diary of An Artist'.
Book and music reviews: J.S. Watts, Steven Harris, Isobel Baker and Jack Dean.
Interviews: Mark Piggott and Leo Williams from Dreadzone.

Available at:
http://www.openwidemagazine.co.uk/

And find us on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101824738077#!/group.php?gid=101824738077

Relocation (First published by Indigo Rising)

2010-04-01T10:23:00.001+01:00

I hear the impact. No more than a dull
thud, distant as a car door closed a street
away. The source initially escapes me.
At my shoulder three removal men
divide the heft of a black-rimmed mirror.

They too have heard the beat and hold their pose.
And there it is. The tiny corpse a shadow
upon the graphite-grey concrete. The men
all watch as I reach with trembling fingers.
A swallow, its neck unnaturally loose.

Still warm with passing life this once restless
thing of sound and fire has winged too keenly
into its own reflection, meeting the depths
of unforgiving glass. Broken body still
housing the last efforts of its tiny heart

only just stilled. The men complete their move
of the mirror into the hollow tunnel
of their vehicle and one, with a cloth
fashioned from a torn rag, wipes away
the small mark the bird has left upon the glass.

New Anthology!

2010-03-27T16:52:00.002Z

Launched in conjunction with the York Literature Festival from Stairwell books, featuring 3 new pieces from meself - "Frisson"

OpenWideMagazine

2010-03-07T13:31:00.001Z

I have just been appointed to the post of poetry editor at Open Wide Magazine.

You can find the magazine here:

http://www.openwidemagazine.co.uk/

Please come visit this great publication.

Oh and also - I've just been shortlisted for the Huddersfield Literature Festival poetry prize. I'm practising my gracious loser face as we speak.

Closing Night

2010-02-17T11:23:00.001Z

After the clutching rocks of hands
had unfurled into paper
and scissored taxi doors;

after the coins had been tallied,
grudgingly given/received;
the open scent of excitement
closed from coffee to sweat,

they found him foetal in a corner booth,
the closed fist of his body quivering
like an echo through the cheekbone of a giant;
the leak of his deference rolling
in broken streams across the bruised leather,

but perfect, caught in that moment.

After everything they knew it was over,
it had to be.

Snowflake

2010-02-12T21:01:00.001Z

(for Dani - part angel, part demon, all cat lover)

Her name was Snowflake.
No one recalled who gave her the name
nobody knew where she had come from
some things don’t need to be questioned.

Two fleshy pink swathes
cut the feline fur of her shoulder blades
an eleven branded from some past mystery.
Someone joked it was where her wings had been.

She never was much of a lap creature
except for the time the grandfather came
and an unnatural patience grew within her
a little kindness perhaps for his final year.

More than once the midnight peace was broken
by one of the children’s terrified shrieking
“It was Snowflake!” they’d wail – something about horns
but it was sacrificed to nightmare, forgotten in the morning.

Memories of such moments would occasionally flash
when a shadow passed over her knowing face.
There was a hushed discussion of what to do with her
but at least Jehovah’s witnesses now avoided their door.

One morning she commenced the fur ball dance
convulsing and choking as if birthing a universe
and out came a matted tangle of bleeding mulch
placental and raw, a chrysalis sticky as pitch.

The mass, dark as a pinot grape,
twitched and stutteringly began to sway.
It unfolded its corrupted flesh, opened like an egg,
then came the emergence of insectile legs.

Alien eyes of black antenna
surveyed the room of their birth
then followed two flags of kaleidoscope haze,
butterfly wings, it ascended and fled into the day.

Everyone knew that they’d witnessed this
but it would never be mentioned again.
Snowflake laboured her ageless eyes closed
as though nothing of note had occurred.

The winter they last saw her
snow had crusted the garden blue
they woke to the smell of cold
and the salted taste of loss.

In an unspoken pact her name would never be uttered
but each of them on occasion had cause to remember
the nightmares she lay like sweet meats on their beds
whatever she was, wherever she went.

Gran's

2010-02-04T13:03:00.001Z

fear…

is a shadow in a military uniform
filling the front door frame,
and the volume of what cannot be said
and the silence which it speaks;

is not the feeling but the memory, course
as a grandmother’s skin,
so fragile a child could tear it
so strong it has held lifetimes;

is the stain left by the exodus from the fallen
cup, ruptured like an organ,
and the shadow spooled on the carpet
still traceable after all these years.

3 New Poems Published in OpenWideMagazine

2010-01-13T11:48:00.002Z

http://www.openwidemagazine.co.uk/

Green Room

2009-12-11T11:23:00.000Z

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

2009-12-10T14:39:00.000Z

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

2009-12-08T13:37:00.000Z

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) - First Published in The Frisson Anthology by Stairwell Books

2009-11-28T11:39:00.002Z

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

2009-11-14T11:31:00.000Z

ditch, | the poetry that matters

3 New Poems Published in Ditch Magazine

2009-11-03T15:26:00.003Z

Eletriptan (Why We Can't Own a Gun)

Line

Cuts

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

Sad Jack (A Halloween Poem)

2009-10-31T17:27:00.001Z

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

2009-10-31T17:25:00.000Z

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)

2009-10-17T19:06:00.001+01:00

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

2009-10-16T15:22:00.001+01:00

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)

2009-10-13T19:55:00.002+01:00

“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/

2009-09-23T20:01:00.003+01:00

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

Infinite Rooms, Covered in Dust

2009-09-14T09:07:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-13T18:08:00.001+01:00

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)

2009-09-11T21:44:00.004+01:00

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 (first published in Open Wide Magazine)

2009-08-31T14:45:00.001+01:00

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

2009-08-11T11:33:00.001+01:00

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

2009-08-06T10:20:00.003+01:00

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)

2009-08-05T11:21:00.005+01:00

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)

2009-08-03T20:28:00.001+01:00

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

Odd Socks (a response to a writing challenge)

2009-08-03T20:20:00.004+01:00

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)

2009-07-11T20:27:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-22T16:56:00.002+01:00

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.

2009-06-16T15:41:00.002+01:00

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 (first published in Open Wide Magazine)

2009-06-16T15:14:00.002+01:00

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"

2009-06-11T12:12:00.003+01:00

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

2009-06-05T12:02:00.002+01:00

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

2009-06-04T09:53:00.004+01:00

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

2009-05-28T10:38:00.004+01:00

She Sang to Us (a ghazal for Debjani Chatterjee)

2009-05-20T12:09:00.000+01:00

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

2009-05-12T11:12:00.003+01:00

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

2009-05-01T15:22:00.005+01:00

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

2009-05-01T14:35:00.004+01:00

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

2009-05-01T14:19:00.003+01:00

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"

2009-05-01T13:50:00.003+01:00

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

2009-04-28T11:19:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-28T09:36:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-23T13:14:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-20T13:41:00.002+01:00

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/ )

2009-04-11T09:28:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-07T12:26:00.003+01:00

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)

2009-03-16T12:10:00.002Z

"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)

2009-03-10T09:49:00.002Z

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

2009-03-09T12:54:00.007Z

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)

2009-03-02T14:50:00.002Z

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

2009-03-02T12:51:00.001Z

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

2009-02-06T14:09:00.003Z

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.