Dead letters

Wick ghost, most cherished

I sketch pissed emphemera in pencil

Soot tress this spring all the more

For the less of you

When callous

I laugh at your choice

Ignorant of the act, ill observant

Yet you know

I would be harder, demand you grow

Than all the giddy drunks you make

The muse like seasons

Persistent           I celebrate you wanting

More              in your unkowing

Wish you every blessing.

It is with some hurt, my jet

I laugh at your choice

But I do.

So do you.

Shrapnel No.56

Because I was effortless
In the giving of these gifts
You took it all for granted
Didn't think they would be missed.
Good friends we had
Good friends we lost
Along the way.
I hope we meet again some day.

Best player ever

Ballon D'Or,

Phwoah, do a step over
Dribble some more.
The world's best player
For those who are savvy
Was once called Xavi – Iniesta – Xavi.

Most footballers count one-two
Wall pass, fly through
But great players make triangles
We all know they do.
How do make one with two, not three

Ask that player Xavi- Iniesta – Xavi.

Some players read the game
But a few write the book
Know the next chapter
From only a look
But there's a novelist, with multiple triologies
That player known as Xavi-Iniesta-Xavi

Duels won zero, successful dribbles, zero

You'd think his man-marker was some kind of hero
The truth is the poor lad never got close
Spent ninety-minutes just chasing a ghost
With passes so sensitive they're type you could marry
Off the boots of that player
Xavi-Iniesta-Xavi.

First world problems

The rich have private jets and yachts and yet the shops
Have no cocoa
These boutiques of Brezhnev where you cannot even queue.

I got first world problems
I got first world problems
Like they dissolved jobs into chips and bits
Extract my characteristics
To bamboozle me and sell me shit.

I got first world problems
Like the 20th century infrastructure miracle distilling
Sixty cents in the dollar
Piped, alembic like, into the infinitely capacitous pockets
Of Jeff Bezos, that leaves the rest of us.....

I got first world problems
Like they only make magic money to rearrange property rights
Privatise my collective services
To incompetent fly-by-nights.

I got first world problems
Like they covered the land in tarmac
So you can't grow food
But you can drive to buy it back.

I got first world problems
Like my mind is under attack
By nefarious cabals
That develop their social agenda on crack.

I got first world problems
Like social organisation is complex beyond my comprehension
N-dimensional factorials. An utter dependence on expert systems
Like trains, traffic lights international logistics, wires and gas pipes.

I got first world problems
Like government beyond amateur comprehension
And I've got amateur representation
They said I was above it
But then they closed my station.
(What would you do?)

I got first world, timeless problems
Like barbarians inside the gates
Power high coke fiends that pillage and rape.

It's loco
I got first world problems
I bought the shop out of tropical products like cocoa.

Lost phone

It was shiny and new
Boo hoo Boo hoo
And its camera shot true
Boo hoo Boo hoo
I lost my phone down the Tube
Boo hoo Boo hoo.
It did so many things
I don't need to do.
Boo hoo Boo hoo

I said its dead.

99.9998% of people on the planet
Fight over 7% of the world's wealth

That's 7% for your food, family, education and health
1300 people own everything else.

Is it broken?

Say you're woke but have you woken?

Bleat capitalism, sheep track, goose chase, dog bark wrong tree
Can't see, the wood, forgive him
They make money of you breathing and living

Life's cheap
Turkeys ain't got franchise

If you're woke then blink
If you can't see what's in front of your eyes
Then you'll only ever know what they told you to think.

From each according to their ability
To each according to their need

Sounds like Linux, Sourceforge, YouTube tutorials to me

With 7% for us.
Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos the surplus.

Citizens of nowhere

Citizens of nowhere
Dog whistle, it's Daoist
The yin and yang
Each word its opposite manifests.

Citizens of our Empire.
Citizens of nowhere
Dog whistle the map dots
Spots like Rockall
Sandbars, cocktail bars, Anguila
Citizens of nowhere.

Mother of that vision
Citizens of nowhere
With zeal and greed
Private planes for old men, old women
Handcuffed.
She stole a nurse's passport
And made her die overseas.
Citizens of nowhere.

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.