Coathooks

Blue jeans freshly washed
hang by the beltloop
from one of a golden row
of coathooks, legs crossed
and stiffened with starch,
fly gaping like a mouth.
The awkward way it hangs
it is a big tuna of cotton
hung up at the lip,
its zipteeth gasping, frayed
threads spread like whiskers,
the pockets turned out
white gills drowning in air
as it dries above the radiator,
fat and salty and beautiful,
good enough to eat, or wear.

A jacket hangs by its side,
battered, burnt leather
like a ghost made of chocolate
from a kind of funhouse,
a cow's hide stretched over hooks.

Wake-up Call

"Morning is a dagger."
Easy for you to say
with your grubby hands
in the toolbox night
calls dream, easy
to grind that out against
the dawn, you super-ego,
you unwanted Zeus
hefting a Black & Decker
at the margins where
I'm sleeping, easy enough.
Waking my pillow is wet
with tears, piss, electricity,
—what the devil—
I reach and touch my head,
find it all trepanned,
part caved in part drilled,
a stream of bloody words
spilling everywhere, over
my hands, oh yes you
like that awfully don't you
skully apparition you
your unholy face there
like a briefcase of bone,
Loki, whispering
"The dagger is a telephone"
or was it Zeus, or Loki,
is words or what was it
night or drills or blood
or trombones you bonehead
what was it what are you?
Answer.

Colourblind

He stumbles into the snow
—furies trace the dark
where the snowclouds come
up from under the hill
his footsteps fall behind
the road, the night, long—
stumbles into a drift,
the streetlamp drops
a raft of cider light
at the lee of the curb
tethered there in snow,
edge of an ocean
overcome, dreaming,
a world costumed yellow
for a dance under light, light
like a Baltic king
fishsmelling and sallow,
a dance the rushing drifts,
outer night, threaten to swallow,
light grown replete,
and beyond, in sleep,
in sleet, houses bunched
like grey mushrooms,
a kingdom of the monochrome,
blinding, dressed in weeds
of white, a crown
and an ivory throne—

but the boy is lost
and he will lie awake in
the bathing halogen until
his gills are full of snow.

*

Napoleon
III
awoke
to the
exploding
timebomb

DO NOT INGEST THE UNITED STATES

THE MIDWEST FOLDED
LIKE A CHOCOLATE PANCAKE
THE BADLANDS GAVE ME GAS
FLORIDA WAS TOO SWEET
TEXAS TOO BITTER
THE ROCKIES HURT MY ASS
THE GARDEN STATE WAS FATTY
THE EMPIRE STATE WAS RAW
VERMONT WAS TEPID
MAINE HURT MY JAW
OKLAHOMA CRUMBLED
INTO DELICIOUS BITS
ALABAMA WAS HOT
ALABAMA GAVE ME THE SHITS
NEBRASKA WAS PLAIN
VIRGINIA WAS SPICY
MASSACHUSETTS FISHY
WISCONSIN ICY
I COULDNT FINISH CALIFORNIA

FOR DESSERT I HAD
BAKED ALASKA

Smile at me again

and you'll get one
right in the eye

said the horse
to the horsefly

Black

Ho um
black as blackness
midnight shadow
windowless room
locked safe full
of coal of coal
what a sweet
darkness open up
at night it goes
invisibly into them
your bulbs until death
puts on two coins
the world's red eyes
sink black inside
blinking volcanos
leave this poem behind
it is too black
even for you, friend,
glowing lights dance
before your eyes
you feel cheated
by this dark
and you write letters
to me or to
no-one at all
they pile in the dark
so black it hurts
so black Norwegians
get terrified and light
candles in church
and tell ghost stories
in Norwegian, I
well never be scared of
—I don't understand—
the language is simply
dark to me,
dark as the bottom
of a tin bucket
when water pours in
and that I call
ladies and gentlemen
the eye of the sea
looking from its bottom
through a fathom lense
into a vacuum
into a galaxy,

What a sweet dark
it is, ho um, what
a world of chalk

Sweet of

Oh kitten me—
world
you have far too
long
sung out your
heart,
hung out to
dry
laughing at your
fate
with a ripe
bellow
like a ghost of
fruit
oh take me,
pip
on your tongue
that
I may blossom in your
gut
and escape it with
wit
I am a fatted
calf
a maybe man, a
one

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

The back of the world is broken
Saint Charles has spoken—
out of a Panic cloud
the hordes of Hades crowd,
tyrannosauric martyrs, blood rain,
incubi, necrophages, fauns,
the four horsemen—a world of pain
elaborated into many forms,
and at their head the queen
a skeleton of evil wires, contorting
sickeningly, surveys the scene
and blights the land with fires.
The gods surround the planet
to watch its catastophic ellipse.
"The hordes of Hades have my bet,"
the black saint said, "That's what
I call a goddamn apocalypse!"

Through A Glass, Darkly

In the space beyond the window
worlds commune
hinged on a pane of glass.
The fading blue
of dusk, the dull moonlight,
the grass—thoughts
a nearer scene assumes—
then, double glazed,
a pair of halogen lit rooms
living through
the unconsciousness of light,
libraries
hung out out in the night.
The glass
invites its dual selves
to burst
like branches from the shelves;
a fire escape
climbs from a haloed head,
pages falling
heap about the eaves, the dead
wake inside their books,
the streetlamps softly calling
their stories into flame.
The unnamed sky is full of light,
full of the windowframe.

You stare through the glass,
through your ghostlike image,
as if looking for something lost,
until the windows of a building
beyond the trees, long dark,
illuminate.

That Shadow, Sister

That shadow,
sister,
takes the sun in hand
green as the flame
veils the heaven skirt
fire as black
led down from the sky
dreams that unlearnt
haberdashery and music
slowly whiten
that coral sky
for embroidered fires
the magician's sleeve
out burst a rose
swelling waves
of owl-lit clouds
crowded into oblivion
as animals beyond
the hedgerows recite
their lines the scene
opens in darkness in-
between the blood
cooked out of sin light
and the moon collapsed
under a nightlight
finding its effigy
a pale leaf horse
vein to solid vein
a god of mulch
these words incantate
—daybled darkbreak
abracadabra light—
horsewords
from a mouth of teeth.

Vv

You have forgotten
the skeleton of a fox
in the skeleton of a hole
the spine giving its telegraph
to the unlistening earth
the architecture of it
honeyed with maggots
the pupa of the hole
hatched into the soil
the earth an exoskeleton
honeyed with magma
rock as hot as guts
yawning catastrophically
coreward
from which the spine erupts
with a rabid screech
as the mantle folds
as the lightbulb stuns
the skull with revelations
from the electron gospels
reanimating the fox
which now wears the mantle
as it traipses through the stars
leaving pawprints of lava
among the milky archipelagoes
all of which you
starry-eyed
forget

Our Two Years

Standing with you before Kirchner's street walker
glowing with acid green and flashing orange,
our colours, dressed in light together, across
an unknown German evening in the past,
I turned to watch you looking at it
and that was a painting all in itself.
We stood so long time almost lost us,
stayed in that moment together as the
acres of the painting stretched away.
It could have been months, years.
Your face was lit up like a flower
open in the evening, you seemed so happy,
like you were about to start laughing,
and I thought about looking, how we were both
looking at each other, and that through the image
we saw a shared love in the other.
The beauty couldn't stay in the painting,
it came out to us, because we saw and knew it.
And I have been watching your flower open two years.

Karamazov

Smerdyakov threw himself
down the cellar staircase
into a rare darkness,
with some deathwise angel
escaping as white saliva
from his convulsing face.
His was not an embrace
of the bloodied earth,
no hieromonkish love.
There was a mutant bloom
of thought enrooted there
behind his crawling eyes,
something black and silent
beyond the abattoir gates.
In that dark seraphic fall
the blood flower grew.
A nothing was in nothing.
Spittle like ectoplasm flew.
He gave an otherworldly cry
like a night hawk's boom,
the world shivered under it
as at a feathered spirit
passing over in the rain.
Fyodor Pavlovich was woken.
He would not sleep again.

Dylan is Fed to the Dogs

Down the street the dogs are barking
And the day is getting dark

The day is getting the dog down
And the dark street is barking

The dog is barking down the dark
The day dogs the bark down the street

The stark day greets the dark
The band stay down the street

Dark is down the day is dark
The dark is regretting the day

The street is a dark bog
The stray dogs are betting

Dark stray dogs gown the dork
The gay bard downs the grog

The dogs down the bar bark
The dork and the bard are kings

Down streets the dogs a barking band
Down the bar the kings a-downing grog

And the dark Gods drown
A thousand miles behind

Haiku

space is dark
we are a spark

Magic Lantern

We lie staring upwards
as the shapes traverse
the painted rafters
of our universe,
the lamp behind us,
our eyes in shade.
As the tungsten sings,
the shapes parade
in clockwise motion,
against the turning earth.
In the west, deceasing,
at the east, in birth,
the icons of our life
evoke our sun.
Inside the lantern's bulb
everything is one.
Life is not a shadow,
it is a fugitive light.

Golden Underground

Light floods into the cavity
and we find it sweet
being passengers

light drips with lustre
from our sultry eyes
and we are lighthearted

light falls from our lungs
as pneumonic dust
in the speaking of mantras

light comes in golden gobs
as we cough up riches
the spine of dark is broken

light floods the tunnel
as the underground pulls itself
out of the earth

light becomes momentum
as the embryonic earth
crawls to Midas' ghost

the next station is Angel

The Tunnel

There are banshees
waiting down the track
as we pass by Angel.
The cargo is docile,
the air is thin.
We are weakened
with the compression.
Heads slump on necks
like overloaded servos,
faces yellow in the light,
as if a yolk was broken
somewhere inside.
Hunger and shadows
make a restless motion
along the dim carriage.
From an access tunnel
a leering face flashes.
It cannot be much further.
From down the tunnel
comes a kind of music
that cowers in the air.
We pass by Angel again.
There is something wrong.

Rhino

White wing telegraphed home,
night had broke the river.
News grew from her mouth
like dandelions from a barrel.
The barman left his piano
black with grit and rain,
thrust his crooked arm
by the teeth of the window,
clicked his fingers twice.
The canary fluttered childishly
vanishing inside the candle
and the shadow of her wing
beatified his open palm.
There was romance that year
in the palmistry of air.
He went behind the bar.
In dehydrated settlements
strung across the plains
there is a religion of whisky
and a religion of wings.

Night had broke the river.
White wing crawled inside
the wiring of the telephone.
He lifted the receiver.
The canary's bones scattered
like dice across the sky.
The barman swore outloud.
Grief in him grew
and made him tender.
His brother, in Denver.
Over his bowed head
the storm collapsed,
bellowing and grey,
with a broken horn.
He nursed his drink
as its footfalls died away.

Evocation

Consumptive and blue
Casagemas stares out of Life.
That same palid stare
he had leveled like a gun
in a Montmartre cafe
in Paris, 1901,
with disbelief and longing
at his Germaine.
Who seduced him jokingly
only to cause him pain.
Who gave herself to other men,
at their slightest whim.
Saving all her pity and disgust
for him.

Casagemas lies at the foot
of Picasso's Evocation,
lost somewhere in green.
Mourners crouch at his side,
and somehow he dreams
put down the gun!
of her upturned, pleading face
what are you doing Carlos?
her eyes gasping for him
for God's sake leave her!
the shouts had risen;
he in a loving act
had turned it to himself
and pulled the trigger.

From his body the ghost
rises in fantastic shapes.
A blurred host
of night-gowned children,
silken wisps of smoke,
the figures of whores
naked, in suspenders,
one straddling a white mare
mocking his dead virginity,
laughing in silence.
Far above him an image,
faded and spectral, hangs
like the white body of a diver
or the skeleton of a horse.

Little Boy

Green:
A light was spluttering at the wick
from the kitchen the kettle roared
all ailments diagnosed as coffee
the back door hung open
the garden a dark cupboard
aspirin melting on the tongue
television sounds, like oceans
clocks piled in the attic
a dressing gown taking a bow
in a photograph of clockwork
somewhere came the smell of gas
a promise slept in the bathtub
your flowers watered every day

Amber:
There was a movement as of sparks
across the dawning atmosphere
bones jangling with ceremony
the citizens of our blue earth
drinking coffee with milk and sugar
staring sarcastically into the afterlife
drifting somnambulent out of love
somewhere a fire leapt up
in the Moulin Rouge the can-can
toppled off the sequined stage
like a wave of rushing blood
time comes the silent hosanna
take hands brothers and sisters

Red:
They opened a door in the wall
and a supernova fell out
Krakatoa blinding black and white
sin and love were swallowed up
electricity and ash out of the ground
light in a cathedral of teeth
there was a sweet surrendering quiet
skin shivering from the bone
a suit of ecstasy became the moment
Superman fell like Icarus burning
the earth was turning on a cinder
the news read "The World Is On Fire"
a suit of ecstasy became the moment

Sleep Talking

Who spoke?
A pidgeon clatters from a roof,
the clouds crowd with faces.
I think I am becoming confused.
When the wind roared low,
I heard, thought I heard
a voice mumbling something.
Everything is growing old.
My arms are getting frail.
Every night a ragged man
falls asleep at my feet,
and when the sun comes up
he crawls off away again.
Can hear birds somewhere.
Stop that disgusting noise!
The air here is so stale,
and I am dying stupidly.
Nothing to say about it.
There is only concrete,
and the foul air, and rain.
I wake up covered in piss,
I don't know whose at all.
Its all completely absurd.
Who spoke? Someone out there
is speaking to me, I swear.
I am going deaf anyway.
A face floats by on a cloud.
I imagine the face of my mother.
Who spoke? Oh damn them,
what's the use,
                             moaned the tree,
and shrank into the ground.

Al Capone and the Crack of Doom

One evening in the old country
Capone made out of his villa
half soused on Jamaican rum
and took the hillside path
to the edge of the crack of doom
with the empty bottle in hand.
At the edge the air was stiller
than in the smoking valley,
he looked back from where he'd come
where the earth's dull hearth
had let the August fires consume
the black olive trees, the laurel tinder.

Now wild sound escaped the fissure,
a devil leapt out of the black crack
with white eyes wriggling in mid-air
only to leap like liquid back
into the bottle, and settle slickly there.
Al Capone, forty one years grown
fat in mind, afraid of Communists
and George Moran, in old Italy alone,
riddled by craziness and syphilis,
looked into the belching chasm
and formed his heart into a fist.

He drank the devil like cheap gin.
Once the devil is in, he's in.
The crack of doom yawned wide
as Alphonse let the old boy inside,
as the blood boiled his bones,
as a choir of screeching saxophones
came crashing in to break his neck,
as his trousers filled with dreck,
as at the last limit of human pain
a tommy-gun exploded in his brain,
and he fell a shadow to the ground.

Passengers

Night is loading
on the back of the train
as it slopes gently
past wheatfields
down the long Atlantic plain,
the carriages buckling
at a blank velocity
over England's foothills,
the ink smudged ticket
chewed back accidentally
into the great machine,
each passenger keeping
their deep sea watchword close:
take me with you,
there are many stations,
we are going downwards
into a sunken Kingdom,
take me with you.

And night is loading
the trees hove in view
as white as coral,
the sliding deep
has cut a path towards
the central drain,
and there you see
silhouettes of seapeople
their mouths full of salt,
which glows like phosphorus
from their darkened faces.
Someone is taking tickets
from their unresisting hands
saying take me with you,
there are many stations,
there are many doors,
we are going downwards
into a sunken Kingdom,
take me with you.
I am in your hand.
There are many stations,
and I have forgotten my name.

Prodigal

You have wandered the earth
for a hundred years
childless and sainted,
with a chalice in hand,
and finding in a valley
one swollen night
the mythic town
you dreamed of in childhood,
and finding in a valley
chrushed rose and bourbon,
foxbrush and chocolatewood
and angelos in the brambles,
your searched for firelight,
your wifing candle there
with a hand of light
laid on your dropping arm,
finding those with surety
as a blind cadenza lands
its one ancestral chord,
you fall giddily among
a few drowsy insects
and kiss the earth
amongst their glow
and let out a noise
that has been finding
its way back to you
through some winter
on some dark night
some river –

Pariah

You remember walking the streets,
remember the hush, drizzle
spooling from limp branches.
The shade of your father
trudging behind at a distance
in a long dirty mac,
his grey face bunched in a scowl,
as if behind a waterfall.
The street artist, scuffling
to bag up his chalks
as the rain beat on his art,
turning a dribbling face
from the earth to sky, to you,
and how you said something
multicoloured and strange,
how you couldn't help or hurt
him in his spat on dreamland.

How that moment broke
the clouds, ivories tinkled,
how a blue, angelic hustler
sung ragtime waltz for change.
How a crazed African ran out
in a dazzling white thobe
and seemed to dance
across the busy road.
How the horns and sirens
broke like sugar glass
at his heel.

Chanunpa

Dark night on the corner
of Central Park and 5th,
the hotdog stand is there
same as every other night,
glistening rows of ketchups
mustards mayonnaises relish
frying onions and dogs
the cart lit in neon
like an infantile casino
its grimy surfaces swelling
with buds of living grease
beneath the tubelights
like the rippling of sweat
and steam on televisions
in the apartments above
the scene is dull, grainy
fat Greek's hands moving
surely above the counter
stuffing the cash register
with rough wads of bills
his grey mustache quivering
and tasting the wind
as he licks his lips ―
a black cloud of smoke
comes off the grill
and fills the heaving night
with the smell of flesh.

Beautiful people pass by
and the smoke tangles
in their beautiful hair.

Iron Lung

Davy Jones is wandering on the beach
in his raggy sailor suit
with the golden cuffs, silk tassles,
cockle shells hung from his neck.

He stumbles with a bleached look,
smiling at the clouds,
where the faces of his daughters
shimmer like piano strings.

At the white horizon, atlas moths
fall silently into the air,
streams of them, like water
boiling off into clouds.

The sun is crying for bones.
There are vultures overhead
with love and hunger for the man.
Raggedy Davy seascarred Jones

crosses his crossbone heart.
He's a shade, kind of a mirage
made of aether and bandages
dragged across the shifting sand,

and he is growing tired.
His body is five fathoms down,
crushed two hundred tonnes
in the black lung of the sea.

Sweet Thistle

Eating an artichoke
leaf by leaf
with sweet salt butter
as the rain goes on,
in the closeted hold
of the world
with the bird song
of television, telephones,
and the bird song
softly mewled
of kittens under porches,
with the grey sleep
of neurogeographers
on the five continents
peninsula-wings,
lilac explosion
somewhere in space,
soap and butterfat
on this childeyed planet
and the electric thought
oh long oh long

you feel yourself turning
at the heart

Steam Tree

She peg legs over the tiles
on tip toe, with a pan
of water for the stove,
ballerina, spatula in hand,
cherry tomato up her nose,
bullies the sizzling courgettes
lashing them with olive oil
and sweet balsamic, that rises
from the carmel onions
like a steam tree of sugar.
Broccoli tumble lightly
from the basket of her hands
and land as asteroids
in the hot potato jungle
in a rain of golden
withering chlorophyll
anticipating the mother belly,
sparkling light of hunger.
She is there, salt shaker
a black machine in hand,
clutching a sheath of noodles
with which she javelins
the supersalivating pan,
and then boiling over
she collapses on the counter,
head on her folded arms
a cauliflower of coffee.
She's a fallen sparrow
in the cucumber mountains
among the grains.

Skin Flick

Silos and churches
seen through scratched windows
of the Bridgeport train
seem like gelatine
in the 100 degree heat,
there is the smell of tarmac,
stubs of ice cream
on the sidewalk,
pretty blonde babies
hunching to their mothers.
From the hilltops
trees ripple like pondweed,
somewhere in the scrub
a black vulture
kicks at a grocery bag.
There are red blotches
in the air, humming over
the bare outlines
of shops, warehouses, homes,
charcoal drawings
in a gorge of dry tinder,
red blotches morphing
over everything, like sweets.

The train pushes
into the dripping
New England valley
like a brassy tongue.

Hummingbird

Like a clockwork toy
in the slow light of dusk
sipping sugar water
from a slender ruby vial
with tiny pulsing movements
of its sequined throat,
feeble motion of the heart.
The mechanism moves,
hummingbird in the world.
A flash, electric red
as the pines catch fire,
and this god of moths
skeletons upon the air,
half of nothing, microbe
in the valley's stomach,
its bill a scimitar,
wingbeat flowering darkly.

From beneath the trees
a shadow crawls,
last shade of Thoth,
as old as the mountains.
Wingbeats break the clouds.
The ghost of earth
is waking into hummingbird.
There is pollen in the air,
and a sad, sweet song,
dark river.

Living Dead

Wake up in the pool at night
with a hotdog in your mouth
a barbell on your windpipe
an answer creaming in your mind
and a smile of benevolent love
for all God's living creatures
which are lunching on your testicles
as you drown in the shallow end
gnat have mercy, mother Mary
you are choking in a blue blue dream
where angels of salt in speedos
feed you earwax from a trumpet
owls doggy paddle in your skull
which is a gourd of marmalade
you are the undead King Correction
with a poolside death, ladling
lollipop porridge into your eyesockets,
organs with distinct personalities
that reason as they slowly kill you
coming backwards into consciousness
with a headache like burning death
you flounder from the water's edge
into the dense and dripping forest
regress into your beehive childhood
smashing cupcakes on toadstools
with drooling fairy whores
oh yes oh yes

Mockingbirds

The mockingbirds
in the woods
biting at stones

the mockingbirds
scream like newborn
in the spreading branches

the mockingbirds
crawl into mailboxes
and die in the heat

the mockingbirds
soar through backyards
grey black forever

the mockingbirds
fantailed jesters
crown on the winds

the mockingbirds
anthem of feathers
harlequin harlequin harlequin

the mockingbirds
bomb black into blackness
caw caw caw

the mockingbirds
dandelion jewels
as it starts to rain

the mockingbirds
jape on lightheart
heart of the medallion

the mockingbirds
feathers falling out
of an eggshell wig

July 4th

On the highway
cutting through the forest
of New England
cruising under peachpie
and violet heads of cloud
through the evening,
tail lights coalescing
on the black tandem road,
stars and stripes hung
from grey mossy bridges
with stonethrow kids
escaped from their wardrobes
on this, Independence Day.
White houses like breakers
from a sea of trees,
Connecticut is in a dream.
The highway bends
into a sunset gorge,
brokedown bridges, neon
lights of Walgreens,
elephantisis hoardings,
and the sluggish Indian river
trickling from a bottleneck
into a mouth of chocolate,
slowdown summer night.

Dog Day

Joey Chestnut
on July 4th 2010
tries to eat 70
of Nathan's famous hotdogs,
makes 54 in ten minutes,
retching like a goose,
shaking as he pushes
the franks down into
his esophagus
with gulps of Kool-Aid,
folding the buns in half
and pushing them after,
soppy and pink.
His head inflates
like a red waterballoon
as he jumps on the spot,
face full of slop,
dough and chewed beef.
His shorts are speckled
with sugar and grease,
but he keeps going
on and on, decades
of dogs and buns,
the competition is still
gorging in the shallow end
in Nathan's T-shirts
like giant bibs,
the minutes crawl by,
agony, gutachingly
crashing like Titanic into
the colon of the afternoon.
The sun dips, the crowd
roars over the countdown.
Joe Chestnut grimaces
against the gag reflex.
No mustard?

Laid Over in Paris-Charles de Gaulle

All through the night
He is drilling and hammering
the concrete of the terminal
in an orange hardhat
chisel and an iron pick
He is smoking cigarettes
under a wall of glass
watching the taxi rank
He is in the beast's bowels
somewhere on the 1st floor
with a blowtorch,
with a circular saw
sending rain of sparks
against the back wall,
out-brief-candles ―
He is pacing slowly
past the flickering lights
of the departures board
with a Steyr automatic
cruising down the escalator
in a ghostly dream

with the gun quietly there
in His hands

He is cleaning turbines
with black gloved hands

He is on the runway,
holding wands of semaphore ―

Travellers crashed out
in the abandoned cafe
move in their sleep ―

Someone watching over

Kong

King Monkey comes
          from behind the curtain
chewing a cigar of dynamite,
          with talons of gold,
a velvet cape
          and a bamboo wand.
He is the last:
          the forest is dying
and so is vaudeville,
          in the twinkling
of his hundred ivory teeth.
          In the wings, hyenas
hover like angels—
          before the stage
the jungle's daughters
          pare their incisors.
King Monkey knuckles
          downstage, and starts to sing,
with all his simian might,
          into the silverbacked night.
There is a sound of jewels,
          and a sigh of wind
like a great orchid wilting,
          and the crackling of pigskin.
To end, he pounds his chest
          with a diamond fist.
There is a second of silence
          before the deluge.

As the curtain falls
          he's seeing stars.
The world falters.
          He is lost in smoke,
his cape torn,
          wandering a landscape
like the surface of the moon.
          He roars and leaps
into vacant darkness.
          Feels wind. Hears drum.
Before him a golden shape.
          Banana of Karma!
Thy Kingdom Kong!
          He peels ―
The star is gone.

Fire Eater

Night in a coma,
an unassuming night in November,
rain like whiskey
running down the faces of buildings,
rattling of streetlights
and the souls of mosquitos
moving together mechanically, forms,
a badly broken piano played
all across a hundred bars,
across the blank roadways
and the key finding its tonic
in a mouthlike lock.
Beyond the road, chain fences
and pit bulls bark
and sarcastic messy faces
of the bloody and beaten,
the dead dumb drunk
with raggedy suits
and dark leather briefcases
in which the whole town is folded.
They drink the dark upon them.

In every house,
there is a smell of gas.
Searchlights cross the still white faces
of mothers and children, of fathers,
sleeping in their cotton beds
with dismantled organs,
like people that never have lived
but the life of metronomes,
on the operating table, unconscious,
dreaming of their birth, of fire.
I can see you have questions.
Can a dying heart be saved?

Patercove

The hawthorne tree is dead.
Trunks of ivy like pythons,
cauliflowers growths of bark,
follow it from the root
to the upper reaches,
the tree brain, the head,
and the sky's blue roof.
In the wig of branches
bleaching in the canopy
a hoary old dove sits
collared like a priest,
cooing lust and melancholy
with a wheezing noise
like a broken accordion.

Around the neighbourhood
its rivals call magnificently
from the tops of rooves,
from throne-like chimneys,
clattering into the air
to survey their territory,
chasing sleek she-doves
across patios and lawns
with the bent hopstep
of the terminally sprung.
The bull dove still cooes,
monotone, hopeless,
growing stupider gradually,
forgetting its many children,
lost in ivy and rheumatism.

It is able to hear only
the language of starlings
as they build new empires,
which is incomprehensible,
and sounds like laughter.

Quiet Now

It is quiet now,
in the half eaten twilight,
grey shapes of passing cars
and the upstairs rooms
with berries of light
bulging suddenly into fruit,
lightbulbs coming on,
and in dark doorways
they pause by the switch
barely visible, beholding
the outlines of their rooms,
these other human beings.
At the skyline aerials rise,
thickets of wire and metal,
microphones and lenses
of the suburban brain.
Red plumes of cloud rise
from the bleary smog,
aeroplanes make off into night,
black as submarines.
The ground rumbles from trains,
like a heart murmur.
Lonely sometimes at night.
When will you come home?

Epoch Times

Gerard Street, in Chinatown,
the scrappy outer wall
of the Exchange Bar
is covered in Mandarin fliers,
licks of white and blue paint,
stains of vinegar and tar.
In beaten crap-metal boxes
stacks of free newspapers,
Epoch Times spine out,
Business Gazette, full colour,
catalogues of shrimp soup,
property, jobs, cigarettes
of paper and ink for clubs,
strip clubs, massage parlours,
vice imported from Soho,
the news of the world,
a revolt of dashed symbols
that spreads across restaurants
and facades of offices.

There's trash on the ground,
fag-ends, exploded bangers
and bits of chewed fowl,
gum of brash Italian tourists,
the end of a panini
tossed in the gutter
by an oily suit and tie.
The bins are full of menus.
The alleyways are teeming.
Girls buy cheap jewelry:
"Good Luck", "Blessings".
For those coming in the gate
China is a thing to eat.
In a pagoda by the carpark
old men in football shirts
with wizened yellow faces
drink and play mahjong
with an audience of tourists
eating chow mein and Bigmacs.

Over the hum of air vents,
and the soft churn of sewers
you can hear the newspapers
going out of date.

Subway™

Subway in Long Acre,
your identikit loaves and soda,
your sad Polish waitress
with gloved plastic hands
smeared in chili and mayo,
your watermarks of New York
like blueprints on the wall,
your catfood olives and cheese
in perfect plastic triangles,
your fathom-long sandwiches
stretching back into dark oven
oatsmelling and divine,
salami and burnished ham
in mighty Parthenon columns,
your Dominican in the back
with centenial mustaches
shouting something about salt,
your invincible refills
from the sugar and ice machine,
your unknown herbs out of
the gardens of antiquity,
your apocalypse-proof salads,
face filling, stomach fucking
glory of American invention,

this amber evening is like looking
through sunglasses of Coca-Cola,
and I love you.

Play

Outside Hamley's toy store
there's a man standing on a box
in a black hat and paisley scarf
like Axl Rose's bandana,
a snakeskin effect waistcoat,
and a tiny plastic guitar
that he's pretend playing
along to "Hey There Delilah".
Beside him, a bearded man
like a heavy metal drummer
or an ex-convict blows
through a pink plastic hoop
making clouds of bubbles
that kids in England shirts
kick around the pavement
or try to grab for like sweets.
Across the road chubby men
exit the Ferrari store all red,
in baseball caps, stallion sweaters,
tailed by bored-dead wives.

This is Regent Street,
windows and baskets of flowers,
and the happiness of fat women
leading their pretty children
in and out the up-market.
The toy store still sounds
like whirring racing cars,
plastic helicopters, fake guitars.
A bus passes with a collosal
poster of Shrek, his latest.
A man with a cappucino,
in a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt
plays with his touchscreen.
This is a child's universe.

Sermon

The preacher steps onto the 453
into central, black shoes and slacks,
a thin white check shirt
hanging like a veil off his ribs,
smiling hugely into people's faces,
hand raised, shaking, ready,
he begins to speak.
The words come fast: "Jesus",
"save you", "eternal", "God",
as verses he has rewritten
in the backend of his brain
they stream like bubbles outwards
from his thick, working lips,
that open too wide, as if grace
were about to descend into them.

He has the look of a child
with food stuck in his teeth,
his tongue rolls crazily around
as he pronounces "damnation",
"final judgement" and "iniquity",
the last word mangled slightly
by his African accent comes
with a strange amphibian squeak.
This causes a boy to giggle
and suddenly it seems
the whole weight of the ministry
is on him, with hawk eyes,
with the blood of the Crusades,
the Inquisition, the Salem trials,
and damnation is very close,
is a real and palpable thing
bearing down from above.

The kid shrinks behind his Ribena
and leans toward his mother.
The preacher shifts instantaneously
from thunder to angelface
and he graces us with his last
monumental words, the bus by now
a sea of glum or rolling eyes,
he leaps through the closing doors
like Gabriel off a cliff.

Take Care

The caretaker is sleeping
in the 1st floor maintenance room
dreaming of his past lives
in a pile of cloths and bottles,
head on his shoulder, drool
growing on his chin like a plant.

He rockets through clouds
of incredible colours,
his first night as a father
is swallowed by a liquorice mouth,
comes back garbled in a language
that his forefathers spoke.
A chocolate tyrannosaur stalks
out of the pond he fell into
as a child, or still has yet
to fall, tears right through
his first day at school.
His 18th birthday party is eclipsed
by a white tower that falls
trailing red curtains, stink
of turpentine and dogshit
that dances like the alphabet,
redecorates his eyelids
with streaks of squealing guitar,
changes his nature left
that had slouched to the right
every time he drank vodka
or quarreled with his wife.
He finds himself a stranger,
on a dark street corner
draped with angler fish,
converses with himself as the war
is exploding in the sky overhead,
reaches for his shadow
and cuts himself a suit.
They both go attired
in the other, until the world
is looking in a window at its organs,
the eyes into themselves,
until the animals lose silence
and scream violent obscenities aloud,
lose their natural love,
begin to murder one another.
The caretaker is left in a high chair
floating a mile above the Pacific Ocean,
which glows bright white
with a thousand eels
and the burning shapes of whales.
The clouds move, a steel crown
comes down into his hands.

He wakes up in the diluted light
of the maintenance room, notices
a bright blue bush is growing
from a small black hole
in his plain blue overalls,
and wipes away his drool―

The Rifle

Mosquitos mill in the dust
floating in the humid air
of a white timber porch,
on the hill the cattle
bat them off into infinity
where they lunch on microbes
or the blood of ghosts.
On the porch, a man
sits and cleans his rifle
with a bit of rag,
each tiny ligament and organ
atomised, light as chicken bones,
each part half of itself.
All will be assembled
on the man's clean lap
in the blue evening light.

He stares into the trees.
All that was taken out
will be put back in,
made clean in the daybreak,
the sum of an equation
old as the pine barrens.
He fingers a spent casing,
throws it over his shoulder
into a pile of sawdust.
It patters on the wood
as a pulled out tooth
into a bed of flowers.
There are animals out there,
he thinks. Wolves.

He rises from his chair
and leans the reassembled rifle
against the peeling white front
of his quiet wooden house.
His eyes seem to flicker
across the surface of sight
and the halfsight in which
his ancestors pass like smoke.
He feels pain of age,
his coniferous blood running on
into a calm green clearing
where his body cannot follow,
where the quarry will turn
only to embrace its hunter
in a dream, like sleep.

There is fire that night,
somewhere up on the hill.
Dawn, he takes the rifle
like a still sleeping child
up the hill, through smoke
blossoming slowly from the earth,
grey flowers, memory of life.
As the sun lunges up
to smash the halflight in,
he fires the gun.

Phantasmagoria

There is a burst blister on my toe,
weeping with bloodless skin
like the eye of a blind old man.
As it looks away from me,
I get the sense of vertigo
and it is now a gory crater.
Its edges whitely fall away
as the world is wincing
needles in the atmosphere,
the planet is a falling foot,
I am the bloody shoe―

There is the smell of plasma
and a red waterfall
flowing backwards up in space
through a door of skin, that is
curtained with black and stars
backstage of the universe,
and I slowly walk through
into an abundant valley
with huge arterial trees,
flocks of miscarried cherubim,
clouds smeared with lipstick―

I back away into the darkness,
running through some hospital
full of the wounded;
black horses, black pigs,
strapped in giant white beds.
I am handed a weapon,
a white-hot steel rapier.
A horse, foaming at the mouth,
shouts "This is the needle!
You are coming back to life,
be ready for the charge―"

―I come to in insanity,
look for the blister,
and with a demonic laugh
pull my entire leg like Excalibur
out of a wound in my chest.
The cherubs rise around me,
there is the sound of drums
and the movement of great engines.
With a crack of thunder
a black horse vaults the moon.

Closing

Outside the supermarket at 10pm
the last shoppers with bulging orange bags
bob off into the dim lit car park,
the trees breathing calmly out there

like sleepy kids around the sodium lamps,
attendants pushing stacks of trollies home,
wind getting under the first night busses
as they pass the carpet warehouse.

Before the sliding doors a homeless
walks a puppy on a rainbow lead
around in little circles, tugging it
as it gets floppy or hearing something
points its head slickly into the dark.

The man quietly asks for change
as people bustle past him from the shop,
when he gets some the dog jumps up
to lick the stranger's hand, whines
as the homeless tugs him down again.

The stranger is brisk, straightening
a ruffled shirt-sleeve, making off
for his old Ford estate out there
beyond the recycling bins, its floor
messy with bottles and clumps of hair.

The last customer, an obese woman
in a red duffel coat whose puffy eyes
give her a constant crying look
waddles quickly past the tramp until
she is just a sidling awkward blob

in distant pain of orthopaedic shoes.
The shutters of the store front crawl
down. A couple kiss by the cash machines.
There is the constant sound of overnights
from City airport, pushing into the sky.

A flier stuck to the ground by the bins:
"Never forget how beautiful you are."

67 & 72

Halogen bulbs in cherry red shades
hang like paper lanterns above heated trays
at the counter of a Lewisham Way chinese.
The window is plastered with orange menus,
a paddle and a porcelain cat on the sill,
digital photos of oval dishes next to geishas
preening their polythene wigs in vanilla light,
strings of gold in their tiny china hands.
Behind the marbletop, exotic beers glint,
from Turkey, the Caribbean, or the orient.
There is cheap wine and Japanese whisky
in the cobwebs, dressed in paper flowers.
At the register some little cousin sits
in a plaid shirt, smiling into his bowl of soup.
From the stairwell the smell of steam floats
off the noodle vats, and some bigman
coughing and arguing down his phone,
voice muffled as he chows on black bean beef.

The door is wide open, a blue dusk
seeps in with sirens and the speeding cars,
the shouts of early evening drunks,
black thunder as articulated lorries charge
crosstown, the hour gathering a head of steam
behind the motion of their cycling drums.
A thin man in a suit sits by the window,
blowing his head off over and over
taking huge mouthfuls of crispy chilli beef,
wheezing and laughing at his tears
that fall into his mouth, and taste of stew.
Ghosts of cows and chickens scrabble up
into the sky, and a growling night comes down.

Old Moonshine

A robin perches on a yellow deckchair
among the vivid scruffy lawn
with scattered leaves, dark flowers
the kind you would accidentally crush
as a child, and mourn in fragrance,
clothes pegs jangling like pulled-out teeth
on a weatherbeaten line, another garden
in the humid evening, in New Cross

The robin darts through the brambles,
skips the wilted geraniums that gingerly
press the ground in hope of a storm,
sends out of its origami mouth
fluting yips, babyish punctuation
that floats into the trees above,
where the jangling minds of London
lodge their green undying memories

They are drunk on champagne now,
two houses over, roasting meat, laughing
in the smoke as they grow lightheaded,
gross and happy they are England's princes,
bathing in the steamy air with largesse,
cheesy noses, kissing, dancing to the Duke,
their hearts like robins fluttering inside
the shady houses of their bodies

The evening wavers with them,
at the buffet table, one hand halfway
inside its wallet, half-soused on wine,
losing itself in a beard of dusky clouds,
in the trees that sap it for their fruit,
as someone is singing far away
an old jazz song darting birdlike on the air,
the earth turns, the dark flowers turn.

Fleet

During the night, busses pass the window
with a glare of empty fish tanks,
clinical argon, raging brake lights.
Later they come lightless, creeping,
elephantine hearses taking no passenger
no where, their routes through shadow
clambering the child of Kentish hills.
London's heights, cobwebbed in telegraph,
dusty trees and rooves, bear them through
the watchful, humid passages of night
as the catacomb opening to intern
its millenial returning princes.
The city holds them all as brothers
in the moving world of its embrace,
every spiracle of light a signal,
each lonely soul a passenger.
The busses begin to dream, rocked
into a brakeless, whorling doze.
The roads grind beneath their wheels,
as moths come threading from the dark
and settle on their moving rooves.

Baby Blue

Today the park is cool and teeming
as a church in a rainforest.
Bicycles whirr back and forth like insects,
kids come charging down the hill
dressed in skipping ropes and sweaters.
Under the trees, pale sheets are spread;
light shines through lemonade in rainbows,
daisies bloom among used bus tickets,
old men mumble in their sleep.

There is a lollipop lying in the grass.
An old lady stabbing at a crossword
rubs the skin of her head, where lives
the old sponge of her torture.
Above her the trees accumulate
as beaches of cotton, leafy cumuli
billowing out of the ground like gas,
or green dye spreading upwards into water.
The willows weep into the pond
where once a chocolate labrador drowned.

Beyond the cast iron fences, cars
whistle through the day like wind.
Above, hydrogen is wearing thin,
God is nodding like a giant blue baby,
his eyes closing into our green world.
Clouds drift across our nursery walls.
Out of such bright imperial blues,
come lightning storms, and bombs.

Ring o' Roses

There are monkeys with golden teeth.
A lion with a bloody mouth stalks
the garden, zebra roam the street.
Old men are being dragged into bins.
Clowns come driving tiny cars,
laughing, setting off all the alarms.
I wander the house, which has
become a giant music box.
Looking down, a pinball machine
has become lodged in my ribcage.
I have children in a nest
inside a grand piano, laying eggs
and eating their own eggs, and
turning into paper aeroplanes
that fly at my face, alight.
My doctor is in the basement
strangling my mother, he says
"I don't know if she'll make the night."
and folds into a deck of cards.
The trees outside break my windows
and force their way into the house.
My penis is now on fire
and trying to burrow into my stomach
to lay its tiny musical eggs.
Motorbikes of light come out of nowhere
and crash soundlessly into my front door
which I try to hold back
as the doorbell rings "Ode to Joy".
Flowers fall out of my mouth
and pour painfully from my ears
and nostrils. The floor falls away,
I fall in darkness, surrounded by
the buttercups and daisies of my mind.

I wake, in a fever.

Silent Era

A black limousine crawls in
to the parking lot behind the store,
its wheels crackling on hot asphalt.
Acacia bushes rustle softly
as housewives push their purchases
up to the backs of vans,
children pulling at their hands.
A security guard watches the limo
as it cruises through the lot
and is reminded of a snake.
His hand moves slowly to his holster.
The sun beats down in waves,
somewhere there is a radio
with lap steel and ukeleles.
A dog writhes inside a hot car.
The limo stops at the curb,
a man pours out the rear door
made of oil, shoes slick black,
dark suit rippling as he strides
between the rows of parked cars.
The sun reflected in obsidian shades
seems like fire pouring from his head,
all the security guard sees is
a sharp suit and some dark stars.
He slides down the wall unconscious.
The suit bears down on a blue corvette
in which a girl is applying lipstick.
In the air, murder is palpable.
There is a high pitched ringing sound
as the suit pulls a silver revolver
with a long barrel from his belt.
The hammer goes back, the cylinder
turns with the motion of a clock.
He lifts his arm―
                          there is a crashing noise
as the laugh track cuts in and out
and the image flickers in slow motion.
The scene is plunged into darkness,
the actors scream in their confusion
soundlessly, through roaring static.
There is an explosion―
                                       and takes her hand
as she steps out of the car in a blue dress.
They dance beneath the streetlight,
her hand on his chest, his at her waist,
as the heavens are seared with nuclear fire,
and a cacophony of saxophones and trumpets
pours from the falling buildings around them.
He holds her hand as she removes his glasses
and leans in for a kiss―

The Late Showing

In a dark movie theatre:
"I dreamt I was a dancer,
and the dream stayed with me,
prevented me from working
finally resulting in depression,
and my ultimate dismissal.
I turned to drink, and drank
in the lowest places pissing
the sum of my earnings away,
gambled away my car.
I met bums, disgusting winos
that told me of their dreams
in which they were dancers,
the most incredible dancers
the world had ever seen.
How the dream had come
to each of them in turn,
how they lived in the gutter
as brothers―"
                           at this moment
a monster made of knives and forks
tore through the silver screen
spilling razors and decapitating
most of the first and second rows.
It expanded to a colossal size,
filling the room with grating steel.
The musicians in the pit
tried to crawl into their instruments,
which were shredded instantly.
Several grossly fat women
began to eat their own legs,
but were pierced and burst.
A child with braces was snagged
and lifted from his seat
into the mass of whirling metal.
Those running to the exits
were blinded by a mist of blood
and stumbling, were devoured.
One man in the back row,
driven insane by the incidental music
of the massacre, drew a pistol,
aimed it at his temple,
bellowed "Halleluja!" and fired.
Only one escaped the carnage,
the rising flames, the blue stink
of molten metal, boiling blood.
Stumbling from the scene,
he felt a spotlight on his back
and began to dance.

For Dennis Hopper

The goon at the rumble
with a switchblade knife,
or laid out under fireworks
with starspangled crazy eyes
leering into a microphone
on the highway at night
in a steel black Cadillac,
or bursting through the mirror,
in dreams he walks with you.
He will haunt American cinemas,
bug eyed, gritting his teeth
as the house lights go down.

Where is he now? In some
candyland, huffing cocaine
from a sherbert straw,
or stumbling into an audience —
lights, camera, Dennis Hopper
this is not your life.
And he looks confused, as if
the trappings of the old world
ought to live on in the new.
He sips tonic water, growing strange
as he answers all the questions,
the audience become uneasy,
he now sees the Totenkopf
coming down out of the lights.
As in a dream the scene shifts —

the show continues, but he is old
and doesn't recognise his body.
He is drunk, lying in the street,
realises he can reach and touch
every one of the stars.
He is still being interviewed,
and to every question he replies
"Hollywood's mad dogs are dying"
and laughs a barking laugh.
The applause is overwhelming
as he lurches from the floor
into the air, clutching a bottle of spirit.
Curtain.

In Heat

In the park on the first day of summer
a woman is stalking with a limp
in a cardigan, her glasses singeing her face
past dogs fighting and fucking
and pissing gaily in the shade
where students are dreaming with red eyes
and red skin, sinking into their wine glasses
or sinking into the ground.
The dogs bark and leap like lumps
of charcoal into the echo,
hissing of the barbecues
like armies of smoky tambourines
and the dogs are burning,
tattooed men are chewing at their legs,
the housewives yip and skitter
into bunches of daisies.
A hay fevered child rolls sneezing
through a dream of rape seed fields,
in sun-stroke, in sunburnt mercy,
as the men are baring their chests,
as the women are itching at their breasts,
as the dogs are loving endlessly
their scruffy, blunted bitches.
Old women shine like raisins under the trees,
glinting eyes like diamonds, watching the kids
with hunger of marrow and black thoughts,
thoughts of age and hunger, hidden in woodsmoke,
their hands moving like a spell.

As the children wake among the flowers
the park is tumbling in a furnace dream
of sizzling meat and broken guitars,
and their parents are beetroot naked
barking at the sun.

Vessel

In the 21st century
the world has become an engine.
Miles underground, the great dynamo
rages in the act of dreaming,
pouring out a violent music
through the caverns of the earth,
its energy doubling and doubling,
lost at the surface in a craze;
the lights of every city being born,
every ancient empire failing.

They are sparks of the great wheel,
a glinting in the eye of this
diver through an ebbing galaxy.
We are conduits, cells frying
in a bath of blue electric,
seeing each other's spasms and splits
in music, as it uses us
within its brief communications,
expressions of parts of thoughts.

We hear them, sometimes dreaming
at the fringes of our world,
asleep beneath the cliffs as waves
rattle over from the further shore,
we are carried back on this electron
into a history of atoms,
the biology of ancestral stars.

Last Song at Night

With your millions pounding grain
your orphan towns and citadels
and pyrotechnic animals
in the electric alley of Gods

With the smoky chapels
stacked sadly in your valleys
the ground that stumbles
finally to the sea

With the mourning songs I hear
over your first born rivers
in the ancient night coming
the faces of your ghosts

With our tired, tired hands,
you are the father we can never hold,
only push our sunburnt faces
into the cool, dark earth

With your oceans we know like death
and the tiny, dry acne
on which we live, by candlelight,
glad of idols and maize

With your feasting clowns
loving lonely in the same evening
we have lived in all our lives
like children of other children

With your music that moves us
in tears, dancing, fire
at the tips of every limb,
as we are your children too

I can't help falling in love with you

Nocturne

The trees, and their sea green leaves
are caught in golden light
as the sun goes gulping like a carp
through jet streams and glass

to bury its face in a bed of pebbles.
The trees, smell like being young,
mint & algae, dead frog of bruises
that told tales among the plums

that like a lush drank up their puddle
in a dream of the garden of youth.
The trees, that tonight crane their necks
through the window, over the cradle,

singing to the newborn a grey song
that it will dribble on, softly nightfall
as the planet burps and rolls over.
The trees, go back to sleep, shh

that are holding up a star pricked canopy
as dinosaurs come plodding, wise and sad
down the silent avenues, beneath
the scabby arms of our loving forest.

The trees, you are peaceful now
that glower in a galaxy of towns
crying about the past, blind with grief
and your dinosaurs are forever real now,

stalking hugely into the deep black river.
The trees, on a long blind pilgimage
go sleepily back down messy lanes
dressing themselves in hay and flowers,

napping in the land of donkeys
with their heads buried in their roots.
The trees cat call you at dawn,
you are lost under white sheets

waking into a dalmation world.
The blackbirds are bursting from the pie
as the trees rip livid from the earth
and thunder as a choir into the atmosphere.

As you rise in smoke and sweat and robes
the trees are bickering in the clouds.

Harlequin

The harlequin of New Cross comes
singing reggae walking past kebab shops
with a tyre around his waist
with a traffic cone his crown
falling into every pothole on fire
doused in hotsauce and ginger.
The ladies beam and pelt him with gold
from their wrists, scrabble at his thighs
tear off their burkhas and hijabs
and run home to bathe in beer.
He's drinking malt with the Ghanaians
covered in mayonnaise and flour.
They clap his shoulders, offer fishes,
bake his eyes red and roll him
battered out into the street
where he feasts on beef brisket and shrimp.

Children dance all around him,
swing from his red and green tailcoat,
prank on his chicken ribs, his bells.
He grins like a piano, plucks goats' eyes
from behind their ears. When their mothers
come wagging tongues like steaks in scolding
he waltzes them across the drains
crooning to them like the Caribbean sea,
leaves them breathless, bosoms bowling,
holding baskets of mangoes and figs.
Twilight, he quits the drunken town.
Cartwheeling, throwing off his clothes,
his crown, he gives a glorious cockadoodledoo
and leaps like a lion into the sky.

In the garden

In the garden
poplars crack and leaf
a fox eats daffodils
sparrows begin to bloom
gurgling in the trees
ivy drops like smoke
branches lose their rags
a squirrel chews its foot
falling from the fence
pidgeons crash unconscious
into the bramble bushes
the roses come humble
with twenty kisses
the crow is stalking
from behind the tulips
the ground is broke
the soil is soaked
the rotten stump falls
in love with woodlice

At night the rain
will wash the reeds
drink the ants
coronate the bees
now the starlings crackle
around the king
the badger wakes
and eats its young
owls shed their wings
deer are mating
in the sun
while in a ditch
frog lies bleeding

Host

The pontiff has a whale eye
turning like a planet in his head.
His bone groans from the weight,
the other eye is cowed and red,
squashed bloodshot in a corner
with his nose, his lips.
His skull is like a shell
exploded, the rest lopsided, bent
to fit this ball of blackness in.
Tears of oil fall when it
turns to heaven, when it blinks.
At night his body is shaken
as it rolls back over hours
finally baring ropes of nerves
encrusted with salt.
These seem to grow each night,
boring into the socket
until the old man gasps
and the parasite sings darkly
out of his closing throat.
The priests whisper together
the eye has found its throne.
They go to him, and see
the other eye has fallen out,
the human mouth is gone.
The pontiff's body rises,
robed in blubber, ghost of bone.
The eye sings out
as it drinks them in.

Pop Idol

O Coca-Cola
let us kiss your horny feet
look on us weeping ink
you chink of belly light
you sickly constellation
you sudden racing heart
you dizzy god of us
with a gazillion microbes
rinsing in your caramel
let us lie in your wake
bearded with creamy froth
dreaming of black diamonds
dreaming of nougat
dreaming of the dog
that barks you slickly
in the faces of the stars
dreaming maybe of death
the brown hair of children
ploughing up a thirsty earth
the gaping gulch.

O Coca-Cola
O let the levee break
crows are exploding
crops are burning
the planets are moving
the storm is coming
the children are dying
the king is going blind
the veil has dropped
there is such drought
O pope us with black love
blind us with black light
cake us in your grace
stomach our salvation
we are but purée before you.

Beer Bear

I was walking past an alley
when the beer bear leaned out,
grabbing me and pulling me in.
It burped in my face, took
a couple of healthy swigs
and fell backwards into a bin.
It crawled out, covered in slop,
eggshell, bits of fat and fruit,
shaking, starting to moan.
"You're a disgrace," I said, "look
at all this shit all over you."
It threw up everywhere, hunched
against the wall, then turned to me,
face dripping snot and spit
and growled "This is nothing new."

I remember it was so handsome,
toothy grin and pristine fur,
on the label of every brew.
It talked to me for hours,
about the baiting, the back door,
the way they screw you
out of every cent, pay in perks,
dope you up, finally kick you out
or just dump you at the zoo.
They way they bring you down.
It crushed the bottle in its paw
and tried its best to stand.
"Fuck the world," it said,
"I'm going to get out of this town,
walk until I'm in the forest."
When I left the alleyway,
it was face down, starting to snore.

Riddle

My mouth's a wallet
and my teeth coins.
My eyes are bulbs
tucked up in bed.
My head's a pumpkin
with a hand inside
holding a tablespoon.
My gut's a grate
full of melted fruit,
melted typewriters.
I sing like shoelaces,
I dance like breeches,
a bow tied tight
beneath my chin.
At night I let the cat
climb out my mouth
and in the day
I let him climb back in.
My star is blue,
my cockerel crowned.
My bowels go round
and round and round.
My hands are getting thin.
Who am I?

Riboflavin

Village life is peachy, no?
Every driveway a kingdom,
every latch, gate, porch,
or set of steps a curlicue
emblazoned, cack-handed
on a coat of arms.
Your ever loyal subjects?
Potted plants. Your mount?
Sit down lawnmower, baby.
Ride that in circles Sunday,
watch the geraniums die,
the neighbour's conifers spread
like imperial Russia until
they blot out the sun,
watch Bob McJog run
with his wife alongside
screaming from a Land Rover.
The great dane breeder
from number twenty four
goes behind your back
with your Black & Decker.
Your organic milk is sour;
you are a curd yourself.

The wife has joined
the parish council board
from which she'll lead
a horticultural revolution,
finally renouncing you
in favour of asceticism;
she will become a hydrangea.
You prune her daily
as you limply sip your coffee,
then tinker in the garage
until you stop and realise
your underwear needs ironing,
your toenails are getting long,
you didn't eat your five a day.
You didn't get your vitamins.
You didn't get your bran.
Your hair is getting thin.
And what if Fairtrade
isn't fair? Can you trust
the National Trust? What
about your tax returns?
What about the drive?
There are weeds coming
up through the cracks.

You start pulling the crazy
"oh dear God help me" face
as relaxation, gurning
like an emasculated gargoyle
every time your children
turn their backs.
They will find you, one day,
by the kettle, silently
punching yourself in the face.

Waltz

The trolley man come
past the cardboard houses
with their folded eaves,
where the doors open up
like bright yellow gills.
The north wind blow
the cock o steeple south,
the cobblestones dry,
fish guts on sticks
pirouette their prophecy.
Trolley man skid by
the yackety yak flats,
washing out in banners
teatowel flags of neighbors,
skipping ropes and carts,
kids with dirty noses
and ribbons in their hair
coddled at the waists
of the broody local girls.
The trolley clatter on
down into dusty lane
and trolley man waltz
like he did in his day
past the palisade
and the odeon
in the muddy rain.

The Arc

The hellship has embarked
from a tear in the earth's backside
in a shower of soil and lava.
It now makes its final run
on the gassy upper airs,
crashing like a retarded donkey
into a buffet of stars,
chocolate streaming from its prow.
On the planet below, captive hearts
held by the race of wives,
captains of the dawdled year,
the coffin mouthed lawyers,
the hopscotch children, hobos, kings,
find their stomachs turn chrysalis
and their souls pour as butterflies
into the beautied air.

A billion cabbage white rise,
pale horses from the husk of earth,
all crackling up around the ship
sucking at its sugar oars,
painting its ghost with wings.
Still bruising into deeper space
the hellship takes our butter souls
turtle-backing back to Om ―
the all-voice of the minstrelry,
the arse that candy coats the night
and swallows the cosmic thumb.
Inside the ship the humours
are boiling into an every-none,
biles black and yellow squirm
and lunch on bones of fire,
carving ribbages whole out of
the alien queen Phlegmata's side.
A boar of blood stalks the deck,
biting off the heads of flowers
and phthiffing out confetti colours.

At the gooey epicentral pit
the galaxies digest themselves
and that is where the captain steers
this caterpillar Noah's arc,
into the berth of Omish caramel,
the seventh circle of the universe,
the vortic treacle pit.
At its lip the vacuum crumbles,
the orchestra of stars ― nebula
singing in tongues out of a fit,
calves at taurus' heels, every
jack o lantern mother of suns ―
all fall silent as the sea
and watch the hellship teeter in.
Hull broke, the seeds of man
spilt silly into the depths of dark,
blood bile and phlegm coughed
blackly back beyond the lights,
and the ship took itself in bits
under the broom of nothing.
Our butterflies tinkled down
into the abysmal sluice
and found Om waiting there,
buck toothed and delicious,
a pinata of blossoms.

Last Supper

Doner is the lamb
polystyrene is golgotha
about the darkened sky
articulated thunders freight
their cargo culte.
The son is minced
the carver comes down
the word is spun
on a metal skewer.
This daddy's boy, the
every-other-lover
dances in circles
as all his disciples
digest and redigest
the ground-up moggies
fat knuckles of pigs
the dogs bollocks.
But Bo Peep's sheep
sure has no worries.
Though spun, not done,
his fumes are sucked
into the aluminium vent
where Abraham, Isaac
and David probably went
on that last trick
that last meal ticket.

The big spinning stick
is the new dogma,
a chip pan fire
roaring to the roof
caught with holy water.
In this town
we shish our saints
and tenderise madonnas.
Prophets in the stocks
are brought down, fried,
and served up in a box.
On the shining hill
it still stands, the vehicle
miraculous, all-skewer,
blood shadow, superhero
of the world-belly,
a new cross.

Sat out on the ledge
cleaning windows, I can see
the whole street. The pane
is clamped on my legs
as I lean out and squeegee
its brown corners. The hedge,
the paving, the road, sway
below like branches of a tree.
In my curling, sundried head
they are the black dregs
of dust, sap, wasp water,
wrung out of a jay cloth sky.
My hands are gritty, grey
speckled with chipped paint
and bitty, rotten wood,
the windows smeared with dried
muck in microscopic shoals,
but to feel the air, the day
drinking in a stranger sun
and to see an idle task
at least adequately done
is all that I could.

Cello Suite No. 1

There's no courage left
in the entire world,
no one who'll scream
out loud Bach's
cello suite no. 1
or beat their hands
to pulp on pianos
or sit listening
to the sound of animals
breathing in and out
or climb the buildings
they have built for us
take the rooves
tear the hoardings
dive like dolphins
down into the sewers
and eat the earth
and burn our hair
until the smell is gone
the terrible smell
of death, and deaths
to come.

Bottle of Ashes

A bottle of ashes to bring
daffodils from our bellies.
Blankets stuffed in the cracks
of the windows, beach towels
draping the radiator. Like this
we slept off the winter.
Gather up the crumbs
the ring pulls and corks
the arthritic aluminium
of all these empty cans
throw in the Christmas lights
all the skins of balloons
throw in the dead mice
throw in this sky
the vapour trails
the lisping moon
and boil and boil
until the flowers smell
the steam, and birds
and buds and grain
batten down the hatches
of the mother brain.
Then drink it all
until the insides burn
and puke and shit
across the dozing world.

That mess will bring
the lords and ladies
out of the grate
burning into spring.

Nightmare II

I wake up
the room is black
there is something wrong.
I am on my back
arms by my side
locked like that,
a weight above pressing in
and it's cold,
cold as the earth.
At the edge of sight
I see sparks
dancing on the sheet
a few, then more
coming out of nothing
there is music
beautiful, almost silent.
They are laughing at me.

Now smoke rises
growing into arms
grasping arms
and demented faces
flashing black gums
climbing to the ceiling
and coming over my face
into my nostrils.
I cannot choke it out
the weight is pressing in
a throbbing wall of sound.
Fire leaps roaring
over the bed closer
and closer eating up
the distance, cracking.
The ceiling starts to burn
timbers fall all around
I am paralysed
as the furnace takes me.
In the last moments
all I hear is flies
thousands of flies.

Nightmare I

The fat horse sat
belching and whinnying
songs of love
with all the words changed,
yellow teeth, yellow eyes
cloven black hooves
and a throttling gullet
swinging from its bones.
Ribs like spiders' legs
and then below
a giant seething gut
a new horse planet
a bitches brew, an embryo
of coagulating pulp.
This is an animal
must have been fed shit
whipped with its own umbilical
tied to a post and left
beyond the hard shoulder,
because now it wants to feed
to blunt those teeth
on something hot and sweet.
When the eyes go white
and its gorge fills the sky
you'll know either we have fallen
oats among a million oats
the world a nosebag,
or it is about to die.

Spill

This is a sipping sun,
a light that tinkles strawly
down through hips of glass.
Poured out round, pale
whisper of a drink,
spilling on the grass
through a cloudy chink.
A winter sky, tumbling
like a blue bowl, dropped,
mumbles shyly to prettier orbs
propped at the counter
of a low horizon.
The sun's song punctures,
comes whinging down
like a stupid child running
screaming about the town.
Back at the bar,
Venus blithely sips
the dated light of day
like a fluted glass
of Chardonnay.

The Road

The road buckles
like an outstretched arm
at the point of pain,
hauling the horizon closer.
Your path is written
on the bulging surface,
a ripe, golden vein.
Above, in the aurora,
the constellations tighten.
You slow your pace,
drinking in the air.
Something bubbles upwards
from your heart,
the leaves of your brain
and your strands of hair
shiver up and start,
your hands clench,
your eyes whiten.

The light drains out
of everything around
and pours silently
between your white knuckles.
From your fists
it drips onto the ground
making silver puddles.
The landscape falls gently
away from your eyes,
but the road still twists
from the edge of reach
into the back of your mind.
It tells you things,
terrifying things
that glisten even in the dark,
in a voice so beautiful
that you laugh as you go blind.

The Drunks

Winos crowd the city bars,
usually the cheaper places.
Their mouths unclench, storm drains
ready to glug and gag
a deluge into their faces.
They carry leaking minds in cups
balanced on sagged shoulders.
At the slightest slosh
ache drips from the brim
and trails their blinking dishes
leaving them black as oil.

Later they'll have to piss,
shuffle past the bathroom mirror,
peering at themselves, hands
lightly moving over and over
the most eroded places
where their hides are slack,
blood vessels blooming like roses,
where the bottle once bit
a hair line crack
and sent them with a stroke
into a pile of bleeding noses.

The Blue Room

The blind is down
but strands of the sky
fall into the room,
going softly through the slats.
The cold outside is soft,
the kind that turns
as slowly as the world,
coming in at the walls,
rising with the sound of planes.

The room could have fallen
off its axis into the street,
left leaning like a bucket
in the corner of a shed,
lopsided and grey,
but you wouldn't know
because today
the air is a bed,
television has spilled out
in a puddle before the screen,
whiteness drips from the walls,
the colour and weight of everything
becomes absolutely clean
and falls.

The arc of light and motion
judders into life when you wake.
When you fall asleep
the last reel of the show shuts off
and a world of noise and colour
becomes silent and opaque.
This blue room is deep.
It breathes in from the window
and blows the light
into every solid shape
until the edges roll like sleeping eyes,
and break into darkness.

Giftshop

Bothered dads with bum bags,
plastic straws in rucksacks,
boxes of smeared sandwiches,
some with babies bouncing full nappies
in their marsupial holsters,
some with fingers red from airfix,
all with the nervous eyebrows
of Charlton Heston in that movie
Planet of the Children,
stand with handfuls of pencils,
grimacing at the checkout girls.
Mothers float like squids,
toddlers plucking at their tendrils,
past giant stuffed geckos and apes,
deformed orcas with impossible smiles,
tubs of rubber dinosaurs.
The assistants grin like auctioneers,
throwing paper pterodactyls like lures
into crowds of clammy hands.
Vacant little girls gaze
into cases of glistening stones.
One father strikes a tragic pose,
a novelty pencil sharpener in one hand,
the other working at his scalp,
then darting to his wallet only to flip
like a helpless fin into the air
with the choice despair of parents
forced to cough for nibs of plastic
and baubles of rubber put in paper bags.
In the entrance way a girl in frills
swells like a bullfrog, screams,
and tears apart a doll.

Taxidermy

The moodlit corridors
of the stuffed fish and reptile wing
are full of leathery gulpers
gazing snaggletoothed through glass,
bulbous eyed, slack jawed,
cameras slung around their necks
like purses of shark eggs.

A bald man stares at a tortoise.
A fey father at a seahorse.
A meathead in a vest
scratches at his groin,
nodding respectfully at a swordfish.
A cast-iron grandma with leashed kids
at her ropey heels eyeballs
the glassy eyeballs of a crocodile.

In the distance, Spanish tourists
skitter past cases of hummingbirds.
The guard by the bears scowls.
The lights of the corridor flicker
as a one man mountain
lumbers from the hall of whales.

Feed Me With Love

The doors of the factory
snap open like a mouth,
chewed up cardboard boxes
crumbling out into a drain,
curling like a soothsayer's guts
into wet brown shapes.
The wind brings down walls
with the crack of a studded belt.
The wrecks have voices
and lift into the looming clouds
as bubbles of brick.

Glass bulbs of streetlights, shaking,
fall like bright cocoons
and let their electric ghosts go
screaming into the afterlight.
Behind black shut eyes,
shapes still march brightly
with a creeping song,
popping in ears,
and spilling on the tongue.
Writing appears in fire at the curb.

Suddenly, WB Yeats appears
in the body of a bird.
The moon prangs at a weathervane
losing height,
spins into a whirlwind of light
and rockets down his throat.
He retches a calendar of signs
which spread like music
across the night.

An angel smokes beneath a fountain,
ears pricking
at artists screaming like candles,
writers gnawing their shins,
rats dancing in piss,
the lawns of countries
blossoming into the ground,
the insane rising up with bile
and burning tongues
to massacre the court.

The corpse of love,
collapsed across a bench
and soaked in beer,
coughs and splutters
and is born again.

Betsey Trotwood

Betsey Trotwood on Farringdon Road
with its dark green walls and wood
like an out of use Masonic lodge.
There are chandeliers blooming
like bromeliads hung with pearls,
a stag's head with an eyepatch,
a fifties standard lamp, setting sun,
bronze bust of Edith Cavell maybe,
and a painting of Elizabeth Hurley.
The brown ale pumps bulge, tall
and shining like chess pieces.
On the counter, tin buckets of bottles
of ketchup, vinegar, Lea and Perrins,
behind bottles of pale ales and gin
glint like grapes. The board is scribed
over with French Reds badly spelt
in white chalk. The tables are pale,
grey like dust jackets of old books.
In here there's an orange haze,
like the air is blushing from a shot,
the walls lean making a bower
and all around chairs curl up,
creaking like choir children
shuffling hushed into a pew.

The pictures in the windows
of ambulances, traffic lights,
space to let, cones and brick,
alarms and engine roars
stretched into the falling afternoon
seem thin, and sad, and blue.

The Checkout

The mothers pass packets
and bags like shed skin,
boxes and foil, wraps
of roll, toilet, domestic
tools and chews and toys.
Babies hang from them
like big blue fruit.
The tills beep up and down
with a soft computer song,
when the rustle and whirr
falls to a lull, yawns
mouth out of the cashiers.
Among the mother bundles,
big men in big coats
buy beef and beer, thumbs
push roughly in and out
of leather wallets, hands
inside of leather jackets.
Hairlines and firm expressions
like giant felt puppets.
More women now, older
singles with beehives
and grey houndstooth bonnets,
cartons of milk and olives
they love with their eyes
like promises. At the rear,
the grizzled fen potato
with a beard like a lizard
and soily, rutted skin,
chewing on a parsnip.
One cashier knocks off
and leaves the scene,
shuts the register
with a slam.

There Are No Demons

As the farmer comes in
the sun burns into the copse,
yolk broken over trees
dribbling light on the soil.
A bruised bunch of poppies
blush inside his fist,
he keeps them to his chest
like a dead love or a child.
In the darkening yard
the stink of hay and shit.
From the pasture
he hears the shaking
of his skin and bone horse.
In the house he wanders
for hours and hours,
looking at the walls, or into
the garden that lies dreaming
or down into the town.
He finds himself in the pantry
staring at an egg
cupped inside his hands.
Later, he wakes in bed,
covered in sweat, laughing.
The moon bulges badly
into his bedroom,
the throbbing is there again,
behind the eyes.
He hears moans rising
from the yard, rushes down
the stairs naked with poppies
flying from his fingers,
to the cattleshed.
The cows are black with blood,
reek of metal and screaming
in their eyes. He reaches out
until his hand and hide,
trembling, meet.
The dogs, he says, the dogs.

The Entombment

Christ hangs dead and limp
between the silken arms
of Babylon's best whores,
toneless like a dusty olive.
He's green, a ghost of oils,
no ochre in his pores,
among the dancing silk,
the bursted gates of beards,
he swings silently on worlds.
At his feet a girl has fallen
with an arm of canvas
Michaelangelo forgot to paint.
The ground is brown and rises
in a tide, grey and nothing.
Golgotha falls in patches
from the blue punched through
heaven, to there below
his broken, floating toes.

He Lifts the Trumpet

He lifts the trumpet
through the bleary room.
The smoke and suffering
hanging on the clothes
of barflies with black hands
and red eyes
reaches his nose.
In the alley children dance
hopscotch on the coals.
The angel glances from
the pocket of a bum.

Below the coming chorus
the wheels of love hum
and all breaks!
The first note flies
as his left hand shakes
voltage from brass
tone like broken glass
and he keels over one
splits two with a gold crown
three he's a holy ghost
four is none —
the stagger staggers on.

The night passes through
a bell of burn
and is found melted
into a beauty blow
at the shoeshone heel
of the new creator.
His blown head is open
like a crater.
The echo sobs and
in the street everyone falls
to their knees.
His trumpet has the sky
by the throat.

And then he plays
the second note —

18 Today

Over the street, the helium balloon
tied to Mr. Russell's crooked wall
turns her fat cheeked face around,
to frown down on a bed of weeds.
Throwing her head to the moon
with expert mock despair,
she hams it like an am-dram dame.
Once upon a time she had them.
She's strung out all the same, sinking
over days and soon to meet grit
on the freezing tarmacadam.
The streetlights, flickering lemons,
are sour critics of her last hurrah,
the driveways full of brainless clay,
the cars only cattle in the stalls.
A security light claps on, uncertain,
like the grand duke in the gods
who starts, snorting from a doze.
Night draws in, the final curtains
close, and there is no encore.
As she deflates, the flowers file
out of the street in rows.
The birthday girl spites it all
and turns up her sparkling nose.

Blackout

Frost turns to caramel
as the sun turns down.
The roof's ribs grew
white last night, dew
covering the dull brown
hardened like a shell.
Now the sugar sticks
in the last shadows
as the sunset licks
the shining windows.
From old back doors
the darkness pours.
The light like blood
beneath the skin,
once a boiling flood,
goes blue and thin,
and twilight steals
like a black cat.
The violet sky reels,
the stars grow fat.

Moon Rise

The moon is huge tonight.
They say that its a trick,
and the bowl of light
going over the fields
never grows or shrinks
but in my rosy eyes.
That it's only perspective
and harvest moons are lies.
It makes me sick
that the moon can't rise
unless a pedantic prick
is there to supervise.