The bombs rain down
Doorways fused into ugly splinters of light
Safety is nowhere
Somewhere the beauty
Reeks its still scent
Into those that might remember
Even as the bombs
Incendiary patterning of fire
Coursing through the streets
Orange blood breaking
The streets and houses
One from another
Fracturing into islands of fear
Heads bowed and senses numbed
Waiting
September 2007
Dreams emerging from granite
Entrapped within a life
Lived only by numbers
Dots joined from day to day
And hour to hour
A puzzle without the clues
Vital evidence blurred by anger
Despair blinded those pauses
The notes between the music
Had remained unplayed
With broken instruments I toyed
To a past that I knew
But I grew weary to recall
Until
Inside the breath
I forgot someone that was
The face that stares
Back from a void
Because
I arrived
Here
Bursting into you
September 2007
Feeling the way along
Tears lit our way
As a broken torch
Kicking up the lust
Breathing in petrol
We came too close
And were burned
Into each ones other
Self
Along the streets we hunted
Your sight broke my gaze
Returning the hand to its glove
My grip tightened
Now here is the thing
This object we coveted and knew so well
Lit by its own tears
Pouring in light
Dropped
Remembered
Held
I smelt you
Closer
September 2007
The sheets are colder now
Hard and clean
They stagnate
Except at my own touch
I played with air
While you are
Lessening your grip
I floated only to myself
Holding myself tight
In the vacuum
Air squeezing past my cheek
Vacated of warmth
Our dirty secrets left untold
Confessed to air
Actions now mechanical
Audience departed
And now remains
This our beautiful sadness
Our legacy
A testament to dreams
Scattered like a broken
Child's toy
September 2007
Within this frame I feel a space of time
a noiseless momentum not yet wasted, but held
trapped in a bubble chronological resin,
even now hardened, irretrievable only to be
viewed solemnly from a respectable distance
This can never happen again, for again this
sporting chance may offer itself as a
relic of fallen empires of old
Yet this is mine, mine to keep and to
hold this indivisible slice of mine
To others this moment may be synthesised
but not bonded
Are these not wanton thoughts of mine?
Unverifiable and insignificant?
Yet it is this that is more than we
can ever experience,
a sampled portion within an endless numbers of courses
1986
Who Stole My Childhood?
What seeped out in the dead of the night
Innocence of dreams was stolen by stealth
I sat playing in the corner
Watching the footsteps
Order got sucked into a big grey hole
Cloud cloud cloud
A sense of wonder was taken by the headhunters
they wear it round their necks now
Yet I existed for fifteen more Christmas mornings
I did not need to understand
At all
Strip mining my
Imagination
Of all the
Colour
February 1997
White birds glide by on a breath of nature
I remember these birds had their place, always
The sun holding its allotted place in the deep blue disc
Challenges nothing for sovereignty It is king
These vital seeds are reborn and die,
but in just one turn
They are forgotten,
in many, held up, shaken, prodded and
dropped to smash onto the rocks of apathy far below
This is not a sad poem but rather that you should realise
your time may be now
But only one season of this rich harvest
is brought forward in perpetuity
Grown in the past to rot and decay in the future
And if understood by its own definition
and acted out there upon
It shall know forever what we will be
Tomorrow you may be gone
Tomorrow I shall watch the grass grow
When your feeling like this
It is not obvious who to say you are
I walk down the street
Subtle
Trying to collect old thoughts
(For comfort)
Tasted yesterday in the bar down the block
Clever
Saw yesterday in tomorrow
If I forgot yesterday
I would find today
Now
April 1995
When I created life
Something changed in the corner of the room
Somehow the shadow turned inside itself and danced beyond the window sill
When I created life
the cans rattled on the street
Insects begged passers by for morsels of food
When I created life
the brown witches gurgled in anticipation and pleasure
When I created life
there came soaring out from the stairwell a shaft of pure light
It was wrapped carefully in a green wave
freshly rolled in from the beach
The wave asked for its safekeeping
So its smell and feel and taste would not be forgotten
I promised
and always I will keep this
June 1998
When the waters fade and fleck
Their fickle foam no more
Drawing up that shutter last
Silently against the outer door
I remember nothing
My outcast pen casting stones
Ink against the shelves
Save a halftone smile folded in
Really a dual time passed
Witnessed as a rolling moon
Turned briefly on my doubtful soul
Again here joy whelms to the silent edge
Pausing to cut back my fears
Laid heavily down by dark and greying years
1986
"What's life?" Whatever you make it baby. What about running outside with a knife and stabbing the first passerby? Just think, you've got all these choices that could eat you in the space of one breath. Fuck You!
What if I did it? I can destroy both our lives at the same time. Far more efficient. So my life is worth destroying and yours isn't? You value yourself that little that my life has more value to you than your own and therefore it's there to be broken? Is the life of a stranger worth less than that? ( Fuck You ) .... Well .... Isn't that at least telling you how I feel? Yeah. And I didn't even know that.
See, here's a knife, Well I just want to go out and use it right now. Even on yourself? Why not! Would you stop me anyway ( FUCK ) So your just going to wallow in your hate filled passion, drawing emotional blood wherever there is a soft naked tenderness to be found. Here, let me stand up, remove all my clothes and scream abuse at you at the top of my voice with my eyes closed. Why don't you try the sharpness of that blade on your own thumb, before sticking me with it....
1993
What I hoped what I hoped
Burning fingers pressing into my back
Somebody knows all about this
Don't I remember that?
It felt like a whole slew of yesterdays
but I didn't remember that
I saw the stammer in your eyes
The fleeting gasp of your touch
I've forgotten all that now
Get used to it don't you?
Days, nights and then more of the same
I'm leaving now
Because your not here to stop me
I assumed you wouldn't mind
I forgot something the last time I came
I've remembered now, so I won't come back
1993
Tired and sick, sick and tired
A walking pressure cooker of seething platitudes
and idealistic idiosyncrasies
Yes
tired
No freedom of movement and no free moments
Tyred worn with a steel belted radical
Turning into rust
a senseless weighted expectation
turning into dust
Crisis one
crisis too
See the happy T.V. people playing on the zoo
1987
There’s a Tui feeding in the Kowhai tree
Spoke of a short illness
My imagination turned hollow
Somewhere else tonight someone is crying
I don’t feel the need for solitude
Some form of the presence of the living
Is welcome
The people walking past my window
Aren’t seeking to interrupt me
I follow their heads bobbing along outside the fence
The heads hear the Tui feeding in the Kowhai tree
For the moment they and I feel as one
And are gone again
July 2003
There are fifteen thousand reasons for looking out the window today
Eternal numbness of endless patience is one of them
It’s like looking into an empty fish and chip wrapper
A cold greasy day where there was once warmth and desire
I never wrote anybody a letter like this
Reminding friends of distance?
Haven’t seen a film for weeks now
There are always faces I know
They know me
But shit, it’s all way too cool, ya know?
June 1995
The Velcro scream of a wallet having
its guts ripped out by a ever poorer owner
Flies with no break of concentration
scab their devious fumbling onto gleaming
utensils of pure plastic and they bite
delightfully into another starvation
starved offer mixed with a heady
but fruity liquid of carbonated chemicals
pace quickens meal squeals for mercy
receives none as massive white rocks
of perfect uniformity grind its life into a pulp
extracting the life and death that
vegetables must suffer in the quest
of another few hours of a full stomach
and a night of darkness and digestion
The eater pauses cuts with another motion She bites!
DEEP!
HARD!
with a suddenness and horror that only a
threatened piece of corn could possibly
experience the remaining
peas scream and quake staring straight
up at a ruthless efficient killer
knowing their fate but resisting to
the bitter end
like only a British vegetable can
The death juices are wiped away in a
brilliant and indifferent display of victory
the drink thrown back as a final gesture of supremacy
1989
The sex pistols ride the shoulders of the polio victim
surrounded by the shrouded of body
and the shrouded of mind
Conformity fingers it's way around the counters
consuming its victims as they consume burgers
mirrors of fingerprints
throw back blank stares and fumbling indifference
parkas and dullness rustle about
jostling with hats and bags of boredom and
heads full of fares and timetables
flakes of skin peel off over scratched forrids
settling on dirty shirts and displeased trousers of
narrowness and unflared vision
piles of piles press plastic seats in
a pleasure dance of pain
fingers push their way into chemically enhanced
piles of carbohydrates and cancer
A kiss rings out like a cannon
meanwhile the boredom turns its head and
tries to stay bored
the directions find no direction and
the meanings are ill defined
1989
The coming of life closes further
The valve of energy constricts again
My face rotates over your hands
Sliding into the mirror
Running into ripples of frowns
Waking steps of mercy cry out from your lips
Frozen spiders break the ice from their webs
Showering shards of glass into my mind
Under the doorway we kissed
Weeping and sobbing into our minds
I throw my soul at your feet
My crudity wraps your ankles
And asks for its own end
Slender visions back up in my mind
Sighing for release
And reconstruction from my prostrate form
Running past my own shadow, on the ground, there!
See it fail and fall behind, so slow, so unsure
There's an empty dream lurking down that alley
Waiting to jump me and drag me into its false neon flash
Now my own shadow staggers and reels, jumping about
Never with me, always threatening me with its dark nothingness
Blotting out the light and withering small flowers
That feel
Its icy to touch
Running to the window, the sky's gone red
The walls speed past and kick gravel in my face
Light switches lean out and scream abuse as they flash by
Everything speeds up
A chair screams by
Blasting death into small clumps of grass
Large empty rooms fill with mountains
Ceilings change moods
Windows look round and I look like nothing at all
See my shadow now, prising itself away from my body
Struggling for its own state of mind
Striking out against the wind, running further, faster
Pausing briefly, waving goodbye
October 1988
Rolling my thoughts along on a wave of reason
Items pass to the crest, boil and become subdued again
Pulled down by the force of another,
Fighting it's way to the top
Some thoughts are discarded and cast aside,
Slowly building up the seabed, others are nurtured and tendered
To sustain the momentum of forward motion
My mind is a rolling wave,
Approaching from different angles and with
Different intensities as my mood dictates
In the night it crashes on a lonely shore
And breaks the beach into patterns of destruction
By morning all may become calm again,
Yet ever rolling on it goes, changing with time
I am now at a lull, a moment of pause
Before again I roll towards a distant beach
My task to perform
Challenging the inertia of intransigence
1987
Not doing anything...
Now
Last night I thought about you
And then I changed my mind
Didn’t decide at all
Saw it all as darkness and light
Together, one, the same
It just wasn’t you
And I didn’t know how it really was
Except I wanted to ask you
How did you stay away?
So far, so long...
I was here
I was close
I heard you
And you... not knowing
Can’t decide why I thought of that
Except that you were there
Not here
There...
JULY 1995
No clothes, naked
Faceless cowering in the shadow of plastic images
fades to nothing
no uniform of conformity to salute the general
fast food flavour of fashion
Myself, being myself
Feeling the cool breeze of space hanging around my shoulders
dropping all the way to the floor
Newness, nowness, arousal
Walking room to room, gracefully,
feet curving around every floorboard
The air arching it's back and bending to my form,
embracing me as I embrace it
My body no longer a contrived restriction of spirit
throwing back any gimmick, gizmo or gratuity
Giving out, giving back, thinking, walking
moving, stretching and flowing
Vulnerable, vulnerable and independent,
vulnerable and weak, vulnerable and strong
Independent and visible
visibly naked and nakedly real
The craziness of shame and anxiety gone
an act of freedom leaves me free to act,
to stand to reach forward
1986
My heart dies in a rotten stump on the beach
The waves have washed the blood into pink foam
I felt it die, somewhere in my chest, at peace
I'm standing on that beach now
I wonder who placed that television set in front of me
And I'm catching the way the wind is blowing, just over there
please tell me you've seen me standing there
I can't seem to help being somewhere else when you look
MAY 1993
My brain is an obtuse shade of green
There is a blue snowflake lying in my memory
The lime tasting socks melted past my stereophonic sound inductor
There is a matted rush of live fish in the living room
Take my slender spleen to a safe deposit
Glue my knives into a sacred place
Fly my clean blue rifles into formations of plenty
The ozone pies out of the skies into a policeman's helmet
I went out today with fifteen cream buns stapled to my hat
My friends are standing in catfood dishes
The ozone layer thickens and encrusts itself
Through five rises and ten falls of the share market
I have my own personal skinhead
Non removable, non stick with a no return no win guarantee
My carpet was taken out of quarantine fifteen days ago
And the fleas are jumping higher to my window
Through my door, look! look!
It's travelling HIGHER! FASTER! GREENER!
I feel a blueness
Everything is multiple-contrast shades of cynic
Contrasts, colours, fade in fade out
Fade in fade out fade in fade out
MARCH 1992
I want to cry, seeth, explode
spread my guts over half the planet
I want to die
broken alone with nobody close
I want to rot slowly into the ground
back into organic nutrients
assisting growth again and
conveniently forgotten
take me down to the waters edge
tie me up and push me in
quietly and without a tear
I'll float awhile and then pass under
I don't want to feel anything at all
like a photograph
a two dimensional walking talking
synthesis of nothing
I want freedom no pain no memories
no future and no past
no broken dreams
no unfulfilled wishes
only death and an end
1990
I really don't believe there's no-one there
Empty rooms turn inwards upon themselves
As they remember
Could not see past the painful windows
For the expenditure that should renew
Standing, staid up and waking through
The threshold
Glancing
Glaring around and hearing
Heartening a distant call
A fatal fallacy
Far off
Thought of over
Obviously the varnished
Vanquished floor
Over the old sideboard
Clanking into the old siding
1986
I lie here sleeping
This is the saddest moment of my life
This poem is the barrier
There is nobody else
There is nothing
I cannot want
I cannot see
This is blind
This is senseless
Nothing forces me to write this
Nobody watches over me
Nothing is disturbed
Violation of the sanctity of eternal activity
Life has gone
God switched out the lights
June 1995
I have your memory
It belongs to me
Documented with photographs
Carefully printed and stored
I dive back into you
Into your arms and into your smiles
Was it ever that way?
My pictures of you were a map
A Shangri La of happiness
That I marked out in
My imagination
Softly setting aside
The misunderstanding and pain
The drifting of our times past
I have you in front of me
As it was
As it will be
For a few minutes longer
Its just taking a step
Over a small rise
Breaking a short silence
Of no particular value
Voices on my mind
Coming a little closer
Narrowing down a possibility
Seek, remind
A precise little calmness
Diving through a gap
It makes perfect sense
No need to falter
My little secret
I'm feeling alright
There's nothing going on, yet
Something new is about to
Come into existence
Running a little way ahead
1987
Footsteps, footsteps, footsteps....
Purged by stealth from the myopic and the morose
Now it was time to steal them back
He drew his gun on the passers by
Knowing that a konsequence is only
The aftermath of the action that proceeds
There was no visualisation of an aftermath
Yet to burn that journey into the soul
Like the jump off a kliff
Horizontally hiking into space
(briefly)
Then express to the basement
Clunk!!!
That’s where he wanted to go
Nice pain, good pain
Pain make me feel all better
November 1995
Discovering warm yellow bedsocks on the mantle
squeezed into mugs of lager
from Bantu stands, far over a blood stained velt.
Where five million throats call for freedom... FREE NELSON MANDELA
Meanwhile Pik Botha sweats yellow pus into a can of stymied lager,
industrial non union strength.
Five million angry typewriters chloroformed into ranks of silence
by a tentacled arm of egotistical surprise not seen since the
re-union of Neolistic, Nihilistic Nazi's nourishing their dreams
of Nationalistic annihilation while a cowboy plays six guns
with radio active phallic symbols, prematurely ejaculating their
concentrated sap of death into a infertile inferno of I.U.D. inhumanity,
destroying women's lives leaf like, clinically deflowered and rendered
sterile by a phallic fallacy of phantasmal fornication on the part of
imbecilic ballistic arms manufacturers and their
self created children of the armageddon toys, fingering and twisting the limbs of
their Rambo dolls, transforming transformers into
indeterminate lumps of sterile plastic, desperately trying to fondle and caress
the warm sickly perfume of a napalm nightmare
invented by their fathers in sordid tribute to the American way of life
so much longing for an excuse to prove it was worth sending it's
nations youth into a war created solely for the political appeasement of
a theory called Domino since toppled by those pinko communist bastards and
peace campaigners waiting only to subvert the god fearing freedom loving
nuclear family, which statistically couldn't give a fuck
about war or peace as long as the side they sold arms to wouldn't
try to ask why people would be continuously replicated into
tasteless little kin volk clones of some shithead meddling American
meddling with the subservient scum of a constitution, which always pleaded the
filth amendment if somebody ever thought of changing the fucking thing.
1986
