Ash Wednesday

Someone must’ve spiked me with methedrine because I’m way too high. That shit gives me crank bugs and the heebies. Another nightshift scheduled – my body aches and my mouth is dry.

I saw him, we danced real close, he has black eyes and the blackest smile. The drinks were on him, black wine from Corsica. I’m halfway to Ash Wednesday and my penultimate oblivion. I hooked an angel with my kite and cut him loose with the Devil’s scissors. I wrapped him up in a parcel and mailed him to the Church – they said it was a miracle he ever arrived considering the state of the Italian postal system.

You must send the boy away. If he goes to his father the old man will think him evil and wild like his mother. His father has religion now and has become a terrible bore. He sits all day issuing sober soul orders; “Repent! Everyone is responsible for everything they do. The Lord God demands his supper!” His inquisition isn’t welcome around here; we’ll have to stone him one day.  We’ll mail him to Church as pate for the Holy Father. All organisations are built on lies, but he has all the best ones.

Exile the boy and nurture the man - with regular beatings. Spare the rod and spoil the child. It’s in our nature to nurture, so beat him relentlessly. Cut him with the devil’s scissors, make an end to his childish ways. Take him to Church and bury him - every church is a tombstone for the spirit of man.

My mind is my church; no altar, no preacher, no ceremony – just thought. The Church is theatre and religion is politics. The God venerated in the church is completely at odds with the natural universe. Iconoclast is the answer; smash the idols, burn the churches, free the mind.

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The Sickness Of The World

I have always been the victim of my own machinations   I always gave in to the blunt and vicious side of my nature   I feed that hump monkey with my bitter delusions and confectionery lies   I’m not a victim  I’m a volunteer  the sickness of this world is fear  fear of disclosure  fear of truth  fear of death    creeping fear is the prime motivator  the scent of excitement  the stench of dread apprehension  take a little whiff and he’ll make your wildest nightmares seem true

 my cloak of invincibility  my masquerade of masculinity   are driven by the shameful quirt of fear  the whole public edifice hangs on one tarnished nail   the threat of exposure   the disgrace of discovery  fear is the touch of death   my most secret paramour   fear has driven me to the contortions and exploits that map the surfaces of my life   but the hidden depths are his alone  he is emperor of the interior  my internal story is one of revolution   of my struggle against his tyranny I’ve learned throughout the years that inaction breeds doubt and fear    you gain in strength courage and confidence   when you confront your fear

A Criminal Mind

A thousand Kafkas, arithmetically sound, file the dreams scouted awkwardly in your sleep. It’s the low sleep; the sleep of dogs left dying. None shall trespass here in hollow space – none will hear your cries, or read your laughter. It is a wretched thing - scrutinized by panels and commentators in the prime time of your imagination – it is a wretched thing. 

You are a pile of limp bedclothes in an empty room. You are the blossoming of dead flowers in the dark. You are the silent echo of screaming corruption; poured out as congealed blood into the night. No-one can reach you now; you’re out of kilter. This place is the last elaborate station before damnation – there are no roads out of here, just a gradual sinking into nothing. 

This journey was in your stars; this place was always primed for your acceptance – you want to go home, but you are home. You were incarcerated for possessing a criminal mind. You saw crime in everything. You saw injustice everywhere. But you lacked the imagination to act like a criminal – you had to play the martyr. So take this crown of thorns and sow your dirty sheets. There are betrayals and crucifixions to re-enact before  you ever see another dawn.

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Flight

At a run we could leap between the garages quite easily. The wooden rooftops would give our footfalls an extra spring and help us to build up momentum until we reached the final garage in the row. Then we would launch ourselves into the air with a final thrust, our arms and legs still flailing as if we were running on air. We experienced a moment of exhilarating flight then, a moment of ecstatic buoyancy, before gravity took hold and we landed with a thud on the grassy ground. We would compete to see who could fly the furthest. My brother Tommy was the best flier by yards. He was part bird, my brother Tommy.

Joyride

Richard brought her around

they brought some booze

which soon ran out

while he was out buying more

I fucked her on the kitchen table

I still can’t remember her name

but she was a looker

or I was very drunk

Richard arrived back just in time

to see her straighten her dress

and me pulling up my jeans

he had that resigned disappointed look

that told me this was not his first time

he dropped the booze and left

not all bad news then – he left the booze

we drank some more

she tearfully told me she loved him

as I undid her blouse

we fucked with less passion than before

we took the time to get low down and dirty

when the booze was gone

she remembered

she had a full bottle of gin at home

I was beginning to get the impression

that booze was a big part of her life

she took a minute to locate the car keys

“Les go” she said

“No” I replied, “Les call a cab”

she would have none of that

she pronounced,

 in slurred speech,

that she’d drive home

with me or without me

that’s how I found myself driving shotgun

in a weaving death trap

I steered from the passenger seat

and she operated the pedals.

we were both blind drunk.

still, I wasn’t so drunk

that I wasn’t terrified

all the time I was thinking;

will I die like this, drunk in a pile up

with a nymphomaniac alcoholic

squeezing my crotch

as I steer through the blurred traffic

on my way to a bottle of gin?

Christ, I don’t even like gin.

Plague

Rats! – I saw rats. What kind of rats? - Big fat hairy bubonic rats, delicious rats with long juicy worm tails. That’s how I know this ship is sinking. Flea bitten scurvy rats are deserting in droves; it’s not too healthy around here anymore.

This place is a cess pool of vice and debauchery – not the fun fleshy kind, oh no, but an inane limp variant of isolated key punchers and video hoaxers vying to impress with the vacuousness of their thought. This is a plague of ineptitude, the triumph of mediocrity. Mankind is doomed to die of impotence; a whimpering lovelorn adolescent reaching across the net searching for human contact by remote console. They have not deserted the sinking ship, they have locked themselves in their cabins. They say the Roman Empire died of decadence – our civilisation will die of negligence.

There’s a pandemic stretching an ugly hand across the globe – one that reduces all it touches to the commonplace. An imagined empire of sameness; the current composite existence is dwindling into a mire of self restraint and tasteless simulacrum. We no longer touch. We no longer experience firsthand. We share. We share a pseudo reality where even our dissent is manufactured and orchestrated by unseen commercial interest. Our every thought is digested by the combine and regurgitated to inform new patterns of consumption. The machine has set us free. The machine has relieved us of the burden of thought and feeling. There is no choice to hate in this brave new world; only the option is to ‘like’ – not love – ‘like’. Even our emotions are being reduced to the mediocre. We can rage against it, but will do so next to advertising selected by the machine to reflect our current status.

Feast of Souls

the dogs will have their day

when the beast calls us home

we will devour the world

at the last great feast of souls

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we shall call on a saviour

but no saviour will come

we shall eat our children

at the last great feast of souls

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there will be no burial rites

no funerary procession

no-one there to mourn us

at the last great feast of souls

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Psycho Reflex

black blood     the rancid shit    comes from deep deep in the bowel    that’s a sign      a deadly sign     of cancerous infestation    some vicious invader eating at my guts     that’s slow death      death by maggots    incremental      relentless

I know from the pathology     I’m in the balance     I only have ounces     left to live     but don’t we all?      we fend off creeping rot      with lacerated hands      and shrieks of denial      not now      please not now     but if not now     when?

my gut is home      to numerous infestations       and inchoate hunches    I feel things with my gut       the way you might feel with your fingertips      or your love pump       my worms have tendrils everywhere    they think they call the shots     I can ignore      their more extreme     fear fuelled  demands       until they lay on the brain pulse      and cripple my membrane     with the hurt   

they force me into     drastic actions     which will inevitably     lead to humiliation       such is the frailty of human nature        we are often in the squishy dark       groping blindly     for comprehension      in the shit and slime      thinking with the gut    not with the mind

my skull is packed with stained sheets     and rare botanical exhibits of stolen graveside flowers       taught to help myself     but not too much      I flounder now on the shores of dementia      my public decomposition     and damaged precocity       have burgeoned to insane dimensions

I have become a spectacle      for leering jaws and wagging tongues     I’m making manic      with the sorry classicists     who bought me dinner     and stole my luggage      they share their condolences       as they rifle my drawers     I stand subordinate to my monomania       awkward in my anaemic droplets    frantically attempting regeneration       through my psycho reflex

Cabbage White

nothing corrupts a boy    like a father’s love    a few blows here ‘n’ there     some bruises     a little blood    and a thousand humiliations    cause you're a useless cunt    you're shit      you're a prick     an’ you’re  fuckin’ thick    words that once trampled my heart      like his big work boots     his filthy    ugly boots

 

I sought a place in the shade     closer to the cool earth     while fire poured from the sky       but it wasn’t as harsh as his words     there was a butterfly illuminated     in a corridor of light     it was nothing very special     an ordinary cabbage white     but it was beautiful to me     I’d have gladly flown away with him       but I was rooted to the ground       and couldn’t fly as yet

 

you know      that stony cold silence    the morning after a beating?     that fragile feeling    softly trembling    the queerness in the gut    when the ebbing throb reveals      the broken incestuous jaw     of the sacrificial lamb       in a garden untended       and filled with nettles

it’s a mouthful of blood       and a handful of hair       nothing to write home about      no need for tears       it’s not as if it matters      even then I knew too much        to take too much to heart

 

 

Popsicle

I once knew a guy, a square, who would unfold his elbows to disgorge great chunks of scripture from his ugly fissure of a mouth. He claimed to be an artist and a writer – a literally terrible Baudelaire under the influence of an evil river of semantic bullshit. I used to abhor the sound of his voice and his predictable Boy Scout denouement.

This bead twisting bastard considered himself to have been appointed God’s lawyer. His mission was to weed out and pull down the atheistic, agnostic blasphemer hounds of hell that kept bad company and cluttered up the corridors of hope. They only tripped up the unsuspecting with their weed, speed and jumping Jack Kerouac; preventing them from reaching a state of grace in God’s red white and blue heaven. It was his task to usher, forcibly if needs be, the vile unbelievers into the glowing light of HIS love. To this ends he would grind out sermons on every subject from evolution and the ‘monkey fallacy’ to homosexuality and AIDS as a judgment of the Lord.

He was a loathsome little bigot of a man who pulsed negative energy in every direction, but worse than that he was a complete drag who could banish a smile at three hundred yards. One day I spiked him with cyanic acid and stuck him in the freezer to cool off – I turned him into a Popsicle; bitter almond flavoured.

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Experience

There are no free lunches, there are no free rides. Experience is paid for with the sharpest of currency and often in blood. We gamble all and ultimately lose, for the game is rigged that way. There is no point in complaining, our only failing could be that we had simply not wagered enough. When it comes to experience it is far better to have been a spendthrift than a miser; to have been prodigal, than left wanting.

Decisions

Between thought and motion lies a lifetime of indecision. Between impulse and action lies an eternity of procrastination. We live in the angles between those split vacillations; locked in the prisons formed by our accommodations, shut out by our deferrals and postponements. We are exiled to nations of the yea or nay behind the wire of choices, judgments’, compromises and reconciliations. Isolated from our feelings by other considerations; our final adjudications are questions of reason. There are a thousand judges awaiting our every verdict. The sentence is mandatory for acts of treason.

In the distance between the thrower and the stone cast lies an ocean of experience and shared guilt. Behind every curse there is concealed a blessing; a secret prayer for atonement through condemnation. Just as in every question lurks the desired answer, so every answer is a masquerade of some unasked question. Life is an island in an ocean of questions – questions and answers separate us into archipelagos of existence.

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Love Is The Law

the electric prickle of awkward instance pierces my skin with tiny dragons teeth      and circumstance rains down on my head as bags of hammers    I stand embarrassed before the blank ignorance of my judges     I’m speechless at their presumption     I am an innocent man    the crimes I am charged with were acts of love    they say that I’m a user and a lowlife dog     but I’m just wild that’s all    so don’t take my drinking hand     that’s all I got left

 

I’m pillared salt and oxy rush   you have to look within to see where you been    spastic colon and diarrhea mouth     my jury has been selected from jelly mountains     my fate is sealed before the judges of certainty in apocalypto jackboots    I’ve been a naughty boy and ought to be locked up     with all the other glorious bindlestiffs who dared to live a little    but love is the law     the law is love     for us down below     and them up above

Fences

Let’s be entirely zoological about this – cats and dogs don’t mix. One is east and the other is west and wherever you stand the twain does not meet. That’s why I say that you should stick to your side of the fence and I’ll stick to mine – sitting on that fence will only get you splinters in the arse. You can paint your side blue and I’ll paint my side red – neither of us wants purple do we? They say a good neighbour is a fellow who smiles at you over the fence, but doesn't try to climb over it – so be a good neighbour, stick to your own yard and I’ll stick to mine. Don't get me wrong – I’m all in favour of friendly relations, but you never take a fence down until you know why it was put up. I just don’t want to wake up one morning and find my yard full of cats that’s all.

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Fool’s Gold

Everything that glitters is not gold
Things are seldom what they seem
When the sands of time run out
It don’t mean you’re out of time
It just means you’re out of sand
And although fool’s gold
Is not real gold
The fools are real fools
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Now I Know Better

I used to think that people are basically good and that conflict arose from misunderstanding. Now I know better. People are basically stupid, selfish and cruel. We spend more on weapons than we do on medicine or food – what does that tell you about the human race? People only care about what’s in it for themselves and are only ever altruistic where it concerns self image. We want people to think well of us – no matter what our motivations and goals are.

I used to think that good would always prevail, but I’ve been disabused of that childish viewpoint. Now I know that stupidity always prevails. All you can count on in this world is crudity of thought and deed. You see we are just monkeys after all. Our basic outlook is tribal and our prime motivator is fear. It’s hard to think straight when your default position is fear – all you can do is react – fight or flight are the orders of the day. Shave a monkey and you have a man, but being human takes effort – constant effort. Most never make that distinction and so they are immersed in the tribal.

“It’s them or us” they say, “If you are not with us, you are against us.” Well they look just like me. We all look the same – stupid and ugly. I used to think that the good outweighs the bad. I still do. A little good can undo a whole lot of bad, but we live in a world where they tell you that to kill can be bad, or good, depending on the cause. So now I know good can be bad and bad can be good – depending on who you are. If that sounds crazy to you – you’re right, it is. I used to think people were basically sane and that enlightened self interest would save us from insanity. I know better than that now; the greatest insanity was to believe we were ever sane.

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Photograph ‘Shout16’ by Misha Cordon
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Like A Dagger

I abandoned rhyme
As I abandoned reason
I like my words jagged
As crocodile teeth
Dirty as a whore’s tongue
And rabid as the breath
Of infected dogs
Rutting in the street
I don’t require prettifying
Or disinfecting
Keep those nice words
For old ladies
To sprinkle on their cakes
I want you to feel me
In you
I have no time
For ambiguity
Or tickling ears
I want to ram my words
Right down your throat
One day I’ll find the beat
That forces the rhythm
Of my concoction
Into your heart
Like a fucking dagger
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Can you see me now?

I could feel your eyes on me
Your cold, dead eyes on me
I could feel the spittle
From between
Your clenched teeth
Spray against my cheek
I could hear your words of hate
Feel your fists slam into me
All I want to know is
Can you see me now?
Can you see me?
Set the stars alight?
I’m beyond your reach
But I always was
Can you see me now?
Did you ever see me?
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Haiku

Three Lines

To express

The intangible

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Turn to me

When rain pours down
And thunder shakes the sky
You can turn to me
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Laughs like a child

She moves like a woman
But laughs like a child

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Perfected

Shadows of the Earth

Echoes of the sky

Walks on many waters

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Lamentations

A pale orb silent shines
Over those at rest
Both the living 
And the dead
A million silver tears 
Are quietly shed
For lovers lost
And children taken
In the soft and bitter night
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Yo Yo Adjustment

 I don’t know which way is up   and which way is right   some police officers   from the zoological geometry division   was asking me the square   of the hippopotenuse   but I kept shtum     I ain’t as dumb as I look    and I don’t look as dumb as I seem    I just stared at their velcro macramé feet    and acted all sweet and innocent    like a cubic hyena in heat  

I had shoes like em once   I said    but they wouldn’t hang straight    they beat me relentlessly    they beat me   thoroughly    when they eventually left    I knew I’d been beaten    cops don’t hand out beatings    like that no more    no pride    no professional pride in their work     I’m not complaining see     and I ain’t going all nostalgic    it’s just I hate to see declining standards    

I lost my sense of up and down    so I went to have my yo – yo adjusted    the man said we don’t do that no more      people use scatellite navigators      I can’t afford no scatellite     if everybody gets a scatellite    they’ll blot out the sun!      but we’ll know where it is     he explained    we’ll track it on scatellites

I got a new string for my yo – yo     but he said I’d have to wind it myself    they had declining standards to maintain     I no longer know which way is up      and which way is right        my yo – yo pulls to the left    or maybe it’s me     standing a little to the right