The reprieve

This cloudy flesh, 

this thick drift, 

blood fog condensed 

as dew on brittle nerve 

on frosty web sense net, 

frozen tense trap, triggered,

snapped to pad out stiff 

stumbling trees

erupting necromantic 

skeleton love wandering

in this illusion of flesh

from soil sown, strewn, 

with dragon teeth to bite, 

puncture, sink and suck life,

to plant seeds of death

that sprout steel sterile

scaffold structures,

inflate doomed zepellin egos,

tight wound coil tethered

to ancient hatred. 

I beg for many

when I beg for me, 

else I would not beg. 

I beg for many. Please, 

spare us from the machine. 

I beg for many. Please, 

spare us from the machine.

Dead air

We think it is silent, but we realise

we cross a threshold without knowing it,

into a quieter place, and from there we pass

even further, into yet another airless country

where even the vacuum is depleted.

We are untroubled by checkpoints,

our progress as unimpeded as a cortege,

borders only existing in the imagination

as we discover new extremities of silence.

As we try to find words to describe 

each new horror this war reveals,

we simply identify new reserves of silence,

as if it was a crude resource we need,

which we were exploring for all along, 

to keep lights shining somewhere,

in a distant bar perhaps,

filled with the chatter of the certain,

where the ultimate silence is heard.

Dawn

Truant nature, innocent of all artifice,

more beautiful for not knowing what we mean

when we call her beautiful, ambushes me

with the honest deceit of breaking day,

although the truth is we bring the lie, 

our power to describe limited to falsehoods

cultivated in class to practice on the world,

so, standing in the sudden untutored morning,

I pick a flower for my lover's hair

while high in the blue brightening sky

a contrail cuts the throat of dawn. 

Catacomb

Can you feel the seismology of clouds,

the earthquakes in the air? Not thunder, 

but the shifting tectonics of the centuries,

the avalanche of bone that has come to rest

burying us in catacombs where anonymity is thick,

subterranean, like oil waiting to be discovered,

the accumulated silence of a million graves.

Time sits like a beggar at the entrance, 

the clock face his collection plate. Inside, 

the seismology of silence: femurs stacked

where the orphaned present shuffles past 

pilfering seconds from the altar

that must eventually be surrendered to death 

who will fire them into the earth 

in a single volley someday. 

When we confront the final reality,

when our investigations reach their conclusion

and we are faced with undeniable truth,

we learn nothing exists and everything is a mirage,

a tapestry of guesswork we weave,

possibilities to which we assign likelihoods

to pretend to measure the increments of our ignorance, 

because they conceal absolute impossibility, 

absence, a void bereft of any attributes

excavated beneath the solid ground,

where we return to our ground state, 

and breathe cold catacomb air once more. 

Confession

From our shadows we infer 

the existence of ourselves,

as if we were sentient sundials, 

as if these observations reveal anything 

other than the movement of the sun, 

and if this deception were to be believed

it would leave everything in darkness eventually, 

but we are a path taken by someone else

who walks in our footsteps for while,

at least, what we consider to be our footsteps:

retrace them far enough, back towards the light, 

and you will discover they are not your own.

All lives belong to a single journey

apprehended by our limited understanding

only as individual trajectories, perhaps, bifurcating, 

splitting as it collides and subdivides,

constrained to what we can perceive as real,

leaving us in an endless search for meaning

in an apparently indifferent universe

which we enlist an invented shadow self to pursue

through elaborate calligraphies of inky speculation,

but all these stories cascade from a common source

beyond time and death, to which the darkness yields,

for which no explanation is required. 

We live in an age of lesser demons

We live in an age of lesser demons. 

We are confederates of those fallen angels

who first offered us plutonium fruit

in the irradiated Eden of our carrion dreams

where the border between paradise and perdition runs

and we lose ourselves in geometries of doubt.

Bureaucrats of heaven compute increments of sin

while the absolute magnitude of our error

remains a mystery. Some say it will be revealed

in a final reckoning, and lure us with promises

broken and mended, fractured and reforged

by some blacksmith metallurgy of divine law,

a muscular law that hews commandments in stone.

In the meantime we gain knowledge through injury.

The scars and anatomy of these hard lessons

grow infected and contaminate our science. 

We build glass towers to act as chimneys

from which our stale ideas spread like plumes

and settle on the world like dust, like fallout.

We forget the power of speech, 

abandoning words for guttural gestures

indicating tribe and ownership,

and imagine indolence is industry 

and ignorance erudition, 

the announcement of any appetite is language

and the calculus of hunger civilisation.

We digest the ash of tongues we cut out

and threw upon the fire to celebrate 

our loud silence, our exquisite barbarism,

and worship a bloodthirsty god. 

The petty evils of stupidity and selfishness 

ensure a present free from curiosity

and the threat of alternative futures,

and so we live in an age of lesser demons, 

confederates of those fallen angels

who first offered us plutonium fruit

in the irradiated Eden of our carrion dreams

where the border between paradise and perdition runs. 

Parade

In the end time shows all strength is weakness.

We recognise empty pomp only once it is punctured. 

Pageant does not impress, nor placards persuade.

Cancel the cavalcade. 

Our heroes' cardboard armour is useless and ridiculous. 

We can't pretend it protects against the monsters 

they claim to slay on our behalf: harness perished with age, 

fastenings disintegrating, plate corroded, panoply ridiculous;

their services are self-parodies on parade.

Cancel the cavalcade.

Our demands exceed their waning powers. 

Proclamations and announcements are hollow boasts.  

The monsters have shrunk. They are harmless, 

vulnerable themselves, persecuted victims

of our strident self-deception and charade.

Cancel the cavalcade. 

Every threat is revealed to have been an excuse,

a pretext for a posture that defies the helplessness 

to which we all succumb as our youths fade.

Cancel the cavalcade. 

 

Spectrum

Imagine discovering your religious sensibility, your spiritual awareness, is based on post-traumatic dissociation, which you mistook for a mystical experience. Imagine discovering what you thought was creative flow is autistic focus, that the ecstasies you mistook for aesthetics were really how you escaped from an unbearable situation which erased your existence. Imagine discovering your ethics are based on an unrealistic ideal of humanity you found could alleviate the excruciating loneliness of the isolation to which real people seemed to have abandoned you. 

Spectrum

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was bliss is dissociation. 

What I thought was ecstasy is escape. 

I thought I was nothing.

I took comfort in being nothing,

took refuge in it, revelled in it,

flowed through it, resigned to it.

Was I wrong? Do I really exist?

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was divinity is dissociation. 

What I thought was aesthetics is escape. 

Love was a mystery.

Why would someone love me?

What purpose does it serve?

What's in it for them? 

How do I play this game?

It certainly can't be as simple

as them actually loving me,

because I don't exist

and therefore all emotion

is theoretical. Or perhaps

the emotion is too intense 

to experience and survive,

and can only be approached 

in theory, the empathy so profound

as to be identification and oblivion.

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was bliss is dissociation. 

What I thought was ecstasy is escape. 

Maybe I'm less than nothing.

I thought I could trust no-one,

that they were all out to get me.

I looked for ways to disappear, 

into music, into astronomy, 

into art, into poetry, 

trying to paint a picture 

that was all background,

where I could be represented 

by the opposite of a portrait,

not up front in the foreground

but lost in a landscape, absent,

unnoticed by the casual observer,

but the pulse, the flow, 

the ride, the glow

was always more 

than I could know.

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was divinity is dissociation. 

What I thought was aesthetics is escape. 

Was trauma the gateway to God,

not opened but shattered, kicked in,

or was God just a way 

of dealing with the trauma, 

of picking up the pieces

and making sense of them?

What I thought was flow is focus. 

What I thought was trance is trauma.

What I thought was bliss is dissociation. 

What I thought was ecstasy is escape. 

Cult

To have a cult of personality 

first I'd need to cultivate a personality. 

I am flat, blank, in two dimensions. 

In three you'd describe me as empty.

In more I am a hypersphere of absence

across all spaces you'd care to map.

I am a balloon that does not burst.

In fact, you must take care

not to deflate the world

should you puncture me,

as it is the only source 

of anything you attribute to me.

I am entirely content free. 

So you see, it's you I worship. 

It may seem I seek your devotion,

but that says more about you than me, 

by definition. There's nothing to tell. 

There's nothing else to say. 

I'm blank. Empty. That's my secret. 

The choice

Summits we would never reach

were we not restricted to ascend

only one small step at a time 

rather in a single all or nothing bound; 

sonata cycles we can play by memory

only because we are not required

to play all notes at once; marriages 

built on increments of forgiveness

for what is in its totality unforgivable;

cures that would kill us

if administered in a single dose:

we live by limitation. Is it any surprise

that God appears with so many faces?

A wise man once said there are many paths

up the same mountain. My nana told me

that all gods are the same god

in defiance of the doctrine of her sect

and the faithful with whom she shared communion. 

Find holiness wherever you can,

which is to say, everywhere. The difference

between the meaningless and the miraculous

is a choice you make. Take that step. 

Pollini

You should play music
as though your life depends upon it,
because it does. I saw him on the TV.
It looked like he wore white gloves
because of the studio lights
and the cameras. The applause
reminded him there was an audience
once the performance was complete.
We had eavesdropped on Ludwig
and Maurizio, we realised.
It was an interrogation, and the few feet
between the front row and the piano stool
was enough to prevent us from knowing
who interrogated who. Our lives
require further inspection.  

(In memory of the pianist Maurizio Pollini (5 January 1942 – 23 March 2024), renowned interpreted of Beethoven's piano sonatas)

Zeit

Dew drop stars strung along lines 

drawn in the night sky by ancients

connecting them to illustrate 

the toil of those gods and heroes

vomited from their imagination

ring out like cat collar bells

to warn a celestial mouse or moth

and postpone its demise. 

The dark puppetry of my struggle

in time's tangled meridian web 

sends a distressed morse signal

along silk spun over the abyss.

It is observed by remote arachnid eyes

waiting for exhaustion and surrender

and my final acquiescence to annihilation.

Ewigkeit im Augenblick

There is no death. 

There is only pure, infinite,

undifferentiated being. 

Death makes no sense

from this perspective.

The contents of experience

are artefacts of limitation

that is itself an illusion. 

Surrender to your inner void:

the safe, lonely refuge

that comes to claim you, the place

which you withdrew to as a child

when the world could not be endured,

the secret chamber of your heart,

the solitude no heartbeat reaches, 

hidden from the storm of the flesh,

your pulse the dull and distant thud

of artillery in someone else's war,

while you sit alone in the corner,

knees tucked under your chin,

waiting for time to end. 

This inner void

and the outer void are the same,

from the point of view

of your insignificance in both.  

There is no pain or fear here,

and if you should die tonight

how would you know?

You exist between heartbeats. 

What would you say?

Everything has already been said.

Your voice is sealed 

within the celestial monotony 

that resonates between the stars, 

and has been since the beginning.

What we call life is just a moment

when the cosmos

was distracted from its song, 

and the moment passes. 

If I should die tonight

So far I've dodged the curses,

the mines scattered by ancestors

over the land I must now cross.

That's how it seems. Fates 

negotiate in secret with each other

about the precise disposal of luck.

We mustn't count our blessings

lest we tempt them to rescind

some favourable arrangement. 

The therapist suggests

another interpretation. 

I'm happy to pay to have options. 

I haven't choked on trench mud,

shat myself away with dysentery,

gone mad, got locked up yet, 

limped, lame and doomed 

into an era of impotence, pity, 

and disgust, to endure decades 

of disappointed half-matrimony 

perched on the mattress edge,

or, heaven forfend, caught a bullet

that spared me from that outcome

in an anonymous instant 

of imagined heroism, catalogued 

with all the other fairy tales.

I haven't fallen foul of all the things

we now joke about, "health and safety

gone mad" - no mine collapse, 

no fall to the deck from the mast, 

no asbestos corrupting my lungs. 

Hungry looms have left my limbs intact.

Genetic liabilities seems to have found

their way to other branches of the family. 

No, if I should die tonight, 

if I should die tonight, know this:

it is death fresh and new, 

not stale, rekindled flesh 

from some clarty kirkyard deposit

stealing a last breath, dragged 

from a lit fag burnt to the filter,

before it finally reclines forever

into the damp incommodious dirt, 

no, this is life's first edition

being remaindered. The rich

have many iterations of their privilege,

but we are richer still, dying

free from their inheritance of rot. 

If I should die tonight, I die clean, 

pristine, unburdened by misfortune

or by the crimes of the fortunate.

Come, cut my throat now. 

The chase

The dwindling of hope

from a promise of respite,

to a possibility of respite,

to the ability to imagine respite,

to the ability to understand

that such a thing might exist

even without being able to imagine

what form it could possibly take, 

to a stubborn refusal to give up,

a decision to define oneself

in terms of that refusal,

to make your brain a fist

wrapped around that single thought,

until eventually a bone-tired fatigue

drains that decision of meaning,

and the only thought you can hold

is the certain knowledge that to stop

would have death-march finality

and this is enough to make you continue,

until at last it is not enough

and you stumble in your marathon of mourning 

over the hard packed grief-yard ground, and fall

in the ground down justice dust of broken faith

and briefly dream of Eleatic paradox

in which your inevitable fate is Achilles

unable to match your now gastropod pace

but this was never a race, or if it was, 

it was away from, not towards, the finishing line, 

and the infinite madness that pursues you

vaults the logical hurdles you hurl at it,

and in this final split second 

it takes the form, not of Achilles, 

but a tracked vehicle, a bulldozer, a tank, 

rolling over your house,

rolling over your head. 

(Written in response to evidence of war crimes discovered at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza)