Cast down
Rainy days
Settling in tight-eyed
Searing pain
Edges frayed
Here to stay
Dirty tremors
Nine tail sharp
Spiking in the pressure
Cooked at the devil's leisure
Skin sunk
Flunky
Witness to perfection
Wrestling under a misapprehension.
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Her face was hidden.
Turned to the side.
She sounded familiar yet a million miles away.
She spoke lightly of high times and life.
When she turned her hard eyes flashed in a sparkling, darkly powdered face.
For a moment she was mistook for evil potent.
And fear fanned her away.
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Cadet's Morning

A cock-eyed cap,
Peaky cheeks.

His breath makes him wretch.
His stomach lurches.
And his head's heavy as lead.
Last night's glasses sweat in the heat.
The air tastes salty with sea and sex.
And all around is the silky blue.

Exhausted he drags himself from the bowels of bed.

Wrapped in sheets he left a lady.
From tireless twinkles on a ballroom carpet to sweat-filmed sex with a ship engine's heartbeat.

They danced and danced.
At least that's the story he told.

Mythologised youth.
Buccaneering, daredevil pasts.
Made in memories that last.
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Wandering through fleshy landscapes.
Assessing the lay of the land.
Wet and meaty red.
Spotted orange.
Mind mountains.
A horizon of hope.
Beyond banks and banks of emotional kaleidoscopes.
Scanning coursing colours for signs.
A single corporal landmark pointing the way.
Summits of decision.
Flying the flag of intuition.
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Peace

Deep blue velvet nights,
Where else would a star go?
Some places are meant to be.
Were made before you and me.
Pure chemistry.
Slowly cracks begin to show.
Chinks where the light goes.
What used to be wire turns to ribbon.
And all I want to do is smile.
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When she said I am a mum of three
I didn't expect her to be so aggrieved - as though it weren't a choice.
One that some don't have the option to choose.
She didn't see the joy of her immortality in their snotty noses and constant whimpery
She saw blood, sweat and tears going on for years.

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Tonight’s the night - sweet cheeks.
We are all enthralled.
It is you my dear. All you.
The butterfly girl.
Radiating charisma in apocalyptic measure.
Beautiful and wonderfully clever.
Idea to inception - you’re the immaculate conception.
Tonight’s the night – my love.
The night to launch your dreams.
The bankrollers of Belgravia are out to sniff the air.
They shall gangle gannet-like over canapes.
Gawping and gapping.
Expensive cloth flapping.
Loudly mouthing senseless noise.
Outside car lights will sweep, yellowing spitting rain.
They’ll steam the windows with their scintillating outbursts.
Belgravia cats are on the prowl.
Tonight they lap at your palm.
Pounce and make a killing.
Doll.

In a Scottish library
Lies a piece of music.
A 17th century bewhiskered and bewigged Scottish noble took himself to Europe to see all the culture of the Western World.

One hot afternoon he happened to be invited by a gentleman to a concert by the great Vivaldi.

It was like no other he'd heard.
The music welled in his ears.
It stuffed his heart.
And choked his fears.
So beautiful it was.

He ensured the composer gave him a piece.
He paid silver for what he heard as gold.

The silent sheet
Holds in it's inky lines
A world of sound
So uplifting
it wouldn't matter if it were the last sound to ever fall on these ears.
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Coming home.
The human dowery.
Warming silence.
Fell through two met minds.

Decibel symmetry.
Entwined in softening skin.
Skin falling through to me and you.

Washed to silky sands.
Ebbed to flow.
Bobbing.
A docked ship's cast anchor.
Seaman's talisman.
Locking hands.

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Cold water Lido blue.
Polka dot bikinis, sky high dives and red lipped kisses linger in Hollywood technicolour.
The fringes of a film from childhood.
Under a streaked grey moon-white sky.
The sun has caught the rain.
Gold cascades.
Falling on the fifth cold water championship's parade.
The marshals swarm in yellow bags.
Handing out towels and shepherding the teams.
The swimmers' extremities pricked pink with blood.
The announcer's purple shoes, pink socks and tweeds louder than his lip smacking, wise cracking, ear thwacking microphone banter.
Gearing up to the waters and a minute long swim.
Taking in breath, sharp and thin, mitigating against the risk of fainting during the sub zero swim.
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Injustice screams harder than a banshee fighting the wind.
Matted tresses lick and stick against ugly, grey foreheads.
Wiry wills bend into and away.
Give a little, take a little.
Finding leeway.
Outrage courses through the veins like a derailed train.
Careening on to deeper anger.
Teetering on the edge of disaster.
Reeling back from the edge.
She toes the line – holding onto dry powder.

We saw alabaster.
He saw the nose of a Napoleon.
An inverted 3D.
An image internal.
Projected on the sculptor's screen.
The chisel was minutely chinked with the faces of all his adams and eves.
Ideals eternal spun inside the beauty of the solid stone.
Stone as white as a cloudless moon.
Bellini in the Villa Borghese was made to make us weep.
The heightened reality of Jupiter's fat fingers sunk into Persephone's petrified thigh.
And Shakespeare's Hermoine's Perdita is found.
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The clouds are making room for you.
Slipping through your illuminum.
Cast aside by your ancient lunar wave.
No one knows how old you are.
Or how you became the biggest of all our stars.
Rainbow rimmed with your white light the clouds know your bright majesty tonight.
Master of the sky.
Jester over hearts.
Watery Wizard.
Hosting the burning sun.
You make your own time.
Lunar time make slaves of sanity.
Strips souls of banality.
You sing in.
High and clear.
Hugely near.
Your magnestism touches the oceans and makes them swim.
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Driving at the normal speed.
He travelled the stretch of new road.
His little car a dot of red splitting through parched land,
Tall, glass buildings
He saw the group of three.
They were drunk.
In control of cans but not themselves.
They gaggled too close to the fast lane.
You'd think he'd be able to see.
But he stepped out anyway drunkenly losing his last second
to eye contact with the driving boy.
Bam.
Glass sharded and shattered.
Digging into the driver's hand.
The hit man rolled and bumped over the bonnet like a rag doll spilling onto steaming asphalt.

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The lion is unleashed.
He's on the prowl.
Padding through sandy brush.
Eddying between prey and his next lay.
King is he.
Not an equal amongst equals.
His kingdom lies as far as his roar rolls.
The moon lives deep in his shining eyes.
He watches the edges of his home.
He owns this universe.
Not an inch is unknown.
Neither thoughts of what lies beyond or where it came from trouble his quiet mind and his lion heart.
He knows his gentle paws can turn to deathly claws.
And he never thinks of his own death.
Or the limits of man.
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C-type and lumingrams

Years of fiddling with drifting chemicals, light and chance.
Siphoning forms round egg and chairs into organic leaks.
Shaping shape-shifters into solid shadows.
Elemental shadows with infinite indefinites.
Scuffing against the threshold of promised space.
Whispering on the edges of a smoking curl and a fern's furl.
In black and white,
All the colours of the night.

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The Most Expensive Street in the World

The lights are for the special people.
Polished people with time to shine.
Eating like kings and sleeping like babies.
They rise from handwashed sheets and pad to soporific worlds of fine bone china and tea leaves.
Slip into beautiful clothes and touch up perfect coiffures.
They waft elegantly down public streets.
Lined with delis and boutiques.
Cafes smell of Italy.
And the pubs are all nile green.
None of it is free.
It all took someone's strife.
The bubble's addictive.
And restrictive.
Titanic square footage for show.
Showcasing 100 pound socks for baby Eve.

Street Kid

If he had known then
That this life wasn't worth living
He would have lain in the blood and flux of his mother's womb and died.
He hadn't asked to be born into this.
He'd have turned tail and scrabbled away.
He'd never known play.
He knew what it was to be hungry for days.
He slept to forget.
He slept because there was nothing left.
He could sit cross legged with his dusty, bloodied, dirt torn brothers.
Silent and watchful.
Leaning against walls.
Basking in the heat, waiting.
He knew what it was to run from guns.
His will to live was animal.
He was too young to think of death.
Though he saw it everyday.
He knew what was left.

She's a nutter.
An eloquent, educated and successful,
completely crackers, bunny boiler.
Unhinged.
Brain loose and fanatically free.
Glaring at the screen.
She read and re-read her silent scream.
'He did this and he did that and what do you think of that?'
Shit scared and crazy.
Her insides melting through her arse.
Her heart like a hung hare.
She copied and pasted her humiliation to 130 contacts.
Names and addresses she had gathered through stealth.
Never thinking that she was worth more than that.
That she didn't need to creep and she didn't need to scream.
If she could only see that on her own she was a Queen?

The possibilities are endless.
Infinite and indefinite.

Seventy Three.
Perm as pert as a purple walnut whip.
Gnarly claws the colour of ‘Gossamar Rouge Cloud’.
Because she is very much worth it.
Her knickers sink washed nightly because the laundrette stinks.
Tights wrinklier than the powdery face 73 lives in.
Son in Australia – he moved as soon as he knew he could sink or swim.
Daughter in America – she married and took to drink.
Her parenting skills had a lot to be desired but she meant well.
Idling in the queue at the bank one day she saw an opportunity.
She was off off like a 20 year old spring.
Snatch and grab, granny, snatch and grab.
‘Honest guv I tried to hand it in. But the cashier he didn’t want to know.’
She must have been dim.
She stole a phone in a bank where cameras are a common thing.
Poor old dear.
Seventy three with a toothless grin.
Useless when it came to thieving.

A dead pigeon.
A flying rat on its back.
Dirty white tummy open and worm wrecked.
Gnarled, red feet curled up into knobbly little legs.
A hive of disease and pestilence.
Squirming under oily feathers.
A harbinger of loss and death.
But somehow not bereft.
Cheerful even.
Almost funny.

Bristling with people.
Bustling with noise.
Brilliant with lights.
It's city bright.

Streets stream with sold-off gold.
And each new corner rewards the bold.
It's so loud.
A machine with no 'off'.
Or stand by.
Humming and roaring from now,
forever,
from then.

Sights layer paint searching eyes.
And ears listen for silence beneath the noise.
Looking for flow in traffic lights and fountains.

Rub rub rub.
Smoothing away the black sky of night.
Black lined with the lights below.
City lights - night's life form.
Living in late-night buses, 24 hour traffic,
24 hour streets, offices and homes.
Light that warms the walls.
Electrifies brick to fever pitch.

Rub rub rub
Picking sleep from night for day.
Black clouds dress the shy bold blue.
Bruising a bright day.
Night rain smatters the panes.
Fat drops...
and slim.
Sun spikes the drops with gold.

The unwanted gift,
All wrapped up; no where to go.
Not greeted with a single ho ho ho.
Cast aside with small thought for pride.
All ribbons and bows.
All of that tat and glitter,
Unwanted bits of schmatter.

The big cheese.
Head honcho.
All sparkling white shirt and bravado.
Dapper trousers so tight they make his balls shine.
Smart little pointy shoes that’ll cleave hearts in two.

The ego of the man is as big as his briefcase.
I have never seen so much freshness in a man.
Like he’d just stepped from a bath.
His skin glowing with the water’s warmth, as soft as fur on a Summery peach.

The man has aged well.
No scars or wrinkles.
No wife or kids.
No time, no inclination, no need....
But is that just the way things seem?
Maybe no one wanted him?
Or was he too hard to please?
Always looking for something better.
Less boring.
Less average.
Because he’s soooo above average.

A good job, a flying career.
Head hunted from here to Korea.

Surprisingly - quite an attractive man.
For all the swagger and clout.

It's a Wintery frozen land.
With a spade.
She hacks, hacks, hacks.
At first without precision.
Digging with all her weight.
She adapts and shifts to work to it.
Breaking the packed soil.
Digging a deep, dark hole.
Pulling up through the roots and worms a single inner-earth flower.

RESTAURANT TEAPOTS

A teapot,
One of thousands.
Made in a factory with chimneys as high as mountains.
and gates as wide as lakes.
Fired, glazed and painted with blue fish.

The portly potter bends, the paintbrush poised.
And dips it into the Prussian Blue.
He lifts the oily tip.
And gently dabs the teapot.

He can't help himself.
Everyday he paints a thousand fish onto a thousand teapots.
Every fish he paints is different.
Each one he invests with a creative care beyond his control.
The whorls of his fingertips twirl the paintbrush.
Rolling from side to side into fins and eyes and tails and fish.

The teapot is taken off the conveyor belt, packed up and crated off to a ship.
Handed from City to City.
Busy, busy.
The teapot is breifly brushed by a workhard man.
Nails ingrained with kitchen grease his fingers skim the glistening glaze.
His waiter in his restaurant (same chef since 1990) fills the teapot with aromatic tea and carries it to a table.
It sits looking at you and me.

I love Christmas, I really do.

12 days of fun.

A seasonal vortex of spinning baubles and a lack of rules.

Even the homeless wear a frozen smile.

Christmas tree cast-offs become....

Cinematic cutaways from front-room majesty to street-side travesty.

Bushy bum's bucket free still look jolly and rotund.

From bedazzle and bedecked to bedrazzled and wrecked.

Splendor slipped and awaits the tip.

Promise fell like star struck glitter from the New Year fairy.

They aren't smiling anymore. It was nice when people smiled.

The phone call

Hello how are you?
Hello I am fine.

Response to the Archer's 60th anniversary:

Christ, double whammy.
I really was in a bit of a state listening to it.
If it doesn't rain it pours.

And resume of the day:

Got some gardening done.
And fell in love with a little robin who kept me company while I gardened.
'There is too much breeding that is why we keep building' is what she said at lunch.
But I don't think there is anything wrong in having babies.

And debrief on the new arrival:

Fresh from Latvia and his gran sent me some chocolates and spirit drink.
Which is very sweet it looks like vinegar but it is mind boggling eau de vie.
She'd written me a note: 'I'm very happy you gave a chance to my grandson to live in your house.'
Where is Latvia?....oh I don't know.
I should know. He's living here now.
He looked like he had black eyes. I think it's exhaustion. It takes a long time to get here.

Low down on intentions for 2011:
I have been doing some serious thinking - well not serious - but have concentrated on my Buddhist view for 2011.

Too good. Too, too good.

Elemental
Snow falls calm and slow.
Steady as the fire's glow.
The temperature rises and white flakes turn to golden drops of lamp-lit rain.
The street turns filmy.
Tree-sap trapped leaf filigres stain the pavement with a natural blueprint.