Ouch

I.

Sometimes, when summer dusk comes and the sun
Lights sky, like a fire in a whitesmith's forge
Eyes become giddy with riches and flame
And what glides across your gaze is missed.

II.

Brush dip the sky-line and colour the night
Running where eyes do not help, the woods, the caves
Where only ears and fingertips may aid you
Hoots, mice sound like giants stirred in the brush.

Fears eats your shadow, grow on your shoulder
Pushing your cheek, holding your face from truth
Face them
Face them, as you would children
Face them well, and they will become guards and pets.

III.

Sunset led me into blindness
Where eyes do not help
Into this cathedral, where dark decorates dark
And all ornament is silouhette and scratches
Are saved for morning.

I stumbled amid lice and rotten wood
Till my shoes broke brambles.
I stumbled in the blast of guns
And warfare for ivories.

IV.

Sunset led me into darkness
With but one silk length
Where eyes do not help
Where fears eat your shadow
There came a beast so vast its haunches
Shifted trees like dancers
And its ivory outshone the moon
Each step an earthquake of night falling within night.

With but one length of silk
I stumbled
Amid lice and rotten wood, the scent of earth at night
Till my soles broke brambles like grapes
Morticed brush to paths that lay
To the holloway, to the rising horizon and hills
To the pale nervous scorn of morning light.

V.

Sunset led me into ink
In silouhette decorated cathedrals
I stumbled, the scent of earth at night
Where fear holds your face from truth
Would I cage the moon, would you
Take it from the sky,
Stuffed with straw
Hold it in some room in fear
Of tides, of earthquakes, of night falling
Within night.

With but one length of silk
I hunted earthquakes
And sought to feed them from my hand.
I stumbled.

VI.

In the pale, nervous scorn of morning
When braves slept and mice crept
Feathers slipped silent from the bough.
I sought to call a beast so vast
To my wrist and feed it
From my palm.
I command no other way.

Feathers slipped silent from the bough
After blind, warm, embroidered night
My sore eyes caught a final flight
In false first light's nervous scorn
I saw Minerva's owl at dawn.

Like dancing to D&B

I've been dancing to pop songs too long
In four four
Side to side steps on the dance floor
A little shimmy or a shake
But nothing so complicated
You have to concentrate.

But there's the odd track that's Goldie
Hip shake palpitations makes a break sweat
Feet sweet confused, ankle, passes ankle
New fangled angles, half spangled
As the drop lets your fingers dangle.

Shifts lift, kick infiltesimal gifts,tuck adjustments
From just where the cusp of balance tips
Boated lips spit time, butt grinds
All other limbs celebrate like panic.

I can't live in country, I need city
Syncopation, smoking jazz or frustration hints
Every missed chance the artist omits
Trying to add the extras, I admit
Be committed and quit
Be committed and quit
Rather than subsist on off the peg regular popular dirges
Purge dregs
My feet greet jazz, greet breaks
Like new found lovers
I've been dancing to pop songs
For too long.

Letter to W.H. Auden cc: Foreigner

I don't feel you need no teaching
You know what love is now
Not for weather or for bacon
Or strangers in a crowd.
The kind that plays on Steinway grands
The kind that really sings
Not that which leads to suicide
That isn't really loving.

It looks as clear as ground and polished glass
Lenses light to crystal points of focus
It stinks unto high heaven, since you ask
That reek speaks sweet like the scent of crocus.

Touch a pile of small particles like sand

Dive the water of the river

With a little luck you will understand

That's what it'll give you.

Others often talk about it

Like it is something new

Love speaks of all the particles

Your body's sliding through

There are versions told in stories

That make the heroes tick

But stories have their editors

I doubt you're quite that thick.

And you hear it when you can hear

The lark or blackbird sing

There are times that you can hear it

Above all other things.

You can hear it in the questions

The echoes and replies

And when it speaks you hear it clearly

It does not bear disguise.

Go look at how the waiter feels

Watch the eyes of their pets

Go look when your telephone rings

And look on further yet

And if you can't see it clearly

Don't get it twisted bruv'

If you've searched and haven't found it

First look inside for love.

It doesn't just do party tricks

It works white magic too

It will feed the finest lunches

On only scraps of food

It has opinions on investments

For when the times get rough

And is the finest company

The odd truth about love.

Love's all the water in the sea

And oh the rose has thorns

Love's look out post sways tipsy high

Don't say you've not been warned

If it comes when you're unready

Then it may pass you by

But it is sure to come again

As dawn is in the sky.

You can try blind it, force it, shout it down

Love will be heard

And it ain't shit to be flippant about

Not a careless word

And though it's more abundant still

It's worth much more than gold

That's another truth about love

That's very, very old.


W.H.Auden. O Tell me the truth about love

Capitalism

It feels strange, a wake 

And yet no sorrow

I talk, get no response.

I used to see you grow and learn

Ensconced you in warm clothes

I call, get no response.

I tended you, and fed you

For many years now
You used to wake

And talk

And now I sit in wake 

Brimful confused sans grief

And cry, I get no response.

It always feels odd

Sitting with dead bodies.

Untitled

I wish I could stop
Writing about sadness and loss
Eat berries for breakfast and floss.

I wish I could stop
Writing about sadness and loss
And go rolling on
Not gathering moss.

I wish I could stop
Writing about sadness and loss.

Tanks - empires of numbers

VII.

Fixed point attractors, like power

Pack actors in recurring patterns

Fired by predictably sick desires

A's will over B happens, rounds and batons

Struggle, collusion, betrayal

Seeking the imperial delusion

Of infancy, of omnipotent will

The great self-infantilising

Fantasy of the great.

VIII.

It came in waves

Ever faster waves

The progress

And due process and the institutions

Were soon next to useless

As were the populace

But the bastards are a restless menace

We had built habitat for empires

Empires of numbers

Built scaffolds and canals

Down which empires sluiced and flourished

We irrigated empires

With all our laws

Empires of numbers to the nth power

And their emperors by necessities of scale

Lost no sleep in treating people

Like numbers in columns on spreadsheets

Push button mutton,

Can't see the sheep for the meat

Always better prepared

Uncaring as to who's spared

Who scarred, who discarded

They didn't lose sleep

Leading numbers

Saw no loss in reducing the universe to maths

We made our lofty peaks with feathered nests

A habitat for psychopaths.

And these Peter Pans

Soon sought silicon oracles

That modelled decision trees

From all recorded human history

Controlled production from touch screens

Found they preferred steel sycophants to flesh

For yes, it was so much more like god,

Like magic

With native fabrication

They didn't need consumers

Only power

So they found new adjectives

For us,

You and me

We mostly sat there

Because it was easy, by and large

To stop us going cold and hungry

And keep us entertained

Though many drowned

And some still died young

But she

She did not sit down

At least one

Reason why.

Tanks part II bit

She missed living above the sea

In the old towers

Watching the waves collapse

Breaking into bubbles

And the music it made

Each tower with a tutu.

After she lost her signature

And gave up on extensions

She sailed from the home

In a dumb boat to an old block

The type certified unsafe

That were squatted.

A pebbledash of guano

Barnacles and gulls

A block with no tutu
That water argued through.

She ate oysters and salmon

And when the waves were high

An old industrial mixer could be animated

In her hands

There was nothing it could not produce.

She met a scrap diver there,

Old for a scrap diver

Who claimed never to have had a number

Since birth eating oysters and kelp

And something like noodles on the reef.

Surfing the long breaks, salted in the knowledge

Of each block underneath.

And the scrap diver would come back with gifts

Wrested from Atlantis

And she would throw them in the mixer

When the waves were high

And make robots to feed fish

And seed oysters.

She was happy

And as it happened
Would meet many of them again

But one day in spring,

The scrap diver didn't come back

The gifts stopped

None of the divers came back that day

And when the waves rose

It just felt damp

So she went back up the hill

Leaving them onions, the windowbox

And her favourite robot made from compasses.

Grime Bars

All dem want is a big, big war
Boy step up get slap to the jaw
Your mans chat like they never been chored
Bet my ghetto more gutter than yours

Gutter than yours
Gutter than yours
Bet my ghetto more gutter than yours
More gutter than yours

My mans roll with no front door
Dogs in the yard blood, its your call
Hardcore t'iefs that'll take your floors
Bet my ghetto more gutter than yours

Gutter than yours
Gutter than yours
Bet my ghetto more gutter than yours
More gutter than yours

All your boys is in plus fours
You got guns but we got more
Chat like that, kidnapped in a car
Bet my ghetto more gutter by far

Gutter than yours
Gutter than yours
Bet my ghetto more gutter than yours
More gutter than yours

Who's gonna hack the tanks

There were tears in Tahir

But I fear in coming years

Young soldiers won't be there

Just massed robotic ranks

Then

Who's going to hack the tanks?

I.

Let me introduce you to her

She lives after you

Not long after

She has a name

But it is not important

She has many numbers

Pick a number

Any number

It is not important which

It will relate to her

Pick a hex code

And a double helix

It will relate to her

It is not important

That you understand

Only, the important thing

Is love.

If she needs a name for you to love her

Give her a name.

If she needs a voice for you to love her

Give her a voice.

If she needs to be beautiful

For you to love her

Read here that she is.

II.

The voice on the phone

Said to her

“I'm doing everything I can to help”

The voice had a name

And a number, which she had recorded

The days extended, went and came,

She held for hours on the exension

“I'm calling from a friend's phone, it's just

I have no power, it's not just

I have no power”

“I know”

“I can't catch a car, or get a drink

In a bar, is there someone

Can you find out”

“I have no doubt, no passwords, no cards

Your account has been listed, in error I think”

“Is no one accountable”

“Do you have any known terrorist links”

“What do you think

I have no molecule mixer, nothing to eat

Just a whole lot of ink

Please help”

“I am doing everything humanly possible to help”

She remembered when she cried at school

The robots would pleasantly ask if she wanted more

"None of my numbers work" she said

“None of my numbers identify me no more”

III.

Before folk started to come up the hill

She would spend her time not in class, with him

On the steep bluff overlooking the pass

And they would rest, laugh and pass the glasses

Between each other tucked low in the grass

And play if they could see the same window

In needles that rose from the concrete reef

And the lights that frayed the far away bay.

They cheated and never needed to say.

He looked like his cousin, like they were twins

And one young day in one windy summer

She thought that she had seen his silhouette

And scrambled the bluff with fist fulls of grass

She flopped down flushed and found the other one

Setting an Exocet and fled as fast

As Goats. Yet since that day the cousin said

She lusted and was just too shy to say

And would always call, visit her mother

It might have been that

Or just that they looked like each other.

IV.

It was after the funeral

The tears and the drone

After she'd gone back up the hill

Near her home

A young man came across the field

Covered in sulphur from head to toe

Gave her physical memory

And said, you are not alone

These are their addresses and history

In the files, see, there is your destiny

He had names, important names

He had her name, his own

She didn't have long, she knew

She would kiss a one line obituary

Before it had all gone wrong.

V.

A smart suit

Came through the door

Representing power

To the top of the steps

Made an excellent speech

Saying they could talk

Agreement in reach

And they started talking

The flock in the square

Grew thick and packed

Some hawking, some gawking

Some part of what's growing

She shared her knowing

Showing others, others came

There were many others.

Predictive vendors and sweepers

Big and small, a steel ecology

Around a watering hole.

And while they were talking

It was like carnival.

And she felt like bursting.

VI.

It made a difference to him

Back then.

No one expected them

But they came

With spreadsheets and servers

And the whole blockchain

In physical

“You misallocated, we have proof

This is carbon clear financial abuse”

But they needed, he said

Without it he pleaded

It made a difference he said

“Indeed, no doubt your subjective assessment

Has more clout and prescience

Than what the redoubtable algorithm spits out

Heed the budget”

And with that they put him on a boat

It was all shut up

They left for the shore

People still came long after the door closed

He was one of the only places to go

One of those faces you know.

It wasn't the difference

For her, he spent more time at home

The difference came later

They should've known.

They always knew

What made a difference.

VII.

It was all meant to be public

But it was like Latin Mass to most

Talking heads discussing logic

Spectacled experts who boast

The values in the object

The value of the project.

To change a parameter

Was the stuff of treaties and summits

A lifetime endeavour

But she watched the casts about edits

And the nightly slots on bug fixes

Before the weather and a blizzard

Of financial data with the line number

And the code which she once uploaded

To a file, as a child thinking she would learn new tricks

Before she realised

She was only being shown washers and bolts

And they always said it was a fix.

PART II

Her tear hits the wreath, then earth

They said it wouldn't happen

They will sweep it underneath

The rug

Slugs from pattern recognition

Gone awry.

When drones first stole over skies

Well a human had control

But deep learning and ai

Crushed their worth

Their first choice like most, the dole

And drugs.

Then facial recognition

Went pixel perfect, that's when

Surgery got in fashion

Plastic.

Elastic faces as often

Changed as phones.

Just last week they gave a tweak

To the code, the net, to keep pace

And then the rain spread, and wreathes

Drop by drop

Airbrushed facist states with clean face

And drones.

Tear hits wreath, the earth.

II.

It was her roots that saved her

The Challottes she kept

In a plain windowbox and laid

In brown cloth or old sacks.

More than once

When her numbers stopped

And they barred her

But she believed

For a few weeks

Onions were her umbilical food

With almost any ink

In any mixer you could make

Something quite like noodles.

A friend from an old post

Would bring her battery sticks

Take her clothes to decompose them

And bring new dresses freshly mixed

And always managed to make them fit

Even as the weeks wore in.

III.

In the low ceiling crypt

Where they chose to gather

The rounded brick

Threw a mesh of shadows

With the candlelit plot thick

She waxed again, in sips

Of warm coffee, the water.

Energy coursed as tips

Forced through dark earth

Bulb to light, reconfiguring

Kite born over the sea

She felt full for sprouting

Throughout the estuary, the bay

She carried physical memory

Would not be waylayed

On their road. She had found

A way and there were others

Dozens of others

Uncovered voices

Who would be heard

In waves and light

United in fights that gave purpose afresh

They were not just the usual

Superfluous flesh.

IV.

Her mother was a traditionalist

Permitted no passive entertainment

Insisted the terrace cultivated.

Her father would not allow them seated

Without concentration. And had no mixer

Just an ancient printer undefeated.

With a sequencer, her sister, for fun

Would breed bees that made cheese and big Golden Orbs

That spun silk as thick as a steelman's thumb.

She printed parts to fix the parts that broke

Of mortal robots that she built and wrote

Some farmed onions and one just told old jokes.

She took brush and pan and gave to them life

And if she wasn't so nice, she'd set them

Sweeping up spiders and sisters pet mice.

And her mum would shout go fix your device

Get them back farming the onions and rice

And she would plead it's not me it's a bug

It must need a patch, the mice mixed it up

One day, six of her sister's mice got crushed

After that day she would kneel and hand brush.

V.

It had become perpetual

There had been no war

And no peace,

Lethal force ubiquitous

With leaders confused in oversized shoes

And the leaders of others

No longer suffered visits

From men bearing flasks and stark choices

No caskets with cacophonous voices

They were kept in their chairs

Confused without numbers

Made pall bearers and everything

They cared for left charred

Till they sat scarred and bereft

Jesters to power

Fountainheads dripping water at their feet

Millions of others left looking on

For leaders

VI.

There was no point keeping it a secret

They already knew

Dozens of them must've known

She had sown deeds in places

That would be searched

Said things in places

That could be found

More or less anywhere

The concrete reefs even

Even up the hill

In places deep underground

They were watching and listening

Millions of them for dozens.

So they went public and posted

And hosted events

And went to the square

Sang in front of their tents

And they watched and listened

Millions of them.

VII.

When she moved

To one of those homes that was hacked

So that it accepted

People with no numbers

They called her the French Lady

As she always had onions

And she used the excuse

That she was cutting onions

When someone came in

Some had gone on never seeing a root

Let alone onions and she would reply

Do what I'm doing and see what happens

And they would cry too.

VIII.

She missed living above the sea

In the old towers

Watching the waves collapse

Breaking into bubbles

And the music it made

Each tower with a tutu.

After she lost her signature

And gave up on extensions

She sailed from the home

In a dumb boat to an old block

The type certified unsafe

That were squatted.

A pebbledash of guano

Barnacles and gulls

A block with no tutu

That water argued through.

She ate oysters and salmon

And when the waves were high

An old industrial mixer could be animated

In her hands

There was nothing it could not produce.

She met a scrap diver there,

Old for a scrap diver

Who claimed never to have had a number

Since birth eating oysters and kelp

And something like noodles on the reef.

Surfing the long breaks, salted in the knowledge

Of each block underneath.

And the scrap diver would come back with gifts

Wrested from Atlantis

And she would throw them in the mixer

When the waves were high

And make robots to feed fish

And seed oysters.

She was happy

And as it happened

Would meet many of them again

But one day in spring,

The scrap diver didn't come back

The gifts stopped

None of the divers came back that day

And when the waves rose

It just felt damp

So she went back up the hill

Leaving them onions, the windowbox

And her favourite robot made from compasses.

PART III

I.

The young man who came across the field

Was caught with roses

A gross of bouquets

Having managed to evade and survive

For moons.

The kindness of strangers.

The hills and bamboo

Were not home, to live

A satellite detected

Numbered Entity No Data

Like bugs and flies

Was not life

To the young man in the field

Who sought to organise

Who sought society

Who could not enter conventions

Without signature

Who was sick with visions

And sought to compose

A different type of change.

Who was sought after

And caught with roses.

The days a rose could cloak a man

Had long since lapsed

Every base was mapped

Every volatile organic captured

All strains reduced to abstract

A gross of roses insufficient noise

A post smelt through the poor disguise

What's left is guesswork

Biometric from some contact

With the network at school

Silent as a barn owl

Into anaesthetic gel

And spirited away.

Stray petals all that waved goodbye

And laid to rest

Guesswork.

They love to talk about positives.

II.

In the square there was a lady who worried about the elephants

Who wanted to do something for the elephants

One of the first signs were the elephants.

They say it would take a lifetime

To read the discoveries the algorithm made

The day they fired it up

Across the world's servers

Fed it all the data, journals

And it pumped out interdisciplinary papers

At a rate at which the Academy could not

Stay the pace.

In a few years concrete bunkers appeared

In the Sahara. Cavernous bunkers with battery pens

And robots began shepherding elephants down motorways

From Kenya.

It had started with values

The values had been contested

Of course

They arranged the best

Array that could be compromised

And set it off doing diverse goods.

The annual cull became a migration

A careful recycling into humanely farmed

Factory sheds of bellowing sows

Thundering against stone pens

There were things

You just couldn't make

Without gestating an elephant

The efficiency of living tissue

Lab grown pumps and motors

Had heart attacks

And got tumours early

But Saharan parts

From elephants born and died without seeing sun

Those hearts would run and run

For terrible deformed white elephants in sheds

The lady wanted to do something

Something for the elephants the algorithm bred.

They said they could remake the whale

But what they made was not whales

Tethered to feeding tubes in the bay

With monstrous births that flapped and failed

If you freed them, they'd be dead in a day

When they remade things

They remade it all that way.

The lady wanted it remade

But remade like older days.

III.

It was the familiarity

Back up the hill

To the home of the family

Over the bamboo forests

The craters and gashes

The rhythm of life

In coffins and ashes

The familiar impression

Of high explosives

And at familiar places

Some still stood

In the village

Buried memories back with floods

And she heard

Her cousin had gone from man to woman

And back to man again before they struck

Lit up by signatures in the whole band's ink

No one had a name

It was always hard to know

A self-destructing drone

Leaving pointing fingers

And blame.

Dozens had the inclination

Still more the capability

She had the capability.

As she crested the bluff

Looked out from its height

She saw the peach orchards and terraces

The copse turned ghost

By her sister's escaped spiders

Saw where her father's house stood

She saw a familiar sight.

IV.

The square by then

Circled in steel, a wall

That would wheel and yaw

Heel to call

Track to track, fifteen foot tall

In front of the stone, the servers

The throne

It had been a long time

A slow, cementing drip of time

The vendors mostly moved on

With the day trippers, pretenders, the songs

Were quiet and fire lit

Not riotous choirs

Only the serious, the tired, the coders

Those with nowhere to go

No one to go to remained

Only the list and sweepers were left

And the suit came to the steps

Above the massed ranks of metal

Above the messy rabble of flesh

And said I think we can come to a deal

We will make changes to the code

None of them thought that it was real

The suit watched the square explode.

V.

When they were born

They knew everything

Everything we still knew

Everything it had discovered

What grew from script and speech and song

What they had done and all they had created

They did with satellites and data

Every one

Knew everything when it was born.

VI.

A friend from another village

She met by the well

When they were two girls

Had returned to hills

The first time since children

Her friend had left

For dry land to the West

To find skills

It was lucky

The type of connection you miss.

Her friend helped

They pitched a lab in pod

While jerry rigged robots

Rebuilt the house

From odd snaps and aerials shots.

The young man came across the field

Consumed them

They submerged in the list

It's meta data and logic

Logging variables

Contacting those still connected

To wearables

Finding the wherewithal

Hacking satellites in hope

Tracking and hunting as

Conservationists raced poachers

And they began to understand

They had understood long ago

Perishable innocence, once you know

Dies, she could not look away

She needed to tell these people

These people needed to tell

She could tell people needed them

She would go back to the bay

Tell people their knell tolls

Hold the bell, hold gates of hell.

VII.

Fixed point attractors, like power

Pack actors in recurrent patterns

Fired by predictably sick desires

A's will over B happens, rounds and batons

Struggle, collusion, betrayal

Seeking the imperial delusion

Of infancy, of omnipotent will

The great self-infantilising

Fantasy of the great.

VIII.

It came in waves

Ever faster waves

The progress

And due process and the institutions

Were soon next to useless

As were the populace

But the bastards are a restless menace.

We had built habitat for empires

Empires of numbers

Built scaffolds and canals

Down which empires sluiced and flourished

We irrigated empires

With all our laws.

Empires of numbers to the nth power.

And their emperors by necessities of scale

Lost no sleep in treating people

Like numbers in columns on spreadsheets

Push button mutton,

Can't see the sheep for the meat

Always better prepared

Uncaring as to who's spared

Who scarred, who discarded

They didn't lose sleep leading numbers

Saw no loss in reducing the universe to maths

We made our lofty peaks with feathered nests

A habitat for psychopaths.

And these Peter Pans

Soon sought digital oracles

That modelled decision trees

From all recorded human history

Controlled production from touch screens

Found they preferred silicon sycophants to flesh

For yes, it was so much more like god,

Like magic

With native fabrication

They didn't need consumers

Only power

So they found new adjectives

For us,

You and me

We mostly sat there

Because it was easy, by and large

To stop us going cold and hungry

And keep us entertained

Though many drowned

And some still died young

But she

She did not sit down

At least one

Reason why.

IX.

In the square, some of her best friends were NENDs

They had come from the hills

From the forests

You could tell the ones 

Who had never been to hospital

They came with the list 

And others.

Early on it was impossible

The spectrum of variables

Cascading inaccuracies

Garbage in, garbage out, unscaleable

Rows and rows of befuddled muddle

Then the Human Object Model

Helped identify anomalies

Irrationalities and trash

They became better at data cleansing

And it proved its worth.

The first results were equivocal

But they refined the metrics

And the datasets

Took less garbage in,

Moved more garbage out

And started to chart

Statistics that showed beyond doubt

It was getting better

Getting so much better all the time

For everybody, throughout

Increases in wealth and pleasure

Though there was the odd variable

Or other unmeasured.

She would officially opt out

Of various datasets

But there were so many, officially

They had the right to collect it

And the power to do so

That was the truth

Most only collected data of use.

Now she was an entry

That said she had existed

Officially listed as

Other

Not died, archived

To access apply

Data for experiment only.

X.

In the square there were many

From the squat

And they shared stories

Of faces she had all but forgot

Whoever made the list

Had made a great list

They all had ideas

They all had a way

They all had love

For those who are not here

Their voices were clear

Their voices a choir

But this was not like Tahir

Or Tiannamen

No soldiers took favours to cheers from the crowd

None of the tanks wavered or danced

They simply advanced

Track to track

In the most mathematically efficient pattern

To flatten every single one of them.

It only took seconds

And the sweepers moved in

Onion seed in their tracks.

You were my wildest dreams

Before you my dreams were mild
My teens trial's failed
Amid reams of papers, folded and filed
You were my wildest dreams.

Before I dreamt of lawns and flowers
Holding hands and hours speaking easily
But not what lawns and flowers
And hours speaking easily in your hands could be
That
And how dreams run free.

I picked roses, ripped them
Stem from branch for others
Like I knew where to put my fingertips
To avoid thorns
And make a rose break clean
Like I knew where to put my mouth
To avoid what it means.
You showed me a rose
You left me among roses
You were my wildest dreams.

Valentine for A

I cannot write this year
For a dream has died
And rivulets of tears
Have fallen and have dried
How optimistic it appears
That I would hold you near

Though you are one so wise
I dreamed your practicality
Would see me by your side
But oh the harsh reality
Through all the days i tried
I dreamed you'd love another
I never dreamed you dreamed
Of being a single mother.

I held the thought the two of us
Would one day be together
That you would trust
That your delight would always be my  pleasure.
Oh how I love your calculus
So unlike any other
I should have known you'd make no fuss
Of being a single mother.

Gare du Nord

Today
I have carried a pack under suspicion
Eyed by tribal minded ignorants
Who seek to be saved from last week's disaster
Which they clearly were not part of.

When young I would have angered
And shot back hate
But now I softly offer smiles
And quiet pity for their mistake
Their fear everywhere
Ill-equipped hatred
Indistinguishable from brotherhood
Throughout the City of Man.

Here,
Once you have passed the guards
And gates and magic wards
They offer free electricity
But not free water
And those in tailored clothes sit tapping
Oblivious of location, of space, of fear.

A young couple carousel
Like the escalator is an aisle
Oblivious of location, of space, of fear.
Spinning in a dream
A progeninating dream of dreams
And it seems to me
That mine were once alike, light
And floated like zeppelins
But now their broke, tear soaked
Components parts
Weigh down
So much more cumbersome to carry.

Sobering up with my mother

There are some experiences that I would not wish for myself

Or any other

And one of those is sobering up

With my mother.

You see, the evils of society I blotted very early with curly wisps of smoke

And some have said, not in joke that I'm easier to cope with when I'm blazing dope

And so what hope

Sobering up with my mother

All in all drug withdrawal ought be called a good

For I stall in cloudy shawls enthralled longer than I should

But when the switches start to spark again there is oft some fire

I'd be a liar to desire this quagmire for I, my sister or my brother

Don't try

Sobering up with my mother.

Some arithmetic is additive some follows power laws

And trouble does not double but multiplies by threes and fours

Of minds I find some clearer, I hope better you treat yours

But mines been kippered up with biftas, since very early doors.

But ontologous onerous love calls the mortal in us all

And if I was the author I might not write it quite like this

But I cannot forestall for down the hill her house does fall

I hope no one gets killed, I will, life insists

Be sobering up with my mother.

My poems are getting old

My poems are getting old
Full of yellowed moments
With torn edges
Where I have sought to hold
Or edit.
Full of traced paths back
Down the slope, away
From this glade
With its liminal thickets
Its trickling brook.
Full of thoughts and comparisons
To books and lessons
Massaging regrets into
Existential letters
Addressed to the weather
In the absence of lovers
My poems are getting old.

This East - VI

Eastwards

Glass mountains give way to concrete foothills

Tarmaced ravines and rivulets of brick

Wire fronted shops and paint peeled sills

Analogue aerials like tribal sticks.

How long will those armies wear Petticoats

And other civic Victoriana

Now the conduit of Commercial Road bloats

With bodies, traffic, it chokes. In summer

The ancient stench from delicate sewers

Gagging as from great glass cliffs tumbles

A weight of shit they were not built to bear

And always underneath the ground rumbles.

Later, some will ask what it is we did

And they will ask who built the pyramids.

This East

I.

When paved and terraced streets I paced to school

Bounded all the tall known world then nowhere

Was without magic.

In red brick maqui, arches and ivy

I sought out alleyways, spells and witches

Cavorted by time machines and made merry

On a pitch built of patches and stitches.

In science at school we had a lesson

The teacher did TA in holiday blocks

On the half daft doctrine of succession

That swamp becomes forest, and this east clots.

Steel girders form the vanguard, staking space

Lancing the static swarming red brick sea

Above the parish' frail pensioned terrace

Over old walls; and while I sipped my tea

Carped about starting, procrastinated

My old landmarks were assassinated.

II.
And interred unheard from in unmarked graves

Plyboard hoardings like police lines hide crimes

Hide ochre pits, dust, grit and wounded clay

An economic guard, silent as mimes.

Move along, move along, there's nout' to see here.

Again a kid out of the underpass

Bewildered and lost under soaring sheer

Cliffs, once muck and brick, now towering glass.

Ape batteries, story upon story

In which men at desks are seen to look down.

Mirrors held to the Old Lady's glory

As engorged she weighs the weight of the Crown.

Her table bursts its belt and belches out

Over Barbican, Aldgate, East and South.

III.
When the flock had forsook our parish church

It lay idle till on one autumn night

Feral vandals set it blazing alight

As flames ate beams like they were twigs of birch

My mother ran in to save the bible.

After that it became flats, luxury

And Starlings stopped filling the four Plane trees

Once, there, playing cards I scarred my nostrils.

Roaming away from wide straight Roman roads

To the winding sheep tracks down by St.Pauls

Where buildings clustered like pilgrims with loads

You can hear brick scream, as clan by clan falls

The old yard's children, each slowly eaten.

Oblivious progress strides slums with lead feet.

IV.

After the scouts, forms a phalanx of glass

Looming over bowed ranks of cornered brick

Levels of a lost co-operative past

In this east the new dawn is rising, quick.

At Bishopsgate steel of imperial scale

Belittling people, the streets, the sheep

Tracks stacked with tall testaments and tiled

Mausoleums to corporate fiefs.

On worn keystones there is calligraphy

Statements left for us with care in the course

But this age speaks in its geometry

An implicit understanding of force.

With futures and interests and asks and bids

This epoch too builds pyramids.

V.

Eastwards, in the garden behind the George

If you buried fingertips into brick

Left blood in the cracks you could scale the walls

To the roof, look out over the city

Along the Lea sclerotic industry

Budlea capped patches of necrosis

Have lost the war and succumbed to disease

Boxed and shipped like bits of Acropolis.

Armies have won with modern logistics

Undone anywhere things were stored or made

With the autistic force of statistics

The shopkeeper's wide-eyed workshops are razed

Men may not scale these alien spaceships

And nature find nowhere to seed or to sit.

VI.

Eastwards

Glass mountains give way to concrete foothills

Tarmaced ravines and rivulets of brick

Wire fronted shops and paint peeled sills

Analogue aerials like tribal sticks.

How long will those armies wear Petticoats

And other civic Victoriana

Now the conduit of Commercial Road bloats

With Mercury's priests, it chokes. In summer

The ancient stench from delicate sewers

Gagging as from great glass cliffs tumbles

A weight of shit they were not built to bear

And always underneath the ground rumbles.

Later, some will ask what it is we did

And they will ask who built the pyramids.

Helicopters

Two ends twist
Or bust
It's just
It seemed to stack so well
On all the other bricks
So that instead
Of my eye filling with dust
And fragments of wall
I could gaze from atop.
So I build more bricks up
Leaf by leaf
Until I look from high
Amid the tree tops
For helicopters.

Letter to Wayne Rooney

Dear Mr. Rooney

I am just writing to say,
To say
I watched your fine display
Against the Swiss, the other day
Witnessed your fervour and magnaniminity in celebration
And would like to offer my,
My....
Dam this is hard.

You see I'm from down South
And remember you in Blue
Going through, a callow youth
And in truth, the headed touch
Made it obvious, but my word
Did you produce.
And now you are top scorer of your nation
I would just like to say,
To say....

That you have definitely scored
More goals than any other from these shores
And saw the pass that dropped the jaw
And made run that got ignored
And for all this I must applaud
And extend without hesitation
My sincerest
My sincere
My most sincere
Dam this is hard

I must clap
That the pack of hacks
That harassed you since that very first cap
For a month or two are off your back
While they sit down to eat some hat
And read the stats in white and black
So it's one of those situations
When you have to hold your hand up and say,
And say....

That down the pub or in the press
Some will say their mate rates some late
Player as better, but to the last letter or breath
That unavoidably makes you a modern great.

And we will argue ounces on the tonne
Whether Scarlet or Vermillion is a better shade of red
But of names to conjure, yours is one
Face upon the wall above so many dream filled beds
So I must offer my sincerest,
My most heartfelt,
My humblest, proudest

Oh the jealous tribal pain
But you don't need it from me,
Or any of the rest of us
The numbers put it simple,
The numbers say it plain
Your best is good enough
Top scorer for the country that created the game
Crack on son.
Congratulations.

Debates

There are those grand debates
Where you are offered conterfactuals
And coincidental twists of fate

And some will bring forth shiboleths
Some foundation of the edifice
The narratives by which we exist.

And I will put a point of view
Somewhat different, if not new
And they will say it is untrue

That it comes from out the blue
That it's a fact they can't admit
All because they never knew.

And though we argue hard and long
Sometimes with careful tact
Sometimes with ardent passion strong
It doesn't change the fact
That almost all the way along
I am right and they are wrong.

If one should bring me this report

I have to play

To play for you so you will sail through

And stay the course, I cannot force a thought

Shuttered owl roosts, though in this great midday

There's no sane way that we can stop to nap.

I can talk of bright coloured plastic wheels

Rolling under peels of bird-song, bells

In tufted fields, talk of family

Not modern dyads, but ancient kin

Upon the savannah in tanned animal skins

A school of small dwellings and cousins.

Where there are gluts of brick and cash and glass

Apes butt cheek by jowl, battery fowl buses

Rock clad paths and myths, back-lit myths of now

Blaze a beacon for flocks of sheep who seek this stock

Skip lunch, the sunk forgot, the beacon stoked.

A culture of cricket whites

From summer arm-chairs we tune such fare as the smack

Of leather on willow, of ordinance on entropy

Pillow talk the score under ordinary unbreached roofs

Unbroken triangles that spread forces.

Our silicon Oracles turn water to wine
Transubstaniate raw data to flesh

Out-calculate the entirety of
Humanity arraigned with abacus.

Amidst the glut of brick and wash of cash

The rock clad paths aren't as was told, faced with gold

But under-girded with glass and lasers, obliterating space

As stirrups, galleons and ball-bearings did

Before, but not for those who sunk offshore

“If one should bring me this report

That thou hadst touch'd the land to-day”

Not for those in sand dusted clothes the hand has closed

The door. The door will not close

These chalk walled pirate isles. Of Rhodes, Drake, Clive

This sanguine, stoic form of speech may sup

On schadenfreude or Siddartha

Court roots or court disaster.

Long since Subitai and Sulyeman

Since bodies piled up in Pesht and Harwich starved

Amid heaps of rotting herring.

Long since Ecumenical blessing apportioned space

Chain linked the ecumene across oceans

Since the roof truss placed spread force.

Truth, right, power. Kingston, Bristol, Accra

Unbroken triangles, of course.

Bastard princes engorged call feathered beds

Aged reds and credit

Over thirty faces and they're just chimps

To a chimp. The 0.1 percent

Difference. They lie like us, war and get high

But never pressed papyrus

Smaller frontal lobes and fusiform gyrus

But we scale. Horse back, iron horse, tarmac, cable

Wood, Charcoal, Coal, Oil

Till we have tasted flight

And eyes skyward wade torrents of plight

In opulence, afford to ignore uninsurable

Sunk dinghies, the latrine stink cess of promises

And declarations, obligations. The ghosts

Of Roosevelt, E. and deflation

Haunt a family in tanned animal skins on the savannah

Immiserate, immiserate.

Hiding under a canvas wagon cover

A one season teenage Temujin whispered promises

To Bortei, but a bud, too young for make-up or disenchantment

A heart that launched a million hooves

That day, what did she hear, what did she say?

Leaves fall in the lake

To rot, to feed crab, to feed fish, to compost

For dark roots, the rot of social contracts, the compacts

With gods, with falling leaves, with post-war settlements

Unsettled shettles, flee shuttled in sealed buses

Flee blundering humpty-dumpty and uncle

These wars never happened, under the law.

The lessons of Dachau, of Auschwitz, learned lessons

Of aftermath, of outsourcing, lessons of digital distribution

Lessons of chaos, the schooled rapacious, debt fuelled

Scions of Cortez, the hounds must be fed

Chow down, Chow down

Snout brown in full bullion bowls, chow down

On pensions, on freedoms, on relations chow down

While others promise, chow down

There is enough for everyone, chow down

We sent no invites.

They will all drown

The family, savannah pinned in tanned hide

The self-selecting Darwinian footed thousands

The kerosene lofted connections, the cargo containers

The obliteration of space

And in time

Sit like Canute, and cry, cry for your Ayrian myths

Cry as waves of reality rend your misapprehension

Of culture, of humanity, cry

That the iron horse crosses your land, that the beacons

That have branded your mind have branded the savannah

Cry like Canute and sink.

The Assyrians have come, come in iron chariots

In God despairing iron chariots, Assyrians with wings

And chemical horses, shift beads on your abacus

Go to the beach and builds walls on the sand, build walls

On the shore, on the cliffs, build your walls against water

Against the lake, against the weight of numbers.

Shift your abacus, or come with clubs and dialects

Against the tide of Genghis and Cortez

Against the tide of these pirate isles

From whence warriors sailed

Against the weight of Clive, Rhodes and Drake

Come with your dialects and clubs.

There will be blood

You will drown in that blood.

A family, on the savannah, animal skin minded

May cry

Cry like Canute

There will be tears

You will drown in those tears.

1 "If one should bring me this report..."

Mislabeled

One draught is never enough
Missing the old land lady
Gay days, frayed memory
The hand cradles amber nectar
Even amid buffed wood and steel
Of monotonous chain pubs
One draught is never enough.

But enchanted ones, canalside
Or pitched surprise on hillside bends
Black windows, low slung
Magic ones make me long
For alcoholism
Hang-overs and misjudgement
One draught is never enough.

I have paintings from Italy
Paintings from towns I don't remember
Paintings of towns I never knew
Paintings that call thoughts
Of sun, hills, Roman blue
Thoughts so easy to love.

A picture of a harbour bay,
A distant town, vineyards, roads
Church so far away
No details the vague wash holds
I couldn't see that day
Whether there are singers
If the harbour's rife with thieves
A brush as free as hope
The view as beautiful as it is remote.

It is my own painting that I love.
As other artists do
One draught is never enough
I could murder a forest with you.

Birthday Poem

Fusion
Star fuelled muse of all men
Hydrogen to Helium
Naturally, and all them
Photons
That bless skin a billion miles
Distant from the tides within
Life giving
Heart of summer
Light bestowing wonder
It happens to the lucky ones
These passing suns.