Poems

This article has become my poetry post. I’ll add poems to it over time as I write them, or collate them from things I’ve previously written. My longest autobiographical poem, Deadwater, is towards the end.

Edit: I just want a text editor where the line spacing on the email that goes out is exactly the same as the linespacing I see on screen before I hit send. Is that too much to ask Substack?

Upon seeing a rose encased in ice

The night air
Throws a glass cloak
For modesty
Around the red 
Offering
Offering a little pause
In time from whithering
Pleading no end to
That redness

But the sun reclaims for a jealous sky
That water again
Soon after, rotting petals fall
I am sorry water could not hold time

Untitled

Do I remember the pyroclastic light?
The rhythm sun of the sex discotheque
Robed in warm water and silky skin
The limbs slide over silk in soapy suds
The need to own and be owned, fused
Clothed in bridal white rapid waters
Sequined in bubble bright red gleaming light

Dying in the rain

Do you think there was blood in
The mud in that flood as the
Rain cascades down down down down
As the wicked ram against
The wooden gates of the great
Arc stark upon the green hill?

Or do you think the wicked
Beheld their children and saw
Their mothers and their fathers
Saw then that though they were bad
They were people cold in the rain
And how merits man to drown?

Did Noah floating on the boat
Remember their names, their sins
Or did he just see their faces
Sad, scared in that first rain
No man nor woman so bad
That they were not dying flesh

Narrow escape

I lost myself in the heaven of stars
Circling the drain of being, of ending
Your cheeks like the slopes of deadly mountains
You are direct, sharp, shapely, kingly

I wanted, right there, to hold you snugly
Your hair tumbled like a silken crown
Your red towel loose as if a regal gown
Your voice drifts, laden in incense of power

We talked about the best song by tenacious D
We talked about trouble composing harmony
I told you I found you once on Grindr
Thought you were catfishing when you caught me
Now though, here you are, bereft of whiskers

You said you were an actor, I wondered
What you’d made and whether I’d ever see it
I wish I’d asked your name, your name though
I am glad I didn’t ask your name though
Your ninety seconds of speech haunt me still
Another ninety and I’d love you, long you

Glide your eyes over blank walls

Glide your eyes across the blank walls
Like the clutching hands that sink
Beneath the quicksand of doldrums
Searching for purchase on
Perfectly smooth rocks, illegible
To all interpretation and mental essays

Consider a peculiar dimple in the wall
A line or knot in the wood making
Earthbound constellations a practice
As old as buildings- older indeed
Since there have always been caves

The school child and the worker alike
Achieve a state of agitated tranquility
A state that is neither inside nor outside
Time, or rather time becomes an endless
Field- again, without purchase, again in
Repetition, tick, repetition, tick, repetition
It's bloody dull.

Such altered illuminations on the mind's eye
Like a lantern made to cast a special shadow
Can generally only be achieved with illicit substances
But in the schoolyard, the office, the factory
Eternity is free. Oh churlish mind, why do you
Not grant such in the brief hour with friends
In the embarrassingly short minutes of fucking
In the days with a dying mother, or even
The last years of an aged dog's life

You have made eternity unequal in each hour
Until we die, and from that moment on, all divisions
Upon time receive their just allocation of oblivion.

London Underground Blues (Poem co-authored with GPT-3)

• (This poem is still subject to revision, and will be appearing in an upcoming article on GPT-3)

A Woman on the London Underground
Is reading poetry on her phone
She’s speaking it most audibly
She sees no other passengers
She hears not the train’s dull moan
It is as if she is just in the bath

It’s by W.H. Auden
It’s called Funeral Blues
The dart of her eyes along
The screen suggests a rapturous descent
How we hate the cadence of her voice
Yet we may not deny it
The cock has already crowed
Through the rap tap of her hand and voice
We can hear the thump of the pallbearer’s feet
As the coffin glides towards the crematorium
We can feel pain
Know emptiness
And in that pit our resentment breeds
At this train woman who would be
The breaker of civic indifference
Reader to many
For an audience of one
A scattering of grunts, stares, eye rolls
Attempt to skirmish with her
Unimpeded, she reaches the last line

…………………………………………….
A pause, a clutch to her chest
She is pale, then she is deep blue
Myocardial infarction
We race over to save her
(What do we even hope to do?)
But now she is dead
Tetelestai oh funeral blues
Our once over-familiar stranger
Now forgotten by all warmth
And nothing now
Will never do her
Any good

My beloved in the snow of midday/ “He’s”

The purple flowers were like
Chemical fire on the white snow
Height, water, a little wind
Covered us in bright blankets
Glorious crystal of noonday
That winter fire light bright sight

My hungry hands are full of
My beloved, my beloved, my
Jewel who outflames refraction
And, so it seems is on earth
Only so as not to cause
Undue stellar jealousy

But words are common things and
The stars are not here and can’t
Dispute the justice of my
Intemperate and lovesmote claims
Right now though on planet earth
He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s

Conversation in a garden about a trampling

A garden. Trees are swinging. Stars are spinning cold.
That cold up above parade, liminal lights.
The dreadful lust of roses beneath moon shade.
….of course, he speaks
“I trust not justice elephants dispense, hence
Though that there bull trample twice I trust
Him not once and wish the woman more mercy
In next carnation, so she be free of tusks”
So bad- I’d like to fuck him till he’s mute
….Impossible creature, he owns all the rules
….It’s his eyes the stars spin in
….I love his stupid genius
….I’ll be here so he can discourse all night
….I hold him from behind
…Cupping him against the astral and boreal winds

Dew

Dew flies in 

the sunlight

Rockpools

For an adult a rockpool is

A bit smelly, sometimes pretty

For a child a rockpool is

A nursery and a graveyard

The soft adults are wrong

The loud kids are right

Playing in nets of light

Cast by the little waves in

Petit oceans surrounded

By tiny rocky coasts and cliffs

Rockpools of recollection

Remain in me now that

The tide of seeing is

Receded to the ocean

Hydrating me, keeping me

From growing tired of being


I dreamt I saw God’s face

I dreamt I saw 

A portion of God's face

Only by his grace

Did I not see more

Lest I end like the sea

Ends a tributary creek

Rich in the mystery of darkness

Abundant in the revelation of light

The fire of his eyes is justice

And from that flame rises 

The incense of mercy 

And all the heat is love

And the cold is love too, 

Lest we burn away

All there is, is love

Moonrise

The night before moonrise is old
The weary birds conclude their skirmishes
Singing out agreed partitions till tomorrow

But the night after moonrise isn't young or old
No time (or all) passes under the lunar-lit stars
Eternity strokes the earth and cicadas takeup
The star-chorus

Futility

New shoots

On a fallen trunk

Untitled (slam poetry entry)

I.

I recall an evening, out of my mind
Prone, belly skyward, dissolute below the stars
And wondering
At my absences- at my trite completions
But on that evening I was distant from my own heart

So I beheld distantly the gorges, pinnacles and crevasses
Of myself
And in my relaxation I permitted
Wonder at my own hesitations, fractures, fearings
Seeing my mind in a warm, though patronizing light
I have always wanted to return to that place
Where I ceased to be, yet was not dead

And I have heard it said by the poet
That with each dart and turn
A sparrow annihilates a world
Enters a new one
But in the lidded cauldron of the human skull
Steam has no exit
And so we become wise
In the memory of gathered thoughts
Carrying them, like aching joints
Till we are arthritic in the mind
Hauling the cold weight
Of thought ghosts - Of memory ghasts
Homesick for a distant place,
Soft in mercy

By a lake with friends

We are sitting in a wild garden

On a warm twilight, with cheap wine

There are about twelve of us

We laugh over and over like waves


And I know I will always be here,

Twilight won't end, I have my peace

By a lake with friends I lie, I laugh

By a lake with friends I lay, I laughed

Break silence

You don't
Have to break
Silence
You can just
Walkthrough

The Ballad of Tim

In the distance at the fork of a river
Off the coast of Canada, a grizzly stands
He does not need a mysterious forgiver
For he is too simple to do a thing wrong

Long have I longed to be known for
Faults and virtues. To sing of myself and
Leave none in doubt of veracity as I tore
A copy from the account book of the soul

To have a disease which doubts and condemns
To create a mess in the heart so dense
You wish to open the door to show your friends
Air it, get help carrying it all outside

And if showing the truth made them hate you
That would be a fine judgement and an end
You’d hope to love them still no less than due
Sunsets over the windswept cliffs you love. Be here.

It’s morning and the cosmic hand has swept
The cold dark sky and its starlight guards away
Even in the secret chambers of sleep I wept
And the sun won’t change that, yet it is warm

I dream of a paradise that I cannot reach
For I am human and would unmake paradise
At some unimpeachable place they come to teach
Each of the seven bright arts of the gentle-kind

In that place there are flowers and holy lights
Because I want to be there I cannot
And for that yellow-warm light to glow
That place was sealed against all like me
Let me be gentle so when the world is rough
And I pray, heaven won’t see a hypocrite
And I won’t wear the crown of proud white bluff

And if I can’t be gentle, let me not pretend
As my flesh rots my mind lashes out weaving
In the void projects, truths and lies to sustain
A life after life, in terror I am heaving

Death is already within me so I run, write, fight
I found you searching for communists that
Also appreciate Sufjan, Felix and Bernie
Cyber nymphs led me to where you sat
Algorithmic woods by river of hope

Ibis, peacock, hen and falcon hawk and dove
Skylark, raven, kiwi, albatross and hummingbird
I wish I could open the aviary of my love
But you appraised me and found in me light
We are dying all the time. More or less frantic.
More or less rushed. No less dying still.
We are unbeing, decaying, necromantic
Please hold me till I pass on from this world

Babel

Shatterlight and higherrise
Bellow the longinus waves
Oh staves! Oh cups!
             Jug of thou- and wine!
(Blood is the life, blood is the life)

And if there were gods searing
In the thickets of nothing betwixt
Stars

Perhaps ascended they
to higher sublimity-
Existence without attributes
In a world with a taste
For desert landscapes

Deadwater

I

I recall in tranquillity
Fever-dive hours.
Once I saw a sailboat listing Upon a great-waved sea
The sea was I and so was the boat I could not see any stars
For the blasts of ocean-spray

In what quiet cove can I go hiding from a storm
Blasting up the cartoid artery and flooding through
The cognitive estuaries, over-spilling memory’s tributaries?
Tell me where I might make my stand against my wrath?
Might a clever present play the future off against the past?
Am I to live only in the lacunae between foretelling & recollection
In the times between guilt and dread when, exhausted of mental flight,
Whether backwards or forwards, the I drifts in easy content?

We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth

II

Behold, a shattered glass bowl that held doubts
They multiply in shattering
As each beam of light
Crosses every glass splinter
It breeds a new splinter
And a new lance of light
Fecund heresiarch

Absolute clarity lies within
That lit glass rubble but the trouble
Is that so does everything else
As in Borges’ library up in that tower

III

Do you know where your right hand is? Walking through a shop and not knowing whether you’ve assaulted someone heedlessly. Analysing each moment of your past like a sicko prosecutor. The fears iterate by sinister Darwinism, seeking cognitive blind-spots. Did I mutter threats of violence to that child? Did I insult that shop attendant? Mixed memory and aversion form a rancid bin-juice born decaying.

IV

I came to the stairs
There was a wobble in her voice
By each step her voice rose higher
So I rise to her and she calls with greater urgency
And I rise to her with greater urgency
She and I can only meet after escalation shatters
Past the horizon of panic and further-
Past the sea rock of worn defeat
She and I must be one.
I sprint.

V

Imagine that someone came to you in the middle of the night, stepped into your mouth and began to grow through your capillaries. They were not content merely with habitation, their constant insistence was that you must keep grafting dead organs and limbs onto yourself. You become a born-again Frankenstein (don’t be a pedant) with all the zeal of a convert to an undead lifestyle. The new limbs are heavy, and stink, and burn up your flesh with septisemic fire and puss-flood, but the man who stepped inside your mouth begs you stitch on more.

VI

The inside of a head becomes lonely as it becomes crowded
The only things that elbowed through those crowds
Were other hauntings
Brief dune-sedge love in salted ground
Warring wrath against money made world
Twin engines of raging-love and loving-rage
Racing for diversion and the exaltation of rebellious motion

Circulation round the track kept my blood in motion
Rammed down winds to bellow my lungs
Political contention, war, courtship, frenetic study
Vain dreams of greatness, discontent
Which gave me a little contentedness
To declare permanent war or endless love
And so to terminate surrender in unutterable resolution “Optimism of the will!”—clenched hands, though they wobble

In the obsidian lands where resistance gave no comfort Resistance still gave sustenance

Just as all the previous Sugatas

VII

Life is so long. Are you so innocent? You are tired. You dream of a gentle place. You saw it as anyone might imagine it—holy light on wild-flowers, easy with its comforts, free with its joys. To be such a place it had to be distant from this world and sealed against you.

VIII

Maybe I just wasn’t fucking often enough?
Victorian life is better novelised than lived
Hysterical, neurotic, guilty, phantasmal
Maybe I wasn’t drinking enough?

A friend called me the Ayatollah
In respect of my beard and sobriety

Hume and the Buddhist sages pronounced that persons are aggregates without greater unity. I find myself a bundle but there is no liberation here. The parts rub against each other like cans in a grocery bag bruise fruit. Or perhaps I am the curate’s egg.

IX

Give me a seabird’s wings
On the cliffs, about forty meters over the crab pools I dream of ascending with the gulls, but higher
Diving and again rising in alliance with wind
What waves perturb the gull are brief
And if it is to end by hawk, that too is brief

Yet I would rise higher still, till I sat on a perch
Overlooking time and the jolting succession of moments
Above the waves of kings, ministers, exchequers
Yet if I am not to reach that exalted perch
I will be low enough to observe the bright net
Of refracted sun that plays upon the hills of water
Give me a seabird’s wings

X

Easier perhaps to talk of the accoutrements of terror and the reflections it invoked. Easier to do that then to photograph medusa. Yet I do remember being confused as to whether I was more guilty or more afraid. It seemed important that I be more guilty than be afraid, but it is hard to feel guilt while facing knives. Consequently, I felt supplementary guilt at my thin guilt.

We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth

XI

The future is boundless, not only ahead but sideways
The patterns of your inferences only ever ape
The subtle causal chains which bind the forward momentum
Of the world whose surface you cling to

The mind is stretched between times and possibilities,
Beyond any accommodation by mental sinew and bone
The heart successively roars and fizzles

XII

I came to the living room
And it was filled with ash
Though I never smoked
Or sat by fire

I made an ink of that ash
And began to write these verses upon my arm

XIII

He is there, and I smile into his oblivion
He never loved you, so ideas of romance
Had the character of Banach-Tarski’s sphere
He is gone now, other suburbs, other worlds

I do not miss him, except on special occasions
My affections were never lost, except perhaps at the first moment
Dead on arrival
Yet still worthwhile

It is right to rebel against most things
But not you, oh sweet tyrant
It’s good odds you kept me breathing

IXV

We do not sit upon heaven’s throne
Nor are we the rebel, cast down like a slash of lightning
We are the flesh that raised our gaze

Half wondering, half begging
The dance is ending, where is the bridgegroom?

XV

How rash are those who clamour for justice? (I have been among them)
Life is wide, deep and changing.
We are excesses
Of identity, act, motivation.
Of miscalibrated judgement and selfish grasping.
Do you think you would be clean under heaven’s eye?

Were there a book that contained each numbered thought and small deed
Of yours wouldn’t you shred it, burn it and eat the ashes?
I wouldn’t. I would give you that book. Press you to read it.
I do not think you would like me, but my terror is to be misunderstood
I fear that you will think I am a different kind of monster than that I am.
So I give you my promise, that should an angel scribe that book

I’ll give you a copy.
And I promise that if you ever give me a copy of your celestial biography
I’ll try to shut the my eye of judgement and open that of mercy
It’s simple self-interest. Chesed pro chesed.

XVI

Can we remember pain? In our mind’s eye we might
See rose fluids or, under that, a startling glimpse of pearly white
Laid open by a scalpel. We shudder back. We peer forward.
But who has the pen by which to bind agony? “Sharp”, “dull”, “throbbing”, “irritating”, “intense”

Wholly feeble, as if a snake tried to wander with its vestigial leg bones
But that is where we find ourselves—thirsty for conveyance in a desert of names
We can only hope to articulate pain through our inarticulateness
Just as, by chance, static on a television set captures a snowstorm

I remember wandering the streets, sobbing and calling for divine fire to kill me and all the other wicked. As I wept I listened to pop on half smashed headphones. What would it take to make you march through city streets weeping and calling the fires of an unknown God?

XVII

I ascended to the attic
To store, retrieve, invent
A mnemonic parade
Without volition my hands
Raise the dust in small incantations
How does one dislodge a fake memory?
Or terminate the routine of shuddering

I see
He and she are here, interlocked eye-beams
I am not in either eye

In this attic I lay in the pattern of my veins I am sinews.
Whether these gobbets
Be thought or flesh I am in neitherway free I am chained by my own substance.
Above me powers contend in the air.

XVIII

Think now

Life has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering trepidations, Guides us by vanities.

After such knowledge what forgiveness? Forgiveness after such knowledge what? What forgiveness after such knowledge? Knowledge what forgiveness after such? Such knowledge what forgiveness after?

IXX

In metamorphosis the tissue is not merely subtracted from and added to inside the pupae, rather the whole flesh devours itself, save for microscopic clusters (imaginal bodies), becoming a soup of cells. What unites both life-stages is scarcely more than a double-helixed teleos. Yet memory persists.

We shall build a tower

let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth

XX

If I could but seize the wax of Icarus
The tailor of Ulm’s fabrics
Etana or Bladud’s crown of feathers
If I could but fly, I could seize the sun’s silver
Forge a mirror by which to demonstrate

The storm that rends the head
Of some shivering soul you know
Forgive a thief that stole for you and
Shelter all, for you, cannot see their weather

XXI

To find a point of collapse at which loss and victory die.
And that sea is now
A vast lake that
Night or day
Forms a perfect twin
To the sky

Over the stones of the tower
Drift currents and sweet, lazy fish
The waves will dance again
But I might hope to dance
With them

Afterword to Deadwater

A word on credit. This poem is allusive to the point of plagiarism, and past that (about 5% is lifted from other poems). My purpose is to convey an experience with all that I have and I’ll gladly steal words for that. I have no concern to prove myself as a poet, only to tell the story as well as it can be told.

The debt to T.S. Eliot is obvious, even in the title. The debt to the Aiken’s Tetelestai and the Romantics (including Eliot perversely read as a romantic) is less obvious. It’s very much a poem about me, and I apologize for that vanity. My story is not unique. My particular kind of OCD based on a fear of harming others is quite common. Yet few talk about it for fear of seeming like a dangerous weirdo. It is an inherently self-concealing form of mental illness. Especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to avoid the narcissism of self-display even in an anonymous form, but I want to show you this story, lest it be scattered everywhere among the nameless like me, and forgotten.

For those who have loved me.

I miss you

For someone I have never met
Strange thought, I must confess
I miss you, oooh

I miss you in summer moonlight
I miss you in winter sun
I miss you, oooh

One day by pygmalion’s chisel 
Or one day by explorer’s eyeglass
Or one day by a mystic canto spun
I’ll find you.

When the branches are too cold
To grasp onto their leaves
I miss you, oooh

When I am scared and naked
When I am soaring unbound
I miss you, ohhh

One day by pygmalion’s chisel 
Or one day by explorer’s eyeglass
Or one day by a mystic canto spun
I’ll find you.

When I am veiled in glory
Or draped in humility
I miss you, ohhh

Beneath star, sun or cloud
Above peat, ground or concrete
I miss you, ohh

One day by pygmalion’s chisel 
Or one day by explorer’s eyeglass
Or one day by a mystic canto spun
I’ll find you.

The anonymous author’s ballad

Dedication: To anonymous, vale.

I’m a chrysalis, splitting
Out of me pour my many words
Moths fly out, invade the night
After the dusk that ends my days

I have lived now, long or short
If I die now and comport
Beneath the soil, past the toil
Still, my words wind to other minds

Some smash in spider lace
Some jabbed by parasite wasps
But more moths breed, scholar’s greed
Larvae words fresh for new mouths

I’m a chrysalis, splitting
Out of me pour my many words
Moths fly out, invade the night
After the dusk that ends my days

Merism life

I wanted to write something using different kinds of words in each verse. The first verse uses only nouns, the second verse uses only verbs, the third verse uses only adjectives and the final verse uses only words that compare two things [not a proper category like the others, I’m aware]. The final solitary line goes noun, verb, adjective, comparing word. Let me know if you guess the narrative arc.

Fire air earth water
Swamp slime dinosaur bang
Rock rock spark heat heat
Metropole office chair

Staple print email
Check recheck sigh sign
Wait wait wait wait wait
Exit drive wait open flop

Dreamy sexual red
Lubricated saintly
Hopeful sad gleaming
Maudlin open dreamy

More truer different
Bloodier older less
Obscurer hungrier
Eyes look sad above

Mindstuck

This rather gives the game away, but I wanted to create something designed to make people endlessly seek meaning. Six lines in a made-up language, and two in English, all designed to be and seem like a sort of puzzle box.

Sansi arcti mor
Sansi arctosin
Tavorki Vastor
Rhktos marble vin

Mi-a-lear rasko
Champagne fellatio
Mi-a-loar rasko
A most brutal Twitter ratio

A bundle in time

If God is outside time
Then prayers reach him
In time. So reasons
I, as a child who
Prays for his dead gran
Prays for her good health.

If I am a bundle
Of agitate moments
Dying each second
Let me do another
Charity. Pray for I
My future stranger
Though I won’t survive
Until his coming.

Song against nasality

In singing, there’s this old trick where you hold your nose and sing. If it doesn’t sound that different, you’re doing good. If it sounds very different, your voice is most likely too nasal. You beat this by singing with your nose shut until you can sound normal. The problem is that everyone’s voice sounds weird with their nose shut on M and N sounds. So I wrote this little ditty, suitable to be sung at almost any pitch, and with a variety of different melodies, without any M or N sounds. It’s about something like a schizophasic person describing a sunshower.

Light gathers, circles below
The day-star drizzles holy water
Drops flow, fall from orb-star fall

Unfinished mountain fragments

Otzi

He rose up to the winter sun and down
On each little cold step a small happless
Avalanche does run with bow between boney…

Elliot

Echoes of heavy snows in the valley
Below, below the vault celestial

In this season the ceiling is gray
Dreaming below stolen blanket
Winter is fire time, light zerofire

For thirty images you bought in
Look now and see your wealth
Keats Conjurer…

Sea

Sun glances down
Light lances down
Light weaves a net on the sea