I'd love to see the unclothed world
And not just garments of these obscuring irises.

In one word
You seek for the
Knowing
Of ground beneath
Your searching feet
Thick, tangible
So that when the
Darkness
Piles up to your knees
You can go on
One step at a time
A thousand unnoticed miles.

Dear Kryptonite,
Whenever I am with you
You make me feel like superman

Firefly
Burn so bright
But you'll never catch the moon

The Mountain

No matter how hard I yell
The only thing that moved
Was my own echo

Were you ever real to me?
Did I rip the floorboards of my fantasy?
Oh love,
Better to have loved and lost
Than to turn and love again.
Were you an illusion,
A substitution til the end?

Here is one more certainty
Beneath the waves a calmness has come over me.
Oh love,
I have come to learn from you again
Forgive me that I never
Knew you by your name.

Don't go on
Carrying hope
Like an Olympic flame
Though you wait
The runners never came
Don't go on
Growing older
Like everything has changed
Beneath the waves
The mountains have forgot their names.

27 Reasons

There are twenty seven reasons why

A collection in Short Spaces

Moonlight
Is only second-hand sun
But it beats a world
Where the light gives up
Before it finds your eyes










If you live your dreams
YOu will forget to live your life.









Smiles are only heavy
When they aren't worn
On the inside









Loss
Is the privilege
Of those who have something

Love
Is the price you pay
For giving something up

Thoughts
Are cruel company
To the unsilent mind

Mocking the wind
That bears them
Like a child

With the cruelty
Of an honest lie

They lurk in bedroom closets
Behind suits hanging at their best
And pour moth-dust in the creases.

Yeh...

The Map

In a pocket of time
I found a map to you
I wonder if
The path still lies true
When I've lost all trace of North

Some things can't be frozen
In a cage of pen and paper
Some times the blood in my head
Is the only ink at hand
That can write trust into my bones

I'll stay up all night
And plot my course into forever
Hunched like a starving bear
Over the season's last salmon
Doom rolling in with the snow clouds.

I'll tread the path
Till my footsteps are as natural
As the wild earth they cut,
Warmed against the winter scorn
Wrapped in thick determination

And
Never once pause to think
If you've somehow
Moved on from there

Are there ways of being human
That don't get lost in the fog
Of time's sticky fingers?

Are there questions
Whose answers are so large
They'd squash me into a new shape?

Will I move fast enough
Next time I open my mouth
To catch my foot before it gets there?

Pins and needles
Like it was before
Dead limbs coming to life
Crawling up inside
That shape I'll always remember
I lost you between the aisles
When the crowd pulled away
I was all pins and needles
Coming back to life
Phantom pain for phantom limbs
When standing is being lost.

Fold yourself
Sticks and glue
And paper moulds
Shape yourself
Into that thing
You wanted to be
Deep down
Where you lose
All your surface.

Not another wounded street
Or an end that cannot meet
Just the passing of time
In the other lane
Just the fractures of mine
Lying in the way.

The Crusade they called me to,
Bootless and weary,
Had forgotten its enemy
But we'd fight on so long
As morale held itself aloft.

The flag we raised,
Hacked and torn,
Was too heavy
With trust and ashes
And the wind too feeble for
The pennant to hold itself high.

The guns we cradled,
Were not our own,
Caked in purchasing blood
And with the same betraying barrels
That sent them down
We held us out of death's clinging mud

The things we lost,
Youth and light and peace
We never missed
As we chambered them
And set them off in clouds of thunder.

Don't wrap yourself so tight
You aren't a birthday present
When your outer layers peel away
It's not going to be pleasant.

only fools fly
when they've lost their wings

There's nowhere to hide
From a life lived in the corner of things
Where all is cracks and seems
Made for slipping through

You can't live with your heart on a napkin.

Dreams don't get more real
Just by being dreamed more
You just get less able
To tell the difference

When the lines cross
And sparks jump into the gulf between
Reaching out with twitching fingers
To snap the other side
Then I let go
But try as I might
I can not suck the burn away
Or forget my glimpse of light.

FOR EVER

If you've ever
Seen the wall ascend
Like a line devouring the horison
Swallowing up, and left, and right
Know
You are not alone

If you've ever
Run bruised fingers
Along it's cobbled skin
And wished yourself inside
To show
You were not alone

If you've ever
Soaked in the fear
Like the wrong medicine,
Of letting it slip from your sight
Go
You are not alone

If you've ever
Wandered through
Wall-less woods untracked
And hated yourself for looking back
No
You are not alone

If you've ever
Felt trapped in wicked skin
Carried by the strength of weakness
That was heavier than all the words
As though
You were always alone

If you've ever
Lost a day in its shadow,
Let a heart grow cold at the spine,
And surrendered gravity to the inevitable
Know
You were never alone

If you ever
Rest your eyes on where
The scar of hearts and mortar stands still
Yet turn away without catching it's dreadful gaze
Go
You'll be never alone.

Would you shatter your doors
And batter the walls
Kick through the beams
And knockdown the halls
If you never look up
Then you won't see it fall
Brace yourself honey
You're gonna feel small
The lies on the street
Will cover your floor
The sky coming down
Will open the door
But you'll never see
A single day more
The truth cuts with the falling
For there is no future
Where there was one before
When you ignored the warning.

You don't break up like stone
But settle like sand beneath searching waves
And in the sifting footsteps of your dance
You tread the path, find safety
And are reborn once more
Beneath a sky so open it's split in two
Joined at the horisons with thread and glue
You wait like stardust in the black of the shore
Never breaking up like dying stone
To fly with newfound dusty wings
To sleep within the footsteps of kings.

YOU need to stay out of my dreams
Until I find some new ones
Or find a new universe to wake up in.

Someday

You don't rewrite a symphony in an hour
But I want to be the moment of a flower
The instant of a snowflake, hanging
Lost at home in a world of white
I want to be the hole that makes the parts greater
The lens that lets the light inside
And opens the doors to forgotten radiance.

You don't repaint a masterpiece in a second
But I want to be the silence that beckons
And hides the sounds that get in the way
A smile that's there before you turn around
I want to be the ship that breaks the ice
And settles the distant lives of strangers
Till we share a language running deeper than words.

You don't rewrite your soul in a heartbeat
But I want to walk that strange, familiar street
And be the laugh that's forgotten the false
Till I wake one day, human to the bone
And full to the seams of the world

These stupid holes that I cling to
Grim, savage tears down through the bone
My life rafts in a sea of my own creation
Are not a home any longer
When a hole makes me less
Than the sum of my parts
It's time to drift below the waves

Help me stitch these inner seams
Where the thread has cut the cloth
And whispered into dust
Help me to catch the inner cold
With warm steady arms
And cage the fleeting brain sparks
Before they burn my bones to ash.

Throwing words down for the sake of practice

That green you hardly recall
That hangs beneath innocent shoots
Leaves whispering in the breeze
Lies and politics, spinning like tops
Open up your mind and fall off
Saturated down the gangway
And into the dorsal bellies below
In a greyscale world, we're already lost
Floating off with the Titanic into the black
Terrified of whites slicing in the grey

Wake child
Walk in your velvet slippers
Through the tolling of the morning
Separate
The webs of every second
With fresh-shed finger nails
Slip inside
The creaking closets
Where shattered feelings hide and die
Wrap around you
Every fleeting wish
Every evaporating sigh

Tragic creature, if you never
Change you'll be my iceberg
And all I get to see is the surface.

I wish that you were here with me
To shuffle up the deck
Messing things up to make them better
Is your style to a tee.

Wishes he could drain like water
Through the sands of time
Disappear in a hiss of air
And in the dead of a night
Where the sky is a rocky bed
Slip into the streams of slumber.

Beat yourself up
You'll still look like a fool
For picking on an idiot.

Stitch me up before you go
I'm happy for my seams to show
If the thread is made of you.

Why don't you do it?
Wield your conscience like a hammer
And crush my shell before it cools
I'd like to feel a little worse
For not being the right sort of me.

The Angry Man

I'm not gunna walk this line, old man
Yellow-toothed envy doesn't cut my skin
Yell all you like, but you're not getting in
I don't get angry, I just get on with the plan
This house is my armour, my soldier, my second-born son
So you go on with your words while I go get my gun.

You
Leave larger footprints
Than any feet ever could
In the sifting sands beneath me
Where the carpet once stood
You
Spiderweb cracks that race
And bite and wrap me up
In threads of silk drawn tight
Threatening every breath
You
Haunting like a ghost that never died
Or who died so dusty long ago
That every face is yours, and isn't
But might be if I just turned around quicker
Next time.

Maths

Gotta stop pretending that I count
You plus me always adds up to the wrong amount

Traffic is thick on the blade of the knife
You let yourself go when you hold me so tight
And cutting you off is killing the light

I howl at the moon and I blot out the sun
Remembering crimes beyond reach of a gun
Breaking the Sabbath before it has begun
With a conscience uselessly raging
So I bury knife in the soul someone
For the times they are a-changing.

The bankers and ghosts
That are tied to their chairs
With ropes and with shackles
That are thinner than air
But stronger than life
And completely aware
You're money may need some changing
Value your mind
Till it's no longer there
And the chairs stop rearranging

Now you're so faraway
He won't come when you call
The wire's so tight
That it cuts when you fall
And you've lost the way down
Cause the ground is so small
Remember what is worth saving
From this dizzying height
You feel nothing at all
For the times they are a-changing.

I wanted to paint over my memories
Of you
But I didn't have any paint
In your colour.

If I made you better
Would you make me well?
I won't hide behind the curtains
no more, Counting down the seconds
Till you are first.

Toss out your badges
Wear your bandages with pride
Polish up your boots
And then leave them far behind
You're wearing someone else's shoes
Through the long and broken mile

Need a life with less clutter
Less heart beating on the door
Asking what's the matter
And if I told you what I saw
You'd see it's nothing more
Than stupidity mirrors
And memories on the floor

I wish you didn't play with my head
Or I didn't play with mine
Or whatever
I wish I could look at your name
In the regular way
And not like a combat statistic
Pushing up daisies where a headstone should be
I wish I didn't feel.
Like a robot counting the days
With warm metal indifference.

To All Those Dreams That Never Made It

I used to think in clouds of watercolour
At night my mind would race
In pastels on a damp, white, hopeful canvas
But now when I go to pour the paint, it's dry
When a dream grows up, it dies.

You can't steal yourself away forever
Without something getting lost
Click your bootstraps together
Kansas is going byebye

Love is the feeling of falling
Into someone else and getting lost
In the collision

Love is the decision to let
Someone else's thoughts cross your finish line
Before your own

Love is the warmth of knowing
The coldness of life only through
The flames of fire.

Would it be such a huge thing
To lose yourself in the walls?

Sew your ladders onto the sky
Leave me here to wait a while
I'll climb these clouds
Or stitch myself some stairs
That lead to safer footing.

Quietly fail to prepare yourself for sleep
Be careful not to wakeup all the counting sheep
Lose yourself in remembering what you couldn't keep
Where are you now? Just a light in the deep.

If I found the word
To make you complete
Would you let me spell it for you?
If I found the map
That leads to your feet
Would you only be an ex?
If I asked the wrong question
When we happen to meet
Would you give the right answer anyway?

The present is the future getting lost on its way to the past.

When I think of you
I remember I forgot how to forget
It's growing in my mind
This feeling like the best is better yet
And we don't know what we've lost
Losing ourselves to the snow
And we don't know what we've got
When we refuse to let it go.

The sprinkler on the lawn
Is making rainbows where it cools the summer sun
I'm sitting on my porch
Pretend my grass is going to grow back when it' gone
And we don't know what we've paved
In unhappier concrete
And we don't know what's been saved
What is hidden in the seeds.

If I decide it's true
Then I'm leaving for a place where I belong
If I go then I'll be wrong
The world is bigger than I deserve

Photo

They were all of them framed
In the gold of darkness' birth
Hung on a moment's wall
Painted by the synthetic flash
Of a machine turning chemicals
Into a ragged handfull of emotions
For anyone who would glance back.

Every hour used to come to me
Regular as a blink
But now each second hangs around
Far to long to ever think
Linking me to memory
Keeping change the same
I kept myself inside the eye
But the storm begins again.

Please fix that leaky tap
Dangling in the bathroom
You watch and will the water down
Rinsing cleanness through the plughole
Till it's gone like money

You could be forgiven for falling in love
If it weren't the unforgivable sin
But crossed stars and fingers
Won't stop this tide
From sucking the sand out under you.

Take only what you need from my weakness
I hope you find the cure to wasting away
In the inevitible salvation of time

that thing
what slipps a little at the corners
and relieves itself of your grasp
that thing
you know that thing
hold onto it

Emerging from the winter
Wakes you up to the cold

He was a good man

Remember him as a good person

Always with a smile that made itself

And a joke tucked safe in his pocket

Next to his battered pack of cigarettes



Remember him as a good person

Just a day away from reaching himself

Trying to find the softer shade

That wraps itself around the next tree along



Remember him as a lost person

When is wallet ran dry to his thirst

That struck deeper than any bar could reach

He would strike up a match and swallow down

Some rich cotton wool smoke

And waited for his patience to fray.



Remember him as a lost person

With boots scuffed from the kick of the earth

And licked over with layers of old dust

With eyes that peered out, wrapped beneath

Layers of worried wrinkling skin

But with hands soft enough to keep his word

And straight teeth that remembered

The taste of unvarnished youth.



Remember him as a good person

Who lost his questions in haystacks

Where they were too safe from answers

And the answers he found, Were distorted in glass

Till he didn't want any around.

I don't know what this says about me but..

I’ve always had a subtle kind of loathing
Held in special reserve for those
Self-promoting reporters
Who on first blush appear simple agents of the daily news
But in reality breathe the stuff of endings.
And feed off our collective emotional conscience.
Always earching for the next tear jerking tear jerker
And the irony is, the more we cry the less we feel
Till our ducts are held hostage by each new day’s
Grander homage to
Some nobody that nobody knew,
And nobody cared about
Who had the good fortune to die in a way that left some shine in his name
To be gobbled up like candy by the ever circling vultures
Who can smell these corpses a mile away
And whose pens cut deeper than any talons or beak that nature ever made

I for one, would care to die in obscurity
Whatever faint glow my passing leaves behind
Gently decaying amongst my dreams
As they too are reborn
Composted into new vitality
Under the fingers of a new mind
One who gives a damn. One who knows
One who cares about
The intangible stuff that fortune tries to pluck away from our names
To be carried aloft like the green olive shoots
Grasped in the delicate claws of Noah’s dove
A messenger, crying in silent voice “New lands ahoy!”

The danger of waking up is forgetting your dreams

There goes my girlfriend
Lady Tuesday
Sun-fruits glitter in her hair
Cannon balls lurk beneath her stare
Her weekend is never far behind

Remember
The nightingale
You eager seek
Lives in the breeze
Of the open wild
Not in the feeble
Cage of your
Calcified imagination.

A poem
Is just a picture
Tied up in strings of words

I chased ghosts all that summer
Between the breaking bars
Carrying the tune to the daily rhythm
They supplied the lyrics
Sometimes
When all the world was in a line
And I was at a loss
They were kindred spirits of a kind
Rich and full of the life they lost
I chased them with the spark of youth
Till I too was lost.

Peter Pan

Today the children dress themselves
I want the swing sets for me alone
Squeezing adult hands into kiddie gloves
To swish and soar and fly off home.

Soldier

Great is the darkness between
That place where the gaps flow smooth
Reaching out to one another
Never quite to touch

Out pours that viscous liquid
Thick with the flows of the ticking clock
Straining to catch the second
In its spinning teeth

Round pools the warmth
Curling at the finger joints
To spew into a sandy maw
As wide as any I've ever known

Long beats the chest straining
To keep each gap from swallowing
Drinking each tick down, down
With a fat, slow, hungering tongue

Sealed are the eyelids
Resigned like gutters to the pavement
Holding the end in shutter-tight
But it stutters in uncaring

In the light greater than any darks
It singes away the shadow's hairs
And leaves... nothing
To drip, congeal, set
Into the final inscription of what was
But has now slipped through desperate fingers
And drunk the dry desert wind.

Don't dream that
Or you'll never wake up.

You'll never know your future
in a bubble of the past

I said sorry to my dad
For the mess I've made
Of the hands that he gave me
Nails rising like driftwood
Chalking above the sands
Fingerprints smudged guilty
On the glasses of now
Fingers scrunched and tossed aside
Into despair's waste bin
Holding desperately onto nothing
Till it bleeds away into the warmth
Of cramp and strain and futility
A mess with the stamp of dead-wood
Jutting from palms that know no peace
Except the comfort of arthritis.

Even puppies have wings

Inception

Some nights
I stay awake and wait
For the bump
The feeling of reality returning
The dream fading fast into the undergrowth
Swallowed by the jungle noise
Of a million eddying lives

Some nights
I lay awake and dream
Of the drop
When the legs fall out from under me
The world rushing past on squeakless shoes
Smoothly like a looming pickup line
A race to the floor

Some nights I think
I'll actually wake up
And remember this
With the forgotten clarity
Of the dream that it isn't.

I told you and told you
But you wouldn't listen
Fickle fickle hands
Catch me if you can

It's funny
Realising you are an idiot
Doesn't actually change anything

When I was a Child I Thought...

How my memory... You are
Everfresh
Growing up like grass-
Stains each time I fall
Knees and warts and all
Angel eyes, angel sighs
That's one way to keep floating.

How you are, the question why
I never cease from asking
Holds my tongue hostage
The rudder in the storm
That sank me in my mind's eye
Where the calm
Stretches
The waves flat, long enough
To catch a breath
To drop a wall
You are ever-fresh
Warts and all.

Questionmark.

Burn you out my blood
Thick as a summer sunset
Seal me under the concrete
Of a thousand blank pages
Till ink flows in black veins
And you and I are safe

Fighting against himself
The enemy never shows
Just who is winning?

Hole in the road
Don't let the tire catch you
Tired and on the sleepy sea
Steering into the distance

I'm a darkened soldier
These streets are paved in blood
But no one ever held it to the gun
It takes time to see what you've done

Hole in the ground
Everybody gathers round
Only keep the beat with your little drum
Skin-tight, tatooed farewell
Into that hole in the road
We drive on and let you go

It must have been love
That sort of thing
Can't be mistaken
For a lesser set of feelings
It has a special hat
And makes you welcome at parties
And hugs you when you are down
And uses warm, soft knives
To cut you into different pieces.
How can something else dress up as that?

Untyped

I’m tired
I’m tired of my heart giving out
Whenever it gives in
That things being the same
Never makes a difference
Of looking forwards to something
That never happened

I’m tired
I’m tired of levering up my lashes
Just to blink
That every breathing space leaves
No more room to think
When I hike that haunted hill
To watch the hole grow deeper

It leaks everywhere
Stain from the puncture marks
Lurking like punctuation
Tripping the feet of consciousness

You renew me like bleach –
Freshly scrubbed, rubbed raw
Tossed forgotten to a creaking cupboard
Till I grow old, and mould. Told
By every cell I trust, the lie
Tomorrow’s just a sleep away
I’m tired of today.

I’m tired.
I’m tired of the way everything
Slinks around with nothing in its hands
Of trying to cut you out, but
Only cutting me in places I can’t see
That remembering the hanging thief
Had only palmed a petty trinket charm

A heart beaten bloody
Tired of the weight
Of holding oxygen
At brain height.

We
The beasts
That cherished the stone
That broke the world

Run from me.
You who take my cherished memory
And sets it alight
The flames shall burn us both no longer

Good.

Numbers have no meaning
Just a way of passing distance
Between two different things
I'm counting up my blessings
But numbers are what you make of them
I can stop just when I want
Or go on till forever
Numbers don't mean a thing.

Does it make you happy
To define the world
As the distance between your ears?

Every single day
Oh the sideline and cliché
Drive-byes and driveways
Goodbyes and and you say
You didn't ever do
What you promised
I hope that I could never need
To hold you like I do
Wash the words away
And you're left staring
Down the sink hole.

Quicker than the end of a sentence.
He left
Cold water and the cool of a stare
He returned
To the sound of the record on repeat.

some days
I just can't seem to say enough nice things about Annelise.

Energy you give me
A waterfall in a heartbeat.
The silence lasts just a moment
Hanging still until
Thump
Religion.

Such a pretty smile
And my fat peasant head
Hanging around the doldrums
Stirred by your passing wake
Is determined to watch
Just to make sure I do not follow.

Float like silver pain on the bullet of the night.
Sting like a cure that hides its punch beneath a skin of sugar.
Run with the wind dangling between your fingertips
Silken streamers slide through the cough of autumn
A slumbery sun clears its throat
Stumbling back to bed with the freezer door left
Ever-so-noticeably ajar.

walking a little each night
Let down your hair
You won't change but that's alright
Don't have to dare
striking the mystery
Send showers to space
You won't get the better of me
It's much too late

Much too late
To wake up and see
What the waves
Carried onto the sand
To carry your mind up to me
From your solid land

Planting your feet so deep
Your toes kiss the earth
You won't get the better of me
You've exhausted your worst.

She was classically beautiful.
She had a nose like an oboe.

Carving through the hills that hang
Brown and pregnant with the frost
A silver spoon with dirt stained hands
Rests easy on the porcelain curves
Not enough mouthfulls to go.