The tale of the credit card thief
is one that is hard to stomach,
not the person who finds themselves unable
to pay back what they have borrowed,
Time has a habit of making martyrs
out the most carefully sewn purses,
for the ones who push their refined snout
into the bin of inequality and declare
with the grace and attitude
that they are not getting their fair
share of the leftovers whilst hoarding
the banquet that would give a King a ruptured heart
and have his over gorged head removed
The atomic clock granted an extra second,
like some miserly, downcast and heartbroken Scrooge,
it offered no extra bonus,
such as a break from the brain
and the incessant noise of Time chipping away at our lives
with a tiny hammer, sculpting the grave before
we have had chance to crawl,
nor did it shove in a half day’s rest period in which Humanity
could look up at the stars and wonder why our feet
were firmly stuck in bronzing clay.
Instead it suggested to the scientists polishing its hardened shell
Hewi-Manod slips off her Ruby rings,
collected over time, given in earnest
in hopes of marriage proposal, no suitor
ever realising she was already with child
but not yet laden with drought and looks ahead
to the start of Dog Days and the spoils of war
that she will soon bring.
Whisper slowly, war is coming…
The blood courses through the two bodies with the eagerness
of a rattlesnake caught on drifting sands,
one eye on survival, one upon the gleaming future ahead
The man with the velvet collar
and the impressive skills on the piano
once sang a song for me
across the white crested waves
between the past
in the undiscovered Bronx
and my home in Bicester
and I could not help but be saved
I put a dime in the juke box
and I believed all what the Piano Man sang
about the ups and downs of a life well lived
and how at times the girl gets away
but if your fortunate enough
I fear that that the plague under the skin,
first suffered as I entered the twilight of being considered
young, has returned as the itch of skin flares
and erupts like the seeded grumblings of Vesuvius
as her townsfolk gathered in blissful ignorance.
I am exhausted, yet words continue to flow
and they mock the carrier, taunting that somewhere
under the surface, next to the silvery fish like scales
that threaten to burst
and pulse and spread across my body once more,
causing anger and confusion as the pain in my back
How long before the nation goes under the hammer
and its people sold as slaves to counteract
the weight of expectancy being urged
in a propaganda battle against Humanity?
Part of me wants them to fight on,
to deliver a black eye to the lords of high finance
and make them blush for the years they treated
a proud nation to the point where they become
the equivalent of Poundland,
the cheap shopping centre for the sun blessed and
morally out of step as they forget that the point
I lost a thousand days
and gained a thousand nights
on the moment I decided I could no longer
be in a relationship with my black Empress
who had seen me bathe naked
in a polluted river
every day since
I was a seventeen year old boy
desperate to be kissed by the exotic and hard done by.
What is there to be missed by letting the beauty go?
I mused one October morning at three, I left her
to be frozen out of my life
I hate
how you make me miss you,
how you have occupied my thoughts
and perhaps being
the reason for the tarnish
upon my skin to have
returned,
scaly, dragon-like
and festering, biding its time
in which before the eruption and
the chemical disaster spill
combine
to infect every pore of my blistered skin
and I potter in darkness
away from the sun,
Marlowe stanced and not get over excited;
I hate
how I miss you.
I hate
Madness dwells within each of us, for some
the normality of the sacrifice to the death of Kings
reveals itself in their actions, the jealous zeal
in which they covet everything but life itself
and the dishonesty of their envious desires.
For others though it unwraps and unfolds like a
forgotten parchment,
a map of places unseen, of continents lost and drowned
far below the surface of Earth’s majesty;
of a building with secret time decayed, narrowed
dusty and cobwebbed tunnels that bid warning
There was a time
before time,
somewhere around the end
of the decade of lost hope
that was known as the 1980s
in which being given a phone number
by the girl
you liked
was as prized as any medal
or award handed out by the state
or the unsaid respect of your mum and dad.
That number was hard won,
it was the mark of envy
perhaps in other’s eyes and the sudden realisation
that what came next was love’s equivalent
to standing in a closed forbidding