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.

I Am That I Am

I am the smoke that bruises the lungs
I am the petrol and the gun.
I am the elephantine buck.
The gas and the smoke that masks the sun.
I am narcissus
The little boy lost
The joy of fixation.
I am pathological growth
I am urban sprawl.
I am distrust.
An inflammation of the earth's crust.
I am the 3D cinerama.
I am photography, perspective,
The splitting of the atom,
The secret of the Vedas used
To boil the blood of thousands.
I am God's closest whispers
Used to deafen the birds.
I am a perpetual Autumn, a summer shedding its skin.
I am the winter sun,
low, impossible to catch,
piercing visions with a blade-like burn.
I am an old story, a boyish myth,
Parsifil, unheeded hero, with the deftest touch.
I am one melody among many,
the song of Arjuna,
the sound of "stand up and fight"
and Krishna, orchestral, silhouetted in flame.
I am black oil, the treasure,
the earth's sweetened muscle.
I am a scorched soul, branded with wisdom,
leather skinned, tanned by the moon.
I am Eros, the coffee-coloured kiss.
I am the velvet rush.
A jolt of fearless blood.
My tongue darts in hendecasyllables.
My fist in iambic jabs.
My body moves in verses, the dance.
I am athletic, poetic,
the secret unfocused, Picasso's neurosis.
I am the sound of the sands.
Gold, the colour of prehistory.
I am the black Madonna.
I am Scotia,
I am kali,
I am Dana,
I am the Goddess, white, ablaze.
I am her primal turmoil, her breaking wave.
I am her body, her wounded chariot.
I die in rituals,
feasts are cleaned with my blood.
I am the leaves like jazz in the sunlight.
I am that birdsong.
I am that ornate bitch's lipstick
– I am that hard fuck –
I am Milton
– himself bond under philistian yoke.
I am an unfunny joke
I am the night
– cool on your chest like a purple pearl.
I am Cynthia – her head cocked like the moon.
And I am Hercules of course
– dancing with his dick out among the trees.
I am god's gift.
I am the ocean and the rock,
the petrol and the spark,
the resistance, the unjust onslaught.
I am neon and the black.
I am hatred.
I am the tears of the sun.
I am not sacred. I am violent.
I am not saintly. I am electric.
I am no craftsman, I am an artist,
aggressive, spiting absinthe on the canvas.
I am quiet but riotous. A threat.
I am evolution, the pounce.
I am deadliness, announced.
I am the tropic breeze.
The sleepless jungle sounds.
I am the keeper of diamonds. The silver.
My soul is sharp, flint, the verve.
I am barefoot speed, the heat and the hunt.
I am visceral, the horror.
I am war, thunder in slow motion,
lightning's terrifying secrecy.
I am the mountain's whispers.
The pierced rock, the bite of frost.
I am the planet's tired songs.
I am Atlantis, the broken legend.
I am a bitter wine on dry dirt.
I am a Tuscan forest, red, burned out.
I am God's exhaustion, the relentless panic.
I am Jesus' hubris, the spirit of attack.
Stand back.
Be still, and know that I am that.
I am that I am.
I am that I am.
I am that I am.
I am that I am.