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.