Autobiography

A painful shift held together with smiles,
Ones that make your face ache
And your hands shake,
While you’re taking orders.

Awkward conversations with a manager,
Or a friend,

About a close friend who died this week. He was only 18 and I am so lucky to have known him x

Every year my family and I went camping, invariably to Cornwall or Devon.

A ruthless virus,
dressed as a security guard,
got it in an art gallery(busy stirring a cup of coffee)
with a tommy gun
blew it to hell
(hotmail and Facebook and Brittanica all at once,

It was good to see you, man
not like cool great good
more like real, soulful good

Well, I feel like hell:
I'm sure you do too sometimes

Looks like
we put our perfectly good quarter

Scared of me? You bet! I've seen your tragic
Castles and the holes beneath your cuirass.
Paint me stupid – I am full of magic,
Bright like stuff of dreams, as warm and true as

Monday March 9th

I have a 'sister', she is big
And also an insufferable prig;
Five foot eight, with her five foot feet,
Red in the face, and packed with meat.

i want to fuck your creativity
make love to your beautiful mind
corrupt every thought you ever have with my cock and cum.

help you force out the darkness onto the page

this room smells clean
it's not home
but for now
it will do.

the hum of the extractor fan
smothers all other noise
except the sound of fingers on the keyboard.

my window is two stories up

ugly, heavyset curtains
block the light from passing cars
the kettle boils as the TV lights the room
i lay naked
refreshed
clean

So much light and colour -
and the promise of spring.
And it feels now
as if nothing
in this life
will be as perfect
as this moment ...

(note: I originally wrote this piece years ago, after my first stay in a psych ward in Medford, Oregon, USA, which followed a rough stay in a jail)

This place isn't exactly heaven:

The earth below my feet,
grounds me
to my reality;
it shoulders the rocks within my life.

An aged woman, currently living in a sanatorium, struggles to escape her past and present.

A belly-full of flirting –
and looking back
posts are knocked into the
ground at equal
distances
and look at me leaning back
against one of them –
smiling and referring back

Unworthy

Driving through an upscale neighborhood in Nashville Tennessee on my way home one day.

When I was fifteen I had a flashback in Wigan High street.

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