Miscellaneous

RED

These letters spill over our pages, aerosoled
in featherstorms of raised voices and wastepaper thoughts,
needlessly bereft of a cushioned farewell –
disposable, bruised, and de-winged;
the final chapter flailing its arms in a vastness of space
so inspiring
were it not for the rush of an ending approaching too soon.

Rain falls (tears, perhaps)
and our story now rusts itself closed,
finally embalmed within white noise and salty waters, and
blush-coloured fragments of doe-eyed corrosion; red,
as the deafening lips
that decline to author any surrender.

UNHEARD

Look at me, my pages are written in gold thread
and bound by the ancient skin of my past.
My library W-A-I-L-S in whispers of conspiracy and truths –
of desire so outcast it finds itself homeless;
a thief
carrying life upon its shelled back
turtling its way between crowds of ears
too muff’d to care or to listen.

Look at me, my story is the grand facade
of my penniless home.
My memories spill like curtains
from the sills of these eyes
into lobeless tunnels where I chase for tails;
drawstrings
that I will to capture for a moment’s audience –
a re-telling no soul might ever stay its ground to hear;
my name on this leathered spine
not enticement enough to be considered.

Look at me, my tounge-pen dribbles with needled letters.
My lips foreplay with top-stitched finery,
archiving yesterdays in self-distress like ageing wine;
time
and all its silence
slipping beneath the presser foot where it cannot be remembered;
where the archives it declines to embroider
fondle themselves alone in knots
to ravish to the last my unheard
and anonymous remains.

TWO PEAS

We had our differences,
and that was the only thing
we could both agree on.

It was almost poetic
the way we left it
without ever really arriving.

DEAD INSIDE

And here we end
word chef-ing mixed media whispers with
tears fought in unison after the war

paperback cuts and empty pages to line our
tongues: a vastness, like stale bread
and un-gardened fence lines.

Here we end our story where
it never began: with hollowed sights
and enemy trenches and
bonbonnieres filled with armories
and dartboard calendars

– riding shotgun with fries to go –

carrying anthrax and V-shaped saliva
in white pockets of revenge

bleating our way
between dichotomy and conflict, where,
in this absence of hope we are just
zombies in a dollar bin –
half the value promised
and reduced to clear.

COUNTLESS

So many words,
fuelled by everything,
filled with nothing.

PUPPET

Here comes the addiction again, its
whispering lips disguised as passion, the
touch of its hidden hand tap-running
way beyond the weave of my skin
and I
soaked to my core, allow it to wed me:
these buckling knees and paper mâché vows
impressing the addict impaled inside, and
while it listens
eyes necking everything in raised pulse,
it rolls them back with slack-jawed possession
and I move aside
host to a beaten heart that will not commit to stopping
– a puppeteer’d shell in this limbless silence –
running far without a single step
both of us
gambling with a satisfied purr that only I
once combative
now frail
know as loneliness

SOMETIMES IT TOUCHES

They all write of love.

But true adventure lay between a
frozen boundary of stony words;
between a synchronism
of dishonest friendship
and the cowardice of being alone.

Poetry is animal without tongue or limb
and it bellows wildly in dormant pursuit.
It flowers only to write of
hand grenades that fall like alphabet stars;
pollen, like acid rain.
It flourishes in drama of silent depth
as wound commits to scar.

Sometimes it touches
and perhaps we might call it rape
but all it ever seeks is our forgiveness,
an atoned pardon for not arriving
– for not stampeding us –
any sooner than it had.

WHO ART IN

I might have confessed

were it not for the blanket
of second chances,
assumption oiled at the hinges
by forgiveness –

a permanence arriving
to shuttle me beyond
the gates of my first

Suddenly, it’s stage fright
that trumpets me an usher –

it bleeds me
a carpet call of thin red lines
and I tamper with the packaging
of cause and effect –

two quality seals,
the loose embodiment
of error and apology

I might have confessed

were it not for the bible’d cancer
of my second coming

SMALL

I am the starved sanctuary for unformed words and
by I pass the feverish wind that recipes its way
beyond my teeth to mix another spoon of
awkward with a sifted pound of nervous laughter,
folding and kneading a cavernous desire
that piecemeals its softened voice
into any semblance of oral freedom
my selfishly shy lips will dare untangle.

THIS POETRY LAY

My poetry lay hungry,
over-indulged on missing vocals
and absent sound,
under-fed from swallowed emotion
and buried tears –
throat-lumping in the name of opinion
better kept to shadowy under-jaws
and burbling stomach acid;
cocooning noisily with butterflies
of rage whose lead-heavy wings
and straight jacket veins
pin themselves to freedom
with only my dry throat
a means to escape.

My poetry lay hungry
while I feed on its promise
to blanket my attempt
at making it known.

ORIGAMI

Your lies are like origami –
they all start from the same shape
but take many forms

DIVERSION

sometimes
I lose myself in you
whilst wondering
how I ever survived
without your distraction

HOW DIVINE

How divine
that thought can both
dress and undress the mind
without ever leaving it

KEYBOARD ASSASSIN

I have
once more
jailed my vision
splicing diamond-cut thoughts with this
cross-bred and violently bleeding doubt that
feeds from the stomach and shreds the sanest of minds

It is here this rampant indecision
squawks in wordless tongue, lashing
its disposable fancies
(arrow-tipped precision)
at my shaking core

bowels emptying
alongside any creative thoughts of semblance

Now all that is left to bear witness: a sweaty palm or two
– and silence –
as the webbing of my fingers um and ah
hovering like midnight fireflies
over the speech-impeded womb
of my QWERTY keys

And, inside, I hear laughter

THE MOUTH OF SILENCE

Fluid,
the mouth of silence
while the drowning poet
writes to starve the
mind of words

OPIATE ONIONS

Opinions
are an
opiate onion:
they sting
they burn
but they taste
oh so
delicious
on your tongue
when you speak them

STUNTED

Where, I ask, exhausted, did my creativity go?
Was it shadowed by my many burdens
and finally let go?
Did I forget to save a seat for it
while I rode the highway of life –
carrying every ounce of every day
in a heavy sack by my side?
Did I leave my creativity far behind
and outside of the boundaries
I once hungered to avoid reviving in my mind?
Or has it leapt ahead of me,
light-years away to a time
I could never expect to write or reach?
And will it only greet me again
in the next life
in shoes that another more
worldly and traveled other would wear
better than the ones I, alone, attempt to fit?
Have I,
just a here-and-now speck of dust
that tumbles aimlessly along,
reached the limit I somehow self-inflicted
earlier on
to stop me from rhyming more
about what I might never know,
or perhaps, am never meant to find?
Shall my questions be the soothing pets
that follow me like loyal friends
but somehow stay an arms length away
and whisper secrets I could never
– even with a stethoscope –
allow myself to hear?
Knowing what I know, would I detain them
to keep them near?
Shall I, neither ancient, nor elder,
try to understand the heart-beat silence
that, like a disease,
runs impatiently through these veins?
If it returned, would my creative other
fall like pounding rain into my arms and
dissolve itself of any sin
by becoming,
yet again,
a part of what it once was in?
Would my creativity starve, or feast,
by sinking and syncing deep within?
If I handed it the keys, I am certain
we would both deserve to win;
but neither I can, and neither it will,
because without each other
we simply
– both –
are frozen, less, and still.

TO HAUNT

These long silences
used to haunt me –
now every ghost
of every memory
comforts me wisely
instead.

I HAVE LOST

I Have Lost

I have lost
you: lost myself
in the search
to find us both.

VOCAL

I can be silent
but vocal
if you only had eyes
to listen.

ENDLESS PATH

concrete emotion
part water – part sand
stiff and retrodden
imprinted by hand

unbroken dazing
obsessive addiction
weathered disfigurement
stolen ambition

frozen with purpose
externally veined
denied all surrender
exhausted terrain

captured in burden
expressionless pain
mindless estrangement
decisively plain

distantly suffering
obsessive beliefs
helpless remorse
escaping relief

painful receding
numbless appeasement
gone now, the bleeding
here, quiet, the easement

MAD

each of us
as insane
as the other
– you, more so than I –
we both repeat
at once

SECURITY BEHIND INSECURITY

Instead of foraging around making connections
with cables and wireless systems that
bluetooth and sync their way
into our pocket technologies
and portable screens

(tablets of which we self-prescribe
and regulate through overdose
and comatose seedlings of stillness
and waking dreams)

why, instead
don’t we fool around
making connections
with others of like mind and brainwaves
instead of radio waves and
the mastered minds of computer waves
and lift an arm and
really wave
beyond our windows to
real people
in real time
rather than peeping
like a holographic Tom through
tabs and browsing windows,
multi-tasking time in a state of mime
like it’s about to expire

(like the wireless wires will break)

and all that we’ll have is
all we can physically take
from this moment awake we call ‘life’
– a mistake.

What else is left now
in this vegetative
one man / one woman state
where we live to close our eyes
and shut our minds and wait for
the modem-router to re-dial and
get our avatar back online and
our friends back into our
multi-dimensional realer-than-time
time?

Pseudonyms solving identity changes
emerge without birth with designer non-faces,
as
now that we no longer need imperfection
or meaning or privacy
or even perception
we alter ourselves to impress our connections,
to bond in the moment like a drug we’re ingesting
while hiding as one almost fearing detection,
and tip-toeing straight past
concern or reflection

– invisible firewalls at our protection.

Where IS the affection we actually share
in this digital age
that we turn off so rarely?
This internet craze has become a new God
that we dial to be saved far more often than not
while we race without feet
over networks in haste
with the spambots and viruses
to infect and defile us
– and not without mention
the ads, and our logins, and
passwords impassable if ever forgotten.

And yet
we grow fonder
of pics and of pixels and
texts of expression
(the emojis by which we select our impression)
– and all of it
coded to task like an errand:
the reality of which we could lose in a second