Poem: Lies, damned lies and...

Make your way in silence to the edge of our cities
and hide yourself there, behind the newest addition
of multi million showcasing we call art.
Keep your eyes downcast, do not cry out
or we will find you and bundle you off to anonymous elsewhere
to muffle your voice, fearing the human story.

You are 22 per cent that falls through the cracks of policy.
The other 78 do not want to bear witness,
as you peer through the double glazing,
flattening the flowerbeds and rosebushes
and mucking suburban content
with the detritus of a broken life.

Poem: Safety

It is the right thing to be kind, from a safe distance,
if you let it the terrible weight of others need will consume you
and you become a parody of compassion, trampled and used up,
pathetic in your bruised black acquiescence. Mortified martyr
to the consuming greed of your own capitulation.

Lost in subservience you cease as an entity onto yourself,
a perversified puppet to another’s damage, you are nothing
but a willing victim, revelling in the depth of your terrible sacrifice,
waiting for the world to take notice. Ridiculous distortion
of the notion of empathic intervention.

Take yourself to one side and be alone, you are damaged,
unable to connect without making yourself a casualty to
the human tendency to take advantage, inspired by your submission
and masochistic kindness. Beautifully broken
you will be safe at last in isolation.

Poem: Shame

As small children we were taught about it in baggy school uniforms and knee socks
and never wearing patent shoes lest the boys saw our underpants reflected in them.
We were taught about it at rare school dances,
where the nuns pushed us apart telling us, ‘leave room for the holy ghost’.

Later on we were taught about it in class with talk of a man and a woman,
being married and doing your duty, bearing children.
In not speaking about pleasure and desire they taught us about it,
leaving us confused, betrayed and alarmed at our own bodies.

We were taught it in girls disappearing from school once bumps began to show
and in scandal when one teacher was asked not to return.
In not talking about the diversity of sexuality they taught us about it
telling us lies about punishment and consequence.

In teaching us about it they took what was good and pure
and twisted and corrupted it until every longing was a perversity.
On our knees and confessing our impure thoughts in dark rooms
we were taught it, without their ever needing to say the word.

Later on, in trying to rebel against it we rediscovered it, deepened it
in the bottom of a bottle, a handful of pills or powder and bad decisions.
In being determined not to feel it we bargained our happiness against it,
driven by it we sacrificed ourselves to dirty dark rooms and misery.

Poem: Are you Happy?

Are you happy?
Have you lost yourself in this Americanised insensibility
demanding that it be a continuous state,
expecting to smile every moment of the day.

Do you measure everything by it
and desperately scramble for its attainment,
scorning that it is enough to be content.

What will the cost of achievement be,
did you shelf common sense and empathy,
swap the diverseness of experience for fantasy.

Did you forget that pursuit was the actual goal,
negate all thought in favour of soul
taking one part as the sum of the whole.

There is bliss beneath pain, did you forget
When you planned to go smiling from birth to death
As a pointless grinning marionette.

Go ahead and bask in your vacant glee
Feeling virtually nothing and calling it happy,
You have my grief, my heart and my absolute pity.

Poem: Epitaph

The wind is howling through the old oak trees.
Who would have thought?
Sweet smiling eyes, sweet eyes smile.
Whisper your secrets in a cat’s ear
But I can see you. The hunter is here.
Lift up your frock, at least above your knee
And the wind is howling through the trees.

I can see you hovering in the corner of my eye
First left, left to right and sink lower again.
It was a back tooth wish this time,
Quarter for quarter and swallow a dime.
The first clock is chiming but the last keeps the time.
And the wind is howling, and the trees cry.

Poem: Winter

Winter is coming again, crisp clean cold and Christmas lights.
The plants have died, the trees naked and stark against autumnal skies,
This is my season. Briefly I pretended to be a Summer flower, for you
But of all the fairytale characters I most wanted to be the Snow Queen,
The White Witch. I was never a Disney princess.

When the sun was shining I played at make believe, pretend warmth.
I do not feel it, they tore it out of me with good intentions,
I am safe. For awhile you made me wish that I was better, able,
Somewhere deep down I think it would have be something to love you,
But it’s a relief that it is over. I am glad that it is Winter.

Poem: A dream

Here is a hope for you, here is a dream,
I have wrapped it in silver paper
and hidden it, unfulfilled and secure.
You can keep it, put it with the rest of your curios.

I like to look at it sometimes, this glittering thing,
but we must not touch it
it will shatter too easily, already it is cracked at the edges.
Protect it from me, hide it from the world.

I am trusting you with it, it is precious,
without it I would wither away,
I will not risk it with foolish determination.
Mind it and admire it, do not let me lose it.

Do not look at it too closely, it will blind you
with its burning need
but glimpsed from afar it is beautiful, promising.
Treat it gently, keep it safe, do not tread on it.

Poem: The World

There is something bleak in the winter sun, we expect it now.
A long time has passed since we took the magic out of the rainbow-
Picked it into it’s component parts and marvelled for once at reality.

Twenty five letters to play with and we have Shakespeare or Jordan,
Words crafted carefully or thrown to the new wasted world,
So much uncovered, yet clinging in desperation to insipid fantasy.
Twisting our tortured forms, hoping to create human chrysalis
Whilst ignoring our wings and stagnating in ignorance.

Stronger, healthier and safer then we have ever been, we panic.
Imagining paedophiles in every playground and the earth burning beneath us
We twitter uselessly around nonentities, prattling instead of listening.

Today’s newspapers no longer tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper
To pay homage to the Gods of health, safety and stupidity while
We cradle the blood soaked innocents we forced to be our heroes
And imprison the broken in a kinder chemical Bedlam.

A long time has passed since we took the magic out of the rainbow,
We have forgotten the majesty of simple solutions in fractured light-
A whole world pointedly looking away, frightened children covering their eyes.


(This has been posted before, but much edited...)

Poem: Damage

They got to me in the end.
I thought I had escaped them
with my books and poems, with my thinking.

They got to me in the hidden inside place
where I live as myself, snide whispering voices
I had forgotten, still influencing.

They got to me with made up stories,
make believe that lurked and grew in secret
only to appear in a hateful moment.

They got to me, they tore through
sense and goodness, until I found myself
parroting bad black lies, instinctively.

They got to me, just when I thought I was free
From dusty, dirty old books, from this
ugly stupidity. They got to me.

Poem: Heroine

She is all used up, worn to nothing by the harshness of life,
go ahead and talk to her about dreams
with your idealistic cosseted view of the world,
then watch her step outside to barter her hopes
in exchange for so much poisonous escape.

She believes herself loved, he waits for her
in the next room, listening closely for her distress
so that he can intervene when she needs saving,
they trade on household chores, he washes the dishes,
buys the drugs, she spreads her legs and mops the floors.

She smiles emptily into the distance, spaced and absent
but for rare moments of shattering reality
when she talks about the remembrance of hands on her skin,
each moment of desperate surrender breaking her apart,
etched with terrible clarity on her body and heart.

We make her a cautionary tale, another statistic
to use for advocacy and funding,
when she was a child she dreamt of what she would be,
now she is wrecked, vanishing into the footnotes,
filed away with the rest of the detritus.

Brash, brazen and angry, she views the world with a cynical pragmatism
that makes mockery of our wishing wells,
all of our desultory interventions meaningless
in the face of bone weary despair, a broken life,
an unfortunate contemporary human sacrifice.

Poem: Virtual Anger

It is easier to be angry about nothing at all,
Spewing ferocious hatred, irascible in our insistence
That we are right, like it matters in
The greater scheme of everything.

It is a certain song, a lyric or
Some television programme, swearing
On the radio, how dare they,
We give in to righteous anger.

Put it in a letter, on a blog,
Tweet it, how much hate can you
Fit into one hundred and forty characters?
@everyone, the world had turned to dirt.

Impetuous, we do not think about anything,
Retweet this, borrow an opinion
Without thought, hesitation or consideration,
Ideas are cheapened, moot social currency.

Virtual opinions for a virtual world,
Reactionary causes that matter if they are trending,
Easily we can all pretend to care
When it requires us to take no action.

Poem: Mediums

Despicable carrions, gorging on grief,
picking over old bones with gleeful deceit,
vile abusers of the bereft and bereaved
exploiting their victims need to believe.

Heady with power they descend and they feast
and call it a comfort, this rape of the deceased.
Their despairing prey so intolerably misled
by these liars who claim to speak with the dead.

Poem: Result.

The men are hanging around the backstreets, like they did when they were boys
uninterrupted now by school or wide waisted shouting mothers
beckoning them home for dinner and bed.

There is no need now for secretive smoking, and the cheeky calls to passerby’s
have taken on a leering and sinisterly threatening air
darkened by hopelessness and disappointment.

These men are the faces behind the numbers, the real world result
of the consuming greed that used them up
and spat them out to be forgotten.

With nothing to do they drink and fight, armed with their own pointlessness.
At midnight the Guards come and move them along
to be somebody else’s problem.

Poem: Nothing Matters Anymore

It is not true that nothing matters anymore
but I have spent four hours pacing,
Beyond shock,
Contemplating,
There is no time left for our wasting.

These were my words,
My craft,
I fed my soul to parchment,
Long since I was parched
I emptied out my heart to this unimportant paper,
Never loving, never touching,
Thinking I would have time later,
Tell you later,
Empty words, empty paper,
And always later.

Time runs out, I had forgotten
Books can be burned, the pages rotting,
Twisted from their one time wish
For a poem lasts little longer than a kiss,
They do not matter next to this,
It is only you, not them I miss,
Without you I do not exist.

Everything for one more kiss,
And everything destroyed by this.

It came too swiftly in the end,
To lose my heart in such a friend,
So simply pace and try to write
And drink and weep into the night.
Wrapped in this hurt I am contrite,
I did not love you as I might.

In this pain I am now alone
And only need you because you’re gone,
Burning need,
Broken poem,
Always and forever gone.

Poem: What they will do.

They will teach you how to be someone else,
It’s easy to play at make believe, to hide under the bed with the monsters.
They will hold up your deepest shames and fears and tell you that they are true,
And you will go on your knees and thank them for it,
Wrap yourself up in lies upon lies, call them your prayers and swallow them,
They will give you a spoon full of sugar and applaud your efforts.

You will learn how to fit in with their vision of the world, God will love you more,
So it will not matter that hating yourself eats at you or that mirrors mock you.
You will be lonely, but you will not remember that it does not have to be that way,
Your body will belong to them, the purest of pleasures corrupted as sin.
They will take from you all of the joy and love and life that you could have had,
And leave you empty, unable to vocalise what it is that you have lost.

There will be no part of you they will not corrupt, you will believe it is for your own good.

Poem: Rain

It is raining outside, the sun catching in the drops
Creating a glistening difference in the mundane.
From this vantage point I can see the city,
Alien in a blanket of coloured umbrellas.
Water gathers in the gutters, mixing with spilled oil,
Creating swirling rainbows on the ground.
Just for this moment, still and soaked through,
It is easy to watch and remember what we forgot.
Soon everything will be washed clean and waiting,
The past drying out in Summer puddles.
Hopeful, amid small hurts and happenings, we realise
That the world is very beautiful, despite everything.

Poem: It Does not do,

It does not do to dwell on dreams
And live in make believe,
To take others truths as certain things
And forget to question these.

It does not do to wish on stars
And be defined by dying light,
To allow ourselves be shaped by fantasy
And not be what we might.

It does not do to cling to lies
And use faith as blind defence,
To be afraid of the great unknown
And surrender common sense.

It does not do to ignore the truth
And mythologise reality,
To bind ourselves in code and creed
And not wish to be free.

It does not do and yet is done
And we feel safe in empty trust,
To make sense of a nonsensical world
We each do what we must.

Poem: Things we won't do now.

We will never go out at one o’clock in the day and drink until the pub closes,
Stumbling home to cold Chinese food in your house.

We will never have a ’do nothing day’ and wander around town, penniless
Looking at pretty things that we do not have the money to buy.

We will never have another fight about something thoughtless
That one of us said to upset the other.

We will never decide that it doesn’t matter and laugh at the reasons behind it
Over cans of cheap beer and cigarettes.

We will never get in trouble again, for not being able to keep
Any of the secrets we are told from each other.

We will never gossip shamelessly about everybody that we know
For hours and hours on the phone.

We will never get stoned and lie on the floor, listening to music
And singing along tunelessly.

We will never dress up in suits and traditional white dresses,
And make forever promises to each other.

We will never have even one more second where we are together.

Poem: Believe

I do not believe in things that cannot be true,
Insects but not angels.

I did not believe in this thing we call love,
I could not touch it or quantify it.
You told me everyday, and I smiled, condescending,
But you accepted what I would not say.

I was always the cynic,
I did not believe in broken hearts,
Now I cannot reason away misery,
And trusted semantics have crumbled to ash.

I cannot change the person I am.

I miss you more than I can begin to explain,
Never before did I want to believe in Fairytales.
Would that I was rich in faith,
And could imagine you waiting for me, happy and safe.

But when I am in that twilight place,
Caught between waking and sleeping,
I feel your presence and know it is wishful thinking.

I would never have believed that my heart could be breaking.

Poem: Medium

I dream of you sometimes.
When the cold is in my heart and bones
And I am lonely again
I wish that you are whispering to me,
And reaching out from some great, black
Mystical beyond.

So it was easy then
For him to say a name and sway on his
Black draped stage and flutter his fingers
Over my cheek,
In some mockery of how you once touched me.

I wanted it to be you so much
That the table bucked and rattled
With the strength of my want, and
I thought that I could smell you in him,
Taste once again your taste in my mouth,
Feel you moving with me, breathing your breath on my neck.

I ached for you and he saw it,
Cramming his pockets and purse with
My hope and hurt and desperation.
For a while I wanted to belive the lie
But I know that there is none of you left
The truth? There is no life after death.