WHAT SEPERATES US FROM THE STREET
Joyful fear incline concrete bones matter
Pick up a new script empty old found things
Scatter them between us and the street smeared with
Everyday fluids blood piss etc
What came before will come again they say
Yes we are talking about the apocalypse
That separates us from the rolling news
Steam rolling its way into oblivion
Our favourite world
A swift kick in the nuts away from the broken tarmac
Roots push up through patchworks of paving
Rejoice they say.
One End of Fear
Poems lost in error
replaced with new words
like peace
and rest.
Let’s repaint the world outside
with the grief explosion of our aging hearts.
If we have the chance
to lift life’s heavy rotation
can we also broach these congested roads with other journeys made?
Let’s take away today’s crisis vote
where we are willing to concede
that the rain is right.
Even if what we have done to it was wrong.
Excited for a silent feast that sits upon the matted mind
growing faster than bulbs in the dark
slipping over the edge
into the slow retrograde infinity
of the open mouths we need to feed.
ROMANTIC HORROR STUDIES WORKSHOP
Each corresponding horror-scape
Negates the previous with fresh
Horror
Scape (s)
WHAT WAS IT ?
It was a reverse cat bandage
A reality brace
A black hole collapsing in on itself
An old shrew chewing an old shoe
Four thousand butterflies released from captivity
A burning city at night
Grape vines
Goose bumps
A package holiday from hell
A package holiday from heaven
Motivation just at the right time
The last chicken in the supermarket
A bumper harvest at the charity shop
A listless rainy day when you forced yourself to do yoga
A distant figure on the marshes possibly tripping on acid
Last night’s washing up glistening in the sink
Tina the cat meowing at 5.30 am
Mist and fog our favourites
Will there be another pandemic?
Do we need flu jabs?
But what was it?
A LITTLE BIT OF ENCOURAGEMENT
Is all it takes
whipped cream dreams ascend into the afternoon.
And what is the total cost of children?
And the meteorological data, do we have this?
The snake skin life behind us
The pasts all dodging each other crossing over the road to avoid awkward confrontations the street signs that were once important now gone.
Is it the gravity of age suddenly so heavy
that hurts our shoulders restricts our breathing?
Cold songs haunted
cloud memories
the blinking of a traffic light eye.
To A Smile
Run towards subtle joy. Congratulations under glass.
A thousand year old Quran.
Let’s take a walk together. We three. Me and my boys.
Into the crowded museum’s ancient aura of tourism and coffee and wooden buddhas. After the bookshop but before incense.
Must we make the same mistakes and is it taking without giving?
What the hell are we learning here anyway? That gold was gold is gold?
Fashioned in stone or precious metals signifying the ticket price minus two children plus lunch.
Forge a new future from beetles' wings and alabaster to recast failure with bitter contempt. But walk on. Breath fire. Spread joy like ashes in the air.
Flying Buddha’s Revenge & Rebirth on the Blackwater Beltway
A clacking sound, no,
a beating sound,
in the rafters
trivialise things always
yet stay entranced
by hypnotic violence.
This day
of orange
dances.
connects earth to the lungs
just bags of air?
bags of you
the same albumen is all over that opens
the doors to a ruin?
Blood pressure is
Brackish,
Piety softly driven insane by innate survival instincts,
Slowly introduce succour to the subject of a new nothing.
Pitched towards the horizon goal.
Shopping push your way through heavy fruit; swoon against the
protest flow.
Meanwhile
discomfort ignites new folk horror aberrations
we watch the bladed stagger from grub to grub into white light
beacons of harsh tranquility.
The returning images are just:-
Mad park avenues lined with bird shit.
The undignified body groaning.
Bones creaking with remorse.
Fumbles finding fury in perm-a-frosted moorings.
Up before dawn.
Something going on.
Never before like this.
