Things I didn't hear at the meeting

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

I tell you they're coming

They're coming they are

With bulldozers like tidal waves

Voracious steel jawed monsters

That crave to encase our community

In concrete, feast

And block out the sun.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

I've been here for ten years.

Me twenty.

Me since sixty four.

I was here afore all yee in misty days of yore.

I was here when the shops were nice

Before people came to score.

I was here afore all yee in misty days of yore.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

We intend to build a series of skyscrapers

That will blot out the sun,

Saddle the council with debt

Take the money and run.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

The alternative to a festering turmite mound

That will devour the suffocated heart of our community,

An army of atomised worker cells

Shedding anonymity to lubricate the path

Of thieves and men of bad affections;

Is a collectively constructed

Constructively created, all purpose

Purpose built Shangrila.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

I am diverse, I

Represent diverse people

We speak with one voice.

We are diverse here

And they want to build the same

On diverse people.

We diverse people

Need space to be

More diverse within

This community.

If we do not have space to be diverse

We cannot remain the same.

We hope that other

Diverse people will join us

And be diverse too.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

Hello, I'd like to declare my interest

In a collection of ideas, ideals

That everyone thinks they'd like to believe

And feel quite good with tea and soft focus.

Hello, I'd like to declare that I'm drunk

And the chair of the club

That wouldn't rub shoulders

With you, the community.

Hello, I'd like to declare that I'm sent

From the infamous armies of Satan

We've got pictures and papers

On you and your offspring

And we're waiting,

To integrate input from you,

The community.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

The picture you see before you

Has no sharp edges,

The colours represent

A very fashionable choice by Arturo

Who did the Auto CAD.

As you can see from the map

There are many spaces

That could be filled with a diverse range

Of hope and energy

Please all imagine

Something that you would like to see

Say “mmmmmm”

And forget the desperation on the doorstep.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

Please disperse with military efficiency

Into groups of relevant proficiency and expertise.

Assemble your blueprints in two blinks on post its,

Please keep the yellow and green ones separate from pink.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

Wouldn't it be nice to have some nice things.

Yes.

Other places have nice things, it could be nice.

Yes.

This is nicer than the other place I was.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

I mean where they going to put it all ?

Where you going put all of them ?

If you put them there,

Where you going to put

All things you have to put

When you put things places?

Where they going to put it all?

It won't fit.

And who put em up to it?

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

I need something for what I do

People like me, they do too

We could do something for what I do

I like doing what I do.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

You call this business,

Strung out hairdressers, beauticians and fried chicken

I'll buy a flat and you'll feel me pissing

From a great height.

I'm drunk and I don't give a...

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

Space is love

The love of this community

Concious of its beating heart

Seizing this transformational opportunity

To reaffirm tradition with a new start.

We can build something beautiful

With all the voices at the table

Open up the arena
For an eco-equitable, enabling eco-system

Of interactions symbiotically structured

To be systemically symmetrical celebrations

Of space as love.

Things I didn't hear at the meeting

Why don't we just chip in and buy them out.

Pass round the hat, get busy

Will have a few hundred mil in a couple of minutes.

If there's any left in the pot

We can give it to married, mortgaged middle-aged

White men because they don't seem to get a lot.

But we could build a tower block.

Yes, we could build a tower block

That's exactly what Tottenham needs

Another tower block.

So often it would come to this

And then it would come to this
Some wide road, empty and orange
East of the known world and alone
This is like that.
Carrying the valuables
Fielding unsuitables
Adding another ladder rung
Nut to the scaffold
And then some unknown road
Not long from morning
Gone missing
So often it would come to this.

He was a sensitive child with his own mind
Even when he could crawl
He'd show boredom with coeing adults
Turn his long thick torso to the grass
The probation officer fell in love
That bored him
A love that needs the valuables carrying
Hands too small
For any oedipal shield
Or sword
The archetypes we learn
Are not our own. Formative
Chinese whispers and trauma.
So often it would come to this.

His grandmother said
"Welcome to Africa"
Opened the door on a whitewash room
Just large enough for the inch thick mattress
In the morning she drove me to Robben Island.
I never saw her happier
And then sent me on, out to Observatory.
They said his granddad jumped off a block
In Angola, when the revolution was won
After he had bitten tears,
Blessed improper funerals
Seen the fruit
That grew from high ideals.
So often it comes to this.

Teardrop haiku

All teardrops are salt
Salt water is poison to soil
It sterilises.

Requiem for human flourishing

You can't tell what we've lost

Her, drowned in the Med

With all the secrets that she held in her head

All of those things she could have said

The machines that could've come from her fingers.

There's no way to count the cost

He could have been writing like Rowling

But belt tightening and frightened of howling wolves

He goes begging

While Dem Belly Full.

There's no way of knowing.

That kid growing without folic acid

And he sits his SATS but behaviour erratic

Cos his mum is attacked by the panic

In sweeping up bread crumbs.

Attachment deficit. Label him, dumb.

We lost an Einstein illiterate

We lost another itinerant

We lost another at the border with no visa

Because his skin didn't fit

There's a cost to us all

No way of counting it.

To the confused (spoken)

They been confused by J.Edgar Hoover
Y'all gangster, movers and shakers
The music that your chains make for your abusers
The crackers. Ya Babylon. Vampire Squid
Pickney tricked the road to nick is paved in riches
Reinstitute the slave trade in weak minded bitches.

Man tell me they need crime to write a bar
I'm like ra-ra-ra, go bath in tar
Roll your self in feathers
Lock your own hands in chains
Since the sixties and Nixon J.Edgar Hoover had your brain.

II.

Why you think they shot King
Black fame?
Or because he was a messiah preaching peace
In rhythms of the King James.

Call it all jive
Farrakahns a racist and he's still alive.

Drowning horses

Washed hollow and prone

Frayed bridle cut through palm to bone

Beside this bedraggled, exhausted nag

Our breasts both rise like hills and sag

Its tongue lolls from sandpaper throat
On lake shore where clouds of pennies float

With heavy heart I exert these forces

I have been drowning horses.

Sure enough, in comfort lead

It whinnied not in those first treads

With husband hand I grasped the tack

We strolled in peace along the track

For sure this beast does have a thirst

With eyes to sky I ask what curse

For when I lead it to the lake

It just stands and stares and waits.

And though some may find other courses

I have been drowning horses.

Sticky eyed with foam flecked lips

It will not stoop to take a sip

Despite running sweat in beating sun

Ne'er spoons its tongue in proffered tun
I'll take a pale and douse it down

Careworn, it just stamps and frowns

So I wrest the bridle with all my thunder

And pull the damn fool's head right under

It is not without a grave remorse

I have to drown this horse.

How we thrash and flail like alligators
And draw a crowd of awed spectators

As in struggle we rise and fall

Making fountains and waterfalls.

I heard you can lead a horticulture

But can't make vegetables think
And you can lead a horse to water

But you can't make it drink.

I will apply my unconventional resources

I have been drowning horses.

Washed hollow and prone

Frayed bridle cut through palm to bone

Beside this bedraggled, exhausted nag

Our breasts both rise like hills and sag

It's tongue lolls from sandpaper throat
On lakeshore where clouds of pennies float.

The critical question

There has been some fuss
Over the referendum, EU withdrawal
Schengen schenanigans
Other addendums
The proper question for the body politic
These are not.
The proper question is
#BunDemHowHot?

Wax, Petrol, Bottles and Rags

Wax, petrol, bottles and rags
My doubt in dhotis doubles
Trouble. Cartier cartels like Bolsheviks
Parasite this Empire's sunset
Sunset on the senate, quarterised Agora
Centuries since Tom Paine's tree transplanted
Tankers and satellites bring Ash Die Back
The Old Lady knocked the rafters from the house
This shack a sty,
Pigs plastering edits on the walls
Deifying myths of our perfection
This church takes more than Tithe
Thrives on human sacrifice

The pragmatic response?
Wax, petrol, bottles and rags

Turkeys balloted on Christmas or Thanksgiving
A needle in the neck
To paralyse the body politic, ancient medicine

Pump oil to the furnace planet
Till giants corner the ring,
Regulation as usual, business in digital.
A stitch in time saves nine
So they stitch and they stitch
Alibis over the crimes, wool over the House
A douse of paraffin is a sure cure for louse
Stockpile in case of
Disaster capitalist frags
Wax, petrol, bottles an rags.

I used to gaze at castles

I used to gaze at castles

And dream you'll understand

Their high stone walls

Pennants and armies at command.

My battle voice so rarely used

On illustrated plates

I used to gaze at castles

Think of all within their gates.

At Harlech, where the castle stands

The sea has fled

A golf course and a camp site
Sit in the harbour's stead

I dreamt how ships came into port
With mutton and with mead
Just thirty men to hold the fort
Was all that they did need.

There is no call for castles now
Walls just well built memories
That make this tourist town
There for all to see.

Caricatured in knights and wars
Moores of legend and of magic
I used to gaze at castle walls
Never knew a siege so tragic.

Things not to say on Tinder 42.

Oh sweetest Seraphim
Arc bright lamp so luminous
I've been off a-foraging
Through this landscape so voluminous

This landscape where
Your message raised me
So high above the penguin crowds
With butterfly net and razor
I have been picking clouds.

Searching only for the sweetest
Not the over-ripe and weepy grey
Those fluffy white with crispy tops
Not whispy ones that float away.

I picked vanilla cirrus, apple stratus
All the Cherry cumulus I'm able
Even Wasabi alto-stratus
To lay upon your table.

I cup them all in ramikins
Juggle the crop for all I'm worth
Until your thought evaporates
And I return to earth.

More must die

More must die
This battle not enough
My lord in wrath unquenched
More must die.

Though on these acres souls
Like stubbled fields of straw have fallen
Those callow tender sprouts misguided blow
Like flakes of ash upon the wind
More must die.

Though my footprints inked in blood
Ankles lapped in crimson tide of sacrifice
Breeches soaked in spleen and fluids as I wade
More must die.

A legion will not quench
Like starved hounds bays ire unsheathed
Though lit pyres sicken the morning sky
More must die.

Till artisans replace the forest with bones
And build cathedrals of skulls to placate my Lord
More must die.

The world's fracked

Gas, for gaslighting
Grilled world seconds from midnight
Eichmann in Houston
Short sighted pollution
Turkeys vote from one night of maddness
Before they ring in Christmas
Liquidate the forest, desecrate empty cradles
Civilisations and small business fail
When they don't price time.

Poison Ivy

The fascist apologists tend to come from the middle
Strivers, connivers, the safe
Those at the top are oft for the chop
Those at the bottom can see what is rotten
The conformist, uniformists that hate
They agree to the fiddle
Facist apologists tend to come from the middle.

Romantic advice

If he asked me, I'd say reoffend

For this love would not leave

And even if she's not that fond

Of you, in faith believe

This love would not leave.

In all sympathy abandon

To forsook incarceration

This is not how love is done

In any situation.

So there may be some frustration.

A love to set you free of course

Cannot leave you locked

To be the cause of such remorse

Is not the conduct of a rock

So go back to the dock.

Shoplift, or insurance fraud

Or barring that a fight

Such priceless love man can't afford

To let away in flight

For every sleepless night.

So reoffend my friend

The surest way to keep her

Give all the water in the Thames

For rare sips from that beaker

And absence make love deeper.

As she passes

Softly goes my sweet

In notes like snowdrops

A symphony of whispers

And gentle as a rose.

Pills

If you feel unwell
There's a pill.
And if that makes you unwell
There's a pill for the pill
And should you find yourself still unwell
Well there's a pill for the pill for the pill
Till your killed.
And if you should wonder why you never got well
Well, where there's a pill there's a bill.

And other mistakes

Some I pushed away

Some I just let go.

Uncertain on a foreign street

Amber catching the beach highlights

Awed my virginal eyes

After years, the airport, when you cried

A phone call over oceans

When I said there was no one else to turn to

And cried.

The grey air in that manhandled flat

Grills on the windows

When you returned

Charged the air like coming thunder and said

“He said don't cheat on me”

The door, an invisible valve

The candles you lit, if I stayed

Till they dripped together into their plates and shook

So wise, gentlemanly, I thought

To leave unknowing for the next party's entanglement
And revenge, caught in somebody else's war

The door was like a valve. I recall

A mind full of abstracts, taught ideals,
That lacked a sherpa's barefoot intimacy

With the undulating track, details
Each hillock, stone and rock, how imperfect we all are.

The wintered Hackney streets

Through greyed snow, when spring was within

And concrete felt like rubber underfoot.

Some I just let go.

Picnic short of a muse - Things not to say on tinder 86

If you're a sandwich short of a picnic
Then I'm a picnic short of a muse
Fruity, cheesy with some breadsticks
I've got something you might use
We'll go country, find a hayrick
Pass the offy get some booze
If you're a sandwich short of a picnic
I'm a picnic short of a muse.

Blueprint - Ghosts

Those that pass through walls, the halls, courts unseen

That raise the terrified from their sleep

The rustling papers, the forms of dead

In screens, smiling, seductive, that lurk

The fridge, dark shadows, the laundry machine

That haunt the story high fonts of our streets.

Do you dress in my mind of them?

Do you believe in them?

Ghosts.

Do you wake, dress and wash at ghost's behest

You, of solid flesh, by borders bound

And steel word of law. They pass through walls.

Your desk they pace and press the circled clock

Between your blades, to find a spine

Pushing honey up the twine, 

String lines to marionettes.

Putting money in your pocket.

Do you buy old rope from ghosts?

Do you sacrifice

The pennies, hours, sensibilities and principal

For the invisible

Look your brother in the eye and lie

Steal, turn people from the door

Over to the law for the undead unseen

For the rustling papers

Would you operate ovens

For ghosts?

Crates and paper travel like the poltergeists are puppeteers

The chill hand inhuman

A morality of Gyges, picking the pumphouse lock

Come by, and whistles. The crook.

The dead with unfinished business

Some functionary faked the paper for a cheque

Fiddled while the world burnt. Banal concerns.

The furniture is gone, the railroad and pipes

The miracles of yestyear's endeavour

In flames devoured. They gather

In a semi-circle and rub their hands

Stretch their formless palms towards the flames

Solid flesh blisters, yet ghosts cannot get warm.

Uniformed armies at their beck

Daily ford the river, daily scale walls

Battle blind and raging at their foe

Soldiers cannot see the war

Yet blood let, pillage and enfief their fellow ape 

The corn we tend, the nightingale. What if from far, far off

With a bottle top taken as a token to a wraith

You choked the albatross.

Do you believe in ghosts?

The belief in fear

Listen, casually. Believe what you hear
And you will be made very, very, afraid
What was it last sent a love to the grave?
Terrorism is the belief in fear.

Life's a short surf on this thunderous wave
A wet board under foot all in balance
Accidents, incidents, timing and chance
And what was it last sent a love to the grave?

There's a war on, and foreign invaders
Blast bombs everyday,
                                      but not over here
Terrorism is the belief in fear
We're worried yes, that's how they made us.

Painting a picture on bright coloured screens
Truth's got shoes, there's fibre optics for hoax
They'll teach you hate like they taught you to smoke
A hollowed out husk in the spider's machine.

Do you wear raincoats when the weather is clear
Need protection, rally round and obey
What was it last sent a love to the grave?
Terrorism is the belief in fear.

II

They've mapped new Asian pipelines on a plan
Because they fell in love with LPG;
And Russia's gas transmission monopoly
So, well, they taught us to hate all Islam.

Two men stabbed a soldier in Woolwich and stood
They were nicked, arrested and sectioned
Flew a kid back from Libya,
                                   to Manchester
                                             in the election
A Home Office assett, he ended up dead.

Shapes

These loves of different shapes

They do not always tessellate

Naturally slip to fit, embraced

Like fate cast each for other's sake.

In an instant stick, attach

Some may not stretch, to depth

To fill that hole, some gap

Or knot that stops the closest breath.

But oh, those fine balancing acts

Dynamic, each in flux and pivot

Like champagne, upon a plaque

Upon a hand, upon a ship.

With time some loves may mould

Flow to sediment depressions

May shave or carve, swell to holes
May grow
We never sat that lesson.

And you, you loved me

Like I was a leak in the gutter over your pot

And I, like you were a lost

Lego technic toy from the attic.

But the shapes didn't fit.

I knew it. Did you

Did you make that mistake?

The shapes don't always tessellate.

Field of Hay

This field of hay
Is featureless
The sun lost
In late day haze
Cans and empties
Which way is home?
Is it fair to ask
The field is featureless.

White satin

Seraphim, guardian of hope

Culmination of nature's art

Jet flame high, remote

Open up, let flow you heart

Your lips

Close enough for blood to bind

All before, pay no mind

Other lovers, yours and mine

Pay no mind

Gossip and judging eyes

Pay no mind
For what judge
Are eyes of souls and love?

Call, tell me are your hands empty

Holding soap bubbles

And where do you remember me?

Do you pinch yourself sometimes

Troubled that I can't be true.

Those actors that you know

Could they dig this deep?

Could you?

To the editor

To the editor
I often write poetry
Do you read haiku?

Trying for Sticky Toffee

They promised sweets of our heritage

And pink cheeked childhood

Cooking sticky toffee

It's not looking good.

That sweet sticky toffee

That you chew and chew and chew

Till you're sick

Seems simple enough
But it's a delicate trick.

If it's too hard

We'll break our teeth in a bite.

If it's too soft

We'll swallow all overnight.

Stir butter and sugar

But the heat's hard to judge

I've always preferred the imported chocolate
A British tradition,

They'll serve us a fudge.

(Diabetes is the only outcome of this shower

There's a mountain of butter, start over

The pan's a hard scour.)

Shrapnel no.7

Black coffee and acid for breakfast.
Tai Chi.
False spring starts me like a childhood memory.
You should stay one day
For coffee.
We could discover a whole new city.

Thing 2

Haul upon these mooring lines

Till separate gravities meld

He told me hard across formica tables

And I laughed

So far from Delphi

How would it be different.

The harlequin and bells

Against pavement teeth, stacked dice

With lights on on some floor

Adequate camouflage

Concrete, at least temporarily.

They changed hands

The cafe that made the churros

Watered down the chowder

And soon there will be funerals

Crush buckets like pallbearers

Pause.

Traditions, like guards

Will change

Like water through a lock

So soon forgot we'll say here's level

Even if it's the 27^th floor

And they still call the children African

Eating bacon, stale churros

And shaking shrapnel at their elders

To buy beer.

I cried the whole night through

You did not come

I cried the whole night through

Such that my soaked mattress

Became a marsh

Sinking in the thought of you

Submerged and all surrounding

Body riven through with flame in drowning

In the brackish, black undertow

Like a hot wash spinning

Sweat drops on my spine

Mustard tears on my cheeks

The thought of you sawing

On my stretched gut string.

You did not come

I cried the whole night through

Such that my soaked mattress

Became a marsh and I awoke

Surrounded by wading birds and heron.

Crisp Packets on the Avenell Rd and A letter to Arsene Wenger II

I. Crisp Packets on the Avenell Rd.

Crisp packets on the Avenell Rd

Under the clouding Sky.

What once was diamond, marble, bronze

Is plastic now, light and glass

Astroturf

Where was once was grass.

Hashtag protests staffed by ghosts

Journalists and empty crisp

Packets blowing down the Avenell Rd.

Felt-tip scrawl on A4

Out of all proportions lensed

Broadcast reproduction

Global distribution, trends

It's Freudian. The trapped at home

And fatherless grasp manhood

Through patricide. With Oedipal leverage
An edited double page spread

By buttered bread mercenaries

Goes blowing down the Avenell Rd.

Under the clouding sky.

Lesbian bloggers on the Avenell Rd.

Crisp packets in Damascus

The tactics of birth certificates

A war of pipes, fox holes and pockets

Non-linear dynamics, google mapped

OCEANs, fingertip cracks

Fissure outliers in the system

Literate multi-lingual sophistication

Went out of fashion.

And enlightenment so yesterday.

II. A letter to Arsene Wenger

A guess the cock if oft the weather vein

A shot at the big cup covers a couple

Of crying actors, tickets and twitter-bots

Same shit. I blame brexit.

After the game is done

Blinded by the Sun

They'll blame some crazy bastard from the A-team

Claim he didn't work his share.

After the game is done

In light of the sky and the sun

If we look around for those to whom comparison seems fair

What colour was your revolution?

Beyond Michels and Paisley

Like none since Ali

Alongside Gaddaffi, Assad, dare I say

Obama

A leader worthy of hyper reality psychodrama.

Transcendent in the end

As Kings are ever known as Cesar

The Gunners head will be Arsene.

Not for the rhyme

It ain't poetry that makes them fly from overseas
Swear they won't leave
Long after three
Holding cold cups of tea.

It ain't the rhyme
That makes them bang on the door
Call at the window
Wanting what came before.

I can't put my finger on it
It's on the tip of my tongue
It's not for the rhyme that they come.

Fish and refugees I,II,III

The bald heads bobbed above the standard seats

Like toffee apples in a bowl on Halloween

“I'm shipping the chest freezer all the way over”

“All the way over!”

“All the way over. Shipping's cheap.”

“I was a child in the Isle of Mann

It's their fault for having open borders

All the way to over there.”

“I know about the EU” he said

“We have an agreement with the French”

37,000ft in the air.

“Do you know how many people died on Thailand's roads this month?”

He asked, almost accusatory.

“How old is yours?”

“36”

“You don't smoke”

“No”

“No”

“Not anymore”

“And how old are you now?”

“We can have the fish”

“You can't just fish more fish there are scientists”

“Scientists give our fish to the Spanish.”

Fish is 0.5% of GDP

97% of migrants are not refugees
This I didn't share, lean in, intervene
From my chair, given that obviously,
Small changes can cause chaos

In a complex system

And at the time we were all 37,000ft in the air.

“I haven't done as well as some of my friends

From the Grammar. Secondary Modern?”

The other nods

And I don't blame my father” to strangers

37,000ft in the air
With no mention of the City, or pensions, tax
Empire, sunset havens, their asylum.

“but you want to know what went wrong of course”

The man from the Isle of Mann agreed.

And they talked fish and refugees.

II.

Because the commonwealth will come and help us

Because we were raised on these myths

That Johnny Foreigner loved the way we give it to em

Because coal black, white tooth sambo

Will offer up his bowl

In exchange for a touch of British class.

Because they were lucky to have us

We were raised on these myths.

What have they done to Greece?

To Sumeria?

Ruins now and aped in architecture

The house that power built and myths

Stripped and shipped and worn

Like ermines of our time.

Do they build like Christchurch in Korea?

Will we who first burnt coal be remembered in our forms

Will they read Shakespeare and Newton any more

Like Pythagoras and Homer

Will these stories fur our descendants shoulders

Even as their great arc breaks on this new era's shore?

The myths don't tell you
That we dismantled the cotton industry of India
For the mills of Manchester

Dismembered the Ottoman Umma when oil was new and cool.
Fought the Chinese for right to sell them smack
Fought them again to sell them more.
Murdered the Irish for nine hundred years,

James, Henry, Cromwell, the blight,

Filler on the Western Front.
Armed Benin to enslave the Gold Coast, Guinea
Then broke them in debt

Our myths don't record this
But the Irish, Chinese, Ghanaians, the Indians

They all have their own myths.

Our myths speak of a heroic past

When pith helmets paved the way for God

And God spoke in English

When we bought trade to backwaters

And illiterates ululated, encircled, enthralled

Crowned us with garlands and feathers
Showed us gleaming treasures which we took.

Our myths never say that maybe they
Expected garlands back.

And so we go
Cap proudly on our head

And offer up these myths to the French
Who we fought for five hundred years
And sneered at.
And Germans, who we fought and humiliated

The Italians who we fought, the Austrians and Hungarians

Who we defeated. The Dutch for whom we invented
Concentration camps.
And the Spanish where we've got a rock

Stuck like a pile in their butt

And say give us this, for these myths

But they have their own.

III.

The driver made the ride scream all the way

Down the road from Bangkok, professional

Past low foundries, platoons of effigies

Blurring like change, green and sweat, square shacks

Body shops each block like the vehicles here

Are broken.

The green Island rises above grey sea

Like a well sung myth. Roof gone high and wide

Above the shrubs, pale sand, dark palm fronds splay

Like torn Venetian blinds against the sky

Pennants of a paradisal army

And some, beetle eaten their headdress slipped

Make littoral a harbour of stalled ships

The tropic thick air presses like a dilute sea

Seasoned by butterflies, blooms, these foreign

To my eye the lizards, bugs, the plants here

Flower until they die.

From the shore at night you'd be forgiven

For thinking the fishing boats far cities

Lost Atlantis and its suburbs risen

From the sea. What chance do squid have, what pity

Soft flourescence the most delightful spell

Of all sweet dances in staged Darwin's hall

What chance do they stand against the blazing lure

Appolline, Venusian halogens

To see such beauty so immense and pure

That we could not know, but to call it awe

So they rush to the net, the plate, their end.

There are young teak stands, seas of cane acreage

And the jungle brush fires reak like temples.

Throughout the year, when the cane stands tall

After sundown men go from the village

Set flaming torches to ripe sugar

And it lights the countryside like pillage.

The saddest part is to see elephants

Balding pink patches, hunched, dropped ears, limp trunks

Chained waiting for riders they cannot want

Far from home jungles and most often drunk.

A couple, young and bronzed track the water

Footprints snakewise though the sand and jetsam

Their hands are not together, heads are down

This dream they both dreamt in another town

Seems dreamt now in separate minds today

Like they woke in a brochure and full of reproach

The saltwater washes their tracks away.

Shrapnel 32

Damn fools got trolled, sell the crown jewels for roubles

Posh trash and screwballs, wash cash with new rules

The carve up, of the imperial cigar butt

Ash for the hard up, putting robots in Starbucks.

Penny pinching cos your pockets is picked

Taking in inches cos you swallowed the shit.

Since the voyage of the Begal

Stitched by thread-needle, the spread eagle

Spreads-evil

Easier to rob oil when the country is feeble.

It's like banks leak to barbados

Played us like guitars and invades us.

Treat the whole world like Vegas

The shit's worn old

Rachet strap attachment for fascists

Get the scaffold.

Ask me this

Ask me this
In magnesium flares
That which you wish
If you've will to dare.

And I would grow flowers
Cut flowers like the heads of heathens
Like harvest corn.
What colours would we make
Kaleidoscope and follow fate
Through fractal days,
Reinventions, iron filings
In the fireworks
Cream in the puddings
All this patience in the dark
Ask me this
At the end of a touch paper
Full of spark.

Fish and refugees. III

The driver made the ride scream all the way

Down the road from Bangkok, professional

Past low foundries, platoons of effigies

Blurring like change, green and sweat, square shacks

Body shops each block like the vehicles here

Are broken.

The green Island rises above grey sea

Like a well sung myth. Roof gone high and wide

Above the shrubs, pale sand, dark palm fronds splay

Like torn Venetian blinds against the sky

Pennants of a paradisal army

And some, beetle eaten their headdress slipped

Make littoral a harbour of stalled ships

The tropic thick air presses like a dilute sea

Seasoned by butterflies, blooms, these foreign

To my eye the lizards, bugs, the plants here

Flower until they die.

From the shore at night you'd be forgiven

For thinking the fishing boats far cities

Lost Atlantis and its suburbs risen

From the sea. What chance do squid have, what pity

Soft flourescence the most delightful spell

Of all sweet dances in staged Darwin's hall

What chance do they stand against the blazing lure

The Venusian halogens

To see such beauty so immense and pure

That we could not know, but to call it awe

So they rush to the net, the plate, their end.

There are young teak stands, seas of cane acreage

And the jungle brush fires reak like temples.

Throughout the year, when the cane stands tall

After sundown men go from the village

Set flaming torches to ripe sugar

And it lights the countryside like pillage.

The saddest part is to see elephants

Balding pink patches, hunched, dropped ears, limp trunks

Chained waiting for riders they cannot want

Far from home jungles and most often drunk.

A couple, young and bronzed track the water

Footprints snakewise though the sand and flotsam

Their hands are not together, heads are down

This dream they both dreamt in another town

Seems dreamt now in separate minds today

Like they woke in a brochure and full of reproach

The saltwater washes their tracks away.

Fish and refugees, postscript

Because the commonwealth will come and help us

Because we were raised on these myths

That Johnny Foreigner loved the way we give it to em

Because coal black, white tooth sambo

Will offer up his bowl

In exchange for a touch of British class.

Because they were lucky to have us

We were raised on these myths.

What have they done to Greece?

To Sumeria?

Ruins now and aped in architecture

The house that power built and myths

Stripped and shipped and worn

Like ermines of our time.

Do they build like Christchurch in Korea?

Will we who first burnt coal be remembered in our forms

Will they read Shakespeare and Newton any more

Like Pythagoras and Homer

Will these stories fur our descendants shoulders

Even as their great arc breaks on this new era's shore?

The myths don't tell you
That we dismantled the cotton industry of India
For the mills of Manchester

Dismembered the Ottoman Umma when oil was new and cool.
Fought the Chinese for right to sell them smack
Fought them again to sell them more.
Murdered the Irish for nine hundred years,

James, Henry, Cromwell, the blight,

Filler on the Western Front.
Armed Benin to enslave the Gold Coast, Guinea
Then broke them in debt

Our myths don't record this
But the Irish, Chinese, Ghanaians, the Indians

They all have their own myths.

Our myths speak of a heroic past

When pith helmets paved the way for God

And God spoke in English

When we bought trade to backwaters

And illiterates ululated, encircled, enthralled

Crowned us with garlands and feathers
Showed us gleaming treasures which we took.

Our myths never say that maybe they
Expected garlands back.

And so we go
Cap proudly on our head

And offer up these myths to the French
Who we fought for five hundred years
And sneered at.
And Germans, who we fought and humiliated

The Italians who we fought, the Austrians and Hungarians

Who we defeated. The Dutch for whom we invented
Concentration camps.
And the Spanish where we've got a rock

Stuck like a pile in their butt

And say give us this, for these myths

But they have their own.

Fish and refugees

The bald heads bobbed above the standard seats

Like toffee apples in a bowl on Halloween

“I'm shipping the chest freezer all the way over”

“All the way over!”

“All the way over. Shipping's cheap.”

“I was a child in the Isle of Mann

It's their fault for having open borders

All the way to over there.”

“I know about the EU” he said

“We have an agreement with the French”

37,000ft in the air.

“Do you know how many people died on Thailand's roads this month?”

He asked, almost accusatory.

“How old is yours?”

“36”

“You don't smoke”

“No”

“No”

“Not anymore”

“And how old are you now?”

“We can have the fish”

“You can't just fish more fish there are scientists”

“Scientists give our fish to the Spanish.”

Fish is 0.5% of GDP

97% of migrants are not refugees
This I didn't share, lean in, intervene
From my chair, given that obviously,
Small changes can cause chaos

In a complex system

And at the time we were all 37,000ft in the air.

“I haven't done as well as some of my friends

From the Grammar. Secondary Modern?”

The other nods

And I don't blame my father” to strangers

37,000ft in the air
With no mention of the City, or pensions, tax
Empire, sunset havens, their asylum.

“but you want to know what went wrong of course”

The man from the Isle of Mann agreed.

And they talked fish and refugees.

Note

In lieu of a hotel
I spent the night in Pattaya
In various bars
Decorated with whores
But you had exhausted me
Of all, none seemed worthy.

Emotional Intelligence

I had looked in through a lense

Bent light magnifying the focal point

Making elephants from sea horses

Like a ship's captain or spy.

Espionage on my psyche.

Infiltrating which why.

Straightening my spine
In mantras, calming horses in the garden

Until once I just heard waves

Like radio from inner tides

Like surf wash, too wide for the eye

Meaningless through a lense.

The voice the forest makes

From all its combined parts

Asidophilous, the gut, the heart

The eukaryotic colony, full symphony

Messages formed before the ear

Before words reach

Wi-fi in the mitochondria

Answers like a village greeting

Within the citadel's defence

In waves received emotional intelligence.

List

Phone battery and lense
Tracksuit bottoms.
This is an incomplete list.
Add wanderlust for spice
A thimble of zest
Add white to blue mornings
And watch the sky lift
Add enthusiasm and stir
Thrice widdishins
And check the clocks
Add why to nots.
It will never add up
If you look for the answer to be four
It's not arithmetic, this course.
This an incomplete list.

Acts of faith

The roads are an act of faith

The old world left

Where time was taken to cut corn

Cement empire, mitre ashlar boulevards

For this florescence of concrete rectangles, coated beige

Like religion has faded from yellowed walls

Low houses lost, the undergrowth

Like stenciled adverts peel, eaten by the sweat of air.

A verdant florescence of failed Tetris

Crystalising out of poverty like an invasion

Necessity's efficiency, three to a scooter

While the bloated SUV sits marooned 

In traffic, in rivers of screaming steel

Pheromone lines of industry swarming

A cacophony of honks and horns storm junctions

Like piston driven Wilderbeast across the Mara, Mbalageti.

Over such self-organised acts of faith

New Collossi tower, children of Luxor

Stronger, better fed, clad in dark glass, bones of steel

Saturated in benzene smog like an afterbirth of wealth

The Napoleonic dream lucid in this half light

Tarmaced ballistics, the gyre on thin wheels

Young trees, scaffolded in the flood, a sticking plaster

For this incensed place, that boils.

The roads are an act of faith.

Valentine for L

Moon over water
In love I went diving in
Trying to find you.

Valentine for an errant muse

It's a scar upon my mind that kiss
Etched my nerves like lithograph
Parting peck branded my cheek
Now this sense unbidden comes
The skin blushes
And the bone
A tactile hallucination
The sweetest gift I've known.

Valentine for uplink

Am I allowed to miss you
All this while elapsed
And you moved through
Jail birds and murderers
And I through houses
I was rich then
Favours in my pocket like bank notes
And all so valuable
Most, Most
Favours are not printed from a plate
Each art work unique
Your imprint so soft and brief
And I ended so off and chief
Am I allowed to miss you?
It wasn't ever
That I thought your soul not art
The work that you have wrought
So beautiful, a perfect crystal
Of balanced love, warm joy
And tact
Am I allowed a fond look back?
I will miss you
When I'm a faded memory
And you grey haired and courtly
When the towers are being torn down again
When the seas come, and each season
Is a blessing.
I'll miss you
And know love better in the missing.

Valentine for A

Sproutlings, my fountain, zest
I sketched a thought upon a napkin
To hand onto a passing Toucan
Some token of my affection
I'll act as if you never got.

Some time back I lit a fire in this spot
Not that block that blazes up the way
Down the charred path ashen grey
I wonder how that caught.

There was a sapling on this street
I've searched for day and night
Perhaps if I climb this tall tree
I'll get a clearer sight.

Feather bale, the sun was better with you
Finding myself in the long grass
Corridors booby trapped with anticipation
Your voice like a trapeze harness. Pinstripe suit
The sun was better with you.

Valentine for S

When you put your ear to a shell

You can hear the sea

Only its not the sea, but air

Reverberating between your ear

And the empty space of the shell.

But I'll still reach the pink conch
Off the shelf and listen.

It was only when we stopped

That I saw everyone watching

When we danced in the restaurant

A few days to go.
Woolly hat, green sarong, the pattern

On the cafe window on Mare Street

It's odd what you retain.

Air reverberating against the shell.

I gave no thought to memory then

Tea tree oil and lavender

Turn tumblers, and I hear the sea

Only it's not the sea, but time
Reverberating between heart and memory.

Thing

Call these piled clouds, tall toppling bubbles
So they sit gathered upon my shoulders
Like plastered cherubs with bugles and flute
Blue note sets Weeble free tarantella
I shall wash in this thick winter frost, hot
Till hail spills warm from my brow Baptismal.
Desire born for this season, Christened
In cursive fonts like Ariadne's thread
Lay traced in rotting archaeology
Its direction reckoned in forensics.

Blueprint - Cake

Silk bussel, silvered mirror and wig

She thought leavened eggs

Sugar, risen golden baked,was cake

A hall of silver mirrors and lace.

With a common touch,

Grease fingered and muddied

They called pie

Higher, with deeper slices

Stories tall sliver of filling

Steaming via the podium

From some nation's womb

And it's news.

Pie is how we organise sunshine.

Calm at the eye of the storm, cake

A gyre spread across continents

Wrath or bounty in a wing's breath

Bodies of men and women, steel hoppers

The wheels of lorries, docking ships

Hands in chain across dimensions

Plane brake smoke on bitumen

Cake is not the the thing in the tin

Cake is how we organise sunshine.

Certain as it rises

Balance a pyramid on pin

Set head after tail, after head

After wing, after leaf, after blade,

After photon..

Alfafa, Cock's foot and Timothy

Concentrate blue grass to cream

Organise worms to custard

Box sunshine in steel and ship it

From under the watchful eye of Christ

To glass mountains

Soya beans marching like Napoleon

Rivers be dammed, greenhouses

Built on sand. Blood on the walls

Blood in the drains, for Pie.

This is how we organise sunshine.

Therapy Notes II

In calling after echoes of you
I found hard walls
Tunnels reverberating
In hurled questions
Heard the old curse repeat
And repeat and repeat
Until it settles.

In calling after echoes
Calling out to walls and tunnels
I heard a wailing child I could not find
Beaten by bounced brick bats
Indicted by blame
Found that comfort missed
From the call of anguish
That repeats and repeats and repeats
Until it settles.

In calling after echoes of you
I began to find missing screws
Piston bolts, the grit, lost teeth
In lightless vaults retrained sight
Retrained my ear, like bats to
Echoes
That repeat and settle.

They make the air a vice

They make the air a vice
And the pension crisis
Solved by wolves

Fear in the hollow eyes
The houses, mouths open wide
Respectably shocked
And silent.

They make the air a vice
Pressing like a coming fire
Walking with hands ready
Clenched, missing a rosary
Worry lines like tectonics in streets
And an ad break.

What's the benefit of all this
Orwellian project handed in late
The trail of a small jet
All the clothes a little older
Decorated.
Chop and change like shops
The air is a vice
Invisible wolves in the clouds
There will be looting.

Like Nandrolone

I'll see you soon
Means the same as I'll phone
She loved me
Like an iguana in fish tank
I loved her like Nandrolone.

Going to sleep on the job

Here's a thing

And you may think it's odd

Top pros

Fall asleep on the job.

It can be a hard day's work

Full of stress and strain

But when the jobs on

It's not time to complain.

When it's all up in the air

And there's lights flashing up

And all about

Have just run amok.

Here's a tip from the top

And you may think it odd

Top pros

Go to sleep on the job.

When they're all out there

Looking on you

When there's no way out

And more chores to do

The solution, is not what you think

Find a spot right by the fuss

And take forty winks.

When is comes parniing down

And they call off the dogs

That's when top pros

Go to sleep on the job.

Salt and ashes

Cast this cargo seaward
Salt and ashes, what it fertilises
I will neither know nor tend
Only seeds upon the wind
I will not pass by here again.
The watermark is low
Cast this cargo
And should some find value
Fish, urchins, crab
Let us celebrate next habour
With logs, flagons and song
They will not mark this spot for long
Not with an X.
But let us celebrate
Sacrifice to fish
It was but stowed weight these gifts
This fresh wind so swift
She skips across the crests
And runs the storms like Terns
Tell me are there ports to West
Or South of here
I have a hold so capacitous
Maybe in Dalmatia
I'll find pepper I can trade for wine
This cargo is but salt and ashes
The wind is good, the weather fine.

Patterns

If as from my life seems clear
I fall in love every seven years
Then by the time I love again
I'll be 49 and to what end?
To just repeat this pattern.

It's a thought and part a fear
A cause to check the course and steer
By the time I love again
I'll be 49 and to what end?
To just repeat this pattern.

She was so hot

When I met her I was like

"Where do you shop?"

She was so hot she burnt cotton up

Made nylon melt

She'd walk in the rain

And turn wool into felt.

I said "Would you like a drink?"

She said something with ice

Didn't blink 

Held my heart like a vice. 

She was so hot 

She turned shower drops to steam

Kept changing the channel

With infrared beams

She could cook an egg in her hand 

The constant smoke alarms

Give her oats, butter and

Honey, she could make flapjacks in her palm. 

She was so hot 

She was so hot, I candid confide

I was afraid for my child

Because of piles of bromide. 

Like an explosion

White heat, blue lights, A&E, third degree

Six months in traction, intensively. 

There were times I thought it couldn't last

Like after the fourth skin graft 

Making love in an ice bath

But the water wouldn't last

And we wouldn't stop

Wake staring up at a pitying doc.

After the fourteenth graft post-op

Got a consultant proper top

Nobody's fool

And he suggested investing 

In a swimming pool. 

It didn't take long. 

We got an ice dispenser

Opened a hammam as a community centre

Then thought why not. 

Got a turbine charged 20p a kilowatt. 

Now everyday we fill the whole pool with ice.

Steam generate making nice.

The Venerable Should

In the Understood Wood

In the Foothills of Good

Lives a beast known

As the Venerable Should

With two hundred heads

And a great sense of smell

The Venerable Should

Is often unwell.

For with two hundred heads

It has two hundred minds

And they don't all agree

All of the time.

So as one is given

To climb up a tree

Then another is given

To burrow beneath

And it furrows the brow

Of those in between

A hundred howls echo

Through the glimmering green

For a Should could do this

And Should could do that

You will often see Shoulds

Going forward and back.

And sometimes its coat

Is a big fuzzy ball

And sometimes it molts

And is clean cut and small.

And if you see one

You sometimes can't tell

For the Venerable Should

Changes colour as well.

Sometimes its brown mottled

And brushed into the green

At others, pink polka dot

That cannot be unseen.

One head likes to fish

And stay down by the river

Another gets colds

Its nose all a quiver

And yet another

Will eat only fruit

And the next one along

Likes Trivial Pursuit.

And they all think that they're right

And they generally are

But the Venerable Should

Seldom strays far.

For with two hundred heads

And four hundred eyes

That it is often confused

Is no great suprise.

In the Foothills of Good

The chorus of Should

Is sometimes seen chasing

For Ifs and for Woulds.

And rarely, when the stars

Are all in correct sections

The two hundred heads

Face one direction

Then, in the Understood Wood

In the Foothills of Good

Goes trotting forward

The Venerable Should.

Jerry Beck's grant cheque

Jerry Beck's grant cheque had knees
And jumped from bank to bank like fleas
They gave him this, and gave him that
And soon that grant cheque grew fat.

He took the entertainment cash
And put it all on railtrack
Over summer made a stack
Then returned the balance back.

Jerry Beck had patience
And asked good questions too
From fractions of a cent or pence
His yeastlike fortune grew.

Jerry Beck's grant cheque had knees
He plays cricket
With the Cayman Island cricket team.

Weather balloons

We read it very early on
As the hole in ozone bloomed
NASA in Alaska with their weather balloons
They captured all the data
And when it was not what they assumed
They said it must be calibration
The gadget out of tune.
So they put it back to benchmark
Light made dark by folk so smart
We'd just been to the moon.

And throughout the 70s
And in the 80s too
They threw out what they saw
For what they thought they knew
We sprayed aerosol and CFCs
The hole above us grew
And all the while they changed the spreadsheets
Thinking them untrue
And these were folk of science
They were not buffoons
Whole teams for decades
Deaf to weather balloons.

Forget all this

Love, why not lover, come to bath, to wash
Come to the table, to cloth
The cost, the hurt, would make this love so firm
On deep cut foundings we will grow and learn.

Know it's only you
Your cautious grace, a slow embrace
Like every space is kissed
Your regal air, your will to dare
Makes every place a palace.
Forget all this.

Forget the day, these hours
The shackling clock so slow
Forget the brick, the towers
This city paved in gold
Forget your doors and curtains
Your furnishings and clothes
Forget all your bright jewelry
Forget them all and come

To the forests, the briars, the dark thickets
Beyond all lies and truth
Beyond veracity and acting
Beyond age and youth
Tear yourself if you must
Till blood drips,
Drips from the wire pen
Sunshine, our land
Are not yours till won.

Rugby ball

This may be not the thing to say
But we'll make it right another day.
And now if you admit your fall
I won't treat you like a rugby ball
Seek to grasp and runaway
Drop kick to touch to make a play
Throw you swift around my friends
And push and barge off other men.

This may be not the thing to say
We'll make it right another day
When you call, it's joy to fall
You won't become a rugby ball.

Therapy notes

Too much the child
They will not help you up
And fix you
They've done their time
This what their skills can do
They will not help you up.

And if they could've done better
Settled all the butterflies
Set up all the dominoes
You know they would've done so
This is what their skills can do
They cannot help you up.

The slow rolling of the hill
The greying hairs
The baggage train of unexplained
Armaments, defences
The rusted buckle on well stowed pain
The ordinary pretences
The soft and seeping sore of love
Too tender to be touched
Too much the child
Too much the child
They will not help you up.