Happiest Away Where I Am

In the dawn of frost –
It's blue veins bulging like electrical wires.

Women holding small shoulders
Passing us listening to stupid music
Around a clear air of non-sound
Between us that felt like you were
Never really there.

Your clean soft skin
Like plastercine moulded with
Thumbprints under the cheekbone
With a nervous quiet
Like meditating rabbits –
And unwrapped from a towel
You float in space,
Uncommon as a bullet in the spine.

You are happiest away where I am
You soldier the roads
With an old shivering presence,
Gives me a thirst for Coke.

With a mouth square as a brick
And eyes brown and quick
You'll see me coming.

Some Images From Dec '09

New Year - New Writing

Haven't written on this in a long time, but I have been extremely busy. I was working 8 hour shifts everyday, having to get up out of bed at 5:30am, it was a killer. I was in University, too, doing my MA Writing, and having slaughtered my brain - along with my friend's brain - it was difficult to think of anything to write but small notes that turned into a poem now and again that got left to one side.

I quit my hours at work, and back to my part-time hours; I was fed up with being on a part-time contract and working what hours the bosses wanted me to work. So, out of spite and principal, I said no more. I would have, if they'd given me the full-time contract I wanted, but it was given to a temp. The cunts. So plan to quit within the next couple of months, as long as I can find a new job before I go.

I hope I can safely say my writing has improved. I submitted some poems to GetBack Magazine and, from what I remember, they were accepted and should be published this month or next month. Also, choosing some poems to submit to another magazine. The good thing about an MA Writing is the opportunities for publication.

I should publish my fiction. I was told the one I submitted for my course was good. Though I prefer just to send poems, maybe to establish myself as a poet? I don't know. Maybe short stories are just too big and hefty compared to poems.

This is one I wrote around Nov/Dec after I turned 24:


Silent man was a boy
Or, at 24 –
The young used to eternity
Placed between things like ghosts –

And almost floats from wall to wall
And oozes between things
Until the wall itself –
A perfect lake of flesh,

Where silent man has someone
Whose moth-from-mouth voice
Is a little flatterer, you flutter
Your eyes – laughs at me –

Sitting like an elephant
Waiting to vomit –
You say stop it,
Hunger. For 40 years –

I am an owl whose sleep is dead –
Demented and red
In the eyes, I am stood like a druid –

I have dreams they want
To set me on fire,
With a match and fluid –

Eyelashes fall constantly,
Until eyes are naked –

Weird cocktail of desire,
You flatter me –

The cold is inside warm
Bodies ravage the old
And the young die young
Like musicians they wish to be.