International Tattoo Convention

Limb badges
Imagined masses like an
Out of body jigsaw collective
At the body’s brink like
Animals celebrating
An extended consciousness
Insatiable in ink

The Valley

This is about someone who prefers the ‘bliss’ that comes with preferring to live a life uninformed and not know things

What planet are you on
Look at life pulling a sun
Under and pulling it up
Again for fun for ever
It comes up against these hills
It goes over your head
You just know of the death of news
By the emptiness of the wind
If you can turn your lantern
Off you can free your brain
From half light search light
And surrender happily to the dark at night
And feel the whole illumination of daylight
And give thanks to the valley
And life not yet taken

New Build

The sea keeps some things
But what it finds it brings
Back like offerings,
On its knees before the land
Gifts thrown from its hands
So generous, the sea, so generous
With endless messengers,
Each wave is a new child
Each tide a new sky.
*
I am apart
Player, running on my own revealed sand
Of opportunity, like a gap in time
I’m in it and I’m off,
Running past the workers on the front
Who amble to their sea life centres,
The only way they know how the only way is way
Mouth facing South tracing,
I am running to find a second nature
That I have brought ever sought from the North.
The tide of work is high
And I am running to see your locality
As you have been reclaimed by reality
And the party is submerged
Like good times our bloodstream.
Your hair is like gold to me
Your body like a river
Your neck of the woods is luring me
To see the new build estate terraced above
The mundane spectacle of the sea, the sea,
Where you live; good time girl, happy family.
So what if I can guess who you are?
It is not who you are. You picked me up
And I will not put you down.
What we don’t know between us
We can sense and that is all that is sure,
What we feel, for too long already
I have been apart from that,
From you and now and your seaside town.

High Jumpers – The Facts

Its time that the tale were told, how they took a lump of lead and made it into gold. Morrissey’s words are tellingly adapted here. He made songs. He was a lyrical athlete making records. Real records. But what about fake records? What about mistaken records? I am of course talking about drugs in sport.
Used needles and empty powder bags may litter the modern athletics field and that is no sight for sore eyes. We may come down heavy on those ‘high’ on the substances that were in them. ‘Scruffy cheating bastards!’ we cry, ‘verminous hounds of hell!’ or just ‘call yourself athletes? Well you’re not!’, but isn’t it time to expose the cheaters behind the cheats? The shady purveyors of the wizz of winners? The lurid leopard behind its own smacked up spots? The powdery power behind the swooshy thrones and the tracksuits of sporting success? The pill popping puppeteers behind their pop-it-there creations? The fairground controllers making unfairgrounds; making level playing fields down right unlevel..?
They may have a giraffe like innocence about them but their athletic category reveals clues about what they’re up to. If you just care to look. They’ve been getting away with it for years: High Jumpers. Drug Dealers? Oh yes.
From which impoverished part of the world did they come? Many parts. They made sport from the streets in the urban tracks and fields ‘du monde’. They made sport from adversity. Their starting blocks were actually the tower blocks of ghettos. Jumping over obstacles to evade the long arm of the law in deprived neighbourhoods is a ubiquitous skill for those whose daily life is the hustle of the streets. Given the choice these guys would have liked a low profile but its hard when you’re nearly seven foot tall.
And eventually, these spontaneous evading leaps became a signature activity amongst those who run with the night and obstacles and objects were sought for their flinging and frolics. Park benches, passing traffic, bus shelters, fences, pool cues held by encouraging hoodlums in pool halls, shop counters were all leapt over routinely. The Fosbury Flop was born here, named after a particularly creative lanky gang leader. This clever contortionist developed his technique as a way to hit and open the drawer on a cash till when jumping over a shop counter. This would then allow his accomplices to help themselves to the money as shocked staff aided the near paralysed protagonist of propulsion.
Globally and over time, dispossessed and especially tall drug clans of the world were erecting makeshift structures in their communities with the sole aim of seeing how ‘high’ they could get. Rather like the opposite of the Limbo, where one tries to get oneself ‘low’ all those seeking elevation would queue up eager to surpass their PB’s. Throughout the darkened backstreets of the world they improvised their flinging of themselves ever upwards, literally to ‘new highs’.
And so softly, softly these lofty, lofty narcotic know-it-alls found their way into mainstream sport; the High Jumpers. They are the choreographers behind the smiling cast. The chemists behind the condoms and cough sweets. The pilots of an ecstasy that is unfortunately false. Beware of all those who ‘raise the bar’, especially in our faces. There on TV they ‘push’ themselves (as they are indeed pushers) ever higher…how high can they go? How low can we go now that we know?

Lichen (an off the wall poem)

Language is a dry stone wall,
Subject to salivating elements.
Once it rolled off the tongues of
Hills and then it was gathered
And presented and accepted
But now the lichen creeps in.
People are becoming lichen-oying
Always letting it creep in…
‘Can you give me lichen-other chance?’
Or
‘Do you have licheny water?
Do you have licheny thing like that’
Or
‘Are there licheny jobs?
Or
‘I wish I had lichen ‘elicopter’
Or
‘I am lichen dire need of lichen egg timer’
I wish there was lichen end to this!
I’m going to get lichen entirely
Empty bottle and send lichen SOS
To the lichen tire world because its
Nearly lichen emergency, lichen the
Way we lichen-sert licheny thing
Lichen alternative to ‘er’ its just..
More fillers like chocks and shale
Overwhelming the walls now
Crumbling, we should feel for
Weightier words, better bonding
Licheny time we lichen gage
In conversation.

Glue Gun

Into your ears, into your eyes
You’re pumping the glue gun
Blocking out sound and sun
You’re pumping the glue gun
Down into a sticky town,
You go suspended along sticky streets,
Caught up in what you secrete
You’re pumping the glue gun
Into your ears, into your eyes
You’re pumping the glue gun

*

At cash point I’ll pin you up
Pin you up and steal your breath
Make you transfer something
You’d have preferred to keep
And delay giving away,
Why do you always say,
That anything given is a loss
Your time is my time is mine
To give but I couldn’t give
A toss.

Soft Rock

Soft rock is hard cheese
Grating, permeating with a twist
Of cracked black vinyl you insist
That it is no crime to feel good,
Coming up on that formula
You feel rocked, you feel released,
Unladened by the power ballad,
To follow a non existent road with
An air guitar, a tight perm, a blurry horizon.

Dogs On The Hill

My Deerboy

The last to leave leaves cling to the branches
in the warm wind
and sway in the yellow October night,
And those dogs on the hill are howling.

I don’t know what they’re howling for,
they want something they can’t get,
like the moon or someone to open a door.
I should be in bed;

I am tipsy tired and wired,
my mind is green like phosphorus;
radiant with possibilities..
but I fear I have sprouted already and shed.

I’ve died for life and lived for the dead.
Tonight I felt lucky to have your company,
you were hanging out and I was hanging in there;
look at me now on this old patch of ground,

this field is benign and luminous with a trace
of you still in my eyes
and like pastures of green to embrace;
I want to fall into the meadow of your face.

I could…

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Streaker

I am emerging. My mind itches.
Light is scratching at stitches
And I’m zestful flesh squeezing
Myself free of my clothes again.
Keep them, rags. The human race,
Is all sown up, in screens and shells,
Here I am swinging an old jumper
Above my head now doing my best
To interrupt any event I can in a
Flash, escaping; a pet turned pest.
I am breaking free, ending the fast,
Like a surprise full English,
Filling your mooning faces, aghast.
I’m a guest speaker, uninvited,
With more bare cheek than you
Ever wished for; the self
Sought publicity seeker; the streaker,
You’ll only miss me when I’m gone

Youth

It wears thin usually about now,
When the decades start to stack
And the sugar rush of your hopefulness
Stops like a piggy back stopping in your own blood stream
You stop you start you accept less
You stop you start you accept more
And support wavers.
Youth! Its an allegiance you can’t live without.
Youth! Keep it on your side.