Smoke

Music is a kind of smoke.

I sit here in the music

and it's a kind of smoke. 

I don't recognise you 

at first, through the smoke.

Who are you? I don't ask.

I imagine asking, maybe, 

if I was human, in the smoke, 

but I am not human, 

so I don't know you.

All I know is the smoke, 

and now it's up to you, 

sanctiminious coward, 

imbecile, repository

of every insult - 

and not without reason, 

all the ways you know me

better than I know myself, 

all the ways 

you don't know at all

- fool, for what it's worth, 

now the ball is in your court. 

Music is a kind of smoke. 

I was born burning. 

I don't know a world

that isn't on fire,

so maybe don't put out the fire. 

Maybe just try to find me

in the smoke

and if you think you know 

a better place, maybe

you can take me there. 

To be honest, I don't care.

It's up to you. 

Stuntman

This slow isotope world, 

this rickety lickety split rickshaw ride,

this Geiger counter crackle place, 

the countdown not clockwork,

not tick by tock by tick by tock

but click, pause, click click click,

no clock, no gameshow shock

as we slowly realise we don't grow, 

we decay, expire, decline, deteriorate

from me at eight to half past eight, 

the descent not a dignified step by step

but a chaotic stuntman stumble

down the comedy staircase

into a trailer where they find you

a year after you died, sitting glass in hand, 

mummified, dessicated, desecrated, 

ashtray and ornament, tomb trophy, 

artefact, fossil, afterthought, gift horse

screaming above the threshold

of human hearing from beyond the grave

about this isotope world, this open secret,

this nuclear test site village we inhabit,

props, mannequins, around a dinner table

beneath the tower we refuse to see

that carries our plutonium future. 

Whore

What if jism was like oil?

I'm sure men wouldn't jerk as much

if the stuff was going to run out,

so why do we tug the Earth, 

tickle its dark declivities,

tease each pore,

until it is as spent 

as an obvious rhyme? 

The angel

The angel descends.

Surely, here is vindication.

The struggle is over. 

At last the world will know

I was right all along. 

The angel speaks.

I am wrong. We are all wrong

about everything all the time.

The angel departs. Obviously 

I am less wrong than you. 

Obviously degrees of error

beyond an angel's reckoning

are enough for me if it means

my enemies bow to me in hell. 

The end of the world

We dream of heaven 

while destroying the Earth. 

This is not an accident. 

It is not a coincidence, 

and it is not hypocrisy. 

These things are connected. 

Both impulses originate 

in the same moment 

of grief and horror, 

of aversion from death. 

We turn away from it in rituals. 

We create graves 

and raise monuments to the dead. 

We separate death from life, 

and imagine fabulous afterlives 

populated with ancestors

who eventually are so numerous

they blur and merge into gods

that offer a promise of escape, 

immortals fat on the anonymity

of the long forgotten dead, 

the name of God itself unspoken

because it redacts all other names.

We do this rather than accept death

as part of life. 

But in that subdivision of the world 

we reduce the world to mere stuff, 

inert substance drained of the life 

that once imbued all things 

without limit,

and suddenly the world 

is only visible to us 

through the distorting lens 

of how it might be used, 

how it might be tooled 

into an ornament for a tomb, 

how it might be mined and milled, 

extracted and refined, 

and how it might be punished

with axe and anvil

for harbouring the death we dread

and ignore and dream of escaping,

and we are blinded to a beauty 

that exists without reference 

to how we might enjoy it,

that does not kneel 

before the beholder. 

We flee the eternal present 

to occupy a new, linear time 

in which death is decay, 

and in so doing, 

create a way of seeing a world 

that has a beginning and an end, 

a world with limits we must transcend, 

a world in which the apocalypse 

becomes a logical conclusion, 

in which the end is inevitable.

Cancelled

We're born cancelled. It's a secret, though. 

We don't even realise it ourselves until 

it is revealed in the behaviour of others. 

Sometimes they try to keep it secret. 

They don't tell you that you're cancelled, 

but I know, because we're born cancelled. 

What other explanation is there? 

Confession

Beckett says "fail again. 

Fail better,"

but there is no success

in that improved failure

of course. 

We may act as though

the incremental is final,

the relative absolute,

the journey complete,

but there is no arrival, 

only delayed departure. 

Meanwhile, we wait. 

There is no universal truth

beyond our need for truth.

It is lost in the obscurity

of a forgotten massacre.

It approaches us

with a Gethsemane kiss.

Yes, the hunger is real,

and we will eat sawdust

if it lets us claim satisfaction,

and our city under siege

is the New Jerusalem,

or, if you are an atheist, 

some secular Utopia, 

but there is no-one left to care,

no-one left but us,

enduring famine, 

so, do better. Testify to hope. 

Confess your faith. 

The Cross is the doorway. 

The Cross marks the exit

to our ultimate failure. 

(Written waiting outside a chapel)