Poem: Surveillance

Watch a bird in its cage,
Surveillance is enough to make us insane,
The watched pot doesn’t boil,
But blows out its own brains

When observed, I must hide or strike out,
Scurry off to hedgerow,
Use my beak,
The knife I call my mouth,
To rend muscle from tendon,
Inflict wounds to inspirit distraction

But the blood has a way of following you,
Like the leech of bad memories,
Embarrassing actions, drunken confessions,
Of night breezes blowing in past-life memories,
The toxicity of oil spill odours

Spilling the beans,
I spilled out not just my heart,
But my ignorance in a hunk of gelatinous mass,
Something to wrap tentacles around face,
The shattering of serenity,
The prat-fall from grace,
The soaked credibility of good first-impressions,
Met with cold fingers in the morning

Knowing to disbelieve hope’s mercy,
The discouragement of over-spent warning

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Poem: Autopsy of Obsession

There are days when I turn into the very spitfire of rage,
Imagining each of my corners has the sharpness of a blade,
In the mutated tree of my thoughts, barbed wire epidermis,
Pierces all the women inhabiting my fantasies,
The dramatis personae of my harvested whimsies,
Of dresses clung to wet-mouthed thoughts,
Ill-advised courtship indulged in draughts

Sex only comes into it as a primordial energy,
An intellectual game,
Most of my philandering I do in my mind,
Dreams of infidelity help me unwind,

But, if unfaithful, then unfaithful to what?
To the contrived concatenation of feudal civilization,
To the Christian relic of unhallowed churches,
Doomed to lie in the dust of theology,

I merely want to be there,
To have your aroma,
To be the observer of your wit’s Passover,
To have a figurehead I can quietly worship,
To give my obsession a cathexis, a direction,

There need be no passing of organs, of fluids,
Of kisses stolen from needle armpits,
There need be no moisture from dewy mornings,
To taste your dress when kindled with grasses

If push came to shove, then shove I would not,
Sooner crying into your lap,
Than allowing myself to weep through my phallus,
I want a friend who is sharper than a friend,
From whom I will always taste the love of tension,
An uncertain comfort that needn’t be mentioned

Never sure I truly do,
When I say ‘I love thee true’
Loving truer, having something to love,
As below, so is it above,

Poem: To Poetasters

There is no such thing as ‘light verse,’
Only the putrid stench of indifferent thought

This onslaught of banality shatters my tolerance,
The fragrance of flames licking to sulphur
As I sit in a furnace, devising torments,
To punish the flaccid carelessness of your empty sentiments

A wounded fury, woundingly furious,
I cannot think on the subject of publication
Without arousing tears of desperation and anger

How can I be calm,
When you feeble poetasters
Drain all blood and fury
From the emaciated corpse of poetry?

As your limp-dick words
Sprawl from the arsehole of hypnosis,
My lexicon grows rank with hateful profit,

In pursuit of genius,
I find none here,
Smashing my testicles into a hard-boiled throat,
To smother you with a tablecloth as meaningless,
Unportentous, as your verse,

I shove my thoughts into your dull labyrinth,
To boil my genius in the clogged bile ducts of your notes,
To wish against kindness,
In the lowest tiers of the Inferno,
Mediocrity will receive the keenest retribution

A little boy imagining his passing sharpness,
May have the rigour to change the world

Poem: In The Midst

In the midst of Death, we are in Life,
Where green hollows give riot to full-flower thoughts,
To the mocking of yaffle and titian speedwell,
Benches so little sat on, grasses grow between their ribs,
Reclaiming to ruin, ivy-bound

The beauty of tombs almost justifies the killing,
Lichen UFOing in annular growth,
The space between songs
Are the lips of the bell,
Kissing your hours into subsistence

Fed on the flesh of sundial birdsong,
When shadows are secondary
To the sovereignty of light,
Corpses exploding into bluebells,
Fully-clappered, with the eternal pulsation
Of several Spring seconds

All is complete in the green of young leaf,
Pointing to where eternity beckons

 

Poem: Swallows of St. Illtud’s

 

Swallows fly in and out of St. Illtud’s,
Singing mass in melodic whispers,
They do not sit still for the communion of the saints,
But dance dizzyingly with them in the air,

Perhaps they are etching Ogham on the sky,
Writing invisible vapour trails of all that’s gone by,
William Blake winks out at you from the fire place,
Fumigating with the black smoke of truth

The silting of sand trailing over vital hands,
Scratched hard by the certainty of proof

Poem: Sea, The Builder

Counting out the change of marsh pennywort,
The Sea is the finest architect,
Thinking not of porticos, corbels,
Synthesized by this architect’s moist fingers,
The real estate of Blue Mother Sea,
Puts seaweed in the drowned lungs of singers

Her body is crystal,
Melted and given motion,
The rhythmic undulations of sparkling sapphire,
Symbol of the subconscious’s cryptic emotions

In the bellies of grey limestone caverns,
The latticework of maritime honeycombs,
Wrought with striations of ochre and quartz,
Red torsos webbing between earthed gasps
Of landmass

The fishermen will be given a separate church,
So their scent offends not the men of God,
While God himself huffs all the perfume of the world,
Caring not if it is shit or vanilla

Scurvygrass will be the fruit of your arthritis,
When the sea counts back the bricks of your digits

Poem: Thalassic Discothèque

Staring out from thrifted cliff,
White-rumped redshank perched on limestone
Carboniferous, views of Lydstep just beyond,
The thoughts of death, body sea thrash,
The fear and joy of feeling the ground
Beneath me breathe

I have walked away from old patterns of frustration,
Uncluttered now the deeds of dissatisfaction,
Skylarks erupting in interminable car alarm calls,
Black tar lichen autographs the walls,

Over on St. Margaret’s,
Razorbills and guillemots rejoice,
Ululating into clanking air tangoes,
The great vault of stone is a discothèque now,
Evicted, humans have been put back in their place,

But I am no intruder,
Animal enough to be granted a season pass,
I feel the serpentine pulse of coast unpeopled,
Of Pembrokeshire magic insisting on the completion
Of a malingering shaman’s soul

And turning my body into octopus arms,
Into the sea I now will roll