The dark sun of a god

called winter, the winter of our

discontent, unrelatable: Walnut

Whip, fury like an unspoken

wave of collapse, the gunfire cry

of fear over love. Ghost faces

flit across floors of fallen gunk,

America is itchy with mouths,

a single mind- a jiffy of dread.

Voodoo death explodes like

a joke cigar, a clown’s flower.

The wall is a hand in a slap.

The elastic-band snaps back,

always. Mildred rejoices at the
pale, the blue lives. The word ape.

Who are those filthy embers

about to catch? Children with

whitewashed bellies, no picket,

nor monstrous vehicle.

Don’t tread on me. Girlie,

sit back down. Open your legs  

for the tiniest hands. And all along

we knew it was the case. Every

Injun slips by like a day. Oil & labour,

scored like a map- footfall of

terror, complex.

Waterstones frog with a golden
crown. Remember that deep
pool, the flaxen ball scattered
by a Princess? Like a tinderbox

that held all the evil in the world,
but gooder. Apple-right. Easy for it
to slip from her powdery hands
into the gravy-black pond, now

lost. That froggy in the cold murk
flipped it up with his webbed fingers
from the sticky mud, the gore, 
and swam to greet her blue

strange planets of thanks,
the lashes that cradled the trinket.
He was neither frog nor pipe
but after a kiss a shining boy

called Prince. Now in a carrier bag,
hidden, the first belonging of an
unborn sprite. I carry him careful past
the playground where chalk crackles

like a radio. I love you Mum it says,
October broadcast. I love you.
A golden thought that waits
to surface- for all this open space.

Nectarines settle in the icy 
dawn, one skin against another.
The cherries are out of fashion-
berries in general are aggressive.

Panda bowl. 
Vivid rips in the fabric of reality,
squash like the evening sun, crass
pumpkins, pink at a banquet.

Sometimes the oranges go magic,
bobbing down the market. Slice
them for a white light, the turnips
are moons, mais quel est un gourd?

Nobody knows. Traders wheel
like birds in slipstreams, biggy 
biggy big bowl they cry, breath
exiting into the crisp morning Wow.

These the stay-at-home, elders, the wise ones,
the unemployable, day-offs, the night workers.

These the freelancers, poets, the guilty, 
artists and strangers, mysterious cargo.

River of potterers, dodderers, the aimless undirect,
the Asda shoppers, gentle with avocados,

Totting it up. The disabled, unable, the radical 
and rutted- we flow through the mall, rubbernecked.

Enlightened. Beguiled by lights, the ambient puddles-
ushering in air on some unwritten mission.

Pumpkins swapped up with
the Coca-Cola saint of chimneys
who plops down into your soot-filled
reception like a fun-ripe carp.

Bones skitter across the ice,
sycamore bobby-pins strewn in wintry hair,
leaves whipping over the forecourt as
demonic confetti whirls to the right,

archaic-sploding to left-overs, crisped.
The first trees in polystyrene storms,
the crooked fingers of a skinless hand,
and all the while the outside whispers

not yet, not yet- the glistening gift!
Like Blanche Dubois in a dirty slip
mulched whole, our broken quarter,
O lady of swans- Trump aftertaste.

No one knows where the

Morris came from, some

say Africa. Or what?

Blackface see. Tradition

with its wreaths wrapped

alien tight around our

island. Don’t touch it. We

are not for you. Our children

suffer, whatsisname prizing

out the tuck from under their

Roman noses. Scarcity,

a woman scrabbling in the dust.

Brown people bleeding their

brown blood everywhere.

Muck. Time to look backwards

to a time when things were

lighter. Just don’t mention the

wars! Our Great Nation spraying

Enlightenment all over the

place- a tired child learning

how to use the Big Boy.

Nope. Your utopia is short-

sighted. Love is finite. No

space for humanity here.

Time to dial it back

to a dreamless rock,

all lonely in its sea of Mine.

Clear Channel

carol ann 
is stuck behind the glass,
a fish of gold, guppy, 
filming us for no one.

on the edge 
of a thought, froze
motionless, poem
to fixation, to thought,
the unthought, 

regent dreamings of 
a caged sprite.
our lady of unwritten
queen-deaths, 

dead airspace,
the space between  
the words, aether,
specs in the fridge,
4'33, 8.48, projected

mind-demise, hologram
of the public sphere,
of the market place, 
flogging a dead horse-
arrested.

exposed flesh on the green- 
littered sun-littered garden under
the giant tv. it is black & white
with the same surface areas,
prone to the same cancers, multi
way. just one day of shining sky

opening treasure chests, these pastry 
legs. a boy runs between fag-ends
toward a shady dog, tongue like
a spoon. the blossom is out yet we
still won't believe in it. snow will then 
tumble from the sun into our cocktails,

and boat drinks with cherries. gale
force winds will snatch the bangers
from the hopeful coals. sod's lawyers
in superstition, it is may but it may not
last. in a few months winter will return
with eggnog and the whole circus of

cold ceremonies. we strip hard here 
on the rancid sward with the rest of the 
demographics, pinking, darkening, 
slushies from the sickly shop that sells
dummies, canes and laces, the sun
that batters our eyes, these hunted caves.  

the biggest failure on the high st since Woolworths.
88 years of underwiring, chandelier water sports,
grief-deep hearts and picnic wicker that shouts
Are You Being Served? a gloom that seeps
into the psychedelic fabric of the counterpanes,

administration, administration, administration.
the final nail and british homes all left bereft of 
Roses, the owl-shaped butter dish, towels that tower 
in spires of dry infants, the white embrace of advert-fresh
caucasions, jaunty bubbles and nose-pink skin.

depressing coffee and pain au... no, depressing 
pensioners in tans and beige, staring out at the cold 
playground, listening to the sound of sore replicants oh,
no hope for this store, the passing of time, the carpets
worn to nil- the shining desperation of a carriage clock.

Poundland the third.
Three kingdoms reigned over
by fake hair royals, a Charlie
Dimmock god- terrible and
just, plant ties for fingers-
doing the job for now. 

dream of the countryside in spring.
the birds with their songs and spaces.
we are so immersed in london now,
the fields have smoked into black-

to burning stubble. when will we be 
old enough to retire from the mall- 
if ever? faces always open, the lights
and music have infected us into 

staying. no forks or combines, no vivid
sun that yolks onto the top meadow in
black strips of ripped up tights, no cockerel
sounding out the death bell, nor silence.

The 50 pence drops
and it seems disconnected from
me. It is not mine, though
I realise as I pick it up and pass
it to the lady in front of me
that it is. I am a child, loose

change in my pocket, I had
assumed she was also. But
out comes her lady purse,
it is a brick with a movie star 
clasp, she unclasps it sort of
officious as if it is I stealing

from her. She is well to do
and I am ruffian, clothes never
sit upon me right and she can
tell it. The 50p slips into 
her void, gone forever- 
embezzled. Could have been

a tip for the chirpy girl who
makes an effort to make my
coffee sound like the most exciting
thing that has ever happened,
even in her brown uniform, 
here in Walthamstow, in the rain.

What do you call a cat in a chemist?

My favourite joke,

The only one I ever remember.

Apothecary bottles

with coloured potions 

and Mum gets her 

Nicorette there, six

months before her death. 

Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté

bags his rabbit, red as

lipsticks in the strip-lit aisles.

The Marquis of Carabas dreams

of the eighties, Anais Anais- 

the byways of Essex,

lost car trips.

rain sleeps vertically,
the scooby-doo

sea-footed crowds
slurp prints onto the

waxy floor. exoticoffee
holds them up, they

dance on the head of a
pin, camels, needles,

sharpened semaphores
pointed as poems,

coughed up, battled out,
as an april shower, and

also as plans, bulldozers
that run daggers for

ze trampolines.

the inside of the easter egg
is empty. paying for space,
the air is wrapped in cocoa
and golden foil. a bow,
the box, an idea.

A man in Deichmann
stands at the counter 
crushing flying saucers
into his mouth. His boots

are ragged as the claws 
that scuttle through Prufrock.
Sherbet is made of atoms,
the shop floor a library

of babble, cheap wallets 
the colour of stolen sit
strategically by the till,
like reincarnated baddies.

He taps his card onto the 
space-age, the wink-light 
blue as a pilot. His new shoes 
nestle in their crackling nest,

in dreams of acceleration.

grief 

Distant laughter is a bad opening,
the romance of loneliness is fabrication-
people are all around and receptive, 
open-armed, kinder than ageing.

You separate yourself with thoughts
of otherness- particularly sensitive
that day, even if every day. You are not
an intruder, they love you even if you

set yourself apart in awkwardness.
The inability to join in is not artistic,
it is an excuse to stay a science of
yourself, outsider, your nose pressed

against the window where a fire burns
in a faraway hearth and a family toast
marshmallows and laugh and lovingly 
smile at the other, gazing outward.