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