Leaves like ears and tongues

I have been waiting for the Sage to flower

This village of grey green furred leaves like ears

In spring rooves spread curved about the compost

Now build cathedrals, articulates spires

Skyward, like furred radio towers.

I have been waiting for the Sage to flower.

How it has grown, grey-green furred leaves like tongues

That wag in wind, pregnant with utterance.

Rising like a snap of timelapsed helicopters

They stretch their soft cupped tips slowly upwards.

My mother says it is good husbandry

To snip back stem to base before it seeds

Or that lush Sage company grows chaos.

Sparse mess of wooden lines, withered ears

A mass of snakes at death. The roots expire.

I have been waiting for the Sage to flower

This tall copse of rushes, soft leaves like ears

Still in the morn, a landing patch for flies

Around the black bin a grey forest throngs

Steadily rising furred leaves like tongues.

Faeries make their home there, in purple cups

A bit like bluebells, with a summer outlook

A feast for bees now the rocket has passed

All the Daisies and Borrage, Thyme flowers.
Since retired my mother's Thyme is pruned

To perfectly round bowers, pres d'Agen.

I have been waiting for the Sage to flower
Its towers engulf the old compost bin
Slender grey green palms now stand two foot tall

Their bobbled leaves loll slow like thirsty tongues
Hanging silent in the July sun.

Thick trunked trees well mulched, strawberry patches
A thatch of dry grass, Ivy and Yew
And the faeries will stop, when they pass through
Sprites and pixies too will come
For the purple flower with veined leaves like tongues.

I have been waiting for the Sage to flower

From rising tongues it has built its empire

Elaborates joints like candelarbra
The old black compost bin in forest lost
A cloud of veined grey-green tongues that thrust.

I thought, clear in error, some dyslexic
Misfiled season that Sage when it strung
Its palisade in spring would purple bring
And faeries soon but many moons have sank
And still, my mother would have said the other
A, not April, how fell, my foolish mind
Does serve me ill.

At some august time, correct and proper
After purple sentinels have trumpeted their nectar
The grey-green tongues have fed the zenithed bells
When flies have drank and bees, the faeries swum
In purple cups and pixies played harp
Upon the petals; I will take scissors
Cut stalk to base afresh, tight bunch the stems
With Honeysuckle twine and hold bright flame
Carrying all about house and garden
As witches would have done
A censer make of silent grey green tongues.

For good faeries will come rushing to aid
And bad faeries will turn tail and run
When they smell the scent of a home burning
The purple cups and their soft ears aflame
Fig hollow, foxglove will house those that came.

And set ground afresh for spirits next year
I have been waiting for the Sage to flower.

Shrapnel 102

I put a pin into a fountain and it failed
What is one to do when there's no donkey for the tail?
What is one to do when you've an aeroplane to mail?
I put a pin into a fountain and it failed.

Shrapnel 31

The was I time I ran
Broken mooreland and glen

And clouds gathered like a temper

The clouds were not looking for me
I did not dance for them to come

Yet it rained

The gathering weight of water drops
Washing salt, sweet over my lips
I drank every breath.

Therapy Notes III

I don't care

The frayed child's lie
You should not argue with those not there.
The washing machine will not clean
The churning of these waking dreams.

Pouring dirt in the powder slot
Push the button, pressing play
Turn the dial to boiling hot.
A grey matter, you cannot run away. 

Nor waste in anguish yet more days
For all the fearful love you share
You should not argue with those not there.

Wasted

I.

The cranes are pecking at the mudflats
Scarred ground and glass

Unresting spirits, in torment, the ghosts
Of terraces down west and east are lost
At night, great red eyed rats sit atop

The office blocks
Great red eyed rats, fat

They have evicted even ghosts
And busy making new ones from the young.

II.

Cup aloft in flowing throng, young, tall and blonde he loudly calls “Can anybody help me”

Falters his voice through heaving halls, "Can anybody help me. I'm homeless" receding backs "Can anybody, anybody. Help. A hurry, hurry of hair and cloth stickles past the paper cup; stick to the path in forest, for many are lost; to the escalators “Get out, Get out” The bluecoats shout at she, traffic powdered pallid hurt, knees up, sunweathered spots and anger. Shouted "Get out" as the portly lady just put a KFC bucket at her feet. "Get out" when she got a mega bucket at her feet. She standing now clenched and shouting, silent; not her parents, the numbers, she, we, we've all seen the numbers, all of us, the figures; kid's gait, small storm, zephyr in an alleyway till the grey, bitten hand carved of frostbite says.

“Go get your food”.

III

“Les enfants danse sur la cupole" seulement
Without religion

They offer opiates and racism

Like the bones are no longer in our mouths

Like we miss a season when dead flowers bud.

The children are crying in the tunnels again.
Git, git, git

Glug, glug, glug.

Shrapnel No.88

The rarefied, most alive
There's no need to deify
It's the way I see it in true
And I justify it too
Tell it straight up
I'm gonna subjectify you.

They must have told ya
It's in the eye of the beholder.
At your shoulder, cold how call girls
Can't hold a candle to you
So I hold a brush to canvas
There's no rush, and there's no
Kansas
It's yellowbricks and only us.

No need to mystify my intention for you
You can see it in my eye,
I'm gonna subjectify you.

Faraday might've kicked his cat

This knowledge did not come from God
This but single tapestry stitch

Made by flawed hands that broke edicts

This knowledge was made by humans.

The system made human minds

Inhuman. Without need for God

For grace or piety.

This knowledge is stained with slavery

Torture, war and sin.

There is no stitch in this rich picture
That bares a thread untouched by blood

This knowledge did not come from God.

Ode to the shit they utter

In an emergency
The blue lights flash, sirens and engines
Expensively assembled teams years in training
Rush to the scene.
Pour on as much water, see no expense spared
Get a helicopter up, the cost is who cares?

In an emergency
You put everything to one side
It's not time to do dishes or watch the paint dry
It's not business as usual, take it all in your stride
With that emergency response
You find people died.

Swifts

If they gave swifts a sky trail

That is how i'd like to write
Or hand washing on river rocks
That is how.

And if I've been unfair

To you, to me, to pages

It is in naming this infatuation.

When to give its due

The muse is one type of love

It's true.

And if I've been unfair to love

It is to say

This is not the type

One needs. One needs

A weave of loves like sail rope

A chord, made from chords

Made from threads.

This ink is just one thread

And I would write like swifts instead.

Santa-Claus doesn't wear a crown

There's always been relations
By folk across nations

Scientists and artists
In horse and carts didn't start this.
Erasmus' letters were not the first
Jean-Claude Juncker, far from the worst.

Just as artists will make art
Scientists shine light

Troubadors come with music and fun
Powerful people muster swords and guns
And relate through fights.

But it's bedtime
Four seconds from midnight.

Kenwood at Christmas

Out from repeated fractal grey

The falling licks of yellow flame

Burn brown the fronds of earthen brains
And all the years whares
Laid in carpet on the floor.
The blue has gone and slowly
Yellow turns to brown and grey
Leaving lignen tributaries
Stretched in awe up to the rain.

This a time of furs and scoured grass
The rasping wind in lupine howl
It barely takes a gasp. They will fish carp

Carve turkey and the year's fat from goose
The flames are burning now

These named benches of no use.

In honour of Theresa May's deal

And where Cassandra?
Not since Troy tasked men

To pull the wooden horse

Within its gates

Has such statecraft taken place.
Auto-colonialism to rue and ponder
And facepalms for Cassandra.

Valentine

Let me at this time lie
Just for today.
Tell tall and wild tales
All the while a rose
Between my teeth
Today at least
Let me lie.

Forget didaction and analysis
The mirage oasis objectivity so illusory
In all illusion, lie wildly
And with passion, my rose
Between my teeth and talk
Of buttercups, pillows and home returns
Of roses, spring, covers and pillows
And beaches, peacocks and cake and stars
And cake and, pillows and clouds
And let it all seem true.

So just this one day you may know
How much I always love you.

The 12.51 to Preston

Sitting in a rickety

White conservatory in Leeds
Talking to an umbrella plant
About zen philosophy,

The twelve fifty one to Preston
Is this what the world expected.

The recovering man sits
On the phone to benefits
Poison fossilised in grey snakes
The mill's curse, scarring these hills,
Gap toothed half literate crack piping

Meat packer stamps his feet in threat

Stowed crow bar in the back pack

For opening doors, the politic

Is this what the world expected.

Make a bare room a seminar

Who's doing the throttling and how

The proper method of crop rotation

Palid, with a handsome visage

Rarely visited by smiles

One of his eyes wanders, the son

Oh him, with the racist Staf.

There are no songs

Of how the steam milled killed

This wet aired town.

Is this what the world expected.

After two shifts the soldier will return

From taking all of the five kids to Mosque

Ferry the recovering man for cash

Like basket weavers who borrow cane
Horror dawns over his jaw on the stair

Witness now to the impotence of serfs

Alone with the pots

Is this what the world expected.

Crack concrete to fit fresh pipe

Shift grit in sacks and back

For aggregates till the clock matches

All of that sweat
To cut the ageing radiators out
And create something better
Wait, for the fruit fly to drink
Gas off the fresh ink

Is this what the world expected.

Sitting in a rickety

White conservatory in Leeds

Talking to an umbrella plant

About zen philosophy

Is this what the world expected of me.

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.