Poetry

Poison Coffee

Personal, Poetry

An oldie I thought had a hint of charm left in it…

Dans la fromagerie a londres
The scents of smelly cheese like happy rotting
There are cakes
Not cheesecakes
Normal cakes
And the waitress is poisoning my coffee.
Her eyes reaching up and down my face
As she fills the cup
With almost nicotinal pleasure
Words
Sugar?
Milk?
Kissing my ears
A smile that remembers,
Burrowing into my heart
And the waitress is poisoning my coffee.
I fear her touch,
Giving change,
Like a witch must fear salt or water or salt water
So soft her hands
Reminiscent of rows of young,
Painted
Sicilian cottages,
Melting in the sun.
I take and drink the poison coffee.

Thirteen

Poetry, Prose

The lights that show us through the dark are burning away our days

In crowds of black&white commuters, stark against the background sound quiet, glaring on, petty mumblings, headphone pendants, votive coffee cups left in temple alcoves

Or

Shellshocked private school boys in red scarves and brown wool overcoats the colour of dead leaves in Winter shining gold to be embezzled

Dulux charts of navy swimming in that grounded sky blue perpetual in the night and

Listed buildings stand testament to our strange obsession with memorials of the damned&angelic

Global Corporate Golgotha

All the tombstones have personal names that mean hotels, finance, property, alcoholics, pharmaceuticals like the way we give God a personal pronoun: Lloyds will handle it, Marks will handle it; He will handle it

Violent partially-erect sexual aids consume our city finances

Smoking&fire&loss&alarm&prevention&free paper are red

Security cameras are blue because they are comfortingly sad, or grey because they are not there

The harsh butcher lamps in shops saying come&buy&leave, in homes saying come&sleep&leave, in hospitals saying come&die&leave

The city heaves great lumps of dripping profit

Streetlamps making you drive & closed parks

The ant-hill windows burning on condemned estates

Then a thousand artists iridescent in pointless silver running onto railway tracks

To report on suspicious citizens & see it & say it & sorted.

The Curly Auburn DJ

Poetry, Prose

My nostalgia for you

Particularly, hugging me at work when you’re tired
Sharing sandwiches and mugs
Because you don’t like too much cheese
Being okay with my saliva
Dirty fingers from polishing your shoes sometimes
Because I want to
Sonorific MTV memories
And your little unexpected gifts
Always

Especially, innocent shameless on tired weekday evenings
Warm, rainy nights behind open doors
Lonely blue guitar rockstar singalongs
And romantic pointings beloved of Elvis
Lookalikes of lookalikes
Staggering
Striding through streets
And being alone with our lagers, hands

Specifically, kissing me with your hat on
At home, in private, with no-one to see and the windows open to the night
With moonshine and lamplight on the sill
The felt catching on my forehead but sliding over, not down
Silently looking into your eyes
Feeling your body, privately, for the first time
Through softened wool or cotton and layers
You watching as I hold you and touch you
You would want to understand
And you would
A little, or more

To your quiet music

The Lusty Abbatoir (V1)

Poetry, Prose

In the alleyway of forgotten hotel rooms
Unserviced, we shrugged
Up to a numberless door, a key protruding
From your coat of sheer confidence

Tumbled into the breathing air and you
Showed me past the pots and on the staffroom
Carpet we cried our little hearts
At the dusty old past and that
Empty work filled into the night

Butcher lights cut our drunken daze
I considered the toilet to wash
In case the cocktails worked like in movies
Aphrodisiac in every drop of Campari, Martini

But your face was inscrutably beautiful
Mouthing me things with your sparkling eyes
The tone of your voice settling in my mind
Leaving something somewhere bound with the drinks-memory

Even crusty kitchen meat-hewn meals
Spoke notes of quiet understanding
That put me naked in that blue place
Barely a shiver before sheets enveloped

So in your bed I was back at the bar
All smiles and cards and happy stories
Yet with a grin you let yourself under your sheets
And I could feel our sweat touch cold

The lips holding daring hands when you asked
Can we kiss. The twining like misty trees
Silent shiver of blissful fear as your boxers
Were pulled away

Howard and Vince Talk About Love

Poetry, Prose

Love is animal
Being willing to beak and be beaked
To curl inside eachother, to scratch in play
To stroke and tend hairs and furs
Flying together
Sharing resting spaces
Pomp and puffiness that comes out in cute
When the other creeps nearby
Love is basic
Essential
A knot of roots that snuff and howl and laugh
Sharp and clear, soft as pig skin
Hairy as sheeps
Because human isn’t love.
Human is appreciation, the better communication
Of animal things, the better understanding and use
of those things. Human is craftiness.
An ability to avoid pain or any emotion at all.
Love is gnawing on a leash.

Of the Winter Offensive

Poetry, Prose

As the frost settles on their broken bones
Squat in deformity the huddled pair
Clasp hands in perpetual motion
One grey cloak and one green
Both white faces tugging
Eachother’s corrupted
Fingers.
Even
The living
Dead can be beautiful
With a rosy tint to their
Empty sockets and a certain
Pink to their lack of posture that
Crumbles beautifully into fleshy moss –
Even broken bones last centuries.

Five

Poetry, Prose

She cut loose over the copse. The morning bird:
Singing into the fog of early dew, cutting the dull
Dank clouds with velvet wings, sharp as knives.
I watch her between the long, easy breaths of branches
And their leafy veils, following her flight through
A tunnel of clear dry air until all begins to soak
With morning tears while the fields and woodland
Stir, and somewhere I catch her mounted by a fairy,
Driven down underneath the roots to elven kingdoms.
I drop into my puddle of lost veils: here below,
Where the leaves are sweet with fire colours.
They stare out from their spines. They crackle
Like rotted twigs in the wind, or tiny bones.

Consul Aurantiacus

Poetry, Prose

I can smell your flat Shandy Bass
Crazy fresh open window Streathamings despite 4x4s
Maybe the orange
Lube seal guardian
The prickle of Sainsbury’s soave
Demented cartoon solipsism
And no questions
Some kind of pure morning sun feeling
Histories now seemingly too similar to be counted
Vague attempts at siphoning
The hairy butterfly embrace catches
In oesophageal anticipation
Exhausted Tadcaster blur moaning
Like Pink Floyd behind the eyes
The drowned sugar between sheets
Invader Zim acceptance
And white emperor armour self-inflicted orange somehow unjust
Like discarded lines sweat-patched
And lonely perfumed shower soap irritating unknown orgasm
A world set above the world
Your shiny glass skull self-reflecting or alien crystal
Talking fish singing penitent
Discarded shirt tie lissom French letters
Vapor boots neatly stacked with wine glass columns
Your epic poetic resounding sweet chill pizza
I could have laid the whole mourning through
No cold in the exhausted breeze cradling

Summer parks, pavements, towers, bins, water, birds, weekenders, dogs.

Poetry, Prose

Sitting glazed by the sun
This park bench pondering
Stroke victim voyeur
Touched inappropriately by the news
Dragged away from glass nipples
Looked out on the streets
And they were the stone streets
They were the cold streets
They were the dusty broken-slab streets executing old people
They were rough flags that would grit with shoes like sand
Looked at the buildings
And they were concrete slaughterhouses
They were camouflaged with glass and perspex
Their animals put blood in shining boxes and died
They were full of suicide cubicles
Looked at the parks
And they were the garbage hills
The bin mesae overflowing filth rivers from passersby
Modernist artworks of misery and neglect
Their grass was not green but grey
Looked at the river full of water rats
And air thick with flying rats
The water writhed in laminate pain
The plastic bags mocked fish and jellyfish
Ducks building nests out of trash for their furry babies
The world seethed.
But here in the sun, watching people glide
Families with their pets and dogs
Readers, sun-bathers, barbecuers
It’s this:
A little dog gnaws on its leash while the owner says
You like this new leash don’t you
Says
This is much better than the old one, isn’t it
Says
Good boy:
And the way it gnaws almost looks like nodding.