june 2017

                                                  (i)

...this is the demon that was never born

and can never therefore die

it is the reckless unease

the slurry about our hearts

that tells of imminent lies

approaching from somewhere out there

somewhere beyond the closing twilight

a reckless, anxious universe

that stands each night beside our beds

waiting to sip the saliva from our lips

and leave its taste of panic as a mockery to tenderness

our lips left moist

our hearts again beguiled

and so we became the consumers of speech

always applauding at exactly the right moments

demons full of imminent subterfuge

our strange words poised at a cliff-edge

pulling at the closing veil, the waters breaking

and all that which was never to be born

is finally released...

                            (ii)

...only once have I ever seen my own inscrutable façade

the dog of dark platitudes

staring at me through the half-light

the stranger behind my face

the stranger who has always been

methodically sifting through my existence

searching for the remains of dead angels

smouldering embers of what I once had hoped was love

the anaesthetic certainty of which finally sexed me

and drew my life down into the centre of the earth

home of the dark dog

my unfathomable friend

whose eyes are always full of soliloquies

omens, curses

you sly sifter of remains

who said you could roam about my mind

with your scales and weights

it was only ever this need for love that burnt my face

otherwise I would have been like you

an inscrutable hunter of existence...

                             (iii)

...it is said honest music always carries with it the scent of apocalypse

the shock of hundreds of singing mouths

scattered randomly through the air

their volume an effortless brilliance

dislodging me from the ground

and diving so high into the soul

this world becomes a drop of foetal blood

a memory of something that never happened

although I’m not at all sure why

the smell of so many cremated dreams

should snap my tether to the earth

but it does

and again I find myself to be a gorgeous part of nothing

the music effortlessly tearing down my soul

exposing the confusion and pain

scattering the brilliance

the repeated halleluiahs

of a foetus which never happened

of the apocalypse we have all become...