Battles

I’ve been fighting all the wrong battles

And I’ve been losing time and time again

Looking at the faces of all those departed

Feeling in my pockets for the key to see them safe

This is a long long way from home

And I never made all the right allies

Turned some to enemies

In retreat again from the shame of disbelief

Scoured the shelves for the tools to lever open

Never felt further from the truth

The things that hold this together

Chew deep into flesh

Straining for purchase

No less fraught for all their bite

The marks we leave on each other

Heal rough and clean, stitched by time

And I’ve been making some right turns

A passenger charting hazy terrains

Our movement fluid

Steered by steady hand and strong currents

Never fled from fire only from fear

And the romance of the things we can never know

The rights and wrongs escape us

But we can never escape them.

31

27 Times came the knock on your door

Mummy answered

Alcohol on her breath, body black and blue

Domestic after domestic

Police turned away and your teacher never knew

4 times

You were sent to the nurse

They patched you up, swabbed you down

Patted your head

Noted their concerns

And never asked you

One more time

One more chance

They stepped across the threshold

Ready to help

Not from the school, not from the station

Unconnected to other and seeing as if for the first time

This filth

This degradation

The violence and neglect

The denying defiant faces of your abusers

The one who bore you and helped to take your life

Your sickly frail body twisted unnaturally in the corner

Disfigured and discarded

No-one’s fault but theirs

Still the questions beg

31 of them screaming in the conscience

Torture Artiste

Leather bound, yellow, distressed,
Tortured in a garden
That cost too much to bear
The distance cultivated by it's own inevitable logic
Bore fruit in the form of a sadistic neddle prick
Foreshadowed in jest
Piercing ego cloud and leaving naked flesh in the limelight
as the limbs writhe and the pulse pounds
Shrinking, shrivelling into shadow
No defence left once the invitation is inked
Permitting violence against the person
Different fabrics, different crafts, a silk scarve to strangle hope
The Torture Artist sees only products, objects, subject to the whims of the marketplace,
As his assets appreciate and cheerful buyers circle behind glass
The neon flares, the liquid pours, the flesh tears and the little bit of soul seeps out
A little part of me bleeds out and heals over harder in a flat line
Further discussion would be asine
The fetish for things that intoxicate, things that hurt
The hunger, the thirst,the discarding of spent carcass, the polishing of knee high boots
All render it absurd
To consider an audience with the torture artiste any more than an offer to populate his next installation; material, emphemera, expendable

clearing (April 2013)

Sometime it doesn't matter why
Like every rule you every wrote yourself
Is an absurd notion beyond contempt
Not just made to be broke but the product of another hand
A less full person too scared to risk
Bound by habit, by rationalism
Destroyed in an instant consumed by licking flame of
Real flawed awkward beautiful prickly sensuous beating heart painting hand tactile growing
Skeptical hooks driven into your flesh racing pulse woman
When you want so much for someone to give and every detail divulged into the air between is a
Gift unlike an other; a grace and a favor , a cracked door, a chink of light imbuing her armor
With the pores to breath
Breathe out cynicism
Breathe inspiration
Breathe out suspicion
Breath in inspiration for fresh innocent action
Breathe out heavy breathe in deep until our breaths mix and become
That motion that moves that movement that proves
Locus
Imbued
Not
Focus
Misconstrued
Fleeting; it crystallizes into new us
Two separate bodies perspective sharpened triple filtered blend over ice warming in my chest
And rationalism returns not, is missed not,
No binding barrier
Barbed wire lock
Push through this green undergrowth into clearing
Barbed thorn kissing wrist drawing enough blood to know that we are alive

The air breathes us in and this has no end but that which form provides.

Schoolboy (June 2013)

Schoolboy
Searching for that
Diamond in the flood
Inundated
Optimist obliterated by the
Pressure of creation
Constrained and constraining
Further
Restricting supply of air to lungs
Blood through heart carrying the vital bubble of future
Innocence transported t'ward the next time fire
Next live wire church spire
aspiration
Soars
blocked airway from breath sharply drawn inward
Respiration
paused
Anything anybody anyone throwing a circle of red striped hope my way
Could push restart with that simple indulgence
As they have done before 

anesthetized (June 2013)

Passage through a lazy rain of barbs
Afforded by an optimal absence of mind
Spirit body vapour
Floats into the ceiling
Ceremonial dress is donned
Armour for the soul
Anathestic for the war to come
Strategies laid out; the emancipation or the trap slamming shut around our ankles
Gamble illustrated landscape fashion
Old rope is sold
Wheels reinvented
To justify this love
unrepentant
Sabotaged by the unmentioned

graves (August 2013)

No grave for him
A lesson to others
An example made
Long spine curved in the dirt
What special crime appointed him to this role?

Everyone loses but he lost more
Short straw drawn
bullet caught
In the neck
Perhaps the back
Whilst turned change mind fleeing he

Five miles away
He may be a martyr, a hero, a lost son warrior
Here he is a pile of bones in the dust