into tyrannical black gold meltdown.
I take a back route to avoid the black hole pull
of their plotting schematic World War Three,
but keep the river with me and its speed
fine-tuned inside my arteries,
and know Bill catches it from his window,
the pick up rhythm as the tide restarts
the stick-change of its continuous flow.
Russian Caravan
It’s the Jack Daniels of smoky teas
a furry complex JDT
pungently memorable as lavender,
but rawer, whiffier, alert
as liquorice—it’s like straining a mood
out of the leaves identifiable
as brimming gold chrysanthemums
in tracking September rain.
It leaves me wanting a raspberry sorbet;
(500 gm raspberries, 2 lemons juiced
¼ tsp natural vanilla extract)
as aftershock, the aftertaste
to JDT’s Lapsang Souchong and Keemun Congou’s
onomatopoeic mix
of campfire tang. We drink it sitting out
both of us plugged into the Sirt 1 gene—
200 calories for lunch
to get detox ultra-skinny—
the lighter the better for poetry.
I maintain for lyric climb-out
at accelerated speed, 140 lbs
paradigmatic writing weight
in my quirky obsessive belief biology
controls a poem’s shape, the verbal protein
of its anatomy,
the skinnies leading the way, picking at rice
and noodling ideas over smoky tea.
Sequins
I buy them like compacted currency
scintillating micro-ufos
20 sparkling grams sealed in polythene
like a micro-thin condom teat,
ruby, cobalt, shocking pink, gold,
emerald, NASA silver, thunder black,
a turquoise like Antigua
each crunched up parabolic galaxy
fisted into dispersed starbursts
when I perform my poetry
emoting at the mike, raking the air
with glitter as my shimmied signature,
fall-out littering Chinese bits
as random mappings spilled over the floor,
a loopy black-headed python shot through
with aqua contrails, mauve surges
of coloured plane fuel leaking into blue
exploded like a shattered Milky Way
over the space I work raining
counterfeit money—4mm discs
like unstamped blanks—a poet’s currency
for synaesthetic imagery
chased on the glossed-up wooden floor,
a scattering of mirrored plastic hearts
and hologrammic pink Frisbees
on shimmery trajectories
writing in stardust at my feet,
the oval mirror at my back empty
like a plane window, the music
giving my voice space round the beat—
the Ginger Light on at First Out
a floor under St Giles High Street
making it happen for 50,
my sequin grab lifted out of a dish
like laundering money for metaphors
and through the gold dazzle making a wish.
Jean Cocteau Lines made into a Pop Song
Opium and a Chinese lamp
the light like a goldfish
swims in a red dish, the trash
I’ve picked up sitting on the floor
counting out cash, a sailor’s cap
hanging from the door
The pearls I’ve retrieved belong
in the back of a mirror
my song’s about sunken wrecks
and a drowned sailor
The light between the islands
baby is the colour of Bengal
white sands and if you listen
a silent waterfall
the trash I’ve picked up leaves a trail
of cash in the hall
The pearls I’ve retrieved belong
in the back of the mirror
my song’s about sunken wrecks
and a drowned sailor
The old torch singer sits
on horseback in the yard
bits of a red velvet dress
ripped now times are hard
the trash I’ve picked up leaves a trail
of cash in the hall
There’s a suicide and saint
in the final hotel
rolled into a ball
the trash that I’ve picked up leaves a trail
of cash in the hall
Lissiana
Leggy as gladioli
in variant purple and lilac
what’s purple and what’s violet?
a subjective trick.
they’re angularly obstreperous
to carry on a crowded bus,
roped together like Japanese bondage
on the 134,
and angled in a grey glazed pot
the twist in it like abalone
they’re showy on my flat’s black boards
like stemmed purple cup cakes
grouped into a hub
and sold at the International Space Station
to drop-in astronauts
slammed by microgravity.
I google lissiana
and find an authored paper
on how cocaine alters
prefrontal cortex states in mice
through catalase activity
and note the cool transitional tempo
July to August brings
like my spine was brushed
by a fistful of rings
and look to how my flowers adapt
to their location in the room
more a spontaneous accident
of placement, and their purple
appears like thundery indigo
the tone suddenly vehement,
while rain starts volubly
crunching outside, and I share
concentrated time with ten
mauve flowers hand-tied by McQueens.
Allium
My Boots mood-lifting St John’s Wort nose cone
compacted with yellow sunshine
I get systemed pre-9 a.m.
The brain glow’s slow
like waiting at departures
for jittery boarding.
Sight one allium
like a purple glitter ball
90cm—a preenish queen
with its hybrid Asian sub-genre
shining on like a purple traffic light
in the smoochy cloud-drenched garden,
just one purple solo
signposting spiky halo
scratching on my sighting in the bitty day
weird as the 170 moons
with dusty faces out in the solar system.
Most of space is missing matter,
like the stuff I can’t work out
that orbits in my cells, as me.
I don’t know why this oniony allium
gets in on me, tapping my messages
on a blackberry, while the news comes up
hot as pollution choking the planet.
Maroon Dahlia
A dahlia’s optimal virtuoso
solo, rayed-out, spiky maroon and white
hairdo like punkish manga,
the no-scent bitter as tobacco
or a memory trace floating
like gold leaf flaked in cappuccino froth
remembered like the flower’s look
and how I looked at it this way
so full-on I forgot myself
in seeing, taken over by the flower’s
maroon/crimson/vermilion lip gash,
the whi
te looking like fingernails
done as cool manicure, that ultimate
stretch-limo white.
I’ve seen that red before in Mac’s
Resolutely Red, Chilli, Dubonnet,
a bruised, crushed lipstick agglomeration
of bedroom reds, a subtext red
to submerged sensuality,
but here pigmented in response to light
in an Octoberish anthology
of peppery nasturtiums I turn to
for defiance, going back to pungent dahlias
and one stripy aristo’s upfront pull
to bend attention into attraction
like finding a face in the crowd
that’s unforgettable, and turning round
to make eye contact like a visual bullet.
Sandra
You’re always downstairs when I’m there,
Sandra with Sandra, the same
same-sex name that you share—
I love you for it in a way
I don’t do other girls, blonde streaks
remixed in gelled glossy black
for glamour banditry
and looks that kill, the circular mirror
on the rhubarb wall at First Out café
sighting you in
like the see-for-miles blue window
in a Boeing 737 cabin,
and drinking Becks and Corona,
one Sandra in black patent ankle boots
the other Sandra skinned in jeans
with a too white dress shirt
a shared citrus scent mixing butch and feminine
into a surge of tangy vetiver
like spinning Saturday into Sunday.
I watch you from my table, it’s your time;
two Sandras ramping up the temperature,
arms round each other, tongues forming a kiss
of a loopy calligraphy
in which the vowels are shaped like oranges.
Urban Cannibals
My fridge magnets—a purple star attracts
a manga android’s red sequinned
iconic heart-shaped pouty lips
like an alien moon that sits
in its planet’s habitable zone.
The day lights up like sci-fi medicine
engineering stem cell organs,
the rebuild possibilities condensed
to benefit this group who leave
departures now under a pink-red sky
windswept a moment on the boarding steps
for a flight to Cayo Saetia’s
white Cuban beaches, a cerise cloud well
inserted like a strawberry ice cream cone
into a stacked Heathrow sculpture
of charcoal cumulus. I write myself
into a shareable reality
by 10 a.m., orange juice, honey, oats,
part of the come up for my poetry
to launch domestic stuff into orbit
oddly as a black push-up bra
attaches to a maroon tit.
My neighbour does a quasi-cannibal
bacon fry-up, pig in the air, the fat
a toxic drizzle soaked into the gut,
the smell similar if he cooked his thigh
in crisp rashers and popped a tomato
like a gas giant in the pan.
I breathe the world into myself and out
converting rhythm into poetry
attracted by two glittery magnets
as favourites in a shattered galaxy.
Autumn Blues
Rain breaks into my sleep at 3 a.m.,
dead Paula in my dream inside my room’s
searching the contents of her bag
for keys and drugs, makeup and things,
sorting through clutter for a clue
to help me pull her back
to my reality, Oh you
my baby blue
from overdose and dead at twenty eight.
I nose the kitchen for inspiration
like plugging in a purple bulb,
the room another planet, a moonscape,
it’s suddenly that urban alien,
like A1 hundreds of light years distant
if we could get a signal
or surge of photon clusters. I make tea
and stay with Paula, not the one I knew
but some residual image in my brain
of junky Paula at Piccadilly—
the closest to me in my life, at 4 a.m.,
the dark giving a fraction, reddish-pink,
alertness, strangeness, disorientation
come up in me, no going back to sleep,
but sitting out the hours listening to slow
tempo consoling intermittent rain.
Depression Greys
Josie’s lid
she can’t get out from under, a loop
like a Burmese python
locked into brain chemistry,
an aberrant gene, a rogue
cannibal star
that eats her out like an orange.
She’s off the drink and off the ward,
a brainfade day patient
moping with the greys
as flatter than the blues,
a mood that won’t come sunnier
despite a third espresso rip
and a lip-blistering roll-up
angled like a baggage-chute
from cake-flaky lipstick,
her dynamic sealed in the fridge
with a bio-blueberry yoghurt.
She wants me to read her novel
provisionally psychotic
as a purple banana
doing a flyby in the attic,
a sprawl, a slew of chewed paper
bullet-holed by vision,
but somewhere at the core
hot as a chilli
with imagery that fries.
She meets my blackout lenses
like gated property
I’m closed behind, though anxious
to come through to help.
Writing, I tell her, is venom
refuelling the snake
that can’t free itself of poison,
each hard-won line injures
intending to repair.
We sit outside a café,
her depression’s a rock
spinning like a planet in her mind,
so palpable I feel its grist
clamp on her like knuckles
of an impacting fist.
The light meets us equally
from a foggy August sun:
Josie tries to lighten
her load, while I stay neutral,
searching to push a button
to go-ahead green.
In her punkish tartan jeans
she’s drug-coshed and bleached,
a snail locked in
without eventful rain
to a gritty leather drought.
We talk up disdain
for systems and sit
picking at her depression
like seafood on a plate,
agreeing the way forward
means waiting for a slow train
that’s too early or too late.
September Writing in the Rain
The nights break open in explosive rain.
I’m caught out like I’d jumped off Brighton pier
into a sea-grey corolla,
take my quotient of serotonin boost
Rhodiola Root extract
to climb out of the transitional blues—
the sad in me that dumps this time of year.
Nasturtiums redden like goldfish
in the garden’s twinkly aquarium,
red sedum places China on the map
as a dispersed crimson star-belt.
My friends go to the dark side of the Moon,
stay home, drink, readjust themselves
to burning light bulbs in their heads
to keep it all away.
Green chlorophyll breaks down to carotenes
and xanthophyll pigments, first orange-reds.
My light/dark information gets confused;
I sit outside and let the rain make tracks
over my naked poetry,
the inky splashes like a mauve tattoo
squirting the language into fins and tails
and DNA. I work against the dark,
the big come down of torrential downpour,
the smashing equinox, and go inside
and write in red felt tip over the floor.
Honey
I’d left it on the pillow
a used condom foil
a silver Okamoto
Skinless 1500
translucent jade
like a turquoise lagoon.
Later a flashy sky
trafficked July rain
a beady tympanum
bonging red geraniums.
You’d gone about your day
off to Caffè Nero
crouched over a laptop
a Toshiba powerbook
its case Aerospace silver
like the Okamoto foil
nicked by a tear
for immediate fit.
The rain filled in the quiet
of your not being there.
I dug honey on a spoon
and rolled it on my tongue
in a sensual twirl
a loopy spiral
a slick swirl
and did what I do
when you’re not around
thought my life over
the things that I’ve lost
and the ones I’ve re-found.
The box had 4 foils
still sealed for our pleasure
compacted slinky skins
like blue contact lenses
to be thumbed into place.
What I’m Doing
I write poems because nobody else writes or sounds like me or pitches my individual subject matter into poetry, and so I chase after what I would like to find in others but have ultimately to create for myself within the context of imagination. I don’t even think of it as poetry, but more as a series of adrenalin hits that optimally sensationalise my days by pulling visual images from the big-city milieu in which I live, mostly in a Soho-dominated London West End. I’m an image-bandit, particularly on people, noting every fractional detail of a look from the makeup brand to the colour thread used in sewing a button to a shirt or coat, to observing barcodes, logos, number plates, fonts, ingredients on packets, sky colours, pollutant additives, shop interiors, nail transfers, patterns created by rain, whatever comes up in the moment and will never be like that again and so needs to be nailed by a poetic image. I deal in images that can’t be monetised because they’re too prohibitively expensive. I’m an image-kleptomaniac. And usually when I go out I make contact, by which I mean someone in the crowd is going to be picked up on my fine-tuned imaginative radar and become included in my anthology of found ones, and all the friends I’ve met in that way, and mostly on the street in a public arena, have become personalised to me through a look that connects. Poets sometimes fascinate, and I seem to do that. And I can never remember anything I’ve written, the brain doesn’t have sufficient memory, not even what I wrote yesterday, which seems a hundred years ago in my time, because I write all day every day and only the next line counts. ‘All my work is preliminary to the work’ (David Meltzer). I can understand, working like I do, why Bob Dylan has been on a never ending tour for thirty years, leaving a busy carbon footprint on the globe, because he probably can’t remember where he played yesterday, and anyhow, it’s only today’s gig that counts, like today’s poem for me, and because doubtless he’s surprised into the awareness of being there, and there’s nothing else to do anyway, but go on with the momentum.