Mendicine

To me - and what I tried to do - in this poem is write exactly what my teenage self would have wanted to write. It has all that teenage cool hormonal angst I had to it. It feels confessional, which I wanted. It feels like it is trying to break out of as yet undeveloped way of expressing something, anything. And that came easy as I still struggle to articulate. It's a poem that wishes it could be better, but realises it maybe just needs to be there at all.

It has that grunge to it.

This is... Mendicine

My timing's slightly off.

Plead with a squall:

A little more time over there.

Voice cracks into a beg:

A little less time over here.

Not grief enough for the living.

Comfort myself by consoling the dead.

I'm sickly when I'm sweet.

Watching myself pass right on by me.

Are my convictions based on muscle memory?

A conscientious voice on a whim

I'm no longer

Invested in?

Don't conflate politeness for my acceptances.

Take another bitter pill.

Take another happy pill.

Take another pill

to stop being ill.

Watching my language whenever I can.

"A sensitive boy" is some euphemism to a man.

Well you know I perfectly am.

Sensitive to motherfuckers

Spending beautiful days.

Sensitive superpower at locating our differences.

Take another calming pill.

Take another caffeine pill.

Take another pill

to stop being ill.

Waiting for the mendicine to kick in.

Watching the needle of the record player.

Played B side so much its flipped the A side grooves over.

Spinning reasons to be beside the living.

Some are bloody minded.

Some are forgiving.

Sometimes the bride, sometimes monstrosity.

Take another patchwork pill.

Take another tailormade pill.

Take another pill

To stop being ill.

Watching the surrounding walls closing in.

Knowing they are paper dry and just as paper thin.

I pretend in the room when I said

That the walls are built

of solid lead.

To stop them stopping me torching them with flamethrowers.

Take another paranoia pill.

Take another mind expanding pill.

Take another pill

to stop being ill.

Watching corkscrew chain reactions spiral.

In a fuzzy summer afternoon suburban smog roll.

I threw them out like sickly sweets.

Don't think I don't hear these

Under floorboard heartbeats.

Hands shielding eyes from the blinding flash of consequences.

Take another ten dreams per hour pill.

Take another anti-nightmare pill.

Take another pill

to stop being ill.

Take another pill to get down.

Take another pill to swallow.

Take another pill to endure the collateral. 

Take another pill to be unconditional.

Who made whom; it doesn't matter at all

We won't always be able to

touch the way we want to.

Take another pill to numb all the pain.

Take another pill to feel it all again.

Take another pill to be unreliable

narrators.

Take another pill to be uncompromisingly

put on this earth for.

Take another pill

To be what we always will be

To the other.

I don't need to take another pill.

I don't mind being ill.

It's not the getting better but the scarring.

It's not about the healing but the mending.

Not a rapier blade, but a hickory bow bending.

I hear the sound of arrows whistling.

It's the sound of the mendicine kicking in.

Long Jolly Crossbones

 
This is... 

Long Jolly Crossbones

Breaking light over flowing on your high seas.

Playful shines upon them quick silver.

And you told me this was treasure.

Under colours hoisted into vaulted skies.

We hanged our enemies to the yardarm.

And you told me this was freedom.

A crow's nest sighting of the world's edge.

The old charts declared: "bad omen!"

And you told me this was living.

So you set course by canon grey clouds.

And sashay between opium puffs.

And you told me this was the true compass.

And I sailed on your high seas!

Felt your body writhe in swelling waves.

And I sailed on your high seas!

You held me with a thousand fathoms.

And you told me this is ritual.

We floated on backs out in the vast and formless maths.

In the iron caldron, huge shadows in torus stirred the depths.

In celestial constellations we saw the sublime.

In Northern Lights saw their minds spill out.

And it was then we made up our minds nothing was Divine.

And I wished upon every shooting star I saw

I'd never feel earth beneath me anymore.

The bite was a natural good. The calluses came 

From holding tight.

The sea sickness was plenty. But the sickness thrilled me.

But all voyages discover shores eventually.

Even when sailing in your high seas.

I said, we are organisms in an organism world

Everything just a conceptual design

Of yours and mine.

We go where the wild wind picks up sails we unfurled.

You told me:

"You wish an undertow will carry you far

Where the only lines left are the straight horizon

And sparkling  tail of a shooting star.

To hold faster yet in a sweeping perfect maelstrom. It breaks

Down, the din, upon you and you push back with all your might.

Like beauty, it will pass by.

Know this:

The most enduring ships are wrecks.

Throw the jetsam, throw the flotsam.

Let them

wash up on someone's heart.

The ocean can be mistress or lover,

Distress or comforter.

It can reflect or refract.

Tentacles sometimes pull wishbones apart.

Spirits sometimes run aground on humanity.

Shipmates sometimes shift into mutiny.

Springboards sometimes are just short planks for longing.

A bow clipping through water can be clipped wings

in fallen tears from a crying shame.

Winds on the tundra can sound like confessional howls,

or the sound of prayer.

And, again, I see you walking on water,

Only the first time I didn't see your ankles wet.

And sea green meadows are green from algae,

Choke-hold with weeds and overgrown ivy.

Nothing matters: Not any ship,

Not the opera singing siren. Not the 

the jagged reef."

And you told me

You knew the melting point of portraits.

And you told me

The length of chain doesn't make it easier to break.

And you told me

This sea chest is full of pulled out gold teeth.

You marooned me.

Left me an X on your map.

What a cruel thing.

Left me lost though left me exactly where I am.

Cast adrift on an island of tidal sands.

And I've named each grain you.

And I look out

At your high seas.

Rolling in an out like your breath.

A monkey on an expedition to circumnavigate the face of God

 

This is only a mood piece.

This is...

A monkey on an expedition to circumnavigate the face of God

You hurt me just the right amount.

Set me up just as a body count.

Surround me in ways so few ever do.

By a Japanese master's brush strokes.

My spine is a needle and its being threaded through the canvas.

When existence is only by texture thickly layered onto texture.

Elementals thrashing into spume.

Like peacock feathers in full bloom.

Lipstick spit; nylon dipped; hot wax dripped; cityscape stripped

To the teeth bared back.

Lens flare headlights and growling exhaust pipes.

Copper eyes glinting out the dark.

Out in these lupine days just bright enough.

Everyone sticking onto everywhere from obsessional sweat.

Shirts peeled from surfaces, shoes fetishised in their purposes.

You hurt me just the right amount.

You know I'm your devout.

Seize me as a relic you possess.

Release is slow; every breath as ghosts.

My spine is a weeping tree: leaves may fall but branches remain.

Where you can't see my ribs for the vines laced good and tight.

Skeleton shows sharpened marks from flint.

Sharpened cutlass to slice through the all of it:

Purging flame; curse blowing hurricane; human detonating pain

Of a nuclear blast.

All consumed bones are getting exhumed.

Rake over ashes to see what's glinting out the dark.

I'm in these lupine days just bright enough. 

Time as Witness metamorphoses its final form of Time as Absence.

When existence is only folding matters into madness.

When my existence feels like texture.

When my existence feels like time running out.

You hurt me just the right amount.

Draw a chalk outline around what I adore.

When rain is passing, knocking on new town doors, 

And softening dirt to get the bodies out.

Ends tend not to be wrapped in bows, but in shrouds.

The Sculptor (AKA: A commercial radio song)

 

This feels like an affinity piece to Hallucinogenic sister 

This is... The Sculptor (AKA: A commercial radio song)

Globules of morbs rolling off my form.
Organ pipes squeal and moan when fingers hit the keys.
Begging me onward: “harder".
Sabre for a spine, so everything en garde!
Sharpening strife from notes and notes from me.
My self-harmer, snake-hipped charmer.
With love of Pan, the sculptor
Gazed upon this work and put down the hammer.
No one could agree on what the shape was meant to be.
For all eyes on it, the shape was different.
For all hands on it, the shape was different
Didn't understand the shape
was too painfully beautiful to behold.

This shape doesn't do this emptiness justice.
Trying to form it from the waste is:
The non-existent past. The dust.
Cotton that grows cold.

Gravity pulls            out in waves.
Months stretch like years to get this way.
Nothing more moths vomiting mulch from decay.
Trying to shape this elemental absence from you.
Feelings poisoning ground wherever Time once grew.
Bloodied mind writhing tied to late summer vines.
Body crackling like crisped, frosted fallen leaves.
Imploding with a pressure of a thousand seas.
Keep centering to a centre that cannot hold.
A shifting shape I cannot mold.
A shape to lay with.
A shape to fall
down
the
cracks with.
An added line.
To slip in between.
A shape to be with, to be there
in the depths of despair of yours and mine.
A shape that fits the puzzle, a piece shaped universally.
A shape that recognises
shapes no one else can see.

A shape that dispels noise with resonating music.
This pipe organ keeps sounding out the notes.
Throwing anything overboard that floats.
The chords, jagged like river rapids.
Heart of meat, the wolves can have it.
It's the plasm spirit that I don't want ripped asunder.
So I hit the resin keys harder to try to hear the echo and wonder
If you are aware I still try to play the harmonics I hear in thunder.

Sweat rolls down off the coffin.
Pallbearers squeal and moan with each step of the carry.
Begging me on: "How much can you take?"
Jaw like a vice, only clenched when awake.
The shape, a shadow from the lashing flame.
What shape is heat and cast-off light?
Some believed the shape must have inner sculpting.
Cogs to be swapped: one for another or another.
Others said the shape was at once each of the four seasons.
Within it there must be moons of orbital gardens.
Flowers in full bloom or withered by shade.
Perfection made an ecosystem in constant imperfection.
Spirits for botanicals.
Such was the sculptor's marvels.
But they couldn't understand.
The shape and them are contortions held in perfect suspension.
Between loss and lost clinched in macabre shaped occasion.

A summer evening's garden

 

This is... A summer evening's garden

A fox in twilight on summer evening prowl.

Moving like a half-light memory I have winding

In an evening summer garden.

Under art nouveau leaves.

Brushing through angel feather willow trees.

And palette popping colour petals.

Rows of can-can skirt dancers.

Embrace of tight go-go-dancers.

Peacocking barroom romancers.

Sliding oil bubbles floating across and bursting like

Prism tear drops scattered.

And compound fractures.

The apple white flesh of a living branch half-snapped

Skin holding on, sinews bent but intact.

Chlorophyl keeps photosynthesising.

You say it's nature but I say it's misery.

Where I lie still as the fox steps over me with its kill.

Nylon flowers

 

This is... Nylon Flowers

Nothing blossoms in this garden.

It's without a cradle into the clouds' bosom.

Lacks lightness of being sparkling above water surface tension.

Under the weight of this dense earth forces evolution.

Stems of wire.

Lace bowed into posed leaves.

Nylon flowers.

So yet we bloom, of course, of sorts.

Torture back garden

This is... Torture back garden

I read in the latest Lady's Flora Gazette

Plant life know when they are being eaten.

"I am being eaten"

Fucking Hell.

They say to the other plants around them:

"I am being eaten"

Fuck Me.

To warn them the latex sheen bug is taking bites.

"Assume the brace position"

My God.

You may still be identifiable by your thorns.

I read in a botanist research paper

Plant life count bees as a concept of time.

"It is time again"

Jesus, yes.

They listen out for the buzz-buzz-buzz-buzz

"It is time again"

Holy fuck.

Recognising the individual style of sting.

"Assume the brace position"

My God.

Count the blessings for the bee and the whip.

Sermon from the Priest Of Crows' Beady Eyed Pulpit

 

This is... Sermon from the Priest Of Crows' Beady Eyed Pulpit

Come and suffer.

Come where there is no lyrical dealing in faith.

Come where there is no offering of uplifting hope.

Come where there is no lesson, no matter you need to be taught.

Come where there you are seen: glorious and tragic.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit sees you: tied to the stake.

When ideologue flames meet you, let them know you'd rather burn through

Crucifixions, auto-eroticisms.

Only you can ever be you.

Wherever you are travelled.

You're going to get travelsick.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit watches you: message in a sea-glass.

Wishing letters could be bottled up, tossed into colourless tumult.

But the current always pushes back to shore.

Only you can ever contain you.

Always near sinking below

horizon's sight.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit views you: beautiful as liminal space.

Sighs emptiness between words not more than uttered.

Lovers, saucer-eyed, under the same moon phase in a countryside

A mass of land between.

Raspings of the rushes

A reminder of the distance.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit recognises you: duality of man.

Uncanny out of body sensation: the feeling of magic before you knew the trick of it,

yet present as steel between a hammer and an anvil.

Only you can ever be you.

On instamatic film: it was once all real.

Layers of flesh, Ruby gemstone, bone-shells, crushed hormonal states of mind.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit waters for you: demigod.

Mankind worships only what it sees itself in.

Acts for a purpose it can't say what it believes in.

In the atomic light a steady beady eye can make out self-destruction.

Even on Sundays meant for heads to shake at sin in.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit stares at you: wild with your bounty.

Foaming and dissolving clouds, texture of time.

All the while taking liberties with your crops and berries,

You are taking up the prognosis with the doctor at the bedside.

Discussing costs of being turned on by pump and valve machine.

Eating warm peaches out the bowl.

 

The beady eye from the pulpit sees you: as you intended.

In pursuit of relativity: mixture of passion and vulnerability.

Existing to push molecules around. 

Only you can ever move you.

A beautiful curiosity; Flowering like a galaxy.

A spectrum of consequence in fuck-up-ability.

Hallucinogenic sister

This is... Hallucinogenic sister

Hallucinogenic sister.

The Beatles got a ticket to ride the helter-skelter.

But it was you who sent me spiraling.

We sat on a mushroom together.

It's where you did all my rewiring.

I never 

knew I wasn't free.

Until you turned the key.

Look what you made me do.

Got me talking in cliche.

Created with a lyrical intensity

To survive in the spite of oceans of pressure.

Gears cranked by great cogs in the bleak whatever.

You were right: diamonds are more than density.

Look what you made me do.

Got me believing 

Got me believing talking people could be dead.

Got me believing they could be alien abducted.

Got me believing I could be wanted.

Got me believing not all madness is insane.

Got me believing not everything comes with pain.

Where have you gone?

I went to watch the wood-chip walls fall.

You were right: there was no physics behind it all.

The knocking was in my head, all along.

Look what you made me do.

Got me talking cosmic mundanity.

Where have you gone?

I went to see Venus on the half-shell.

You were right: it was not the painting, but a novel.

The devil is always in the detail.

Look what you made me do.

Got  me questioning my reality.

You screwed me apart, you screwed me back together.

Transfused neon gas for my bloodstream so I'd be modern-noir.

Showed my heaven is hell: 

Showed a curtain call to an actor in a theatre of war.

Showed in this hotel there is always a caretaker.

Where have you gone?

The fading light is the same.

But the oncoming night is not quite the same.

My typewriter still licks out one letter at a time

But the ink from the ribbon is not quite the same.

Gravity strings hold our places, still somewhat entwined

Just the stars are not quite so aligned.

And that's OK, it's alright, it's fine that you got me sad.

Greville and the Tombstones' tribute to William "Topaz" McGonagall

 

This is...
Greville and the Tombstones' tribute to William "Topaz" McGonagall

Dolly Parton spent one day writing both "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene"

I spent whole day only writing this:

People living in 1809.

A world without the novel Frankenstein.

Dead before the movie.

Bones, home to moss and creeper vines.

They won't see the good in me.

They won't know how many times I'm bad.

They won't count how many lives I've had.

August 24th, 79 anno domini.

Was the last day, for the residents of Pompeii.

Cast across centuries, their agony.

Caught in crude plaster like a sculptor’s yard.

Like them, you left me charred.

Like them, my pain is visible, but not the tears I’ve cried.

Like them, I didn’t think a Sunday would be the day I died.

9/11....