sun don’t work today
sits on neon omnibus
weeping like a baby
jackdaw trapped in hearth set free
safe home now comrade raven
acknowledge the greatest
dreams keep their own diaries
float like an anapaest
from here to eternity
stinging butterfly
Five hundred before
legendary lost lunchtime
Torrential London
buses, easy similes,
heavy workload for
eternal editors,
that which is permanently
out to luncheon,
wield escutcheon spoon
limply with panache
seas contain plenty fishes
most worth throwing back
Carbuncles, moles, tumescensces,
spots, scar tissue, warts, blackheads, scabs,
bubos, boils, and bruises…the rest is blistery.
One
o’clock news blackout
Losing all integrity
Over emissions
Aleppo massacre
hogwash lubricant green room
full of terrified white elephants
Modest interim proposal—
Cannibalism
Nothing to add
Perhaps
I’ll go back to sleep
After drawing the curtains
With indelible charcoal
Inside our discrete brainwaves
Go attend those dismal drapes
cheapest seventies vintage tat
lurid floral potato prints
emitting neither light nor heat
prize them open to reveal
a frosty morning, frosted green
frosted black, frosted silver
frosted yellow cars, parked up
neatly by frosty drivers
living cryogenic lives
Wichita Lineman pitches up out of the blue Lacuna inquiring: Was you not once a carpfish plagued by crippling doubts about a distant golden age of innocence? Yes,I was once that Carpfish You confirm resonantly with disarming brevity quasi-presidentially semi-residentially taking it all in your jackboot crushing a face stride making cryptic hand signals in clipped bespoken cabalistic tongues Yes. I was that Carpfish: for old halibuts die hard go hang a sharp left at Cape Codology there bipolar dancing bears picnic out on melting strawberry ice floats on mustard wallowing in unabashed self-pity seconds before the bullet hit you in the forehead Trespassers will be Executed read the flashing pulsar over the black horizon
Lawrence Binyon eulogy condemned to years of turgid crass repetition— if he knew then what we know that war is manufactured hell would he have set to writing pretty propaganda in nineteen fourteen one hundred miles away in a picture book rustic Georgian vicarage spewing out doggerel for the yellow papers to assuage the fears and galvanize national pride in imperial sacrifice to be ridiculed and derided by seventies rebels in army surplus great coats sat enjoying themselves in muddy fields listening to Van der Graf generator making a racket shivering and exhausted in stockinged feet cos a playful reveller robbed your trendy espedrilles defiantly pretending you would not rather be toasting fresh muffins with a giant fork on the glowing coals of the lampblack brazier?
The road is full up
bold brazen alien cars—
fireworks party sleepover,
vodka cheeseburgers,
Haircut 100 (Boy Meets Girl),
Megadeath (Love’s Old Sweet Song)
—sailing metaphor
discovered cringing in
uncharted waters.
Here?
Early night after watching the box—
quiet as a sober xmas and about
as memorable
as a drunken one.
That time of year is about
After all that sleep I am up early,
cognizant of bowel, reminiscing all the time,
self-nutting, never the plaintive, always the pontiff,
he who must be dismayed at all times,
grovelling before the
altar of adverse opinion.
Waiting for my hat to be knocked off
Ireland beat the All Blacks in Chicago—
were they wearing Blue Shirts?
Always feared the Moor, the Bogmen*
And its bog weather down here in the Cut
Dross grey damp dank murk
Sunday in November
Glamorous brown tortoiseshell
bicycle clips seconded
make-do Alice bands
by stray myopic pedlars
*The bogman learnt to fear the Moor
when they left the quay of Baltimore
with a penchant for paella,
whitewash, and a wife and kids,
slave traders of the Levant,
sporting nubian pantaloons,
chain smoking ali baba camels
swiped them in the night
All pills bulletin
Filthy crypto dawdles neath
Hazardous staircase
Awkward traverse to summit
Landing guarded by clutter
In the shower I crouch
A potbellied question mark
I anti-pasta rasta
Hairier than thou
Either me or this gut must go
green beans & brown rice
Matabele tea and toast
The clever money’s on the gut
Hope springs eternal
Skinless sausages in brine
The politics of cheesecake
Pressing issues of the day
Weigh heavily on my mind
Grimbeau 