VOID SPACE 1

Life less leaf matter rolling fog

Over marsh under bridge upon the Lea.

Gene exchange hereditary flashy kindness

Oyster bay swill the glassy meniscus 

Each way to lose or replicate basic laws that

Besiege autotoxins as the great Wurlitzer rises 

From below the stage grease proof painted

Gaudy music hall impresario tilts a waltz

Towards sun trails hot dust popping and

Arm in arm to sanction circadian life forms breathing

In formation to a time Being unlocked from capital

Hold forwards here it is now… gone.

 

  

WEST HAM ON RYE

like a dung beetle slowly nudging it forwards

write a list of painful things that expose bare faced

feelings that you find troublesome homeopathic love

wounds that will not clot or coagulate now

send a scout to plot next moves over the board or

if you like plant stakes in the ground to claim a

way into the recent future. No doubt redactable no traces

we live silently without regression it’s time to go now

you know how hard it is to live. So why not stop? We

were manhandled in your dreams last night; big broad grins

all round it didn’t stop us though. Laughing over chips

and curry sauce later then; maybe a trip on the Woolwich Ferry,

the London Riviera pleasure cruising tidal terror watching those

hypnotic little whirlpools that whisper go on do it.

 

 Days of monotony were really not so bad then

 

what you never had you don’t miss

Out on the big swirling peninsular

Swollen tide bursts, silent barns rusted paint tins

Poorly supported yachts

Wintering on land.

Ploughing the dry mud with sullen boots

Looking for some action but

Mainly the horizon

Noticing grey shards of rain clouds

Blowing in.

Turn towards the extracted margarine Other

Nothing happening today apart from tarpaulin wraths 

Toasted cheese trumpet lessons count the breath

It is here that we reside washing on the line knickers

Fancy pants.

the city won't let us go under

 

it keeps clawing us back

 

dreaming of a provincial

 

pillowcase made of prescription opiates

 

and a little piece of hash

 

ah village oblivion

 

wake up smothering a coma

 

walk to shops hunched over

 

luxurious in poverty

 

oh, the dream

 

 

TAKING IT FOR A WALK

 

Large sandy coloured mastiff with a mouth that looks like a grin

 

Keeps turning back to look me

 

each time it catches my gaze

 

“It’s your wheels”, says the boy, his master being pulled along 

tall young and gangly

 

Happy in charge of such a spirited beast

 

I look backwards and catch Arthur’s eye

lagging behind,

 

We’ve been out for hours

 

“It’s the wheels”, I keep thinking.

 

 

The Xan bypass the mind body ‘problem’

 

There is no distinction in their culture

 

They are simply a living mind

 

Opaque almost invisible but more than this

 

You will know of their presence before you see them

 

They will inhabit your thoughts

 

They dwell in daydreams 

 

Only certain of us can

 

See them.

 

The wry crack of a smile

 

Down through generations of imperial sway

 

Under silent fans rotating on some malarial veranda

 

Inchoate with liquor sweat beads soak the back bone

 

Infernal buddha on a funeral pyre

 

Scorched suburban enclaves of closet empire dwellers

 

Dreams of lightning over the Ghats more essence

 

Than whole embodied

 

Steady as she goes my man

 

And on hacking and thrashing at the bush

 

Unsteady psychotic obeisance to benign powers

 

Inherited powers and wealth

 

Superior death rites

 

It must be tamed, this swelter born out of stasis

 

This greying of the cells pulped matter roadside huts carnival baggage

 

The buffet car entranced 

 

Acts of self -sacrifice are folklore

 

Signs through the forest

 

Make believe fictions of innate human benevolence 

 

To keep you warm at night

 

How to feel how to sink into a coma

 

Of delusional contentment

 

Watch the tempting smile the laughing buddha’s cartwheeling through space

 

Brain flowers death cults naked

 

Ash covered sadhu by the Ganges river

 

Rolling in death

 

 Shavasana, the working dead 

rush past trepanned out cold lung; 

flames spit drizzle stacked  cereal scrub 

sink radio holes feet distinct scree hazard 

remain flayed interstitial lunate blade.

 Aureate opening 

closing colossal in 

growth 

Mouthing sounds

 fretful dumb diminished 

     stately home orchard able only

                                  simplest symbols corrosive

                                   Wax metal edge digest

Sugar alchemical wealth cough drop

Planate precious repetitions 

Metal filament distil lineage.

 

And always thoughts return to that empty village square

 

Where are all the people in these places

 

You might see one scurry quickly from doorway to doorway

 

Even the houses look deserted

 

People are hiding

 

I want to take leave of my body; let it continue on without me for a while

 

Oh, I’ll be there if you need me, just write and I’ll attend

 

Let the old body do its thing. I’ll check in every month or so 

 

Taking into consideration the relations between brain and liver 

 

Feeling strength in getting further out; hacking through brambles, fantastic forests.

 

As if it was destiny to some day meet the point of a knife

 

Not this week but next week

 

Inescapable 

 

You will meet it

 

It IS your destiny

 

You do not have control here; the future is out of our hands.

 

Knife spinning back through an already happened future

 

Your body rushing to meet it

 

Your body sleeping in a doorway

 

Your body riddled with ten types of cancer

 

Consuming itself in a fireball of morphine and exploding cells

 

But take heart in this poetry; it is only poetry

 

That can stave off destiny.

 Tyre tracks turning circles who will save us now?  

 Is no more death at all costs ok; did you get that? 

 You have to get underneath now, under the skin of it to feel the heat. 

Then, if you get the chance, rip out its heart. 

Each house needs to burn out the toxic excess.

 The tower of games  resonates with wasted energy; tainted with a melancholy glow, a half light guiding 

us through slow motions. 

Fear is exhausting, paranoia and waste twist in the breeze, catch hold of everything.

 Every day an epic journey to find a new religion, 

uncover the true meaning of existence in some text or other. 

Books are pulled and flung open.

 

‘Inner city life, inner city pressure’,  

I knew a city but it wasn’t yours; it didn’t service the leisure of a new class of urban elite,

It was outside this remit, it was workaday it was Peter Tatchell and affordable eccentricity. It was

Free things to do it was liberation from class consciousness. Where can they dwell now, the misfits, the odd-bods the obsessives need a place to be. Hopeless pangs of nostalgia for that delicious twilight London past that dwells in sodium glows; the streets that echo with the ghosts of ‘playing-out’ now replaced with graphic design, coffee shops and overconfidence. These are the very last days of that world that most don’t notice, but we do. We notice everything in minute detail, we know where all the old phone boxes are, the fading shop facias of old family run firms, the ‘hello young man’ even though your turning 50 soon. The unselfconscious ungroomed lives that live day to day, no grand plan just getting by with a smile and a bit of laugh now and then.

 

 

Magpie old friend I hear your cackle, Green Parakeet outraged against the grey black ice; most visible in winter. Duck your heads to avoid the swing. Swill down coke and chips as the masked singers reveals themselves.  Cherish mystery like an anchoress crouched in silent prayer; confined in a box of love. Procuring themselves to God like delicious chocolates plucked from a silver plate by benign soft hands twisting it round up in the air, gone.  Rapture binds the heart swell mesmerised by incense and the echo of footsteps across the vestry. Give yourself away friend, scatter your hearts ashes into the wind. Crows mobbing Kestrel, Parakeet screech and Magpie cackles.

 

Crawled out from under the hedge with that roguish jumble sale smile. Here comes the Green father of mildew brother of moss. Faded suede and monkey boots Aladdin Sane hedgerow haunter; who once won a thousand quid on the pools, which was a lot in the early eighties. Green by name and green by nature curling fronds of ivy around weathered stumps summoning the paisley junk of a thousand wasted days wandering inside a cosmic whirlpool. Ask him about the time he befriended an escaped bear hitchhiking on acid. Characters from the past reach out to remind us of what once was real. Now all that remains is that grin Cheshire cat-like above a branch losing its leaves; cans crushed flat fags snubbed, those yellowing finger tips.

 Scratch cards and proto ambient 

 

‘On our website people meet each other with the only aim to have sex as fast
as possible’

 

Take selective serotonin uptake for a run talk ambient, play the scratch game

 

 grab the handrail. Next item is lost.  The fruit is already rotten . Jab the needle then toss it in the sharps bin. Shunned to the shoreline the frozen channel small dinghy’s  cresting waves even in winter; one mistake here is sudden death. “It is illegal to go on holiday”stunned into silence grab another handful of scratch cards; go out find something to have sex with as fast as possible. Make a note of any useful metaphors, cum trails vapour waves leg trembler horse shoe bender etc. Don’t wake the shut-ins they sleep silent as bodies liquifying all around us quiet as snow fall. 

 

Thankful for the silence radiant through daylight curtains. The choice then which is yours.

Tokens of the root sum of love received. Pull them close those ones; the Being we cherish.

Throw some sticks for burning. Swarm behaviour, blooms, murmurations all etch out this pattern.

If we take this as a symbol of the Sublime, then language retains its mastery where roosting forms emerge as primitive acts of giving Love. 

Nurture not false acts continue in this way to pass on how we know what we know. In the breath of everyday actions this much is palpable as a constituent part of our reality. Inside this dwelling space we reach a place called ‘home’.

 

Wake on the factory floor 

bones in fright eyes on the method

flight path neural sledge 

bring the horn section get the juice buds flowing

taste that waterers wave of unctuous hypnotic slew

now your mine delicious jellyfish trace.

 

When we both got erased it felt like a blessing

They gassed the dog as well. Funny how it goes

Never thought too much about it after that

Something sinking in the frozen lane reminds

Of breakfast in a new town torn behind glass.

 

 Scoured remainders washed of people, hope, desire fabrics of 

open wide appointments expect details in the meta-data. 

Ushered in to the decontamination bay;

Florescent mouthed Pinhead from Hellraiser points 

towards a parking space that empties into The Abyss.  

Vital organs frozen seed banked 

lobotomised future proofed  

Up to your ankles 

in the slushy future of what once was you.

 

Hard mouthed hope seedlings collecting scraps of kindling on the 

outskirts of a ragged tented zone. 

Now you are actually here; living in that future nightmare 

that we boasted would never come in our life-times. 

 

 

 

Disappointment old friend. Tramping for signs; paths that reveal themselves. Obsolete wet cardboard; locksmiths and handymen looking for clues. Faded Holloway floats by, dog eared Manor House, Finsbury Park milky coffee dragging out the day, watching boxes burst at the seams. Hop on rub the window nursing a plate of unrequited eggs. The joy of the tumbling bouncy castle. Here we go now before it steams up again.

A frozen rat a fox mating frenzy my poor old cat. Staring into a dismal blizzard I thought of skating on the ice back in the big freeze of whenever, mulling it over turning it around into ah whatever… But that’s just lazy poetry adding three dots to the end of a whatever… the back wheels of a Toyota Previa turning useless in a puddle of black old-world oil smoke rising, lean snow- flakes hovering outside my window like a song by the Cocteau Twins, irretrievable and just out of reach.

Eyes follow the folds of  fatty fissure. She’s been working through some stuff. 

We help her load the car, ungainly over black ice. 

The close-knit acoustics workshop has fallen apart since lock down, 

causing the news-letter to fall foul of chronic re-formatting. 

Nurse Moribund issues a brutal enema; the screaming intensity shatters glass. 

Straight into veins, rising purple in exhaustion bleeds out to its end. 

Everyone lodged inside alone squatting on guttural urges now children gone. 

Burnt up all fried unevenly, expert wisdom dissolves easy over ice.

 BOLD FROM NOW ON

Our task today is limited to a special realm that quits its’ armaments

And replaces them with a bolder frame, clustered in a firmament

Of fire. Is the blood pressure machine to hand and visible? 

Vantage point dry to the long form; this will be it. White out no sun beyond coming metallic 

Voice is flat pedagogic data flows in through the ear whole then out through the arse hole. Do you know the way to San Jose? Please focus on a boiled egg La Traviata understanding is all we ask for not recompense or belief systems. Buds, fronds, rhizomes of erotic fungi working their way slowly towards you under foot over head snatching breath. No silly siskin she, but alive warm hovering; a drone in repose with full 360-degree vision over the flood plain. Brown Lea flow, the guts the eddies the whirlpools; Egyptian Goose, Heron and Egret. Please post it, no I don’t want to know thanks again; it’s over just like that. No fateful narrative to save you now just a weaponised exegesis.  Cover ground in a straight line bundled over barb wire slink by the TV glaze; monitor the empty swamp of the heart lands. All are grazing doing time in oddly dysfunctional ways. Rushing around searching for onomatopoeia to prop up a failing wall.  Clutch lichens, auto park strung out on too much credit; so much in fact that you’ve been sold. Sandstone lode stone dolmen and sarsen.   

Cake swallow bitumen over wilted tar, crenelated fences and bird tufts, crusted spawn holes hides for looking & fearing have you an answer? Percy Ingle delicate fancies, the Egret dancing on poles looking at itself in a mirror of chemical hues peacock purples and salamander reds , the clamour of crushed tar oil in water the scum, the past bleeds out of the ground. 

Crooked paving cracked concrete dead end motor works the over spill. Through the underpass the sleeping bags hung spiked on knuckles of hard wood. Hang on to it they say.  ‘Dose’ ‘Fatsoo’ and ‘Dime’, footprints into the bushes, membranes poking out behind weeds; the skeleton of a Boris bike stripped bare.

 

LET THE GRINDING COMMENCE

Give me a touch stone please, whatever that is.

This situation is a struggle. Make something out of nothing the weather says.

Summon that life saving energy to drag yourself up over the precipice; 

the wind howls this message in our faces. 

Flecked with ice particles we brush ourselves down

And  stare at the hollows of left behind slush; shivering to wonder where

The time has gone. 

Kids jolt us back into the present moment. 

That precise moment happening now. 

The blood pressure apex ; the in and out of breath, the clear 

pathway to the lungs that really is the only thing worth worrying about.

 FRESHLY MINTED

The broken level is just presumed to be an over spill

The ground bent suddenly; we followed the signs that lead to an end.

Pine                       wizard                   sump

Quest                      swelter                  scheme

Oval                      curated                   well

 

Familial obligations fade. 

You feel left out but it’s comforting though; to think it will all be over soon.

Gestate                 purchase              base

Stronghold           fleet                    scar

Hello                   down                  there

We walked a tightrope to bring us what we wanted.

Never Look down once. Eat nuts like a squirrel store some away.

 

He had a good eye for junk; everything else was a punch to the guts.

Horded books piled up next to doorways; cats prowling , the inevitable.

 

Ghost                           home                                       time

Eat                               ghost                                        home

Home                           time                                          again

 

Pressure inside the body will kill you. Lying on the doctor’s couch, legs over the sink.

There are people that care for your life. You do not know them; they will find you.

 

Blood                                   matter                       body

Matter                                  over                          sink

Bones                                 stomach                    blood

 

The mind shores up against an attack. It retreats behind memory.  

Walking slowly around the flat in the dead of morning, foxes howling in the garden darkness.

 

Clear                             up                                                          sky

Turn                                         on                                                           fire

Phase                                                   yours                                                              signal

 

Piles of shit everywhere. What do you need? Nothing, ok so let’s go.

Like a 1970’s sci-fi horror your trapped; smothered in alien spunk.

The stuff accumulated was too much; it threatened everything. To 

Survive they adopted specialist interests. The science of sound; how everything is rebounding 

Off each other. Get a grip they said.