Sonnet for John Keats

Shadow stencilled the floodlit spillage
Laces the city's chromatic heart,
Tinctured by the silk of wind
That reddens the sinew crooked peaks
Hidden in the time-burnt bushes
And the wet banks of luxurient dirt.
Arterial branches stretch their blackened nerves
Against the palms of the blood-damp night.
Soothed in the rose-dark darkness,
Life mothers itself in the crippled woodland,
The ancient waters of silver freshness,
And the quiet tempests of the grasses.
A landscape of electromagnetics pulses
At the points of its aeriel spires and cathedrals.

Let's not give the bastards another chance

The best kind of lovers do not plan

Nor pre-empt every single warring kiss;

They relish the risks of being human

And gather strength from the threat of weakness.

Like the way the poet’s pain reshapes his heart

Sharpening the point of his bulleted words,

Or when our childish dreams are pierced, each hurt

Somehow leaves new visions to leap towards.

We know now how needs mask the face of love

While beauty hides from predators who feed

Themselves on that light lit but quickly snuffed

By careless hands, pride, neglect, or conceit.

But lets not give up passion for romance

And lets not give the bastards another chance.

A birthday poem

In those moments between the minutes

Of the day’s cluster-fucks, its intrusions,

When city wind boils in backward closes

And beauty breathes dangerously in the leaves;

You’re drawn to grand mythologies, unicorns,

To epic acts, and lover’s heroics;

And to God knows what other damned romances

Dancing precarious on your empty walls.

It drives you to spirit-music, cooked on fire,

To words that skirt on oil-black oceans

Where wounded silhouettes shark the light

Beneath brooding skin never broken.

The seasons themselves appear undecided,

Between storm, or the boldness of the sun.

South Kensington

You whose beauty pierces.

Whose glances spark with irritable purpose,

And thoughts, sword shards that jar

Under a skin of night red roses.

You who wears the hide of a wolf.

Whose looks access a lover's cowardice,

Who swallows her intelligences,

Issues her sex in warring confidence.

You whose eyes catch a stolen hope

Between the pincers of your perceptions,

Who freezes with green dilated ice,

The insolence of my trespasses.

You're gonna need my help some day

One thousand and one little heroisms.

To you just stepping stones, or pebbles.

One thousand and one little gallantries

To you testing patience, just pleasantries.

Under the sheet of drizzle, depression.

Under the pressure of doubt, indecision.

I am no saint. You make a good point.

But I fear no Satan. Being right's not always right. 

Cocaine.

Midnight on a river of piss.

Cocaine.

Jealousy in the eyes of tattooed ink.

Cocaine.

I forgot I was fat and looked a woman in the eye.

Cocaine.

Girls use gentleness as an assault weapon.

Cocaine.

Love in vain, on couches, couches, couches.

Cocaine.

Arid soul worrying about the next line, the end of the line

and where to draw the fucking line.

Cocaine.

6am planned closures on the Central Line.

Cocaine.

Three hours in the corner reading between the lines.

Cocaine.

It's true what they say about parallel lines.

Cocaine.

You can't do one line and think you're a rock star mate.

Cocaine.

Do you know who I am?

Cocaine.

I've got gasoline in my synapses.

Cocaine.

I crave intimacy but I avoid it.

Cocaine.

I long for touch but it petrifies me.

Cocaine.

I want to be held but I won't let anyone hold me back.

Cocaine.

I need validation but people's opinions disgust me.

Cocaine.

I want to be loved but it's too much pressure.

Cocaine.

My disappointment disappoints others.

Cocaine.

It is better to be one step ahead of loss.

Cocaine.

Bite the hand that feeds you

Because that hand that feeds you can also strangle you.

Cocaine.

People always tire of me.

Cocaine.

I feel like a cunt.

Cocaine.

There is nothing you can accuse me of

That I didn't accuse myself of before 9am this morning.

Cocaine.

I'm probably gay.

Cocaine.

I'm probably carrying around cancer of the bowls.

Cocaine.

That Camden Town whore probably gave me AIDS.

Cocaine.

My dreams have worn away from petroleum.

Cocaine.

Loneliness becomes sclerosis.

Cocaine.

I want to see the bitch swallow.

Cocaine.

The life of the party is dead inside.

Cocaine.

Soho

The moon bursts its varicose yoke

On clouds like winter thin skin,

Spilling nutrients across the

Frostbitten sky. Her vitamins

Bounce on the plaster-glass streets

On the jagged perfect faces

Through a beer-stained breeze.

Thunder-light renders neon

That dresses the night in sugarcane. 

Exposure

Memories like tongues leave licks, imprints,

Liquids on our freckled hearts.

We must dry undressed in the frosted sun,

Bleach like film and scorch our silhouettes;

Melt chiaroscuro, let the polychrome run. 

Thomas the Rhymer

I loved her like..

I loved her the way the sun hit the city. 

How it's pink light burned 

On the symmetry of façades,

The boiling hole in the clouds 

Where my eyes met the white heat of my heart. 

I loved her with the music of water 

From the wind on rainy pavements. 

I loved her like a furious pallete 

Of acrylics, the colour of words 

On my ethanol tongue. 

I loved her like a whisky, 

A fire of richness on my lips. 

I wanted to drink from her slowly, 

To swallow her malt age 

In the damp and the dark, 

To feel her copper waters drench 

The dry earth of my mouth, 

And warm my lungs with 

The after-taste of her flames.

A Lyric (For Leonard Cohen)

You are the image of my beauty.

(You thought you had me

But here is my wisdom, my honesty).

I feed on lyric, and wash your face

In the waters of my torpored eyes,

Because you to me are a cityscape

The ruggedness of industry

You inflame horizons in your achievements.

Whatever disgusts me about me

Is cured by the facts of your beauty

The crooked architecture

That bends under the sadness

In your shoulders.

If sunlight was music

Your voice would notate it

In its pitch-perfect brokenness.

Your anger makes your suppleness

Dangerous.  

Your bluntness kills.

You cry tears that burn.

You kiss with a mouth laced in acid. 

Your eyes are burst fruits

Weeping daylight's fluids.

You are the image of my beauty. 

Half an hour on the Heath

Bricks that in the rain

Are stained claret red.

Cocaine powdered clouds pout

Across a chalk sky of queue-ball blue.

The wind traces it's kisses cold

Like a girlfriend's October skin.

Sparks of burned petals break

Into a flirtatious surf

From the oil-rooted

Muscles of the branches.

Magpies shoot flight-paths in the rough

Uniformed officers mapping the grasses. 

Apologies

This was my cruelty: to collar you

With my loneliness like a necklace.

The prison of a princess

You always resisted.

To love you is to force the issue.

To inflict affections, press you down

with light, when you prefer a rage

Of autumn's rain to drench the sun,

Or lips of leather numb on your stomach.

I have seen your yellowness however.

And watched the very place

Where your unstoppable mind

Breaks upon a beach of tectonic sands.

Yes. I have trespassed you, your body,

The politics of lines that wrap your figure,

The conflicted highground

Infuriating your beauty.

But a conquest of eyes is nothing,

Just maybe a battle cry of dreams.

Perception getting overzealous

At the passing chance of a feast.

Live at The Camden Crawl

Reality

It's now the fashion and the norm
To crush all hope in politics of fact.
It's seen as smart to bleed all love from form
And exchange courage for cautious tact.
Accuse me then, of making all this up,
Victim to my own dogmatic heart.
Call me weak and bruised, a wounded dupe,
In love with love, or worse, in love with hurt.
Though thoughts not facts are what infatuate us,
Romance is not without its healthy frictions.
A love free of its risks and threat of madness
Is craftless; empty of imagination.
No art lives uprooted from a ground of truth,
Theory's theory regardless of any proof.

I Am Not Your Destroyer (Live at The Camden Head)

All My Heroes (Live at Word Of Mouth 2009)

Ends and Means

In light of dense and jealous ornament
Your temper's strident, mind rapacious,
Beyond the abstract, form's irritants,
And executing dangerous genius.
Fingers piano pointed, lips cussed shut
You tend to innocence, the pure and passion
With soft distrust that leaves untruths in cuts,
And acolytes adrift in your derision.
A body bowed, a weapon of the moon,
Pierced sharp towards the point, bent back to shield
Your chest, your tissue folds, the guarded boon
Of womanhood's unseen, unvalued yield.
If truth is forced we lose ouselves in truth.
Pursuit of love's seduction by pursuit.