Swimming Pool Rules

Flat like a deflated manta ray Hugging cold concrete sea bed I’m left to entertain The leaden Thoughts occupying my head Gazing up through azure avenues It suddenly occurs to me Time ebbs and flows like [trapped] water And light refracts just like memory. Stripped to nostalgic caricatures Future skewed, past […]

When the bough breaks

I found him swinging in a fresh breeze. He was hanging from a dead tree. -Told me to listen -Asked me to kill him Once he was done, He wasn’t done wreaking mayhem. Glassy eyes drained of surprise He tells me with a settled smile We’re doomed to chase that paradise We’re doomed […]

First Left at the Asteroid Belt

Tastes like cold fruit Smells like delusion Feels like survival Looks like confusion. Deadpan daydreams Of darkness, Black Death, Die a little every night Speak in whispered silhouettes Like a wisp of cigarette Toxic and malevolent, Silent and sublime The cancer tasting heaven sent. I’ve been stand-stumbling At the edge of the […]

Pursuit

I woke up this morning, Proceeded to die, Woke up again, Climbed into the sky. Sat in the clouds As they drifted and dipped Floated through fractals On my candyfloss crypt. The bed beneath parted And through it I fell, Hurtled through earth And landed in hell. Satan wore a suit, A […]

The Staccato Struggle

Bodies like bricks Leaden and low Whose stony salutes Cast cold shadows. Concrete castle silhouettes Knock on cracked cognition Each ring leaving Bloody knuckles -A momentary spark- Too quickly extinguished. Sandmxn baked to Clay Under the cosh Of chaos Lacerations luminating Vapid, flailing veins -A momentary spark – Too quickly extinguished. We […]

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Perception is everything – and it’s a very fragile lens. That’s what I found at the heart of Oliver Sacks’s monumental collection of case stories, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks, a prolific neurologist and writer, documented case studies of people afflicted by inconceivable impairments – conditions that could render one […]

An ode to a twisted home

Claws of conflict clasp at these night-times, Ringing in their screeches in the wails and Obscenities of those too inordinately fucked to care That their slurred syllables carry pathogens of insecurity Two streets down. Bellowing from the chunder-piss-semen-EDM stained alleyway that rears Its ugly drunken head To all that would hear, From Calata to Canterbury, […]

The School Bus that Wasn’t

A green school bus At the bottom of the sea. A cold, heavy home, For the likes of you and me. At the front door there’s an usher He greets me with a line. He says: “We’ve got much to do If we’re to waste all this time.” But isn’t there a […]

How the Wind was Won

In a greyish-grey house On a greyish-grey day A greyish-grey boy Pirouetted away. Through baby-blue kingdoms He hurtled and swayed, His greyish-grey self Being slowly replaced. First went his senses – The sights and the sounds The bricks and the mortar Of his greyish-grey house. Even the flakes Of his pangolin flesh […]

Bedtime on the Far End of Andromeda

“Tell me the story Of that sad little race Of sad little people In that sad little place. You know – the ones With the eyes and the ears? With the false little hopes? And the really huge fears?” Ah! Gargantuan dreams Those clever apes had, – Built ships to the stars, – Cleaved sky […]