Copse

Whilst a-wefting woe on woodlands edges

Your cold curtained breath across the breeze

Slipped to speech, aligned in misty wedges

Salt blistered hopes across the seas.

Each floss and cream of night-time airing

Became the treasured touch of empty hands

Instead fixed in skin, sun-spots layering

Which you had plucked from day and brought to land.

O! But how grey were the copses features

Which lit, the candle coiled within your flesh

Ringed the clean smooth bodies of love’s creatures

And crossed upon their path, aligned to death.

Reaping

Collected in some correlation

The wild refrain-refracted night

Laid in your eyes – and there again

Brindled, burnt in rings upon a sky.

Were they angles - well?

What would matter

The mind in each inhuman crease

And sealed the wax which went to suffer

Upon mere two, their wicks still weep.

A pulse in tail of pastures heavy

Porous, poised beneath the siege

A stumbled act, in wet wool spinning

Sinew backwards into ends of sleep.

Trails of life aligned between the bough-heads

We crushed whole, in palms of liquorice leaves

Untouched – the mixed jet juice

Of man’s own myth

New veins below the opaque sleeves.

Pavement

The stale shrew shrunken

Like breadcrumbs, spit-ball-bathed pale

On a pavement, half-opened

Pulse glut grimace failed.

Your shame. Our words once

Woke illocutionary, littered each other

Lusting for blood, when surveillance suffered.

My nails on your cheek

Chastised chinks in the wood, as if adjoining

The vice of your heart, and the mind of the other.

In blood, or

Perhaps it was gold. But you were ashamed

My face failed you

Bitterly, the lamp-light you had stumbled through

To battle my own conscience. Swill wayward

Your dreams

In each awful clasp

Unconscious, Round the back of a failure. Rusty nails reigned

Of eyes, inside, a lapse into labour

Of life, and of toil, this meandering macabre

The chassis of corpse. Burned

Broken in nine

Sweet flints – the sooted air shook to rain

Washed the face of the final scenario.

The hot circular scream of abandoned babe

Red as the frosted fruit which fell

In faces, and grew

Abstract faces, in ages, into the groves.

Bet

I will knock you down

The die who serves drinks for ten

And itself for two.

I told cards, stubborn-faced to the

Table

If they didn’t turn up...  They already were.

Someone signalled vaguely, behind

The bar.

In sympathy I thought, acceptable

Black. Hard changes apparently, determined

Young men cutting backgammon, cigarettes.

Connective tissue still dragged

On the unsolved system

In Roulette wheels, Babychams. Spinning eyes in revolvers

A tragic mess

Almost competitive

For the retina, the spades said

Cheating the holes of old hearts

In perfect fields. Adjacent parts.

Triple eights.

Grammar

 

The burn and birth of a word became something

Different

Rubbery lipped - lurched dry to their own ash piles

Positively smouldering. Slit. The defaced hour’s wanderings

Ready to die – well, simply meant

Nothing. Any of it

Toasted – wept on the walkway instead of the wipe board

And I moulded myself to a body of grass on a seashore.

True,

I couldn’t let this go, the

Tip of your shoes on my laminate heart

Manufactured dark, the waxy coracles at each corner

Dripping past dry

Falling past you

Back, back, back

The bite of the moon.

Out

Frustration fathoms stained

Rings of Chances, the unfinished canvas

In ammonia decay

Is listless.

Reciprocal rancid though – the words which roll

From the leather mouth

Like some foul emergency

Unheard of

Residual heat slimed off a wall

Into a pouch. Rushed,

Angers curtain comes to settle

Like a sick film

To choose light becomes a moral battle.

Insistence of ills.

Mind screaming

Soliloquies feeling

Shot and ruptured and ripped

And spilt.

The shell-dust conglomerate

In each ear, guilt

The hot sharp sincerity

Like fox-scent.

The redded edge of carcass speared

Bent to pretence. It’s spread of thick

Long whorish legs

Riddled whole in my mind, where tears rest like birds

Coves of bone a-jaw, mildew

Scudding ears.

Unbeaten – well

Disproportionate weekend.

What did you think you could offer? When

Gored

My skull, a grey hole

On the horns

Of the devil

Lulled and dishevelled.

I count hours down

Till they slip to the pretence.

Everything mingles

Minces freedom

From its littered window.

You can watch the heavy eyeballs

Blithered, vociferous

Lingering inside a shot skull

And believe this autonomy

Was owned without fault

Of the slipped bedding pane I attempted

To cross. Each year

Raised hands to my head

Felt the shot of

Stone-cast cold in Midas sleep.

In that the peace-pill of one

Slipped to seventeen.

 

Back into the lotus

Androgyny of angels

Caught cold fruits

Same skins shone in petrol –

Instalments of smile.

What was and what would be

You.

Stars screamed within each

Feminine arc

A cacophony, patriarch

Parted empty needle eye

In Sun-spot time

Snarled, deciphered dusk

In dark.

Clever heart, yes hearts

You can look up

Waxed vessel junction, jammy red.

Sanctioned. Some cut down the middle

They opened me like book

Split my spine

To skip the letters at the edge.

Wind licking water

Was momentary –

Cruel shades asked to be adorned.

Warm rocks spooled last of light

Worriedly, hurriedly

Curled a listless limb

A swarm of brains. Three lieges of light

You’d seen

Plucked with your sieve

Like the silt a moonbeam

Became elusively dissociate.

As we did, back into the lotus.

Voice

They fell

Figures splayed

Their shell-dust

Dredged each end of age

Deep, the human crush. Each face

Luminous, cries embossed

In honours pale, a page...

Self sacrificial sunspots played

A strewn eclipse to broken sky

The men to not return again.

 Tears taut in each terrestrial eye.

Each body burned bewildered ground

Embers craft on cratered cheek

The moon’s sedimentary oceans

Wavered

Boy’s blood induced her scarlet weep.

And there whistled waning on the wind

The wish to see the sun again

The lights sieve of civilities

Shone in sanguine scars of moral men.

Congealed memories in time displaying

Mere figures, numbers, names, but hopes

Embedded in still in voice, in spirit

Speaks in soldiers names upon the stone.

Endangered

Dragging words in irons,

Italics

Some obscene gesture...

Explicit in rapture

Splits silt of graphemes

Into globules – a mothy warm, splintered.

Hands down the chains trained in

Human liniments.

Veined in shutters

Silkwormed, the conical curve

Lozenge of baby’s ear, crustacean

Hot coiled from a birth.

Beaten, raw-red

Nerve-end, laced up with pills

Drawn out in defeat. The drag of the drill

Struck dumb, that dentists gun -

Wasted. Swapped for two ripe eyes

Vociferous, plumbed

Slimed in a basin

Asphyxiate still, dripping from sky.

Femininity splayed, blazed and blistered

The setting skin-egg sprouting gills

Dragging in androgyny

She waits to rinse that final will.

The Orchard

Fleeting of failure

Vividly visual

Seams splitting black-ripe

Metaphorical, miserable.

Tautologies trip from fissures of tongue

To dissolve, or encircle

The paper-veins, warm.

And you are too human

Your future subservient

To the crass crush of each limb

Fruit of womb on the pavement.

Skin stripped to lament, hours

Hot forgotten

Limbs wriggle like fish, and she falls

Apple-rotten.

Sum

I see

Radius wrapped around an eye

Somehow differently

Your smile, your face

The mysterious anatomy

Of your fading-felt embrace.

I never knew the numerals

That gnaw – the knowing of the know

I fall only at peripherals

 To which you sigh, and stop, and slow.

I’m slurred, my speech yet urging after

Every word’s wan witless wastes

To which rings the room in raucous laughter

Guides the guise of my disgrace.

Page prickles under compass point

The tributaries wrought to replicate

Are simply slimed to streaks of two

Red and blue, aligned in fate.

I never knew the categoric

Clawed clasp of crass cerebral hug

In which I breathe, in blind, euphoric

And count until my number’s up.

A Corner Contemplation

The walls of this room are nothingness

That never knows another day,

To be adorned only in articulate

Touching time, and torn dismay.

To love, to fear, to find, to tame

Nobody’s breeze stilly behaves

In freedom flows across a throat

Brassy rivulets wrought within a brain.

To obtain, to gain the surge

Should be said to score a knife

Across what is meant in meagre words

To symbolise the rest of life.

Grandeur

Muscatel grapes

Dust, the helm of your neck

The well at your nape

Little levelled excess. Extends

Hot veins

 A crust of a lip to your skin

Finger-prints on crepe paper

Puckered, in sin.

Listless

Dressed half-baked dreams

On the pillow

Eden sinews like sleep

Stretched two arms to a middle

Moulding warm skin in speech.

In words larger than works

Than the spaces I’ve missed

Syllabic soft when you listen,

When you listen, to this.

The Woman

Certain, left-deserted

Eyes betide - occasional phrase

To the woman, wards with shrapnel bangles

The lines which crash and coil, coagulate.

Inside oceans tongue in catacombs

Thinking we were similar, sped

Singular speech to the plural -

Subliminal, female-form split suffragette.

I am a well oiled human being

I tell tracing trawls of wrist

Your skin, darkness drawn into my favour

The rest undone, and loving this.

Room

The floorboards fake their disarray

In their domestic symbolism, cracks

Chisel at a face today, tomorrow

Someone’s feet suspend, intact.

Swung open like a pendulum, the abstract

Dead trees, empty children

Falling away like old news

Embedded, in the two skinned fish

Of souls.

Ricocheting light of yesterday

They count concentrated ground

Its terrible dates. 

Wavering

The unfurled flag of your thoughts

Wrapped your sardonic wit

Your packs of lies

Should have been copyright, like mother said.

Sorry was foreign.

Hadn’t come yet

In its longboat of needle

To reside in my flesh. Glut red

The tonic smoothed sea

Almost narcotic

I was the Belgium-belle you brought over

Figurine fixated, haunted. Two seas slid backwards.

Rolling hours

In your arms

They were beautifully broken.

The flag was white, empty, unspoken,

Slit.

Preservation

I willed that I wouldn’t

And willed it again

Do distil the moon’s shadow

From séance of pain.

To pluck sovereign

From snuffbox

Under archbishops eye

To be placed in your palm –

You’d complacently cry.

Ask me a three-letter word

I’ll attempt ends with four

From syntax-stripped insignificance

Hearts lent – lapsed no more.

Free from transplantation

Coined phrases, acronyms, chance

We’d seem whole in each archway

And of some greater sense.

Perpetual pools
Loose under the eyes
Lose the transitional
Senses of time, affection
Dulled - white spools slimed,
Prise at an eye
In the flecks of black's vacuum.
Resuming ruefully backwards
Boiling into the ends
Jupiter's chalk-broiled dreg blackboard
Yet awning West.
Fissured in wisdoms
The embossed edge - aluminium
Foiled to a blue-black bruise
One stapled grape
12 hour fuse
Oildrums.
Opening wound extract, coming to cool
bleached its porous

November

Novices bite ends of embers

A pivoted grit beneath dry molars

As they lift him onwards, his urban carcass

Unfurled fine frail in his empty eyeballs.

His limbs are useless, some riled raucous

Rasp of a flame on the last of a wardrobe.

Faltering onwards, the socked head sapless

Leaking reckless vowels into awning assonance.

The meticulous shadows, following afterwards...

But yet, as it was

Yellow tongues goaded the gallows of soul

Snapped once, each flocked arm and threw him on.

Crushed

The whole, glut of heart

Spurted leached lines into mud

Reversed the rain upwards

Rivulets wrought in the sod –

Scoring sky sudden in the blue black attire

The moon wept a weakening eye

In the wound of her fire.

Insistence

I cannot perambulate upon my periphery

I cannot call concordat, encore my epiphany.

I cannot drive by the knife you align alone, literally

I’m slipping meticulously

Go on, Forgive me.

Unmarked

I’ve stuffed myself with porridge

Accosting eight O’clock again,

Inch by inch, cold colours conglomerate

Closeting the rain. Their urban fringe

Seems sick, ashamed –

There’s nothing left to give.

It’s stain

Sitting, pensive, like my coast of Britain

With the bridleways unnamed -

Not even the man tracing oily tide

Unto the cliffs

Can paraphrase this.

His final wave.

Spectator

Countenance – artificial draw-dropped red

The dew milk set sods of old rose thorns

In the hearts of Christmases. December dawn

Bore the sleep of the sky in its crumbled dust-chalk...

Creased chrysalises, warmed, the warp of gas

 Leapt before us. Its crux cracked

Crept, like the uncut monkey, in the sledge of the

Scored flux

Splitting in rivalry, the smut of the Alan key.

Almost in victory...

The disembowelled headboard, a victim of anarchy

A coil of dressers caressed at a left edge

Spurting their filigree.

Smells of soot afterwards, still warm with monotony

Beating bold benedictions, the ticking clock

Hollowly

Another quarter, they brought you

From the edge of the gallery, as I slid my mind back again

Down the dregs of an alleyway.

A continuum

When we depart

I’ll know your name by heart

Strange seeds sewn

From despotic dark.

With you I’ve grown, your tonic

Sharp, yet lozenges lips like

The hum of a harp. I’ll ask you why

Hypocrisy numb

Why you sift through your words

Before they come, and bite back down

From thrifty stares, when you hold

Me close, rile through my hair.

Feel my breath unfold

Your fools-gold smile

At the man at your ear

With his love-stained phial.

Lulled lexicon remains to mark my grave

When my every bone blackens

In intrepid ache. For the grasp

Of your hand at the back of neck

Glancing up to the nape and down, down

Again. Checking the keys

Of my teeth – a piano you played back then

For friends in your fleeting facade.

I guess, a flicker meanders incandescent

Its specks

Spat hot from your tongue – centre, front

Right and left. Who belongs there to hold you

My imperious imp – limping through flat-toed

Prom shoes to throw up in the sink.

To whose chest are you moulded?

Like a new chassis of bone

And in our liquid night shadows

Where will you grope home?

To an insipid lunch laid like on a lawn

Fills ambiguous bowls, now arms

Opened in awn. Or will you

Give your notions of sleep unto dawn,

Dine alone.

This once

Unlike late-childhood fibs, tendrils of talk

Press my kiss unto you, your invisible corpse.

Sinews skim your lips, force bubbles

Of dark

And your hue, my love, shines

As bright as a star.

How sadly sublime – the rest of your

Nights, scarred hands span your waist

Nestle into your spine. Wandering,

Wondering, forever your smile

Words pestle, to crush on your teeth

Somehow seize and beguile.

Compiled on your side, all worth

Eased into warmth, hair shortly shorn

Mottled skin sides your jaw. Pursed

White flesh throbs in the mauve of

A bite – the divided love of your day

To the thick of the night. So why

In my dismay did I lunge

For the knife? Plunging iron ore

Right into heart strings

Their disporting chime. Hurting,

Heart-spurting like some territorial

Whore

Grinding and snap, snap, snap

The secretarial snare of our lives

On the floor. Smeared

Into the air like a cadence of flowers

The memoir that we still live, share yet years

Within the same hours.

Fewer words

Is it selfish

The shellfish

Pitted peasants

Score your shore. These olives

Hard-hearted Bolsheviks

Toy soldiers, awaiting orders – war.

As a caustic mould

Ground by tooth and claw

To powdered chalk, caught

About my mouth. My soul –

The downy goose-feathers

Taut in sluice of talk.

You spoke. The elevator

Warming my mind descended

Down to nought.

Arms a prefabricated shroud

Against the cold, my throat

I thought.

The balm of tears tears

Down, down, the moulded feign of

Throat.

That time forgot

And love-worn words

In the moonlight,

Seal this oath.

The sin of Pride

Somewhat abides in infantile minds – the sin of pride

Somewhere after dinner, jam-plastered mouths

Lolloping a lupine south

Soaks up, a concentric mask of kitchen cleaner.

Still a child, a brittle thickness stained

Unto Time

Rains a mess of chiding fists over every

Misdemeanour.

Proverbial verbs – thin hymns

You know the words

Actions – metaphorically warm, preferable

Nicety glitter. Tea later – chips

Something battered, still warm

And awaiting for its eater. Enchanted charms, a phial of spice beguiled

A Bitter-boil potato. A broiling blush

Coiled across wakeful touch – extinguished

The fire of my soprano. Feminine grace

Now tumultuous train, fills a space

Wasted with wine and ouzo. Its Spilling fame

And fortunes name – results you say, adorned,

Torn and frayed with my excuses.

A flip-flop falter like old breeze upon water

Turns our mind-sets puce, as dark as asphalt

Worms betrayal back down

A desperation derived only to drown

To hold you where I want you. Closer.

Brown envelopes taut, hands crossed bold

Enfolded noughts, our gaze elopes

And confounds the conspiring glimmer.

Gold. Ground down, at the back of my throat

A rage implodes at

Allowance of thirty minutes.

Still waiting – what is this? Home?

Almost in hurt your smile unfolds

Its paper crisp – illuminated incandescence

Bold books backed upon each shelf.

Love to us perhaps only a sigh, and the

Sin of pride looks not so lowly on myself.

I tied it up, kindling-box of final want

Throwing minds skimming the sky

Fingers find mine, put past behind

And lit the fire inside someone else

Tonight.

The Library - An in-look of an outlook

The council-funded chortle cheers

A countenance crumbled under wearied years

The secretarial slap of suede severe

And the waxy leather’s wary smears

Like pound-shop tea, backs corridors of library.

A dialogue drained from dictionary, or so it seems

The smog of carpet a congealed, encrusted cream

Spectacles warp walls in their concentric gleam

Circle immature beliefs, within the library.

Weekday workers creep in wild pretence

Like an ivy skin on garden fence

Shy from any amiable acquiescence

Look for books to tell them why, hence the library.

The secretarial smug pout, the greedy gain of fines

Out-back colleagues swear, and split their dimes

Ingraining over Lipton’s tea, their stereotypes

The juveniles who flow in their illicit lives

Congealing in uncommitted crimes, an explicit little brethren blind

Spit to shine their kitchen knives

In the street close behind, aside the library.

Dripping liquid rolls as dark as night

The slip of wind slurred syllable - lost its lines

Fingers through a troubled girl’s soliloquy

At the window, lets a sigh

As if we know no alphabet to organize

The sordid shelves of human mind

Stews inside ourselves throughout our lives

A whole library.