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.