Out loud

There is a way they laugh
Who have forsaken delight
They throw their heads back
And squeeze their eyes shut
The laughter rolls out
Like the melody of a march
Played on a tarnished bugle
From yellowed sheet music
In a dusty quadrangle
The cadence is a shackle
The soldiers are prisoners
The prisoners pensioners
Retired from delight
The wages they are doled
Are only in money
The laughter they enact
Only an old military march
Played in weed-choked squares
Honouring a forgotten conqueror
As they throw their heads back
And squeeze their eyes shut
Anything not to break form, not to
Break formation
And at last remember
Laughter's noble opposite.

Green Label

It was a heavy, mediocre whisky
Gilbey's Green Label
It would be years or a decade
Before I started drinking good whisky
And now my guts hurt when I do.

Some kind of heavy, sweet perfume too
Subtlety and taste were not your strong suites
It was a heavy, musky hangover
And if I'd spent more years like that
I'd be a terrible writer today.

The sort you like.

The old duality

The body is the mind is
The body remembers, it
Keeps covenants memory eludes
Holds vigils though remembrance fades

The body is the mind is
Thinking through motion
Through repose through a twist
In the marrow that slowly nudges
Its frailer twin, cognition

The body. Remembers.
Memory fails but the body
Remembers

These are the streets
I've walked 28 years
Only our names are the same
Even the city has changed
This is the corner
Where the buses still slow
A schoolboy leaps on
The other passengers grumble,
Grudgingly make room
That wasn't me
Clumsy, I'd have fallen
My friend rode the footboard
He'd painted MOTORHEAD
On his cap, in the Metallica font
He's in PR now
Only our names are the same
Even the city is different
They'll rename the streets too
Change the names of everything
A forest is a highway
Exploitation is protection
Majorities are dwindling
Even tolerance is capitulation
28 years and there's less space
About as much trash, I guess
Only my name remains
Written in exhaust fumes
On a lamplit sky.

Xymox soundtrack
Half-dark room
Sun reluctant
To break cloud cover
Basslines throb
And skitter
Birdsong combines
Cieling fan on full blast
Cold like a quilt
Green means go
Amber is wait
Grey says stay
Grey days stay