Funeral

Heavy industrial gloom
Settled like a mantle of black ash
On my old hometown
The crushing weight of sanity
Cast an oppressive pall
Over the grimy rooftops
I had to prise open his coffin lid
To ascertain the cause of death
They say he jumped
But he was pushed
No-one ever jumps
They are all pushed
We lifted him from his coffin
And left him in the open air
Where the crows could get at his flesh
Where the sun could bleach his bones
And the wind could caress his carcass 
While the rain poured down 
On my old hometown

Pistol Whipped

Writing without drugs is like squeezing spunk from stones. I promised myself I’d write for an hour every day, but I can’t find the head room for that. That unbearable straightness precludes the flash of inspiration. I cannot shoot no-one with an empty gun. You can try beating sense into the words, but you end up with a fistful of bloody words.

I underwent analysis to make myself more likeable. All I got was a navel load of introspection and an even greater craving for drugs to wipe away the memory of self. Who can I shoot with an empty gun? I can only beat myself around the head with it and hope that concussion brings me some measure of euphoria and I am pistol whipped into some kind of order.

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Mysteries

the three great mysteries       life, love and death     compass all      our little knowledge     borne like jewels      is of no advantage       in the face of the unknown     deep in the heart of the sun       the sound of tiny hammers     beating on golden anvils        ring out in a single wavering note      they are pounding out our dreams   too vague to make sense of    and as fleeting as our lives  

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A Little Blood

a little blood?
well, what did you expect?
every birth is an act of violence
life is bloody, beautiful and short
at night we lay us down to rest
in the morning we shed our dreams
and take our place on the treadmill
the dreadful work begins again
bloody ankles and deadly smiles
men fall as the leaves fall
each is whittled into nothing
by the relentless mechanism
of commercial necessity 
an unseen hand wields a final blade
we are enfolded in black wings
and ferried across dark waters
out into the nevermore
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Bad Luck

I’m reaching critical mass. I may implode, explode or expire. All that’s pent up within is spilling from my lips in a language I don’t understand – all the wrong words in the right order. I blurt, I spurt – my negativity appalls me. I wish I could stop, but I’m playing out the reel and can’t change the script. There are explanations for my plight; a lifetime of suppressing my emotions so that I occasionally blow a fuse and spill my guts. The curse of manic depression crosses the wires in my head causing emotional overload. I put it down to bad luck. It’s bad luck I have the curse.

I believe in bad luck. There is no justice in this world – only good and bad luck. The people experiencing good luck are far outweighed by the people experiencing bad luck. Bad luck is ubiquitous and it’ll find you out sooner or later. Destiny is a concept we are willing to accept if we are fortunate, but we call it injustice when we are not. We regard good luck as a right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right.

Some say we make our own luck and to some extent that must be true. Poor decisions and bad luck are bed partners. However, the universe is a big place and it’s chaotic. It’s only natural that chaos touches us sometimes. There are unhappy situations that cannot be attributed to any logical theory of causation – we call them bad luck.

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