Oh whatever

It's 'choose your stupid haircut' time. Really, it's as simple as that. And if you get it wrong the world dies. Well you asked for reality TV. Mwah! :0)

pop song

see in the dishonesty
we have become enemies
seeing each other
through the trees
each of us effectively
on our knees

thank god
for this
breeze

.

haiku

in every second
the lost heart returns
its clamour

.

parenthood

somehow levitating in that moment
into the treetops and the drips and leaves
showering all around with the earthy
wet feel and smell of one's children

.

haiku

the doors are open
perhaps a dark fairy
might just walk in

.

the owls yap again
now the rainstorm is over
all night so clear

.

wildflowers

the wildflowers never happened as everything
was too ill, too disabled, too uncomfortable
as though a grey malaise of sky had been drawn in
bringing shouting and storms, and despite the best
intentions in the world the wildflowers just didn't
ever
happen
for how would they in such fog and tempest?

.

some huge bright day

in a stolen open-top car
we drive towards a cliff edge
and I ask her
to marry me
for as long as it takes
for a blowjob maybe
or to change her name
change everything
and both of us sharing a bottle
of something

pass it back, I say
for we might never hit
maybe she says

when we hit the bottom
but not fucking before
I need to see commitment
and it's her turn with the bottle
as we go over, laughing
yes she says,
yes, to this
down through the low clouds

the trees, the whipping branches
that break the windscreen
that lacerate our wild, bloody faces

pass it back, I say. it's now or never

got to be joking, she says
crackling through the broken radio
that was your last shot ever
and I look
and seriously no one is there

last thing I hear
is nothing

laughing like the sky
far above

where birds now gather

.

Rachel Jones Uproar. On the Day of her Death.

as though one should hold upon high
high high they cry but no
messing now is the winter of a life
less lived but if we charit
then no less oh stop there is
and is almost and is not

listen, creep. I knew and knew not
but it crawls

upon just now death, its yellow/grey bony place
its cessation, its evacuation, its nice thing
that we think of as

things as though perhaps
some spirit were near (here, spirit,
one could, hey no, here, serious now
spirit

(here, spirit!)

not help but feel that, and want to reach
her at the utmost
and say
SOMETHING
and feel the birth
of religion/shamanism/the caribou fucking
drear the vast unforgiving wall of grey
the unappointed

death just now i have been in the presence
of death and other death the other language

frog creature leaping with deep resonance
into the haiku of nothing

I cried. clumsy. ill-fitting. that's all I had.

goodnight, powerful woman x

.

.

on the disposal of the possessions of a relatively unknown and recently deceased man (unfinished riff)

strangely like the clattering of 1950s newlyweds
they go clanking down the garbage chute
this and that, each a thing of significance
even if only, and the plastics I imagine undisposed
straight out to sea fragmenting, denaturing, atomizing
into a haze of green mutant depth under a sky
so brilliant, so thick that fish walk upon air
choking--this then the man-killer, the fish-killer
the fifteen fathoms of evil water column
your monument and eulogy
stranger, stranger old man, possessor of these items
which now clatter into a skip somewhere below
in our dark dreams we see you whirling
in some anti-recycle, into the trash vortex
into the undifferentiated trash tissue which no one
will ever excavate and treasure in any far future
for you are not Mycenean pottery with its hydra
swirls and fixation of the sea--you are just a bunch
of unknown plastics and crockery clanging only
the funereal clatter of your own falling into
some industrial embrace, and your spirit
each tiny fish-swallowed fragment of pvc
some particle of spirit and where perhaps
we will end up, now toxic, bringing down
great birds on dead islands, choking in black sand
surrounded by unreconstructable vestiges
of someone's shopping one long-ago day
in fucking Halifax, of all places. Goodbye,
honoured at this moment, unknown man
down the chute. goodbye, man who once
must have been huge and vital and beloved
goodbye

.

sixteen love songs and a game and a waterfall

just like that planets
and then stars somehow
as if never
and this, this
may finally
but what if not
and all of it now
in handsful of dust
y shit?

what then?
I suppose we know, but let's not
say it while the trees shake
in the slightly opaque wind that creeps
up the beck, tilting
the geraniums or Herb Robert
into angular distortions of love as we walk by
wondering as we go
is this this or that, we wonder
wondering further
well is it?

and the fennel is out and reeking
and the trains go powering by
in remembrance of a steam age
that we feel anyway

and in this moment I wish it was you
and I know that it is
and always will be

.

To join the mile-high club
you really have to give
a flying fuck

.

late at night

in the rainbows of Bradford
with the light
why the light obviously the fucking light

downtown wondering

blown up, in a hole somewhere, my heroism

carrying you out, smoking

on the fucking News

canonised by Marlboro

raining

Oh shoulda stuck with me, baby

etc

etc

at this point the world floods
and we are thrown back to Joyce
and paralysis

is it even worth bothering, he must have asked
fuck, if they won't even try

rain

somehow a rain of slugs
not my favourites really
but we held hands sometimes
and the sea and the cliffs
and we got lost
and it was nearly dark
I loved you and felt responsible
but then suddenly we knew

but the mornings
were always six ways out
of delight
so I apologise
for the late  nights
I couldn't help it
god I'm struggling a bit

not to ring you now

it's lucky really
that I have my new helicopter

.

there is no room
for loving you now
but the flowers just
keep growing

.

there was an impolitic teaser
known widely as Sleazer Theresa
who said will but then won't
but I do and I don't...
this geezer should be in your freezer

heave and heave again

I am angry with you today, dead elephant friends
and lovers. I feel myself there amidst
the scattered gravel, the scorpions,
the very scent of murder.
I want to feel you again, but I shall not
now, for the beat of my life denies it, as does yours.
I would not rouse you if you were
not needed on this occasion like the milk
of a dying mare in the harsh sun. So
I ask if you will rise. And I ask,
and ask please. All your ghostly forms,
please rise and lend your heft
for you are needed, and you would
not anyway have this bond were
it not that you had some instinct spirit
of war upon which I now call.

Rouse yourselves, warlike women,
from death or from sleep, or from
your lovers; our children have need
of you and your warrior spirits.
As ghostly elephants from the swamps
may you arise, laughing, to wage war now
bedecked in cobwebs, dripping
fearsome things of love, moaning
in your mightiness, with vines and ivy
adorning your grey backs as you lift
all of you from the mires
then looking south or west
decide no, and decide and turn
this way, mighty beast,
for we have war now.



.

Clare de la lune

not like it's real anyway she or they
sat next to with their her but i thought
stupid i thought it was or were or might
but have to say and stutter that this or these
before the fire in the front room
was uh the best uh time of my life
it's i suppose not great to learn
of the qualifications, but here and there
we are and is all wrapped and trying
to live through our filters. i don't know how
really but mine still allow love. it keeps coming
like a bat up a chimney a first date like
a zebra just walked in now wants
ta piss all over your floor
alien creature, forever now unknown
came out of this chimney with love
dead all around me in red strands
gotta swear one choked on one's own ass
so sad but the survival and everything
grates and then it steams up
your narrow garden, wide
garden, all that it is
forgiving, most unforgiving ever

just a little lights go out
watch

.

Cinquain

I flush
the fish away
she beats a kettle drum
the children watch the funeral rites
struck dumb

Love is a weird old Church near Corwen where All is Forgiven

even in real life i won't not now
or i will try not to
you owl
fuck in the tree
i gonna hoot too like more
mad than you
i won't stand here sayin no hoo hoo
that ain't how
ya hoot

make me a owl now
ya fuckoo

.

hexenoic acid

I was in my other self my bad self
in the very stink and reek and altercation of it
and she recognised this of course
I did too but not being this self
it felt legitimated and righteous
as any other madness
it reeked off me and she reacted
as someone would react to a huge wild goat
that suddenly materialised in their car
and grabbed the wheel
sticking its heavy hoof
on the accelerator, cackling and spraying
I woke up in jail, beaten up
just being left to materialise back into
the driver's seat
it stank it reeked it felt like
one inhabited the skin of many goats
you fuck, I thought, not really even knowing
which goat
or whose wheel
or whether this was that road
or the other road, the fucking
goat road upon which
so often we cackle
she left me a note saying I love you
goatface and it made me cry
like a goat heading for a ditch
in a stolen car

.

the altruist-narcissist dreams a dissociative dovecote

... he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
... upon all the living and the dead—James Joyce

one morning for a few seconds
upon waking

I knew all of your secrets, knew your byways in and out
your off and on upside-about sideways glancing of a soul
—that wary askance that keeps you semi-whole—
till you did creep upon me, half-asleep, within-without

and these rooftop morning
pigeons, not the least dawning peep

now ceased to coo in their redoubt
and—though in mourning—blew

both west and east
as lonely souls released
they, madly, flapping flew

sadly, both ways only
as you

.

such bleak mornings
your angry ghost at the foot
of my bed

.

America: it's like watching
a brain-damaged child
punching its own face
again and again

.

Romanticism is all about death
about an unsustainable level of feeling
this stuff has got me heartbroken and beaten up
and banned and in prison
all of them plosives
Romanticism then--
it's probably only good if you're looking at it
in a fucking zoo

"Humankind cannot bear
very much reality"--Eliot.

.

The Duodeniad (2017 remake)

La Rage—sing, goddess, of the Rabies of Achilles

the Pope now has an HIV-infected Gay lover
—this has led to a considerable softening of his position
regarding the use of condoms

words that won't wash out: tubetrain/rucsack/Krak des Chevaliers

the Chinese eat cats like crackers
but that's nothing to the French
who drown young beaked boys in Armagnac
bury them in woodland in Spring let it all mulch down to thick soup
they swear by the fortifying properties

his vegetal body his machine massif
his midriff his central nervous plexus a clock
a barometer to be tapped and adjusted
it tracks responsively the snaking isobars set it in train
like a Victorian clockwork golem
trained to follow a bannister commit strangulation upon
a sleeper on the highest floor he intends instead
the meridians of psychic commerce every time that she
walks in the room rage sing of rage golem sing of
Aung San Suu Kyi at one end of a telescope
a little uniformed general with his mouth grinding the other
like a cat with nothing else

rage sing of rage he says all silly with a new bike and hat

North Utsire/South Utsire: a sea giant moderate to good
occasionally poor at first

who could love your face so full of interior disfigurement?
the Vatican explains that on a case by casis it has never opposed
the use of condoms if you have been kidnapped by Islamist baboons
force you to commit acts of disgusting coitus on a monkey
but regret that you will still attend the 7th Hell on the grounds
that to be able to commit said act at all you must have had something
going on

we took me and some friends took control of the world sometime yesterday
in ways too subtle yet to be understood
I have decided not to give up wanking
there is a pleasant place just outside Hell where you wait
until the Pope catches up
it's all just a formality now
papers and ID please how often did you do it
were you married no well in here please
try to cool it in the waiting room there will be opportunity later

the Vatican explains that it has never been opposed to the use of
trained monkeys for sex

The Papa has issued clarification-condoms

Hunkpapa winewall at the margo
in eery breathbasks

.

Samboo's Grave at Sunderland Point (revision 2017)

Samboo's Grave at Sunderland Point

Let us not arrive on our deathbeds knowing

that we should have done more, that we

should have listened more closely

to our hearts—Madeleine Shine

On our deathbeds we will cry to have it back,

this wasted time—Alice Aforethought

creeps of sunlight over the salt-marsh
there in the wind from over without
Barrow and Overton, from here to there
up the Irish Sea the overfalls sing
then all out southward freaks of wind

curving in eastward on the intent, the raptor
look of it (in 3D—look again, Samboo

(bells everywhere—what bells?
nothing left below only a tiny skeleta)
your mother dead on the beaches, the bone-beaches

of the endless western Afrique; far-off the sluff and slough
the gold and the kohl the markets of Cathay and Shendy
for this for this, you here, you here—why here?
all of it, ten thousand years in the marram the cow-heads narrow ring
and no homecoming—just this loneliness
just this violation of the co-opting into everyone's dream
everyone who came here to stamp (and steam)

like cattle about your little garden of squashes
pumpkin-head boy from the meridian lands
sleeping soft and lonely beneath below and black
of beyond—and how was it done, Samboo, was it just a wheelbarrow
some seaman's cart; no gymkhana plumage, no funeral cortège
only the function, the deposition, the sediment
the geology of the placement of a little black heart, deceased
there at the wind's wild edge where it mattered most and least

dislocked now from his beach-heart and heave-head
trampled a thousand over, Samboo universal Samboo
weeps soft over the haunted bay
whirls thrice through the cockles
lingers a moment like a ghostly Susan
then thinks again, then is gone
here, spirit, here … we have caught your soul and you

are forever our little semantic boy
all in pieces and scatters underground
squashed and overarching—how little and lost and longing, all of it
how tiny and lost and ferocious
down there Samboo, down there in the warm and endless cold
where your mother gulfs across all of time
some great universal choke

where is my mind?

across all of this, swooping bells, worlds of light

.

so body its own pataphorics

love you most when in need of sex its urgent look
its height of attention to the topographic light from below
the horizon early in the year
that this then cannot be modified or proclaimed
as goodness that requires no control or cessation
its own thing it is and more in the making
it binds like stopless weed-growth rooted deep
its ramification fungal and all of white tendrils, filaments
who snake into and within breaking down of wood debris
lest we be drowned a hundred feet high in it all and below
so insignificant in that lost other world our human walking
submerged in your envelopment wrapped all up
in all of it that crying moment when your head, borne aloft
explodes like aircraft through this another glass roof of love

.

"Powerful feelings: the emotions recollected in tranquility"

-- Wordsworth or some other Romantic fool.

.

flahrs (for you who like flahrs)

not one more moment, not ever
but may you be full and honest
in all your fillings and love
may you in all things whatever
for one cannot countenance now

(so foul a day anyway but love
such stray as though we would
to the riverbank or something
 as we walked, look the shake of

tiny little petals
we look upon them
we marvel, oh
look now, one of us at least
look, for all of our shakes
in even effect

.

DELPHINE by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated in 'askance' by Steve Parker.

Those reality that their peers 
to grow everywhere and to live 
gave, felt on related characters 
Same in the resolved rich, 
the god, with dripping Tritons, 
overflowed at times exceeds, 
for since the animal had shown: 
unlike the mute, stumpfgemute 
breeding of fish, blood of their blood 
the human inclined and from afar. 

A crowd came, the cracked, 
glad when she felt the tides shiny: 
Warm, Zugetane whose train 
as confidently ride crowning, 
easily attached to the round bow 
as to a vase hull and rounding, 
happy, carefree, safe from injury, 
erect, entranced, purling 
trucking and diving with the waves 
, the trireme further contributed cheerful. 

and the skipper took the newly agreed 
friend in his solitary threat 
and devised for him, for the companion, 
grateful one world and believed to be true, 
that he loved tones, gods, gardens 
and the deep, silent star year.

.

darkening snow-clouds
over this waiting lake and land
black birds whimpering

—Otokuni

.

shine (2009)

                                                                                                     

                                                  after a few weeks of this new start

though she could see he was trying

she could also see that it wasn't working

she loved him and everything

but she couldn't keep living through this

like this for ever

& so one night when he was fucked up

she slipped the gun

into his open mouth

blew his head all over the wall

behind the bed

where they had made their babies

she sat there afterwards for a while

cried a little

made some cocoa

read a Stephen King novel

until she fell asleep next to him

in the night she cuddled him

in his dark uncomplicated wetness

.

Epitaxy (2010)

"All of you know nothing; I alone know something" - Wilhelm II 

let this be an end to it 

flowers unarrayed funerary sprays of moment 
..........................(whiter than Gogs) from the Northwith 
..............a surrounded look (just don't, don't) 
...........................or looks ..............on which 
..................they take wing 
..........at each other his face 

shines flicker with digital craquelure 

"all this is drift only of interest 
to the novelty hunters it obscures the true processes beneath" 

once in Macau in Spring 
a man sat in an alley with shears and 
live tortoises "zunguzung .......................the archbishop warns 
ungu..................................that Sharia law is soon 
zunguzeng". ......................to be implemented wholesale 
- Yellowman.......................across Europe 

they have lock-ins nightly till two
it is here that the real business
of the speed-dating enters its
tertiary phase ........................................[behind shutters outside 
........................................policemen with moustaches truncheons 
........................................lanterns whistles smell trouble 
........................................up iron drainpipes of the now true process] 

you'll have to stop all this masturbating he said why doctor will it 
make me go blind no it's upsetting the people in the waiting room
- B. Manning where flyspray flowers shook safe as houses 
at the passage of steamtrains—there there

..........................There 
is this drift into breakout.there.uncertain (even 
as) informations have not come to.our inattention. 
leave quietly 
............................by the back door.there. 

they have till two by the back door uncertain .........he beat 
...........................in Old Ama Kow 
..................................................at the first with a hammer fracturing 
...........................the rim of its shell began to open it 
with the shears its head concealed alive 
...............................(((legs moving in clear distress there there) 
as he cut in was impossible (not to look) in Old Rainwater-Macau they sang 
O lost songs of turtle goddess love not to watch 
.............................down running culverts 
..........................................
............................................On 
to the harbour dreams (now virtually 
certain) quietly by the back door 

the busy temple terrapins in plastic bowls 
of banknotes assure the safety of seafarers 

..........................(that Stonings 'n' Beheadings 
..........................of adulterers and homosexuals 
..........................routine in London by 2010 a arcbishop infronted 
..........................by accusatives of High Trees and Heresay 
..........................qualify earlier abatements 
..........................—I didn't mean it as it sounded and 

............................no one would really call the Queen a MILF 
......................................he says like aloud) 

new terrible vernaculars array themselves 
....................................on all sides on the beaches 

(want to die peacefully quiet in my sleep 
like my father not terrified screaming 
like his passengers - B. Monkhouse) 

.......................and landing grounds 
bedecked in bright bunting 

there's just no arguing with you now, is there 
let it 
be an end to that

^{(this poem was published in the Burning Gorgeous anthology 2010, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2010 haha!)}