This is (Not) a Rich Man's War

Peace

Sweet All - Animated

Frankly, I'm not sure of other people's take on these animations.

I love the original - It's a eulogy for an old friend, Declan Mulholland.
One of Declan's biggest roles was that of Jabba the Hutt

... and so I thought it might be nice to do a second version of his piece... animated and in a space station.

If you view this in Youtube, closed captioning is also available.

The Nature of Grilled Bread - Animation

This is another experimental piece... The original (with my voice) is up here too, but the effect of this version is (to me) quite different.

I like that there's a discussion going on between the superhero and her alter ego... It reflects the duality of the piece I thnk.

By the way, I've added closed captioning which is synced to the animation... However, I think you have to select "Watch on Youtube" on the bottom right hand side of the video

Intended Purpose (animation)

I continue to explore new ways of presenting the written word/sound/and motion graphics. Most explorations are dead ends...but I find this interesting enough to want to share it.

It's an experimental animation of one of my poems.

I used a computer generated voice to "read" the poem. I then animated an avatar in an artificial 3 dimensional space to present the piece.

This creates a very strange (and I think compelling) relationship between the humanity of the poetry and the mechanical qualities of the presentation.

For me, this has added new layers of meaning. The computer voice software introduced ghost artifacts (surprising phrasings and intonations) - Many of these interfered with comprehension and I removed them in post production. However, some of these "ghosts" were chillingly appropriate - and I emphasized these.

The animation software also introduced ghost artifacts that were incredibly apt... and since the poem speaks to the role of chance in the creation of art...Well, I had to keep them.

FYI, like an increasing number of my pieces, this video is Closed Captioned... However, I would recommend leaving this OFF for the first viewing of this piece. I find this a bit distracting - particularly on a smaller screen. If you choose to view it a second time you might try making it full sized to fit your screen.

Intended Purpose

Most poems are not put
To their intended purpose

Virtuous
They may be
And filled with innovation
Novel scansion
Consonance
Galore
Assonance
And more

Sure rhymed and chimed - But never mind
The original intention

It's all defeated by a chance line
An off-hand mention
Of a cat's curl
Or the purr of a friend
Or the dark shadow of loss

And thus
The reader reaps
Finds unplanted meaning
Of their own

This is not selfish

This
Is genuine
And truthful
And beautiful
And Divine

On The Nature of Grilled Bread

Absence of evidence 
Is not evidence of absence

Let me explain - There is a part of the brain
That when stimulated makes one perceive god
Kzzt - God! Kzzt God!

There is a part of the brain
That when stimulated makes one smell burnt toast
Kzzt - Toast! Kzzt Toast!

It's all in the head
Yet this does not make me question
The existence of grilled bread

God is a lie
Atheism is a lie
Equal lies

Let me tell you why
Though god (slash) atheism is true to you
There is nothing you can say or do
To make it true for me
Particularly since
My god is an atheist

Try not to worry about that too much
I know it upsets you
To think that others haven't pierced the veil as you
That others wander aimlessly around
Bumping into coincidences
And misinterpreting them as 
Proof (slash) disproof of god

Surely life has no meaning for the bumblers
And the mumblers at the churches and (slash) or pubs

Don't they know that the universe is ruled by absolutes
And that every dogmatist agrees 
Universal principles - 
Require full certainty
That cats observed are either dead or not
Not both and neither

Of course, there is another point of view
Satisfied by proofs among the truths of math and physics
It's this
Gods and atheists do not exist
At least not separately
Both observe the non-existence of the other

That's why Absolutes and Truth 
Consistently defeat detection
They're probability waves that collapse
Upon their close inspection

But - I've made a home in this untidy universe filled as she is
With glorious approximation
And strange charm

Maybe that's strange of me
To delight in the necessary tremor
Of the search for something else
To be satisfied without proof that
A thousand unseen hands reach out to me
Just as I reach out to touch the face of god
And to sense perhaps that if I ever reached that space
I might feel fingertips upon my own

So forgive me if I doubt all gods and atheists
But don't confuse that doubt for lack of faith
I believe absolutely
In the existence of toast

100 Steps

Wake up and exercise your own personal dawn
Doesn't really matter what the time is
If it's the first time you yawn - It's morning

Take a hundred steps before you raise your head

Know the world isn't real until you open your eyes
So look around the inside of your lids
That small and redly-tinted universe

Take a hundred steps before you leave the bed

Keep your hands at your sides like ghosts
Touch your hair at the roots - From the roots
Feel the texture of a breath

Take a hundred breaths before you end this death

Don’t make the decision to be born - Yet
Drink in the possibility of waiting
Or (if you could) donating consciousness to someone else

Take a hundred seconds for your second thoughts

Ignore the fact that god is just a dream
And start a dialogue anyway
It's a good way to start the day

Take a hundred steps with the god inside your head
Take a hundred steps with the god inside your head

Once your feet have touched the floor
After your feet have touched the floor
Then you can debate
Whether to take
A hundred more

Um

I
Stuttered
Lost in
Ems
Or Tees

Mostly
Silent
Except when too excited

Pulling hems
And pointing
Look

Grown ups turn
So
Slowly
They miss so
Much

Leacock's Lament - A Glossa

This was the cry of little Jane
In bed she moaning lay,
Delirious with Stomach Pain
That would not go away

Oh! Mr. Malthus! The Hickonomics of Hearth and Heart, Stephen Leacock

In that great depression
Way back then
When men were regulated by their greed alone
When wars were fought for ego
And sustained
By madness
Some day, some day things will change
This was the cry of little Jane

A childish regression
Lack of food
Made her hungry for the good - Blind to all the rest
Her world drowning in excess
Still she starved
Cold kindness
That she couldn't tell the night from day
In bed she moaning lay

Planned for her succession
Toys to friends
Foolish amends and unneeded apologies
Thankfully complete in time
Her mind left
Her heedless
Of the need for market gain
Delirious with stomach pain

Divine intercession
Took her pain
Made something useful of it in a memory
A poem for others - She
Now equal
Now lifeless
She was free to go - But famine stayed
That would not go away

Choka - Interpretation

Melons eaten
I remember my children
Chestnuts eaten
I remember my pain
Invisible - I see them
In my mind's eye
I cannot help them
Night without end
No rest or quiet sleep

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Uri hameba
Kodomo Omohoyu
Kuri hameba
Mashite Omowayu
Izuko yori
Kitarishi monoso
Manakai ni
Motona kakarite
Yasui shi nesanu


My interpretation of a choka by Yamanoue no Okura circa 730 AD.
I tried to honor the poetic aesthetic of this beautiful poem (particularly the repetition and rhythm) - Mine is not a literal translation of the text nor of its scansion... I would love to see other people's interpretations.

You were Spain

You were Spain
You were the switch back curves
From the mountain to the sea
Hairpins holding back the olive groves

You were Spain
And we flew through you
Noise some witches
Riding our motorbikes
Riding our broomstick Vespas
Like virgins - Knees pressed firmly to hold our place

You were Spain
And your words made sense
Ananas y Naranjas
Fruits made real by closeness to their roots
And your villages
Clung to the mountain by their high mountain names
Binaraitx, Andratx, Fornalutx
Or lapped low and lovely to the sea of Soller - Puerto de Soller

You were Spain
And we rode the San Franciscan tram
Along the beachfront - And everyone smoked
The black tabac
The cheap filterless Fundadors
More foul than French
Burning our nostrils with their gunpowder stench

And someone young - Played guitar
And someone young clapped
And someone young clapped
And someone young clapped
And we knew that this was perfect
And we knew that every other flamenco
Would be spoiled forever
We knew that every other flamenco would always be somehow wrong
Painted on velvet

Y sonrió
Todos sonrió salvajemente
And we smiled
We all smiled wildly - And we saw their
Tears streaming down cheeks that were clenched with joy
And we smiled at their simple sentimentality

And then we tasted the surprising salt on our own lips
And we smiled again in our community
And we
Were Spain

Nichola Ward - Villanelle Bio

A Writer and Performance Poet of the hood
Although her neighbours are all decorators
Nichola Ward - Oh yeah - She's good

Not one to self applaud - But if she could
She'd call herself a wicked - Rhyminator
A Writer and Performance Poet of the hood

Inspired by voices from fair Thomas's Milkwood
And by the likes of Arnold's "Terminator"
Nichola Ward - Oh yeah - She's good

Fearless - She'll milk any sacred cow - from the Bible to the Talmud
Preaching to the public - She's a peerless Mass Debater
A Writer and Performance Poet of the hood

She lays no claim to Sainthood
But she's a lover not a hater … and (like most of us) is scared of coming off as some asshole second-rater… So when you see her tell her later…
Nichola Ward - Oh yeah - She's good

Because when you take away the bullshit - She's been standing where you stood
And sharing some humanity… well, that's the reason why she's placed here
A Writer and Performance Poet of the hood
Nichola Ward - Oh yeah - She's good

A Venue

What future comes from
A void
What place
What pathway

Wholly empty
Completely at a loss
In my loss
As to where I should start
Caught in all that chaos

Where can I begin
To sort the wheat
From chafe
The sheep
From goats
The boys
From men
The truth
From lies
The
What was
From the
What is

They say that art
Seeks
What is and what is not
Which makes it a fair companion for the lost
Like me

They say that art
Like love
Is but discovery

But I have been recovered
Like an old couch
Re-upholstered
So many times
I wonder
What lost
Is left

So I protest:
I cannot start with art
I do not even know
What is

And in the denseness of my argument
I sense the arteries of creation
Narrowing
Constricting flow

And I hear the barest whisper
Of a voice I know
Offering
Not guidance
No that would be too too gauche

But just a thought
An idea
A …perhaps

Perhaps you should just push the boat out and write
Perhaps this is the thing you should do

Perhaps this is the thing to do

To write

Envoi

Never complain
Never explain

As fathers have it

Or as Fitzgerald said it well
Advising literary folks
Don't use some
Mark of punctuation to exclaim
It's like laughing at your own jokes

And though I don't wish to state another person's truth

...

Damn even that's a lie
More truthfully I
Do not care to close the door on my own truth

I want to leave the door wide open
Open to new strangers

Yet strangely
I feel compelled to craft this envoi

Not to punctuate
Nor parenthesize
Nor foolishly
To try and set some compass path

But selfishly
To try and synthesize
My present sight

Poppies …poppies have to find their height
Search for light

And when a tree dies and falls
It feeds their roots of course

But long before…
Above the forest floor
Above the shoulders that you used to ride
Above the bearded birds nests
Above the silvern hair

Where ancient arms held back the world
The canopy exposed
There is a hole

And light
Before unseen
Light previous and unwitnessed
Light which blessed
The former father

Now unfiltered
Feeds the child

Almost to the point of poison
Sun poisoning
And the son
Is father to…

…Some computational obsession
Circular confusion
An endlessly reworded confession
That only ends
But is never finished

Thoughts wrung out
Exhausted of meaning
No conclusion

Just clues

Geographically
I examine where I was

Geographically
I examine
Where I am

Geographically
I examine where I am not

And graphically
I examine
What I have done with nothing

And I try to think my way
To feeling
Logically

Psychologically

Pharmacologically

But all science fails

Lost in faith
To face

All those shifting sands
And then
Colliding with a barely
Incidental
Accident

And something breaks

And I leap from a diving board into nothing
From a diving board made of nothing
From a platform that I know to be unreal
Even as I lean on it

And knowing this
I use the non-existent recoil
To launch myself
Ignoring the so-called rules of conservation
Self propelled

Into

This devastating insight
How little I know
How little I am

I have to start again

…again

…Yet again

I pass from
Madly quiet

To

Quietly mad

I laugh
Cry at insane legacies

I laugh
Cry at the mad march of science

I laugh
Cry at my deception

Laughing at my
Lies

Laughing at performance
Anxiety

Laughing at sex

Laughing at absurdity

Laughing at the ordinary

And coming to realize that
The gods adore the ordinary

And that living

And growing

And godliness is…

Emptiness

And that art
Is proper suffering

Singing is eternal

And so I sing to you

Imperfect
Unresolved
Trite
Beautiful and temporarily
Complete

I write

Solitary Affair

I can't live this lie another moment
I must confess my faithlessness

…To a solitary affair

I have been intimate
…With myself

I have told the truth
And watched the movies that I love
I have held myself
And laughed for no good reason

I have remembered that odd waiter in New York
And made my quiet inside joke
About his Freddy Mercury moustache
And his inappropriate trousers

I have sat and watched the sun come up
Cried for long-lost and much-loved pets
I have rehashed old and endless arguments

Which on reflection
I have validated
And finally won

I have argued with myself
And even hated
Had angry sex
Makeup sex
Quick and selfish in the shower
Or bathing long and languorous and alone

It has been an effortless commitment

And some might say
All this is innocent enough
Why bother with confession
There are no victims of this
So-called indiscretion

But that's … not true

Long before I was unfaithful
I escaped - Ran away

That is how
I came to know
I have to go

Everything must change

…Now I … know that

I cannot love myself
…Without first
Leaving you

Evolution

I have an
Evolution of thought:

Hush
Breathe
Don't search for resolution

Don't be so quick
To seek
Acceptance

One stage of rage
Is merely to
Acknowledge it

Sure resolution comes
But the quest for
Restitution dumbs me down

I know the dissolution of my
Bitterness
From forgiveness
Will come

But do not
Numb me
Now

Don't pacify me yet

Let me
be enraged
… Engaged

Later I will forgive
But first I will be angry

For me
This is a revolution

Full Stop

The purging of an egg
From womb to tomb
A new death
An old beginning
No wonder I'm sad

This monthly grieving
Grips me and
Lest I dare forget
Clamps me

Cramps me?
Hah!

That's just a pale invented word
An extremity
A bare approximation for
This motion-emotion

Inside it is far more and less

Pulled inwards down
Dragged down
To the size of a half-child I cannot see
Crushed to fetal comfort
Savage in its intensity
Insanely selfish for attention
Clamped to my origin
Wondering
If continued would I in-fold?
Turned outside-in
Like some impossible animation?

I am crushed to singularity

And wrung out
Like some saturated
Psychic sponge I
Expel - These eggs - Expunge - Ex purge - Yes purge

Exhausted all my last
Regrets emerge
…Coincidentally
Putting purpose to my pain
Compelled to re-grieve all my exes
All my pasts

Time passes

And all those once and former princes of my passions
Become flushed clots - Passed clods
Full stops

For now

Sweet All

Ah, sweet all
‘Tis a pity I cannot sing now
To your poor and mortal ears
As you call for uzz to sing a song

But as I lean back
From this marvelous groaning board
As I lean back gently
Rubbing my proportions
Celebrate that I am here
And dine with the fallen gods
Friends now passed and friends I yet have met

Ah well
I would have loved to speak my own words
Resounding with the swell of Shakespeare
Or that other lad
An' now t’would have been lovely to make you cry
With songs of Yeats and other faerie loves

Ah but never feast on your regrets
I leave you there fair
Friends

Ah the past
Never mind the drab windows
Or all the rubbish parts
The only thing worth carrying
Is all your blessed hearts
And all your faults
And kindnesses

I sit here now
As the ale passes round
And my the food is good
And the craic is something marvelous
So many songs that I have never heard
That it will take eternity to learn them all
How I sang with you my friends
Now I sing forever
Of a long life and a wet mouth

Sure it falls to you
To stand your shout
To raise a hale and hearty glass
And belt one out for all of us
…And all our foolish failings

Jazz Izz

Spin it
Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds
Or count it out
One Hundred
Plus another Seventy Nine
S’your dime
That’s fine
Got all the space I need to make my time
In Two: fifty-nine

See
Jazz is the space between the notes
Jazz is the space
…
Between the notes
Jazz is
Jazz is
The expectation of
The syncopation of
…
The space between the notes
Yah dig it?

It’s the pauses
Not the clauses

Cut them into quarters twice and twice again
And I got spaces to the power of ten

I can break a heart
Fool around
Roll you over in the clover
And still have space left over

Jazz is the words between the notes
Jazz is the words
…
Between the notes
Jazz is
The alliteration of
The reiteration of
…
The words between the notes
Yah dig it?

Playing with all those crazy mad ellipses
Eclipses sound
Yah ha

Let me show you now the score
Sure

And Honey
If you're looking at all them dots
You gots
It wrong
You surely know that aint the song

Hoo boys
Them notes is noise

Jazz sings the words between the notes
Jazz sings the words
…
Between the notes
Jazz sings
The hesitation of
…
The anticipation of
…
…
The song between the notes

Call it two minutes and fifty-nine
Or count the seconds one hundred
Plus another seventy-nine
S'your dime

That's fine

Got all the space I need
For all the words I need
To sing all the songs I need

My Jazz

Like me

Izz Filled with

… Syncopated
...

Found Album

I stare at this found album
Each half recognized face
A fractional memory
I can't remember the conversations or the slights
The fights
I think I liked him - I think I had a crush on her
Or vice versa

It wasn’t that I turned my back on them
I just looked forward - Out

Escaping to the gaping
Mouth of …
Running to the empty
Pit of …
The vacuum of
… What now?

Not running away … No

O

I didn't know nostalgia could crush so much
But then I suppose I did
And that is why I never could look back
Not conceiving anyone might care
Nor conceding
I still can't

Beyond the - Occasional - Saloon bar
Whatever happened to what's her name?

Theirs were pinched out lives
Of course they all went on
To do the things that real people do
Being faithful and unfaithful
Coming to god for the children's sake
And battling with addiction
Or paying off that second home
Or not

And I took strange comfort in the fact
That they might assume me to be dead
Sad in the abstract for a moment
But no real or specific pain
And nothing to explain

'Least
Selfishly that worked for me
Taking all their histories in the aggregate
Freed me from conscience

Now this album of awakened ghosts
Reveals the nature of my comatose
And isolated state
I did not ache
For then
I mostly hated
Then

But then I stare into that telescopic past
And realize I've been hypnotized by the highway
I was awake the whole time
I would have crashed if not

But I don't know how I got … here

So I look vainly for landmarks
Or some version of myself
In all those ancient photographs
And the only thing I recognize
Is I
…Was never there

Jimmy's Demons

Pretty Jimmy
With his gods and demons
Plays both sides
Losing twice

Pretty Jimmy
Faking like some He-man
That he's doing all he can

Shakes down his tricks and demons

It's a grim
Romance
A taxi dance

Meter running on his last chance
He takes cab fare
To feed his demons

But they only feed
On him

Sum

I am in tears

I am in joy

I am in passion

I am in fear

I am in rage

I am naked of expectation
I am free

Fractals

I roller blade - hit a crack and fall
I hit a crack while roller blading
I fall
It is the crack that made me fall
Not the roller blading

No
It is my ego that made me think
That I could roller blade
I therefore fell

When I was not so brittle as to crack
I rolled with punches

Now I am less flexible
More frangible
More tangible this ground
I crack and fracture

Fractal
I
Roller blade

No matter how
Finely I divide this
Thought
I still can find a crack
Inside it
Large enough
To make this roller blader fall

Festivities

We who hibernate meet those who aestivate in spring
Get together and in the break between our
Restive states…

Festive dates
May First a queen and lady day

And then again in Fall
Some Hallow weekend ball

Between the Summer and the Winter sleeps
A moment between realities
Extremities

In winter I am bedded in my clothes
Wrapped in down and comforter
Uncomfortably down

In summer I am dressed in nothing much
Wrapped in oil and musculature
Uncomfortably high

I am festive somewhere in between these seasonal phases
Two intermissions
Parenthesized by street borne
Phrases
Intemperate crazes

Dog days and Jack Frost hazes
Sandwich my sanity

Old Dog

Loping
Lupine
Floating Across the field with liquid grace

Back straight
Legs driving
Paws that barely scratch the ground

A perfect illusion of movement
As if you trot in place
And it is the land that moves away

A flurry of leaves
Alerts you to your nature
Awakes
Your passion for order
Creates
A phantom flock

Unruly sheep
To stalk and herd

And job well done

Come away boy
Stay back
Look back
...And smile

My civilized wolf
My herder of dreams
My friend

That’ll do

Bad Art & Man's Best Friend

I turn and my aesthetic reels
As if hit with a blunt object
I see
What I have been told is street art

Abstract in that it is badly rendered
Expressionistic in that I think I recognize it as an object
It is wrought iron
And not rusting fast enough

I sense the art
But only in the deceitful poetry
Of the budget proposal
That spawned this shite

Those council led
And counseled words
“Fusion”
“Respect for Environment”
“Old Meets New”
“Inclusion”
“Social Commentary and Iconic Landmark”

Fabulous and artistic lies

Our children will look at it
Reluctant to melt it down
To put the material to some more productive and artistic use
Like parking meter poles
Or manhole covers

They will fail to label it correctly
As folly without humor

As unintentional satire
An expensive symbol
Of political expedience

No... They will perpetuate
And create new lies
“Part of the community”
“Culture of an era past…
… Demanding conservation”

As if antique
Means
Somehow worth preserving

I see a dog cock its leg
Spraying his nectar of corrosion

I consider this canine
And erosive commentary

I buy some street-meat from a nearby vendor
Tear it into small pieces
And scatter it at the statuary base

Artists need encouragement
But we must also feed our critics

A New Yorker Sketch

A New Yorker Sketch
Way, way east of the Lower East Side
Spain – crushed by Franco
Proclaimed by Hemingway
And late lamented

This Bebop expectation
Fuelled by Harlem wealth
Onto a self-conquered nation
Pentecostal zeal
Meets pentatonic stealth

Yeah…Funkin, Moorish
Tambourish
Opium baked and desert caked
Sirocco’d - Morroco’d - Kerouac’d then castaway
Tapped out and taken high
Castanet approval and a white ole

A White Ole

Takes a black, rented horn
So what the player’s scorned
This don’t call for café au lait

But Heroin hooked
And crème brule

Five points
Five or more to the four

This place where
Latino, Nehgro
Jewed, Gentile
Arab Style
Azul da blues

Black charcoal
On a city street

Muddied by Manhattan rain
Blurred sketches of Spain

Mistaken Sense

Now and then I still remember when
We used to laugh too hard
At jokes we didn’t understand ourselves

Forgetting that the laughter turned out flat
When bitterness crept in

At slights we didn’t understand ourselves

And I wonder how I lost myself in you
‘Came uncertain as to what I ought to do

And I wonder how we went from
“Love-that’s-true”

To Gods
I cannot stand the sight of you

I miss our love

The silken fist inside a velvet glove

And sometimes I mistake that sense of loss

…for missing you

Tranquil

Within stillness
There is no room for suffering
Or any other expectation
Just gentleness

And perhaps a little truth

Calmness

Is not work or toil
Just the harmless

Wisdom

Of standing still

Immersed in self
And other-self

Moistened by truth
And other-truth

Sincerely
I have learned
To be tranquil as a lake

That understands her place

Loyal to her truth

Pole Dancer

I improvise your dreams
As if they’re yours
But that’s only how it seems

In the balance of expression
You are the substance of my impression
I am the printer’s block
To your paper made of reed

So who shows what to whom?
A dancer in the light
Or an audience that is trapped within its self-reflective gloom

My buxom exhibition
Of untold inhibition
Is movement given voice
A voice you wished you had

Heel and toe, calf and loin
The well rehears-ed elements of style
Creation echoed in your groin

You see

This notion of exposure
Is a fiction of composure
For I am made of flesh

…And you of need

Landscapes

Passioned Fertile
Fragrant Wild
Virgin Madness
Blooded by hunger
This is a landscape of my birth

A Market Fair
Flat and Far
Untidy, Busy
Messy Mismatched
Patched and
Somehow Saved
This is a landscape of my day

The graceful arch of a bay
A shimmering of leaves in a coastal breeze
The promise born of sidewalks aching from the sun-warmed days
Conspirators of an evening yet to come
This is a landscape of my night

A sunrise grazed by sands
Duned by whispered winds
A watery and golden path
Fair and unknown
This is a landscape of my hope

But there are brushstrokes yet unpainted
And images untainted
In another landscape
But there are palettes yet uncolored
And hues yet undiscovered
In another landscape
But there are vistas yet unseen
And views yet unperceived
In another landscape

My own: So

No… Virgin Forest:
Lest Rousseau be reviled
No… Long Awaited County Fair
Lest Wickersham be wasted
No… Bay of Angels
Lest Dufy be defiled
No… Sunrise between Two Headlands
Lest Turner be untasted

Those are those artists' landscapes
And though I owe to them a deep abiding debt
Yet
It is not to honor artists by
Reproducing their vicarious flaws
Instead to honor their attempts at mirrored truth

The grand escape and the glory of them all
They faced the barren hopelessness of empty space
The wasteland of a blank canvas

Sextina

Outside the womb of woman
Ideas birth wild
And selfish as a child
Chaotic as a human
Reborn, reworn and falsely styled
Ruin

Upon ruin
A woman
Self-reflected, self-styled
Self-neglected, self-wild
Human
Resurrected and dissected child

Remnant child
Of a bird-nest ruin
Poor human
Groomed woman
Coiffured wild
Styled

Fashionably styled
Coat-checked child
Choked back wild
Jungled ruin
Woman
Naturally human

An unnatural human
Misshapen imperfection styled
Almost woman
Mostly child
Tamed to a selfless ruin
Wild

Contained wild
Maintained human
Sustained ruin
Token styled
Child
Of the broken woman

Just a tangled ruin where vines run wild
A living woman – a dead human
Life-styled into orphaning her child

Foot Fetish

Stuck to the heel of a shoe
Dirt
This is the aleph
A tiny syllable of observation
And a universe of meaning
When attached to moving people

The subtext of passed lives and passed hopes
Or lack thereof

So it is that when you and you and you are still
You are still... moving
And instead of moving on
I observe shoes

Each wear betrays a past
A history of paths walked
Of puddles not entirely avoided
Of litter that has been scuffed to the curb
And then, having entered a car

That is appropriate to the style of footwear

The right heel worn down with the remembered curve of the wheel well
Gas, brake, Gas Break

A long distance driver’s heel curve is more profound
Gas for twenty clicks, brake at the bend.
Gas for 5 clicks on the 1 in 50 grade
And grinding to make the sunrise delivery

So different to the cabbies heel
The inner city heel and toe
Stop and start
Chasing perfectly timed lights
Avoiding fights
But not eye contact

And different from the rolling right hand
Soccer mum, cross training
Picket fence of an indoor/outdoor runner
Never worn out
Barely broken in
Discarded before they betray anything
Smelling only faintly of regret

Pedestrian lives

The Fridge of Destiny

I am someone - I claim
I only have indirect proof
Echoes

I cluck at the late-night news
How awful - Why can't someone...?

I tut at the sad and wasted street corner
How bitter - If only someone..?

I gaze into the oracle that is my refrigerator
My crisper has gone from ironic

To disgusting - Why doesn't someone..?

I receive distressing wisdom
I am disturbed to consider that if I am someone…

Then that "someone" is me

Cabbage Town

We're in a hog town
A hockey town
A slice of Orange with a slab of
Cabbage
Town
Nice and Swiss and orderly

Dumbing any wit down
We're whittled down
Eroded by this city's drabness
Averaged
Down
Fiercely bland and ordinary

We could be world renowned
If we weren't hidebound
By the fact we drag our
Baggage
Round
Blaming our geography

Because the whole world round
The heart of art is found
When artists seek the hidden
Savage
Sounds
Wherever place and art meet awkwardly

Like in a hog town
A hockey town
A slice of Orange with a slab of
Cabbage
Town
Nice and Swiss and orderly

Back Bacon

How many times I painted those same slabs of meat
Gay pugilists and wrestlers
Grappling men
Groping men
The rough trade
The ancient catch of boozy trawls
Hampstead pub crawls
The Black Cap and The Richard Steele's
King William the Fourth
Jack Straws

And then outdoors
Seeking the Heath and homophobic
Horsemen of my own apocalypse
Cruising for War
Settling for Famine

And later
Lonely and insatiable
I took my papal rage
Cast across a canvas stage
Anger, hatred, page on page

Meat on criss-crossed meat
Crucified
Intense
Youthful
Free-willed and unselfconscious
Though always photographed

Turning tricks into Triptychs

… I outlived my angry work
Aged
Outlived my lovers and regrets

Lived long enough to
Spin my histories of vagrant impropriety
Funded by the patrons of society -

As art that showed a pure and flagrant piety
Haunted by the demons of occasional sobriety

… My demons are gone
Cirrhotic
And forgotten
Once dangerous - now sad

But paid and paid to revisit their vague gravesites
I touched the faded names of headstones
Weary
Vainly
Trying to remember how to dream

Once
…Once I could paint dead drunk
And now I'm only
...dead

Lies: First Draft

Like you I have no script
On this stage that's not a stage
Like you I am engaged
In autobiography

Like you I write a fiction
In the sense that it's made-up
Non-linear
And not a How-to-Book

Non-fictional
In the sense
That it is true and real
Although, perhaps
My editor would beg to disagree

It all comes down to definitions
Which
Characteristically for me
Seem to keep on changing
Like the index

Which
Although not finished
Has a sizable proportion
Devoted to the topic: Sex
But in the interest of full disclosure
Despite it's scope
It is regrettably
Not quite as broad as I had hoped

The chapters are a bit uneven
"My Youth: The early years"
Leaves much to be desired
Long on enthusiasm
Short on fulfillment
And looking back
Mostly lies

The history that I continuously revise
It flies
In fits and starts
Thank heavens for amnesia
To filter out the boring parts
Or those awful awkward times
When I was wrong

And still today
in the telling of my daily tale - I'm truly awed
I find so many, new, exciting, different, brave and novel ways
To illustrate how deeply I am flawed

In terms of the dramatic tempo too
I've noticed that
I cannot even follow my own story's arc
I'm parked
In my life's first and solitary Act
I keep on missing, that obvious dramatic cue
to signify the beginning of the part that is "Scene 1, Act 2"

Ah what a happy hopeless task
To ravel up this thread the fates have cast
To write a life as best I can - The best I have is this
To document the times I laughed
The rest
I will revisit if
And only if
I ever get a chance to write a second draft

The Gaia Hypothesis to be Promoted to a Theory

I'm reassured to find this notion

(That the ripples in another ocean
affect the waves in mine)

Is almost ALMOST at the stage
Of being accepted as a theory

Hurrah for this Aquarian age
One cannot help but feel a little teary

That men of science who once disputed
Unifying study

Of this so called "bio-sphere"
As if it were one "giant organism"
As if the things we do in other places
Contribute to this planet's homoestasis

Those self same men
Now almost ALMOST universally
Tentatively
Possibly
Are prepared to shift from

An HYPOTHESIS:
A merely suggested explanation
to
The Gaia THEORY:
A POSSIBLE explanation

To be clear:
Promotion to the Gaia THEORY
Doesn't mean it's true
Just that you can safely study it
And have your research grants come through

Ah beyond their moral courage

and their sage precision
I marvel at the speed
Of this difficult and brave decision


That we are NEARLY there
In less than four or five
Short decades
Barely even half a century

Ah tis pause for thought indeed

But since we we pause for thought
Theoretical
Let me posit something
Hypothetical
At the risk of sounding strident or heretical

I wonder if those men of science
Would have been less deaf
If instead of Lady Gaia
Our planet
Had been christened Jeff

Paisley

There is a cursive smile
Where my pelvis used to be
A lightly bleached
Mustachioed upper lip
Contrasting my tanned skin
and alien to my reddish brown hair

I feel like some
Deliciously
Fleshed
Harmonica
Half toned and tongued

There are fingers
In my flesh

My thighs
Paisley'd by afternoon sun
Filtering through lace curtains

My legs
A wrap
An
Off-the-shoulder
Shrug

The Naked Page

Naked and blind to its future

I placed the virgin paper
Between the parallel
Priapic rollers
Ready for the cudgel of the golf ball keystrokes
Selectric typewriter

Teenaged
First page
Intense and unfiltered
Moist ink and mostly angst
Spilled as densely spaced pornography
Bearing witness to my own psychology
And pressing need

First page released
Liberated
Uncritically read
Intellectually massaged
Masturbated

I should have been ashamed
Of its banality
Instead I blushed at its carnality

I lacked the tools to white out my profanity
So lest my less-than literary diversion
Reveal a fledgling writer's base perversion
So I
A coward and a prude
Pursued insanity

First page reinserted
XXX
A vain attempt
To cover words that can't be said
And only lately realizing

Far from sanitizing
The Ex of text on text
Adds sex
Rated triple X

And more
The four letter word
World-known by tone
And context
Frayed and appliquéd
Was rendered coarser more profane

Scantily clad with XXXX
Those peek-a-boo and crotchless letters
Titillated
I exed her ex until her ex was sore
And then I exed her ex
Until she couldn't ex no more

Those exes only served to underscore

So first page reinserted
Once again
This page of sloppy seconds
To be covered with a QWERTY of nonsense

And the page moved from being nude
To rude
To tattooed
Bruised beyond just black and blued

What was left
Was less than naked
The paper's weft
And warp degraded

Pounded into bas relief
Ragged from the brutal scrapes
Of sans serif
Helvetica'd to death

Ruined
The reworked incest
Of a palimpsest
Ruined
The page once naked
Now blind
No longer had a future

It had been undressed
And dressed
Just one too many times

Doing My Nails With Freya

Sometimes it’s a banquet in the hall of the valorous dead
Sometimes it’s communing with the Lady of the Hunt
Sometimes it’s staring at the huntress moon
And sometimes it’s doing my nails with Freya

The bath is run
Vanilla candles lit
My toes emerging from the foam
Leave-in conditioner… conditioning
Ginger peach tea
With something special in it
And doing my nails with Freya

A manicure, a pedicure
And what would the soulful equivalent be?
A trimmed soul
A cuticled soul
A buffed soul

Cleaned to squeakiness then moisturized
Avocado face masks
Soul masks

And sliced cucumbers where the eyes would be
While doing my nails with Freya

The massaged care
The afterglow
The sense of rightness of a warm soul

This comes from doing my nails with Freya

French Haiku

Sans peur sans courage
L'espoir est la nourriture
De nos reves

Still Dreaming

Coffee mornings and wrinkled sheets
The shadow of your warmth beside me holds your scent
Still dreaming of you

Midday cigarettes blue ghosts of smoke
The echo of your laughter in my ears
Still dreaming of you

Why is it that the smallest things
Pull at my heart with tender strings?
Place the world within my hands?
Is it your seashell eyes or sunshine ways
That give my soul such wings?

Lazy haze
Dog days
Misty rays
The waitress’ trays – Each says
Still dreaming of you

A breath of wind across my face
A fleck of dust suspended in the air
Still dreaming of you

Twilight tears of evening rain
Twinkling dew of memories
Still dreaming of you

Why is it that the smallest things
Pull at my heart with tender strings?
Place the world within my hands?
Is it your breezy laugh or easy smile
That give my soul such wings?

High-rise
Wind chime’s sighs
Twist ties
Night skies – Each cries
Still dreaming of you

Empty doors unblinking rooms
Hollow hallways and an empty bed
Still dreaming of you

Midnight books and wrinkled sheets
The shadow of your warmth beside me holds your scent
Still dreaming of you

Q.E.D.

Life is Boolean
BUT

NOT
always

IF
logic is greater than fate

AND
truth is stranger than fiction.

THEN
all else is false

THEREFORE
the sum is the truth value

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Abstract Melopoeia

Excrescent spatula
Winsome Homburg
Excruciating
Equestrian
Fenestration flogger

Crenelation bladder
Poontang duck widget
Crepuscular
Squalid pox

Druid flux
Mandrake flatulence
Crustacean creased
Frangible
Intangible
Gantry flange

Cop-out Clang

Remorse Code

.:Did dew do it?
-:Doh

[Dot dot dot]

.:Did Da do it?
-:Da!
.:Da did it?
-:Da did it!
.:Da did it?

[Dot dot dot]

.:Dash!

~|~

Dark Satanic Toilets

The urinals unseen

Are heard
Playing host to an incessant and North-Country drip
I can hear
Their public porcelain
Their brass and copper fittings

Their aging tiles
Haven't seen a cigarette in over a decade
But they are nicotined

And stains
stains echo

Paints yellow
Off Pink and
Institutionally soothing
Clash imperfectly
Missing kitsch

P.T.W.

It seems so inhospitable
To love you this way

You were free - effortless - amicable
An easy blend of
charming and despicable

Such a worthwhile
Honorable cad
But ultimately
Just not that good
At being bad

Harmless as a child
And therefore
A monster

Epiphany

Epiphany, I don't even know how to spell it
Here we are
All those we's

Those selfs or selves

Made quiet solitude by
What next
Expectation yes
Exasperation
Aspiration
Breathing halted
Expectoration stuttered to a full stop
Reprieved
I cannot respond to my own lies
If I am saying nothing

Silence is only temporary truth