Weather are Gods

 

This is... Weather are Gods

The sun hounds down

From eggshell blue sky

Sizzles and fizzes off wooden fences.

The air is lit cigarette, alcohol, chocolate.

And I'm walking, minding my own business.

In this uncanny valley.

Finding my way

from the blood boys and husk fathers.

A fire line smile across cremation clouds.

Shattered sugar glass rain splinters down.

Clatters like a typewriter.

The weather like syrup, coating the surface.

And I'm walking, minding my own business.

In this forced perspective

To find a place away

where there are no stars of animal eyes and black hole jaws.

Lips blew charred match ends of days.

Run a flick comb through the slick night hair.

They built a romance gate lodge.

It's not original.

To find a place to get away.

And I'm walking, minding my own business.

In this surreal estate.

To find a way away.

After the minute's silence comes the encore

 

This is... After the minute's silence comes the encore

When I was young I struggled to express my fate.

Well, today my insides are still out of tune to

articulate

Just how I'm feeling about it.

Nothing gets in or out.

Zeus smoked a large cigar

at my rocking cradle

He gifted me an iron key.

It unlocks all meaning but won't fit a safe answer.

A fable

but I see:

A sky above that will never be 

the same again.

A sky up there and that won't ever change.

I am a universe: no more, no less what I can contain.

At times I do feel new, I confess.

I can't help what I'm feeling all this particular evening.

It's in my DNA to believe in souls and black holes and 

Shooters on grassy knolls.

This is something to break the minute's silence.

Like a thunder storm is something to break the minute's silence.

Like my confession is something to break the minute's silence.

The silence will always be here.

The breaks will always be here.

Nothing is lost, nothing is gained.

You and me and every songbird forever the breaking silence.

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.

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.

I didn't know it until I looked at the receipt, but I've been living in a mass extinction event for a while

 

This is... I didn't know it until I looked at the receipt, but I've been living in a mass extinction event for a while

Steal myself against a 

mass extinction event.

Saucer eyes, 

Rung out cold war mornings.

Space rockets pierce the city-scape.

Glinting silver panels shaped into a future.

I wait for a Queen's thawing opinion.

I don't need forgiveness, just release.

Before I get used to this.

The past often repeats on me.

Oh no, I've used up another of my lifes.

I'm dealing with it pretty well, actually.

Reminding myself time is a pristine stream

Running over names like sun blanched seagrasses in the shallow bed.

Carving and wearing out second chances.

Like my meandering filthy tongue in my bird brained head.

I toss a rock in.

In attempt to some permanence.

Shimmering silver splashes up, like spooked bleak fish.

Then swim by as if it's nothing worth happening.

That's how I learnt it's not rocks; it's driftwoods carry on the current.

I found a folded receipt

of a moment spent.

Lying on the bed,

Rung out nightmare sweat.

The moment hit like a rock; receipt floated like driftwood.

Listening to the texture of constant falling acid rain.

I wait for a dream Queen fever to break.

I don't need mercy, just release.

Before I really get used to this.

Satanic panic attack.

I'm at ground zero percent.

Emotion spilling all over the place.

Slithering guts.

Rung out rags of blood.

Dropping grief like stones but the water is too shallow.

Creating reefs instead of sinking deep below.

I wait for a Queen's ship to sail.

I don't need saved, just release

Before I get much too used to this.

I don't need absolution.

I own everything I am.

I was created as perfect as only possible by man.

The reason I broke is because I'm brittle.

It's my poor language, not on you to understand.

It doesn't mean I'm not broken.

It doesn't mean I can't make you understand.

"I'm sorry. Sorry for whatever happened"

Doesn't cover the sadness of realisation.

It feels like a mass extinction.

It feels so lonely to be living in it.

This is not symbolic

 

This is not symbolic

[Sample of The End by The Doors]

This is not my bread. This is not my blood.

This yogurt is not pro-biotic.

This is not symbolic.

All that's high, is up. All that's down, is low.

Melancholy strokes a slow arpeggio.

Runs a bow across my body and listens for a sound.

Laments in last and wretched testaments, and other things it found.

Mercury in retrograde, I've used up all my lives.

I don't need a penny arcade to tell my luck is out.

All suffered. All endless.

All is tenuous which holds together beyond all science.

Cannot say I know not what I have done.

The results are all to see of what I've become.

All pulp. All writhing.

My mind, A captain's quarters on a Man of War.

All ebony wood. All creaks and groans.

Candle flames casting quivering shadows.

The scent of oxblood leather straps like a red rose.

Ink blot scraps of hidden treasure maps.

Memories rolled into scrolls, books with broken spinal words.

Gun barrel grey skull on writing desk.

Thoughts skulk in the domed recess.

Regrets and missteps slide across the drunken ground.

The crew say this ship is cursed.

"It'll never see land" "The waves come as fever"

"The captain has gone insane"

They don't know. Finding shore line is sometimes worse.

I navigate and set course for another seizure.

All shifting. All needless.

My flesh, soft for talons to sink in of the morbid bird.

Happily pecking at my sweet gloom.

I have plenty it can consume.

All instinct. All hunger.

I'm of nature.

Only sickly hearts flutter. Wolves lay down in packs.

A woodcutter just means they possess an axe.

A sky above is to cry under.

Once a rasping rage at the anxious, industrial grind

I find glorious ennui lit peachy sunshine.

All juice. All fibre.

My two-vices.

When a nun comes numb from faith,

She finds colour with devices to feel her anatomy.

When a necromancer needs to be central to disassociation.

She throws herself into occult occupation.

Incense burning to feel her mortality.

Angel and demon both claim self-sacrifices,

when they're always acting in self-destruction.

My two-selves.

Open-minded and paranoid, I perform seances in coffee houses

In attempts to talk to myselves.

God or monster, it doesn't matter.

When each at the same time is sublime and wrecking ball.

They say artists jump. They say fools fall.

I'd be foolish to say I don't know what I am at all.

All beauty. All agony.

All mine. All requiem.

[Sample of Eight Mile High by The Byrds]

Shapeshifter

 

A crow lay one day quite dead. The late afternoon clinging to it.

Its imprint on the window pane, shocked into being.

The stars above me are screwed up scraps of paper.

I threw them way up there.

On them, written previous indiscretions.

I glued them so they stick in the air.

At night I look up and stare at all the constellations.

Here on the earth of my limitations.

I once crushed a lady bird.

I once told someone I had no choice.

Taking my comfort the dead can't be disappointed.

Passive aggressive Ouija.

Granny always proud but concerned about money.

I don't think my ideology is healthy.

I need belief in me the dead can't be disappointed.

One day I can't be disappointed in me.

I once buried my bodies in you.

I once stood soaked through to the sin.

 Crossroads on the highway say "your place or mine?"

Chewed honeysuckle and geranium.

Fish feel free to swim but they're still in an aquarium.

Sometimes divinity doesn't seem so divine.

Sometimes humanity shows itself as being human.

Every climax casts out a confession.

I once thought fire was sped up time.

I once wanted to burn the history, all my failings.

Pureed into test tubes for unusual experimentation.

Don't think it always was this way.

Concrete alien crafts with square tiles for carpets.

Probed by grey suits beside photocopiers with tablets.

Morning abduction meetings require Geiger readings.

Absurd language lacking meaning.

I once didn't give something I should have given.

I once read a science fiction story from nineteen thirty seven.

A time traveler pinioned a prehistoric bug specimen.

When he returned to his own denizen:

 Fascist pessimism was the political scene.

People added jam after their cream.

A rain of heavy night swept the land of the King and Queen.

No one much cared how this came to be called living.

I once shocked an unhappy memory into being.

I once wondered if disappointments cling to the dead.

It's the weather for it

 

This is... It's the weather for it.

It feels like I could successfully contact the dead.

It's the end of November and fallen leaves on the ground

are easily read.

Winter season brings a haunting to resilience. Or resilience to a haunting.

I'm not meaning through a performative medium.

Guests unconvinced by a knock, cloth or breath on neck.

I've got laudanum.

The house has sharp, cold, air in it. My father died in this room.

It feels like I could successfully contact the dead.

By myself, I don't intend to converse because it's memories

 I've come to resurrect.

 

Acid rain

This feels very much like a B-side. Not actually saying anything in particular.

This is... Acid rain

I don't want to go out in this change of weather.

I'm not having any fun in it no more.

Watching you become acid rain.

Don't want to walk under it.

Step to not slip on its shadow,

spilled thickly on the ground.

I don't want to get soaked through.

Laid there.

Cutting sheets off from my body.

In a shower of wire barbs.

Things grow on us.

Rushes.

Thorns.

Trailing vines.

Day's eyes.

They weave and they push apart.

They save and they hurt the heart.

It's a shame how it went down.

I tired of whistling for it.

Out twisted lips, always sucked instead of blew.

When I came to see, the light was blue.

When I came to talk, the temperature was blue.

When I came to touch, the hand was blue

We don't talk about the cold weather no more.

Hourglass figures

 This is... Hourglass figures

We have always lived in a sandcastle.

You and your past self would not be friends.

We drift out to one another's obscurity.

We have hourglass figures.

At the end of the World.

There will be calm to count.

 Individual collateral accumulation.

Blue teddy bear, dog toy, fast food wrapper.

Foxes' hidden treasures in suburbia glade.

We have hourglass figures.

Finding faith in séance.

Playback birds from yesterday.

Sing us something we know in tremolo.

What had no weight is too heavy to lift today.

A river is only water in cupped hands.

We have hourglass figures.

Sedimented allegory.

Chroniclers are unreliable narrators.

Cassandra knew she'd be unfairly written down.

Cleopatra was shaped of the right stuff.

We have hourglass figures.

It ain't snowing over seas

This is really a b-side.

This is... It Ain't Snowing Over Seas

It ain't snowing over seas,

It's cold pink petals floating on the shore.

What's a rise and fall narrative for,

Only to miss ebb and flow behind every one?

All the while trying to figure out how to navigate

A way through this undertow state.

I'm a plan 9 survivalist.

Left with resilience to last out whatever this is.

Can't be everything it seems, immersion in a deep dream.

But then I got the feeling I'm awake and wired to a socket,

And why do I have blossom in my jacket pocket?

It ain't snowing over me,

It's cold letters settling unwritten, never sent.

The book on the shelf: poetry of Brecht,

In one of these years I'll open it up, I suspect,

When no one I trust is calling on the phone

I want all this living to leave me alone.

I'm a plan 9 spiritualist.

Left with fallow faith to grow with what I'm faced.

Demons exorcised slow notice we're the ebb and flow,

Perished, weakly moaning, they vomit stories to the floor,

Looking much like snow, floating on the shore.

Stripping away what's beautiful

Greville and the Tombstones tries to write beautiful things. But #thereisnobeauty sometimes and this is my attempt to write something that has no beauty at all.

This is... Stripping away what's beautiful

The clouds are gathering.

The crows are gathering.

The day is autumnal because it is spiritual,

the air hangs with natsukashii.

The leaves are gathering, the teeth are gathering

Don't plug me back in, don't reconnect my limbs,

they broke in the season of summer.

Did the sun ever shine like you said it did that time?

I don't think it even shone once.

Rain in glass shoals as it swirls, splinters and falls.

My weakling eyes can't raise because they've 

only witnessed sunsets.

Souls scraping to escape their little black holes.

Coagulating around blood-wet introspective ground,

I've never been so lonely.

Medical experiments and philosophise treatments.

I don't fear these masks no more, they fetishize.

Nurses need the bodies.

Then what will you write, knowing it'll outlast you?

Whatever it is, write it out neatly.

The act of vandalism was not what was pulled from you.

Here admit deviations, recognise you were a

Dead symbol to begin with.

The nights are gathering.

The lines are gathering.

The heartless don't use a key to set the cruel beast free 

from the basement.

They leave it to crawl, pretending it's not them at all.

They thread a needle, call it transparency: 

that's where they hide in.

Does it matter if the saviour invites me to her chambers

So long as she saves me?

Goddess iconography, wood incense of her presence.

No telling after what position she'll chain me

because I'm still agnostic.

Confused at a life that won't love you back.

Now the murder is no longer nesting

in the bell tower.

Memories huddled, the birds' chests are bloodied.

You say sentiment of the missed don't haunt you

then find books with bookmarks.

It's not really so much, it's not really so much

feeling for a pulse.

Check gently for my own, it's here or there I know.

It might be feint as a word sung on skin

But I'd like it to be felt.

The candles are gathering.

The animals are gathering.

Scatter flowers anywhere, they don't matter. 

Inertia Pareidolia

My attempt at writing in britpop.

This is... Inertia Pareidolia:

Sitting at a window. 

Rewinding and forwarding the view. 

Even while it's bleeding out. 

Still life creaking, high rising, falling hard at you. 

Missing what it's all about. 

Sea-glass forget-me-nots wash into the picture, 

From the eternal, uncharted wave, 

Her driftwood voice, slow quotes scripture. 

Jesus would come again for the head she gave. 

I'm seeing faces in the time that passes by the door 

oh-oh-oh 

Are they from a future I will never see anymore? 

Sliding the abacus. 

Counting out bad dreams. 

Taking register when they return home. 

Horizons narrow, hands reach cold walls as she leaves. 

Lost eyes will always be burnt holes. 

Man way up in his moon puts down songs of sorrow. 

They're limited and out of tune. 

Morbidly listening in to heartbeats in the afterglow 

of love long since abandoning the room. 

I'm seeing faces in the afterlife that walk by everyday 

hey-hey-hey 

Are they ghosts of the usual or have something new to say? 

Watering houseplants.

They keep dying one by one. 

Even while they're blooming. 

Words picked for their beauty of lovers to listen. 

Birth roots dirty and ripped open. 

Is that the sound of rainfall, or is it the typewriter 

stripping petals to their waist? 

"Restlessly pulling at bedclothes, I recognise her. 

In creased sheets: her taste."

I'm seeing faces in the static received by my tv screen 

yeah-yeah-yeah 

Are they reflections, premonitions or moving in-between?

The pre-history of the post-apocalypse

This is... the pre-history of the post-apocalypse

Saturday, twenty-first century.

Let's paint the floorboards red.

With a dress, a dress, a dress.

Philosophers say we must be living.

But I can't hear

One breath, one breath, one breath.

Alchemists write "the World must turn".

But I can't feel

Any breeze, any breeze, any breeze.

The last great voice of rock 'n' roll was

Lana Del-Fucking-Rey Or was it

Nick Cave, Nick Cave, Nick Cave?

This is the pre-history of the post-apocalypse. 

Broken down submarine hits the bottom of 

The sea, the sea, the sea.

In 1989, we knew every line.

"We Didn't Start the Fire"

We were the fuel, the fuel, the fuel.

Rent our bodies from the government.

Tells us the goodwill's spent.

Because we didn't buy it, buy it, buy it.

We all mistake the bad things change,

and the good remain 
the same, the same, the same.

Sitting in a parody of a sunny day.

No one gets to stay in a flash bulb moment.

It burns out, burns out, burns out.

Gluing back how those shredded affairs could have been.
Home recorded cassette tapes, touching lips.

What the nets dredge up when grief goes fishing.

 This is a checklist of the pre-history of the post-apocalypse.

 Seek an explanation by our nature.

Hindsight lies a useless mute.

Foresight blindly reaching out as the grave.

Surrounded by modern saviours.

They lost the power to save.

It's ok if you're not all that brave.

Three weeks until daybreak.

Longer depression breaks.

It's a chain of light and darkness anyway.

Empty opportunities is not to say

I didn't fill them.

It's that they cannot come again; it's always the way.

Life’s ups and downs remind me of

Graceful acrobatics

Back in the pre-history of the post-apocalypse.

Saturday, twenty-first century.

Let's spill a little, warm red.

In a glass, a glass, a glass.

My happy place

I wrote this very quick today. I lay down yesterday to calm the calamites and sundries. I remembered someone saying they go to their happy place in their head. And I thought of what would be my happy place.

This is... My Happy Place

Over the iron filigree fence clutched in ivy,
I’m sitting, quiet, in white cotton pyjamas.

Trees tuned, precise garden.

Wildflowers roll like the ocean.

No, an absorption.

Swallows the sun and the panic.

The nurses are also dressed utterly in white.

White shoes too.

They are quiet.

Go to your happy place, maiden.

Sweet airs scatter ideas like a murmur of birds.

Inside, the library contains writing paper

Finely tuned and furnished.

Silent, like pointless haunting.

No, a heart sickening.

It pleads for an injection to beat.

The nurses take my arm and often guide me in. 

I feel a sting.

They are quiet.

Go to your happy place, mister.

Where I go to. I can't remember ever leaving.

I’m in my happy place with melancholia.

Perfectly precise and tuned.

Hospital hangs moon white.

No, seashell upturned.

Spirals, reflections, part of the body.

Lunatics around me, dressed white as pearls. 

And I am one.

They are quiet.

Go to your happy place, animal.

Six feet apart

This is... Six Feet Apart

Disconnected and senseless

Me in my spacecraft

You in your spacecraft

Only six feet of space between us

It might as well be three hundred years

Might as be as wide as my fears

I try to feel what you're feeling

Me in my spacecraft

You in your spacecraft

Birdsong

This started off a happy little thing about the joy of birdsong. However (and there always seems to be an "however" with Greville and the Tombstones) it developed into a treatise on something which is altogether of the weirder songbird.

This is... Birdsong

Graveyard under moonlight.
Grass blades form of twilight.

Dark winds whistling a sweet song to it.

 It’s where you want to be all along.

To feel you can belong.

 Life is in tune everywhere.

Wings cut through deadened air.

Evening rains dappling down on stone.

Private carriage, you’re all alone.

All you seem is all you’ve known.

Then the needle looped at the vinyl’s end.

Scratched out beat sounded so final that you cried.

I offered up kind words of my own,

but you placed them all down and replied: 

“I hope there is a B-side”

You know of a wild, star bush.

 In the middle is it’s seeded fruit.

Times you crack it open,

put your frail hand in,

Grazes your skin, every thorn sings.

You’re reminded of the sting.

 Masquerade night sky ball.

Silently waltz in the grand old hall,

Deities wear baroque masks to fool all

behind them they can hide ridicule.

You need to be a fool.

Then planets fell off their springs. 

I didn’t know what was happening, I cried.

You whispered “Life is not only being alive,

it’s seeing its terror and not being terrified”

Well I hope I didn’t waste this ticket

on a free ride.

How did I miss her birdsong has died? 

No celestial bodies to hold, flowers fell by my side:

 “The birdsong is long gone”, you sighed,

And that’s the sound I realised:

 She stopped singing to peck the flesh

from my goodbye.

The Red Drenched Hill

This is....

The Red Drenched Hill

Lit by low-slung sun, 

This is the red drenched hill, 

I am going to die on.

 Like a moth 

in a trial of fire. 

Until all love and hurt is gone. 

Because 

Everything ends up used. 

Scattered and ever abused.

 And you keep on coming 

Round to play. 

As if you’ve not got the news: 

I feel nothing for you

still. 

You see I see you from way up here, 

Wonder if you can climb high, 

Now I’ve cut my hair short 

Let the stormy clouds rot. 

I’ve no need of them 

in my eyeliner sky. 

When you cannot reach me. 

Gravestones sewn beneath me. 

And the weakening sun ray.

 By the weary sigh on 

sigh. 

If you want some advice. 

If there’s any left to give. 

Dismount from your high horse. 

It’s dying in pain of your loss. 

It doesn’t make any odds. 

When all sunlight leaves us 

Don’t think darkness frees us 

We intertwine like lover’s brides

 And call out

 To our gods. 

Even while Hell is in our eyes. 

You know, 

We’re too busy feeding robots 

Because we’re all just robots 

Programmed to eat donuts 

And self-destruct a wish that we die. 

Make no mistake 

I feel nothing for you 

On this hill. 

Time heals nothing around me 

No cure has yet come found me.

Loss is never found. 

It is never more healed. 

Alone, watching all down below. 

I realise the carnage 

See the tragic damage 

Smell the smoke of Carthage 

And there’s one truth that I know: 

When everything is on fire 

That can catch on fire 

My love lies still beside me, 

Burning. 

Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said: 

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain. 

And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human.

LIFEFORCE

This is the B-side to:
To be treated like an author discovered off the prescribed student reading list 

It was not meant to be, but it quickly developed into something which had a voice and something to say, so why not let it breathe now? It seems an apt negative to the A-side.

This is... LIFEFORCE

I’m torn apart nightly. 

My love. 

Pull pieces together each and every day. 

All sound and contact and light and motion 

hurts me in a different way. 

All seems useless acts of attrition. 

And to what end… does it flatter. 

To live. 

More hours to kill and with a flourish scatter.

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star. 

At the bottom of the wept green sea. 

Shells for teeth. Coral for hair. 

Rocks in shoes to keep me underneath. 

People on the shoreline talk on behalf of me. 

But I don’t trust their laughter there. 

Sounds of tides crashing over pebble and shale on the beach. 

I’ll be dug, 

dug deep underground. 

The horror. 

Trinkets for archaeologists will be left to be found. 

And I know 

I’ll lose all I ever had. 

Is what is 

God’s plan to make me unbearably sad. 

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star. 

I’m the House of Usher. 

Foundations cracking up. 

Fuck your struggle and bluster. 

It’s ludicrous to think about 

just how insignificant but all consuming that you are. 

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star. 

I’ve a life-force in a jar. 

I’ve a life-force from a star.