If my fortunes should one day fade, And experience dull the sharp edge of fame, And popularity precipitate out of its false solution To rub salt into the wounds of life’s insults – When the rest of the world is still waiting to win this game, Just give me an orchard of my very own, With trees I can call by name. A living database of the ones who stayed, The ones I helped raise, Even the ones who got away: Each one a monument to the moment we gave ourselves the permis

(Let’s take a walk) Knee-deep in nettles and the weather tipping change – Thick silt raising spirits Beating through the new-grown neural pathways. Footsteps sounding in my shadow Stepping on the heels of a hot new take And ghosts crowding the airwaves. Bike racks Improvised. Steel drum love songs in a counterfeit night The last time – (The last time). Hairstyles may change but the rhythm stays the same – Thames Clippers snake below like something slipping away.

We live by the light of shadows: Absent figures cut their silhouettes Behind Act V curtains, Where paper dolls flirt In the muted hush Of a stayquiet breeze; Pockets full of posies – Hands linked in mind and material marking boundaries I never knew how to find. (But Embankment was much sweeter when the busker sang that night). The skies fly by as painted scenes, Fat nimbus accumulating cumulo-witnesses To our wretched lovelorn dreams; Where the mushroom-cloudy heads

4am draws a bath surrounding island limbs, nail polish the shape of foreign countries in chipped enamel, signalling semaphore loneliness across lachrymose trenches – or shipping channels, broadcasting the old vibrations of some thread-bare intimacy be my be my baby a star of federation stapled brutally to a new white flag nation, stitched with silk cotton grief and the forgotten belief that e equals somethingsomething constant at least I can count on that can I

Remember staring at those Magic Eyes? I can sure remember being blind – Didn’t even know the trick I couldn’t find; Nose getting closer to the chromatic-static, Rods and cones still in their flat-packs, Wanting to see first but always beaten back By another’s Sight, like a club in a blindside attack: An exclusive club, in fact, with an existing founder, Charging admission – With change – For twenty-twenty vision. No – Twenty?! Twenty-something already? Gosh, when

This ivory tower is bricked up with soap blocks: So when hard Hope knocks she’ll knuckle-dust Fine white-fleck blizzards to remind us: Even snow has his false-effects counterpart – So what have you stage-named your heart? There’s no vine to climb, it won’t stick to the side: Rain-slick walls will slip-slide and suds-up; The urgent ablution of detergent absolution, A lather of missteps and sins to be drowned: Forgive me, father – for I won’t let you down. No dirt-steps

They’ll dig us up in a thousand years And dust off the bone-idle lust: Tripping along the path to the weir Past the bolder-hearted boulders, Down where the agitated sediments Kicked up tea-cup tempests, Stirring sugar sentiments In over-brewed brooding tar pits; But the love-note motes settled finally – Where the boats sit like index fossils, And weathered Wisdom sits weaving A striated riverside history. They’ll build a quarry one day, And with visceral granite s

Back to the start. “We should just go, I’ve had enough of this.” I’m sorry – What did you say? Mon ami, It’s really that simple: A life worth living, eh? You know you could easily just give me A hint – ha ha. You think I might take It all away, everything significant. I’ll continuing wishing, I suppose, but It’s not important now, All far too hard to solidify – And your vinous thoughts are Needing room to breathe. These hot heated words are just Condensing

Remember The sands can run backwards – And I’ve seen Right into the heart of somewhere intoxicating: The Archer has shot his arrow The wrong way but You’re afraid of navigating In this Dark Matter. So we’re just time-travellers standing Still. Our own fabric of space Is woven from The eternal blank canvas Of a potentiality. Right in the heated core A French knot singularity, A single stitch of a time, Marked our Genesis – But we’ve already Separated, Our bo

In tennis there’s Love in a zero, But not in Roman numerals. That’s a digit in absentia; Love is absent there. Nulla, void – Null: a void. A trap to now avoid. Nought’s had: nothing gained. But how could you ever feel loss When there’s no number for “nothing remains”? That explains a lot. But the hard-inked figures will try to linger, The ones of greater magnitude. They’re etched into my sight, Like when you look out of the window at the sky And then close your e

We slip-slide past each other, Like honeycomb-slick layers of graphite. I fall into you for an instant And inhale a future that lingers Like the vapour-trail of a stranger’s perfume. A comet. The portent of a terrible possibility. A singularity, Where our timelines cross And we brush palms, And feel a fever that shoots through the vertical plane like a pin. The mounted specimen of a moment. That’s it. The pendulum stops swinging and we pause in the Now. Nothing for