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

and we may never land on the value that sufferance cost us but Neverland is just one too many tube stops past caring and you won’t find happiness in the place where you lost it (it will be in the space that opens when ‘Born to Run’ plays through your headphones as you kick the first fallen leaves of autumn) and together Wendy we can live with the sadness then we’ll stick our hands in our pockets and find the stones we’ve carried have fallen down the valley of lost

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

The skyline is jagged with cranes – dipping fishing lines into tracheal tunnels, to dredge compliments out of the brine and the brackish lachrymal funnels into which the day drains. I jump-cut trains: Keeping trust in transit like my life’s a montage edit to teach the new hearts Please Please Do not wish the world smaller. Because one day you’ll grow taller and that faraway tree you longed to climb will stop somewhere below your eyeline and the Eurostar will be just

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

I dreamt a dream last night. I dreamt there was only One Life: That the universe was dreaming through us all, Meeting all motion and becoming its soul, And with the sun streaming through the prism of my Romanticism, I dreamt of rainbow serpents projected across my walls Like songlines through the Dreamtime, Tracks well worn by the footsteps of spirits with a greater understanding than mine – A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused. And when my own night

I. If your touch could liquefy The frozen music of architecture, I’d want to sit where the silence would fall. Seek the space in the seam Between white noise and daydreams: Breathe the breath before the applause. So just hold me like you’d hold a pause. Or a ‘fermata’, if you think you’re smarter, And feeling the vibe of a cheeky sonata: Those birds eyes can stop time. Bend it, Stretch it like the truth, Test it like patience Balancing on the peak of a heartbeat.

Checking my score on the DLR Measuring the social bar: This tally card of the day, I find Makes a sim of me, All my sins multiplied By a double scarlet minus sign. That’s how it works, right? My heart was feeling Porcupine – Always this fucking train line – A game of points on the underground: Fifty up, a hundred down. Green red green red red Redder than I was on the inbound. Did I lose ten more when I slipped your eye? And slid off your mind No further flirtatio

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