Health and Her

Take no photos, make no sound
One day you’ll realise
It’s better to live your life through the iris
Than live it through the lens

One day, one more day is what we all
Hope for
And not one spent in suffocating suits
With collar chafing tight
Around your neck
A millstone made of menswear
Bought for far too much in a store
For people who put store in counting coins
And ticking boxes
Instead of counting blessings

It’s not like me to be esoteric and meaningless
Crumble some creole into the mix
Natty words from a native tongue
Will wow the now crowd but I
Do it for myself and not for them

And if pleasing anyone but family
Matters more to you than your own
Peace and piecing together
Some form of fabric in which
You can live and lay down roots
Then three cheers for your cares
But I’ll take mine to the wire,
Waiting by the phone for those
Three words that nobody ever tires of

Heard in halting breaths
Between exclamations and sighs of
Delight, when we light up the fields
And call it a celebration
With flares, not bombs
And binding blankets that wrap
Us tighter than any razor wire

But it feels like home
Right here, in this moment
In this place, with you by my side
That house is three thousand miles away
Yet all I need is here, is her
All I need is my health and Her

All An Anarchist Could Care

Such sweet soliloquies
Were wasted when
Jilted, jaded, jawless,
Wanton women wailed
Mindless melodies mostly
Lamenting long lost love

Someday siren songs
Will whisper where
Ravaging rocks rose relentlessly
Dangerously demonstrating deep
Water waits wickedly whilst
Your youth yields

Her hands held his heart
Tight, taut, timidly
Tracing thin ties
Across an aching artery
May more mercies

Have half her hope
And all an anarchist
Could care, could
Ever expect exists
In iridescent internecine

Mixed mechanically
By better beaus, bowing before
Mice, men, mortals,
Deaf deities, dead dreamers

Innocence

It was yesterday or the day before, years before
We sat there on his bathroom floor
Her head in my hands, huddled
Legs drawn up beneath my throat
Chin resting, waiting, compact and cocooned against
The knees which had sat so neatly on the linen

Drawn up,  held up, hoping for
A life in which silk sheets stained slower
And young lives were harder to colour with
The blotting blood of innocence lost
In a sense of the word, perhaps it was
Never found

We walk out into a wide world with
Brighter beaming lights than we had
Ever wanted or hoped to see
And still, when the metaphors merge
With the reality
You’re still sat there
Holding her head in your hands
On a cold tiled floor

At midnight in May
Never so scared or learning so much about
Who you really are as you did in three hours
Aged fifteen

Hearing her heartbeat tick, tock
Stutter, start, staggered pumping blasts
When it’s more than you can bear to hold
Her head up, let alone your own
It isn’t about you anymore
Or her for that matter
It’s about this, this whole thing
This deep mystery, this cosmic mess
That keeps us all constantly on the bleeding edge
Of a razor blade
You’d best get used to this

What they don’t tell you is;
Nobody is ever ready
For this dark ride through narrow streets
This game of life

Victory

I am a victory
She sung sweetly as
Her small form framed
The sky and sunlight shone through
You’re only so sweet for so long

Live life and gather your rosebuds
While you may, as there are many ways
For age to wage on that felicitous form
Smile and dance, hold on to something
The brightest of days not the dark of the dawn

Lights flicker and flash out far quicker
Than the charm of her smile fades
Give up, get up, move on
And muster every fractured fragment
Of what is left of your self respect

Drag up, dig in, weather another storm
Whether you want to or not
There is always something brewing
Humid, a static, there is something in the air
Here, an energy, a flare

A flair for melodrama, oh Brutus et tu?
Hey, her hips didn’t lie but the same
Couldn’t be said for her thighs
And we get up, move on, grow

Standing now before it all
As the grass opens up ahead and the
Sunshine has never shone this bright
Finally you get it
That head over heels bullshit
It all makes sense
As you hold her in your arms

Flavour

It’s funny how things work out
She offered as her lips delicately traced
The long edge of the thin paper
And soft fingers rolled it expertly into a small stick

Chapped lips and yellowed teeth
Teasing, tasting the words more than the nicotine
Watchful eyes wandering across my care – etched
Face, faltering as I stuttered and stammered what

Little I could, blinking blindly into the sunrise with my
Legs dangling limply over the seawall
Struggling to process
She noticed the blink

It’s kinda bright here, dontcha think
Should we walk or stay sat here
Politeness, a kindness
Sincere, no veneer
But it mattered not

Who is it, what is it
There’s no-one, it’s nothing
But that’s kinda the point
We both knew there was a shelf life
To love life, an expiry to the perspiring
The sweat drenched wild nights

When they’ve come and gone
And seen their best days fade
Frankly, it’s, well not a drag
She took a drag of the fag
Breathed in, drew down
But time waits for no-one
Not us

And what have we got
Some laughter, some banter
And that’s just our lot
It’s not you or me
It’s us
This
Right here
Just doesn’t do either of us any favours
When neither is each other’s
Flavour of the month

She turned to me
With eyes black as jet
Soft lips formed a final word
Cigarette?

Oscillate

Love of a broken heart
Cut on it’s edges
A finger round a glass
Resonating, oscillations of the light
Through sheer weight of emotion
The glass breaks, a rose sits
Atop the wing of a raven
Crucified on the mirror

Like the pain of hope we cry
The lord of love shall die
There’s nothing but raw emotion
Lacerated flesh, shot through with the thread
Of our loved dead

I’m not your messiah
Though I bleed just the same
Ripped out, engaged, humiliated
Edge of a spade, this is realising
We are now, muscles like string
A sinew ripping audibly
This is over, no legacy

Love of a broken heart
Cut on it’s edges

A Portrait of A Pretentious Mind

If my heart is an open casket to be draped with fine garbs of sorrow
Then this verse is but one thin silk veil of blood-drenched woe
If the finely entwined threads of this garment
Could give voice to their thoughts they would only choke
And retch their way through epic dirges of lost hope
Tell tales of hurt and abandonment

For now these cloths bedeck my docile heart and whisper
Soft reminders of my life, wrapping tighter round the muscle
Til the arteries are cut off and claret flows no more through it’s ventricles
The heart withers and gasps, faltering and unnerved by the blood’s absence
As too do I, for you are the blood that keeps me alive
The thread that weaves through my mind and keeps my thoughts together
Gathered is all I can be at best and only with you do I cling to that

Without you I am not living, I am but barely breathing
And the absence of my heart weighs heavily on my lungs
For if my heart is an open casket then
Without you, my mind and self have made a bed of the coffin
And are to be buried inside the cold heart
Without you I am merely a pallbearer
And the solitary mourner at my soul’s funeral
I am cold without you
And I realise now that I can’t lose you

Fatalistic

What if, what if i never make it out of this alive
I ask her
Would you mourn for me or carry on in ignorance
Not allowing my demise to affect your poise and countenance
She laughs and smiles, flashing her yellow teeth

You’re so fucking fatalistic, she replies
Without truly understanding the word

I push harder. Would you even care if I died?
Followed you around,
Screaming agonised declarations on the afterlife
Would you even care?

She smiled once more.
I would be distraught, she whispers.
And I’m startled to note the sincerity in her voice
Then I scream. Why won’t you fucking love me?

Because, she says, stubbing out a cigarette
On the tabletop, you’re so fucking fatalistic
And our time has passed

Sent, I Meant

Sentiment; when she was sent you were meant
To seize it
For the gift it was
Heaven sent or by chance and luck

Five letters, a French letter or a red letter
They come once in a lifetime or don’t come at all
And you’re left with the sticky
Sickly sweet stench on your fingers

Hell yeah; part three
Part free
Part of me dies
Every time she slips through my clumsy grasp
Believe in yourself
In something, in nothing
And you’re here again
Forlorn, four long years

It’s formulaic
Lay her form down on the bed
Between the hope and the
Havoc and all the things you’ve done

So I went out, pulled out a piece of parchment
Pieced together, burnt out by her
Fire and a candle only flickers this bright
For a brief few seconds son

The gown still smells the same
Stays the same, sat in the same
Spot, same place on the bedroom floor where
She left it

And I forgot to thank her

Immaculate

We’ve all been searching for something for so long
That the reality is that we simply can’t accept anything
That’s real, as everything that is actual and material
Is by its nature, flawed with faults and far from

The ideal, the perfect, the immaculate image of
That life we dreamt of
That we were raised on, hand reared to believe
That something just a little beyond human

Existence could await us, perhaps only us
And it’s all fairy tales and folk lore
But perhaps thats all there is
There are no dragons, no hydras, no trolls

No knights, no princess
Nobody wears a white veil
We are all muddied, bloodied
Human and defective

Beauty is best left fleeting
Because she is a flickering, fluttering flash
Through your life
A bright flame that burns out far too fast

And scorches into the soul
The first cut is the deepest is
A lie I’ve heard far too many times
As the twentieth gouge slices roughly into

My aching wrist, relax and wrap it up
A tourniquet, a suture sculpting the skin
To disguise the damage of
Every little last laceration

Thanks for the mammaries, the misery, the memories
The mild amusement and the smile that slips across
These bruised and battered features
It’s not so bad, we are all alive and

Well, well isn’t that just the point
We live, we grow, we move on
And beautiful moments are only beautiful
As they are so short, sharp, sudden
Unexpected and altogether surprising
Cutting us to our cynical cores and showing
A glistening glimpse of something that we know
Deep down is the ecstasy of life

All good things in small doses
Lap it up and indulge
Savour it, savour her
Save up the saviour and store it
To save you from your sorrow