On Venus

Hungry, but I dare not eat.
Suspended animation keeps me
hanging on to dreams and dizziness
like the prophetic ascetics of India.
I glorify mortal flesh
in the raiments of a Goddess
and see heaven in her smile.
I live for this:
for her
and am really dreaming
all the while that she exists.
Were she to pass,
I would instantly snap!
out of my revelry, to bend,
as a branch and shade her,
or uplift her to the stars
so she may glow
in a likewise magnanimity.

Ode to Love and the Infinite

I'm not all drunken vehemence and stoical irony, sometimes I'm impassioned with lofty ideals of love.

You are made of the stars;

they are formed of you:

a million, tiny, bright white flashes

of brilliance, each

like the touch of God-

something so unknown to the minds

of mortal man-

a mystery, primal and archaic

as love itself;

you are made of all these things, and,

they are made of you.

Reach a hand out

into the empty sky surrounding

and know that, in all its vastness,

it is really not so empty at all,

because you breathe

and so fill the world

with joy.

Joy and sadness, both,

for these are things that make the world,

and the world was made for you.

Sturm und Drang

Many things have affected my mood of late; stress, lack of sleep, cogitations on amour, anxiety, desperation and the list rolls on endlessly with all manner of (in)conceivable states.

Here are two pieces, not intended as a couplet, that work along similar themes.

Living off one small meal a day;
no cash, no plan, no ability to maneuver through the ceaseless oceans and winds of time-
trying to chase happiness along the trails of 'panty-lines',
give each day the name of another girl-
I find my monday, tuesday, wednesday... Sunday rolls right into line, with beers and smoke and wine.
Travel the county, paying my dues, paying respects and sweating under an evening sun;
walking further than the limits of my energy to douse my apathy- antipathy-
I am nothing but the concepts and complex terms used to identify me as they come sprawling out the mouths of my company. Old lovers and latent ones, I chase dreams of  intercourse like dragons-
lance in hand, writing, riding out on a drunken horse.
I am at one with many, in this way; friends committed to institutions, institutionalised by a hard life like none ever gone before where tickets are sold at higher prices than we have been given the means to afford.
The air reeks of discommunication- breathe it through phones and 'tablets' too large to swallow-
we pour our lives into a sustainable un-reality as the world and the word withers and dies.
Can you blame me?
Looking for something real in hidden places,
attempting to find a bright spark of understanding, the likes of nothing else, amidst a black expanse.
Vicariously, I live, but through my days, I disappear. The man who walks is not I, for I exist in thought alone.

                                                                            ***

Handsome; slapdash; scallywag.
Everyone looks the same:
same face, recycled, regurgitated
few years later, cut-out, cut-off
fashionistas- same brand, same hair,
"long live the eighties!" decades later
still shouting the same chant,
jumbled image of apostrophised
individuals- look sharp, look here
lookalike, coveting false singularities
like something special. Seen it all before
from somewhere, squint my eyes to see
you at a distance in someone else
ubiquitous race in same tired scheme,
discover who you really are
styled like every other,
make no mistake, digital ash,
white noise- salt and pepper people
like a garbled fuck-fest, can't break
away from this season's hot trend,
same as every other, yodelling
"YOLO!" filling pockets of corporate
aggrandisement, the rich kids assimilating
urbanite poverty, social amorality
"bad boy" types fill rest-rooms like
chocolate bars in vending machines,
so cliche I sick up my palate.
I see a man I think of as my father
and detest him for every minute he is not,
losing weight, losing jobs, losing sleep,
losing sense and patience being
slowly eaten by the money-machine
bones all chewed and spat out back
again into obscurity.
Want to know the truth?
Stop fucking and start using your brain!
Advice for one and all,
we are all the same- identity
like a kid's sticker book
full of amorphous silhouettes-
white girl with a "black girl's bum",
I wretch again and throw up stones
the colour of dyed hair
insecurities: insecurely me...
Hack-job stand-outs all stand up, stand-offish, wanting hand-outs and hand-jobs;
arrogant pricks-
reel in furious envy, reeling in envious furies
from others just the same..
Nothing is exactly as it appears:
empty and vacuous.
Why waste a life living as one
when life can be lived as no other?
Round up the horde and bury them
for they know not that they live.

...heroin...

In response to Naked Lunch, a poem derived from a line I haven't since found...

Baby, you're my heroin:
I feed my soul on you,
and digging in
your growing nails,
raked up a wall
around my wound.
Maybe I don't know you-
as I press you in,
like past my skin
and, like a diamond,
treasure you. And you drew me in-
had me erupt in crimson,
pleasured plumes;
you shook me cold
and left me hungry,
hankering for you
and I kicked you
like a bad habit,
but I'm a dope fiend-
an addict-
and totally stuck on you.
   And baby, you're my novacaine:
I bare my teeth for you
in bouts of words,
sobs and shouts,
until they all come through.
You get inside my blood
and settle in my brain,
and at last I'm subdued-
when you hit, I feel no pain.
You numb me to the world;
numbing me to everything,
but the body always pushes out
whatever's underneath the skin,
and so I always need it more-
can't let it all rush out,
and the need for a hit
brings more words,
and then the sob and shouts.
Yeah, baby, you're my anathema-
the very best of what's my worst;
I bend my knee in reverence
to be blessed by your curse
and I bear your weight-
my crucifix-
to be swallowed, lonely, by the night
and every time, stabbed in the heart,
so full of love,
I die.

A Modern Lunch

Jesus accepted all-  even the addict and the whore; 'yay verily', he even took them greater into his breast than the pious and the just, for in their delirium, renouncing all earthly things, they came closer to the Lord than any man had ever recourse to know.

A tribute to Burroughs:

I drink the extracted black liquid of the Java bean for breakfast on a crestfallen Monday afternoon: there is no reasoning behind this day and no desire pulls me in any direction but the urge to smoke and obliviate myself. The urge to toilet raises me from death-sleep, though I try to postpone from it as long as I can, short of pissing myself. I am on the drive to destruction- a burning car plummeting down a dead road at night, lit up only by stars and kept hot by its own exothermic reaction
"Hurrah for energy!"
"Watch, now, as I make myself disappear..."
Hear the sound of the great, white, wail as man bends towards his own end;
"Tharr she blows"- man makes mass squeals pumped full of ego-ridden amphetamines, "watch the showers approaching overhead," advice for those, to be taken, who insist on living ruthlessly.
I reel from another biscuit as visions of grandmothers come at me, apprehending with trays full of 'sweet-treats' you just can't eat. Sickness invades the human stomach and makes 'ass-souls' expand like colonialism. I hear the howl of a painted white plane overhead and wonder if it ever read the words of Ginsberg. How long have I felt like a "junky" now? My body's whole sequence of events indirectly affected by undigested chemicals within. Beauty is skin-deep; I dream of tattooed girls and shark attacks; Shaved heads like a crying singer- Nothin' compares 2 U- text speak like a baby, the way she does, will I go the way of all things?
Plunged down the eternal world of the mouth to be shit out safely on the other side. Fenrir, the wolf-mother finds me washed up drunk on the planes of Tartarus, another jumbled, fading, soul with a mouthful of spit and gristled flesh ripped by bear (trap) teeth from my belly as I prepare to bear all unbearable burdens and 'bare' all at once to be bent over and fucked by the next constitutional climax of my life-
"Paid your tax? Paid your bills? WHO ARE YOU?!"
A man with no name leaves no trace as he passes, wind that leaves an acrid, airy, smell that dissolves the hairs of the nose until another hair-brained scheme is concocted to trap the 'invisible man' who is so insensitive to light that he emits no sound as it pulls right through him, penetrated like a bullet tweased right out of the exit-wound by steadfast, surgical hands. "No need for a rhinoplasty; he knows which way to go"
"Twease me baby, shine a little light on me."

The Modern Werther

A tribute to Goethe

You are the very image
of perfection;
and all my heart and happiness
resounds within;
your very eminence
perfumes the air I breathe
and fills me with compassion.
My ideal is formed of you.
And what is sleep to one who takes
such pleasure from holding
the softness of your arm, or,
gently delivering a kiss?
But I am no longer comprised of the parts
that equal, in your eye,
the very reality
of my love.