The trouble with insomnia
is that you get so damn tired of it.
To me though she is a constant lover,
she fills my day and gives more and more
and more and more….ad infinitum.
I can’t miss this dark and brooding mistress
as she never leaves me alone, she caresses
with care and whilst my head feels fevered,
boiling to the touch on some days,
she whispers down my ear,
that it will be alright, she will see
me through the rain, she will be with
I fell in love
with celluloid before I could spell it
and perhaps even before I knew
how much a grip it would hold
on my soul.
A cold night in Birmingham,
my cousin and I out with an aunt
decked out against the billowing
droplet air, glacial toes riding
against warm pins and needles
and her stockings catching fire
breath as they rode
up and down
over her knees
and the static sparking life
on the nylon covered seats.
I think I will stay here in the darkness,
the ragged curtain closed
across, the light dimmed down
to the sight of a naked flame
waiting patiently
in a gas filled room
and the sheets
pulled over my eyes,
for in the darkness there is no fear,
I am not afraid…
I am not afraid
to whisper to myself
because should I shout in the light,
should I raise my fist in anger,
or see the world
in its blazing fire, in its white heat of explosion
Smile at me Hemmingway, give me the truth
of your demise, show me why it hurt
and I will oblige you with my tale,
you at least will go down in history,
for you my bearded friend, had reasons,
I seem to have excuses to keep living.
These excuses, some by name, some by deed
are wrapped in shrouded mist, hidden
even from my own pathetic pill popped brain
and I weep for myself, quietly, alone,
in plain sight so that nobody
sees anything but the smile.
Overweight,
slightly
bursting apart at the seams,
though once as slim
as an overworked rake,
and slender enough to be lean
and hungry.
Still got hair,
lots of it cascading down my back,
though thin from being dyed
since I was seventeen,
going grey early, a subsequence
of the disease remaining undiagnosed,
refusing to have it cut,
I never liked short hair on myself,
I always looked like a thug
when I looked in the mirror
that hung askew in the draught-filled hall.
It is said,
that the name you are assigned at birth,
by loving parents
or by the invisible masks of state
are only there for the price
of administration, that but for the benefit
of paperwork, those in charge would call
out a series of random numbers,
bar codes, binary relics
and your parents
especially when in the blackest of moods,
somehow remember your whole name
and not just the one of endearment
when you make them a cup of tea.
…And in life there is so much more besides
than the way you present yourself to the mass media tribes
for the way you come across, capable of mass-homicides,
you have to see, that you are the very worst of scribes.
The shuffle of insistence that where is spelt were
and that a book is written where a sentence will do
makes me believe you would spit feathers and set fire to fur
just to make an essay of a point, to see the waste of ink through.
Roll the dice and fill the barrel,
it is the constitutional right
to bare arms and so that makes
it alright and yet people
in the island, set against
the blistering swell of Atlantic Blue
get confused and gnash their flexible
fingers in outrage
as the flash of the blade,
the final cut,
takes a young black lad’s life
in South London
as the Thames gently hugs
the Westminster circus
votes to rain information
down a population
who cannot tell the difference
between Western aggression
It is how it starts,
the weapon of choice,
the painted slur, the smear
of government, of a Prime Minister
justifying his own peculiar judgment
by saying those who don’t agree
with the rhetoric of war,
those who argue with passion
the side for pacifist solution,
are nothing more than
Terrorist Sympathisers.
It is how it starts,
the verbal stain and before you know it
white feathers are being handed
out to those who oppose war,
before you know it,
internment camps
There is a picture
of a man in a crowd, black and white,
taken when Europe stood
once more
on the precipice of age old
and defiant war, when the man
in the comedy moustache, Chaplin like stance
a true ragged disease and blot,
but without the humour
of the boy and the subtle refrain
of the decorator of Vienna,
raged for destruction, raged for annihilation,
with frenzied fury and dire plans of Mercury
filled wrath, rage it is all the rage;
the man in the photograph, Chaplin out of sight,