Starve yourself. Eat words.
Chasing cattle invites just
faith to be misplaced.

It shouldn’t have to be such an uphill struggle to be oneself.
It should not be so difficult to do the things one wants to do.
It shouldn’t be a game of tactics to be with someone you like.
It isn’t right to feel there’s nothing to look forward to at 26.
It isn’t fair that the only thing you’re successful at is surviving.
It isn’t a worthwhile use of time to always learn the same lessons.
It doesn’t change, it doesn’t develop and it doesn’t get easier. But
It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t really matter in the universe.
It doesn’t make sense, but we do what we do, otherwise we don’t.

This isn’t meant to be poetry. Or it is, and meant to be badly written. I used to be able to write decent poetry, a long time ago, but like so many other things I’ve just given up trying. My head is buzzing at the moment with ideas, still strangled by petty meaningless bureaucracy, and ephemeral “urgent” tasks. I want to crawl away somewhere dark with enough light to watch some of the ideas sluice out of my head and into a puddle – enough to reflect something of the world around me.

Know thyself: I seem a reluctant predator of denial, and infested with the parasites of resentment, despond and curdled fury.

they are fizzing on burning skin -
these tears wet as they slowly sink in
to sluice dry and stale flesh
to prove there’s something still within.
yes, there is still something there
with white face, black lips,
a corpse can once more sing!
it’s not affected -
the quizzing consort in my brain;
it’s not defective, this something going insane.
just a word used to denote
that which can’t be contained.
this is a missive
missile fired. Fire!
just a way of expressing the truth;
this, the beginning, the life redefined,
the first step in cutting the noose
so I can say something certain.
I. Am. Losing. My. Mind.

Dear dirty cloud,
Where is it that you come from?

Are you logic’s overflowing paper bin,
unwatered and unread to;
fed on fag butts, beer cans,
and scribbles crumpled again and again;
a platter of clammy neurons stewed in old adrenaline?
Are you that half-hungry pull of just the moon upon my head?

Maybe you’re not enough hours spent in beds made
for sleeping – cries unhaunted, sighs undreaming.
Are you a ghost, some lazy gaze at memories?
Are you the voice come to tell me that everything is wrong
or that I’ve sleepwalked too far from somewhere else I could have gone to?

Or are you just the dust pushed unreachable
between forgotten stitching and abandoned seams,
amidst unused pens and lost and untossed pennies -
everyday buried treasure beneath
just an arse, rarely moved, barely moving, sitting stubbornly still for
nothing more than comfort
alone?

Tell me dirty cloud.
Tell me where you come from.

Ish.

Ringbinders

trudging grey streets lines their pale weather faces
cracked plaster walls painting a midsummer chill
with wet woolen coats shrouding sodden-sock paces
they shuffle silent into the drum hall
beneath an old naval clock, stale carpet soaks up moisture
a stillborn rain sluiced from stone-stolen water
leeched clean from their soles but
destined to dry in only drab faded fluff

tick
tock
tick
tock

as dissoluted youth drips into drains, paths and shelters
rain clouds the distant scent of any city greater
beneath air choked, lying crooked, mumbling they go,
their ties crooked, their hair fuzzy but not allowed to show
colour beneath the grey, white, navy and black
and to get no hours back for following the herd,
an untidy necessary part of the timeless insatiable pack
where earning money is the reward of money earned.

Idly browsing through my “AUTHORED” folder (which is all I ever seem to do with it these days) on Amaunet, my lovely still-smelling-new MacBook, I came across the following poem.

It was actually the date that caught my eye – 7th July 2003, exactly two years before the London bombings. I was vaguely aware of what was in it before I opened it. In fact I even quite clearly remember sitting in Duke’s Meadows in Chiswick on the baking hot Summer day when I wrote it – my last lazy Summer holiday, having left university the month before.

As I kept reading, I was surprised by how simply it managed to sum up everything I’d been feeling in the last few days in reaction to the first anniversary, and what I thought was an attitude to life I’d developed only over the past year (quite unconsciously stark in my recent 100 words). Life endures, and by its tiniest of moments.

I can’t write poems anymore. My brain just doesn’t seem to work that way now. I hardly seem to write at all in fact. The environment never seems quite right, nor the time.

But I’m working on that. I’m working on that big time…