The Way We Were

Micro slang in the culture industry

high fashion, always low ideals 

but words, and in combinations

floated to see what they look like

in the snow globe of commerce.

Jarring that we read in this way,

more so now that this slang

is the disrupter - fomo forces

its hand on the table, disrupts

the Scrabble tiles of comprehension.

Fair play to writers and

what they think and how they...

fair play to the shadows that slid

the Gaviscon of literacy

to the rear of the medicine cabinet.

Not quite at the cusp of how

ageing is alienation,

I should be back on the shelf

but I'm not, I picked up this 20 year old

The Face and I

realise I was patronised then too

and none of it is important

and alienation is not responsibility

or my hairline, or my crow's feet,

it's perpetual want and why.

Dryish Jan

Zooming out and knowing that this

is also something I do with my hands

and that I'm charming once in ten,

excited once in twelve,

bilious usually.

Unlocking cakes is even better now,

slow finger on the crumbs

circles the plate,

next Jan will be about apples,

I'm sure.

Helping Hand

Ticketless hit and hope

Sober and bad 

The lips smack

The bin is moved

The drainpipe is shinned

A bouncer scans 

The balcony is breached

Beyond the field of vision

The triumph 

Moving the bin

We all heard it scrape

The Future Is Now

Hubris across the ages,

the ledger stays up tonight.

And this is likely how

this phase will come to be,

billions of people filling up

with hubris,

minds destroyed by

incomprehensible hubris, 

holes punched in paper

giving way in ring binders

full of hubris,

I'm served car crashes,

which are sometimes

anger, or exhaustion,

or distraction,

but mainly they're hubris,

watching, muting,

watching more,

the hole I plug in my phone 

springs a leak somewhere else,

leaking, car crashes,

hubris,

not hope, or redemption

as Kowalski sees a glint

between the bulldozer blades,

smiles to himself,

guns it. 

The Last Good Night

Feb 2020:

Vina's, Manchester.

The only time where

I couldn't switch 

jubilation

for disarray.

Bodies, the entire floor,

locked in

love, abandon

until they were not.

I turned in my mic

reclaimed my drink,

there was crying

and blood.

It spilled outside-

on my way 

a girl cried out 

something something

gypsies, family,

something, revenge.

Huddled, cold on the steps, 

trimmed in the clamshell of sympathisers.

I had been singing

Once In A Lifetime,

the dj knew what was coming,

for I was not stopped.

The Built Space

 They don't make them like that anymore, ever again

Modernism threw us some beauties and so did the 

louche loungers inside

and their curling smoke thought bubbles

only seem louche looking back.

Or did they know it was as passing as they were,

as they descended into comfort - long shorts,

corn fed t-shirts, splayed toes in their slips -

slipped into buildings,

trimmed out in fake brick that

would melt and could melt you like

lost ark.

The precarity of comfort which 

comes at a price,

or not.

Escapism

Before emoji, the key

millions gone who knew the key:

point of interest

burial mound

area of outstanding beauty

viewing point

steep gradient

travel lodge

beach

pebble beach

gravel beach

pond

lake

regal house that belongs to the National Trust, closed Sundays

birds

swans

Bank Holiday roadside fistfight

dry dock

extremely long road

dead man's curve

a wall

a stile

farm with impudent goose

dead drop

a country inn with an unsurprisingly racist secret

war memorial

knacker's yard

someone with a completely blotchy face

knees burnt the AA (Automobile Association) Roadside Atlas,

1987 edition, spread on the floor,

tracing Cornwall to Cumbria and all the places in between,

that I never did go.

The Mall in my Head

Stuck in the Queens Centre, suddenly undone 30 years,

my reflection in front of Shake Shack shows that the

interim, removed, was a clothes hanger in my shirt,

my life since, any life really, pulling shape into the frame.

Never really been in a space that reduced me as this,

I hated teens and being one, the rank embarrassment

of want blown through our bodies, I want not to be

in the Genius Bar, this focus grouped informality.

Head

5 grey market weed shops

dropped here in the last year,

8am pivot round to the

smell of smoking and

the oblong back,

bowed head,

of not a true rebel,

just someone shrugging

their way through

as we all do in 

notes of lavender

burnt in lemon

and long dead, 

almost gone

animal.

Always the End Times

When things really kicked off

during the second summer of love,

Richard tells me that there was

talk of the army getting involved,

but instead the path of least resistance

was convincing the petrol stations to

shut down between the hours of

2-6.

He must have been high on the

really good stuff then, so perhaps

it planted a memory of both sides

of the 

wow I've just looked this up,

the road between Manchester to

Blackburn is called the A666.

So, imagine, it's what, probably around 2.30am now,

and you're floating out of the Hacienda into the back of

someone's Ford Sierra to drive to a warehouse

45 mins away in Blackburn and the government's really 

upset about this and considering calling the army in

and the road you're driving on is called the A666

and you're so high that you've imagined that

both lanes of traffic are going in the same

direction and that's already incredible enough to

me, born 10 years too late,

before I even run a search on the route.

Wow! This world. 

I couldn't get out of bed two hours ago,

and now I'm living in this person's

quite possibly false memory and I wonder

what incredible things my mind 

has stitched back up for me so

my quiet smile has similar purpose.

The Secret Lives of Parents

Crushed cans in the park

only we can hang out in,

did or does yours do that,

at least five other kids

look exactly the same,

and so their fates are private,

so my pride can be private

and devotion too,

the extended hand,

no, that should be public,

the swatted spoon the

endless lowing of

instruction, I don't

need that noticed,

a good job? Private.

Adequate job? Call

me over after to 

exchange notes. 

Incompetence? 

No-one's going to

be a better judge 

of that than I, 

if I should be better, 

than the son

I want to be.

 

Pentium

None wiser than before,

non-native wire walker,

absorbed into the heat sink,

observations are fucked

quite honestly-

hive validation is such a

wretched thing,

all these bleeding, earnest hearts

finally coming home to

flop around on the

waterbed of ideas,

sunken like cost.

I think we must miss

culture that is neutral,

and the right to say

a non-linear self-narrative

in a contextless present

is just fine.

The Bridge

The mountains were beautiful-

barely saw the ground

windy up there-

rain, snow or hail.

First trip,

in a voice loud enough

to cross 

the big big bridge,

rolling through 

along the way

people cheered, 

they saw.

Much too high

I can't go

I'm afraid.

The truth was,

the big, big bridge.

Are all afraid?

I'm stuck.

Where was I going?

Afraid to.

The whirl,

rescue,

the blue sky above,

I almost.

Backed up

in wonder,

happy to have seen.

Proud,

the big,big bridge.

The Flags of our Fathers

Card school code in the common room,

a dishonoured debt, hair pull and later found

to be an emo on Facebook, request denied,

walked past the gates on the way home once,

people live like this, behind gates,

and languish in the devil's disappointment

of a botched scholarship, 

or a missed promotion,

or a spell in prison for fraud or 

embezzlement of some kind.

The flavour text that appears decades

after the time to explain whose

parent was nothing but the flick of

the tail of a trench coat in the wind

or the smell of walnut and leather,

or for me, six grand borrowed for

a Golf L, disappointment, 

the faint recognition that mouths

often write cheques that the body

will never cash, that the body

actually can't cash and the

body can't cash in class crossing

because there are secret signals,

stand up during the Hallelujah Chorus,

morse code through the space echo

of fists crashing at the rugby club

of dads who suddenly appear

from beneath the eaves.

That is

they are here again to say I had dreams

once too, that I didn't want a voice

that wakened me husk,

that bellowed artificially low

over watery real ale,

I didn't want to think of empire

or industry or anything about my

role in all of that.

 

I simply wanted to step out

of the cockpit,

walk the wings of a Spitfire,

storm a machine gun nest,

manage a verse of 

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

at Twickenham without

weeping into my pint,

or worrying about where

the car is parked,

I wanted not to watch

my upper lip slowly

curl up in distaste

over several decades, 

like a fortune telling fish 

in the palm

of someone else's hand.

Finishing School

Collar starched and the holly fixed

blueprints of the table settings,

shape and form, the veil over

so much horror, and

unquestioning commitment

for what's appropriate,

my theocracy, the stinger trope

reaching through the soil

for my ankles, then my hair,

subtitling the hum of my

arguments with the ghost echoes

of school corridors,

in the knowledge 

I'll never know who played

the Last Post year after year,

teachers bowed

in cloaks as absurd

as mascots caught in

the one minute silence.

------------- is life, the rest is just waiting

In the clothes I woke up in,

stirring cigarette ash into

a polystyrene cup,

the last dregs of tea

turning creamy grey,

ketchup from the bacon roll,

morning tart stuck to

the roof of my mouth,

more in my body than ever,

at the peak of indifference,

wondering if this is waiting too.

Let The Children Play

How weariness does not register and now at the

other end of it, trying to curate memories

and living vicariously through things I no longer

fit in or the creeping sense of ambience management,

as the lights go down and I can never get the combination

of low lights quite right anyway, so maybe it seems

like I'm sketching out motifs on the light switches

and this seems like the secret lives of adults like

my aunt who once played patience and why she 

doesn't now is a secret to me. 

Intention

Here's to scoring many goals read the inscription, from mum. The ball was run over within the hour, it was still playable but now it had a bulge like a hernia and I sobbed because the inscription held so much hope for me, particularly since I was utterly shite at football.

Today, on realising I left Rowan's Peter Rabbit cutlery somewhere in the Poconos, I could barely get off the couch and honestly if Alice wasn't round I would have sobbed again. The cutlery was from my ancient godfather, Michael, who's been terminally ill for years, he still meets my mum at the gardening centre for tea and he unintentionally delivered perhaps my favourite moment of the pandemic when he got locked out of his email account and could only communicate through Jackie Lawson e-cards.

Imagine it, a flash animation of a cat causing havoc with the wrapping paper or a dog sliding on its arse 

down a snow bank and a panicked message at the end from a 95 year old man and yes this is exactly how

I want to misapprehend the future. How satisfying.

Stephen, who accidentally kicked the ball into traffic, gave me the exact same ball a week later, but it just

couldn't fill a hole that had opened up in me which I later discovered, to my complete surprise, I had 

stuffed with Beatrix Potter flatware. 

Duck n Roll

The flush of quitting, a magnadoodle swipe

and the iron filings gasping at the surface 

are torn from the gauzy pane through

which we see all their figures formed.

Comment Economy

Arms like streamers, beak like a klaxon, tongue of paper

my practical skills don't include shelf hanging, or woodwork

or soldering 

or driving engagement, or parsing metrics,

or gaming systems and 

I wonder what I'll pass on,

like they must have wondered what they'd pass on 

100 years ago when minds had been lost already,

my special skill will be shouting click bot

to no-one in particular, derek34516725,

god, guns, my kids, country.