this is not the season to talk of sowing seeds – cold earth & the frustrated gravediggers – nothing can grow now
good intentions count for nothing
she wrote all the questions down that gnawed away
“Oh Captain”…she often murmured – the cold fear of mutineers – go look out the window,
move the curtain and have a look
the mountains are getting smaller and that tree is dead the clouds no longer resemble anything you’ve said
night is coming to cloak us and it sets as we walk away
people are losing track of time
literally it’s falling down the back of the cosmic sofa along with breadcrumbs
hair clips and coins
a burnt out remote control
a family heirloom
a pen lid
all that shit that ends up in the bottom of the vacuum cleaner
the calendar is just a series of numbers and pictures
melding into others like
paint on a palette the
chalk on the floor
lockdown hop scotch boxes & the snake like lines leading to the bottom of ladders
but the pylons will still stand
like the iron man
transmitting pictures of your favourite seven albums no one wants to see
can I get a hallelujah?
can I get a hand clap?
this fat fingered cherub
a ghoulish gargoyle
after two days in the trench I put my head over the parapet and they clean shot the cigarette straight from my lips
mud and grime
drying to cement
in my head
I returned home at night my wife said I’d changed
I was beginning to fade
to a grey facsimile of the person she fell in love with
— drained and washed of colour
a slow death in a verdant Albion
full of lottery winners and knife victims
I still hadn’t written that novel
or made it to the edge of the continent
and in this new landscape
it was so easy to get lost like the blind tourist who feels his way around the world
finds his way back home by following the smell of cinnamon
the roar of traffic won’t put him off
the Doppler wail of the red fire engine moves around him
easy
like flowing water
milky ovaries and we smoked autumn leaves in those days that failed to appear on a calendar
and the lunch time barber found a secret door in the back of my head
unlocked and looking in
he advised me of what he saw:
50 forgotten families
memories filed away
and Iron Maiden poster
I paid and left and made an appointment to return in a month
why is your shadow longer today?
just weighted down
like a drowning man
in wet clothes
an un-tucked shirt can be a sign of weakness beware
speak now
limited edition free ride
kill the engine flat
seen so many people shrunk by grief
skin hanging on bones
t-shirts like a parachute
ashtray overflowing
the slow demise of Europe
are you the man whispering inside my ear?
there is no military parade today
there is no noise coming through the airwaves today
take the dancing girls to the dead stations
tell them to say their goodbyes
in a dream I robbed a bank
and one of the cashier fell in love with me
I wore a mask and when asked to describe me the cashier said I resembled a matinee film star
all chiselled cheek bones
I sent her a £1,000 and a note saying thanks
she thinks about me daily
basketball shoes
Your sense of smell went west
Stuffed crust pizza stained
your vest
More paracetamol (just in case)
that telephone doesn’t stop ringing
23 and
I counting
all the passenger on the side of a dead three lane motorway
carved through a landscapes of buried children dead trees trodden down amongst swine bone
we sit and wait for the blowback
cut price geometry
in the garden where we’ll plant the flowers
stuck in the mud with the burning man
the old buildings have all decided to collapse today
on a train with a basketball team
all long legs and size 12 feet
To
I write bad poetry to a man in Florida
who nurses the sick and thinks about
recidivists siblings and military memories
we’ve seen ghostly figures of Mike Jagger
scuttle across the page
caressing space age cutlery
made in a factory of assembly lines that never stop moving where the tannoys play white noise
and at the edge of town there is a pile of dead TV’s all empty and hollow
they told me the fillings in my teeth were satellites and I was being tracked by men in bunkers somewhere underground
I’ve always like word silo and have dreams
of fake names in hotel registers
the bruised knee of that honeymoon couple the burnt tourist asleep On the beach
I dreamt of death by spider bites
chemistry experiments that went wrong
acid burn
clowns in suits in a town where everyone had Beatle haircuts
no one wanted to be a marionette
one half of a magnet
and your neighbours dogs barks a secret language while advertisers tell you
their shampoo will give you stronger hair and you imagine everything you see is an hallucination induced by breathing in bad oxygen
at a time, we’ll just agree it’s now, when the weather can’t make up its mindand the animals outside just know somethings coming,
a static in the air,
a taste, metallic?
when the grey ground gives way to the brown crunch of dry leaves
I hear they talk about conspiracies
Nazi gold stored inside a Swiss mountain,
moon landings filmed in a downtown warehouse,
aliens living amongst us, and when waking up becomes a reenactment of the previous day and the day before that
I knew we’d never run out of things to talk aboutshe kept a diary of political slogans and propaganda posters
“ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS”
she mumbled in her sleep
He painted a whole town in black and white
the row of shops
the post office
the launderette
the butcher and his bloodied butchers block
I spend days waiting on that email
I checked my spam daily messages about people in my area looking for sex
money scams
girth enlargement pills
out of the fire
head first
into the frying pan
in days before computers
they spammed walls with petroglyphs
which no one could decipher
many names
many names like the father
son
Holy Ghost
different faces for different occasions
– passwords for everything stored in a secret file protected by more passwords, buried in a vault under a mountain in Switzerland
elaborate and easy to forget –
the fingerprints were fake –
my shadow is longer than you’d think –
I’ve seen your passport picture –
all beard and no eyes –
pictorial bible for the remedial kids at the back of the class – big letters and colourful pictures
– we forget who all this is written for
– the unknown readership in the backwoods and boondocks –
leather shoes,
new and creaking like trees bending in the wind,
bury me with the cutlery
and heirlooms
Polishing the stars
Eatmorewords's Blog 
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