It is acrid language

‘…The explosion

is for all of us and I dedicate the results

to the fish of the sea and the purity of

language:’     (‘The Western Gate’, J.H.Prynne.)

About to jump off the end of the year

Like an ice berg

There is more of us under the water

Waiting hoping

Feeling each movement

So much discarded

People, papers strewn

In a refracted mirror the truth 

Can be seen with a sidewise glance

Hanging on to the overhang

Knuckles white protruding

The slow merry-go-round

Of unified memory

Attached to the spurs breaking of

Colossal white crashing in

They love you so much they want to devour you

To crush your spirit

In this way we combine the invisible with the

Actual

Ghosts’ are now officially real

And that squadron of green parakeets that

Careened in off the back of a gust

Will tell you so

You don’t go back

To find you’ve lost

‘the thigh bone of the world’

In sleeping torrents of blue familiar night

Right here in the last lost limbic days

Between and sky 

Between stars and home

Behind the faces that march up and down

Oxford street in all weathers

And the pints that pour like so much steady rain

Or lost rivers

Swimmers plant themselves on the edge

Only frosting out for a quick dip

A shoot em up time

Frayed at the edge of an end

Snatching up at the start

Buildings stained in frozen bas relief 

Hands gesture at people moving off

It’s the closure

Supreme being amounts to nothing

Peddle harder it will amount

To nothing more than

Fox holes

Underground warrens

Your being set in motion set in time

Where was I today

In yesterday’s time mill

Churned on its spokes

I thought

We cannot be still

Here among the wood chippings, the discarded cans that say Zwiec and Tyske

To frozen feet.

“in the call of conscience what is that is talked about”

Do not answer that question

The answer may lie hidden somewhere in the wrecked pale light

The freezing pond surrounded by silver birch trees

The truest colour of my despair

Silver

Is a dog response to it

Those retractable leads forwards and back lead

Tea time thoughts to distract at a fern 

Near the coffee hut

A latter day Todnauberg

Hot whisky sweats the minds depleted reserves force fact into fiction

On and on on into an infinity of ultimate regression

Boring bed bugs bite back hardest on bitter memories

Of skanking down late-night dreams of oblivions that

Ended in stomach ache and worse

Frosted winters that flowed across years

Rain slaked London town always out of reach but right there

Did we take advantage

No

Can we talk about it? Sure, spill your guts

Until it hurts like hot cancerous pangs of unfettered waste burning in the minds centre 

Wherever the fuck that is of course 

You know.

Come into the house of whisky its warm you can slake your thirst

Blow your cares away take a chill of those bones those winter bones

That cold Icey blast that frost is way flinging itself up Camden rd. road then forks out one strand down 

Seven sisters the other up the arsehole of manor house, nothing to be gained in each direction I can guarantee you that.

Up the shitter guaranteed big hitter 

Melt-face boards the love place a sanctified lea valley cruiser that never saw better days

Leverage after one too many in the anchor and hope

Soap up and lather down

Skittering blowholes and fulsome dub architects are flown in from Greece and Spain

All anarchistas to a man boy girl wh`tever

It’s the same up and down the strip now

Barely floating hammocks of junk slung together with rough twine

And the sort of bonhomie that saw through the Russian gulag winters

Freely improvise and self-standing flat pack turgid domain name interval winter vale

It’s a rum kind of poetry rough shod and cloven hoofed that blows in on the wind like that

Never enough to really melt a hole in the universe 

Take some mending to get it up this time

Spooks peak out from behind the hoardings 

They know what blows through the ghost hole

Pre-bored indemnity whispered from a loop hole

In time continuum

Trade winds culminate Elizabethan spectre regained strength but looking older than her years

Don’t let the chaos in sound it out stand firm against it push back

Against its mighty weight 

Reach back in the dark grab a hold on something there to remind you

Of gardens tranquil before darkness

Don’t let chaos reign clean out the gutters with a fine fresh spray

Remove to a higher point to observe then

Fall back down to your knees no pleading this time just

Don’t let the chaos in even though

You feel the wheels rolling heaving breathing all over what’s left of this mystery

Don’t let it burn up what’s been taken 

The breathing in and out of years the lives moving in and out of the frame

Stand firm against the obfuscation on the radar observes its movement 

Track it dodge it 

It can’t be capture tamed its alive out there in you 

It moves through walls it sees time

Remove yourself don’t let it in 

Climb if necessary and implement full colossal refusal

And only recognise the heart burst wonderment of ecstatic contemplation that falls like 

Children laughing into your arms real yes this is real and they belong to you.

In chaos gardens of black infinity

No flowers grow only die here growing into

Distended tumours floating in the heavy air 

In this walled garden old flowers grow black and wither

Jump the growth ebbing edging ending in

Hallucinations gnashing of teeth tears sweat holograms of pain

Just because it will be then as it is now and on and on

Light beams stalk down and touch 

Origins the ghost-work 

Mad glimmerings rain forced shy 

What is a horoscope? How does it quantify your pain?

Spread out your mind over a star map

Stretch its edges to the edge

Still face down in the mud there you lay

Giggling that time is a tumour and fancy this 

tumulus crumbles 

Beneath layers of sedimentary work the 

rock faces dissolves

Take  heed take heed slow your speed

Inclined to rain this season 

It looks 

Hopeless 

“The call comes from me and yet beyond me”

Life in the fast lane

Lived by wits on limbless body without organs

To wit

To woo

Coax them into a shiny gas world 

Smart black loafers attract

Bonhomie this season

You know those grease stains you’ve seen them they are real

And that sweat attractor you roped in to help us forget

Now where has she got to?

Because, and I’m able to say this now, I’m not understanding

You

Better to pore the meltwater over its head

Interminable yes interminable ranges

Sloth like despite 

The army outside the door in realms of thought in space 

They possess you

Green corridors out of the N16 swamp turmoil

It has been arranged and you would hardly notice it

Grey crumble additions 

To swathes of meteor shower discs that hold on

Approach the info war with resigned consternation that

From now on you will be out f step forever

Liken it to the algal growths below the surface

And a toad eyed creature that is undefinable yet creeps to the fore

Whenever this frost fayre abates long enough

For a celebration to breach the banks.

….the world of nature, the world of man, where is nature, where is man, where are you, what are you seeking, who is seeking, seeking who you are, supreme aberration, where are you….’

I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one

sedimentary tumor

'There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go

There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know'*

 earth child

your names are many

 you broke a  promise

and now the 

Autumn smoke 

Slows breathing

the inside of your mind is shining

this mental cathedral
tottering
about to collapse or explode into fireworks ]that pour out of your mouth

In her eyes

Something to tune into

Waves emitted

Received

Emitted

With the purpose of a
European journey

A sojourn

Into the Marabar caves

With perambulators and vultures carrying

Sedan chairs laden with gold effigies

Of Victorian deities

One falls and tumbles and is dashed against the rocks

That line the rapid river’s edge

You see ghosts in the corridors at night

A book ‘Morphology of Landscape’ falls

Open at your feet

Over on the sixth floor

A tumulus of books on Heidegger is constructing itself

Books flit like bats torchlight strafes the dim light

The wind blows the flaps in the air conditioning units on the roof

It’s the perfect storm. 

*Thomas Ligotti

Day break light enamel coat bring out the gloss coated

Yellow spandrel Tardis he quoted not wrong I said

Nineties techno with remix potential to begin a high peaker

Make welcome at the time on the door posited between

Limbic rare fossil requiem speak closely in the shadow of a 

Ruined wildness it can be found up there up the spout.

Break out word rash slimline fiasco making the 

New dawn but at the same time opinion poll winner

Dark magnetic tracery in the noble DNA mantra chant

Hot stones hot runes inside my door there is a picture

Of him of it of her where to go next with this image PLUCKED

Rare writhing flex of terrestrial conspiracy meteor showers.

Immersion in the fire rise up to the man dust bowl

Fling chant upwards over the mobile home live breathing

Excessive and wooden currency bequeathed by west coast

Inventors of planes landing desert bound comes back

Over the memory vine silent response requested speak now after this

One door swings predicted exact match none you know

The growth at first sluggish but then full acceleration reached.

Smell the deluge upend time’s carcass now the grey light

Flickers . it’s because you thought it up lost as we were

Cars crawl speech slows down bubbles froth up inside the gullet

Small bubbles up of gas yellow liquids up and down the island

Friday night is relaxed and frenzied the sun responds with universal

Credit now waiting

It’s gone through the wall bends towards damp greasy sheen of paint over paint

Wait, what is behind the wall, flexing amorphous or amphibious

Drum beat skittering improvised old crust record shop dweller

Eyes light up in the mildewed racks of old rock and reggae

Solid gold in then out of the dustbin back on the shelf

Taboo glam rock bashers now take mdma flight

To stars reach gun-whales battalions of beatles rip off socks

Smashed kit upturned shopping trolly your better off without him they whisper

The acquisition of books

In a quest to find new space to breath

A question. A flame from a spark. These new smoke alarms are unforgiving.

If you form an alliance with the word, will it dance for you?

Will the accumulation of time spent and the blood serpent rising 

Lay calm this rampant host that governs the restless mind.

Carve out a ghost hollow. Listen with both ears. Make huge boasts of culture.

Unfulfilled but full in cups. Volcanic ear worm. Forest fires break out so fast.

Fascinating eddies, currents that are frankly disturbing in their invisibility and voracity.

The inability to cope with rural isolation and a bus stop cloaked in ivy and nettles.

Tea time in the post-war suburb. A drumming up only to be ‘taken down a notch’ once more.

In the minds deforestation the survival instinct says run, but burrow down further and the hurricane winds will pass. Soviet science fiction, keep knocking on that grey matter. Jumping over walls and fences to arrive. Pigs sleeping in blissful abandon wasps gather at their ears, looking for a tender spot. That yellow on pink though, we’ll have some of that, can’t even penetrate the fleshy layer.

So, come on let’s go, run for our lives. If we hold fast will Brexit just go away and leave us alone?

Time winds? It winds and whines like a shrieking turbine. 

Out at see the salt smoke rising. Killer whales distract and drown a seal. A heavenly host of becoming. Theorists gather in the forest clearing. Gleaning the broken semiotics from the factory floor. Blue tits knocking at my window. Uncoil the spilt wine of decades. If it helps recourse to suppressing drugs can kill the flame. 

Wounded staggering. Greasy mantle, iron fist held aloft. “We travel the space-ways”

Arctic frost first crack of ice. Turmeric sample. Beginning data resonance. Infernal rat problems.

Interstitial boat lanes.

“We travel the space-ways”

Not to gloat or jeer or sneer or snivel either.

But perhaps find a space where coexistence is possible.

Space gained

Relaxed pressure           NOW BREATHE 

IN THE NOW . 

Golden pavilions spiral into the air

Autumn creaks out its bones and you feel the

Earth sigh and crack 

And of relief 

For the time being we are here

Who knows when your time is up

Just heart heaving the blood round 

And status wealth knowledge all seem great at the time

The solace to shore up against what we don’t understand

That animals heed instinctively

They are alive with death

We are leaves to be kicked around or blown on the wind

The boys smile they are like animals to

They do not fear death yet 

What do they know of its darkening hand

And how it drives the pulse through the veins

Like tidal skeins filling out the dark black mud

Washing over all our thoughts and memories

Into an oblivion of infinite sunsets

Forever and never

In a remote archipelago situated just

Behind your eyes.

‘The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief in its formlessness.’[1]

Birth and death entry and exit into the formless

Reading this, a horn toot somewhere

Out over the roof tops

it is an essence 

in itself

that sound

---

[1]Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies(London: Calder & Boyars,1959), pp.198

Some thoughts on 

‘Crowhurst’.

 the boredom of being at sea, 

  family.

visual cues of the mundane baked bean 

we are aboard the Teignmouth Electron from the beginning.

Crowhurst deluded, selfish 

 in his heart a ‘good’ man I believe. 

Desperate to live up 

 the spirit of the age, or the spirit of Empire, 

essentially a suicide mission. 

 the twin polarities at work 

dogged determination and dare I say courage, that is set against his foolhardy abandonment of his family.

 and his own cracked vanity. 

 image of a floundering black fish; 

 during these moments that we feel the enormity of his terror. 

 the vastness of sea  the impossibility 

 terrifying magnitude low budget, 

             Crowhurst  in the gathering darkness on the prow of the Electron as it floats silently into the blackness, 

 the collective awareness of loss  experienced by his children as they wake in the night at the same time and cling to their mother for solace. 

 a reminder to us all to cling to those we love the most as the black seas swirl around us seeking to pull our lives on invisible currents into deeper waters than we could ever imagine.

                                  Sea cabbage   sea bee   see potatoes

                                                    winding lanes

                    Swarthy carpenter  extensive gift shop  replica weapons

                                                    divided self

                               Rotten walkway many wasps  English heritage  

                                                    mediaeval racket

                          

                                                  Up in the battlements

                                                  vertigo and wasps

                                                  challenge

                                                   our existence

                   

                        Sharp flint  plastic chainmail  expensive ploughman’s

                                                 extensive wasps .

Agile

Now with fronds

It burrows

Growls at you

Prehensile tail

Curls around

Moss covered.

Adept

At disguise

You wink

Under that mask

I see you

Do it 

Over again.

Uncomfortable

In the shadows

Move into the light

You say 

To yourself

And yet

You don’t.

 crisis 

A shadow 

Stop, a pellucid spectacle

A grimoire 

A grumble sale response

It deals in turmoil.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Slime balls 

Ooze down the inside of your brain

A storm out to sea mid-Atlantic

Hurricanes crash together in broils of

Wilderness visions

No thanks and with that

I’ll take the path well-trodden

Taking breathes every step bouncing off

The walls here we go

Again

Old raggedy heron sits on the marsh sign

Three times I encircled him or her

Three times the watch-full symmetry

Almost stopped me in my tracks

Reaching for a camera that wasn’t 

There

Get up early before the day slips away

Like it always does

Instead of thinking about a master plan, why not

Think of a monster plan like those

Furry old films from Montauk

The overgrown wilderness of memory

Wow it looks idyllic

I bet it was

Rock stars jetting in, famous artist breaking eggs in old beach hut

It’s the perfect fantasy lie of 

Care free bohemia

All systems running parallel

the north Atlantic swell

and somewhere out there

the Teignmouth Electron

empty and broken

cargo long gone

in a watery desert

knowing that

this is how the adventure

ends.

The bells chime nine

the heat 

Of the heart now empty

Of desire the 

summer spent beyond

muscle response and

Air-conditioned moments

Of absolute solitude 

Where 

The things in themselves

That increased in pressure that slipped passed us 

Were too gilded to take notice of

Before the rushing water force

Of times temporality

Took them down stream

and fractured into

crystalline equivalents

they hung in a cave where thoughts impale themselves

reach back but they have gone

smiling faces drag us forwards onwards

to where

the woodland creatures still gather at dusk

The tawny owl and the buzzard 

are the same

ephemeral 

approaching 

mind-fire 

but bespoke

Now whispered in memorandum.

Form a hermeneutic circle around yourself

Draw up books and notes

Revise and upgrade

Change move 

Forward 

Mutate

Survive.

Electric impulses swell desire

To go and then return from

A place unknown

Ungainly walk 

Broken gull

Defence.

Sea folk know the tidal way

Boats return with or without a catch

If it’s rust you want

Come and grab some

Belief.

Suffocating I cannot write

The thoughts are there

But trapped

Just beneath the skin

Wretched

Like cockroach eggs on the brain

Annoying.

Overwhelmed you are

Flung through the hazy forcefield

To drunk and drained to give much

Time to consuming energy

The wasps rip the heads off their prey

A trophy.

Playful nature 

Doomed romance

The interior of the shop was so vile

Smell of packet foods and

Years of neglect

On the village green the fun fair resembled open heart surgery

Remorse.

Flinging caution in the bin

We ground out a steady course of

Bile inflected wisdom

It was going to save us

But this barge slowly started leaking

Now we are almost sunk

Not without love

Autumn.

The tide is mounting

Not ebbing

I flow downstream quickly

“Cheerio”, I screech

Nobody notices me

To busy playing

Suggested offers are now

Redundant.

A gamine approach

To the fourfold way

Smoked butterflies

On the barbecue

We will wait for longer

It is expected of us

Being is time

Beyond that, ‘Poof!’, it’s gone.

Spectral half-light.

Halitosis makes a move on you

It is bequeathed by a friend

That old smell of cheap high street shoe stores

Conjoins again once more

In sharp contrast

De-humidifies blocks out

Repressed.

Praxis makes wisdom whole again

The thought of ‘stepping up to the plate’

Is irksome in the extreme

And should not be encouraged

But to break away from the provincial patter

For moment it looks thus

‘a dialectical intensification of the auto-referentiality of all modern culture’

Now take a

Break.

In the trophy world

The air is sprightly and sumptuous

Non-stop ecstasy is permanent and relentless 

Flowers bloom all year round

The celebrations are un-ending

There is joy, so much joy

Faces contort under the pressure of happiness

They cannot take its weight

The centrifugal force of so much pleasure

Threatens to rip apart at the centre

Insects live outside the core

The conditions are perfect and they have flourished

Dragonflies are four feet long

Their blue crystalline shells catch the sun’s rays

As they dart about

Released then enfolded in an elliptical tango

Small explosions of light fill the air

This cargo has the metallic sheen

Of kingfishers bursting into flames

Whirling blurs into timeless Being

Dawn Raid

Start out 

With ambition &

An awareness of

Time zones, 

Bring an approach to protoplasmic edifice 

under business acumen

Accumulated strength waiting, it’s on hold

Cold callers stalk the house

Stake out

Waiting to pounce on the funds

Carnivores lusting on vulnerable fat reserves

Travel the highways and byways

Instinct responds by head burial, culture consumed

From silos, storage units burst with unused energy

Locked museums hint at strange goings on

Inside distant gated communities

A coeval carnival, masked writhing

Lust for currency, stocks welter

Now into battle

Across the swamp to

Stake claim 

To majority shares

Mithras

The overseer

 Ending the day

Blood spattered gains

All over the platform

Wipe your face

Breathe

Begin again.