Space is the communication

Of atoms with other atoms;

Time is the communication

Of an atom with itself.

All other phenomenon

Are a sort of magic

But I do not mean magic

In the restrictive sense;

The worldly fireworks that braze

The dragon’s snouty maw.

By magic I mean to say

That it is the medium

Of the communication:

The infinitely twisted cork-coloured

Blend of language and air,

An inseparable hardness

Between the psychological and physical:

This is magnetism (1) gravity (2),

The heart crumbling corrosives and toxins

That pull our fingers from off our hands,

Blotting the bones in a virus of sandpapers

And sharpening them to shivs

Before spitting them back in our heads

To pull us apart (3) and

Forgetfulness that glues

Us together like toys (4).

A free, healthy and secure relationship,

Time and space both flowing

Free as water,

Is what we call death

And the whole system is an old dentist

With a hundred sets of teeth,

And not enough skull

To accommodate all that brow.

It’s was dark.

Dark.

Lightless as the sprung raisins,

Still decaying from the party

(And they won’t ever stop)

The poppers hang like ghosts,

And, desperate peppers,

Cling to sounds

They ever and only make once:

”I love you” and “Marry me”,

”Pay the mortgage”

”Pay the morgue”

“Pause”

Children mouth them

With lips as round as oranges

(And they won’t ever stop)

And still the cake is buzzing,

And still the lights are off:

Dark doors don’t ring cops

And even the fireman

Must smoke his money

From time to time.

(And they won’t ever stop)

The clocks, by now, have set

Their rigor mortis:

(And they won’t ever stop)

Back an hour and for an hour,

The hands, they dance around

The jammy knife, a life-

Less thing

No consciousness to feel

The rush of time,

It’s pummel

It’s plump

(And they won’t ever stop)

All things move

To cradle that little head:

That soft skull,

That bad cheese grater,

That bad icebreaker

(And they won’t ever stop)

Coz dark doors don’t ring cops

And crying kids will go to bed

Go bad

And kiss themselves

(And they won’t ever stop)

So buzzing, buzz the birthday

Cake, that black slate, that

Table thing, that fancy face,

That glassy vase,

All poured away

A mother eats her fingernails.

This all must go

THIS ALL MUST GO

AND THEY WONT

Ever

Stop

A match

A blaze

A birthday bathe

And all the rest will drop

In place:

It will never stop.

If I grow my hair

And put all my self confidence

Back in the big blinding box

Where I first found it,

Let it bloom like a radio station

And explode pictures of its face

Across the sky in hot balloons

Then could I watch my way back

To the poems I used to write;

Etch my way into the whispered secrets

I used to hide in the knotted back

Of the perfect clouds?

Could I tattoo my neck

With the proper ratio of barcodes

To win a lottery with only one entry?

Could I feel the patterns in the brail

If they claimed to be a treasure map

Between the shouting voices of raw onions

And the pitter patter of the lovely litter: rain?

Or am I scratching at my own junk food cartilage,

Overflowing like a tip not a river

And irrigating my eyes with the sharp venom

That they splay on the innermost skin

Of depressed chalices and broken teapots?

Holidays that last a lifetime

Litigate their flaws.

They change your beds with cockroach nests

And irrigate your doors,

Grow turnips from your shoulder blades

And over-prune your scalp;

Wash all your limbs in vinegar,

Drown you in pepper talc.

They give you roots and watch your reach

Your fingers up the sky.

When you call for delivery vans

They brush your skin to make you cry.

They turn your forehead into bark,

Your lashes into petals dark,

Your children, lay them by the sea,

And sell your lungs for tourist tea.

They lock away your happy fruits

Along with all your walking boots,

And two or three with company pens

Stamp down your skull in the soft soil fens.

My lips and lungs are cracked like ocean beds,

The weight of the water broiling

Their soft skin, the coins cast in

Scrapping away all excess,

Pruning me like a chandelier of thorns:

A hard place for anyone to sleep,

But for me - for me - whose arms

And legs were weaponised

Against the points, whose voice

Was twined against the grain of growth,

Whose head was hollowed for the rain

To sweat through me into bled life

The colour and texture

Of my vagrant laughter-sprigs,

It is as unbearable

As breathing

When a loved one cannot

As unbearable

As sleeping

When a loved one cannot

Unbearable and furious

As waves underwater

When a loved one cannot.

I want to undo the space between our lips

Without silencing you,

But that’s impossible.

I wish we could think thoughts

Into each other’s minds like flashes

Of the most imperfect light

All different colours, all different threads

Of a single, eternal experience

That

Morphs, decays and grows,

And weaves and steams and smelts

And burns and cools

And bursts and knots and steels,

That swells with wave-like sheets

Of icy love and warm indifference.

Life in all its flavours,

All it’s golden gleamings

And it’s fragrant rusts

All interwoven,

Ever-growing, bright-burgeoning,

One.

Most of my names I picked at random:

I was always disingenuous like that,

Always grasping at the most

Floral pockets of air, labelling them

As if I could see different hints in their hues.

Written in water, crouching down

With a cold finger

To watch the ripples

Undo, then reclaim, serenity.

The trees swaying in the background

Like the baying crowd of a silent documentary,

Birds bursting through the skyline

Big as rockets, rapt as kids

The flowers groaning at the surface,

Popping sunshine and dewdrops

Like dilettantes, loved and damaged,

Blood pumping through their veins,

Veins pumping through the past.

I liked the scent of water,

Like the sense of resistance it transmits

When you push a hand through,

A bee blundering on its way to pollen.

I like the rage of the ocean-met river,

The one careening around the other

Like a beaver and the roots of a log.

I like the lot that it seems to put forward,

The soft thrill of rain

On my dilapidated spine

With the bone-froze cold

On my delaminated teeth.

But I write of it too much,

And I think about it never.

I remember, halfway home

To an olding house,

A youth in which I made up words

That, meaningless, would mean

The moment into which I spoke them.

I say them sometimes still,

Like the scarescreaming blind

Of a whizzing madman’s map.

I let the feel

Of the hard concrete from my old school

Press against my feet,

I hear the rain,

I hear myself a million days ago

I weep thick drops of golden honey,

Missing no thing and all things:

I write it in the water

And wade my way through the echoes

Like a hollow ghost

In a new home town.

Stalactite [22/03/24]

I don’t write to anyone anymore:

I just grab leeches from the

Sinks and the cupboards

(Consume them like a star)

And spit unrhymed nettles in the pastry bin.

I can transmute emotions into coat

Hangers with a flinch, make marmalade

Out of brain matter and wish our lives

Away like a Victorian voyage;

I can gargle fat, salty adjectives

And tie knots with my nails

As complex as shelves

(Hanging from the moonlit backdrop

Of a gleaming river in a day-lit dream);

I can bottle books

And, casting them off cliffs,

Collect the precious shards

Of crying glass amongst the dewdrops,

All whilst inheriting a coffee’s stain

And a pack of the editor’s painstands;

But I don’t anymore, anyhow, anywhere:

I can’t draw a scene. Lend a

River to a footstep or a tear

To my very own pointless throat.

I can’t be honest any more:

No listener is chipping a mountain

Into the roof of my mouth,

Chirping like a chaffinch in the attic,

Or an acid in the base

Of the basis of my days (my words, worlds)

i.

The best title; the best of the best;

The pick of the bunch in the box

Beknighted Big Bulwark

’gainst gaslit death,

With a jig and a jog.

‘Jog on’ jibes the quivering lips

In the lightless and lifeless

Eternity of sand. All red, all sound

Absorbed down to the maw

Of a moor that’s roped to a rock

With a fingerprinting frappuccino

Emblemized inside.

A figure stands with a kitchen knife

And a fork and a face

And a tooth with a gleam and a dream;

With quivering flesh and a wavering chest

With who knows what’s inside.

They smile and a union

Strikes salted on the air;

Strikes softly in the gut,

With a cut and no care.

ii.

The fennel in the kennel for the cables

Of my mind taste sweet as the sweat

Of the crown to the keeper. Think

Jewels big as organs, oranges

Like grapes, cities big as apples

And words the size of maps.

Map minutes to the wires

That run inside this skull; skill

Difference doesn’t cut it - big

Biscuits are no saws.

Now dance for me my children,

Now dance for me my boils,

For bulbous are your offspring

And spoiled.

Now prance for me my stardoms,

And beat upon my tum,

For the darking of the soils

Is a lightening embracer,

But the rum from behind my teeth

Can be your eternal home.

It burns the dust, dusts the edges

Of my rotten rot, rips up ulcersize

Handfuls of insecticide, hankering,

Moth-bit, marble, like statues, hands

Happy as horticulture, crying hands

And whining spines to boot.

It’s in the starlight infrequently,

In the bleach-sized scent and

Event horizon of wooden carpets.

In the muck and the mud,

In marriage and marigold,

Meandering and eating, tossing

Curses like salad bones in the grammar,

Like picketed patchworks, pockmarked

And bleeding in and through

The bounds of the skull.

It’s in the bounds of the sky,

In the lining of my coats,

The door handles of my most

Matchstick and manly emotions

And motives and misprints.

My spirits and kickings, with cackles

In the cots, in the cords

Of my psyche, my Minerva, my paycheck,

My cache and my Medusa,

My medium and reward.

In the plastic of my oceans

And the teeth of my jaws,

In hilarity, in helldrops, in coffees

And calls.

My voice is like a parasite,

A final goodbye. Good riddance,

For when I rid me of my final red sky

Then as sly and as rabid,

Will this paper plane be,

That I will slip it and slash it

Down the stopped throat

Of a cancerous gravel,

And I’ll mock it and dress it

Down with so childlike a glee

That my fee

Could not touch upon a gavel

Or a gable,

A cable or a nape.