THE ELEMENTS

Water needs Fire -
Fire appreciates Earth.
Earth's overflowing girth
Preaches the steady state.

Winds look for a vortex
To entwine deeply in sky
But such hide and seek
Rattles, chafes - until Fire
Produces cool drops of light

CHARITY THE HOLY CHICK

Fire-loving hermaphrodite angel
'Felicity C', Keeper of keys
Supervises the unnecessary mugging
Of an immature angel of dreams

She abhors the lack of procedure
In the talentless bruises administered
By others (Her dark eyes weep pity
Dissolved in Chloroform
Fragranced by distillated herbs)

She is alone with her methods -
Until He of throbbing vein and
Wild hair, arrives on a motorbike
To hose that crumpled imp down
With his hormone based secretions

A lesson from way below
A lesson from the Master of insertion.

So Felicity redoubles her efforts
Ignoring the stench, assuming the
Persona of 'anorexic wench' finds new
Insidious ways to make a baby
Forget he's the guardian of dreams

CHARITY THE STUPID DUMMY

The angel with the wings of lycra
Eyes of brass and plastic
Has lids of tupperware, they
Open perfectly - to shut out rays

Experiencing no wet dreams
No life in the white loins.
The veins are cold as marble.

A forked tongue flickers
Her long index finger twitches nightly
Rehearsing the mechanical movements

Of packing large Xmas hampers
With tins of Chopped Ham and Corned beef
To send to devils who cry Abundance

TA

Thankyou Lord
For flowers,
French Funk
The perfect crystalline structures
Compacted into snowballs....
Bakewell Tarts (of course)
And fairy cakes

Thanks a bunch too
For disinterested dealings
On the Stock Exchange,
A baby's beatific burp,
The huge emotional
Range of actor Jeff Bridges

And the shock
That every face ever
Welded shut at birth
Can open on the beauty of a woman
And see an absolute form

FIZZICAL

Robertson jam jar full of flies
I watch the frenetic dog fights
My lens contracts and dilates
Almost entirely black

I let them out

And each speck
Fizzes into the sky

...THOSE LITTLE GUYS

Microbes eat roses
Strictly nutrition

They view all emanations
As superstition

The old have ganglia
Down to their soles

The young fart out of
Belly-cum-button-holes

DIG

Point your brow to
Space. Your a species
Who can make anything

From rubber ducks to
Nose plugs, from
Norton Motorbike
To Rubicks cube.

Science numbered our
Crevassed faces -
Numbered all on Earth

Listen
...We need screens to view
Our scurilous dreams - talons
Reveal push button futures
Disposable, zipped, nuclear

Our appetite
Unconstrained by morality
Hooks up to biblical machines

We forget how to smile
Yet we dig.

PREDICTIVE TEXT

Hair tied in a bunch
With a rubberband
He was trying to find
The symbol for the ampersand

Dawdling with his lover
Who was shopping at Next
Thats when Charlie got
His Predictive text

Raising a dusty eyebrow
Focussed on gobs of rain
His Barclay Platinum Card was
Rejected, Charlie felt the pain

...And so his pretty Essex lass
Jocelyn, Mother of his child
Was deported to the kerbside her
Bags extracted from his Jag

And the moral of the tale is
If your going to wear Kipper
Ties and live it flash,
Don't let your beautician
Be guardian to your cash.

SKIN IM IN
(Eczema)

My skin
Whispers to me at night
Speaks of wholeness,
A seamless identity

It is as complex
And simple as I am

Most people’s
Faces reveal an inner life -
Go white with fear;
Glow with happiness;
Some flare angry at
Boundaries crossed
“Your in my space!”

My skin is friend and foe
A dog I must daily
Feed with creams
and ointments.

I want to stroke it -
But sometimes
I want to use my nails,
To stop its incessant barking.

SILENT POETRY

Poetry ameliorates
When I should explode
Like a volcano

To be free
I need to turn off the tap
Of distracting images
Tape up the windows

The wind tugs the walls
To let me understand
How during thirty long years
Of emotional
Recording

I have almost entirely
Lost my way

BASIC FUNCTIONS

Cock and piss and shit
I sometimes say all this.
Cock and piss and shit
Such an easy hit.

The horror of the tribe
Is to be excused from dinner
To drop the salt....to describe
A unique pane a dying sunset

I write poetry for the cunts
Fuckers and aggressive lads
Cos' I know deep within
My basic functions are
Love and Harmony

100 DEGREE BURNS

Love burning like
The hottest part
Of a Bunsen

The tips
Of our tongues
Flaming

Our vials of warm saliva
Kept separate and
Under lock and key

Mouths
Kept apart

Because of
The reaction
Of you to me.

BREATH BURIAL

Two great mines completed.
Their wheels spinning clockwise
Anti-clockwise, descending deep
Into the bowels of the earth

Before Empire
Before Cinema
These tunnels
Branched off to newly
Discovered treasures.

Men rested a minute,walked
And crawled into badly fitting
Lives. Filling lungs and
Distant banks with black honey

Most drunken
From their deaths, surface
Later thirsty for meaning -
Their squinting eyes, startling
Like polished white jemstones

THE PIT

Joy with silver in the morning
And copper revealed at night
A feeling of peace within my soul,
As crude Plutonium enriched my life

But the furthest mineral and ore
I ever reached for, was the rare Blue John
Stolen from the bottom of the deep -
A flooded pit we should have left alone.

FEARS

I live in the dark,
Am blind or becoming blind
or am I blindfolded?

I am cold or warm now?
Naked or clothed?
From the smell on the walls
There must be flowers growing
From a vial of vinegar.

Tunnels
Are not to be visited;
I feel their entrances
Their dangerous polluted air -
Sunken tragedies.

A voice once asked me to
Scream and bottle it and I pushed
It into a dark cavern lake
I did it in my dreams

And now nightly I hear it being smashed
By something on the other shore
Into a wall - it laughs.

Sometimes I ask to die
And sometimes, in a deranged whisper
I believe that I might live...

COMMITED LOVE

I believe in the Vision
Of the Lands of milk
And Formaldehyde -
Oranges bred to explode
Riotious mono-colour

I believe in the
True placebo effect
Of the Bible and
Light-filled Koran

***

Wonderful love
Mirrors committed words.
Unlike Guns and shrapnel
It is not arbitrary
It is not full of horror.

I believe
We can raise ourselves up -
Lift the dry stalk
Of our heads,
Spin into ecstasy...

More and more
You and I, the enemy, are
Reading from the same pulsating
Book of Love and Life

Look harder

Leaves speckle on Ash tree
And palms fall,
They are replaced again.
We both feel the process,
Observe the deaths in Spring,
The growth of Winter

***

I sing a canticle of chafing Love;
If we can align with the Source
Burn the tired crops of knowledge
Let words flare up in the dark

It would release a
High seriousness
So that Iris's would open in the soil
Of their organic graves
Where the light mixes in.

STRANGERS
CONNECTED TO THE UNKNOWN

You have shrank
And gone away
Blown by turbulence
To more distant climes -

Dogs read newspapers
The ink becomes dust
The telephone is dead
Words Unread

You could be standing next to me
And I wouldn't know
I would carry on like
An idiot man, eating, drinking
Watching sports

I think I met you once
In the 53rd Psalm
Of my defaced King James;
No-one should be that invisible

Everybody alive connects,
Tugs at another's
Heart or breathes through
Another's open mouth;

I know
That I lived with a feeling once
Set inside a golden hill
But the door was harder
Than wood or petrified stone

And the sunlight of love
Splintered on me -
An accident -I bled myself
To death, in a quiet time.

You have shrank
And gone away now
Blown on the wind
To more distant climes -
The telephone is cold.

TWO DEVILS

I like to torture
On a saturday night
With a mobile disco
And a flashing red light

I like to work chiefly
With adolescence blur
Beauty with Freak
Make the girl with a
Brace afraid to speak

What will the crowd say?
What will her peers?
I credit no-one with
Creating these fears
Its my originality to sink
So low and provide
Her first adult tests

There is holiness
In the twist
That obscures the sun -
There is holines
In setting boundaries
Of fear to overcome.

THE CREDITS

I dismantle rooms
Brains become fuzzy
Empty nests of paper
And words

I was someone
I watch the credits
Nothing permanent
In the dark

Were all nomads
(I don't know about you,
But I formed villages
Towns and Cities,
Just to exchange love).

I was somebody.
I watch the credits
The people who rolled
On through, shook
Hands or sobbed

Then someone coughs
And without further ado
All the lights are turned off

CAIN

I want to live
I want to die
Cast off my humanity
A hollow disguise

I plotted his death
It has turned me insane
I want to plead with God
Clear my name

And the flowers underfoot
Scream out he is gentle
(I crush them all the same)

I never knew how free I was
I want to find heaven’s door
I want to die

Yet all night
I walk the boundary
Of his all-seeing eye

TRASH

Talking on the wire
To the Plastic Man
Full of junk

I predict sunlight will
Illuminate this alley
At two 'o' clock

I find a
Discarded pot
Stainless Steel
See an ex-GI face

(Uncouth white trash)
Poised at the apex
Of a dipper called
Obsolescence
Or death

***

Never been much use -
I shined every other
Punk's shoes. Picked up butts
Smoking on the floor

Yet I found your voice
It took my face
Out of the trash
To examine a flower...

***

Talking on the wire at night
You unpick my knots, know
Each item of my discarded Love
And the yellow faded news
Which wrapped them up.

DIVIDENDS

I want to pinch a coin
And put it behind my ear
And watch my dividends
Grow

Oh - my long hair
Oh
My yellow hair

BUZZ

At night, head in hands,
I look out the plane window -
This alien city glows green
Like algae

A green glow....

My mobile phone
Is dead. I crease my napkin.
The clouds open their mouths
To swallow a 747.

Like a mosquito gorged on blood
I buzz and bounce my thoughts
Around the Ionosphere until

Its mid-day in Bel-Air where
The fine globes of your arse
Fry gently under the sun

You are clearly un-done,
So I slip underneath
Your chlorinated pool
To watch gawp-eyed, unseen
Holding in bubbles

Your silhouette distorts

Your boobs move and shimmer
Your thong caught in a pure
Arcadian frost - a mirror.

I breathe....

***

And then
The tannoy clicks,
The image breaks

I begin my long descent down
In ever diminishing spirals
To a planet of sodium
I used to call home

MADNEEEEEEEESSSS

Go bad skin
Got to be careful

What I let out
And in - Im a reproduction actor
In a Becket

Play

I sit in a concrete
Room with a greased up telephone
Hello,"baby baby baby"

Dream of accidents
Involving sky-divers,
Hayricks -
Half steralised steel pins

I want to give up my O.B.E
My scouting heritage, sit with
My sc-fi comics and smurf comics
Sip Gin

Oh did I mention that at half moon
I get bad skin (and really bad hair)
Got to be more aware really
Of what I let out
And in -
I mean what about this meeester?
Madnesssssssss (yadayada)

A chat by a man in a gilded hat
In tin closet - with copper slit?
Who wants to listen to that old git?!

Yet I posit (geeeeeve me a drink NOW)
Theres more between tarsal and metatarsal
Or twixt kneecap and scullcap than you
I or Mr Wayne Rooney can imagine

CARPENTER

Pride of working by hand
The craft of
The six inch tribe

The six inch nail
That secures His position
Between Heaven and Hell
Between God and man

And his message divine
Yet mysterious -
Anyone can do great DIY

DRAIN

Force
Like a dandelion
Set in the palm of your hand
Force, like a nettle
Curing the land
Of this disease

So many swords
So many dandies and scribes
Draining the marsh -

Pale face
You tipped your arrow
With poison and watched the sport
Of Anglo-Saxon and Celt

Your men drained with law
Tangled yet cleared away weeds
Until embryonic kingdoms
Were born

TALES OF THE GREAT POTATO

One potato
Two potato
Three potato
Four

Prime Pinto in my gun
Cauli shatters my door

And its
One Mango
Two Mango
Three Mango Four

Asparagus at the Soviet parade
Raw potato hurts my jaw