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.

salt marsh

sea grass

radio ship

island of plastic scum 

distant egrets

overhead hovering

the oppressive weight of silence

all along the time worn gullies up the mud track 

farm machinery in use but no humans are visible 

just the thrum of a tractor and the semi audible shriek of some distant children

a few last swallows come in and out of view at Shingle Point, why, I wonder

have these birds not flown yet? 

distant scum

radio egrets

circling plane

sea hovering

oppressive ship

blown grass

rural outpost, humans are rare

up in the village a person I recognise steps out of the past, we make our way simultaneously by 

coincidence towards the village shop; our lives run parallel for a brief moment. We part on entry to the shop but are reunited in the check-out queue, she is buying a can of mushroom soup for one: me, sliced cheddar and some Jacobs crackers, I remember her from when I was a small boy. She doesn’t register who I am.

in the midst of a spill

cold so very cold

those were not my words, he said

seepage across the pavement

damp dank depression

light airy cultural awareness

the canal is an industrial conduit

yet you treat it like a river

it is not

and you are not an intrepid explorer

just an alcoholic with a dog

and some memories

of a previous state

the river contains a residue

the past contains itself

in your blood river

flush yourself away today

on a wave of boozy irony

flake away the paint stained buttress

on your mock Tudor van

with chimney stack and

stained glass embellishment 

views across the tear stained tennis courts

your mind

a floatation tank

saltine saturated moraine

of mounting glacial flight

take it or leave

like it or lump it

choose to believe       jump into 

something new

you owe yourself a special offer today !