The Socialist Revolution

Let me tell you something about the socialist revolution

It happened. While you were sleeping

It happened when workplace terminals came creeping

It happened when the computer came home

It's happened. That's why you check your phone.

It happened with satellites and fibre optics

Computer chips, when the internet replaced television

It happened with the collapse of communism

It happened when stocks stopped being about dividends

When you no longer had to make things

To get rich, just three guys with an app and a pitch

Capital factories high and dry as they put it online

And you pay for bandwidth to reproduce all that.

It happened with SourceForge, Linux, Apache

When geeks united across time and space

According to their ability, to write software

According to your need. Indeed

It happened with the advent of cyrpto-currency.

It happened. But maybe not quite as envisioned.

While you were sleeping.

It happened when you became valued for your data

When they started giving 99% free

To sell you 1% later.

Are you're awake now?

When with a big bang the banks flopped

You woke up, and saw there was a problem

Went to the cook-book and called it

Capitalism, Nationalism, Liberalism

But the revolution had happened

And all the mud you slung got no traction.

As you cried “Burn capitalists”

But capitalists had turned to taxes

And burning cash in Silicon fire pits.

As you cried “Worker's rights”

But workers are nowhere in sight

And electric power runs robots all night.

Tank remix II.III

In the low ceiling crypt

Where they chose to gather

The etched and rounded brick

Thows a mesh of shadows

With candlelit plot soup thick

She waxes again, like sips

Of hot coffee, water.

Energy courses as tips

In spring force through dark earth

Bulb to light, flip state switch

Kite born over the sea

She feels free for sprouting

Throughout the estuary

She still carrying her

Physical memory

And will not be waylayed

On road to them, she found

A way, there are others

And dozens of others

Who will be a band in

Waves and light, uncovered

Chorus of voices unite.

Fight gave purpose afresh

They were not the usual

Superfluous flesh.

I won't explain

I won't explain

And you won't ask

Cracked vase in the aftermath

The over watered pot

The mucus covered calving

Sentences. Things I just forgot.

I won't explain

When paint runs

The current flow

At surface and at depth

Split.

I didn't think that fag was lit

Didn't pour that drink.

I won't explain

A whisper's touch.

Spray breaking upon bare rock

Bamboo shaken in a gust

Gravity lost in rolling surf.

I won't explain.

Tanks remix

I.IV

 

It was after the funeral

The tears and the drone. After

She'd gone up the hill. Near her

Home.

A young man came across tilled field

Covered in sulphur from head to toe

Gave her physical memory, will

And said to her, “You are not so

Alone.

These are their addresses and history

Their branching and probable destinies.”

There in the files the man had names

Important names, hers, others

His. History, chains, more. Their

Curse.

Foot snaps a branch and paths fork, part

From then on whatever occurs

She'd kiss an obituary. Walk

To the field where she first heard

Worse.

The window

In the rain, walled in by clay shades

And the scattered brick that repeats in rooves

Breaking spumes of green, this framed scene

Is the stuff of epics, snow blind boredom

Of escapes and flights. Yoked madness

And demons beaten like sled dogs till they drag

Some words, from the whisper of car wheels

In spray, from the soft pat of footsteps

Kissed by moist concrete. With this

Turbulent pot of spider stocked molten soup

Thick with all that's caught between Colombia

Canaria, East India, flies swarm, drawn

To the sweet rot, scent of piled corpse and sacrifice

The old headstones stacked like index cards

Against the moss stippled yard wall

Of St. Someone's church by the flats,

That sits locked like it or god forgot;

To the sediment of the anthropocene

The rich alluvial deposits of longitude

Of law, the first thawings of power's grasp

And what jungles grew, what jungles of souls

Where cut, chainsawn to planks

By the strong arms of freedom, shipping rope

And sails stretched like spider silk past sunset

And the clay shaded walls left

As testament, as embers and magnets

This horizon of stacked brick and rain

Is the stuff of epics. It's plain.

Blueprint for the revolution I and II

It has to be leaderless

As we understand the risks. Power corrupts

Dopamine makes fiends of Kings and Queens

Makes schooled folly and bullies

Makes a mass, a forest from trees and the rest of us.

The attraction of hierarchy, addiction

Of our institutions,

Manacled to mammalian mating patterns

As natural as they are arbitrary.

Did the enlightenment ever happen?

This great hubris of humanity.

We ape gods.

It has to be leaderless

Poly-centric, poly-archy, poly-anna

Democratically selected technocrats and planners

In a structure of proper etiquette and manners.

That is, checks, gibbets and balance.

Connected and injected with

All affecting the manor.

It has to be leaderless

A network that gets the best work

Tests first, then iterates

Builds and communicates all that is great.

It has to be leaderless.

II.

It has to be transparent

Infinitely perspicacious

Clearer than water

Clearer than glass

It has to be like optics and maps

Like microscopes, telescopes

Stethoscopes for every bloke

To slice and dice

Comb out vices, ticks and lice.

It has to be so transparent

That the path of every penny

Is crystal clearly apparent.

Every signatory and functionary

Every spreadsheet and file

Every phone number dialed

It has to be transparent.

Blueprint. Pyramids

We stand before Pyramids

We stand beneath pyramids built of wires

Built of cargo ships and computation

Built of our venerated law and custom.

That heave from deserts, where the band plays on

Upon the wreckage of old certainties

Upon famished, unwashed, terrified pleas

On legal instruments, players play on.

Watching seasons of reflected sun

On the gold crowned apex, as at Cheops

When the Nile flooded with slave bodies

When the mind budded with new found signs

When Egyptians learned how to split one

Into fractions and built pyramids.

There is no gold atop the pyramids at Cheops.

Their gods long since submerged by grains of sand

Their temples swept by grains of sand and lost

Their dead tongued edicts shorn of old meaning

The broken bodies of their carved idols

Like the scattered jigsaw of a crime scene

We could not begin to know

How to worship Pharaohs now.

We stand before our Pyramids, gold crowned

The gold cap atop Cheops long torn down.

Blue print for the revolution. Intro

Let's get it on, stop pretending
That we're stuck in the days
Of typewriters and pens
Bookends and postmen.
Just stop pretending.

Stop offering wooden soles not rubber treads
Stop offering fruit picking instead of bread.
Stop saying pigs can't fly.
We've a dozen ways to make pigs fly.

I'm not calling for a bit more for the poor
For men to do house chores
Or to let live and ignore.
I'm calling for all these old walls to fall.

For the cathedrals and palaces
To be redecorated, reconsecrated
For the entire architecture to be updated
I am not the only one frustrated.

Each election is an  affront
A front of rubber stamps and shackled tyranny
It's obvious when you understand it
Parliamentary democracy
Is premised on poor bandwidth.

Cherry groves

In these high days the fruit trees bow so low

The cherry spreads its sweep to brush soft pates

Of shrouded idlers slumbered through the grove

Above hand's rest hang all the jewels to sate

Any appetite.

                     Why scale the smooth ringed trunk

When there is fruit to hand to make you sick

Ripe fruit to hand to get you giddy drunk

And baskets brim from catch of beaten sticks.

Would it be greed to leave this tussock

Reach like apes, curious amongst the branch

To push and pull the lush sweet summer luck

Or derelict to spurn these gifts, this chance.

What paths to muse, lain prone in cherry groves

With windfall presents, these sweet merry odes.

Power to the people

When they cried 'power to the people'
They didn't mean it.
Just a them and us confrontation
Against power's concentration.
But it was people that had power.

Now they mean it. Increasingly
We will say it and mean it
Against the unceasing creep of invisible webs
Networks and algorithms in people's stead.

Computers are blind to the streets
Blind to banners,  deaf to demos and chants
Algorithms do not have to face
Their children, their uncles and aunts.

When we cry power to the people
We will mean it.

We, myself and I

So this guy, who I've never met

But connect with over digi shit

From keyboard skirmish in some debate

Pops up on messenger to ask

Who are you?

And I'm like, wait.....?

I am at least 43% bacteria

Who are not me, who do not share my DNA

Governed by linked Eukaryotes

That hold at least some sway.

So who are we, this team

Bounded in a lipid skin

That processes all this data

From without, within?

A nested complex system

Fractal departure in fractal set

A mobile arc for DNA

Electro-chemical and wet.

An optic set of stories

And culture that I've sponged

A city built on many towns

Foundations, deep, unknown.

I am all those I know

And how I know them too

The other teams of storied cells

A node in the Ubuntu.

The Greeks will tell I'm an immortal soul

Ever true like maths

That there is one unchanging me

If I mill through all the chaff.

But if I'm an equation

Then it is one non-linear

The answer made each moment new

With situation and parameter.

For I am not that three year old

Or that young man of twenty

To go chasing after some true self

Is just a quest that's empty.

I am not me ten years back

Or even yesterday

And I am not who I will be

Even later on today.

I am we, is what we find

The more sciene probes

For there is at least one self

In each temporal lobe.

There are neurons

In my heart and gut

Not just in my head

And chemicals that change

With every book I 've read.

Chemicals that change

If on my head they place a crown

Or bind me in shackles chained

In prison, beaten down.

Chemicals that change

If love holds me for a time

Or I run a marathon

Or live on nout but limes.

I have understandings

From animals extinct and dead

And understandings from unique genius

Like Einstein, in my head.

I'm a complex adaptive system

That mills meanings as I be

And even by this evening

I'll be a different form of we.

She is a survivor

Be kind to her

Even if she has grown to wear the crown

Be kind.

Soon after birth she broke

Murdering family, self-harm

Long before the uncle appeared

Be kind to her.

Acount the infant trauma

Questions and pictures of hurt youth

Frozen at heart to know no path

Away from these vexed complexes

Rooted in past and tangled in her hair.

Treat her with kindness and care.

She still walks with stars in her eyes

Still dreams, still streams with tears

And screams, still finds the same faults

Can't stitch the torn seams

Still fights the guilt, clings to toys

Pulls up the quilt. Still cannot help

But see the pictures of those young eyes.

Still caught in recriminations and hate

Asking the same questions she asked then

Young questions from a long held crown.

Confounded in the same debates

From the 1860s

Darwin, Melanin, Socialism or Liberalism

Like she'll never move on, be kind to her

America, her civil war

Survivor of childhood trauma.

Haggerston bridge

London Plane, trunk like old skin, lamp clad and bluing

Is portal guard like Cerebus to dark water in warm dusk

This is not the Styx, this yoked conduit of memory

Slow freight path of archaeology

Is again thinking new sediment.

Where once were dreams rise modular units

Poorly edited, I remember this manuscript

When the blocks of type had no roofs

Shards and boards, pigeons and purple budlea.

The new brick is unetched by traffic

Unwashed by soot, standing as if

It is something, the red faced facade

And underneath steel webbed core.

There is no thought of empire here no more

Thoughts are elsewhere, interest and consideration

Elsewhere, decorations, elsewhere

Stucco and arches, long ago squared

No proud punctuation of co-operative endeavor,

No ornamentation

Just railings, iron, 4x10 or whatever.

This manuscript is seen from distance

Where pride is in different things

Different interest and considerations

Whoever made this wash

Does not know this place

And what it has to be proud of.

Dusk stretches into lost distance like this

Dark artery, spun into glasses, footsteps, kisses

By a million lights, it is hard to know

When the sun sets.

But there is no thought of empire

Where innovation is a different shape of box

Frosted glass steps monotonous, myopic space

They believe in these cube units.

Cubists,

But value just one angle

There is no thought of empire here

Only conquest.

It's a donkey

We're getting sold a donkey

They said it was a Ferrari, classic

The finest engineering, cutting edge

But it's a donkey.

A donkey with bling stirrups and ergonomic saddle

Go faster stripes sprayed on for modern appeal

We're getting sold a donkey, named Ferrari.

It's the best of 800 year old donkeys

But it's not a Ferrari

It doesn't send performance data to track side

To tweak and adjust input and exhaust, real time

It ain't clocking 200k on the straight

You can't change it's shoes in 1.2 seconds

Trade descriptions, this not a Ferrari.

Cross in a box every five years

Deary, deary, dear

It's a donkey.

The mother of all parliaments

Needs to look to the grandkids

Or we will all feel plate tectonics.

They say earthquakes happen

When two adjacent pieces of crust

Move at different rates, one gets stuck

The resulting friction builds up

Until it erupts in violent shock.

The revolution will not be televised

It will not be bought to you by mail train

Or pigeon carrier on velum parchment orginals

But if we don't fix these plate tectonics

It might just come in smoke signals.

I think we've been fooled

They say it's donkey called Ferrari

I think it's really a mule.

Say that again

The things that you say
Say to others
Say them to me.
I want to hear them from your lips.
Hear your lips whisper
Hear your lips
Without words.

No plot left

In the beds that face the sun

I have grown roses

And now they are gone.

The first was yellow

Unlike any other one

An African, yes, long done.

The second, to the West

Was a classic red

Pungent, rosette blooms

That marched determined on

Through the year from June

And I never should have left

The hips on it, unprunned.

The third, to the East

Was delicate white

Fleeting, with scent so sweet

Geraniums and snapdragons

Mark the grave of each.

And now in the bed

That faces the sun

I see no plot for a new rose

Only Borrage and Geranium.

Strong and stable

Strong and stable,

Like a hairpin on a bomb

At the negotiating table

What could possibly go wrong.

Strong and stable

Like dominoes

Once willing and able

To tread on their toes.

Strong and stable

Like Terry Waite

As she sits among enemies

With her new found mates.

Strong and stable,

Like a hairpin on a bomb

At the negotiating table

What could possibly go wrong.

Of course I must forget

I.

Of course I must forget

Like a beach forgets the traffic

With the tide.

Like night forgets a candle

That has died.

Like a shirt on a radiator

Forgets the rain.

I must hold you, or forget.

A single moment from a train.

II.

Of course I must forget

Like oak forgets the summer

Every year.

Like clay forgets its possibilities

In fire.

Like a squirrel forgets
Where it buried its nuts.

Nuts.

I must forget.

Dismay

There will be no snap election

No crocodile tears

What the naughtiest thing you've ever done

Bomb London, child abuse is God's will.

There will be no snap election.

What is it he says

Sweetest summer love

My north star, so long my hope 

What is it he says to you? 

What is it he says? 

Not within my ear shot 

Or gunshots

Those echoes of harm

Snake weak forked tongue

We will see this done

Even weasels have a leg to stand on. 

A kneecap.

What is it he says? 

From the vice dripping 

Glass house of a midlife crisis

I'll be nice with this

Though it would pain me 

To finish it quick. 

He should bring water to your cup, not your eye. 

With grace and clean speed

Sparrow pierces through sky.

Heron, my grace and compass

Don't hold his sacks on your wing

His baggage and shit

And should he seek to clip

Your freedom that lets the air in

I will break each bone from wrist up

And return to his fingers

Oh dare him. And I will visit

Jazz upon his bones like Mingus. 

It gets me a bit old testament

Certain suggestions

Linguistic tricks, baited attacks and gaslight.

I got this instruction booklet called

'Making mothafuckas act right'

Misappropriated entitlements

Fed on sensation, titillation,
Obscured connections, responsibilities 

The globalised ring of gyges

I say ring, wring

Is no big thing

No big thing. 

Lilting stream, water over smooth rocks

On what level do we meet angels?

Some can only rope and drag low

Some cannot fly, and in truth

Some can only lie

For their truth is not to tell.

Your wings reach above the clouds

Where the sun shines

And angels sing at picnic
Spare him no time

Mudslingers leave grime

Bring gunslingers, he ain't yours

He's all mine. 

Man chats flaff

What spoonful of sorrow do you bring

Exchange it for medicine

Tell me where your heart weighs

My ear yours always, in all ways.

This is not you, sweet enchantment

Can't be, but for how you are an apogee

Of every man's hope and dream

Seeming or unseemly.

No, this is not thee.

In all your sweet revrie, wise liberty

Your care, and he might wish to love you

But the full you he does not dare.

Only in your form and shape

That adverts of our heaven ape

But shys from your sweet spell

Inspiring

Too enriching to wish escape.

The only freedom in your following.

Do you not know you are more than diamonds.

Have I failed you?

More than the sun's gold good bye

I haven't failed you have I.

Some years since our summer, close

But more than most,

More than any other, almost

You colour my idea of love

I colour my idea of love

From the outlines that you left on me.

Your laugh, your wit, my sweet revrie.

Forgive me

If I think I learnt

Something of the art you taught

Learnt in lonliness, an acupuncture of intimacy

Learnt in sweat where love maps to skin

Forgive, my belief

That you need to be loved easily

Like brushing your teeth.

Like sketches in ink.

Like casserole.

Your relief mapped in touch and breath

Forgive, if you left expecting any less.

Let me risk this one disappointment

You can't expect most to match your depth

To see what you see in this world and the hearts of men

See beyond how they themselves can with all reflection

You tend the garden well,

Each grows its own direction to your sun.

The way I loved you for so long as a canvas for projection.

One of the cleverest men in Britain once said to me

Another level of understanding is needed for explanation.

You in gifts explain the art of love by demonstration.

And if he wears you too full of care.

Call, I'll tell you that I love you, and ever are my pride

And that for every verse I write

There's a hundred men a tongue tied.

He might want to love you, but love you he doesn't dare

Leave him to rue and learn, go drop hankerchief on Mayfair.

Vote giant vampire squid

Vote giant vampire squid

Because squid will eat your kids.

Squid will suck out your face

And label you a disgrace

For not having enough flesh to

Suck.

Vote squid

Squid will efficiently

Juice every nook and cranny

Squeezing out every last penny

From any pocket.

Squid will beat the small man down

Squid will beat the medium man down too

Give squid your vote

Because squid will fit universal catheters to pipes

And juice your shit on remote.

Squid will pat fat cats and

Eichmann's Jerusalem enablers

Relax in tax havens

And make you play catch for crumbs

Squid will presume you're that dumb.

Vote squid

Because squid will liquidate our common heritage

For a couple of quid

Vote squid

A monster you can trust

To suck out your face

And leave you a dried husk.

Those other loves

Would you ever accept being fourth

Worry of other loves

Worry that at night

I was stealing the message of your touch

For Erato,

That I was saving my feelings for Calliope,

Or that I sang for some other better

Greying that I only wanted you

For your resonance, for sentences

Could you ever forgive leaving you alone

For a sonnet.

Lemel

Candle light

My jet, you make the page so bright

And yet, I know you can't requite,

Reciprocate a love like this

Don't fret 

You make the page so bright.

I spoil her

We shall go to the sea late summer

When a faraway storm brings waves

When moon is waxen yellow and low

And all the sky is a nave.

We shall go to sea late summer

When the air is a syrup of blooms

When the air is an oven of slumber

And all the shore is a room.

The waves will be our whispers

And all we have to tell

The waves will be our cradle

In the frolick of the swell

We shall taste salt on skin

Salt upon our mouths

Salt upon the air that swims

On the shores of the seas of the south

We shall go to the sea late summer

Without gravity or edge

Without the trappings of fashion

With nothing that needs to be said.

We shall go to the sea late summer

When a faraway storm brings waves

When the moon is waxen yellow and low

We shall go to the sea and be saved.

Make me an honest man

Make me on honest man

This tongue of mine so lose and free

For I believe there's one who can

Carry this rich hyperbole.

Would you make me an honest man

I have such sweet, fine things to say

So few who gently understand

These words so often throwaway.

Oh, let me shower them on you

In whispered passion or sweet jest

Be one to make these words ring true

Make them not lies upon my chest.

If I should say that in your eye

Is all beauty one soul could bear

Could you make this not some coarse lie

Oh, make me honest if you care.

Were I to call your touch divine

Could you make that phrase ring true

Whisper you've a heart so kind

Could you make that truthful too.

If I sung there's nothing better

Than to spend my days with you

Would your spirit make the letter

Of this commandment ever true.

Oh love make me an honest man

How sweet nothings flow from my lips

And rising flames they unseen fan

This careful tongue so often slips

And with it words slip to your soul

Like diamonds on your heart to hold

To speak in lies does leave me cold

Oh, make me an honest man.

I only wish to hold your hand

And sweet nothing seeds to flower

Would you make me an honest man

So rare that one has the power.

Thoughts of a grey day

Well, I guess it's a mess

Frayed trust is a hard set to adjust

All static

I can't ask you to do this

The edges of my cover

In lose filaments, the weave

Fading, unbraiding and disordered

Caught on the less populated edges

Like the first dogs

I must mutate to stomach

The rubbish, fed with rubbish

And fed up, to the gills.

These storms of mind worsen

There have always been squalls

Burnt carbon, methane

Now they are hurricanes

And the thick black pall

Hangs on the horizon for seasons

The only deliverance is mutation

Controlled cell growth under this light

Adaptation. The lodger left the toilet broken

My ex got drunk and pulled the guest

Of all, I know not what should be spoken

This frayed blanket is a mess.

Obama,history may see you as black

For America,

Obama, you were a great act

A mixed descent Kenyan

American of melted origin

But heritage, will see you as black.

In Damascus

They will see you as black

In Tripoli and Cairo

They will see you as black.

And all those in the Umma

With their homes on their backs

Well, they might just too

See you as black.

100 years since the Kaiser

Put Lenin on a train

The oil fields in flames

And your closer

The foreign legacy

Was a right Turkey.

You sold yourself so short

In memory of Ted Hughes

You deserved it

Outside the great court

After all our courtship

You sold yourself short

So short

Too cautious, so obvious

You chose less risk

Thinking it was safe

That he would never see you lit,

To turn your back on changing sea

And boat your passions on a lake.

Do you pretend

For a second

That I could not have made that conflict quicken

As you scurried sticky

Under the Plane trees.

I let you shrink

Not worth the ring

Not the worth the mink.

We pretended

Long after it all went awry

When you became offended

That I said your mother had surrendered

In Kent, to defeat.

And I became offended

That you couldn't think on your feet.

You can carry on pretending.

You won't forget me

Or forgive yourself

For missing out on love

However old you grow.

I saw your wedding photos

Who were you thinking of, what

That day?

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.

Hot sauce

Hot sauce

The type that stays on your lips

After the tissue wipes.

Stays on your lips after wine.

Stays on your lips

Like a galaxy of light explosions

Rolling them together

Anticipating

More sauce.

Dipped meat caramelised

Comes alive. Succulent

And moist on the fork.

The aroma of this sauce curls

Gently scented around your skin.

Like incense burning by your ankle.

Laps your thigh encircling

Then splits like shoots of ivy, jasmine

Sweet Honeysuckle in spring

Raises you in scaffolds high

Adorned and flowering.

This is a sauce that coats

Like slow water, sweet

Envelopes to tongue's tip

The more you get

The more the pursed edges

Of your lips drip hot.

Piquant

Unquenched

A forceful sauce, spice remorseless

Unstalled by waterfalls, bread walls

Or heart rent caterwauls.

From your throat, heart, 

Gut a burning chasm

Volcanic. The type to wake

A mount from dormancy

To shaking pyroclasm

The type to delicately

Move your fingers on cutlery

And stir your tongue

The type of sauce

That says there's so much to come.

Excess bars

I got excess bars
Barred for black sheep barbarism
Banged like sing-sing
So many bars make prison
Riven and penned
In editorial decisions.

It's all the tall Ls
Like walls, lullabies over the fells
And moors, and more,
And more, like a cast in foundry
Liquid bars pour
Cup ringed in waterfalls
Can't mop phrases from the floor.

I got excess bars
I let you into a secret
They're secret
If I tell you this
You must not repeat it.
Repeat it.
I got excess bars
Puns so bad they're barbaric
Call to the lawyers
I need to be catching a car
I can't get stuck behind bars.

A bye

Compassionate, confused
She smiled like she didn't know
Why I'd say thank you
As we turned to go.
I'm glad I knew.

Pity the maladjusted

Pity them
For they hate pity
Hate their narrative and hold it gilded high
Proud of difference, they hate
Difference.
The poor terrified hallucinations
Monstrous others
Stalking their imagination
Rapists murderers and thieves
In lurid shadows, indistinct, unknown
And intimate to themselves.
Their own hate and fault
Could only be others.
Pity them whose fictions
Are their only pass to status
And stress relief
An identity of less cortisol
Evaporates in myth.
Terrorism.
And how they hate
Pity.

In the car parks

They are but ten years old
Some as young as seven or less
Standing in car parks alone
On the edge of commercial space.

Our conscience of this is young
We make war on their lands
Murdered old nations and tribes
Acre on acre of genocide.

They had families and cousins
Who would guide them
A parent to suckle their growth
Now we stand them by streetlights alone
With no concern for their loss.

We realised, enlightened
That they have something to give
That we love and need their presence
So we transplant some of the kids

To the margins
Where they humanise brands
The great steel wharehouses
Motorways and railway tracks
Collared, isolated, startled and scared
Passive and under attack.

How long does it take
To find one of their kin
In the next pen
Fingers reaching out
To touch in darkness
Under the toxic shelters of black rock.

Over the tops of old brick
The elders rise, storied
Like veins on the sky
Like the earth's drowning hands
Thin as a cortex.
Will they adopt and make friends
Toddlers delivered swaddled in cloth
Just babies,
These trees, child refugees.

Principles

When you're up on your high horse
And moralising
Riding well shod by those just surviving
Remember, and this may be banal
In human behaviour, context is all.
Think about what it's essential to bring
Principles are expensive things.

More underwhelming than supermarket sushi

This bad haiku that
Doesn't scan at all really
And then goes nowhere.

Standard 16

You ain't heard of me
I ain't got badges in Queensbridge
But if you wanna fuck around
Then you need bring team with.

I don't grip mics for the rep
I leave Django upset
When Babylon run up on drums
Then I'm not among the suspects.

Dip shit MCs ain't got wit to learn in weeks
Talk is cheap
Come correct
Don't even quit in my sleep.

And if you wanna look me up
Go check Who's Who
I thought you knew, those that do
Don't talk, and those that talk don't do.

You hurt the whole world

You hurt the whole world

With what you did

Not just me and you

And mum and Nu

And all the bods in the crew.

But all the others

My work would've helped

If my sense of injustice

Wasn't corrupted

By feelings I felt as a whelp.

You hurt the whole world

You did.

Never, ever

What,

Don't you like riding dragons?

Maybe it's poor eyesight

Flagons and moonlight

But I really thought you the type.

Tell me you've got spares

Who'll hang diamond teardrops in your ears

And lace your marble neck with gold.

You look better in silver

And I'd bejewel your soul.

I don't own pets

Don't need you to be any less

And you can guess one thing

That should you fall

You're heart and all

You'll find yourself flying

On a wing.

What,

Don't you like riding dragons?

I thought you would dare
Unlike the others,
Too coy or too scared
Fair, with poor insight
Can't see if you stare.

Love you've had plenty.
Loved you've been for sure.
Suitors list lengthy

But none the type to open doors

And make you realise

You never, ever

Really loved before.

Brambles

At the end of the night

I expect to be hurt

Not by a fight

Or the flight of a skirt

But the pang of the hooks

Pulling on twine

From some backward look

Long lost in time.

In my organs they bite

Zig-zag snagged line

All caught up tight

In the brambles behind.

My kilter all faltering

Taught lines pitch up short

And I find myself baltering

Between barrels of oughts.

Sideways is pain

And back seems ok

But forward I strain

And hooks rip and flay.

Somewhere, someone has scissors

For a dagger carapaced back

To cut lines so they quiver

And fall shung and slack.

Then maybe, just maybe

Berries I'll find

Following lines over my shoulder

To the brambles of mind.

All I can think of is you

I wanted to write a piece about

How free movement of capital
Allows the evasion of national regulations
And political control

Piling up mile high guarded mountains of gold

But all I can think of is you.

I wanted to write a piece about

How the value of networks being a function of their size

Combines with the weightless economy

And digital goods to facilitate global monopolies

That bleed the world dry,

Feeding small pools of leeches

In Seattle offices

But all I can think of is the time

You wore gothic eye makeup with silver studs.

I wanted to write about

How all encompassing property rights

Within a system of profit incentives encourages

Rent extraction of our common heritage

Co-opting distributed pillage

Like a virus defiling the planet

But my mind is filled with the image

Of you in a white bonnet with flowers and beau lace
And all I can think of is you.

I wanted to write

A polemic about how the efficacy and endemic limits

Of bureaucratic administration creates a situation

Where government is buckling under its own weight.

How the width at the base determines

A pyramid's safe height

But my mind
Keeps going back to that fight we had on the stairs.

I wanted to write about
How surpassed nationalism is floundering

Due the decimation of capital cost of broadcast.

The geography of communication fields bequeathed

By Mongolian, North Atlantic and Islamic imperialism

In comparison to our border being a hundred miles

But all I can think of is

You brushing your hair
From your smile, compassionate, confused.

I wanted to write about intellectual property

As a simple conceptual heresy against

The inherent advantages of humanity, GNU

The defence of Academy to protect

The intellectual future of our race as the task

Of the present generation to gift.

About the necessity of using our freedom

To develop new institutions, forms of cooperation

Demonstrative architectures of distribution

And possible uses of blockchain for value inclusion.

I wanted to write about a new Rochdale

But I fail

Cos my mind is locked on the picture

Of coloured string in your pigtails
And all I can think of is you.

I wanted to write about

Transnational communication, the evolution

And creation of new communal identities

The necessary inabilities of global hierarchy

Against mathematically proven efficiency

And resilience of networks meaning

Their dominance is given

And consequent logical implications for feminism.

But all I can think of is your spinning hem

And feet,

A second of silence after when our eyes meet

And your whites, wide, just for moment

Tell me.
All I can think of is you.

Footnotes

Pickle
That tickled me
I could call you obtuse
Am I cheating my duty
To use your peerless beauty
In want of a muse.
Afflicted by vacancy
But that ain't no news
Love in its latency
Doth always amuse.

It's just that I'm inclined
To spend time finding
New ways of describing
Your grace in text.
The curve of your brow
The fall of your neck.
Making up more nice things to say
Really must be the best use of my day.

Best of SMS

I.

Though you never call me
I know the reason why
And will hear the hills a calling
Calling till I die
And will hear the forest
The heather and the brook
And in them all your timid love
Will never be mistook.

II.

Specialness
I wish you every bliss
Miss you every kiss I waste
On some young wench in tryst.
My compass ever points to true
And all the love that I confess
Just echoes of my love for you.

III.

Sweet pea flower,
Wither do your tendrils spring
Tend what hopelings under wing
Wash what soils from fibre soft
Hold what spoils, high aloft
Sweet pea flower know one thing
I sing warm of you and oft.

Valentine for Cole

They said no to Coal
The heart of England
And oh, oh but Cole
She sets my heart a tingle
How I am not whole
A half when once a single.

And hardened men of grit and earth
Have fought the rock to treasure win
Though true Cole's wit and mirth
Are beyond measure of any men.

Valentine for Maggy

Oh leggy Maggie
Though you're crabby
I long to take you to the Abbey
Though I know I'm way too shabby
To wine and dine in Abu Dhabi.

But your scent I can't resist
Without your love I can't exist
So unrequited must persist
You'll always be my favourite fascist.

Valentine

I don't want to write this
I would rather strike a match
And hold flame to the crisp
Edge till blank paper catch.

Watch black borders advance
Line by line all shaped by chance
Before soft orange silk's short dance
Effaces these diluted words.

I don't want write this
But light fire and let it grow
For without this night's bliss
Then I must just let go.

Valentine for L

Love,
Can I call you that
I ended up unsure
Of what I loved
Or if I was.

Dismissed it all as misplaced fiction
Self-deluding games of youth
And frames we get from stories
That fit poorly on the truth.

I dismissed it all
Till after time so long
I saw you strong
Like a distilled mirror
Of the great gold Buddha
In Battersea park by the Thames
And you faced me smiling
Chest broad, face upturned
Like I wish you would've then.

Valentine for A

Heron,
Graceful by the water
What a smile she has.
You gave her that.
And if she should keep it
What a treasure.
What a treasure.
She will always have jewels.

Next Valentine

Oh surely Shirley you're not too girly
To twirl you by the short and curlies
Whirl you through the hurly burly
Till well early smile pearly.

Oh Shirley don't go all surly
Say that surely you will call me
Or I'll be poorly, wan and mardy
Take me and the glory Shirley.

Valentine for an errant muse

My father went away when I was young
Often, my mum said it affected me
Departure from the archetypes of Jung
Is not something we're born to see.

And few can stand sunbeams all day unblind
Bathe too long rue heatstroke, blistered skin
Warm blooded creatures will seek shade at times
Take some refuge from the orb life giving.

I think of Whitesmiths who make jewels from rocks
Their work coveted by aspiring thieves
Armouring their shops with shutters and locks
The worries wrought on wrights of beauty.

Don't be afraid that they'll leave, let them go
Freed things loved, if loving, return you know.

Valentine for Uplink

Crumpet
I couldn't think of a topping
Jam, honey and cream
Fresh, soft and steaming
The best wake from a dream
Gorgeous gallon waterfall
Of smoothest ice cream
Where you been ?
You must have been close
Cos I see trees looking up
And sprouting all green.

Valentine for S

When I'm at my mum's in France
Where the land still finds some freedom
And chalk oaks twist a living from the hills
There are trees I know
Knot by knot, a braille of youth
All but forgot.
They greet me like the pensioners
Who once were working men
Or the stooping lady with her stick
Who was forever shrinking.
The chalk oaks stand
And grow so slow
They inch unnoticed in decades known
But for branches from the knots
Some freshly grown, some spent and cropped
A path among old and silent friends
Their creviced bark beneath my running hand
Like hope to watch them slowly branch
Constant as the years advance.

The Times offers subscription

The Times offers me subscription
For £2.33 a week
For £2.33 a week
I can digest Murdoch's shit.

Now of course unwittingly
We're all part of this utility
To process new age sewage
Into opiated rage.

But for £2.33 you get a direct pipe
Of distributed shit digestion
Served to you in type.

You can "get educated" for £2.33
Perspective gaslight medicated
Object to facts to hallucinated
Angrily frustrated in hyper-reality.

And sewage turns to compost
Inside the reader's head
Seeded with Murdoch trees
And on this shite they're fed.

Murdoch trees grow Murdoch fruit
That we will never eat
Bloody juice and bitter rind
Pollute the grounds
The roots beneath our feet.

The Times offers me value
Subscription to opinion for £2.33
So I can be a smacked up minion
Of rank plutocracy.

So I can ponder questions
Such as how many foreigners
Sorry terrorists
It would be good to cull
I can have a septic tank
For Murdoch in my skull.

The Times offers me subscription
Education for £2.33
And I say, not me, no thanks
I would rather stay dull
Than set a distributed septic tank
For Murdoch in my skull.

Things not too say on Tinder I.

Sneering, disdain and contempt
Are the road down which lost love is sent
Wind in the sails.
Current for keels.

The attention of some is a blessing
The attention of others a curse
And one love's intention confessing
Can sometimes be roads to the worst.

You should always be sure
When push comes to shove
There is more
More than one kind of love.

Wind haiku

Soft butterfly wings
Cause hurricanes in far realms
What storms a bullet?

Ducks in a line

The big one is down in the rushes
And the little one is up by the pond
The mother is nesting
And another is resting
I don't know where the speckled one's gone.

Sprinkle spring

Sprinkle me some springtime
A tinkling of thimble bells
A twinkling of sunshine.
Burgeon some root fed bud
Some sureptious shoot that scouts
In doubt of curious March frosts.
Warm a nest of noon kissed moss
To catch each wafting cloud that pass
Sprinkle me some springtime
On my breakfast.