By Egret’s vision

Today’s morning melted visage

Plays a game

Of havoc

That we are unable or unwilling to avoid

Hot roads bubble soft skin starts to fry

Cold analytics burst through the overgrowth

It is a simple equation this life

All the frippery that surrounds us

Commodity baggage

Already extinct

Dinosaurs roaming some waste ground

Out the back over there yet to be speculated upon

Forced air in an overcoat

Look for they come in and out with the tides

Memory chance full integrated and over the worst of it

The beginning is the end 

Like we migrate now from one turn to the next

A solitary prelude easing into the bat flayed night

Sunset burns down to the end of the wick

In Paris

In the fresh depth of the morning the city started its action without ceremony

In believing in the purpose of the day was a doing

Apart from the muscular routine of actions based around a system of

Monetary exchange required for survival

The predominant sound the combustion engine

The Seine is a peaceful looking river compared to the Thames, that swirls and frets against its banks like a revengeful ghost. The Seine on the other hand oozes European languor and lazily drifts, it has a different colour also to my home town’s river, a sort of bluish green that changes aspect in the sun. It sits and waits instead of eyeing you up for consumption, saying, ‘Go on, throw yourself in I dare you!’

Swallows and Terns abound in the mornings haze, as I look down I see grey hairs on my forearms today in Paris without out a plan my aim is to cover as much ground as possible in the early part of the day, before the life sapping heat descends and smothers the city in its stifling malaise.

A fattening around the middle man of perhaps his mid-fifties stops by the river’s edge and takes of his white vest, placing it on a bollard. Facing the sun, he begins a routine of gentle flexing approaching the idea of exercise.

City of ancient myth, city of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarme. City where the ghost of Walter Benjamin haunts the arcades. His ghost lost in limbo unhappily cut before his prime, shadow on the boulevards. 

Legend and desire collaborate inside this maze this labyrinth of ghosts inside each one

The I is the minotaur, frustrated lost boiling to death inside its skin.

A motorcycle starts a siren clangs past, some semi silent padding in clear plastic jelly shoes distracts the gargoyles eye view of it all.

Looking up from the dust like an unholy man, mad with the sun bleached ravages of desire, this is historical living for thirty euros a day.

Retreat to a shady café to consult the map, tomorrow we will be back in London and this day will be dream of the past a split second frame.

Parc Des Buttes, landscaped slope, jungle in the city, lush green unfolding before the metro stop, in Mallarme, ‘some golden galleys / beautiful as swans sleeping on streams of purple redolence.’

The feeding baby in the Picasso museum turns the mother into a cubist swollen nipple like three triangles an ovoid and an angry hexagon. Tourists make their way from picture to picture, taking pictures. What would old man Benjamin make of that digital reproduction, the aura drains before my eyes, I was never keen on that period of Picasso anyway, they look like stupid cartoons.

The swollen bodies massed and writhing in the now late afternoon heat which keeps on rising, it is a dangerous age to live in some say, no persecution as such but insipid normalised consent and constant surveillance now. Find some shade to mark time to sprinklers ticking clock, loungers evaporate into the grass, just see the feet then gone, disappeared into the ground. In the air the trace of two eyes like frosted snow globes of Paris, waiting in steaming silence.

At Gard Du Nord way too early the gathering throng outside the main entrance watch entranced at Afro Robotics, the scene is transfixing, here is modernism, here is a multi -level section of this modern strata, the convergence of forces at a point central to its existence.

Transactions are taking place, observations made, eyes follow eyes, raw survival played with ease, the camp with its rules and order, the dandyism of it all is central to its point of entry into Europe, a place of dream exchange of heat and food, sweat and movement.

To advancement

Please take this gift

Exercise caution about the distance it takes

Things in the rear view mirror often look closer than …..

These old dried tangerine peelings are also for you

Go ahead take them

They have been in my pockets for over a year somehow still ok

A reminder of a different time

We were thinking differently then

How does thought change over time?

Does time control it

Eventide damsel fly
ridiculous golfers

Smack the ball wide

Light the incense

Pursue a new kind of language

Wrench it 
spanner it outwards push it towards some kind of truth

Distinct from landscape distinct from predetermined ideas

The mean air temperature the saline levels

Inhabit a moment do

not restrict awareness

So you are sorry in a downwards pose

The line the lump the level

Scratched off to find nothing

But the frozen staircase that leads to the upper rooms

The temperate house the coffee casement

when you realise that this game is up now and forever time and being

Could not exist

Time requires a consciousness of time

Being requires a being of Being

To exist at all

Flame up for oblivion

Rattle cages

 listen

Wild weeds wrapped                                                   the flower dome

The hide sits on the salt line

Guesswork creates the distance need to take on

Species indifference  

larval

Spores born on the wing

The Big Fleet and the counter-

wall place a division between the estuary side

tidal flow

blood pressure rises

entails a metric example of moods response

the car throws a wide arc of dust

swallows burst through its motes

suspension jolts over a badly maintained access path

the screech of metal on entering some stations

bonded we are

hot lumps of flesh

the remains of industry halted                               ‘Squat like a toad close at the ear of Eve’

tokens money gold religion morality

waste greed anxiety pity

build destroy run flee

be born remember being born remember then nothing and nothings nothingness

will find you at the

remains of a pier

like you just alighted from the last train to pull in at the station

screaming in on brakes of rusted gas and crushed shingle mounds at the foot of a Red Hill

remove your boulder sack and throw it now without remorse

into the void into the air explosion

of gas and petals and pages

feel reacting enact

take a notice

place one foot in front of the other

begin to come back to breath

manoeuvre yourself into a slightly better pay bracket

enjoy yourself now

that is freedom

a deep glistening joy awaits you in the next life

in the barn owls window in the frosted fancy of your fingerless retreats

take it all wrap yourself up in the tendrils of this moment

draw it all towards you

sameness and oddity distinct in a numberless numbness

Today a coy rabbi

twisting locks lost behind three inches of lenses

now get back in line and pray with a fervour that is new

the summer light lifts you over the grass you begin to levitate

higher looking down it’s a lightness of being

such a rest you’re so tired

go to sleep now.

Around the townscape is deserted

It will take time for this community

To ‘re-build’ itself

But nothing is pre-ordained no ordinations here

Work takes its toll the graft in the dust

The particles cluster at the mental ears

Years eat away like silent rust

Entering the clearing now

              laughter speaks to another place another time

                   Glorious segments peel off from the centrifugal force

Of wild Nature unbound

a real Reality

It’s the breathing in and out

The simple quietude that pulse like the blood

In our hearts yearning

That keeps the show going

Lowliness pace of ancients’

Myth lights the way back                              look

Forwards

                                   can you see into the future?

                                                                                           Will it sting your eyes?

                                                                                        Can it be worth all this

Blood

Bitterness

Beauty

Ascending falling rising lowering

Waves crash into the shore

‘Me miserable!’

And the lowest deep a lower deep

Harder lither smarmier grander 

Listening to swell maps

It is an underground culture not found now

STILL MISSING

A misspelt misspent youth on a rampage 

Free jazz punk

Wrapped in plankton in a new jazz age

The mad mind minds its mind

Official plague reports coming in suggest

Defunct culture confusion 

Swept in on a wind with this year’s jellyfish

Face your frosted faction\

Opportunist taxidermist takes a pot shot at local cat

What do you think about that mister truck driver

White van blisters by on scorched asphalt this side of Witham

Being and being of being

Knows not how the water vole and rat

Run a place without name

Face like a black burnt sunflower

A hobgoblin indeed 

Add dirt and sulphur for a small town lucifer

Tote bag of beers

Alcohol defines loneliness for decades

The right or wrong way to survive gout and the twisted arm of that’s it

Spare spiral updrafts teenage dreams

Warm salt marsh uprisings 

The graceful Avocet’s the vole

The snuffling 4am hedgehogs rooting at the side of my tent

The morning buddha snail

Abstract apologies just foaming 

Brindle bribed bashed out baked into Being

Ghost written half-light where everything is eerie always

“I can set up shop anywhere”, said the filigree spectre in a half whisper

That came up through the floorboards

“Then take me with you” voice replies

All we need: 1 yoga mat, 2 pens and pencils, 3 ……

Write for life run 

Don’t stop or look back 

Wrestle from memories tentacles

Drawing breathes monstrous

Glacial night time tremors break the 

Crusted mantle

Pour like lava, out through the eyes ears nose mouth

Unexpectedly, it’s ungearing

The thoughts cave where miracles hang

Stalagmites or tites I can never remember

Sickly yellow in the dark they live

Eyes peel back prickly just starting to see again

Among the pines limping the home straight

Auricula whispers 

Though feint trough about

We can catch them 

It is possible to spend hours on this and that

Read about a writer that drowned by the pier

Then taste the work

Still alive

A new Avant vanguard spent swept up

Stake a claim

Below in a bilious wind the galumphing hierophant takes shape

Holds out three straws to be lucky 

Take a turn onto the weasel wind

Watch the crossing 

Trucks vans cars three wheeled bicycle’s clamour for space

Amour foo

Robbing Peter to pay Paul.On December 17^th, 1550

The abbey church of St. Peter, Westminster, was advanced to the dignity of a cathedral by 

letters patent; but ten years later it was joined to the diocese of London again, and many of its estates appropriated to the repairs of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A high coloured command banded but obstinate

In its obligatory awareness of what is required

To make a statutory claim of the heart

Honest yes, but unbowed? Perhaps but it remains to be seen

How these feelings will buttress against further forbearance like

Taking old clothes to a mental health charity

Sorting through books 

Maximus put the order out

Jupiter scorched

Swallows wing

Climbed the breathing awe of the mornings breathe

Horse dung infatuation

Slowly

Now

Here 

poke your head into the loft

THEN get attacked by angry

wasps


lain dormant IN AN

inert hive

a writhing static husk of pale yellow

it is a moment I your life

try to remember the small things