Gripped by love and gripped by death

Today the work is

Blue sky wondering

Stirring in essence and vague notions of

A future survival plan

Because the fate is always one step ahead

Frosted green astro turf type surfaces

Are slipping under us

We glide towards the future

But stagger always stopping

To look around

Notice the small stuff

Breathe in through the nose

Incense flows

Living on the frontline

It feels like

Each crab like pokes

Out the shell in

The morning dew

And duly we continue towards the point of entry

Of this morning suns

Take hell, take a time when hell did not exist

Take some twilight and spread it over a close framed neon sign

On a street that is cool and interesting

Become the idea you had

When you thought that maybe you had cancer

Through the cool trees they whisper

Smoke them out flying things

With fronds that seek to catch on

And hold fast to your ageing skein

Trees bend in the wind

Easy to understand that

What is harder to contemplate

Is the body bent double

Forcing itself against the icy internal blasts

That come in like mini hurricanes off the wastes of time.

Are those rats in the walls

Or did I just imagine the sound

When will this interminable coffee grinder

Cease to produce a filthyscum residue

That tastes so bitter

But I can’t stop drinking it.

Now the heart is racing

Now I know enough to carry on

To believe anyway without knowing any real truths at all

Except that bird that won’t stop singing

Winter Listing

There is somebody in the room

They entered the house uninvited

I do not know their name

I cannot be sure if they are welcome

It was rude not to knock

But sometimes conformity is a drag

Just let yourself in old friend

But unwelcome news we don’t need here

Just luck and a bit of light please

To warm our hearts

From the winter gloom

Please come in old friend

Come take my hand

Dance and flicker light filigree

Expect the tracery to follow us home

It is winter a memorial

Keep eat safe

it knows

treat open hearted

Surgery

In your face death

Skip lines

The Para text

The keeping guards

That close into your fist as you do everything

While you remember nothing

Like a skipping dvd

Like all that junk piled up in the back

Like the very idea of your mind

As a dump

a thought flamed up 
now becomes

A mud slide

Like the one that very nearly washed Oprah away

It was on the news today

And you thought it would all go away

It re-enters

Like some folk fool

Face pressed against the glass

Half full

Half fool

Thoughts formed in a moment

And afterwards the memory of chatter

Why not

Fugitives take flight

And how then

Becomes a mantra

Of municipal car parks, sacred amulets, rain fields

That may contain Anglo-Saxon treasure.

To coincide with news from abroad

We took the remaining boats down to the south of the island

From here clear across the archipelago

The sea had turned a petrol hue

Simple rhythm sustained us through the harsh winter months

Small clinks and rustles marked out the time

Between sunrise and nightfall

Myths and legends became our food

The library our kitchen

Piled up like a buffet

Of all you can

Eat.

Local deaths, even a massacre one year.

Frozen and golden

A hare sprouts suddenly from the shingle brush

Takes off a great loping pace with the invisible

Precision of a grasshopper

Our hearts are now

Carved out of granite

Carved up and spat out

This will be the nearly last poem of the year

And here we all are vessels of blood that contain

Eyes yes meet souled hello cold friend

It’s you again

Everyday

Eyes meat soul

The sounding bells the echo location ghost

That haunt the rebounding silos impenetrable to thought

From across the muddy channel we scud stones

We could be throwing all our books too

But something stops

So off Across the fens we go past Ely

Peat black enriched field’s hold the sides of the ooozzze up

It won’t bursts its banks today peatrevereberating through the top soil

Shuddering an ancient burial mound

The captain of men Raedwald or suchlike sends back shudders

Up through the roots

Break cover we over the metal bridge

Quick into the lighthouse to usncape the thunderbolts and frozen hailstones

Pellets bounce of the car roof

Frozen we the men the armies the sighs

The gold

Eyes meet soul

Eyes meet brain meet death giving towards a time in winter when the days are shorter than you remember

Frost pains liminal expanse account

Over the phone we misheard you say

Buck Mulligan as a Mithraic hierophant

Also

An ebullient flâneur he stalked the periphery

Lending his free flowering thoughts fresh fancy and endless fascination

Of course peripheral like an out of date sauce

Up to date sources canter alongside all this as it happens

Yes, boulevards yes arcades

Benjamin and Pessoa think so to intrepid Adorno    

Observe this special spectral message a

Sudden who

In chambers beneath the burial mound

A Mithras scene scent of ambergris and ichor fills the ancient air

A grove hands and knees and feet grovelling

A disturbance

An essence

Beyond the time the temporal lobes exposure

To vast lakes of inter dimensional forms

Craven images shrouds covered over with thick dusty drapes

Thought baubles up from under

Frozen like mannequins in a dirty old outfitter

Full time horror emblazoned with an unbreakable will

By the river’s edge where the saucy water we all adore laps

Gentle at the foot of a god, an offering yes

Down on the steaming Ghats

At the mouth of the Thames the confluence of the channel

Carves evil eddies out of the brown water

This one young lad fell from Westminster bridge

Body found a week later washed up on Canvey island

You don’t forget these things

Local deaths, even a massacre one year.

the night fox kneels near


can feel hot breath


hovering in the cold

pitch dark



the sky is born

of knotted

overhanging vines

that collapse into each other

through a net of knotted collapsing canopies

twinkles hot breath giant fox distant stars

the tempo the timing
 the right to belong
the right to remain silent
the right to be a ghost

untangle a scrambled egg if you can
process a difficult emotion
observe a land crab
make it's way across a sea of glass


the increasing heart race
the overlapping thoughts
the van hire company
the forecourt is a disgrace


obfuscate defecate objurate speculate an earthquake
dub time
dub wise
dub club
broke

tend to your dream garden at night
shove shale around
pick out a weed 
hear there

here now

is a literary game

Then out came the jew's daughter
And she came all dressed in green.
" Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,
And play your ball again."