Kingsley is alive with life, a puppy and a world.

I will stroke him senseless and he will be my hand,

a smiling horizon of fluff with a collar of dawning blue,

an extravagant Fibonacci tail of promise. This dog has

small Tourmaline eyes, I don’t know them yet but will-

that’s what they’re for. I will learn how to play, steer-

in the middle of the night he will swish round the house

like a silent boat. His tag will merrily ring the hours,

the hero of a larger dream. Soft and found, a Christmas

dog for life- he pulls the sled. Noble, he will trot

through the years, his tongue kept shining best

for the child that never comes, bright river in a garden,

some halfling coming home. He will eat up old shoes

and knit me boots to stride dark mornings hard and

chase the marsh, the wobbling reeds. He’ll race

the rain and crash through bracken, sponge
with paws like hooves that cleave the doom.
Watch this dog explode in droplets- a small silver
spring at a fairy-tale ball. Bear out of starlight,
our doglet- the best goodest boy of them all.

A Winter’s Tail

Now you are a lion

in this dim lit room.

Your watchful eyes

scan mine like cubs,

I like your chest &

heart too wry for our

un-slice of time. Post-

captive & plain, our

fluid tooth of force,

one whole world in

a world. A thing of

snow now loud with

masculinity fights

mine, half quiet

as mechanism, the

happy hour paws, we

wrestle our trestle, all

exit, pursued by a bear.

Supposing there is a tiny kernel of life

lodged somewhere behind the furious wave

of your ailing masculinity, hear this-

we are not for you. We are not for your

tears as the shock of cold air hits you

square in the gullet. More powerful

than you understand, we watch, can see

the desperate boy, red as an egg,

your failed excuse. Buoyed with need,

the big man- hear your foghorn, feel

the scrabbling, all the -ests then more,

most right, most loud, most sexed.

And all behind your blinds of meat,

the old days gripe- that time you touched

the sleeping girl, the feels you copped,

the castles built and smashed. You know

we know, your default fear, some idiot pride,

your fingers dank with beer, with blood,

the well paid plans that never birth. Don’t

sweat it kid, you’re still alive but brinked

and beached for sure; A kind not long,

your war is done- a violence all unclothed.

Leaves chuck themselves onto tracks, flashers

in their airy clearings. A stack of mags with hot

chicks, the haunted caravan in Weeley, Essex-

haunted with Essex. My roving 10 year old mind

like a priest in a lady of wicker- a rubbish witch,

dropped off at dawn to the seafront toilets where the

mirrors are sheets of metal. Dark tearooms of fudge

and lingering death. The fracas of rain on a skylight

which cuts. Wore his t-shirt in bed for months,

breasts pressed flat in penance, the neck too

high, the way he called his sister slag. We burnt

the lanes, as fiery idols of corn that flickered

bright then slipped down cracks to London.

Mocking the plimsoll line, our cat-right reflex spin,

locked in hedgerows with glo-worms and peat,

slight openings and watchful glassy silence ftw

Clean shelter and bounding dogs between the lake

and I for miles. A queen in the fresh mountain air,

up above furrows and vines arranged in perfect

portions, a full-fat exercise book of juicy maths.

Not a mountain person with this pouch, a little twinge

in the back of the knees, cold-stuck in coffee, art,

watching, don’t care if you’re better than me, it’s nice

here. The air is rarefied and sends me dreams of

dead babies, a party at which I am weightless as a

ballerina. I rot in the pool like a lily pad, dangerous

underwater as a sister. The unicorn has popped,

grappled in fabulous rodeo, the horn gone down.

Not my Dad. I am on holiday and keep working

to fill up the silence. We hear a story about a

bricklayer whose fingers stuck fast in a pulley,

crow hard at absurdity, dress light.

The old ship left, creaking into the chop & good-

bye to you. Another month with empty arms &

the racket of other people’s luck, tiny little eyelids,

the slight smell of burning from a fontanelle.

Off you go. I am waiting for ze blood to come, it is

baptism, a renewal of hope. They say relax it’ll be

your big opening soon, I say forget it. Ego’s overrated,

the whole point is to give & it seems I cannot do that.

Sandy tears for the tiny speck of morse-flecked

light that circles my Shangri-la, wanting a go. It is

missing me, wants a gro of skin to slip into,

for me to give it a bit of a stroke- old Niblet.

Honestly, perhaps I am not destined to love that hard-

it is hard. More to give the oak-eyed olds a break

& call those quickstep children as my own . Ok then!
We are all one after all. A writhing mass of golden fleece.

Wrong Birds  

after Leviathan 2012

33 Upon earth there is not his like,

Who is made without fear.

- Job 41

Spreading out from the brave houses of New Bedford into the darkness these men- Azoreans and Portuguese, black Cape Verdeans propelled from the barbarous coasts, ghosts with their whaling mouths- where the sea speaks in fish. These oil skinned men hang from the edge with their golden links, her white hand open to them like a roaring Christ.

From one silver-bloodied hell to the next, they haul this rope of a hanging man, sprats held firm in their yellow fists. The bone white gulls, horrible like stars, have throats full of the electric hum of the terrible machinery. It is distilled wind, the sound of death- they are throwing it out across the knocked up depths of her baited breath.

Smoke pours from their nostrils as from a boiling pot on a fire of reeds. Their breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from their mouths. Strength lives in their necks; dismay goes before them- the folds of their flesh are tightly joined; firm and immovable. Their undersides are jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing-sledge.

Wet lipped, his smoke leaves scrimshaw on the night. She’s hooked and knifed right down the middle as a wingless skate. Shuck on shuck in a steel cage, a man with the face of a pike. Eyes couched in a nest of nets, filmy with salt, hopeless with his sunken chest. He is scrabbling around, lost as a knife as it enters the husk.

Athena, your waterfall of blood. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. He dives down into the blackest gorges and soars out, invisible in the sunny spaces- tension in his neck. Tension in ropes and winches, Tension in the nylon and crow’s feet, tension in floats and forecasts, hands like the jaws of a shark.

Johnny is a sailor, he is in a white vest. he has coffee in a paper cup. by high noon the men are back. Johnny’s eyes are fixed to the TV. Brian makes a phone call home, the crew loses thousands of dollars a day. Indigestion? Constipation that comes and goes every day? 4.5 pounds of fecal waste. He coughs- his throat is fucked. He is fucked.Johnny is fucked up. he has run out of coffee, there is kitchen paper. Johnny is in a room on the sea. he is all at sea. his eyes close. he is asleep- his whole life he is asleep. His eyes are heavy. His eyes are pain, heavy weather, exhaustion, brotherhood.

The birds are upside down and they are wrong. They are wrong and under the water. The fish are gulls with bent wings. There is a joint in them, a small tense joint.  They are giving off light and are the wrong way around. The birds are wrong and your lungs are heavy with them. Thier feet are made of small bones.

Pull in the Leviathan with a fish hook- tie down his tongue with a rope. His snorting throws out flashes of light; eyes like wilting flares.The Lady of Grace is found submerged in 56 feet of water at the bottom of Nantucket Sound, the bodies do not surface. The bodies roll across the sea bed, eyeless, to East Chop- wed with the Summer Flounder.

The mermaid on a man’s arm moves. She undulates on skin, breasts made of skin. She is the colour of skin and the screeching of a terrible bird, harsh as a child. Man as machine, prising out the life and bathing in eternal mildness of joy. Golden beards and eyes that that have seen death forever, foreheads welted as tide-battled sand.

Bug-eyed fish and their gasping mouths. Cut and opened, inside-out and raw as widows. They swim

in their own blood. They judder and crash on the waves, souls like tiny Noah’s, stomachs tipped out, gutted and chucked, wet purses nicked by boys. The sea’s red belly empties across the decks like a sickness- a bloated bird that stalks the bloodied boards.

Chainmail from some giant knight, the mechanism churns and moans. Ropes unfurl like the trunks of great soft trees. The sea and the vessel trawl the other, their hulls like chins that push through butter. Starfish- helms from an airless heaven or the hell above- half-swimming wrecks, piled up like Jews. Call them Ishmael. These men of old and their god-like strength.

Image by Louisa Albani, painted especially for this poem

across a reddening ocean

of tangled cables, sinew,

or by a white bloody van upon

a bridge that does not reach,

one by every one the kids

get pulled like toyless crackers.

old moons, familiar soils. still,

the crones warn us in bullets

love is abstract, childish,

we suffer their unreal flag

in swathes of crime tape-

hyperbole, traditions of sickness,

a terrible romance, these apes.

Palm down, flat with the card underneath. He is buying a small

container of pasta, the pasta is not nutritious and barely satisfying.

Into the station, a clock and also wretches. Some are happy, click-

clacking around, lush. A fake smile catches the worm, she is so tired.

They are all tired but there is Floradix. There is coffee coming from all

the pores in every wall. From every epidermis there is coffee. And time,

all the time. Compared to these skyscrapers and the men who built them.

In the lounge, and hating the way it sounds. Sitting room, Mum would

have insisted. Tapping away, good luck. Stuckist in flannelette.

There are motivational quotes for this I bet, gone viral like a fascist.
There will be a programme for this, a way to re-enter the station.
There is a yoga pose called not depressed, it costs eighty quid at

least, have you tried it. Follow your bliss in an arts admin position, you’ll

be around people: not complex, and they can’t see your eyes.

Back on the walkway there are hundreds of unshackled minds. All with

purpose. A lady nearly knocks my flapjack off she is so full of it. Nips in.

Busy and alive, in her groove. Emotional freedom is an excuse, and it pays

really badly. Also, do you want to be remembered for being tired. She was

always tired! The pews erupt into laughter, they are fond of how tired I was

all the time. Always tired! Just the way she was, changing the world by

loving people. Writing some poems that a hamster made his bed in.

One day the crutches just stop working. It’s ok as we are not chimneys nor

romantic enough to be a drunk anymore. It has lost its mystery. One whole

packet of Nice biscuits is guilt. So now I hobble around on cocktail sticks

stopping only for a single robin. More truth in a single bird than anything I am

told by anyone, more sense. Or a dog’s eyes. I crouch and understand the

dog. His head is solid and my hand does not go through it. Or when a child

speaks to me I can make them laugh. When they like me without trying.

Or I could buy a Graze box and browse products in Boots, they used to hold

such promise. All the potions and stinks, now useless. I see the package

design in vector and people decide to have a different colour hair, how

are these decisions made. People represent themselves and I am lost, can

only see the way they move, with bravado or hesitance, a sudden faltering.

Trying to get past you, winding up to make speed, to their futures on time,

toward the olden days clock with no lovers.

Brace to expand the only magic space

left to us, a place of folk that exists beyond

money. I love money! If only

I had some, or the other thing they all

want, called exposure, or big ears.

Disruptive in itself, the voice amongst

ads, pride in my artform, graffiti all

over the banal- nice, I like it. But

also, why does that vast nation get to

finger our last starry trench with a yup,

filmed on metro sets of faux-reality?

Imagine yourself surrounded

by cameras, your words tripping out to

potential emptor, shoehorned hard in

to fit the brief. The future etc! Saving.

I would melt with the absurdity of it,

my self droning on about shares or family

when I have neither, not quite the way they

call it. Grubby poets with their terrible

clothes and outsider faces, spun

to gold in terse intermission. Lol

at the Night’s Watch, volunteering

to keep the tiny slice of light alive. We

never did it to make ends, but for love-

to transform right and organise.

For we exist elsewhere, always. We do,

time bends. I am useless in the mainstream.

Here are some words that fit ok. Spokey-

Dokeys on your wheel, for recall. Sorry

I cannot sell them. They are already yours.

There is a decent amount of stillness

in snow, and also in the yellow of
daffodils. It would be easy to say they remind

me of you, but they don’t. The crown of each

burns. All around, people

are effortlessly people. Some elsewhere.

Poets are ghosts. It is not especially

romantic. Stillness and the urge to participate,

hoping the snow sits. Casting out lines, always

wonky, the agony! Sounds good does it.

Yet in the centre, amber. Suspended,

knowing our faces are lunatic gaps in some

bottomless armour. So far into absurd that

money is unfathomable, hearts birthing

bright from our sleeves like hernia. Still,

the need to be a part of it, to have existed.

To never forget that we are slipping away

all miracle. Vivid and extra, skin and light,

experiments in weather. To touch, to write it
right. Staying open in the only way we