Poem 3

I’ll shag you in the next life
When I am not me but the person you shag
And you and you
We are one
But our escapades take us abroad
Into threatening definitives
Like Westerns through the ravine
Or non-westerners through the west
But
Satisfied in the good grace of a shadow
Some of the lust safely offloaded to a deduced wormhole
All textural imagining true
Porthole
Under the rhythmic bridge
Beneath the coffee plant
But mass is harder
Clear passionate
Cope, glad
Care for the crying, incommunicative baby of your mind
Try shifting,
Try fresh air
And bring down the curtains
And make common the means
Make your stakeholder trust grow
Shrink out the vast state of ramrods and respect
The tomfoolery of the self declared king
Shrink out those who make a sport of your lives
Kick them out of their deckchairs, their box
Their sallow oblivious nihilist eyes
And we will have a safe life
Not without challenge
Not without graft, I expect
In the spinning seasons
But not our own worst enemy any more
We are sick, and mercy, we can be saved
For many many many
For the rapture of admitting reality
In its dizzying pain
Its versimilitude
Grip
If not you, who else
If not now, what lemon

Poem 2

I would have thought it was pretty apparent by now
And our illuminated arch-backed
Railways
Don’t tell us why
And our gasping enclosures
New builds
Don’t tell us why
And our careful vigilantes
Men
Don’t tell us why
And our promised blowing clarity
Winds
Don’t tell us why
But Pablo Neruda
Tells us why
And we don’t so much as look at each other
Looking up to promises
And down to thoughts
Dressing to a flower-like predestination
Of private buffets
Harbouring immaterial desires for
Common diasporas
With these nobles all vanguished
Filling the jails and rehabs
When you’ve accepted your loved ones
Are victimised by some aristocrat’s invented necessity
And no it won’t do to pretend, bear out this, bitter as the stalk
Bitter as Freddy
Come with a strength of merciful project
Of fury set to justice
Courted, resorted
Forgiving, solitary crowd
Think again of train sets
Over brilliant cold welcoming hills
Or mournful priority
Or weighted footsteps
All clean for the strength of their
Rotten alcohol
Stretching your telescope for want of universal sight
You bar the land
And I can’t convey other
Than my vision aches,
But let me attest
A cherished assiduous tenderness
When your crutch becomes your bi-annual limb
The warmth of my life
The blood in my piss.
The French Revolution
Was where Dickens drew the line
And to the obviate
Top one hundred installers
Your great and central discourses
Don’t include me
And I hope they never do
Dear, they are your mistake
Words double round the fountain
One person’s invention
Is another person’s intervention
And seek no claim of higher permanence
Like climbing drainpipes
Nowhere
Nowhere
Charge with me
Hopeful, humble, provisional
Sure of disgrace
Charge
The gates of balmoral
For relief
For our time

Poem #1

I said already,
Staring quietly at the sun,
‘Raising my own adaptation of otters
A procession that incalculably owns up to
Its relationships
And whether down the Brixton lanes
Or Oregon, or on the border of Nairobi
Or over Walt Witma’s graves
It will provide
It won’t abide
This is my employment plan’
‘But sir’
‘But do not strain it like a cloth map
Testing coffee
I just wouldn’t advise it.’

I don’t say in public spaces
More
For such impoliteness draws the tanks
The thinking and the military,
And the angelic choirs of unethical naive loyalists
Who know no better but the nice side of the perpetual tragedy
But I whisper it here
Who searches for the material in metaphor
And finds one when in truth
Its no metaphor
But nonsense
Yes, the absurdity of dignity
The treasure of disreputable comraderie
And the sumptuous curvatures of insanity
Derived and contented to be derived
They will lead a procession
Just as original as I succeed in being
Just as representative too
And it will be so simple
And so nice
And it won’t be for the record
It will be unobservable
Proud as raking

Let’s not measure
The storms in the teacups of each other’s lives
Windspeed like a cliff dive
Five point seven
Richter’s dead
And every angle is at eleven
And protractors fail
We come together
To reform our god-forsaken pact