Worth Knowing

 I want you to know something rather worth knowing:

this is the second line of a stupid poem

that’s intent on describing itself line by line.

How is it going? It’s basically fine

but what is it for?  What does it say?

It tells you that now you’ve read almost halfway

but is that a fact that is really worth knowing?

Oh, here we are now, halfway through the poem

and how are things now, going into line nine

of this pointedly juvenile literary crime?

Oh wait, line ten’s awful! It just didn’t scan!

I think I should stop this as soon as I can.

Ah, here comes the end of this ludicrous poem.

Just read this last line then you can get going.

What Life is Actually Like

I’d like you now to imagine some flowers

and how their sweet bloom can be measured in hours;

how, as they wilt, you can feel the time fly

and you suddenly realise that one day you’ll die.

You see, each bouquet is a great metaphor

for the fact that soon you’ll exist no more.

That’s why poets love demonstrating their powers

writing endless bollocks about fucking flowers

as though they’ve been given a unique premonition,

a privileged glimpse of the human condition.

But why pick a flower? Why not a fart?

Surely that’s just as ripe for high art?

It’s brief, it stinks and it’s gone with the wind.

Maybe most poets are just too thin-skinned?

They like that their flowers are fragrant and pretty

(unlike their real life which is generally shitty).

Hey poets! Hey poets! If you want to show off

try absorbing the fact you’re just like a blow-off.

You’re no daisy nor rose, you poetic twerp!

Your life’s much more like a loud bottom burp

and, if you think I’m being grotesque or unfair,

go read your own poems. They’re mostly hot air.

Winner Takes All

Listen.

Listen and I’ll try to explain.

I’ll try to explain

a world that’s really nothing new.

Are you puzzled by my memory?

I’m puzzled by the way

she smoked her cigarettes.

I want you to picture this:

a thousand nights have crushed it all

to diamonds.

Or picture this, picture this:

Yeah, a girl has had her ears pinned back,

her face is smiling.

She’s staggering towards the sun.

Don’t go. Don’t go.

Let’s see if she’ll perform a miracle for you.

Don’t go. You and I can

lie about ourselves.

A year from now we’ll be nothing at all.

So picture this: Lost.

Or this: breaking down a barrier

or this: how you and I would fight in Kentish Town.

Her beauty lights up the sky

but now I know it. I know it.

I’m confused. Are you that girl?

Are you the girl

who would say the winner takes it all

and came away with nothing?

That glass is in your hand.

Your smile is a uniform.

We marvel at the pure extremes.

We always did.

You aged better than me

but you got old anyway.

It’s broken sunlight. It’s broken.

Hands, sex, pavilion, sunlight.

Your wounded mother,

your body soft

beyond my fingertips.

Lie to me. Lie to me.

It’s going to last as long as we can speak.

To a Half-Forgotten Girl

In a leather jacket

you play-acted

finger popping wildcat

flashed your teeth like a dog

wore bruises as badges:

‘since I saw you last

I’ve been handed around

by soldiers.’

You’re there

washing my back in a shared bath

wilding a double decker

top deck

howling as branches thump the glass

You’re there

telling me you’re a Russian spy

eyes as white as stratus clouds

just as full of rain.

In your father’s

village-green vicarage kitchen

appearing in a summer dress

hair up

the unexpected good girl

bad girl

bent-backed over a gravestone

as I dragged your flesh into mine

afterward by a motionless canal

telling me you would die

of ovarian cancer

‘so eat me while I’m still fresh’

You’re there in pubs and nightclubs

refusing to hold hands

there in the ruins of my past

saying nothing

in a dimming light

I want to write about your body

but it’s gone

I want to write about your face

it’s gone

I want to write your name.

This poem is all I have.

It’s everything I’ll ever have

of you.

Empire Building

Let’s invade countries!

Let’s conquer the seas!

We’ll carry our banners.

We’ll carry disease.

Let’s subjugate natives

then rape all their wives.

If we run out of bullets,

we’ll kill them with knives.

Let’s gang rape their wives!

Let’s fill them with jism!

That can be their first lesson

in capitalism.

We’ll grant them the freedom

to be chained and enslaved

or we’ll kill them in Christ’s name

so they can be saved.

Oh yeah Christ, oh praise Christ

for Christ is the Lord!

Oh, they’ll learn to love Christ

or they’ll die by my sword.

For His is the Way

of the Truth and the Light

but you can’t have true peace

till you’ve fought the good fight.

Then I’ll stand with the fallen,

the conquered, the lost,

and I’ll show them my mercy

once I’ve show them who’s boss

for this is the way 

that we build a new age;

with our steel and our money,

our semen and rage.

And our sons and their sons

and their sons and their sons

will continue the killing

because killing is fun.

We’ve got greed on our side.

We have guns in our hands

and these ignorant monkeys

are wasting good land.

We do combat training.

They do tribal dances

so, though we’re outnumbered,

I fancy our chances

so buckle your bullet belts,

strap your grenades.

It’s time for our mission,

our holy crusade.

Go tuck in your kids.

Go sharpen your knife.

Padlock a chastity belt

onto your wife.

Take holy communion

and amphetamine.

God bless our mission

and God save the Queen!

Hashtag Poem

“The mountain has overturned

and captured two shepherds

and captured two shepherds.

Two shepherds, two friends.”

- Bulgarian Folk Song

In the funhouse mirror

watch your devilfish release,

sing self bone,

writing the gospel of you

on Facebook.

At noon, you hack off your toes

to fit a ruby slipper.

The blood transubstantiates

into emojis.

At twilight, we walk the tiny perimeter

of our phones

rheumy with contempt

for the vast majority

of Kardashians,

coldly comforted

authorities on nothing;

denatured, unable to eat a whole

sandwich

until a pensive stranger has shared it.

Let us not, you and I,

crest a hilltop

and watch fireflies pinwheel

through the night.

Let us not see the Indian Ocean.

Let us not visit Gloucestershire.

At dusk, chubby mothers are

wriggling in a heap of pins.

My eggshell skull

opens in an empty theatre

and closes the same night.

Beach all the kayaks

dynamite the bouncy castles

forget the rules of hide and seek.

Our little girls need to commit

shame suicide

voluptuous dolls

bent backwards

raped by the algorithm.

Let’s live-tweet every grain of sand!

Maybe your ambitious avatar

and my ambitious avatar

can transfix each other

make cruel love

by the light of the silvery phone,

settle into black mud

solitude together,

two bit-players in a sea of circuits.

Let’s become the dark crabs

we were born to be.

Hashtag everybody is going to die

much sooner than they think.

That’s a trick life plays on us.

Real soon.

Morning

There in the darkness

is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

a black flame that danced in daylight

impassive policemen

with dead women at their feet

barefoot girls with handsome skin

leaping from the ninth floor

holding hands.

Exes mark their windows.

From a wax cylinder,

a survivor’s voice rings like a bell - 

‘…but they should have had some regard for our lives’.

Yeah, but where the fuck is Galicia?

How among boxes of burning skirt trims

a colony of souls

sublimed away like vapour;

how against the locked door

and thunderhead of flame

the spitting fat of bodies

gave way to a boisterous blaze.

- devoured, pressed, rendered -

swallowed - never to celebrate

a snowfall of ash - never to love

burning human hair - children unborn

See them, reader - really look -

a hundred girls

screaming in flame-light

sinews incalculable,

dresses igniting,

the whole monstrous pack

finding its own gravity

ecstatic eyes the size of chestnuts

ecstatic eyes of boiling snow…

My iPhone softly trills

its first alarm.

I strum it into silence so as

not to wake my wife;

strum Wikipedia away,

begin to contemplate the day.

The Thread

You cut the thread for you were scared
but I was rather ill-prepared
to watch you turn and walk away
and that is why I opt to stay;
to re-read all the thoughts we shared
(the best of which went undeclared)
and, when I read, I see you cared
yet on that dreadful first of May
you cut the thread.

Oh, that first month, how I despaired!
I wandered through these halls wild-haired
and now I simply wait and pray
that you’ll return on All Saints Day.
You must. You see I never dared
to cut the thread.