Status Updates From Collected Poems

Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,

The world is half the devil’s and my own,
Daft with the drug that smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

Would leave me cold as butter for the flies,
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke

Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First character characters of birth and death.

Man in his maggots barren = Man is merely food for worms

Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;

As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads

Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;

Standouts:
• Especially when the October wind
• From love’s first fever to her plague

‘ so often the opportunity [for sex] comes too late; the seed has soured; love has turned to lust, and lust to sadism; the mind has become… Choked by the weeds of inhibition; and the union of two star creatures… Is doomed from the start.’

This is the world: the lying likeness of
Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move
Loving from rag to bone;
The dream that kicks the buried from their sack
And let their trash be honoured as the quick.
Suffer this world to spin.

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

We watched the show of shadows kiss or kill,
Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

In this our age the gunman and his moll,
Two one-dimension ghosts, love on a real,
Strange to our solid eye,
And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
When sunlight goes are sundered from the womb,

Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night

Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,