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.