with guided clusters, depleted uranium,
and a chemical equator—
the northern hemisphere 120 parts
per billion more polluted than the south.
The best investment’s always poetry;
there’s never any peak to fall,
no estimable catastrophic crash.
September light’s like 80 carat gold,
that pure it turns to gold dust in my hand
and lazes there, a virtual UV sheath
like dipping my fingers into gold paint.
The planet rests at tipping point,
its bankers in dispersal to rocky cities
(Beijing, Dubai, St Petersburg),
the sun today a universal gift
cocktailed with stardust, a bright energy
that bumps up orange, purple, blue,
a natural high to the morning glories
effortlessly opening with soundless lift.
Addicted
I’m a benzo addict.
I pop disc-shaped blue pills
from a blister pack.
Diazepam 10 mgs,
white if they’re Indian.
I get what I can.
they taste like the Moon,
moondust on the tongue
filtering my chemistry
doing my brain
like things that get wiped
in the pouring rain.
They don’t do me right
but I need their dull glow
binding to receptor sites
sublingual for fast
like a NASA route
into the galaxy.
I buy from a man
who’s straight, but he’s dodgy,
in the back of the bar.
Valium’s like spot gold:
its shares on the increase,
a chemical star
that’s rare, on prescription,
as Martian graffiti.
I can’t get clean
I lick traces off my hands,
a powdery sparkle
of synthesised sand.
I want a blue pill
to cushion my end
metabolised like a planet,
to go out that way
habituated hazy
as a foggy blue October day.
Never Too Busy to be Beautiful
Rain east of me: a steamy greenhouse surge
of liberating energies,
5 minutes of sensational dazzle,
the sky like purple mascara, the heat
underwritten like summer pop
into the city’s reconstructed energies,
I mean those three tomato-red crane arms
positioned so coitally
over Central St Giles, I’ll never see
their placement twice the same, with three red lights
alert under churned up indigo skies,
a transient on-site geometry
my Lumix saves for digital rehab,
Centre Point—26.08.09,
a little slice of psychogeography
in the accelerated hissy year
I’ll remember for how your tan
went up a tone like cappuccino froth
powdered with chocolate: your skin wore the light
as something coloured in, all those photons
directed from big dusty rocks in space
to upgrade an orchid-ivory nape.
The rain gives up: Renzo Piano’s smart site
clears into focus, I move on again,
the city breaking up like a signal,
the sky slashed coffee and turquoise, the bits
reintegrated into rainy local shape.
Pulling the Cork
A slow dig, a ritual spiral,
a DNA helical twist
of metal punched into the cork—
Peter’s corkscrew’s flaked ketchup red
and oxidised from kitchen jabs,
with rusty arms
like bits of scaffolding
slung over grungy tangy docks.
I get in fast with a Macon Village,
slow with a resistant obsidian Merlot,
the route in an instinctual thing
like keyhole surgery,
the skewed, the fissured, the rammed
that Peter leaves me, coax
to a popped conclusion, a pop
that’s incisively ejaculative
and sounds to Peter filtered up a floor
like a red carp breaking surface
on a still pond. Red, white or pink
the way out’s always different
in the gradations of the pull
that’s moist or dry, the nose sticky
with a concentrated bullet of fruit.
The act’s surreal like bottle dentistry
performed under the street in Holland Park,
the glasses upstairs ready for the pour,
clean as I can make it, a red swirl
travelling a fast pathway to the brain.
J&B
A J&B slug, no measures,
the colour of an amber traffic light
facing down on a rainy day,
twists in the glass
like spot gold shares
brokered by my chemistry.
Its personalities are malt and grain
catching fire like sunlight
bursting into rain.
J&B’s my Sunday flavour,
chemical comforter,
booster, it frees up the day
and puts an orange halo
round the things I do
like a beady rainbow
on a matte grey afternoon,
tangy Islay inflections
of seaweed cooking in the malts
as marine-themed undercurrents
adding a deep sea feel
each time I review the glass
reflectively as drinkers do
looking for a double
a fidgety psycho
in the tumbler’s bass notes
rumbling at the bottom
like sleepy thunder
connecting with my poetry,
coming up shine as whiskey
polishes the line.
Sweet Thing
There’s one a day in every street
the twinkling starburst catch-light in a look
finding me out, hair corona
shot through with peacock and hot pink,
the shower starting synchronistically
0.5 seconds after eye contact
as incidental chemistry—
the endless permutations of a type
obsessing me, ambivalent event
like sexuality, sweet thing
I call it, rushed adrenalin, a high
drenching my blood like a meteor surge
that stays suspended in free fall
all afternoon, and if we stop and meet
it’s because like attracts, a lick of glam
reciprocated in Soho
or back of Bedfordbury, two of us
finding each other in the millions
and noting it like a colour
mixed to the exact dangerous zone,
a register that hooks, sweet thing
letting me know that we’re never alone.
Broken Hearted
The pieces never fit again,
a Jim Dine love heart’s red, or pink, or blue,
less heart-shaped than imagined so,
or my bits left over from you
dispersed as a cellular galaxy,
debris that hurts, as though the muscle’s shot,
the hole’s that deep I feel the pain
come up that palpably, it locks
contracted like a fist
and out again.
Emotional debris: rejection’s
a plane shot down by a shoulder-launched missile,
the fuel tanks detonating ripping flame
in orange streamers like an octopu
s.
I go down with it: can’t get right all day
for loss, or colour-code my mood
a comfortable foggy aquamarine.
You left taking so much of me
I’m light as light arriving from a star
so quietly it gets there without noise
created in deep space. And you, you’re gone,
taking our story like a library
compactly fitted in your memory bank,
dead information come alive some days
to share obliquely with somebody else.
There’s kindness in the world. This blond Thai boy
offering me his green and white patterned shirt;
but you, you’ve gone, leaving my heart broken
like a bottle shattered against a wall,
listening out nights to songs that never heal
Global Spin
I click on Lisa’s photo: back to me
knee-high in Pacific thunder
she’s out off the edge of the world,
the wave hemming her breezy polka dots,
her waist a bottle-neck size 8,
the image colour-toned by the printer
as aqua, inky blues, Lisa’s black hair
shaped like a dense square-cut Cleopatra,
the slide beneath her, swirly undertow
that she’s resisting. If you walk too far
you’ll always end up in a war
is my assumption, but she’s just off-world,
a stony whirling twenty metres out
of U.S. beach, forested with seaweed—
punky red and emerald spiking black,
massive, uprooted, mineral deposit,
her right hand extended towards the sun
and somewhere out there waiting for our need,
Earth No. 2, Saturn’s blue moon Titan,
crunchy with great lakes of hydrocarbons,
a rock shaped like an orbiting headphone,
slugging it out in the black galaxy.
Lisa seems off-limits, right on the edge
like the damaged 21st century,
the error in our genes repeated by
the Earth, both cooking in a burnt-out spin.
Lisa gestures to dramatic effect,
she holds a flower, the inkjet kills the red,
but like us all she’s looking up and out
towards an exit, and she’s left her boots
as black Converse post-human exhibits
behind her on the beach to risk out there
contact with currents, the ocean’s live pull
on her skinny figure curved like the Earth,
her feet gripping onto unstable things,
her other hand snatching at windblown hair.
Donald Fagen’s Top Ten
(New Frontier)
Coke lined in a sassy scarlet Buick:
the song parties in a bomb-proof bunker
halogen lights on fucking to Brubeck.
(Morph the Cat)
A shape-shifter: a cat that morphs like Aids,
gets under New York’s skin, a pandemic
that has people wake up with orange eyes.
(IGY)
What if poets were a charity
instead of refugees: image-utopians
following Fagen into the White House?
(Trans-Island Skyway)
Sat-nav in a car that’s an ergonomic biosphere,
the crash victim’s an alien on the road,
neural pathways programmed faster than light.
(Walk Between the Raindrops)
Thunder shatters the indigo Miami sky.
Break-ups have pink linings under the black.
The right kiss traps a raindrop between lips.
(The Great Pagoda of Funn)
Funn’s spelt like edgy gangsta lingo:
two together, like watching a rainbow
open expansive purple in a dream.
(Teahouse on the Tracks)
Signalling UFOs with a Bic lighter
out on the porch, the ultimate getaway’s
not with a boy, but an extra-terrestrial.
(The Nightfly)
The retro broadcasting WJAZ
for consolation. Lost love’s like an empty fridge
found in the middle of the Sahara.
(Security Joan)
He’s clean on the scan but misses his flight:
Joan who delays him’s waiting in her car;
the air smells of planes, damp and kerosene.
(Tomorrow’s Girls)
Girls on the beaches from another star:
they’re moony ETs without DNA.
He watches them with flames roofing his car.
What John Ashbery Eats for Lunch
Blackcurrant snapdragons seen through black shades
in a scorched earth Hampstead garden.
I got their palpable velvety lobes
between finger and thumb like an earring,
a fleshy alert to real time.
I left them, debating internally
what John Ashbery had for lunch
(I’m told the subject isn’t poetry);
Meze with a blond Pinot Grigio
or something gastro Heston Blumenthal
or a meshy spaghetti strung like thoughts?
(3 lines to edit out): what sticks in consciousness
is what the eye retrieves bad side of town,
the singer fronting camp with his Varieté
confessionals on stage, or your first book’s
attempt to find a micro-niche
to saturate. There’s more books than rain
shaken out like a tambourine
over the city’s mirrored towers. I move
write there, wondering this time if Ashbery’s
in tea-mood like myself with dumpy skies
blackening over Marble Arch, the build
slow in its pile-up, charcoal to violet
and loosening as the shower sparkles free.
Mister Handsome
The way you look: north face of the jacket
accessorised by a red Soviet patch,
south side a gunned on badge attack,
an H&M original—
a zippy architecture customised
by you the detailist, black to the hip
butch number, brushed cotton cheapie
modified flying jacket, you Jamie
wear as today’s ultimate hit,
red slashed text-sloganed T-shirt winning through
as taut reminder, the jacket complete,
a modern statement as the time we fill
talking together of how to get by
theming a mood that’s irremediably blue
blue blue.
Just a Shot Away
My raspberry pop-up toaster delivers
its wholemeal page for berry jam
at 8 a.m.
like a nutritional bulletin.
It’s space junk occupies my kitchen time
not rain printing out Liberty patterns
in atomised surges, the litter belt
orbiting 135 miles up,
satellite parts, ballistic bits
bulleting at 17,000 mph,
the mapping of intelligent debris
into brain cells shaped out of oddities,
an astronaut’s glove, rocket casings, bolts,
a driven chain of man-made energies
looped like a metallic stingray;
they come up in my head off news
of an orbital collision
over whiteout Siberia, my toast
bronze as a tide-washed beach, my tea
twisting Formosa into puffy steam,
the day linked to my protein synthesis
and what I’ll do with my hissy spray cans
gunning graffiti shapes on the one wall
I keep for throwing colours in my room,
aqua, scarlet, hot pink, silver and blue
scrambled vocabularies as poetry
done at a run like the act’s criminal.
Broadwick Street
The Soho heartbeat—Soho stems from it—
the John Snow pavement spill, a peacock lick
of sky dissolving into grey
like smudged eye shadow, Cowling & Wilcox,
where I enthuse all afternoon
over Pilot and Pentel pens
(a Hi Tecpoint liquid ink rollerball
V5 0.3mm line,
my purchase) and the sky throws up
big quantum changes in my life,
a look, a recognition in myself
of long-range correlations shining through
like opening a chocolate box
to snap on mint, only I’m shook about
mid-street, and lipstick-red geraniums
bleed on a residential floor,
chessboard interior, ceiling like a cake.
I hang on the corner of Marshall Street,
deep city, and feed on my time
and lack of it—Agent Provocateur,
a pointer at the other end
to confected fantasies: 3 p.m.,
aqua light, my decisions made, I’ll do
just what I want like taking a fast bend.
Vauxhall Bridge
The river’s grey brain-matter over green
a tidal hypothalamus
dumping on crunchy shingle, slowed-up drag
under pixellating September drizzle.
If I had a microphone
I’d hear the river’s heartbeat, double bass
descending to zero
up Lambeth way. I’ve come from Bill’s,
(Bill Franks) a personal hero,
floored second floor at Peninsula Heights,
you sight the river below like a pool
green as a cat’s eye shot hazel.
I do a valium to up the scene
see green-grey as more optimal
on benzo efficacy.
A sighting cormorant monitors the beach—
a T-bar head on a black umbrella,
close up a sheeny bottle green–
and repositions downriver in puddle slosh.
I’ve left the arches for the Whitehall side,
the oligarchs and czars who’ve rocked the world