lashed with purple mascara
drinking gin as ruin
with the moon in her eye
if I drink another tumbler
of the blues then I’ll die
Poison’s my kind of ruin
it’s sweet as black honey
money’s like a drug
a high end addiction
I wanna be like Billie
with a flower in her hair
a voice sweet as black honey
there’s money in despair
but don’t confuse the issue
there’s no right or wrong
if I drink another tumbler
I’ll drown in the song
Poison’s my kind of ruin
it’s sweet as black honey
money’s like a drug
a high end addiction
I wanna squeeze the rhythm
like juice from my voice
of course I’ve got no choice
at the mike I slalom
if I’m another Billie
I’ll take you there too
if black honey’s money
then it’s also the blues
Poison’s my kind of ruin
it’s sweet as black honey
money’s like a drug
a high end addiction
I wanna be a pirate
in a black patch and a hat
a bandit, a hoodlum
don’t need a teacher for that
I’m a student of Billie’s
the thrill’s in the kill
when I fly out to Moscow
I’ve got six hours to chill
Poison’s my kind of ruin
it’s sweet as black honey
money’s like a drug
a high end addiction
I wanna chase tomorrow
like a rainbow in the sky
I tell you that dreaming
teaches you how to fly
if I’m another Billie
I’ll take you there too
if black honey’s money
then it’s also the blues
Excess and Ruin—(Dorian)
Every pretty boy hustler
goes down to the Dilly
blond trash likes tainted cash
or a cute sugar daddy
If I met Jack the Ripper
I’d make him confess
you get ruined by numbers
as a dangerous excess
Excess and ruin
the two go together
like whiskey and ginger
makes stormy red weather
Every boy on the game’s
the same as a woman
he wants diamonds and clothes
and a big spender man
When I met Henry Wotton
at the bottom of the pile
he’d got diamond fillings
and a knife in his smile
Excess and ruin
the two go together
like whiskey and ginger
makes stormy red weather
Henry gave me the gold key
to the city’s outlaws
I pick-pocketed pockets
like a cat with quick paws
I got entrees to soirees
bad blood attracts class
when I picked up a tumbler
I left lipstick on the glass
Excess and ruin
the two go together
like whiskey and ginger
makes stormy red weather
When I killed for the thrill
I felt nothing at all
like tagging graffiti
in red squirts on a wall
If I met Jack the Ripper
I’d make him confess
you get ruined by numbers
as a dangerous excess
Excess and ruin
the two go together
like whiskey and ginger
makes red stormy weather
I’ve lost the incentive
to chase new sensation
there’s nothing survives
but my own degradation
If I met Jack the Ripper
I’d make him confess
a dangerous excess
Excess and ruin
the two go together
like whiskey and ginger
make red stormy weather
Sibyl Vane’s Blues
I’m a glammed-up glamour-puss
in paste and Screen Face makeup
I’m Dorian’s fixation
when I play the Haymarket
I’m a teen chasing fame
a cockney wannabe bit
I’m a name in the spotlight
strutting sex before the pit
I sold myself on the docks
converted flesh into money
and learnt to tell punters
no money no honey
from Limehouse to Mayfair
I hammed up my part
throwing angles and shapes
from a real bleeding heart
He was queer and I knew it
Mister Dorian Gray
he sent me flowers and dresses
(men do when they’re gay)
He was queer and I knew it
but I needed his lies
and the booze and corruption
that drew rings round his eyes
I condensed my emotions
to projecting on stage
did jealousy, revenge,
vehemence and rage
and he took it all in
Mister Dorian Gray
told me I was the cure
for men who are gay
And that cheap Mister Isaacs
who ripped off my earnings
an entrepreneurial Jew
with a fist full of gold rings
he was trashy as sleaze
and I thought that he’d pay
but his twisted deceit
was like Dorian Gray’s
He was queer and I knew it
Mister Dorian Gray
he sent me flowers and dresses
(men do when they’re gay)
He was queer and I knew it
and I just didn’t care
I forgave him his lies
for the blond streaks in his hair
My brother Jim saw it all
Gray as my ruin
and I sang in our cracked bath
an old music hall tune
of how everything’s nothing
and both are the same
and you don’t trust nobody
when you’ve been on the game
He was queer and I knew it
Mister Dorian Gray
he sent me flowers and dresses
(men do when they’re gay)
he was queer and I knew it
but I needed his lies
and the booze and corruption
that drew rings round his eyes
A THOUSAND STARS IN MY EYES
HQ
The sunset’s a pill-shaped scarlet dollop
a planet flipped out of a bubble pack
150 million kilometres away
in the west-facing Magdala window
like a vermilion polymer
coating. What happened today
it could have been one hundred years ago,
there’s nothing left to grab or show
like locking keys inside a car
with the ignition on. We talk time back
into the present by channel surfing
our neural highways. There’s a new Neil Young
signposting debate (Le Noise)—testy
as a submerged biomarker
given guitar angles without a band
and timeless as a gene upload. The day’s
dumped into a black unknown zone,
rain coming on, accelerated squirts
of randomised diamond October showers.
A banana’s 105 calories
(a cup of black tea). I know these things
as crucial to my body weight in time.
We talk and drink, recover what we can
that makes us individual—you and me—
and what we’ve done like two missing persons
gatewayed into our ripped up century.
Hanging On
Wind spills the magnolia like a drinks tray
a sashaying hot cerise swirl
like a pink shampoo
in my grainy window out.
These days I hang in disconnect,
a shoe
lacking another shoe
to pair. The more I know the less,
96 per cent of the universe
comes up as blackout dark matter,
dark energy, like unused brain
turned dark side of the Moon.
It’s detail I collect obsessively
like counting stitches on a shirt
or looking at the lipstick bleed
left on a coffee cup.
Sometimes I follow a shoe for its heel
or peeks of a red satin-lined footbed
a Christian Lacroix.
Falling apart is hanging on
to little things that personally mean,
a song still going on in my head,
the black forked snake’s tongue
on a loose button thread
a smile framed at me in the street
like cutting chocolate cake.
I never write the dead out of my book
or take their numbers off my phone.
Sometimes I punch in numbers for a dead
friend gone, just for the ring-tone’s
familiar frequency.
My magnolia does a splashy striptease
littering its purple silks.
I try to get more present in my past,
move on into the day under churned skies
living each fine-tuned moment like my last.
Ham Yard
We’re outlaws manipulating a space
into a Wednesday photo-shoot,
your Canon morphing time like chewing gum
tweaked into a retextured shape
with each rotation of the tongue,
only it’s Ilford HP5,
that’s your black and white space-time signature,
film noir et blanc 36 EX
to gun me in our accelerated fifteen minutes
optimal burn-up burn-out intensity.
We’re saturated in the place,
its abraded dirt worked into our skins
like Moon grit, and that scorched black wall
is like a slab of peeling depression
resistant to a chemical.
I’m thrown about looking to find angles
in what you do, our spontaneity’s
so simultaneous, we scare
expression into attitude.
I’m blacked out by dark blue reflective shades
piloting thrown-up arm gestures
like contrails posted on the Soho sky.
36 run-ins and we’re done,
my Converse treads like skid-marks on the yard,
the raw punkish improvised shoot done quick
as though we’re engaged in a hit and run.
White Poppy Blues—song for Amy Winehouse
When I sit in this yard
and it’s hard being me
a white poppy stumps up
by a blue morning glory
I’m in Camden or Mill Hill
with a pill and a guitar
a bluesy soul diva
a rock and roll star
Sometimes when I’m alone
stone cold and half dead
it’s a single white poppy
opens out in my head
In the back of the bar
I’m too far gone to see
Keith Richards’ ghost
like a smoky poppy
If I’m on all the time
then it’s a crime to stop
you can take me to the bottom
but I’m still at the top
Sometimes when I’m alone
stone cold and half dead
it’s a single white poppy
does blues in my head
When I sit in this yard
and it’s hard being me
I mix stardust and moondust
in my chemistry
I’m in Camden or Mill Hill
with a pill and some hope
a date I’ve forgotten
and some grade one dope
Sometimes when I’m alone
stone cold and half dead
it’s an opium poppy
explodes in my head
When I sit in a yard
or go underground
the losers I’ve lost
are the winners I find
I’m really on my own
on a dusty white moon
I’m a rock and roll star
with whiskey in my tune
If I’m down on myself
then I’m up on you
I see Keith Richards’ ghost
and it’s turning blue
If I sing the blues black
I’ll be singing till I drop
you can take me to the bottom
but I’m still at the top
Roses and Guns
Mine’s cassis, a single rose given me
from Wild Bunch, I search out vermilion
or sticky tart reds, scarlet,
Mac Russian red to hot up rose
associations, and solo in cellophane
that fits the stem like a condom
is gifted me for poetry
locked into my hand like a gun,
a Gloch or Luger brainstem snout
the firepower metaphor,
I write to rip holes in society,
each image an intended bullet-nosed
subversive shattering.
The world tilts into unnamed World War Three,
economies in the ejector seat,
the desert twisted into a cyclone
of toxic dust, the czar’s mobile-fortress
tanking through the city, armed outriders
gunning a sonic outlawed corridor,
while I tweak poetry like spot gold shares
into another catastrophic blue chip crash.
Pills
A sticky toffee afternoon:
I write a pop song: Loretta’s
left a red shoe on the Moon.
A green coating to a mood pill
adds chill, a blue
does sublingual serenity.
Yellow’s a dose of hot sunshine
delivered euphorically.
The brand stamps are like graffiti
tagged into polymer coating—
I call it scratchy poetry,
Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline
giving brain chemistry shine,
Viagra bluer than cool
blue diamonds, or the sapphire pit
of a Hollywood swimming pool.
Most serotonin boosters
are shaped like space toys,
they’ll get software to off-world rocks
no bigger than a laptop
with a drug giant logo.
White antacid pills are moondust,
you swallow three days travel
in their metabolic churn
like footprints crunched on the Moon.
Nexium’s a purple pill
the only purple glaze in the drug’s lab.
I got it for acid reflux
in stony cold rehab
and grew colour addicted to its cool.
Prozac’s a two-tone scooter, green and white
for throwing upbeat hooky shapes.
It’s blues I do, not power-pointed red,
working the colour up to visualise
a blue bluer than the blues in my head.
Retro Shirts
It’s fine-point detail I retrieve
label and cut, collar point and stitching,
this dark blue affair snowed with polka dots
three buttons on a barrel cuff,
a John Stephen 1968,
the pixellated spots like a frozen flurry
vertical on a blue-black winter night.
I riffle two-tones in this Camden yard,
a pink and white confection like ice cream
the shirt body bright strawberry,
the collar built high, the spearpoints
cut like a pair of runway legs:
Naomi Campbell’s catwalk pins?
I look for buttons grouped in two and threes,
a fly-front on a gingham button-down,
a ruffle like a ski-slope, white on white,
or pink roses scattered like confetti
over an altered-state floral design.
I search all afternoon, obsessively,
preoccupied by paisley helices
bold as tattoos, a blue swirl on a brown,
a red twinning with yellow, op and pop
motifs, a peacock-green teardrop on grey—
a John Stephen creation that I prize
for its detailed aesthetic literacy,
the stitching tight as a neural network.
I take a break to drink jasmine-green tea,
then return, quizzical, acquisitive,
skinning a rail of shimmying fabrics
bright as the colours saved by memory.
I go home with my accumulative lot
bunched into carriers, a retro coup
of shirty flamboyance—a sixties scene
flash-forwarded as pattern on my back,
the best a John Stephen fog grey shiver
dissolved into a vaporous blue-black.
Shares
Another risk modeller’s kamikaze
zeroes into liquidity,
the virtual blinded by light-speed delays
like contact from another star
or hemlines rising and falling,
mini gone optimal micro
like Britney Spears, or dragged back to the knee.
Most futures contracts sit with psychopaths—
bunkered hedge funders radiating Earth