Blake Lennon (August 2013)

Theres something relentless in the wish for things
The want the need
No state is the reason to miss that embrace
Imagined as the antidote to wasted days
Purpose senses skill senses a waiting a world
And I only want what I cannot have
Is that
Too much to ask?
Court is in session
Now. All rise.
Advocate for the defence
Advocate for the prosecution
Advocate to hang the jury
Judging the art of execution
Rewriting the heart of my constitution
And sealing it with a gray kiss
Send me to another
With instructions clear as day
"Fragile. Please handle with disdain"
Ive got a handle on my truth but I'm losing my fiction
Losing my fiction
Every little death that comes unassisted
Is a contribution to my descent
Even once it's ceased and desisted

(untitled) September 2013

Zero sum conception
Bedroom insurrection
Book shop revolution with a gift tag and a smile
Photo resurrection
Entitlement infection
Numbered resolutions tagged, flagged and filed
In this deference
truth by preference
We shop around for it like it's going out of style
Purchased hollow purged essence
Empty echoing with  sound of paid penance
Steady choking on bunting and pennants
Fixated on the dream of a land green and pleasant
Artificial turf as far as the eye can see
crosses
Burning the eyes
To the worst degree
Red brick terrace
Breathless
Asphyxiated verbally
Stuck in a method
I am not these ethics
If I can't live them personally
What a surprise
phantom no menace
Amateur chemist
Bowing for blessings
Jewels where he hid them
Lost in generic
Abundant replenished
Stock of defective
Gems protected
By dubious wisdom
These cynical empiricists
Hold my soul captive
Nebulous daze
Infected baptist
That which washed in can not wash away
Regardless of practice
Premature obsolescence
stars fast to fade
Into backdrops
White dwarf implosion
Fuels most modest blaze
Footnote the end of days
Let's shake this malaise
Dissipate this funk
Lift that haze
Get over this hump
Breathe clear serene
Heave sheer spleen
misstep to our grave
Planned or mistake
Prophylactic mislaid
Our progeny is brave
and proud and will speak aloud of whatever it craves
to make
endowed
With a fear of nothing but insincerity
Whether born of arrogance, calculation  or temerity
The friction between Soul and facade sparks until the heart burns hellishly
Squirms under glass of false pleasantries
Alive with Psychic trauma and moral entropy
to beggar belief and enrich fantasy
If a grain of sand can contain galaxies
Then the world can feel empty as a photogenic fallacy
Stripped of things that give it meaning
Caved in
So if the shoreline is receding
Eventually we'll be swamped by the waters we used to wade in
And we'll find that the fire we threw petrol on is the one which we burn in
World turning
Describing it's orbit
Still yearning
Unsure if that discipline is the price or the forfeit
For adventures beyond the curve
Uncertain thrill of awkward
Unpredictable urge
wild and raucous
Now tamed by an invisible law
Or set thereof
Upset the course pay the cost
For better or Worse
Cost duly paid decisions made regrets engraved through frown and liquid taint
Planetary consequence embodied in that same grain
Left to fall through slender fingers
To it's peers plain
And those fingers that body that beach that continent all facets of another grain
And where are we?  What did we gain?
Beached whale of false humility on a glass atomic sea
Majestic hubris flapping impotently
the sum of parts complete that make this whole mess lovely, new blooms springing as far as eyes can see
And if it's just the minds eye of an a.i all it needs to do to crush it all is push delete
No retreat
No recall
No retrieval
Incomplete
Withdrawal
Revival
Is there meaning in survival?

Fragment of a loss

A Loss

Our reaction tells us what is not

What is the what which is that which is dropped

We map a route over and around these temporary permanencies

Which is the thing that is that which is stopped

Holding tight onto the lines that trace the relief of exile and embrace,

Firewall across temple entrance blocked

Settlement and disruption; and no messiah to shift the boulders, just bulldozers

Of detail, these streets of family, feud and fealty, wear their experience

While these plains of false refuge shimmer with the delirium

The roamers line toward the sunrise, gung ho gun toters riding

Whilst the wrapped shepherds appear still moving, in this reality they are redlighted, past their event horizon

History spirals, collapsing timings, closing on itself,

Cities of the Night emerge from dream into text into flesh on sand building brick on brick, until the architects are in the red

The balance sheet asks, and paper tells

Dry as the sides of these vacant wells

And there is no carpet to sweep it under

Save the sky that covers all

No necessity

Just desert floor, steel boots, fatigues and weaponry

Never Quite Still

Never quite still

A rivulet, blinding, thin, wrapped to asphalt ground around

Islands of green shoot

The branches tickle the midday air

The dead just stare

my 12 o’clock shadow points the way home

at the crossroads of the permissible and the forbidden,the sacred and the profane

the outpost and the empire

the animal and the machine

chatter, grunt, click, buss, flap

the flocks in the pen and those on the hillside

in the hutch and in the battery don’t know the difference

between the hum, the rubber and the needles

sits a single flower, quivering

red with a blue heart

not unique but the first

a precedent in my day

Types

Blood, is blood; 4 types, no religion
Washing from the red to the dead
Washing into sand, into pavement,
Into white cloth, blue and black

(A) Blood filled with wine, with caffeine, nicotine
Blood with memories heard and seen
Blood soaking into stone, long after the surface washes clean

(B) Into soil, dark, sun drying, linking these bodies with the earth,
Blood in the oil from the fruit of the tree, child of the soil, laboured into birth

(AB) More blood that comes in beauty, in nature, in creation
Blood on the brow and the cord the child that enters, and coursing through the veins
Of the Mother, proud

(O) Blood in the same veins, running cold at the sight of the
Blood on that same brow of same child, making a mark, molding a temple
Blood crusting around the perfect circle between the eyes
Blood swathing the metal that penatrates deeper, erasing fragile matter leaving
A name, a photograph, a banner

Black and blue, cloth white into pavement,
Into sand washing from the dead to the read, wahing
No Religion
4 Types
Blood is Blood

mood

Reaching/Still can’t touch peace/Boxed in between lines/So I trawl through the profane in search of the divine/Shared bed/Lonely mind/Frantic making up for lost time/From all the dry dark times when you thought that I was fine/And when I thought I felt something like happiness/I wasn’t permitted to make it notable/Are these emotions or just motions that I’m going through??Vain pained by my choice of outfit/Or am I just crafting the excuse to justify the need for an outlet?/Ageing fast don’t know what I’m about yet/If you’ve got no account to speak of how can you put your money where your mouth is?/ Yet I’m chasing freedom from debt/Emancipation to dance with a lighter step/Or maybe just shifting the balance/A heart and a feather/My transgressions weighed against my talents/Angel of death at my shoulder/Digging in with talons/Human condition could be making me callous/Can any man say that he walks with no malice?/In heart, thought or action?/So many times I mistook anger for passion and chased a phantom/Fixated by fashion/Negative energy/Who can say if it’s temporary?/I still appreciate all the love friends sent to me/ I won’t say it’s pretence but eventually/ I’m scared that I’ll have replaced innocence with decadent tendencies/That this compassion is mislabelled malevolence and this solidarity is a tossed offering to all those I feel I’m better than/But second guessing can’t make me a better person and fear of perversion is just a diversion from acknowledging fear of fear itself/Another version of the paralysis that stops us from working for something else/A different wealth/Regardless of mixed motivation/Not seeking for approval or beatification/I’m a scholar not a martyr so a pen  will guide and chart my destinations/The cartography of contradiction/And we all know that life can be stranger than fiction/Can’t say I won’t behave without inhibition/But I’ll try to use it as a brake and not an anchor to position/Clarity shows the only certainty is that my  doubts provide definition/So if I seem different/Trust it’s the same song/I’m just moving to a different rhythm/And if you see me visibly wounded/Don’t take it for granted/I’m exposing realisation/De Prodfundis/I can’t expect your love and I won’t demand it/In these sentences I’m free yet remanded/ reporting on time/Courting attention /Representing myself/Where justice can't be is art even handed?

untitled (8/12/12)

Constant tension/quivering underneath/ fluffy cushion surface/ shy smiles mask a face//That has witnessed/Waking nightmares/No protection/ From these monsters that now live within/ Polluting a picture perfect landscape/Making permanent homes/Educating their young/Stealing their innocence/ Just as surely/ Reflection of premature jading/ Premature closing/ Of mind/ Of roads/ to other chances, other futures/Everything is permitted/Theoretically /Nothing given/Actually/Blood from a stone/Blood from stones/Blood from bullets/Bullets/Blood on stones/Flashlight/3 AM blindfold beating/Reflection from glass eyes/Stuffed toy bears witness/Voiceless/Whilst the twin sleeps/Waking to the report/That another monster/Is restrained/That she may sleep/Yet more soundly/Tonight/Steel/Rubber/Phosphorus/Will keep/A safe separation/Containing the thread/Incubating the fear/To purchase her freedom/A price seen elsewhere/Felt too/Tears for the fallen and bent/And laughter/Hollow/With the cold dark space that keeps widening/Inside the heart.