IM’s, emails, texts,

would we find a

bell-curve of our hearts, a

Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram of our

souls? or just random dots and a

meaningless chart on which

no parabola can be discerned?

makeshift roadside shrines, wondering why their

demise is tacked to the place of it along with

faded photographs and plastic flowers rather than their

bedroom, say, with the row of shoes like

yawning mouths, or the empty seat in the

classroom, or the blinking cursor on a

blank screen in a busy office, or the

spare place at a table replete with

furtive glances—but life soon scours new

courses for its flow and the dead are left in

muddy backwaters or beside dusty roads where the

speeding traffic riffles the tributes and

muffles the ghosts shouting something about

profit from loss.

jamming her thermostat on maximum

boiling her body fat away so I slept next to a

sizzling skeleton with a libido like a

nuclear reactor in meltdown which

neither I nor her toys nor

all of us in unison could assuage and I

worried my heart out for her but

once she was well again I was

shamefully nostalgic for the

sharp poke of her pelvis and that

auto-da-fe on the

griddle of her loins.

Quattrocento, not mid-winter Kent; gracing a

calvary, not cross-hatched by my bare trees;

glimpsed through a grotto sheltering a

pensive Saint or an impassive Madonna, not

reflected in muddy Medway;

bursting from the tomb like

Christ Triumphant, not ignored by

bored commuters on the tired tarmac of a

station carpark.

few choose to notice the slow

annihilation of time whilst

fireworks burst and promises are

made and broken amidst their

effervescent sparkle, and anyway

who does not prefer the

festive fervour of hope against the

steady paring of life’s nails?

solder thoughts to the

point of my pen;

rivet words

row by row until they’re

watertight;

melt emotions and

anneal them into

something new and less

brittle;

Wordsmith?

shoe my poem fit to

strike sparks off

long hard roads.

darker as though the

damp hem of a long black dress was

drawn across my face, then the

clouds were torn into great

unmoored battleships slipping with the tide

downstream to destruction or escape,

swept there by a

wind that left the sky almost

albino with seldom-seen stars.

that’s when he came home, not

whole exactly but the

children didn’t care, so excited to have a

Father again that the moments when he was

somewhere else got lost in the

lovely mayhem of

unwrapping cheap presents and

carving a cheap bird and

carrying them to bed when it

all got too much, in the

silence peculiar to parents, then the

politeness of clearing up,

expressions of tiredness, his

silent sobs against my

bare warm back.

crowd’s  indifference, chatting and

laughing loudly as you played and you

never raised your voice, knowing

something might stick, that the band you were supporting would be

forgotten tomorrow, that there would be a

fee and a fix and a fuck and you would

die young, so what did it matter that

one man listened and got angry

or that his anger still

effervesced thirty years later, on your

dead behalf?

somewhere down in Happy Town as the

clubs got into gear and the

young went about their round of

dancing, drinking, pulling, puking whilst the

rejects stood sullen, watching,

wishing they were elsewhere or

someone else and sinking

enough beer to start a

World War.