Thursday, 4 September 2025
on the wind
Monday, 1 September 2025
Homemory
I’ll mark you in my book of memories
between sunfires at dawn and dusk
and meteor waves jolting the spheres
the memory of you will be a home to me
as the sunshafts after the rain are home to me
as the goosebumps from music are home to me
as feeling the last page of a book is home to me
you will be a home to me
in my book of memories
though the shades have darkened
and the pages will have faded
as the storm of the century raged
home to me, home to me
Wednesday, 27 August 2025
Circumstances
Where have you been? Missed you so.
You haven’t changed, I’ve moved on.
Both are scary, what’s come over us?
Perhaps because no one’s letting go.
All them big words and no brawn,
but we’ve never been ones to fuss.
Had nothing to do, so I moved mountains
and a third of the sky off my way:
never be a hostage from geography –
always prefer wild seas to fountains.
Twenty-one grams lighter we weigh
now on our sure sway to apathy
had nothing to do so you froze right there
deer-in-the-headlights of a human being
tried with all your might to stay real
blinded and scorched by the glare
– no cure for that sort of pain –
– you don’t have it in you, sweet girl –
– no cure needed as you’ll do it again –
– chaos in immobility you are –
looking for something which stopped becoming
when you silenced your symmetry
bending space on opposite sides
won’t make it come full circle
we couldn’t even if we tried
or we might have and
we might be, different
Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Scattering of flower
Strewn about the vase
the petals a vestige
of a gone beauty
randomly, perhaps
Gathering the withered
soft and dead dryness
the mind but wanders
in the palm of the hand
Left alone in the field or
left to wane in the house
plucked or unplucked
the flower’s sum and parts
ordered by a deeper chirality
disperse long before they were a seed
arrange long after the end of time
yet mathematically arranged
yet unordered, perhaps
By plucking its petals
one both gathers and disperses
the beauty of the flower
contained elsewhere
randomly, perhaps
Tuesday, 10 June 2025
Handshook
All it took was a handshake
to unsettle the masculined gaze
All it took was a kind look
– the warmth of a handshake –
for him to avert his teary eyes
All it took was a “Hello, Jack”
– the second-too-long handshake –
to expose the chink in the armour
to make him chin-on-chest humble
All it took was the simple kindness
– a handshake like an embrace –
of one who fought unseen battles
recognising one fighting another
telling them without stoic prattle:
“Feel no shame, and be brave, brother.”
Monday, 24 February 2025
In between dreams
Sometimes it’s hard for me
to fit in this world
sometimes I feel that I
could stop a rushing train
right there in its tracks
seconds before speeding off a cliff
absorbing its full momentum
saving hundreds at a time
that my roar could cause an avalanche
which in one embrace I would stop
that I would devise an equation
quantising particles
manifolding them
thereby unlimiting food and fuel
that I could fly out in space
grab and chew a whole black hole
and spit out a new universe
in my mind’s eye I can
and have done all these things
of course in the real world I couldn’t
but my daydreams and nightdreams
are full of daily scenarios
because I am weak-bodied
and strong-willed
and because I know
what it takes to love
what it takes to be unloved
to seek refuge in dreams
when everything else
falls apart
for my inner world is larger
than the entire universe
Wednesday, 12 February 2025
Corps mourant
watching the cormorant
alert, scan the river
plucking torn feathers off –
bitter taste in the mouth
of the weary, backstabbed,
morose office worker
Thursday, 30 January 2025
Enough
Not everything was stolen, of course, but enough was robbed. Enough that I cannot love anymore. It was not just the one robbery, of course, it happened over many years. One kiss, one tryst, one relationship at a time. “I’ll take this,” they said, “who cares if it leaves a hole.” “He won’t mind,” they thought, “he has a lot of love left anyway.” “He’ll pull through,” they reasoned, “heartaches never killed anyone.”
Like this one day on a hike when I saw a procession of mountain rams circling around the dead body of a black fox. At the time obscure explanations seemed the most obvious. Now that I am the fox, I know enough.
Leave me alone so that I don’t have to harness my breath, so that I can freely cycle to and from work, simply, Monday to Friday.
Leave me alone so that I can do my work without interruptions, so that I don’t have to overthink about past and present miseries. I want to be able to enjoy my evening walks, my weekend cooking and nightly reading, alone, unperturbed – undoubtedly sad but assured that the certainty of hurt has gone, or has at least abated enough that I can move about untroubled, assured that I can pour over my books uninterrupted, with the obsession of those yearning for answers who yet doubt everything.
Leave me alone so that I can enjoy my episodic sleep, my epic and magnificent dreams and nightmares. Let me enjoy the carefully-nurtured illusion that I could ever have been and done enough.
And no, you cannot ask me to learn to love again. I am too old and tired for that balancing act. I have seen enough. You’ve robbed me of enough. My heart is like those petrified skeletons in the natural history museum: chipped, glued back together with dirt, with bits missing and instead bits of wood and rocks in the crevices, hanging by invisible threads from the ceiling, weightless, gathering dust, projecting ghostly shadows when the moon shines through the windows.
Yes, leave me alone. Now, and for good. Enough is enough.
The body will rebel, of course, but the mind is resolute.
Tuesday, 14 January 2025
The desperate and the mad
Folk say to look for the light within
and for the light above
beacons in a world of obscurity
but when every light goes out
it’s all dark, isn’t it
all dark
and in a world of fugitives
the person lighting the candle
will appear as either
the saviour or the traitor
the brave or the fool
the desperate and the mad
no light is eternal but darkness
only darkness can remain
Thursday, 9 January 2025
Middles
Someone once wrote
that all beginnings
and all endings of
the things we do
are untidy
Vast understatement
if you ask me
as all the middles
are nothing short of
chaotic
Often one thinks
– so…this is how it ends
– how can life go on
– this storm can’t be weathered
– what is the fecking point
One thinks those things
when one feels gutted out
and all one can taste is ash
life a pile of smoggy ruins
and breathing feels sticky
like molasses, lumpy
when one feels
the heaviness in the lungs
the gurgling within the chest
the very air mud, like
bubbles slowly surfacing
as if wading through silt
murdering your lungs
when one has to run
for one’s life
gasping for more air
as the sludge gargles in
This, this isn’t the beginning
this, is far from being the end
this is the middle we all know
tougher than last week’s bread
gnarlier than a knot in a plank
Middles are hurricanes
to be embraced
This, is chaos.
This, is life.
Friday, 30 August 2024
Silly little details
You said
it was the way
I looked at you
played with your fingertips
drowned in your eyes
you felt happiness again
butterflies in droves
I held as long as I could
until you went home
and fucked your partner
for yes, of course
he took precedence
over everything
and of course
I wasn’t legitimate
in any way
and you were a butterfly
intoxicated on fields of flowers
and I happened to have one
ready to bloom
I let you pick
bunches by the armful
you smelt them to exhaustion
examined each
cupped in your hands
then lovingly
you sapped them all
one by one wilted
until the hill, sombre, faded
and you went home
content, sated by
all of those silly little details
which, somehow, mattered
but, eventually, didn’t
who knows how many fields
how many silly little details
laid to waste there
I held as long as I could
until you went to love more
someone more deserving
and let’s face it, better
with all my silly little details
folded up in two
in a fraying petal
soon forgot
inconsequential
in the grand face of
the supernova
of your other love
Monday, 19 August 2024
Us all
Death born as us
borne within us
every second of every minute
not even masquerading or posing
undetectable not because
it is a part of us
but because it is us
not even waiting to be
just being
Existing
as us
innocent until darkened
innocuous until stained
until the will to live eternal
grips it at its core
wrenches the madness
inside its shell
until finally, when the time has come
a time not even it could determine
it unleashes life as its ultimate weapon
killing us with an overabundance of it
cells upon cells upon cells
feeding us the life it takes from us
feasting with a gargantuan appetite
until monstrous, adipose, ignoble
deformed beyond belief and recognition
now a behemoth, yet celerous and cunning
with unlimited resources and craft
infests and corrupts, multiform
unique and multiple
insatiable, unoblivious but adamant
because in fine the lifeblood
can flow eternal
life only matters
its fear of death killing it eventually
Unstoppable, suicidal
outpacing our ability to cope
with its greed, its power
the aporia irreconcilable
killing us eventually
for just being
a cell, a soul, us all –
It starts, and ends, with us.
Friday, 9 August 2024
Palms
In the concave of her hands
The water as an ocean
A gowpen of hope
Larger than galaxies
From which we both drank
In the concave of her hands
The soil orb-like
Brimming with life
Delicately deposed
Tree, plant or flower to be
In the concave of her hands
The sun as if harvested
A cornucopia of fruits
Carefully pitted and washed
The season allowed bounty
In the concave of her hands
Hollowed-out space
All but empty
I buried my face
Finally finding love, and rest.
Monday, 17 June 2024
The first day of spring
There is a shocking violence
in the birds singing this morning
– this quiescent sunday morning –
perhaps they think that
after so many rainy, dirty days
they ought to have the right to sing
for they do it so boisterously
– almost belligerent in the face of peace –
with a raw, unfettered rage
as if they cried ‘spring is here, spring is here!’
with a jagged knife to our throat
curdling both blood and coffee
like so many threats of burning the world down
they chant the behoveliness of revelling in
nature and life in drunken ecstasy
upon pain of painful death
– enjoy or die –
– dance or die –
– fuck or die –
– and that’s final –
they don’t seem to care
if their lungs explode in the chorus
– those scruffy savages
frothing at the beak –
or if they starve to death
– they sing, unrelenting
with every fibre of their frail bodies –
their incessant, arrogant cacophony
fomented it seems since the last equinox
isn’t a celebration, it’s an invitation to murder
to a clamorous massacre
in every hue and smell spring brings
as we all must partake in the rite
they’re past febrility, or even tension:
they’re out for bloody mayhem, these birds are
spurred on by a ferocious hunger
and ravenous lust for their
bellowing decrees the solitude of the flesh over
– step into the light and break body and heart –
as if the only way to cope with so much beauty
was to wreck and laugh and bleed and dance
yet it seems such a small price to pay
in the grand decadence sung
in the sunlit-engorged fury
of the birds’ extravagant song
for we know deep down they’re right
our hair prickling on the nape of the neck
and a jubilant sizzling in the pit of the stomach
with so many things to look forward to
– death, love, sex, comedies, tragedies –
on the first day of spring.
Thursday, 6 June 2024
The hunger of the forest
Speared by the trident of the sun
on the hill overlooking Athens
the beast’s heart grows faint
The smell of charred bodies and wood
ancient and still as the rocks
weighs on the senses
The blood spangles
each drop mirroring
earth, sky and sea, and
the victor, legs akimbo
The hunger for the forest
equalled by the one of,
ravenous in its devouring of time ,
gorges up on the lives
lying there, standing there
never sated, it seems
The beast’s vitreous eyes
a glow of melancholy and ire
the spectacular light in between
flickers like a moth’s wings
set afire on a torch
That very same flame which set
the hill overlooking Athens
ablaze like a thousand suns.
Saturday, 4 May 2024
thirty thousand people
The day was torn and grim
birds yet began to sing
as if they knew
nothing’s eternal
and old gives way to new
that man, one day, will fall
to the nascent murmur of
thirty thousand people chanting
in the fragile dusk of the night.
There is no chosen one,
only the days, torn and grim,
and sometimes hung in the sky
a great white pearl
that makes us cry
to the undulant tumult of
thirty thousand people chanting
in the gloaming dark of the night.
And lost memories
keep coming back
torn and grim
and we dare not look
and we cannot understand
and we thought
we could deal the final blow
estocadar the pain
the unease, the numbness
perhaps drowned in the roar of
thirty thousand people chanting
in the solemn dark of the night.
But the bull in our brain
in one last flick of his horns
impales, bolts and bucks
in the navel through the mouth
rips us apart
leaves us bleeding
blue and white
walled in by the applause
and the deafening thunder of
thirty thousand people chanting
in the grimmer dark of the night.
Wednesday, 17 April 2024
Habits
I am a man of habits
I got to this conclusion
because I flash-realised
that I am hoping
that someone, someday
will see the patterns
the routines
nurtured for years
and wait where
we both expect
myself to be
What Really Irritates Me In Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night, Part 10
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