"Youth is..."

Like sketching out
life in pencil:
A fear of ink
indelible.

St Paul's

Alone in this drowsy epicentre
In the after-silence of the bells -
The stone column an extension of my spine,
The dome the weight of my thought.

Deep in this rock is the resonance of Time,
Scope, Knowledge, the Weight of the sky and
Gravity and Dark and History’s quest: the
Searches of Souls and Intrusions of Gospels.

I listen to the wise instinct of the resonances.

The City of the Monotonous Mass

Like a fanged glass shard
Salivating in sleepy rain,
Another week drips the dregs
Of its hours like watery metal,

Throbbing a wistful glint
Before melding anew.
(The briefest respite of a praying
Ant, catching a breath in the soil).

A missed heartbeat’s silence
As The City's furnace blinks into the
Sleep of the battle wounded, drifts
Into the glide of a ghost bird.

The dreamless sleep of the
Monotonous mass, whose nights are
Warm in the replenishing charge
Of sweating machinery.

They are the crumbs of goldfish feed,
Eyes mired in x-ray-black,
Brains loaded like knotted wires,
Pulsing with digits of warm static:

Slaves to the glass shard
And the gaping abyss that will
Chew and milk them for
Their ripeness at dawn.

Winter gloom

Winter gloom set in this morning:
Doused the room in dark
As I clung to the life of my body;
Temples throbbed blue as
The alarm’s piercing laughter
Mocked me from its bookcase.

Last Train Home

One of those train compartments
From the films in grainy colour:
Through a peeling swivel latch, where
Bronzed wall-lamps trickle muffled
Gold over a congregation of eight,
And Autumnal curtains hang half-drawn.

It spells romance: these lives
Balancing on a knife-edge of mortality,
Hurtling the east-coast cliff-edges;
A storm scene, and the fanged rocks
Thrusting spray close to the rails.

He sat in this scene: a wordless adrenaline.
A stranger: her neck infused him with a scent
Of the wild, had caught him as if by sudden
Thirst. An instantly raw addiction. He craved those
Eyes abandoned to the tide; lips captivating
In their proximity; each breath of hers a narrative.

His heart revved thunder in his ribs, mad, timid:
Pressing against him like her, he dreamt.
Trembling blood, he was filled with a current
Not unlike the sea: almost launching himself on her but
Resisting – just – the taste of the sand.


The moment, he felt, was resting on this
Furlong of rails as the urban world encroached
With heightening layers of imposing grey,
And the glass welled up and wept with lungfuls
Of rain; and yet his needle sharp love: deep, swelling,
Swelled, throbbing, was bleeding him red, and

He fixed his eyes in passion: stretched, wavered,
Grasped the air, and invaded her like
Static.

This Writing:

What lies it impregnates in ink.
Broods too long on the briefest
Of mist-swum pictures that swim my head,
Shorter than static though they live.

When, despite their vague
Almost-nothingness
A well of hours is spent
Reeling them in from fog:

Enlivening them out of proportion,
Embedding them in truth
Now they cry so rigidly
From feathery wood.

Yet what truth can life yield
If one wades its streets unfocused,
Floats its days monotonous
With hardly a flinch

And when thought
Pierces the gloom,
Not try and decipher its root,
Its earth, its bark, its fruit?