Life is like a 1970's Arcade Game
Not because
There are strange creatures
You've never seen before
Trying to kill you
By dropping small luminescent squares on you
And there's only one direction you can move in
 
Not because
You're stuck in a maze
Full of ghosts who are out to get you
Trying to survive by eating blobs of light
Desperately seeking a hit from a luminous Pill
 
Not because
You can never, ever win
No matter how hard you try
The enemies just keep on getting more and more
Faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster
Till you die
 
But because
You've got no 50p coin
But you're desperate to play anyhow
So you stand there wiggling the joystick
And sometimes when the demo starts
You can make the right moves
And  kid  yourself
You're in control

Dead fish,
On your side,
Like a motorcycle accident,
Simultaneously staring,
At the sky,
And the bottom,
Of the lake,
Like a knife,
Slicing between
Life and death.

My brain is full of aliens,
Little green squirmy ones;
There's nothing I can do about it;
 
They shout and shout
In a strange green language,
I've certainly never heard before;
 
I looked around for baseball bats
There are none inside my head,
So I tried and tried to shake them out,
But it seems to make them breed.
 
When I try to strike at them,
My hand just goes straight through,
I only beat myself up
So now I'm black and blue;
 
I tried to enroll for an evening class,
'Venutian in 3 weeks'
It all looked quite promising
But the teacher got abducted;
 
I tried to offer them money,
In return for their silence,
But they said they wanted love.
 
So in the end I said "I guess,
If all they do is talk and squirm,
I'll have to live with them;"

 There is a bonfire at the bottom of my garden
 Which I must constantly feed
 With dead plants and flowers
 Cut from my beautiful garden
 Down the snake-like path
 Of 33 grey paving slabs,
 The fire smoulders day and night
 And I must keep it
 From bursting into flames
 In case it spreads up to my house.

Strange that the most ephemeral experiences,
The thoughts of which I am the sole witness,
Should turn out to be the straight jacket,
Which has solidified around me
Like seawater, drying into a crystal armour
Of brittle, white plates on my once soft skin.
I only feel their weight and their sharp edges as I battle on,
Against imaginary, unseen enemies.

O lone potato,
That was left alone,
Bereft at the bottom of the fridge
At the back on the right hand side
 
How could it be that you,
Alone in the dark,
Loved life so much
That you grew a Six Foot tendril.
 
That you grew a Six Foot tendril
Through the grates in the middle
And up, up to the light from the chink
On the left hand side at the top
 
What were you so desperate to have?
That against all odds, in the fridge
Switched off, and left for dead,
You grew that pink screaming cry of desperation.
 
I don't know,
But I'm going to plant you,
Because it must have been something
Really worth having
 

4AM
I wake up
Hear the sound
Of Snoring next to me
It's not my wife
With a sharp intake of terror
I realize
It's myself
And any moment
I could wake up
And tell
The truth

I fell in love with a lion in the long wild grass,
And we loved each other truly and deeply,
Until one day he waved his paw sadly across the hill,
And I saw his wife running gracefully towards me like a wave in the grass,
A sleek hunting machine with daggered feet,
And I knew she would rip me apart like a brittle sun-bleached newspaper,
Till the blinding white light shone out of my tattered ears.

So I ran away up the hill out of the long grass,
And as I looked down at what had been,
She had disappeared like the waves in the grass.

Swimming in the glassy lake,
A silver coin winks from below,
Round and replete with meaning.
Turning on my head, my hand dives down,
Lungs crushed under the weight of water.

And as soon as I touch the bottom,
The mud mushrooms up around the spot,
And very soon I must go up again,
To the quicksilver surface,
Empty handed, to fill my lungs.

Nasty smelly dungy musty farmy smell,
Can't seem to find the source,
Can't seem to move around,
So damned cramped in there,
Keep bumping into things,
Rubbery, hairy, horny, smelly things,
Can't get into the middle,
There's no room to move.

Maybe I'm going mad
Constant strange grunting noise
Deafening thuds off and on
Keep me awake all night
Frighten me off my food
Wish I knew what the problem was
Doubt I ever will,
Everything's normal otherwise.

Trees are the greatest passivists

Cut off their limbs
And they don't complain
Nail them to a messiah
And they don't complain
Or go on crusades to the holy land
Chop up their relatives into little pieces and make them into pianos
And they don't complain

That's why I like to hug a tree.

Here today, gone tomorrow,
Eternity is an ethereal mist,
Which descends in a gradual instant,
And disappears from one moment to the next,
The worst, most chilling horror,
The greatest, most blissful security,
Hell or heaven, distilled in a thought,
Projected on the moment like a mirage on the desert

My lizards know one thing.
Running away lightning fast,
In a panic flash to hide in a crack.
Their warm eggs gestating down  below,
Waiting to crack open their hard shells,
And wriggle their sinister panic,
By their thousands every day,
Too fast to reason,
They cannot be trained,
They'll even leave their tail
Behind to follow their destiny
To find their place in the wriggling,
Tessalated plane of multicoloured reptiles,
That emerges in a slither from the liquid panorama of my mind.

All times, periods, stories, bubbles,
Events, poems, minutes, lines, people,
Me, relating to time,
Have the same emotional,
Psychotic envelope as life.

THe excitement and confusion of birth,
The complacency of a lifetime ahead,
The solidity of being,
In the cold shadow of the end,
Coasting along, unable to imagine the end,
Or remember the beginning.

The shock of the passed,
Hours, minutes, years,
All the same,
Gone into nowhere

Speeding up, exponentially, unexpectedly,
The fear of the end and the psychotic belief,
It'll never happen,
The paradox of an unknowable end,
Which happens, and does not happen.

All the world's a stage
But I am not
One of 
The actors
Or if I am,
I never went to rehearsals

All the world's a stage
And I have
A seat
At the back
With my girlfriend
And spend most of my time asleep.

High high high,
Split open by the sky
Torn apart by the earth
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child
Who never makes it to the earth,
Never born - never died
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child,
Never lied, never cried,
Never saw my mother,
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child,
Was I created?,
Was I destroyed?,
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child,
Circular, expanding,
Fading out to nothing,
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child
Ripples spreading outwards
Echoes fading
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child
I am a ripple in time
Now I'm here, now I'm gone
Who am I?

?

I am the unborn child,
I am the ocean,
I am the sky,
Who am I?

?
?
?
?
?

I'm an asteroid of consciousness,
Crash-landed on the planet from deepest outer-nowhere,
Injected by chance into this blob of sense-flesh,
It's not just an alien world I feel,
The very idea of a world is alien,
Social customs, laws of physics,
Time, space, thought, energy, reason, sensation,
Popped up from nowhere without so much as an explanation,

Even the desire to explain this strange show,
Appears from nowhere and goes off to who knows where.
I have the right to exist,
But the world has no duty to make sense,
Arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary
Arbitrary, arbitrary, fucking weird

Cocooned in my smooth aeroplane world,
Your headlights glide  with peculiar steadiness,
The jewelled lights wink on and off,
In the treasure chest which is the city at night, from above

And I follow your smooth progress
Along the road past the gas station
And imagine that in your mind
Everything is familiar.

Each well-known land-mark
Passes without impact
As you bump along the road
Towards the destination you know and I do not

And the names and places pass well worn associations through your mind,
Which you see without the need for daylight
And you will never see me,
Hovering above, watching you from a different world.

I saw my friend
On the tight rope walk
Above the abyss, dizzily high
 
A voice inside
Whimpered with excitement
And egged him on to daring feats
 
He swirled and twirled
On his uni-cycle
And made the world gasp below
 
Then suddenly,
3 feet from the side
With a maniacal grin on his face
 
He fell to the earth
Like a bird from the sky
Shot down by the hunter's rifle
 
I flew to his side
And took his hand
But my friend had already gone

I heard the last swirls of the bathwater trickle out,
    The fading turbulence of the liquid,
                Behind it empty space,
                            1000 question marks,
                                        gently swirling,
                                                      away,
                        Out of the vessel of my knowledge,
        Leaving a not needing,
                    And a pleasant, 
                            long forgotten normality,
                                    Where all the questions were,
                                            Gone
                                                Gone
                                    
                                           G
                                             o
                                                n
                                                
                                                    e


                                                        ?


                                                            ?

The tide laps imperceptibly further,
Down the fragile sandy beach,
So that in one moment one notices,
No change in the waves of the days,

But I know in my heart,
That you, mother,
And I,
And all those I love,
Are gradually and ever faster
Washed by the tide
Further and further out to sea,
And one day with the momentum of a torrent,
You, a small and distant speck, will disappear from view,
Forever, leaving a grey horizon of sadness,
As I wait for the next wave,
Of the tide to pull me,
Out to the unknown.

They say its hard to keep the plates
Spinning;
But I've got only one plate to
Spin
And that's my 
head;
 
There's no chance of it
Falling;
But I keep it spinning
Because
If I don't
...;

I was so afraid of dying,
I didn't notice I was already dead,
Grinning like a rotten pumpkin,
3 weeks after halloween,
Candle long blown out
By the wind of change,
Liquifying, slowly putrifying,
Sharp teeth becoming blunt.

Nothing warned me it was happening,
Just the lazy, comforting snap crackle
Of the foam bubbles forming on my living corpse,
And a strange, musty bouquet,
I tried my best to ignore.

My friend threw up in a cave,
Diving.

Big brown blooms of puke we had to swim through,
Clogged my respirator, slimed my mask
He couldn?t get up to the silvery surface
So he had to share his vomit with us.

As we drifted through the cave,
Towards the clean air,
Rank particles of puke,
Mixed with the air we breathed,

In our double panic,
The psychedelic mess,
From the beer the night before,
Snorted through the tubes.

I don?t know what the fish thought?

The king of bulls lies asleep,
Surrounded by his serfs and courtiers.
A small, red ant bites him sharply between the shoulders,
And he leaps up, incensed by the cheek,
Of someone who dares to cross his majesty.
He runs thrashing and grunting into the crowd,,
Goring people, left, right and center, guilty and innocent,
With our small red friend riding happily on his back.

Swimming along with octopussies,
And the other outlandish creatures,
Who populate the psychedelic mindscape,
That is the world beneath the bobbing and undulation,
And snap and crackle and popping in the ears, that is the saltiness,
And general wierdness of the sea, the creatures.
Who can live without breathing,
Who can live with their eyes permanently Open,
Staring at a transparent,floating world which bobs up and down,
Where most of them  don't have anything they could call
"Home," but drifting is the name of the game,
Where you can be a so called individual,
In a swarm of ten million,
Identical silver darts,
Who sway,
And swarm in unison and scatter,
Like a splash of paint in slow motion,
At the nose of the shark or the sweep of my hand,
There I am, a special guest in this world,
With a priviledge pass for the day,
To watch the members only show.
That would flabberghast any normal man.
And I'm thinking about Italian verb declensions,
Singing distractedly the music from a film I watched,
Like a couch potato yesterday, worrying
about my self-image with my friends,
As I watch the vague shapes
Of the rocks,
On the bottom which,
No-one has stood on for a million years,
Draped with fronds of I don't know what but it'd smell of seaweed,
If it ever came up into my world.
But as the vast mystery,
Of the rocks,
Drifts past, with huge labels saying,
"Look at me, I'm a wonder of nature","Look at me, I'm a wonder of nature",
I realise that those irritatingly dreary thoughts,
Which seem to ruin the moment
Of mystery,
That inner drivel,
Which must have bothered Neil Armstrong just before he said,
"One small step for man, a giant leap for [I wonder if my mother's watching]"
Are also unknown mysterious wonders floating past me,
As I float, watching the spectacular show,
Of my consciousness

I tried to take
The short cut
From one point in time
To another
From nowhere
To nowhere else
But I only cut my
Nose
Off
And in the end
I was
Dead

The modern day Christ is tied to an escalator,
A very, very, very long escalator.
The feet are superglued to the stripy step,
And the hands are tied to the rubbery rail.

Everything?s fine for the first few minutes,
They wonder what all the fuss is about.
?Tum te tum te tum te ta
I?ll be alright ? must be a joke.?

But you may or may not be aware
When travelling up an escalator,
If you put your hand on the rubbery rail,
It edges forwards ever so slowly.

The rubber rail is also a drive-belt,
And it slips as it pulls the stairs upwards.
They?re almost in synch, but not
Quite

Slowly the victim realises,
The elongated nature of his, now fixed, fate.
But he still can?t really conceive it,
?Yes it?ll happen?, he now knows that.

But it?ll take so long . . .
It?s so far off it?s not worth the worry
?He might as well forget about it,
And look at the ads????

Taxi along the runway
Pull back the joystick,
Lift off, Lift off, Lift off,
Climbing up, up,
Climbing,
Faster, faster,
Higher, higher,higher,
Higher, higher, higher,
Higher,
Faster than I want.

I want to,
Pull back the joystick,
More, more, more,
I know what?s
Next

My sleek silver jet
Is coming
To the
Edge

EJECT
Cockpit opens
Catapulted
Out
Of my own
HEAD

World blurs
Time split
Exploded out
Where was I?

Next thing I know
Parachute
Thud
Earth
Down
Is that it?


Gone?

I can't believe
When the lights go out,
Death is like an old TV
Disappearing to a tiny dot
 
When space collapses
To a point.
Does it really
Leave you in the dark?
 
Or does the darkness
Melt away
And leave you
In the light?

As the focus drains,
The blood red berries,
Pregnant with death,
Flood the green sky,
And liquify the sound
Of that one moment
Where everything is lost,
Throw into the relief of knowledge,
All that was not admitted,
And swell with their acute color
The final shudders of denial

In the soft whisper of the truth,
You will hear things you like so much,
You want to hear them for all time,
And those you wish she hadn't said,
So much you'd rather die than stand the words,
But you must not finish her sentences,
For her,
Because even if you know what she will say,
Her words may seem to be the same,
But yours are empty chimeras,
As different from the real thing as thought from sound

I know a great nightclub
Very close to home.
The bouncers on the door
Are very particular
They will not let you in
With anything at all.
Cameras, pens and notepads,
Bags, knives or drugs,
Booze, whores and pimps,
Must be left at the door.
Pretty normal for a nightclub,
I hear you say - but what's more
And what is most unusual,
No memory and no thoughts of any kind,
May be taken in the club.

Once my bouncer friends are satisfied,
You don't have to walk in,
You find yourself inside,
Sucked in by a dark, mysterious vortex,
And I cannot tell you what is there,
Not a word about it - only that
The club Sans Pensiero - is a very 
Very cool place.

You can put things in your trolley,
And wheel them around for a while.
While the trashy music blares,
And the kids scream and run around randomly
Like the wheels on the trollies.

But you left your money at home
And yes your credit cards too
So when it's time to go,
You have to put it all back
And walk out empty handed

And you even have to give back the trolley
And the little gizmo on the top
Where you put your pound coin when you went in
Gets stuck and refuses to give back your deposit.

The grey faceless people down below,
Huddled, mumbling amongst themselves,
Suited, balding, strangely symettrical,
Like a stock exchange on tranquilisers,
Long since lost hope of salvation,
Or even the knowledge of its existence,
Wondering, waddling aimlessly around,
Like grey snooker balls with senile dementia,
Like bubbles with haircuts and dandruff,
Communicating, muttering, whispering indistinctly,,
I can't pick out the words.
They have as little personality as a glass of water has color,
But together, like the sea, they are my personality,
I try to reach down to touch them,
But there is a field of silence between us,
When I die, they will rise up,
Into thin air like bubbles through knives,

The trapped spirits do not wish to stay incarcerated,
In the small holes I have built for them,
Within the labyrinth of my body/mind,
Trapped underground for aeons.

When I evaporate the plasma gates with my gaze,
They gush out like the steam of an ancient geyser,
Escaping finally from the bowels of the earth into fresh air

Life is an exam and you might fail,
The forces of will should prevail,
Succeed and you'll have adulation
Fail and face humiliation,
It's up to you to prove your worth,
Your right to exist is not from birth,
You must have proof from the syndicate,
A signed and sealed certificate,
Proof of your higher prowess,
Destruction of your shameful weakness

Stare into the mirror,
Stunned to see no-one,
The empty mirror reflects,
The panoptical paranoid ricochet,
Of me looking at me,
Looking at you looking at me,
Looking at them, who see,
Fantasms of stale seeing,
In a self-perceived glass-cage-prison,
Hallucinated onto pure being

My Father wanted me,
To empty the cistern,
There was shit in his cistern,
Big spawning lumps like brown cottage cheese.
 
So I took a small jug
And poured it from there
Into another receptactle,
Jug by jug by painful jug
 
But my father flew into a rage,
"For crying out bloody loud," he said
"Why did you pour it in there,
I did not want it in there"
 
This upset me so much
I ran out crying with the receptacle
And now I'm too proud and afraid
To give it him back
 
And he's too old and too delicate
To be told
He should never have asked me
To empty the cistern

When I start my plate of tagliatelli,
It doesn't matter where I put my fork,
I get a huge massive dollop
Which I can shovel in with great satisfaction.

But as time goes on, and there's less and less,
Each bit of pasta has nothing to push against,
It's there, all on it's own, slipping around in the olive oil
So I have to chase it around the plate.

It gets to the point where it's no longer worth the effort
Necessary to catch these last few
And so here they are,
Covered in mould on the side board.

When it comes down to it,
All the person footholds I grasp out at,
Evaporate like so many bubbles.

So I?m left here at the station,
Falling through a vast longing.
So many people around me,
All obscured by an icy claustrophobia.

I feel like a violin with no head,
The strings of my broken connections,
Still twanging discordantly in the wind.

As I breathe in, I long to touch just one,
Of the souls on the platform.
But I can only watch my own loneliness,
Reflected across the gulf between us.

The road of relationship always leads,
Back to the point of me,
On my own, staring at another world.

I am like the sailor, dying of thirst,
Tantalized by a vast expanse of water,
Though he knows that if he drinks,
It will only make him more thirsty.

Trees are the greatest passivists
cut off their limbs and they don't complain
nail them to a messiah and they don't complain
chop up their relatives into little pieces and make them into pianos
and they don't complain
that's why I like to hug a tree

They told me the ice cream tasted nice,
But later, I discovered it was my tongue.
They told me her velvet smooth skin felt exquisite,
But later I discovered it was the tip of my finger.
They told me that shit smelled disgusting,
But it was my nose and my bowels.

Was it even the tip of my finger that felt nice,
Or was it somewhere around my heart and my brain.
That felt some excruciating pleasure,
And got all mixed up where it came from?

My warm, red boat
Which floats as I sleep
And holds me as safely
As my mother's womb once did
Is made of steel
But she has a soul
And a warm glowing heart,
Breathes as it hangs in the water
By the dusty paths and the flowers.

Being distanced from her,
I feel as distraught
As a child separated from her mother,
I love my warm red boat,
And her friend the cat.

Why should I fear annihilation?
The unseen background of my life.
Now I'm here, now I'm here
I don't know what happened inbetween

Why should I fear annihilation?
When it may not even be possible
Can something really turn into nothing?
Any more than sugar into love?

Something is a small distinctive me,
But what distinguishes the nothings?
No face, no tone of voice, no enemies, no guilt
No surrender, no past, no pain, no possibilities.

How big, how long, how small is nothing?
How hard, how soft, how durable?
What is the difference betweeen
The nothing that was me and the nothing that was you?

The moments of life flicker like celluloid film
Broken by the darkness between
Why should I fear the end
Any more than the dark moments of void which surround each frame?

I try to pick up the sand on the beach
And mould it into a shape, a thing
But it just falls through my hands,
No matter how hard I press it together.

Do you know what I mean?
When in relationship
We obscure each other?
Cushioned invisibly by you
Like a cotton wool bath at body temperature,
Blurring my core,
I reach out and can?t cut or touch
Like a man inside an inflatable
Drifting insubstantially across the sky

Until we are removed from each other,
- The cushioning starts to leak away
The circles cease to intersect,
Shapes become clearer,
A pleasant sense of weight
Settles
As the blurring of selves deflates
Into self determination,
I feel the ground

Because it was a blurring
I only now know it through its absence.

Electric lights, Aspirin and insurance policies,
Killed the cat,
Management Consultants, estate agents, and telesales,
Killed the cat,
Plastic surgery, celebrity mags, and soap operas,
Killed the cat,
Central heating, aspartame and advertising,
Killed the cat,
Respectability, sunday shopping and place-mats,
Killed the cat,
TV, 9-5 and XBoxes,
Killed the cat,
Curiosity kept the cat alive, stupid.

Why is blue the sky
Why is red fire
Why is nothing space and peace?

Why is white light
Why is black dark
Why is brown earth

Why is light the stars
Why is gold the sun
Why is liquid water?

Which came first,
Meaning or matter,
Anger or righteousness,
Loss or grief,
Guilt or sin?

Am I the only one for whom one more,
"My point is the following"
Might be the breaking point?

Am I the only one,
For whom the chilling protocol-ridden
Silence of anodyne adulthood and its fake passions
Conceals the roaring pressure of veiled threats, paranoias and only-just-kept-at-bay barbarities?

Am I the only one who sees desperate savages
Machined into the precise chaos of a confused and futile project plan?
Paying with their souls,
To squeeze nature's raw torrent,
To a trickle of dry amoral intellect.

Desperate to trust one another,
But keeping both desperate swivelling eyes whirling
For the one who will cut their imaginary throat.

The musician god is like the sea,
He throws the nothing that is me,
Against a vast panorama of dexterity,
A wow wave of ecstasy,

He oozes spontinaeity,
Breezes through complexity
Boogles with his modesty,

For each instant of his eternity,
My heart flowers, my reason leaves,
My jaw drops and I know,
That this here is the joy of flowing,

As long as the waves of the musician god,
Are tickling the ribs of your soul,
You need no religion but him.

The empty shelves
Where your clothes used to be
The empty bed
Where you slept with me
The empty toilet
Where your shit used to be
The empty sink
Where your dirty dishes used to be
The Silence
Where your voice used to be
Where your music played to me
The grief

Dead fish,
One eye, staring, open, at me,
One eye, staring at the world he left behind,
Bobbing up and down, absurdly horizontal,
Like a motorbike which took the corner too fast,
My scaley friend has lost his liquid freedom.

I know you're not breathing,
But through habit, I imagine your chest,
Shifting imperceptibly.

You scare me because
Any moment you might
Rear up from your coffin
And say
"Hello"

You're different because,
Your spirit is waning,
You seem to feel nothing,
You're cold,
And you're very, very
Still.
Only the occasional snap, crackle of the froth
Breaks your silence.

Your smell is not a nice kind of,
Sweet
But I like you because
You live such a simple life,
Lying there,
Rotting away
In a complete absence of opportunity
And you show me the future of my life
May be better than I imagined.

It's tough surviving,
On the shifting paper pack-ice,
For ninety years or so.
 
You've just settled on one bit,
Put up your tent,
Drawn a map of its intricately distinctive outline,
Declared yourself an island state,
And you think it's home.
 
When it breaks apart.
 
And if you're lucky,
You won't be on the fault line,
And crumble with a series of insignificant plops,
Into the knife-icy sea.
 
You may or may not be
On the same remaining half
As your tent and your comrades,
As they drift off forever.
 
And as the kind summer sun comes,
The cracks become more frequent.
As the paper pack ice basks in its warmth
Until one inevitable day (you don't know when)
You sink with a plop into the sea.

Like a rabid dog,
Like a tetanus patient,
Why must I grip this burning spear,
When I could release it to the cool wind
Where it belongs

The sharp edge of the blade,
Appears from the surface of the water,
And suddenly
I am divided

The water runs off
And I feel the sharp definition
Of the edge
As I grip it uncontrollably
And cry out.

The tree which falls in the forest
With no-one to hear ? may be silent
But the blade which slices reality in two
Cuts through its own existence,
The form of its victim,
Held up, naked on its edge,
For all eyes to see,
Impaled on its own undeniable solidity,
Jerked on the edge of the cold steel moment
From the warm waters of non-existence.

I lit the so called "flame of freedom",
It was only a Bunsen burner,
Thin blue and round, it seemed very safe,
But my experiment went horribly wrong,
Something leaked out, I don't know what,
And sent me into a stupor,
And while I was unconscious,
The flames burnt the colors out of my mind,
So now when I look around me,
I see only empty transparency.

My jaw is locked on the future,
Head schizmed from my body,
By a clamp of
"got to get"
Staring doggedly ahead,
Goggle eyed,
Through the taught tunnel
Of my bowels, possessed by
"try, try, try"

Desperately going nowhere,
There is no give,
No slack, no room to breathe,
Against the solid wall of struggle,
I can't even see it because there is no gap,
No oxygen at all between me and my grip.
I am there before I've arrived.
Damn my stupid ambition. . .

You broke my heart,
And it was like dying,
But when the dying had finished,
And the pieces had melted away,
Out popped a small fluffy chic,
Dressed in a shiny roman helmet,
Sporting a spear,
Ready for something new.

Dying fish,
Gasping for water,
Every breath of air you gulp,
Makes you bleed.

And inflates your wide eyed agony,
Which ends in desperate paroxysms of
The slippery metallic sound of a fish,
Flapping hopelessly for life
On the metal deck,
While the fisherman smokes a cigarette.

The doctor said
I should take the whole course
Or the demons would not fully die
They would only come back stronger.

I took the pills religiously
Just as the doctor told me to.

But it was as though,
The pills were a skin
Under which they multiplied
And grew angrier and more desperate,
Then hatched out in their new form.

So I went back to the doctor
And he gave me some more pills,
So I?m happy,
For now.

The hawk frozen in a block of sky
Quivering, pinned
Suddenly
The sky melts
The hawk dives to earth

A man is like an inverse Baked Alaska,
Hard, cold, confidence on the outside,
Soft, fluid fear and paranoia on the inside,
The source of his inner fire.

For the column of ants.
Scrawling across the child's grave,
The dappled marble stone,
Is just another highway;

I went away in an aeroplane
Away from my home and my loves
As I peered out through the glass
I saw to my astonishment
Not the vastness of the sky
But the surface of the sea above
Glistening, shimmering like a pool of molten silver
"This is very odd, I thought,
I'm sure I booked for Kazakhstahn"
What does the pilot think he's on
Flying his jetplane under the sea
But hey, ho, what could I do?
So I decided to enjoy the subaqua scene.
 
Down, Down, Down we went,
Past the fish and the underwater trees,
But all the time it was brightly lit
As though we were still very near the top,
But before I knew what as happening,
A dark band of black whispy shapes,
Engulfed the plane from below,
Primaeval terror as I've never felt,
Took over my controls,
My blood curdling screams were only drowned
By the chilling flood of inner terror,
As an alchemist  turns gold into lead,
My whole universe turned into fear,
And as the dark, obscure forms rose over my head,
I must have lost consciousness
 
The next thing I knew I was back on dry land,
In a familiar street in the middle of the night,
I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed,
At the memory of how fear could be,
I ran down the street, emotionally naked,
Like Archimedes running out of his bath,
And I met a man and screamed in his face,
I didn't care if he thought I was mad.

I went to the river and sat upon a rock,
And cried my tears, 
Into the river of grief, 
Great sobs into the clear water,
That leads to the sea;

I washed away the tears,
And drank the cool water,
And felt the love,
For that which I had lost;

And saw the pettiness of all the games I had played,
To deny my grief, my love, my fear,
The boyish immaturity of 'manly forbearance',
How each morning I had stuffed my grief inside its clothes;

And as I trod the path back to my home,
Felt one with all the creatures and trees,
And the setting of the sun behind the mountains,
And for once I did not resent her for my death.

I have stolen a valuable painting
It may be of my mother
I don't remember the stealing
I know I have it now

And my father's wrath
A menacing blue sphere
Whose slick weight I can feel
Without touching, 3 metres wide
Almost as though it were spinning inside my chest
One hundred times a Second
Screaming, furious,
A menacing power, I could never hope
To fight, a few feet from my eyes

I am large and tiny
I have corners which hurt where they
touch hardness
Sweating under the weight of my
Feverish hallucinations

The effort of capping, sealing
The wellspring of my true self
Whoever that may really be,
For fear of facing the explosive power
Of a blinding white geyser,
Erupting in a continuous orgasm of awe,
Leaving my skull split in 2,
Exhausts my soul.

The effort of straining, confining,
To the boxes of words,
That which does not want
To know the words
That which will continuously escape
Houdini like, from the crushing pressure
The words
Exhausts my soul.

I was thinking about thought
And  I thought that a thought can be a thought about a thought
But then I realized I was thinking about the thought about the thought
Then I thought that I'd just thought that,
Then I didn't think
So  much
For a bit

Sometimes they call me Richard
Sometimes heydude
Sometimes they call me rickylicky
I don't know what my name is.

I shall distinguish them
As the one with the high miaow
& the one with the low miaow
High one and Low one for short

There's no other way
To tell them apart
Pink skin, 2 legs, very large
And every day a different camouflage

Now when I say they're large,
That's only half the story
Half the time there's just well . . .. these heads
Poking out of a big bag of feathers

I know it sounds odd
But I assure you  it's true
For 8 hours a day their bodies disappear
And there's only these heads poking out

But it's ok with me
I love the bag of feathers
I just curl up and sleep on it
It's really soft and cuddly

Generally speaking they don't purr
But sometimes when they're in the feathers,
The low one purrs loudly
Quite often it's so loud I can't even sleep

There's 2 things I'm unhappy with
First of all, they don't like my presents
I'll spend all day catching them a present
Then they shout at me and throw it outside

My second complaint is the poison
Every 2 months or so they try it on
Shoving this stuff down my throat
It tastes like nothing you've ever tasted before

But I know what they're up to
So I just pretend I've swallowed it
Then when they've gone, I spit it out
They always seem to pick a time I'm already feeling sick

?. To be continued

The unknown is a hole in my world,
But also a hole
In the cage whose cruel corners crush my hopes,
And through its chink, a feeling floods,
Which has no future or past,
And my world is whole in the unknown.

The mercy of timeless dust
Nothing rejected, nothing lost

She does not cry
If you kill or love

Whatever violent desperation
The dust listens silently beneath
Patiently awaiting your death

I sit, crying by the stream
Watching your images flow with my tears away
Salt washed fresh by the waters of grief
We all meet in the embrace of the sea

The sun, setting as I sit
Watching your light fade with its gradual death
Two griefs merge in nature's embrace
We all live by the light of the sun

Each of grief's bitter sweet tears,
Tears a piece of my heart away
Away to a clear boundless sea
Where grief and hope and words are one.

"Absolutely," he said
Twirling his silver spoon in the sugar
A person less au fait with the absolute,
One has rarely seen.

"Absolutely lovely," she said
Adjusting her make-up in her mirror
What would she know
About Love?

"Wonderful," he said
Thinking all the while of the money,
A word ending in empty would sum it up more aptly,
And I doubt he had wondered for years

"Frightful," she said,
Wrinkling her nose as she held his gaze
How much fear had she felt
This year?

"Absolutely terrible," he said,
"Do have another fairy cake"
Hitler and friends, I feel sure
Would not have agreed on this point.

I can only watch, powerlessly as
Every second brings a different angle
Without moving forwards
Circular and linear

The slow revolutions of that
Vast and subtle pointer,
My gentle torturer
Rolling inexorably towards

. . .