Which Way Round It Is

I am discovered by my daughter
on her expedition
across the cheap red rug
that won’t stop moulting
so when she eats
porridge has capillaries
spaghetti lengths are blood shot.

My legs on the sofa

torso on the floor
she looks down at me
then up, concludes
this familiar, traffic-stopping lump
must have dropped from the UFO lampshade
and its glass-pear bulb-womb
according to
the same cherry blossom rules
that sometimes blears houses to the right
while her insides softly orient
like deep sea fauna
that migrate tentatively,
one sightless calamari millimetre per hour.

Just-born-useless,
dumb as chimneys mouthing nothing at aloof 747s,
I have been waiting forever
for her to arrive with her genius
to explain me to me.

1
Why He was Successful

The man whose body best tolerated a pig’s heart had a violent past
and had worked a machine that
de-beaked chicks.

Graft rejection was prevented for three years, only partly due to
immunosuppressant drugs
which included an experimental antibody called KPL-404.

The night before the transplant he watched that YouTube video of

the black and white Russian experiment where a Labrador's head is
severed, reattached then has its nose tickled. It looks like it is having
a hunting dream.

Research suggests the man lasted longest mostly because of his past
and that Diet Coke might be significant. He had studied calm.

He could identify and extract worries with the rigor of a bear

hooking salmon loaded with roe
from a river in the frozen dark.

2
An Upside

In the end, it will be merciful, surely

to not have words haunting every surface
activating if you only look at a thing,
or notice the absence of a thing.

Imagine feeling is rinsed off

like winter carwash suds.
Imagine the lonely moon is just a moon
grinding in its socket.

To sit like an Edward Hopper onlooker

at the dark in dripping forests,
all-pupil eyes taking it in.
To do nothing with it.

3
A Young Man’s Version of Men

I’m a man. Not like the men

who hit one another hard in the face
then cry when that other crumples on the floor,
or those who cry when their dog leaves under the fence
having secreted all their friendship into a mongrel.
I’m not one of those men.

And I’m not one who isn’t twenty

yet knows exactly where he is headed –
black car, a ladder, someone extra.
I don’t want to know where I’m going.

How do some men keep a straight face

when they say what the boss said matters, or
now I know it doesn’t matter, how
did they know it was safe to pretend? How did they find out?
I’m not a man like these: not naturally a man.

Some old men make love songs,

and that doesn’t seem right –
that they should even talk about love.

I have to plan to not end up with any such sharpness

that needs to be sung about.
Success will be to make sure
all that has been safely worn down, rounded off.
So long gone, it will be as if love never was.

There should be a law

against the very thought of old men and love.

4
Grosvenor Park Road

You have found your way home. You wait outside for too long and
everyone goes to bed. You don’t have a key so you crack the old
glass on the shed door to get in and pull out a lounger to sleep on;
you want to look at the stars and try hear what they are whispering
about why Betelgeuse is at 73% of its usual brightness, and getting
dimmer.

All the noise you are making wakes dogs and they start to howl.
You get briefly lit by the passing blue lights of a police car: the siren
is off. You have cut your hand and now bleed a version of Britain.
You briefly remember a friend.

The next morning your family don’t suspect it had been you. They
don’t think you exist anymore. Once, your youngest crayoned what
he thought happened to you. In the wood, there isn’t a tree branch
that doesn’t offer its bleak service. The weather repeatedly happens
but there’s no oomph to it. You wonder if it is a Thursday. Possibly
a Friday.

It’s Monday. Again.

5
Samuel Wants to Know

if it is home time at twenty past nine

and whether or not I am a plant.

I made him fold himself together

and asked into his eyes
if he really wasn’t sure,
watching this time to see.
He really isn’t sure.
The basics are not agreed.

Here might be miles away, or here

but six years ago
which could mean pterodactyls
or Victoria in all the greys
scowling at a commonwealth of bastardisations
in a photocopied middle distance.

His written word vaporises,

grey smudges sink through the page fibres
into another now.

I want to explain to him that I forgot

the swarms of water fleas
doing a golden jig in streams, but
that they never went anywhere.

I want reassure him there is

plenty of time, but that is just for me
and he knows I’m already at least

…ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred!

6
The Person

The person has thin skin that looks green in the sun. They do Tai
Chi and volunteer with a bleak church and is often in large groups
but never the same group.

The person wears trendy sports clothing and lives near here. They
are slender and I wouldn’t want to watch them eating. I can guess
about their schooling and evenings. The person is a map tied with
string around a bloody rock. With effort, they would come across
right. Deep in their programme is a function that will destroy us. On
the other side of the world the person’s opposite performs even the
simplest act with such humanity: an egg boiled; a kite unwound into
the blue.

The person might be a rule, or a warning. Their dreams are flies

swarming in the shape of a question mark and their hopes are the
scrapings inside a refuse truck. Their plans are exactly what you
hoped couldn’t happen in the world.

7
Version

I love you.
I love you so much
I must have you.

I’ve had you.

Now
I want your friend.
If she’ll let me
I’m ready to be the perfect mate,
the kind they write about for magazines
in homes/at checkouts/surgeries
where carrot-coloured fish gum algae
and trail their own emergent ordure,
the first curl of rancid words.

Until she changes her mind, I

will wait, with you, and not mention
how you breathe too often
if I can only keep the television on
turn it up, turn it over, and then back
to just-in footage
of gasping, forest mammals
learning fast to swim in the flood.

8
Our Inescapable Situation

A telescopic,
William Morris
patterned
walking
stick,
retrieved
from
a Harrods
bag,
when
shaken,
cleverly
clicks
rigid.

9
Laughing

Everyone laughed at me. But I was being serious the whole time. I
travelled through The Lands Without on a well-publicised tour of
surgeries and club houses, allotment offices and industrial estate
cafes to get my machine-tooled point across to those who needed it
most. I sold all my instruction booklets but they all laughed at me.

I took a sabbatical to deconstruct my message but found nothing

funny in there. I sat on the graves of the great miserabilists and
complained of my curse. The birds derided me with their perky
inner weather and rivet eyes.

To a samba beat, I moved to a garrison town and feigned falling in

love with a member of my entourage in order to capture the heart of
a knife maker. We had two children who died at her hands. She
must have been thinking of something else.

When I got back on the road every venue was 99% empty despite
the fact that this time I was prepared to give them something to
really laugh about.

10
The Other Way of Thinking

Yours is the other way of thinking,

the kind where
each word matters and demands attention,
where everything is precise like mornings
to someone in recovery.

The words I use

are approximate noises
to fit in the silence that would metastasize between us.

How do you not realise I don’t care

about what the novel you haven’t written
really means, or for the title
of your PhD?

I don’t share. You don’t ask.

I will pretend I think the way you do
to avoid the confusion of disagreeing
and save my way of thinking for
how pylons stand like gunslingers
guarding something tucked into the horizon’s lining.

11
The Finished World

First, scuffs,
chalky scrapes and tufts off bandages
in the blue
then a chunk
swells over the tree –
the water of it, and only just there
according to jet streams and turbulence
we don’t really believe in –

and smooth,
so focus malfunctions into it,
loses against its now ashy billows,
cottony nooks, wooliness.

Up there is the comfort

of plump approximates from
a finished world, where the work is
indistinctness. Lethargy. Muffin-top
love-handles of white wetness folding
until darker.

Upside down, our opposites

go to grasp, never learning in forgotten memory loss,
but become the whirl of more-or-less
that a cough of rook calls
causes to reimagine as a tower of pillow-y coins,
haphazard curds cordoning ruminants, returning footwear.

They inhabit rounded-off days,

everything is the same and words are unreadable.
Not there, everyone is not culpable.

12
They walk themselves into wet floor,
erase markings and boundaries
by making contact; such understanding.

By now the sky is scabbed solid

with white, and in this white continent
an unseen business of erasure
is the right way round.
We coalesce the wrong way up
on a boulder.
They dissolve as steam and multiple loci
but just before
look up at us drenched with sympathy.

13
Snub

There’s a problem: I am possessed

and simply acting out another’s sensed duty.
Job, family, charity – I am a wet membrane.
I bring my body to act and respond
like a chimp flipping switches in orbit. That said,
I’m better than you.

14
Shane McGowan is Better

His teeth are straight and his hair is fine and still has a sandy colour
that blows in the wind as he sleeps on a porch somewhere. He still
laughs like a tortoise hissing and can’t talk, his wife answers for him
though she looks at his eyes to make sure she is saying the right
thing. He looks back to say yes, she is.
And his Instagram posts are pithy. I can’t remember the actual
words he types but they are better than you’d worry they might be.
His words from one angle look smeared and over worn, but then
xylophone jazz feelings from the forties mixed with a joke in the
trenches and a kindness delivered in a going-out-of-business-sale
supermarket combine to make the sweetest sub audible drone which
we find gives us enough reason to carry on. Just.

15
On How to Hold a Gun

Tipped on its side

by a laid back assassin
who slides by
in a ‘69 Chevrolet Camaro
in the summer you thought wouldn’t end.
Atomic Space Dust.
Cocaine. Leonardo Dicaprio.

In two trembling hands it looks super dense

as if made of Victorian iron and black holes
and you are crying with wet hair – sweat,
not rain – the trigger
is faulty and won’t give
then does but you click,
click, click, click
till he reaches forward
to gently lift it away
making room for everything worse.

Or your right hand reaches

to the left holster and a bullet is loosed
before you can think,
see the rifling in the barrel, the close up
on ghost town saloon wood splintering,
a shot glass atomises in the hand of an extra.

How about adroitly and flamboyantly up

in front of your face, aimed for the stars
with your steps being counted, it’s snowing
and something Prussian?

16
Don’t forget back to front
and in your mouth
or in disbelief, you’ve just come to
smoke curls out and the air
is already healed.

Hold up your hand. Curl back the two bottom fingers.

Cock your thumb and aim
at your choice of unproven enemy.

Out of context provides capacious damage.

Guns are everywhere in your dreams.
If you don’t decide we will for you.
Now reach.

17
This is What You Make Your Children Do

Your child delivers the filthiest sentence, full of phrases dripping

with hate and constructed to bore into family trees, to recur and
inspire hate crimes and hate groups.
We ask your child why they did this. It looks back at us like a teddy
with polished eyes and nothing is forthcoming. Your child doesn’t
have concern. It is as if someone else said it. When we ask, it
repeats the sentence verbatim.
The best way to describe the sentence is to think of a length of
barbed wire that disappears coiling into a CS gas fog with rags of
flesh along it. It stinks.
Is this right? asks your child as it falls to sleep anyway like a
telegraph pole collapsing into nettles and hogweed.
It is grammatically correct, we say. Knowing parents are to blame
and the sun is a star dying and food is rot and hearts are clocks
going backwards, corkscrewing us into where we live.

18
A Fishy Smell

When she was at school no one looked at her so much that she
popped out of existence. It was warm there. With lots of advice on
posters and elevator music.

She left a gap where she had been. This absence drew much
attention and soon had holy water flicked into it, along with
thermometers and barometers and Geiger counters. Expert tasters
stuck their tongues into it. A psychic tried to bend it.

Meanwhile, the rest of class was barely considered, only being

asked about what it was like being sat next to the vacuum, whether it
smelt, if it moved and who was to blame.

They asked who had been there, before the vacuum. No one could
remember. One by one, all the children joined the girl as they were
surplus to the prevailing narrative.

Outside of existence, they clubbed together to formulate a problem,

solve it and move on. They heard progressive anthems but also
noticed a fishy smell. Given the chance, they would have included
the girl but she had grown in confidence and had other ideas.

19
I Think I am a Poet
I think I’m a poet
but also think I might just have aped
so artfully what a poet seems to be
that perhaps I’m just an ape.

Titles are hard; how much

do you give away
and which words need capitals?
If only there were agreed rules.

I’ve been doing research

have found out that poets
ask a lot of their readers,
often making them hurt.

Sometimes, an idea suggests itself

or a statement is enough
and it hangs in the air, resonating
like a hollow metal pillar
hit by a golf ball.

My friends are no good as gauges

as they are too good as friends.
I have grown a vicious critic
in my mind. His vitriol
has been useful
but now he’s gone too far.

I think I am a poet
but it’s hard to be sure.
Some poems are not poems, but flimsy
imitations. Others, slight things, roughly made
will not be torn.

20
Fuck

My daughter has come home with the word fuck

in her mouth.
It is stuck in there and can’t be coaxed out.

Pulled, its tail would snap off.

Burnt, its head would corkscrew in and go septic,
so we’d best leave it be.

She says everyone in the playground is saying it,

and cunt – the knife of the c,
the soft flesh of the un,
the chip of bone t.

There is a statue on the way to her school.

It is something to do with the war
and has recently been covered
with a beige tarpaulin
that flaps in these unseasonably warm winds
we’ve been having.

21
Passing It On

It’s marked as true and lays in the appropriate in-tray; he believes

how he holds a pen marks him as suspect, as likely to be directed to
attend the Bureau of Verification of Appropriate Intent, though I
keep saying this isn’t a real agency he won’t listen and is trying to
write with his wrong hand.

In a series of vivid dreams, he says he is nightly tried and called out

and ignored or kicked at by an unknown family member during a
close-up ritual observance. He says these dreams are more real than
anything in the office. He dreams of banners with him on, stickers
and posters, texts throbbing into phones around him and ‘looks.’

I gave him a ‘look,’ and he said Yes! Just like that. And he can’t get
over it all day, though I clearly meant it as a joke.

I’m worried I’m the only one he’ll confide in and that this marks me
out, too. Last night I dreamt of barracks-yard voices pronouncing a
regulation prohibiting residual bourgeois tendencies that I had
adopted to fit in then forgot. Real things shift like sand dunes in the
wind. I told him but he wasn’t really listening, more interested in
celebrating how for the first time in years he had dreamt of a snowy
road. Empty, empty fields then suddenly-snowy fields.

22
I Found a Reason to Keep Living

My research ended in your hangar holding a gun to my head.

You were behind tempered glass in your office full of assistants all
gesturing to me not to do it, but not you.

Even as my skull and brains smattered the wall and lab equipment
and the scene dissolved, like it does in the movies, I could see you
just watching. Calm as you like. As if none of this means anything
and you have all the answers.

I carried on being able to listen as they mopped me up and I heard

what I will take to be worry inflect your tone. Too much spit in your
mouth, or a disconnect between purpose and responsibility.

23
Shelter

Now the storm is passed

the bridge we stopped under
drips on us,
it is shelter reversed
a store house for rain
when the sun comes out
and makes a mockery of it all.

24
Thunderball

When I find you – and I will –

don’t expect me to miss.

You go down: deeper than supposed,

not missed for years inside yourself
on a gradual island where land crabs
butt hollow and blind on tree trunks
and banana tarantulas pulsate.

All night heat makes tuna

get out of the sea in arcs.

When I find you, you will be gone again,

or have turned into someone else, or
deny all this, shallow breathing back where you started,
in a queue, or day job.

Too much syrup.

The light, you will say, it ruined my eyes.
All I want to do now is read.

I will find you.

25
Behind the Scenes

I am not liked and for good reason. What I propose is not to be

supported. It is likely I am chronically flawed. It is widely held I am
not orientated towards arrival. I support the tainted and apocryphal.
My money is diverted away from my sons. My clothes make me
look stupid and I hold positions of power which I abuse. I let down
anyone who might believe in me. I’ll take the worst and make it
worse. Shrews and mice make up my shadow. I am against the
romance of ruins in favour of the spikes which prevent pigeons
roosting in municipal garages. I am prepared to take decades.
Nosferatu smiles. A novel bacillus approaches a human answer. Any
endpoint examined is the cosiest high. My toes curl the edge of a
concrete high board. The life support in books is down to 1%. I’ll
make you believe so I believe. Falling leaves play their game. An
option is unearthed in a Roman urn. A forgotten language spat up
from the sea by Sellafield. My parents are younger than me. I have
heuristics which will reboot the seasons. If I could just get up I
could present to the board. If I could have your support, I could
righteously undermine your life’s work. With gravity’s help, I could
coordinate every apple’s punctuation to serenade you to open your
legs and bear where best to access your femoral artery.

26
Strong People and Weak People

Weak people run the world. They are only able to succeed, shout
loud and put up shelves straight. Strong people would let it all stop
working. They would send the wrong clowns into space and not edit
feeling from emails before sending.

Weak people are muscly, polymath and eat sensibly. They are
trapped in the history books strong people fall asleep under having
only read the first page of the introduction. I am so strong I need
help all the time just to remember not to give up. You are so strong
you need to drink and drink and drink, usually on an empty stomach
to guarantee the best damage.

Weak people have so many friends and I might be one of them

because they need to see strong people, to hear our misadventures
and make themselves feel strong. I visit them because I am strong
and have strength to share.

Weak people have planted the wrong trees in the park and need to
keep us strong people busy otherwise our daydreams will go from
gas to solid like god’s fist punching through clouds, flattening the
city to remind them to forever keep the fuck away from us or we’ll
work out how to make them pay for what they’ve done and then
they’ll be sorry

27
Angela

Just to show off, or win an argument, or just out of spite, Angela

would die in meetings. It became a joke in the staff room.

Do you know who did you know what, again? I would be

embarrassed. I could die better than she can.

But Angela was ingenious. And she had done her homework.

On such and such a day she would clutch at her shin and froth and
expire and only later would one of us Google the date and find out a
tribal elder had lost a battle to retain his ancestral soil having been
shot in the shin which lead to an embolism on this day. On October
29th she threw herself from the window singing Billie Holiday’s
Gloomy Sunday. December 9th and she turned into shadow. Last
week, she was ripped into quarters.

I tell my friends I wish I had something. Not this, but a way to be

me.

You could be born in meetings, Owen suggests.

What about tiptoeing away when the conversation turns to profit and
loss? Dougal said.

None of them said, Don’t worry. It’s been raining and more is
forecast. Join the whole world in the queue to get home and once
there interrogate the night as it gains confidence in the corners, in
the black slit where the bookcase hides in plain view against the
wall.

28
None of them said, become expert at forgetting, because that is the
endpoint and society rewards those in a rush. If you can forget in the
right way you could live in several worlds, simultaneously
capitalising on and rejecting loss. The way you have never
acknowledged any of our heart aches is suggestive of aptitude.

Then one of them said so.

29
In Bed with Bukowski and Tranströmer
I went to bed with Charles Bukowski and
Tomas Tranströmer last night.

Bukowski was scrabbling around the floor naked,

balls swinging as he hunted screws from the lock
he had attempted to fix.

Tranströmer was waking in the back of his car,

in horror: his name had gone.
He waited wide-eyed for it to come back to him
like a village re-appearing from mist.

Someone online has been standing up for Bukowski’s

lack of polish: he did things
then he wrote poems.

Tranströmer had the Nobel Prize on his mantelpiece

and played piano with his one, good hand.
His eyes were blue frost.

I sit in a cemetery to escape the city

relentlessly remaking itself
to wonder what it might mean to have slept
with these two men in my head.

One young magpie drops expertly onto a grave,

levers its tail to squirt a blob
of white onto a plot. Tonight
I will go to bed with Russell Edson and Louise Glück.

30
This Work

He keeps asking me how I feel this

work is going. I say
just enough to cover up
the bomb crater I am thinking of,
the occupied municipal buildings I daydream
as we fulfil our roles.
Lights are on but foundations could give
at any moment.

He asked me because I look tired.

This work cannot be completed satisfactorily by
anyone’s reckoning, but that is
not an acceptable thought.

We both know it, but

we don’t know each other well enough yet.
He has an expensive watch
which could mean anything.

31
Mouths
Babies are then born with no mouths; this is viewed as unfair protest
by them. Elders elect not the most skilful but the most subservient to
slip in blades, find the space between gums and fashion a slit-mouth.
Scar tissue puckers for lips. By the time they are adolescent, the ruin
of their mouths is in vogue.

The babies begin to produce sophisticated art which appears to be

designed to communicate backwards to the unborn. A new defence
directorate is commissioned and recruited to. Articles of association
identify a shadowy quango, the website of which only ever shows a
404 error.

Elders convene and agree the directorate should piggyback a

message ostensibly designed to mollify and cajole, but in actuality is
a threat aimed into wombs that next babies better not come out
without eyes or earholes, and it is time to grow mouths properly –
this disrespect will not be tolerated.

There is a years’ long delay due to

The elders plan to praise and promise through taut stomach walls
but no consensus is reached on what the promise will comprise of.
They do agree that it is fair to expect the babies to expect the
promise not to be fulfilled.

32
Bomb

The first bomb was designed to be funny, the second to break our
hearts but not impact on our schedules, we were just to carry on
sadder. Despite everything, no one could not appreciate the skill.

A new bomb is going off like dainty cogs inside a watch to inspire
the aimless meander of corpuscles. If you need we can arrange for
subtitles in the air. To explain the language of bombs I push my
hand into the gizzard of a mortar to feel its bulking organs and
gibbous genitals.

There is a bomb in my wallet, and one in how I use an image of

someone performing Tai-Chi to get the better of myself. No one
knows bombs better than me. I was raised by bombs. Once, I wooed
you with bombs but you didn’t get it.

Real bombs go off and off while velvet swimming crabs release
unfertilized eggs in horror. I alight at the wrong station and find a
discarded sketch of a new type of bomb that will prove what you
have done is despicable.

It explodes scattering bloodied reason everywhere.

33
Slow Slicing
You thought you’d finished,
that to say
the frantic Morse of rain on the window
was enough, but now you have to hear
messages in white noise.
History.

Sisyphus is doing the dishes

stacking the Dishwasher all wrong
because every single morning
the memories;
it’s getting so that your favourite songs
unfold like wet origami
or a mess of code,
date stamped with the heavy thump and echo
of the library stamp
(that sound cannot be sympathetically excised;
I’ve had my people look into it.)

Prometheus repeatedly won’t play ball

to no avail. You wish he would
make us all feel less guilty by
cutting a deal.
Sometimes it’s wrens that team up,
gently untucking his shirt like perverts
like a Disney sequence
to get at the liver by a billion pecks.
It is so much worse that he lets it happen.

And it is unlikely harm will come to rescue

how today replays yesterday.
You are too far away to hear, but
pheasants will be releasing their metallic call
by slavering A-roads
and the worst overlays actual fact almost perfectly.
Almost.

34
Paracetamol will not unattach from
parrots eating ‘em all
and how someone we know knew someone who
rattled when he moved. Dead now.
His face on the rubber neck of a fake Nessie
continues. You repack and reuse.
Bad feeling and neglect prettily made as ravioli from scratch –
that’s what’s for dinner

and even if
a day falls well I know you
might bring me a dead finch, still warm,
having mistaken reflected clouds
in a closed window
for sky.

35
Confusion

Confuse me. Point me in one direction then end directions. Unpick

the view at the edges. All the birds are gone. There isn’t such a thing
as an answer. A deadweight is plummeting through outer space and
what I say is tied to that. Your intestines are so sad. A serenaded
Friesian lays it massive jaw in a lap and sleeps. A cemetery planet
joins out solar system. Guilt isn’t useful. Even if you should feel it.
A nick in your heart and sand pours out. More than would fit, which
is how you know this is a dream. It isn’t a dream. September is
waiting all year for us. We exist in two states: highly autumnal, or
not. Violins still exist? Invincible catgut sawing following us on our
journey. I have one job to do but I don’t know what.

36
Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements and thanks are due to the following for

publishing poems from this collection:

The Finished World, Stand

Samuel wants to know, Poetry Village
In Bed with Bukowski and Tranströmer, Sledgehammer
A Fishy Smell, Wine Cellar Press
Angela, Mercurious
Our Inescapable Situation, Version, Snub, Strong People and Weak
People, BLER
The Person & This is What You Make Your Children Do, Graphic
Violence

37