new year in a small town

a gaggle of revellers giddy
with booze screaming
forced joy at their tottering
friends running for the suburban hills and
the whoosh of a passing car
eddying the damp nocturnal air and a
lonely firecracker letting off
at the year’s passing through the
same night arbitrarily, divided

subsumed in surrey

i use all the gears
tearing down these lanes,
evernarrowing while never quite
running out of road, not lost but
somehow losing my sense of self in
this evershrinking island; its
shredded coast distantly
crumbling, inevitably,    
into the yawning sea.

eurostar

they cancelled the trains
on new year’s eve eve
and left them stranded
here alone with me, meh.

she wasn’t there: perhaps she’s
hidden in a vessel in my
brain, perhaps she’s wandering
disconsolate among the remains of a
longforgotten dream. Either

way she’s gone now & i don’t
know how/when/if i’ll ever,
ever get her back.

holding pattern

Every day is different
Except when it’s the same

gone

i’ve lost a world
inside of me. Daily

i’d take her out, all twinkly
& alive, humming with
an energy oblivious to
confinement. I’d

take her out, turn her
gently round in my
upturned palm, lovingly
put her back inside for
safekeeping. Today

moments

I capture the moment but it eludes me
Spinning around it reveals its nature:
Not one moment, but many, a day of moments
All equal, banal to an outsider’s eye
Facets of an amorphous whole that isn’t really there

A ladder poised against a gutter
An ugly collection of Italianate marble urns refusing to decay
The sun, courteous words with a neighbor

A cup of tea grown cold
My son in the car chatting on the way to wawa
You used to fence there I know
A deckside lunch, lackluster food
Family

Wrestling on the couch
A hug

More likely, far
from this new
emptiness, a
different kind of
life in this, or another,
universe:

a birth, cradled by an isolated dip in
spacetime, never knowing, never
caring it’s all happened before,
happens again; until happenstance
itself ceases, and there
is, and was,
no time.

barefoot, we paused a little to contemplate
the silent noise ;never the long-ago reason we
left our sneakers and socks behind

snowflakes

One day, one night, the
world will end; all
memories and art and
artifice will cease and we,
our helixes unravelled,
will disappear
as if we had never been.

Perhaps, some ship of fools will
survive the many lifetimes it takes
to reach another world worth living on;
perhaps, hitching a ride on some lonely
asteroid, a virus or two will seek out
new chains to infect. Perhaps not.

inconsistencies; recalibrates ·her
perspective; smiles like the
first time she heard him:

He will make them all go away
all the ones not like me.

One by one they will all be
gone, picked off, shipped off
someone else’s problem now.

and she in ·her world,

soothed       unfurrowed
unencumbered     bewombed.

And only ·his
voice, ·his words,
and ·nothing else.

barefoot

barefoot, we walked from one
house to the next, halfhopping
the gravel driveway to the relative
relief of the tarmacadamed road,
baked just enough to smart
young, shoe-sequestered feet

barefoot, we found the road peppered
with islands: horseturd patties,
tireflattened and desiccated, the
strawlattice carpeting a soothing
intermission in our awkward progress

barefoot, we skipped on down the hill to
where the brackened floor of the woods began,
cracking to the tune of our heels

love poem

i started writing poems because i
wasn’t getting laid. Then i wrote
poems about getting laid, then
not getting laid and wanting to
get laid; then getting laid… & ♻.

I wrote poems about hating who
i was; i still write those, i guess.

I wrote poems about:

  • incongruities and patchworks
    of things overheard , and
  • the things themselves (‘no

ideas ·but in things’).

Yet i never wrote about
love. So why start now?

pos·ses·sive

She faces the bowl of emptiness and
dips of regret; remembers what never was.

On the halfshattered screen of ·her phone she
contemplates the man whose vague promises once

spoke to her, as twinkling hopes in some
glossy firmament; she rationalizes the

the arsehole in me

the arsehole in me stands railing at the unjust world
, where ignorance & entitlement walk hand in glove

the arsehole in me protests endothermically, endlessly whir-
ring permutations of immediate & vengeful schadenfreude

the arsehole in me is never the better person, is always
right(eous), indignant unforgiving, unyielding

; un-everything.

The arsehole in me never does anything, never
leaves the cage he angrily rattles, never sees the
bigger picture, or the needs of others, unless projected
through my own need to divest guilt. I look hard at
the arsehole in me,  and i think:

¡what an arsehole!

out of body

Walking up 7th avenue of a

    friday morning among

10,000 office bound

and music

    for 18 musicians blaring

        in my

ears really (yes

really) fucks with

    your

brain

muppet me

If i were Jim Henson i’d be dead;

unsullied by a surgeon’s knife,

uninvaded by tubes where tubes should not go:

unsliced

    unstitched

        unhere

Conurbation

The city is the place we go to
be alone together; little pockets of
ego vying for anonymous attention

We spread our wings, yet stumble,
suffocating among the towers that
suck out the winter sunlight

We come to the suburbs to
recapture ourselves, our meaning in
society, and procreate

erosion
poems 2012–2023