In defence of self-pity

Sun on the cloud like a cut blood orange,

The pupils pinch, and the retina cringed.

That's the life of a boondocked soul.

Wine two for a tenner, you're on a roll.

Bloody minded, playing the fool,

Caffeine enraged, too cruel to be cool.

Unwashed sheets, a jealous stench.

Knee bones, neck jealous clenched.

Light stale, flea-ridden lunch,

Mind on its back and sucker punched.

City traffic, city hypnosis.

Sweat, bad breath, and histrionics.

Pink wet sky above a Picadilly poet

Fingers a cliché in his fraudulent pocket. 

For a pay-day treat

No touch, no kiss, hands off the hair
It's 200, or two-fifty the hour.
Girl brunette, pubescent eyes,
Her doggystyle moans are pitch-perfect lies.
Two bottles of wine, it's got a mind of its own,
Need something back just to go on.
White walls, white sheets, a humourless room
The opposite problem of ending too soon.
No lips, no breath, a shadowless sex,
For a pay-day treat what d'you expect?

The truth is I understand you.

The truth is I understand you.

Your bite and your sneer

And your perfectionist rage.

I understand why you deploy beauty

Like a fleet of bombers.

I get it, how you have to keep

The world at a whip's length

And how in the absence of strength

Your fingernails and teeth will

Have to do.

Somewhere along the lines

You learned to grip tight,

To perform with bitter lips

The way some alcoholics

Become achievement addicts.

It's not hatred of men.

You make out like a chauvinist

Just for convenience,

It keeps the seas parted.

The way you say, 'fuck you'

Is sexy, not because I'm a masochist,

Not because tearing the world an arse hole

Day after day is good practice,

Or becoming of a bitch.

No. It's because

If it's a choice between you and the abyss

You always choose you.

And that's more than I could ever do.

Maybe I never loved you.

Maybe it wasn't compassion.

Maybe it had fuck all to do

With damsels, distresses

And white knight complexes.

Maybe I just understood you.

Great King Street Blues - For Pat

With tongues cigarette minted we lipped

The blueprints of our disappointments

That left our songs in mouthfuls trapped,

Our ingrown teeth red with persistence.

In the afternoons the soul turns timid.

Ideals childish coded against the flow,

The heart’s timpani stride becomes a tired thud

Wise words lose their attack - crescendo.

We are nothing but brave peninsulas

Met only by the pinkish heat of light

That seasons the muted currents between us

And dresses the glittered trimmings of the night.

None of us islands, none free from each other.

Love is our revolution, not our master.  

Been a while

Square against the thumb the cold

Steel fresh with a winter physics.

The sunlight livid on pallid walls

Dry-defeated in achromatics.

Lips alone are mightier than the pen.

Like sleet drops on mountain brooks

Leave imprints on the the water's skin,

They outclass poems in swallowed lyrics.

Sonnet on reaching thirty-two

At thirty-two I feel no shame, I am

No less inspired; enraged, and vital still,

Though money'd power and hustling time

Attack for sport virginity of will.

Sometimes I've felt defeated by a smirk

Left deaf by sneers in London's diesel squall;

Saw Satan light a candle in the kirk

And say 'salvation first must see you fall'.

But no devil, Christ, no market's tick-tock facts

Can mark the scroll on which I scratch my truth.

The rebel's art keeps fantasy intact

A manifesto not enslaved to proof.

My hasting days in flight are still not done.

So listen up, you fuckers, and be dumb. 

Your photographs

Everything discarded

Your books, your records.

It's all at last released 

Charitably unburdened.

Except, though, your photographs.

All memories embittered

The afternoons of laughter.

Coffee, rain and records

Loyalties hungover.

All, just not your photographs.

We said we loved as artists.

Not lip-synched by a  kiss

Not cemented by bodies.

It was all bullshit.

But not your photographs.

Pirate heartbeats still

Pledge beauty's booty shared.

But titillation's thrill

Strips genius bare.

However, not your photographs.

When I come across your footprints
I reclaim it all with dust.
Smear away the graphite
Dirtied with a curse.

Except
Of course
Your photographs.