The Cave

Goodbye, sweet cave, my black-walled, slanted-ceilinged
cubist teenage refuge,
old dartboard ringed with misfired aims.
Sweet shelter from the deluge
of corporate greed, the blizzards of unfeeling,
those blustering, windy moral claims!

Goodbye, my cherished lair where beer-soaked evenings
fell flat in snoring darkness.
“Stop that, you noisy git!” yelled Dave
and poked my lifeless carcass.
I punched and kicked his head in without leaving
my drink-swathed dreams, beloved cave!

I’d huddle by your roaring paraffin flame
with ham and mushroom pizza
drowned in ketchup on my lap.
The phone chimed Für Elise
when I pressed on ‘hold’. Then mobiles came.
I scoffed, “What is this yuppie crap?”

Then came the king of terror from the sky
and Mars, all reigning happily.
Falling towers, crumbling meanings.
I gazed in sighing apathy
out your window, as the world steamed by,
at all the peacocks’ pointless preenings.

And then I’d stare mind-paintings on the wall
of aura-glowing gods
with pear-shaped heads and bulging eyes.
With subtle, knowing nods
I prayed they’d rescue me and show me all
the universe’s highest highs.

The Field

The field is lying empty as it calls to me. It’s waiting.
I sit and gaze across the screaming void.
The javelin quivers in my hand with partially-employed
impatience, action-primed, anticipating.

I chew the tip, carve patterns on the ground, all grids and spirals,
and wait for nature to bestow its ware.
A splash of false alarms. It seems the field begins to glare.
And now they scamper forth. The first arrivals!

Some gallop along like their feet are on fire. Some stand, still, brooding.
Some trot from A to B, then B to A
with cautious glances here and there. Some roar, some howl, some bray,
some tones that trickle out are soft and soothing.

Some spin me round and round, then speed away beyond my clutches,
some drag me on a sweaty kill for hours.
Sometimes I miss by yards and rage at God for lack of powers.
Some drop into my hands from gentle brushes.

My javelin dances in a flood
of spraying, gushing, deep black blood.

Stalking

My ex-girlfriend’s parents
explained the world to me.
“No, humans do not have to
co-operate, stop trying
to speak to us, you
stalker.”

I’ve always preferred
going behind,
not in front. Especially women
with high heels,
clip clop clip clop
like a ponytailed
handbag-saddled
predator. I pull into a pitstop,
“after you, my dear,
and this whiskered clown in the cowboy hat
and the sack of acne
on the skateboard, after you.”
The footsteps, the muttering,
sweep swarms of itchy wasps
round my skull.

So,
when that curveless Albanian girl
I’d met in a bubble of cyberspace
came skidding away
from her knot-entangling mother,
her fist-wielding father,
her penis-brandishing brother,
and then there they were,
in my email inbox,
outside my launderette,
in my front garden screaming
“Where is she? Where is she? Please,
speak to us!”,
a clod of compassion
got wedged in my throat
after I’d put down the phone
to the police.

Letter from a Hunter to a World of Farmers

From lofty pedestals, you tell me that I’m sick, abnormal.
You say my mind’s distorted with disorder, with disease.
You sneer that I’m a weirdo, you complain my brain cells dawdle,
you moan, “Why won’t you swing and somersault on Life’s trapeze?”

You moan, “Why won’t you comb your hair and climb that sparkling ladder
up to a mortgage in the sky and spotless mental health?
Why won’t you woo and date and court and watch confetti scatter?
It’s easy! Why won’t you just be like everybody else?”

You scorn that my attention span is hobbling round on broken
crutches, insist I flood my nerves and shrivel my physique
with Ritalin, amphetamine to nail my eyelids open
until my heart is rattling like a woodpecker’s beak.

But I’m a hunter roving up a hilltop with a notebook
and you’re all farmers hunched behind some numbers on a screen.
I should be sat beside a pile of haddock and a boathook,
not counting out my money in a haze of nicotine.

I should be stalking through a meadow, flinging spears at mammoths
or painting fecund women on a cavern’s bedroom wall,
not racing after metro trains from Monday till the sabbath.
I belong in Paradise. You are Humanity’s fall.

The day that scythes and (so he reckoned) brains began to sharpen,
Mankind began his brother-killing, sceptre-grabbing freefall.
   “And God commanded the man, saying: Of every tree of the garden
   thou mayst eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil

   thou shalt not eat. For the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt die.”
Good and evil. Law. With kings and queens and guns and slavery.
   “And the serpent said unto the woman: In the day ye eat, your eyes
   shall be opened, ye shall be as gods.” (No more shall ye be neighbourly.)

And so commenced your sorghum-smothered, soil-stabbing nightmare,
your diamond-chasing slide into disorder and disease,
the famine in your soul, a valley thick with mental blight where
your tribe and kinsmen’s lives aren’t worth a bag of mouldy cheese.

You burned your sisters at the stake ’cause they remembered nature,
you marched your brothers through a swamp of mustard gas and fire,
you milk your people rake-thin, building factories on a glacier
as you plunge towards the heavens, higher, higher, higher.

And as you soar to Hell’s black chasm, lower, lower, lower,
you’re plotting algorithms, planting microchips in pigs,
you’re brewing murderous viruses and sieving protozoa,
pressing boys and girls to question what’s between their legs.

You puke your poison through the world, through forest, soil and sea,
which teem now with transgender fish and glowing three-nosed mice.
   “And unto Adam he said: Because thou hast eaten of the tree,
   cursed is the ground, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all thy life.

   Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth, thou shalt eat the herb of the field.
   In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground.”
So, on you slog in cotton collars on your treadmill wheels,
all sucking Satan’s hairy balls to earn your precious pound.

You cough your mental virus through the banks, the television,
you sneeze your snotty doctrines through the colleges and courts.
You spit upon your ancestors in soulless malnutrition,
you drug your brains with see-through virtue, self-applauding thoughts.

You offer up your daughters to the bursting bottled cravings
of toxic-minded colonisers from an alien tribe,
castrate your sons with rainbow-coloured dominatrix ravings
and then convince them they’re the luckiest patriarchs alive.

Now women vomit bile at men who follow nature’s rumble.
“How dare you speak to me! I’m brilliant! Stay there on your shelves!”
You’re shepherd, sheepdog and the sheep all rolled into one bundle.
“Everybody, get in line! Stop thinking for yourselves!”

Paradise is lost. You sowed the seeds of Armageddon,
watered a skyscraper, ground the human heart to flakes.
I’ll leave you to your button-prodding sick robotic heaven
where you can play Monopoly with goats and talk to snakes.

Bedtime Attire

I explained, “It’s to regulate temperature!”
But she ranted and whinged like an emperor,
as though wearing a hat could be kinky.

“My Venus, don’t snap like a flytrap.
Here, look at this kid in the nightcap.”
She belted out, “Fuck him, the stinky
snotty-nosed pipsqueak!”

                                                   I said,
“How dare you come into my bed
and insult Wee Willie Winkie.”

Starting Point

Kayak-splashed mosquito-bitten primrose-hosing afternoon,
Polish-German border.

On one side of the kayaks
bustling churches, angels draped across their ceilings,
freckly-chested bottle blondes on painted tiptoe,
pilsner-swilling builders inked with
flags and patriotic slogans.

On the other, dogma-swaddling
headscarves of obedience,
robes of servitude
caging every inch of female passion
under whipping eyes above falafel-speckled wiry beards.

A statue of liberty shrouded in pink
with rainbow and superstate flags in her fist
trumpets in German and English,
in Polish as well, to remind them:
“Europe starts here”.

Still No Apology

We don’t have to apologise
or admit being wrong
because we are never wrong,
even when we are,
even when our wrongness
is fluttering from the church roof,
is blaring from loudspeakers on the high street,
is wafting out of every sewer,
we are still not wrong.

Even when we have no arguments
except abuse
and finger-pointing
and defamation
and abuse,
we are still right
and you are wrong,

you are the problem,
not us,

because our beards are greyer than yours,
our bellies and bank accounts fatter,
our farts the aroma of jasmine,
our piss the taste of Dom Perignon.

This village is ours,
not yours.

You don’t belong here,
on our golden one-horsed hill-descending bandwagon,
so clear off!

You are the one who should apologise,
for existing.

Hope in the Time of Coronavirus

The sun was high in the sky,
the mechanics were welding,
the binmen were clattering,
my landlord was chopping wood
when I woke up,
head hammering with brittle futures
and crumbling economies,
head hammering with
syringes, with Satanic
corporations and conspiracies,
with visions of commands
in microchips
in humanity
in chains,
with marks of the beast,
with the two-decade-long
ambulance siren of loneliness
in my stomach
reaching its deafening,
workless, cashless,
publess, conversationless,
polythene-gloved, mask-gagged,
laptop-hypnotised,
auto-ejaculating,
turning-Chinese, corporate-socialist
howling crescendo
as I shuffled across my cage
of unwashed plates, unfiled documents,
unread books,
unswept clumps of self-cut hair,
to the unscrubbed toilet within a
sky-scraping, turtle-choking, radiation-beaming,
forest-gobbling virus-ridden
toilet.

I’d first caught sight of your
nurse-impersonating, cloth-ensconced face
on a nearly-empty bus,
“Are you the girl from the Internet?”
and now I’m homing in on you,
over the newly-budding,
deer-trampled, stork-pecked fields. A breeze
tickles the warming springtime air
and I can see the church
in a straight line ahead of me. Somewhere
inside that still-towering,
still-singing, still-hoping hallmark of Europe
there’s a Father Gombrowicz,
Zbigniew to his uncle and auntie,
yanking on a bell-rope,
flooding the air with brass and god,
Zbiggi the Ropeman to his mates,
spinner of biblical and home-made yarns,
vermouth-lubricated tales
of trumpet lessons in Chernobyl.
He hurled grenades in Afghanistan
for Communism or Capitalism,
I forget which one,
but now he huddles in a confession booth,
half-priest, half-psychotherapist,
unravelling the ropes of
the beaten housewife
the alcoholic greengrocer
the cheated butcher
the bankrupt hairdresser
the sick doctor
and stopping them
from hanging themselves.

Through the up-thrusting grass
and dandelions and wormwood,
behind a rusty tractor,
hacked out of a wall of wheat and
midge-clouded bulrushes, weaves
the shortcut I found last month after
hours of head-scratching squinting scrutiny,
seven bony logs
with seven drilled-on steps,
a wooden stretcher across the stream,
fourteen seconds and I’m in the village.

There you fizz and bubble,
a curvaceous bottle of nationalist elixir
in a warehouse of globalist poisons.

Along the windsurfer-swabbed,
fisherman-stitched lake
hares and weasels and puppies are scampering,
chaffinches are chirruping,
frogs and lizards leap,
wild boar snuffle around.
The Polish for boar is jeeky, you tell me,
same as the word for wild.
So “wild boar” is “jeeky jeeky”.

Beside a derelict barn,
down on the daisy-dotted grass
in a haze of honeysuckle,
nature finds its way,
our fingers
then our lips
find each other.

The lake-blue eyes
in your maskless face
pour into me
as torrents of sweet hot
medicinal kisses
drench my parched core
melting
two decades
of coughing, sneezing, shivering
winter,

and I fancy,

somehow,

I can see Heaven
or Zeta Reticuli,

and God
in a spinning ark,
hovering over a stable.

Wiara

Teraźniejszość, przeszłość i przyszłość
zawsze wciera sól
i pieprz w cięcie.
Lecz jeśli płacisz czynsz, czyścisz ściany
i czcisz krzyż,
odziedziczysz szczęście.

Brave New World

Welcome to our brave new world,
like Nineteen Eighty-Four but a few years later,
a safe space reserved for Feminists, terrorists,
vicarious intellects, beta-males, no haters.
We, we, we decide the rules,
you must learn them ad verbatim.
You’ll be safe and sound if you obey them:

Enjoying your own culture
is racist.
Enjoying a different culture
is racist.
Looking at a Chinese rubber sculpture
is racist.
Trying to cure a stomach ulcer
is racist.
Dressing as a panther or a puma
is racist.
Preferring tangerines to satsumas
is racist.
Listening to David Icke’s rumours
is racist.
Having a sense of humour
is racist.

Welcome to our brave new world,
like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with an airbase more genders,
a safe space reserved for gormless conformists,
puppets and pawns for corporate agendas.
We, we, we decide the rules,
you must learn them ad verbatim.
You’ll stay out of jail if you obey them:

Explaining that some Muslims keep slaves
is racist.
Complaining that your muslin briefs chafe
is racist.
Borders blocking immigrant waves
are racist.
Wanting your children to be safe
is racist.
Pointing out George Soros’s wealth
is racist.
Lamenting your nation’s poor health
is racist.
Being hopeful it recuperates
is racist.
Opposing globalist superstates
is racist.

Welcome to our brave new world,
like Nineteen Eighty-Four where the citizens are fatter,
where the wisdom of history, small businesses, the common man,
common sense and white lives don’t matter.
We, we, we decide the rules,
you must learn them ad verbatim.
Your soul will disappear as you obey them.

Allowing working-class people to vote
is racist.
Differentiating a sheep from a goat
is racist.
Greeting Indians with a slight grin
is racist.
Having been born with white skin
is racist.
The pigs, the filth of Babylon and ting,
are racist.
Stop-and-searching black men swamped in bling
is racist.
Ignoring all those gangs of Scottish grannies
is racist,
and Catholic terrorists who plot in Spanish.
How racist!

The media, with its Christian-kosher news,
is racist.
Reporting when a Muslim blows a fuse
is racist.
Stopping jihadists waving knives
is racist.
Preventing crime and saving lives
is racist.
Statistics, facts, free speech and democracy
are racist.
Refusing to spout PC hypocrisy
is racist.
Refusing microchipped and masked ingestions
is racist.
Thinking for yourself and asking questions
is racist.

Fuck the Liberal Left

I used to think that you were there
to lift the working classes,
but now I see your heads jammed up
your own self-serving arses.
You see the world in black and white,
through dogma-curtained glasses,
so certain what the past is,
puking moral catharsis.

You believe in nothing but the rightness
of your own opinions
(the ones you sucked from globalist media’s
brainwash-droning minions
and share with Brussels bigwigs’
censorship-condoning millions):
Let’s home a billion Syrians
whether they’re killers or civilians!

Fuck the liberal left and their new Spanish Inquisition
as they famish inquisition, make it vanish out of malnutrition.
Fuck the liberal left, as they banish free expression,
establishing oppression while calling it progression.

You think you fight the system
and its ordered inequalities,
it’s just coincidence
your open-border migrant policies
reflect the world elite’s, Frau Merkel’s,
George “the Giant” Soros’s.
That’s the strident hypothesis
of the vibrant metropolis.

George Soros, he who claimed he’s just
a dollar-faced alchemist
ignoring social consequence,
wow, what a philanthropist!
What next? Will you proclaim George Bush
a hollering anarchist
if he offers the tiniest
assistance to your whining fest?

Fuck the liberal left! (’cause shouting “Racist!” ain’t an argument.)
Fuck the liberal left! (it’s just a child’s verbal armament.)
Waiting for some logic from a doctrine-mangled wrongun
is like waiting for a lap-dance and a hand-job from Kim Jongun.

How does it help the working class
to flood their cities with jihad
or brand them privileged racist filth
in need of political rehab
or tell them their concerns don’t count
’cause they couldn’t outwit a used teabag?
Mind you don’t end up kneecapped
or strung up from a streetlamp!

Just fuck off. This is Europe, it’s
the white man’s hard-saved homeland.
Would you harass Mongolians
if they preferred their own brand?
“Check your yellow privilege, Genghis!
Your empire, years ago, spanned
near half the world, so don’t stand
up when you piss, you understand?”

Fuck the liberal left, who tell you England’s Nazi Germany
and sermonise while foreign rape-gangs colonise your family!
Shoot down the Leftwaffe, that genetic anomaly
that waffles lofty homilies and tribe-deserting perjury!

The Ensemble of Simpletons

Below the belt, below my level,
blathering free,
the ensemble of simpletons
are slandering me
with wild accusations they
plucked from the air.
To say them in person they
never would dare.

For logical arguments
they have no use.
Instead they can conjure up
empty abuse.
Not listening or responding to
a word that I say,
the ensemble of simpletons.
Common are they.

With minuscule arrows they
fire at my shins,
they boast of their huge
intellectual wins.
Above their heads, above their lives,
I stroll through their town.
The losers of Lilliput
can’t tie me down.

Christmas in Auschwitz

Christmas in Auschwitz.
By the barn, on my glove, fall
snowstars of David.

Roman

Morbid expectation shivers
through the fusty air
as every bottom shifts and shuffles
on its creaking chair.

The medium, his eyes wide shut,
is fumbling for a lead
and plugs himself at last into
the supernatural grid.

“Does anybody know a Brian
who rewired toasters,
who drank rice wine and holidayed
down on the Cornish coast as

often as he could, 
who had a parrot with a lisp,
whose hands were swollen from 
an altercation with a wasp?”

A white-haired woman with two needles,
purling, stitching ably,
stops and strokes her wispy chin,
then tosses forth a “maybe”.

All eyeballs swivel round. “Ah, no.
It wasn’t toasters. Egg-whisks.
I still can see them clear as day,
all cluttering up his work-desks.”

And thus I learn this lady’s gate
was painted by a Frenchman
from Brian, as he beams and bounces
round the fifth dimension.

My dream is punctured by
the pointed finger of a showman
who belts out, “You there, sir!
I see you have some link to Poland!

I’ve got a Polish soldier here,
who fell in World War Two.
This – Piosowski? – tells me that
he took a shine to you,

and now he’s watching over you.
His name is Piosowski
or something similar. My hearing
might be slightly off-key.”

Those words march through my mind 
as I sit brooding in the clouds
and drag my battered suitcase
through the passport-clasping crowds,

as I meander through the knobbly,
squirrel-rustled elms
and past Cyrillic black-starred warnings
cloaked in silky films.

Roman Piotrowski.
There he basks among his comrades,
indifferent to invasions
and impervious to bomb raids.

Born twenty-two. Died forty-five,
just three short months from peace,
from Stalin’s different-coloured jackboot
stamping on his face.

“Hello there, Roman. How are you,
here in this hall of death?
Perhaps you’ve seen me dashing past
or grasping out for breath.

Not even twenty-three, you were.
Still on the porch of life.
Perhaps you’d never tasted
the devotion of a wife.

Now, that we’d have in common. 
Is that why you took to me?
Two aeroplanes devoid of wings,
two locks without a key.

So, concrete-backboned patriot,
how’s life beyond the grave,
beyond our trivial little world
that no-one wants to save?

You tried your best for sure, old chap,
so thanks for all your effort,
but all those joys you garnered from
the old world have been severed

from us here in our microchipped
and shifty chapter of history,
our age of raving, dogma-buzzing,
liberty-loathing wizardry.

It’s such a theft, a foppish sophist-
stuffed fascistic hoax.
A bourgeoisie gorged with inversions
blathers moral vogues,

young visionaries jammed
with zeal and vigour trade their blood
for ketchup, for acceptance,
in a culture-slashing cut.

Patriots can’t be patriots now,
since that’s the pit of evil,
or men be men or women women,
people just be people.

When looking righteous trumps free thought,
there is no thought at all.
When fitting in trumps questioning,
society will fall.

Now vanity trumps self-protection.
Thus, my country’s fallen.
The whole of Western Europe’s
disappearing up its colon.

They cannot see that those
in golden gloves, who crush the workers,
are those who cram their skulls with sludge
and flood their streets with burqas.

This race towards conformity
will squash men’s minds in jars,
so those who will not think in line
must wither behind bars.

The school of history is standing
rat-invaded, derelict.
The brainwash-boomerang, once more,
decapitates the heretic.

They think they’re on the brink
of some rebellious rainbow age,
these robots cheering, marching off 
into their rabbit cage.

Your people, meanwhile, most of them,
are snoozing, so it seems,
cocooned in missile-cushioned, twelve-starred,
dollar-splashing dreams.

Sobieski’s men, who spanked the sultan’s arse
and saved the continent,
are pouring tea and skiing while
barbarians choke the Occident.

Does any of this matter, Roman?
Is it worth the fight?
Tell me please, old soldier bathing
in eternal light.”

Clerihews 3

Adolf Hitler
was peeved that Germany was littler
than Russia, but Luxembourg was the littlest.
And it was on his hit list.

Joseph Stalin
would have said, if he’d been a Feminist, “I’m not your darling,
you patriarchal poo-bag.
Go to the gulag.”

Margaret Thatcher.
Who would dispatch her?
Perhaps those who wanted to drag England snoozing and snoring
into a globalist whores’ ring.

Horst Seehofer,
Merkel’s illuminati gofer,
the Bavarian without balls, the eunuch
of Munich.

Mikhail Gorbachev
called Russia’s Communist mortgage off
and let America throw its debauched
degenerate orgy on the front porch.

Markus Meechan
had his life shredded by our virtuous beacon
of justice, for training a cute
little puppy to do a Nazi salute.

Danny Baker,
fired from the BBC propaganda-maker
for comparing Prince Archie to a chimp,
apologised like a wimp.

John F Kennedy
had a glimmering remedy
for the coming fascist global tangle,
so he was shot in the head from an unlikely angle.

The Stasi are Redecorating my House

The Stasi are redecorating my house,
they’re giving the stairs a good polish.
They’ve been out of work since the springtime of glasnost,
with precious few folk to admonish.

The Stasi are redecorating my house,
and now microphones hang from the cornice.
I asked when they’re going to knock the wall through,
and that seemed to engender some soreness.

Reading Lucy’s Old Poetry

It was three and a half inexperienced years
before the first time I would ever
see your pale and puzzled face,
call you by name or absorb your
surprise-laden, whirlpooling words.

Tita the Peruvian clairvoyant, her
mascara garnishing her scrunched-up eyes,
gripping crystals over tarot cards
like an extra-terrestrial gripping
a spaceship steering wheel, proclaimed:
“I see a girl who’s always on your mind.
You’re thinking and thinking and thinking about
this girl, but she’s not right for you.
She’s depressed and my god, she has problems!”

I was twenty-three, fresh out of university.
You were fifteen and about to begin
your second year of supervised,
pill-stuffed, couch-bound,
injected captivity.
You scratched your head until it bled,
you swallowed those pills without stopping to count them,
you poured out:

          “Broken glass, broken girl.
          Useless mask, useless world.
          Fighting temptation, fighting knives.
          Numbed sensations, numbed goodbyes.
          Maybe rope, maybe trees.
          Dying hope, dying me.”

I thought I’d never drink your words again
once you’d flushed them down the online plughole,
but there they are,
splashing across my computer,
intoxicating me.

You must have thought I understood.
You must have thought you’d pushed enough
cuckoo’s nest-shaped hints in my direction.
You must have thought I’d soaked up every single poem.
You must have thought I understood.

“You’d have to be prepared for me,
I am a bit strange.”
That was your warning sign.
“No problem, I see you’re a couple of pips
short of a satsuma.”

I only thought you were 
eccentric.

If someone’s a “borderline fishing enthusiast”,
what does that mean? That they toss the odd hook.
It doesn’t mean they stink of haddock
morning, noon and night.

You hid below your bedsheets and illusions,
you hurtled from reality as if it were
a lion in hungry pursuit,
you pulled your sleeves down over freckly, scissored arms,
you poured out:

          “To write what needs to be written
          would be to face, to think,
          maybe to run to my own brink,
          yet to go with my flow,
          let passing thoughts go,
          may be more risky than to delve
          and resign myself
          to a mental age of twelve.”

I don’t remember that one. Jesus.

Twelve years later, you’re still twelve.
You’re thirty now, but still, you’re twelve.
Your parents are seventy. They’re still twelve.
Is everyone around you twelve,
or just tongueless? It’s like
‘Lord of the Flies’ in your bit of the universe.

Am I a paedophile, is that it?

No. If I’d known, I would never have kissed you.
I’d never have gazed in your crazy blue eyes
and sighed, “I love you, ginger kitten.”

But you were home and youth to me,
you were London and you were the working class,
you were Dorothy Parker, not Sylvia Plath,
and you were my rebellion partner,
the childhood sweetheart
I never had
in this world full of nothing,
schools and colleges of nothing,
universities of nothing,
bars and pubs and clubs of nothing,
offices, canteens of nothing,
studios and banks of nothing,
galleries and halls of nothing,
towns and cities full of nothing,
nations, cultures full of nothing,
brains and mouths and hearts of nothing.

You were something.

We were something.

We were the poets of
a gasping breed, the final Cockneys,
the remnants of working-class London,
the remnants of a shrivelled culture.

But you baffled and blocked me off,
you elbowed me, blindfolded, into a swamp,
you lied and denied and you cast me aside,
you poured out:

          “I don’t want to get better,
          I’ll be fine as I am now.
          Stop writing me letters,
          stop spinning me around.
          Why are you doing this?
          I don’t need your eyes to see.
          Why are you pushing this?
          Stop it, stop hurting me.”

I don’t remember that one either.

Christ, If I had, I would never have
chased after that mirage called hope,
would never have sprayed half my youth down the drain
by battling your poetry-moated
castles of silence
with my broken little catapults of love.

What fun it must be to be sick.
What fun it must be to inhabit a planet
where nothing is ever your fault,
nothing’s ever your responsibility,
where problems are buried
a hundred kilometres under the ground,
not solved,
where no-one’s feelings count but yours,
where silence reigns supreme,
where you may not be criticised,
you cannot feel a drop of love
for yourself or for anyone else
and suicide’s your only hope,
where you’re twelve years old until you die
and the truth eats away at your brain
like battery acid.

That’s right, love. Don’t get better.
You’ll be fine as you are.

It was fourteen experience-buffeted months
after the last time I ever would see
your seething, puzzling face.

Tita the Peruvian clairvoyant, her
earrings swinging in the mystic air
below paintings of Jesus and Buddha, proclaimed:
“There was some kind of problem that you didn’t see,
something you missed.
Now there’s unfinished business between you,
a strange situation that hasn’t been sorted.
She’s gone, but she’s still there.”

Ketamine Trip with Chas and Dave on the Stereo

What sort of person snorts a porky line of ravers’ smack,
then plays the greatest hits of Chas and Dave?
You’re looking at him lying flat out on his back,
his third eye peeking through perception’s bars.
I’m bouncing round a Cockney universe
where pearly angel-kings are beckoning beyond the grave.
They wink at me beside the Pearly Gates and then disperse
in a trillion stars.

Gertcha! Off they vanish
into another dimension,
like a young-retired plumber to a Spanish
villa. Gertcha!
Jason tips his seventh gin and cherryade
down his floating neck and buzzes, “Did I ever mention
that Chas and Dave once played
on an Eminem track? I’m a zealous researcher.”

He hacks up phlegm and fires it out the window like a charmer.
I watch it hit the garden fence about five minutes later
as I lambeth-walk around Nirvana.
“D’you mind?” the Dalai Lama scolds me. “Such an uncouth habit!
Meditation’s nobler and more modest!”
The room’s a flowering crater.
One moment I’m a carpet, next a forest,
and all around is rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit.

I swim along the castle wall,
where all my veins and arteries are London.
My bladder is the Royal Albert Hall.
The rhythm rocks me off to heaven.
Jason’s face is here and there and there and here.
So’s the back of his quiffy Dravidian head, it’s quite redundant
to talk to him below the stratosphere.
He’s got four arms like Vishnu. Now it’s six or seven.

“When they were session musicians they played on a song
by Labi Siffre, called ‘I Got the Blues’.
Then Eminem sampled it. If I’m not wrong,
it was ‘My name is Slim Shady’.”
I beam my soul at fleets of spaceships, every one a target,
through a wormhole as I cruise
along the astral planes and down to Margate.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that. Maybe.”

Abigail

Onstage I bellowed verses to the sky
beside a bunting-woven campsite.
“I’d never seen an aura glow so high!”
you chirped, in my front garden.
A fox-cub stared at us perched on a dustbin.
Beneath the glare of orange lamplight
and puppy, I unleashed my trapped combustion
and kissed you like a Spartan.

Your dreadlocks blazed like sheaves of copper wire.
Your energy could floor a horseman,
leaping off your hand in waves of fire
that almost singed my arm-hair.
From greengrocer to greengrocer you’d tramp
for crops you’d prod around a saucepan
or snapshot balanced on my lava-lamp
and other plug-fed hardware.

Meat would never pass your paintless lips.
Your chakras chimed in time with Brahma.
Every week you’d sally forth on trips
for bold ghost-hunting gourmets.
We prowled around a ransacked office block,
a bullet-littered maze of drama,
a mouldy mossy-carpeted stopped clock
with crumbling doorless doorways.

Festooned with fungus-garnished filing cabinets,
those battered silent rooms had waited
to yank us in like rotting boxy magnets
that shivered like a hospice.
A nitrous oxide tap. Some cardboard signs:
“All occupants evacuated”.
We phoned the local press about our finds
in Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

That night we made love underneath a willow
behind the lake. And then, no more.
Did I hound you? For some peccadillo,
you strutted out on me.
You snatched a job with journalists who snuck
a fox’s head inside your drawer.
I wanted to call round and offer a hug,
but it was not to be.

Jogging Round a Polish Park

And off we go, along the lane,
the roses bleeding, gushing red
across the left side of my brain
as terriers chase tennis balls
into a crashing, rippling pond.
What’s that? Some kind of avant-garde
distorted Easter Island statue.
I wonder what inspired that.
Some pine trees with their trunks all knobbly.
Two girls, one pink, one mauve, on scooters.
Kneepad-clad, zigzagging skaters.
“Dobry.” Zigzag. Skate. “Dzien Dobry.”

Grey concrete drowns in orange, green,
cyan, maroon, magenta, yellow.
Hopscotch. Triple-scooped ice-cream
with flake. Two llamas. Alien spacecraft.
Signed Milena and Joana.

Could I, one hazy far-off day
and in a hope-fuelled, love-plump manner,
propel such innocent, sweet life,
young life ablaze with wide-eyed joy,
into this fake, demonic world?
Could I, one day, help mould a boy
into a man, as long ago
my fearless, knuckle-brandishing,
cavorting, lager-drenched non-father
never tried to do for me?

I’d plonk him in a dojo or
a boxing ring, I’d tie his gloves,
I’d tighten his each darkening belt,
I’d glaze him in a uniform,
though only for a year or two.
I’d nudge him manwards with a shove.
Such pride, such rushing pride I’d feel!
“Be tough, my son. This world is tough,
it’s full of lunging, squeezing scumbags,
oh my boy, don’t let them hurt you!”

Dear Christ, I don’t want British children,
sick demented nouveau-bourgeois
British children squealing, dribbling
on and on about their bulging,
radiating moral virtue,
never though displaying love,
authentic love for humankind
or lifting up a pinkie finger
to assist one single soul
except their rotten pampered selves,
their empathy a fleeting phantom.
If children come, God, make them Slavic.

But every eardrum-stabbing tantrum,
nappy-stench and sight of shit
reminds me, “No, I cannot do it.”

Turn left here, down the twiggy, barky,
helicopter seed-strewn dirt track.
Dusty molehills sprout in random
blobs of subterranean powder.
What do helicopters drop from,
sycamores? Not sure. Or maples?
Orbs of mistletoe and birds’ nests
jostle for branch-dominance
like billiard balls on leafy baize.
The mistletoe is shrivelling now though,
sagging like old ladies’ titties.
Tits are bickering with jays
as magpies flap and swoop and bluster,
bullying the fat woodpigeons.

Clang, clang! What sort of cutlery
can that be? Clang, thump, thump, clang, clang,
as three young men with time-defying
swords and wooden shields clang-thump
each other with the subtlety
of lions plunging famished teeth
in zebra-meat. They’re clad in chain mail,
metal helmets, armour, shinpads,
shorts and luminous lime-green trainers.

An archipelago of pine cones,
daisies, cigarette-ends, beer cans
(Tyskie, Carlsberg, Lech) beneath
a candy-floss of emerald hedgehogs
on a mossy, spindly stick.
Then onward, through a cloud of midges
and a swamp of crashing leaves,
towards the bats’ and spirits’ realm.

Back onto concrete. Up it heaves
in cracking, bumpy, snaking ridges.
Underneath, the roots exhale,
they puff and pant, “You can’t defeat us!
Man, you cannot smother us
with your synthetic passageways!”
and crawl along the wrinkly surface,
ferrying refreshment to
these fortresses of oak and elm
across which wrens and sparrows chirrup.

Stone crosses. Lanterns, candles flicker
with their transcendental purpose.
Jesus with a radiating,
beaming heart. A headless cherub
kneels in stony solemn prayer
for Stanisław, Kasienka, Grzegorz,
Małgorzata, Zbigniew.
Do their great-grandchildren still care?
Behind the plaques and holy virgins,
a vigilant hare outpaces me.

Puff, pant. Come on. Puff, pant. Come on,
we’re nearly there. First stopping point.
Lichen-sleeved and gnarly birches
bend like old men’s spines, contorting,
out of shape, a bit like me.
Come on, come on. Puff, pant. Keep going.

Now some godless graves. Black stars
on cubes on stumpy concrete pillars,
grey eternal anti-churches.
Battle sculpture, huge bouquet
that flutters in the morning breeze.
Cyrillic script. Can’t see the names.
Black marble obelisk, gold star.
Gepoy? Geroy! What’s a geroy?

There’s the wall. Caress the wall
and stop. Catch breath. Swig water. Wheeze.
Wipe sweat off head with t-shirt. Gasp.
My heart is thumping like a mallet.
Lean forward. Stretch those calves. And rest.
Left ankle up behind, now right.
That bush would make a decent toilet.
What’s this? A British cemetery!

Whole lines of murder. Private Simpson,
Royal Norfolk Regiment,
and Flight Lieutenant Clarke, a pilot!
Fusilier V. Rigby, died
aged twenty-five, of Lancashire.
Who were they, prisoners of war,
escape plans scuppered by a bullet?

Is this the same Lancastrian blood
as Fusilier Lee Rigby, died
aged twenty-five on Woolwich streets,
head hacked off by a sick jihadist?
Of all the fruitless, foolish feats
of humankind is war the saddest.
On and on and on it squashes.

And off we go again, uphill,
come on, Sir Edmund, to the peak,
past rows of skulls and vertebrae
that once were fearless Polish men,
were passion-bulging boys of only
twenty-one or twenty-two.
God rest you, lads. Now find your way.
May those who made your parents lonely
rot in some fat bankers’ hell.

Now back out on the open green.
Aha! A dizzy loofah-tailed
noble nibbling ginger tree-rat
balanced on his red hind footlets
like an undernourished meerkat!
Little twitching sentinel,
what are you scouting for, my friend?
Away he darts, across the pathway
faster than a bourgeois liberal
choosing “racist” as an insult,
off he speeds, a Labrador
in hungry, thundering pursuit.
Who’ll win the race to that great oak?

Christ, that was close. The beast in red
was just a prostitute’s commute
away from being even redder.
Never mind, unlucky dog,
there’s always next time. Perseverance,
that’s what’s needed. Don’t give up,
however much this world of reptiles
tries to slice your soul to ribbons,
plots and schemes to stick Vivaldi
in a baseball cap and name-badge,
tries to trap Lord Byron in
a cage of slogan-screeching gibbons.

Up, up again, Sir Edmund, up
and onwards, past these orange berries,
immature redcurrants maybe,
across this flattened tree-stump crushed
to wooden shards, up, up and through
the rooty, stony, nettley grass.

Two other joggers, wrapped in lycra,
sporting flatter, healthier bellies.
“Dobry.” “Dobry”. Jog, pant. “Cheshch.”
Must try harder. Have to flush
this flab right down the gravy pipe,
these biceps have to bulge my flesh,
charge out like meaty regiments,
they have to smash and bash like bombs.

Four stone-faced, hammered, sickled, red
pallbearers prop a coffin up.
Poor Russia! Twenty-something million
of their handsome people dead
in order to swat down four fifths
of all the Führer’s wound-up minions.
Hero! “Geroy” must mean “Hero”!
Damn it, all those geroys wound up
full of holes and underground.

Out on the field, young muscly husbands
clad in football shorts fling frisbees
at their dumpling-podgy children.
Mmm, pierogi, nice and crispy.
Rigging, speakers, microphones
and beer tents. Concert? Festival?

Ah, Mother Russia, frozen scapegoat,
slandered paper bogeyman,
heroic whistleblowers’ shelter,
Edward Snowden’s warm escape route,
European brother-country
flattening Islamofascists
while the bitterer-than-grapefruit
sneering traitors down in Brussels
shake their blood-drained, cum-stained fists,
oh, Russia! Feather-cushioned couch
of Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich,
Tereshkova and Gagarin,
where the drowsy brown bear nestles
waiting for his waking hour,
Russia! Hidden comrade, cousin,
fattest, maddest, easternmost
in our vast culture’s flail-armed jostles,
cradle of the Indo-Aryan,
vodka-powered dissident,
defiant rebel, master, self-boss,
victor from Sevastopol
to Vladivostok. Nowadays,
who here is the belligerent?
It isn’t you. Ah, Mother Russia,
could I, some decisive morning,
dare to dive into your icy,
caviar-strewn, drunken ocean?
Could I, some day, pitch a tent
upon your frozen, friendly surface?

Up and down a hairpin bend,
then over gravel to a playpark.
Sandpit, seesaw, roundabout,
crawling tube, horse on a spring.
A chessboard of square flower beds
in crimson, yellow, purple, white.
Fat bumblebees dive hither and thither.

Valda, cuddly, pretty Valda,
venturer to London Town
from up on the Daugava river,
I remember clear and bright
that day, while drinking honey beer,
a bumblebee drawn on its label.
“Seriously? It’s made of bees?”
Oh yes, I’d said, we grind them down
and turn them into Bumblebeer,
an ancient English recipe,
the English word ‘beer’ comes from ‘bee’.
Oh, bless you, sweet, curvaceous Valda.

That time you climbed a chair and screamed,
imploring me with shoe in hand
to turn into a mindless killer.
You almost had me battering
a guiltless little caterpillar
till I woke up from your spell
and ferried him to grassy safety.
I wonder what you’re doing now.

Oh, Slavic, Baltic beauties, tasty
women of the Eastern plains,
can it be true, as I have heard,
that you are nothing like the soulless,
selfish sluts we have out West?
Can it be true you yearn for love,
that you possess both hearts and brains,
that you are human to your cores,
that passion boils behind your breasts?
Or are you power-hungry whores,
just money-snatching egoists
and pompous preaching hypocrites,
your hollow heads wedged up your arses
like our boring Western mingers?
I live in hope. I live in hope.
Without that hope, I’d slash my wrists.

Ah, here’s the amphitheatre,
a fan of grass-enfolded concrete
mixed with ferns and heliotropes
and patterned with old seat-supports
lined up like Soviet space invaders
gripped by, down the hill, a fist
of uncut grass and dandelions.
What would have boomed across that stage
beneath the clouds and isotopes
back in the booming, level-waged,
moustache-rich, radiation-kissed,
leviathan-cementing heyday?
The Cherry Orchard? Animal Farm?

And, zigzag down the sandy slope.
Nettles. Squirrels. Buttercups.
And, slalom round the molehilled hills
along the fort’s red-orange wall.
Its deep black eyes are peeping, tired
and cobwebbed, from the sullen earth.

Two old ladies, litter-picking?
Nordic walking, one with Pope
emblazoned on her well-milked chest,
well-milked from Catholic birth on birth.
John Paul the Second, obviously.
The cool Pope. Yeah, the groovy one.
What did you do for Africa
about the modern plague though, John?
If I was Pope I’d snort fat lines
and bring reincarnation back.
Who was that scholar, Origen?

I catch a fragment of their chat
that whistles past beneath the pines,
just one word comprehended: pshishwoshch.
Future. Sounds like pish. And hogwash.
The future is a load of pshishwoshch.
Take it with a laxative,
a shrodek pshechishchayahncy, as
the Poles would strangely choose to say.

And, stop. Caress the banister.
My legs are just about to give.
Wipe that pond of sweat away.
Gulp water like a dishwasher.
And stretch those muscles. Bend those knees.

A spiral staircase vanishes
in pulped and straggling shreds of trees
beneath the earth, just disappears
beneath a canopy of roots
and bulbs, down into soily nothing.
What was this place? A stammlager?

Keep going. Up the concrete steps.
Keep trudging forward. Pant, gasp, wheeze.

Away we go. Past wooden benches
with Ukrainian names carved in.
Dimitri loves Oksana. Well,
good luck with that. You’ll need it, mate.

The footpath cracks in fissures like
the palm of an octogenarian’s hand.
They widen into rippling trenches.
Grass and moss and life peek through.
Whole tribes of ants pour out and fidget.
Nature always wins, the land
is swallowed up, like in Chernobyl
where wormwood booms across old car parks,
swimming pools are haunts for wolves,
the ferris wheel’s harangued by fir trees.
Beep, beep, beep. Don’t eat the apples.

Wow, what’s that? A furry midget
scurrying across the lawn!
A ferret? Or is it a polecat?
Ha ha! Polecat! Polish polecat!
Stanisław Polkatskowicz.

Will these people ever heal?
Will they one day forget the bruise
of German rifles, Russian tanks,
Ukrainian pointed bayonets?
Of Chamberlain’s imaginary
helping hand, his hollow threats
that couldn’t frighten off a goose,
not when you’re just a paper lion,
not when you’re a unicorn,
a sickly withered senile badger
yelping, hissing weasel words.

But Hitler didn’t lose the war.
The Europeans lost the war.
The German and the British people.
Mere dispensable toy soldiers.
The French, Italians, Poles and Russians,
all of them – deceived, deceived,
led off to pointless slaughter by
the power-grasping powers that be.
Slaughtered to remake the world.
Brother nations. Sister cultures.

Nearly there. I’m almost there.
Speed up, speed up, just one last burst,
as fast as you can run, come on!
Around the corner. Mind the snail.
Pump that muscle, kill that beer-flab!
There’s the line. Caress the line.
And rest. And rest. And rest. Exhale.