Monday 20 July 2015

1 New Post

The Thing About Dreams
Everything lost along the highway at night
reflects, sparking, torrential, eyes of
landlocked Midwestern states turning in sequence
to battered tomes of ages past:
memoirist typefaces, laggy second-pressing
covers in watercolour fashion, kind to
find in gas station spin-racks between pulps
and Harlequins, beneath fading sun heat of
still water, exhaustion pills and greater motion.

How ever-crossed-up are means with ends,
subtle clanking of pens for wordsmiths,
a glancing glint for shots in the dark,
straining adolescent sentiment for passion;
who can blame for that,
with the tales of freeway freedom spinning
around airwaves' brusque light brigade?

If those wonders held truth, the thought
of leaping right over wood and wire laminate
of these knock-off Starbucks tables to
kiss you
wouldn't seem so distant,

you'd be the breeze between lampposts at dawn.

Tuesday 14 July 2015

1 New Poem

A Dialectic

Always distrust the almost-the-same,
the not-quite-there, the sugar substitutes
and waxy imitations of skin contact,

always distrust that moment when reality melts,
when concrete of sidestreets seems to bend
with sea air and Proms string swells,

they never do measure to life as it is:
a choice amongst poisons where it
takes to a kiss-mark of swirling ink,

and you dance on pen tips,
a mixed metaphor of still spring
love that calms even as rushing,

untamed, eroding what little was there.

Sunday 5 July 2015

1 New Poem

Dots and Dashes

It's telegraphic, scribbled on fence posts,
newspaper bylines, sign signals that
something should be passing through
this way again, some somebodies in
the hip-swing 60s, in the coke-strung banker days;
that feeling you never are first at
doing whatever it may be.

Still:

let's trace faulty wiring to the beneath stars
of Hyde Park's firing fountain reflection,

let's hum melodies to the clang-clamour of
trainers and stilettos on plastic bits of Underground step-up,

let's drink in mock-Shanghai of Shard bars,
pretend we're rich as Russian oilmen twice over,

let's flood the riverside patios in Shoreditch
with a thousand sparks of dancing shoes

let us live, and be young, and be with the Thames.

Then even if it is just

dots and dashes, dashes and dots,
they'll be ours alone.