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.