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Poems 2008:

The Animals of Hiroshima

Tonight For some reason
I thought of the animals
Killed
In the bombing of Hiroshima

The Horses
Dogs
Tortoises
The Cats and Snakes
Squirrels
Lizards
And Spiders
The caged birds
The uncaged birds
The flies
The Birds
Especially the birds
The animals in the zoo

To think of a flea
In the A Bomb heat
The puppies just born
The wise and ancient Tom...

As of tomorrow
I shall never live without animals
Again
Lights Out

Another Phone call
An Autopsy of a conversation
Where we defined the following:
You saw nothing but the last awful year

This then
Was your main reference
Whereas I
Was saying goodbye to the essence
The intimacy
Those seasons of tiny pollen like moments
Whole empires of gestures
Harvested down the years

This
Is what I was so sad for
Not those final 12 months of numb hell

We hang up

This room is warm
The cat beside me
Full of milk and happy

I turn out the lamp
Lay down
Close my eyes
Reach out inside myself
Turn off the lights
You lit within me
One by one

The Stalls
Silences
Layered
Like Lacquer
Gleaming on grain
I paid the cost
Accepted
The ticket
Taking my place in the stalls
This empty ballpark
This vast Sports ground
With the sky going on above as ever
A sudden crafty chill
I pulled my collar up
Cashmere on stubble

I then resumed the pose
Alone in the game
Waiting

FACT
“The Virtuoso Pianist Mikhail Kedrov
Who would slaughter Schoolchildren and army officers in Northern Russia with
Such ruthlessness that he had
To be taken into psychiatric care”

POETRY

It cheers me
When the poets face
Does not betray
The work

And
The way a cat loves its fur
Paws and snout
Cleaning only for herself
Between Suppertime and sleepy time
It cheers me too
That thirteen years on
You have not betrayed yourself
Pretty
Still
Though not my type
Yet I’m surprised and slightly saddened
That you are lost
Enough to kiss me
At this point in our life

The cat yawns
Criss crossing her paws
I return
To poetry
Came to in a dream...
...in a car
A Japanese girl asleep beside me
No one at the wheel
She started to awake
We were best friends for now
But soon we would be married

The sea spoke to me
Summer in Genoa
A cafe by the sea
Eating and drinking
With an Italian Rock and pop band
I phase in and out of the conversation
Allow myself a silent audience
With the waves below
The light here is unlike
English light
The horizon nowhere near home
Even the sea birds seem subtly foreign

As my companions babble on
In that ascending musical tongue
My thoughts turn to us
The new mystery
Of our loss
No one at this table knows you
Or ever will
Yet they know me
And my tomorrow too
But they’ll never know you
Nor Us

In this way
Life goes on
New stems begin
Branches play
A path opens
One without you
Away
From what we were

Back at the cafe
My absence from the conversation
Is becoming apparent
Yet I
Indulge myself
In the waves once more
Just a moment more
‘Cos they will surely tell me
All I need to know
In order to survive
This new life
They will give me the answer
Cure the fear
Cancel the hurt
That I feel even now
Sat here
Among these fine men

On cue
A voice from the table
This time in heavily accented
Intoxicated English
The sound of it
Reaches me
Before the meaning
The sound is wonderful
‘Hey...Tony...This wine, is good, no’?
What do you think’?

I turn from the ocean
Rejoin the table

I drink the wine

My friend is right
The wine is good

The ocean has spoken

Insight

I should hate to be really in shape
I am talking about like
Ali in his prime
Bruce lee
Bowie in ‘75
Johnny Depp
Etc
Imagine!
All those nights alone
High
Unable to get out of the mirror

Poems 2007:

Do you remember? (malefant)

Do you remember?
The way the pastry would fold
collapsing
in on itself

Texture of thighs
Oozing Vanilla
Slow slow tide

Beneath that staunch pastry roof
The glutinous slime
palest pink cubes of meat
Seeming to bear no relationship
to animal at all

The steam rising
The pastry falling
folding shyly inwardly and away

Steam steaming
Window bound
The pastry crust browned

The slow mo flow of Slime
almost transparent
like half frozen fog
Beneath nougat coloured pastry
collapsing
retreating sideward and in

Steam falling upward
The crust giving in
falling
outward and away

Do you remember? 

Morning fragment (evening)

Denied
Not in denial
The universe shrinks
Down
to this roll of fat
At the back of my neck

A sexless bed
where I dream of dead pop stars
Awaking submerged
In the dock of the day

Doctors
Lawyers
Dentists
And yet

'Nothing to be gained here' 

Fact

A tiny work of art by Warhol
Is on the moon in a small museum
That no one
Will visit 

The wound is not healing

Awoke in a bed
So far from home
Tossed from a dream
Wherein I had somehow become the other woman
Between the couch and the TV

So we cheated on he who had taken my place

But it was all wrong
The air was poorly tuned and sick with something
Our act pre-mediated
Heavy on the sorrow and loss

It soaked all
The molecules
 Temperature and music
Were all drenched in this throbbing nauseous ache

I awoke  on the verge of sobbing
for the second time that month
I gagged
A moment’s relief

The air was coming down with something
Then
There it was

The tiny orchestra
Of weeping 

Now that I'm an ugly ol'Muthafucker

Young girls ignore me now
Nah
It ain't even that
I don't even register
I am not theirs to see

I walk among them
A jowly ghost out late

My body mismatched
Buffeted out of shape
By alcohol
And
Tough fate

I can see them though
Impossibly youthful
And aesthetically pleasing
Hair feverishly thick
Skin cinnamon cinema real

Shit
They don't even look through me
What is there to see?

I'm an overweight ghost
With a high tolerance for exorcisms
An anomaly

I watch a while
Remembering how it used to be
Then fuck it!
Forget it!
Log onto the PC
And google me 

Autumn fragments

I was nice out
It was fall
But it wasn't cold yet
Except at night 

Sad orchards

Those grasses have forgotten
The house is done with us

Now and then
On the locus of sleep
I consider the
Apple trees

One male
One female

Only once did you make use of their fruit
You made an apple pie
Politely consumed
Never referred to again
Until now

My Father
On his first visit
Could not bear to see all that free food going to waste
A throwback to his fifties childhood perhaps
So he gathered them into our kitchen
Where they lay on the counter for weeks
Until one of us
Ashamed
Secretly binned them

Christ
Even our horse didn't benefit
I suggested taking her a bagful one time
\but you said they would be too sour
And mumbled something about Colic

For six summers that plentiful fruit rotted on its branches
And in the meadow style grass below
So much bounty ignored into decay
The garden's treasure spurned

Was this
I wonder now
s symptom of our flawed Love?
Doomed as it was
By its nature
To never fulfil the promise I now feel betrayed inside me?

The fruit flies gorged and buzzing
The summer in full retreat
Soon frost will morning freeze the rotting green flesh
That turns in some invisible hand
Yellow, brown and Black in death

Since yesterday another family inhabit that property now
The grass is forgetting us
I imagine the house flexing
Contracting
Dilating as the seasons dictate
Shaping itself lovingly around new lives
And fresh destinies
The fruit aching to be bitten has already forgotten us
If not our neglect
 Yet here on the verge of sleep
I remember
Here
Upon the cusp of sleep
I haunt those apple trees still 

Tweebs dreams

She dreams twitching

swatting at moths in her sleep

Remembering her mother

The tuna she ate this morning

Small cute noises seem to issue from behind her neck

as currents pass through her

Her black fur dense and calling

My hand

which however gentle

wakes her always

She looks at me suprised accusing and somehow dissapointed

I know how she feels

Me and my many many mistakes
 
Paris 1998

I am waiting for someone in the Carrousel du Louvre

here below the glass Pyramid a tiny carnival of lights

play

A fiesta of tiny lights prisim born

As I wait for a friend

When a pretty Japanese girl arrives

Clocks me

Mistakes me for someone else

Is suddenly approaching me

Smiling

For a moment I consider going along with the mistake

Holding open my arms joyously

laughing in greeting

Maybe even kissing her full on the mouth

All the way to the waiting hotel

Who knows where it will end?

But I don't

I turn and walk quickly into the megastore

I am embaressed

Freaked out

I don't look back

Until today

For some reason

I thought of you this morning

Pretty Japanese Girl

And

I think it was I who made the mistake

One light out and the chain won't work

I Was Bereft
Melancholic
And more so because
Of every woman I had been intimate with
Truly close to
I mean
Three maybe
In my 36 year old life
Not one was in reach tonight

Not one could I call

Were any of these women thinking of me right now?
I seriously doubted it
Had they ever?
Sure
But not tonight
And not in this way

Three and a half decades
Christ
It seems too long
Had I a habit of courting shallow people?
Again
I doubted it
Knew it
In fact
I had barely touched the surfaces of all three

Yet something still wasn't adding up

I was no Henry Miller
Or Jack Nicholson
Something was awry

One number out of those three on my phone
And that number a no no

Lord
Did I give of myself to all of you for nothing?
Or even this much

Jesus
Didn’t I comfort you when you split up with the one after me?
Good God
Now it’s my turn
But none of you are here to comfort me

I demand a recount
It’s not fair
But I thought...

Someone tell me
Write in
Reveal to me
The missing quantity
In this here equation

hurt

Came to at Five to Four
Passed out at Five to ten
So much for Sunday

Monday
Found me hollow headed
And still without a passport

Sat at the desk with nothing going on

I suddenly saw us five years ago
A Sunday Fair in May

Children were attempting to race upon Donkeys with Catastrophic results
Falling from the mules the instant after the bell
We laughed heartily
Delighted
Empowered by such unexpected comedy
On this spring rural Sunday

We were just entering a new phase of our Love then
A deeper vein
A stronger design
A more mysterious arrangement
A rich and rare complicated synopsis

This morning
Hung-over at my desk
I was walking into that Sunday of five years ago

While the I of then
Qued for Ice creams
The me of now came to at the edge of the thronged field
Spotted you through the crowd
And went to you

You were surprised
Where were the ice creams?
And how come my clothes were different
And the face
Older puffier sadder

And my countenance
Waves came off me
I had witnessed something terrible
I was in agony over a secret
Some great catastrophic hurt had happened

'Baby what's wrong'? You asked

I held your face of five years ago in my hands

Unable to speak
The tears blinding everything
All answers unwanted
All answers
Inevitable
My face wet
Yours too

Her birthday

It was her birthday
The first in almost a decade that we hadn't spent together

I was on the way to not meditating on this

And what it meant
And whom she was with
Now

Then again
Lets look at whom I was with

After 3 tabs of ecstasy
Half a bottle of scotch
(I had invented a new cocktail; 'The Jamaican Highball'. Use Jamaican ginger beer instead of American dry.)
Aye.
After such medication
I was making jolly new friends at quite a rate

3am
And I'm dancing in my new flat to the Beatles
'If I needed someone'
(One of George’s best in my opinion)

A strange girl is on my couch
Gentle faced and pleasant
A good soul I feel
Her boyfriend somewhere about
He praised my collection of vinyl records
He's half fucked and another good sort
Bald with good teeth
And a well proportioned face
These two share a good heart I reckon

On the terrace a classic fucked up couple of apparent alkies
Barely coherent
She breaking glasses and stumbling to clear them up
With the exaggerated precision of the pissed
He in an amiable half slumber after the valium all us men have taken
Lantern Jaw slumping into red skinned chest
Ready to wake at half a twitch
We had talked of boxing
As he drained the dregs of a 4 year old bottle of Shiraz
And the neighbours below despaired in their lover’s bed

The sky above the rented terrace howled silently like what - a murdered fish?
Shit
I could feel the mdma wearing off
As another of my cacti was overturned accidentally by the drunk girl
And the left channel of the stereo gave out, as a speaker wire was knocked unattached
Leaving only the rhythm section
Paul and Ringo

Outside Sunday had started but Saturday was still taking refuge in my flat
When it hit me

The girl
Who I had met for the third time earlier tonight
Had told me she didn’t like Jews
Appalled and suspecting this was a put on
I asked her why
'Because they have too much money'
I saw she was serious

For some reason this memory did it
And

Now hours later
Sunday came all of a sudden
Violently
Demanding a true answer
And a reason why

Then I thought of you
And where I was
And how long you had gone along with my silliness
Perhaps waiting for my true self to surface
So we could get on with being grown up
Children
All that jazz
I could see you here
Smiling along but not truly
Mere months ago
Maybe
But no longer
Your ghost disappeared
The sun was coming

It broke me
I felt myself folding in half too suddenly
Recovering when it hit me

Tonight was your birthday
And I didn't know your age

Days without stations

Novocaine numb
A heat sensitive photograph would surely show the region around my heart as frozen
Aching on though
Beneath pseudo arctic latitudes

Another fucking morning
Of nothing
Monsters slumbering after the feast
I missed their torments
The bourbon swill of self-administered anaesthetic
A reason to self medicate wrote itself right off of the page
Time zones beyond the recommended dose

Whirling into nothing in these hours before noon
The coffee my sole source of vitamins
The ghost of my sexuality
A hanging rotting garden beneath lemon infused silk

I clocked myself giving up on many disparate levels
The fences toppled one after the other in militaristic choreography
The tunnels caving in
The library trashed and pissed on
Smelling of petrol and raw spirit

I looked around robotically for a flame
My face showing nothing
In the continuing foul stream
Of the every day

These days without you
As their apex

She wore poetry

She wore poetry
Whilst over here
Sleep disowned me

In retaliation
I cultivated a valium habit and a twitch

Having embraced insomnia
I quite suddenly came to from a dream of sleep
To find myself being dressed against my consent

Clothed in rare coutre I was
By silent
Inscrutable
'Men'

But dressed for what?
A ball?
A wedding?
A Dance...?

'What's this for'? I asked the 'men'. 'What's going on'?
They continued to fasten and button. Not hearing. Unable to speak.

Still, I tried a more amiable tone : 'Look...I've only just got used to wearing a Hairshirt and sweat pants all the time. So what's with these fancy duds all of a sudden?'

They remained mute

I looked at myself in the mirror.
(I had to admit, I was looking pretty spry in this get-up).

Turning away quickly, I muttered
'I don't trust this'.

Then and there I surrendered and reconciled myself to the transformation
My life oddly unreal and new in the glare of the multi-bulbed mirror.

I couldn't know it then
But soon Paintings would come alive in my presence
Dogs cats and geese would address me in an upper class English accent
House plants would sprout fresh pale green tendrils in deference to my entrance
Spiders and flies would join forces in a sweet but misguided effort to make me tea in the mornings

One thing however was obvious
I was being prepared for role I had no choice in
I was being called upon to recite lines from a long forgotten script
That I had nevertheless
At some point learned...

The 'men' who continued to groom me offered no clues
They remained steadfastedly silent

As they parted my hair
Fastened cufflinks
Dusted my tux

I was quiet too
As they finally ushered me gently into the wings
Stopping stage right

I looked out into the enormous theatre

There she stood
Centre stage
Poised and becalmed
Elegant and still
A great energy
On the cusp of silence and cacophony

Calling to mind
A brass figurine
Of some nameless Hindu God

Bathed in the spotlight
She was
Dust and lint orbiting 'round her
Rising and falling at the speed of blood and memory

I glanced at the faceless audience
The packed stalls stretching out to infinity
Their dumb chatter and murmurs collapsing into anticipatory silence

Then :

A namelessley silent word in my ear and I was on

Me in my penguin Suit

She
in her poetry

The third date

A fear of Grass stains

Of falling into Sky

Closed my eyes

Behind aviator shades

My own skin unfitting
Taut in terror at its fear of shedding

I writhed inside this suit of Fat Bones
Greasy blood and Shampooed hair

Still able
To sense you there

Less than five hands away

Majestically comfortable
In your own suit
Of silken umber skin
Straight white teeth
Bright Black hair

Riding this earth on your back
You made the grassy dirt happy to pull at you

While over here it took all of Gravity's rainbow
To keep me from spinning off into space and exploding

Your oiled and measured hips
Meanwhile
Spoke to my un-aligned , curdled rusty-dusty hips
Who were even then cursing me through blood for our unfashionable shyness

'Till another voice cut through
With that same old shitty lie
The one done up
Whore- like
As truth

'All of this
The good and the bad
Is already
Taken from you'

Within rain

Umber Skin
Tainted Blood Type
The Sky in this tea

Plasma’s Love Bite
Stockings torn
Tanned
Untanned
Sky delayed
The skin muscle worn

Far apart
Citywide
This afternoon storm unites us

This rain is

Me

Speaking to you

The summer of ‘07

Falling leaves fallen
I squelch through mulch

The buzzards I loved
No longer keening

I run hurting
Skyless inside
The wounding first rate
The scarring lush

Drink and sleep alone
Uncalled on
Self touched

Summer shunting by beneath my book blocked window
I reach in the dark;

Sea breeze
Tobacco
Cocaine
Rum punch

The secret life of plants is no longer a secret to me

My ego bound
My Taurus’ back hunched

Out to lunch

Swallowed stuff that was bad for me
Drunk drunks that did do for me

Spat into the arse of destiny
Gonzo’d my solo sex life indefinitely

Turned to the yellow sea'd pillow
Refusing sleep and the healing

Deliberately

Quite stubbornly

…

A railway track to your heart
A central line to your memory
Me rummaging around
Doing overtime
Attempting to make home
In a place
I was never
Meant
To be

The Dilemma of the wasp

It’s hard to make friends
When you’re a wasp
Even with
Other wasps

TV

The TV is static
Snow-white fuzz buzzing on black
The channels controls still set to the tunings of our old home
300 miles and all of a sudden a lifetime away
This box of tubes wires and dust sits alive but useless
A muted orchestra in full swing
A cacophony of silent hurting

The UHF/VHF denied their source
The signal snipped
No sonic sperm just analogue's semen
Spitting fuzzed blanks against the inside of the scuffed screen

The parallel between this old TV and my heart is obvious

Still

I am suddenly exhausted by this realization and the subsequent burden of the role it appoints me
A hauling in of sadness
A reeling in of misery
On and into heavy weather ahead

Then - suddenly - a sharp citrus pain chest bound like cholesterol
An instant empire of weariness
At the thought of all tomorrows here
Without us

Artists and their garrets

I finished last night's rice for breakfast
I wore a silk kimono
Sunlight was flooding my new room
And the rooftops I looked out onto could have come from anywhere

Suddenly I remembered
Another room like this - Paris - late 1996
A young French chap in glasses was pointing in the direction of Notre Dame

"See that apartment there'?
I couldn't but nodded agreeably anyway.
"That’s where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch'

I nodded again and turned to a girl called Coralie
Who just the day before had told me that 'When you smile, an angel enters the room'.
(You can't see my smile now, Coralie, a graveyard in a drinker's mouth, all the Devil's work. But then Lucifer was an angel once, too).

Artists and their garrets.
The wound wore on the sleeve
Willing it to heal
But not too much

Not completely

For me and Gil Evans

Robert Wyatt once said to me

"Oh yes, I saw Gil Evans - once walking down a street in New York. I almost bumped into him. He was with his family, they looked like this great wonderful tribe who ruled the sidewalk..."

Gil, I want what you had. The calloused ass cheeks, the obsession with voicing a minor chord seventh in a new way, the apparent selflessness and most of all the family. The tribe.

I know you were in your 50's by the time you conceived and I'm fifteen years away from even 50 but the consensus here is that I've lived too long anyway. It can't go on, surely, my mockery of a way of life.

Yet we won't get into that now.

A baby is crying this very moment, from across the way. Or maybe it’s a cat.

The wind is buffeting the windows and I'm sat here in a white terry cloth robe awaiting a phone call. It is warm and I am drinking a bottle of burgundy. 'Domaine tatraux Jean Et Fils' 2003.

In 2003 I was in Love, Gil, with a girl. She heard your records many, many times. 'The individualism of' was and is my favourite but she could take it or leave it. We had the chance to start a family but didn't go for it. I guess we knew we weren't right for one another.

Its four minutes to 7 on a Friday night in March.

Some lunar force is drawing me out into the arms of the city yet here I remain, loveless and unloved and contentedly so.

3 minutes to seven now and I'm running out of things to say.

Only that somewhere, someplace, it’s three AM always.

Letters to myself

You stopped hearing the songs
I wrote for you
Years ago
Well within the boundaries of our union

Could this be the proof
That I was writing only for myself
Was I alone enough beside you
even then?

No
I shan’t believe it
Now that our empire of intimacy
Is being disassembled

(But by whom?
Who and what are these forces that deconstruct
What was once our love and its parameters?
And how do these forces manifest
Asides from their demolition duties.
What do they look like?
Where do they come from
Where do they go to
Once they’ve trampled the flowers
Leveled the field
Set fire to the stables
Drained the lake
Chopped down the trees
Ripped away the table cloth
Swept the table clean?)

Now that we are severed
I am writing for anyone but you
Surely

I am a witness to myself
Reporting to a Jury of me
Playing all the roles nightly
On the beach of an unknown moon
That apparently circles the earth

A one-man show
A man one audience
Soliloquizing
To a lunar silence

I Lost
There is no winning
The Game is concluded before it’s beginning
The final score chalked up
Prior to the first roll of the dice

I gaze down
The Ivy and Moss
Coagulate
Around my legs once more
The vine doubling over on itself
In the rush to smother my cock and balls

And all along my left side
The 3ft wound gaping wide
A broken mass of ribs flesh
Bone
Ragged plasma tissue
The torn still living bridge
That once joined me to you

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