Old bailey

Even best friends
Unquestioning companions
End.

The stone falls
To the well
And echoes tell
Measurements beyond sight.

Memory is the last
Remembrance.
Wish it be a brook
Fond visted
That washes smooth
Edged rock to pebbles
Like round vowels.

Even those we treasure
And best friends
Echo
Beyond our sight
And help us measure.

Tryptch

I.

Sunday vanished in the small box

Of ungodly hours

It was tryptch

A playfighting winter finished shift

And donned civvies, he said, widishins

I am too full of magic, too full of hex

To leave these streets, so empty.

Painted in earthen shades of London

Bi-curious and fluid in language

And youth in the low hall, undecorated

With the thick rimmed blind

And a set grey man who recalled

The fields of Athenry

They span happy in between

My glazed eyes wishing these

Good futures

Hair dye, simple questions and self-doubt

The finding out

Carved in stone somewhere far down the Nile

A likeness and they said they had no purpose

In a back street somewhere past New-Cross

So we walked off to another bus.

II.

It was tryptch.

The first frame left we heard on a bus

We had witnessed someone famous

Under lights that lit only the mind

Of epileptics, it took us to a place

Where everyone wears fame their own way

Down streets lost Sunday scant

The market like an empty bath

And scraped to where

A whisp of smokers jittered

Behind crowd barriers, shoulders

Shaped like hung marionettes

In the deep night and a great

Obsidian obelisk grinned

Wider than the narrow gate.

Curly locked, compact she caught apples

And let lament in arches and pirouettes

She needed him behind the bar

The other, later by the traffic island

Who left blushing in a hired car

Bi-curious and fluid in language

Sunday had vanished

But we were unaware.
Circling, waiting for a bus.

III.

It was tryptch

Hair shirt, she had given everything she had away

In pleas for goodness and treasured

Cigarette filters as her draw

For apple eyes. Cigarette filters for a bed.

Under arc lights, at the interchange, dehumanised

Made stranger by batteries of concrete

Bank vaults that rose from the clean tarmac sea

Like some new White Cliffs.

The cranes that lift us lit with red lights

In this blind dome night we could only miss

The silver arc across velvet sky

That might have made a wish.

At dawn, I was in the suburbs my mother

Would warn me of when she returned on her bike

The old Pit lay on the soft bag with fear in his eye

Tumours like tennis balls under his skin

In the vacuum of grief, she was gaunt

As if the chair in which she rested for years

Was electric. It was obvious why

They didn't take him to die and he lay

Scared, in the thin strip, bright, and almost warm

He could not understand

And I could not help

Other than to not block the March light.

Tryptch. To the bus, we stumbled a fresh

Gambol at the miracle birth of spring.

Back lit crit

And the stalker says

"I bought you wild berry jam for breakfast"

And a wall of texts, calling you a bitch

Some graphics

Depicting threats.

You're narcissistic, an accurate

Projection.

To expect.

How twisted is this shit?

"Who's Paula?

She's a great actress"

Tried to force her way past

After knocking on the glass

"She told me the house

Belongs to Sven.

You're narcissistic.

I said you had a girlfriend."

"I live just round the corner

With my boyfriend"

The stalker said when we met

In the pub, "I left him on the spot".

She said. "I'm just round the corner".
She says.

That's the rub.

II.

Eros infects with back lit ire.

What we hold close we clothe

Throwing our own shadow

If the light's not right. The danger

In spite of intimacy

Calumny and slight

On raised sights we hope might guide us.

How common is this?

To list the defects

Of that which we would call love

And project

Blind that we're backlit

Throwing our own waste

At Them, smothered in our silhouette?

III.

I didn't know the lodger was back
Till I went down to check

"Thank you and could I apologise 

For all of that." I said.

"She kept calling me Paula"
She said.

Evs

I'll be an artist, you be a survivor
You can live and let live
I'll live and spread fertiliser.

Walls

Why desire

Peturbance, initial volition

With desire

Those missions and force meaningful

But learn that nights will be cold

If you don't travel from here.

A fear of failed crops

That hapless harpist at harvest

But know this

Without walls built to store grain

The swiftest reaper suffers rot from rain.

A silo for ears

Like beehive stone huts that dot

The med, the North Atlantic shores.

And paint

Not walls in monochrome, but sails wide

And note there is no colour in the pallette

That you can touch to another

And leave that one unchanged

No two the same and in time

They will dry to different shades.

Without walls

They will have nowhere to hang

The ears will rot on the verge

The rain, weavils and rats

Grain spread flat on the fields

Compost for next year

The plough will tarnish and rust

As sight of heaven weights its tax

Looking earthbound, looking back

And looking up to see

Only emptiness between stars.

There is no flour from spread grain on the verge

Weavils find another living

Build those beehives

Where the sea breeds fish

Where the nights are warm

And know before reaping

The walls will hold safe those ears and more

Till they are ready to make flour.

What desire.

A silo for ears

And sails set wide for paint

Settled that nights maybe cold

If you travel from here.

What's a man to do

I used to have one stalker

Now I got two

And all the time I was looking at you.

And this is gutter

But it ain't nothing new

All the time I been looking at you.

And I ain't fixed the bell.

I should be able to tell

And I don't think the door will go through.  

That and the cell

And the WhatsApp as well

Left me thinking what should I do? 

I used to have one

But I picked up another

Tired and drunk

Late in some jam or other.

If me talking to you

Feels like her talking to me

Then I best pack my bags

And go overseas.

Something scary

There's something scary

Coming over the hill

And that's a privatised A.I.

That's ready to kill

A private A.I.

That's ready to drill

A hole in your pocket

And end your pay packet

And you can't stop it

Or even lock off it.

There's something scary

Come over the hill

That's a private A.I.

Manipulating popular will.

That gets in so many heads

With what you've watched and you've read

That you have to give credit

How well we're misled.

There's something scary

Coming over the hill

And that's private A.I.

That won't for a second be still

That will out think you and I

And that really smart guy

Just easy as we

Would out think a fly.

There's something scary

Coming over the hill

That's a private A.I.

That's ready to kill

That's a private A.I.

Backed by silicon mills

In the hands of a gang

High on satanic thrills.

There's something fuck scary coming over the hill

This is a very, very, very, very, very, very dangerous moment

Don't sit back and chill

There's something scary coming over the hill.