My cousin

The Moon my cousin 

came round to pay a visit.

He wears the faces of the dead. 

"They'll bury you soon," he said. 

"They'll bury you soon," 

said my cousin the Moon. 

He is tired with a fatigue no rest will cure. 

He brings word from a place where truth doesn't matter. 

Lies are made true by their verisimilitude, 

while truth masquerades behind riddles, 

mocking your pursuit of it through the crowd,

or retreats to some remote, inaccessible monastery

to dance suggestively behind the veil of contemplation,

paralysing men with the possibilities it offers

between truth and lies,

where excellence and celebrity 

excuses every sin, and poor opinion,  

asserted with the confidence of idiots, 

condemns the innocent, and mere appetite 

makes the world an abattoir,

a carnival of enthusiastic atrocities 

justified with great solemnity. 

The Moon my cousin 

came round to pay a visit.

He wears the faces of the dead. 

"They'll bury you soon," he said. 

"They'll bury you soon," 

said my cousin the Moon. 

What we were told is important 

turns out to be unimportant

once we are broken by age, 

and nothing matters,

but we continue anyway, 

beguiled by the charms of madness,

while the sun grinds the organ 

and the planets go hurdy-gurdy on their way, 

and every cause we defended survives without us 

while all other grand ambitions turn to dust, 

and along the road that runs through it all,

beneath the vortex of stars, 

within the stroboscope of days, 

my cousin leads his horse 

down to the beach every morning

to feed it on seaweed, 

and leads it home again, 

an imaginary horse 

- you or I would call it a stick - 

for which he feels a kind of love 

to which we can only aspire,

uncompromising about what matters, 

indifferent to everything else, 

because, of course, all that matters 

is love that subordinates us to something

making the interconnection of all things possible,

Love is the only thing that is an end in itself, 

the substance from which all else is formed, 

the fabric of the world,

beyond truth and lies, sub specie aeternitatis. 

Forgive me if my words are childish, 

but we are all children, really. 

The world does not ask for permission 

to be beautiful. It simply is. Therefore, 

I will no longer believe I need permission. 

I will bundle up all my hopes and fears 

and put them away at the back of the cupboard 

with the old photographs and expired certificates, 

pensions, shares, insurance, and forget about them. 

Someday I will rediscover them

and they will be nothing more than an amusing curiosity,

and I will wonder how it was ever possible that I felt this way, 

and the Moon my cousin will come round to pay me a visit.

He will wear the faces of the dead. "They'll bury you soon,"

he will say. "They'll bury you soon," will say my cousin the Moon.

The easy way

No-one does it the easy way, 

and, as it all goes horribly wrong,

horribly, predictably wrong,

wrong in ways that were predicted

many times, remember, you chose this, 

and given another chance, be honest, 

you would make the same choice again. 

You would choose the hard way,

because it looks easy, 

and the easy way looks hard. 

Psalm

Let us sing anthems of absence

for an indifferent deity, 

recite epics of emptiness,

lend our voices to the void,

raised in celebration of nothingness. 

My soul swings towards its perigee 

with that dark planet 

that holds me in its orbit,

and what if this time I should stumble

at that low point, and continue to fall

until my heart is a meteor

charring the sky of that distant world,

coming to rest in some remote place

beyond all limits of discovery?

I have no fear. It is no more lost now

than it was when I first found it

in my solitary survey of this hollow soul,

mapping its emptiness, distracting myself

with the cartography of the infinite, 

so let us sing anthems of absence

for an indifferent deity, 

compose epics of emptiness,

lend our voices to the void

and celebrate its nothingness.

The optimist

The gears of our fates are meshed in secret.

The mechanism is contained within a box

that cannot be opened. Our stories meet

around campfires in a forgotten hinterland

where narrators unknown to us repeat 

details familiar made strange by time 

and distance, and return to us changed. 

We are our own future, unrecognizable, 

come to replace us, with knowledge

that cannot be transmitted to us yet

because we would not understand it. 

The knots that join us cannot be undone

because they tether us to a darkness

we curate for each other, which alone

we would be unable to contain. So, 

be glad. Have faith. All will be well

precisely because we do not know how.

Moral injury

Look at what you did. 

This is what you are. 

Don't like what you see?

Do not look away!

Change the things you do. 

The piano lesson

"What you must understand

is that your piano is an altar.

The gods of the earth 

are appeased by music. 

They demand appeasement,"

the piano tutor said. 

"Your piano connects you to them,

your fingers roots pressed through key

and hammer and string and frame

down into their subterranean realm.

When you play, remember, 

you prevent the end of the world. 

Your music replaces earthquakes 

and volcanoes. The sacrifice of sound

offers surrogate catastrophe. 

Perform the piece accordingly, 

as an act of worship

of something dark and terrible."

Skeletons

So many of my skeletons are strangers. 

I remember barely half the behaviour

that, quite rightly, renders me unsuitable

for high office or responsibility or trust. 

Events are swept into a bonfire of amnesia.

My life is written on autumn leaves

that burn unread in the gardens of bliss

before the winter they foretold

scorches everything with apocalyptic cold

beneath icicles of light at the north pole,

borealis chimes in six dark months' of night. 

I talk to my skeletons and ask them why

the prestige and respect I'm due is denied,

then act as confessor as they explain

the things I once did and will do again. 

We part, and return to two different worlds, 

one where I am blissfully ignorant of what makes me, 

and the dark, for which the closet is their embassy. 

Anti-clique

We live in the age of clique and slop. 

I belong to the anti-clique,

our manifesto: fuck you. 

The right side of history is superficial slop. 

A persuasive machine could write it.

Here on the wrong side 

we won't pat you on the back. 

We will stab you in the back. 

Our dogma is bog water

in which you sink and drown.

Congratulations, if you survive. 

You are immortal and a hermit

condemned to eternal solitude

in a remote shieling innocent of all amenity

in the middle of endless moorland 

on Ultima Thule, finding inspiration

where the eagle has left the carcass of your life. 

You could remain silent. That is the only way

to communicate what needs to be said here. 

Don't worry. Be happy. Be sad. Talk. Recite. 

Re-frame your trauma as privilege. 

Re-frame your privilege as trauma. 

Portray your petty disappointments - 

that thwarted teenage lesbian crush, 

the endemic stupidity of your peers

from which only you seem to be exempt, 

your incandescent outrage at injustices

to which you are uniquely sensible - 

as capital crimes against yourself. 

Your loyal clique of friends relate

from eight o'clock to half past eight. 

The priests of morality masturbate

from eight o'clock to half past eight. 

Announce the indictment in perfect slam 

[pause]

voice at the open mike. You are a gargoyle,

preserved as if in amber

as the syrup sympathy sets hard

around the grotesque you perform

to turn your poem into a sour candy

anyone can suck

when they want to look like they care. 

We live in the age of clique and slop. 

I belong to the anti-clique, 

our manifesto: fuck you.