Tuesday 29 October 2019



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.

Monday 28 October 2019



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.

Tuesday 22 October 2019





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.


Monday 21 October 2019





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.

Sunday 20 October 2019




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.

Friday 18 October 2019




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.

Wednesday 16 October 2019





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.

Monday 14 October 2019



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.


Tuesday 8 October 2019




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.

Thursday 3 October 2019



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 !