The Importance of The Working Week

I have been dying to tell of a

Fossilised brain enclosed in a famed wit lives near there.

Thermals are unique and float easily like a lazy river bend.

You are not what we think I am. It is extra-ordinary how this domestic life shines.

Hold it up to light it clamours for approval. 

Get your dog under control I yell. “Easy” is the response.

We are at a standstill terrified in this life while a yapping dog threatens to bite.

Frozen to the spot it is your fear your fault.

Whispers incarnate petrify over frozen ground and dogs are hauled this way and that weary speculators of forthcoming injustice.

In the funnel of being fed alive snatches of conversation like, “for the people” proliferate

in many plastic bags hanging from the trees 

Deck the halls like so much bells and holly threatening to collapse it all

Under its gargantuan weight

For the final head to head.

Like my malevolent concoction of macerated leaves 

Belching up bubbles of green foam silently on the side then maybe

Curl up in a New Age carapace and sit suspended from it, rock bound miles up

Looking through it over and above

This is not real I don’t believe in any of it today.

In its jaws a rough feathery mess of substance, tracery of the body hauled

Dead or dying bleeding still over the village green to be dumped like Punch on the spike of the pub.

You don’t live in this room

                             These walls are invisible

                                                                See through them

                          It's the world
                                                 where we live

The street is your home

                                    Now go outside


and lie down on your grassy bed.

THE MUSEUM OF CHILDHOOD

To dream the impossible / think the unthinkable thing

Know the unknowable 

in a past less real

Than the flickering light 

Of skulls crushed under Imploding gravity

Severe old light gashes out of mouths 

Sparking bodies hurled 

Into the

sky whispers of a sonic boom shudder

as a small child falling out of bed 

suspended mid-air then suddenly

it doesn’t cry out.

Often now crouching low you can sense a presence

In the bushes just peeking

To catch a glimpse of the real

Crawling on its belly through 

twisted limbs & sharp crystalline fossils

impossible beings

encased in leaf rot 

compacted three hundred million years ago

Eyes from under the glacier

tiny honed

Objects.

‘Dreamworld: a vast, almost unexplored continent in the southern regions. The American explorer RANDOLPH CARTER visited several of its wild regions: BAHARANA, CELAPHUS, DYLATHEEN, ENCHANTED WOOD, HLANITH, INQUANOK, KADATH, KIRAN, Jungle of KLED, LENG, NGRANEK, PNOTH, SARKOMAND, SOUTHERN SEA, THRAN, ULTHAR, URG.’

The weekly itinerant

Exercise muscle

Sport banters

Listen to weird music

That isn’t ‘music’

Gather provisions

Listen listen listen

Respond and then clear up

Think next move

Wash up

Think next

Physical work

Wound flex watch listen

Think

Work unload

Dryer wash

Up response now 

Recoil

Drowsy with stress

Take 

Medication

Sleep 

Listen to music that isn’t music 

Connect a few connectors

Observe: (rubbish on the street, horn honkers, street battles, mythological connectors, news reports on the radio, political diorama, birds on the tree out back, crushed by fate, supermarket offers, cultural intrigue etc) (also invisible maps to imaginary domains, future music pans etc other stuff that never happens)

Communicate at best 

Like music that isn’t music I wasn’t there

It is pastoral yet effectively bounces sideways

Regular in its refusal to allow chance fluctuations

Getting in the way of a costly time please 

We beg for our hearts’ entertainment

Out sourced ethics

But what you ask is the story over

There now

It is shows it is pitting your wits against 

The life

Irregular heart 

Beats now

Unbearable heart break unsolved

In five French parts but the sub-titles where often too late

They flashed in a frame

The dummy was floated to the exact spot

But nothing added up

Pattern of numbers retrieval and starry-eyed surveillance systems

Broken we laugh on the wing

And hope that out offspring will thrive this year

Ripples in the earth slowly expanding like

The froth on my beer breathes early demented spectral loops

On the horizon floatation tanks hustle and bustle

I chose you to be my god my guru

Puckered streaks of night rain thudding

Tropical train rounding the jungle

Bend in the rancid night

Of cigarette smoking eyes without faces

Slung the pack on the floor with a thud too fucked 

To move or care dragging all possessions

In a disintegrating black bin liner up the high street on a Friday

Night with fear bubbling behind the eyes historical legacy of 

Heavy oak framed memorial device languid star clad 

Gentle waste fund corporeal blister pack head rest

Over long sprint gas light beacon mist homage surfeit

Of hopeful longing to the restless 

Competency and Evidence

A macabre head carved out of a vegetable

Slice off its head and place a candle inside 

‘Without destination or intent – onwards!’

 A stunning expose of life at the margins of culture; of an existence in-between Being and becoming in the no-man’s land edged out grey zone classless and invisible. A geology of life between the cracks and the colossal strength of will required to prise oneself out of obscurity and into a meaningful experience in society. Submerged in silence regretful insouciant still breathing a hollow sound, come over drink wine with us remember the humble mist, the hollow-eyed living quarters. Today we will take lunch at Ikea it is a cheap day out overlooking the stunning vistas of the Tottenham Hale retail park from the observation deck. Tipper trucks thunder past, tents encroach from the corner view, clustered near rough clumps of bushes and scrubland flailing like carrier bags against the wind bodies embalmed inside escape the insidious cold. Meatballs. The relentless pace of the days marking time in a vacuum. The cat limps about the place. What exactly is the expression you are looking for? The craft of writing, the unveiling of a vast and unique array of spiritual and emotional contrasts uniquely summarised in the form of incoherent prose poetry. The list is endless, more coffee please. 

Asleep awake asleep awake asleep awake aw sleep sleep sleep

The bicycle wheel turns over wet tarmac slipping by the riverside rowers determined looking straightforward doctors and lawyers taking care of the business of life for us some are coxless others row in time along the bank rough faced interlocutors hurl advice on how to finesse performance it’s a daily task for some out there in all weathers.

                                           

crafting nothing out of thin air

recycled

endlessly

Swimming                  

        
through the seasons

a cantankerous old fellow just floats 

on his back 

occasional languid 
slow back stroke 

barely there 

                                                                                    floating on the breeze

Straying across lanes buffeting the divider

Looking up from underneath the baggy beach shorts liquid billow

A hand dangles under the water a watch old and tarnished by the sun

Consulting notes once more the poet speaks of

Artfully arranged trash piles in the underpass next to the canal

Stylised rubbish has a ‘vitality’ of its own, soon it will require an agent

Social gatherings liquify in the rain

A desperate looking face covering the side of a house

At the crossroads of ‘just getting on with it’, I give my best curl up and die face

Rain in hell stuffed cattle we are trundle this way

Now that for ritual imaginings sparks to light up the winter gloom

‘it’s because your worth it’ the advertising screams lifting a child

Aloft the rapids towards the precipice

Crunch, lurching forwards a seminar in progress by feminist theorist

Gabrielle Shattuck on the legal rights of compost

Rinsing plain language through a sieve

“did she kill herself?” (1) we ask, the few traceable pamphlets would suggest so

And hells breath it’s time to be moving repulsed and appalled mesmerised by it all

Like metals mutable melting malleable macabre

(1) Reference to the tragic early death of poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson aged 28 in 1975 when I was 2 and Marc Bolan was the king of glam rock.

An eternity of mud / visionary genius / pack soil on soil / earth removal / endless development

Absence of cynicism / watching and waiting / an oasis of Regency / the muted quiet of Kennington

On a late Friday afternoon in November / the cloistered calm of a Westminster mansion block, 

unhurried and unaffected by the rapacious change of the city, everything sits silently here as it 

always was / the smell of incense burning in Westminster Cathedral the hushed expectancy of the confession booth the low drone of the organ gazing at the shrine of the Sacrament the gold glittering in low level light we feel suspended calmer around the believers / a purple priests robes hanging in a shop window / the Regency café is closed between 2pm and 4pm / the Thames is over there / peering at Blake through an A4 lens / are things better or worse than then / a rich old man struggles to find the keys for his Landrover Discovery he is wearing dark green corduroys farmers shirt green gilet / one of the mansion block’s has its own built in restaurant the whole area looks like a film made by Americans set in London in the 1980’s perhaps a feature length episode of Murder She Wrote or parts of An American Werewolf in London the smell of shepherd’s pie is strong /  a Thames barge full of dark brown gleaming mud glides under Vauxhall Bridge like a piece of giant conceptual art where is it going we ask ourselves maybe they are building an archipelago off Purfleet.

Mind the gap

Stay quiet

Drift in and out of days

Live in the shadows

Squander 

Time

It’s yours

Keep it in your clenched fist

Forever

Become a leaf on the breeze

Gaze through the days

And the silent breath of the world

Look further

Think less

Now more

Than before

Use soundless power

To connect

Resist the hot chatter

Stay quiet this winter

Embrace the long shadows

The in and out of the bow scrape

Adopt an austere poise of thoughtful joy

Smile at people you don’t like

Its powerful

Bask in the early morning darkness

Take your time

Walk slowly

But think fast

Catch a wave

Let the currents draw you further out

Drink more tea

Savour every last drop

Imagine a world 

Without you

Look for doorways

Into other realms

They will appear

When you least expect them

Mind the gap.

The Hard Shoulder

Everyone is a story

Inside the frozen container wastes

Are stories

People as produce

Cling to the idea of the Human

The networks of the command

Guiding the flightpaths that cluster

On an Earth so simple

26 million views

Survival instinct / bone creak / Greek mythology / topographic oceans

Conspiracy survivalist / crack pots / pony-tailed nerd nut jobs / the head bob

Grinding beauty / shake a tail feather / the grimace / the feel-up

Slobs / jobs / knobs / cobs

Incandescent fury behind the wheel

Surveying the landscape from the M6 motorway

Looking for job opportunities along the hard shoulders

Not forgetting the cold shoulders

Jostling and pushing their way to the front

Sudden truck pulls out now blocking two lanes

Response time quickens

POP MASTER, testing your pop knowledge to its limit.

Are you a pop master, will you reach out in the darkness?

For me, for us, for the stranded in a blackened frozen space eyes glazing

Over, phone screen frosting, Red Kites on the updraft hovering

On the M40 shudder of moving metal and Ginsters packets

Twisting in the backdraft, clumps of toilet tissue attached to the branches of scrubby trees

On this HARD

Shoulder.

Clear sunrise pink

Breathing sky

moves the colours of memory

increased shading here

burnt umber   the

delight 

Of perception

melancholic

Is it that we 

                                               just survived, 

enough today?

a walled garden

women dance 

             strange lament

fall and rise in time

the bee’s hum

and the ground vibrates

when you lie flat on the grass

Ancestral 

Rotting pile

Crumbling glorious

shadowy traces

Of previous lives all humming together

The granite crags speak of time, peer out from behind corners 

of lichen language 

Footprints line the ridge

Don’t look down today they say.

It made them. 

Make them all come out

To go the wrong way

To come back again

To trudge

To find it

Right inside where

Sky and earth connected in

This water scrying mirror

Alchemical liquid mercury

Sky void 

Sump hole 

Atop a ridge

By some crags

To go back

To go forwards

To trudge upwards

Look backwards

Think sideways

Shake the brain matter

The juices now simmering

Down stairs in the kitchen

This fluid life, this existence

Of water and pain and joy

Triumph over the body decay

The mind rot cast out

Over the speed of sound 

Jet across the valley

Reflecting the sun on all the pooled 

Jewelled roads 

Vast green cold life.

Spirited Away

And then a stirring as soon as I started to write

Magical intuitive response movement

The sunrise growling in over the mountain line

Taps begin to run floorboards creek

And groan under the mounting pressure

Of the day and the morning’s payback of a full night’s sleep

In the ton of an anxious lifetimes worth of wrong

Like debris from an overnight explosion

Is scraped away and as we crawl out from under its wreckage to begin 

Again. 

Unbecoming Self

Untethered to it

Unfurls anew, without breath

Comes alive

Unspoken kingdoms pull themselves into focus

Now the revealing has started

Billowing over corrugated sheds of regret

Where tethered

Are unspeakable imaginings

Night hauntings ranters and rattlers

Looking for purchase

A foothold 

Comes clambering 

Over the crater like surfaces of

The moon’s mind

As if in the grip of a madness

So pervasive as to be unimaginable

As it was invisible

Sweltering pouring thirst onto a

Fire like rage

Unforgiving

Weathered the storm this time

80 mph autumn snow globe eyes shut

On the pedal

Into the 

Arms

Of 

Repair.

continental buggy rebate prescription

over taking lane fast

oblique strategic break-down

supermarket is the flex point

for squandered resource

now break flex the liminal muscle

the blood repeat

have you got an exit strategy?

does the crow span suit your consumption needs


what was previously a dystopian fantasy is happening now, it came on gradually so you wouldn't notice a thing. Now the receipt clutching anger is erupting, the slathering gathering enmulching onto the compost pit is diverging into faster lanes than before you know not it or when perhaps you can embrace the it when comes it learning to be present without Being or Being without presence over glowing effused with genetic energy basking in the heat waste overflow pipe dreaming good like

for like.

A Brief Topography of The Holloway Road

is nothing of the sort

of course

“Why don’t you kill yourself and then write a poem about it”

Response in kind, fluid vault resistant to defiance vectors, askance at the applied fakery of

post-colonial vantage point.

Item 2 “Bedside Manner”, “What’s that?”, “You know, human relations.”

What’s that?

So, dredging up a raft of integral poetry pamphlets once more the hands offer up coffers to those 

ready for to apply themselves with conviction despite air pollution memory loss. Torturous bonds 

caught and invested

for a nightly resistance avoid

the shakes.

Item £: (The poet leaps to his defence)

And gains time advantage over temporal destabilized self.

Self-help from a kayak, by the river.

The individual epic epiphany of misery soaked up, blood test held aloft soon to be launched over

lunch, south bank dreams epic lunacy reanimation of historical re-enactment group Thameside 

fortnightly weather permitting.

In through a parked doorway

“I just want to get in” cries

The door opens, it is not clear on the threshold

Who maintains the place

Those hard lead contours between the glass pains

Give little idea

It is sad though

To see the unloved

Lost in that big old house

Forward and back 

Sigh

Across the street the people come and go

And through these slats we espied them

Coping seemingly mired

In a cold soup of non-traditional care

A kind of carrier bag life of 

Who pays for it?

Nothing is ever visible, what is maintained how and for what and by who.

The grey light of late October courses through the bones now

That great sloshing as a bus ploughs through some roadside trough

Soaking the unlucky with north London scum

And we skid through corroded catkins caked in goose shit

Thanks to the morning bread man

That always makes me think of Dustin Hoffman in

Midnight Cowboy for a small inconsequential moment on the way down to the valley.