FAIRYTALE (WITH UNSOLVED MURDER)

––It’s yesterday. And who will remember?

––You watch the way home for hours. 

––Schedules of trains reaching the source of the plot. 

––The same day her parents filed a missing person report. 

––I swear you can find her name in the margins of this text. 

––Of any text. 

––It's yesterday. 

booklouse - any of various small, often wingless insects of the order Psocoptera, which feed on paper and bookbindings. 

––It’s yesterday. And who will remember?

––And so they began to experiment with anniversaries. 

––Is that your problem?

––Stepping off the page. 

––Black tiptoed resistance.

––Neither distant nor bothered.

––It’s yesterday.  

pinworm - a parasitic nematode worm, Enterobius vermicularis, infecting the colon, rectum, and anus of humans. Children are at high risk of infection. 

––It’s yesterday. And who will remember?

––Years ago something happened.  

(This is a short extract from a long poem)

ISBN 978-1-907812-33-0

£5.00   42 pages

Elms

Walking round

           among the

thin bald elms —

           like pines their

young eyes ad

           justing to

the dark or

           needing praise

like fat men.

isbn 978-1-907812-08-8

£5.00    24 pages

***

laughter with purple

               that's what's important

sunlight's good

               across what's diverse

chubby green waterways barges

               a man watching his son fish

it doesn't matter about the self

               there isn't one

possession please

               only from what nourishes

other people'll tell you

               trust them & you

***

isbn 978-1-907812-18-7

£5.00    38 pages

I Want to Fuck David Cameron

i want to fuck David Cameron

i want to be the divine Mrs. C

i want to tweak his ruddy cheeks

run my fingers through his thinning beige hair

rub my body all over his

sliced white-dough physique

i want to wear a twin-set in pastel blue

ride with him on his

environmentally-friendly bicycle for two

i’m going to wear a hoody,  just so

he’ll hug me and fill me with his Tory love

i want to be a single mother

i want to be poor, i want to be needy

anything, so he’ll use me

in a moving photo opportunity

oh yes Davey my new Tory mate

i really thought you’d turned me straight, except

i want to fuck Margaret Thatcher too

i saw her down Lash for Lasses

suited and booted wit her concrete hair and that

“come to bed, or i’ll break your fucking neck” stare

oh, those Tories have got me so wet

they’ve gone all lovey-dovey, touchy-feely

they are such sexy Dulux dogs

they’ve gone all blue with a hint of green

blue with a hint of pink

blue with a hint of black

blue with a hint of any fucking tint

that’ll lure those voters little kisses in

you see, they’ve got me so confused

i used to know where i stood

the evil Tories were bad

and Labour, well they were kind of, sort of good

but now they’ve all merged

into one head-fuck toxic mix

of rightwing, capitalist war-mongering shits

and i’m so loved up that all i want to do is give

each and every one of them a great big Kirby kiss

isbn 978-0-9563928-7-9

£5.00    32 pages

Rootstock Rose

See my flowering

My bold usurping

Enabled by neglect

A sly try at life

Beneath grafted beauty

These single petals

Ugly milk-white

And yellow stamen

Like any old weed

But I am the giant

Upon whose shoulders

I am the step-father

Genetically denied

The strong foundations

Without whom, but for

A direct link to

A common ancestor

isbn 978-0-9563928-1-7

£5.00    31 pages

We welcome in the view

Sticky fly droopily blood pills juice

Black, non-small rebellion in Canada,

Soon change gold produced near gnome seminar

This is about Venus

Xuexuexuexue

He died as a lonely road area

A clear victory kicks Houston

Killed Houston

See sticky resin named Alliance

Union

Staphylococcus anal auras

Frozen Time

Juicy anger and a pickaxe

But we can find oil

Ironically, because the bank - 

Happy tears, not a manager.

isbn 978-1-907812-15-6

£5.00     19 pages

I want to be left

with Szmaglewska but

you ply me with Mengele,

your eyes say a slim volume

of cold snippets, 

statistics between men.

Under the screen

Hotel Galicja

has extraordinary rooms:

Do you leave in Oświeçim?

Tell us places

that shouldn’t visit.

isbn 978-0-9565418-9-5

£6.00     33 pages  with  14 colour plates

I don’t remember going to the Grenada in Portland Road, Hove, don’t recall the film on show, and don’t remember, on the same day, seeing a play, or its plot, or its title. A frame set up, years later, by others. Outside of it there are voices, whispering. Empty landing, tall doors never shut, banging in any wind. The attic, its sloped tar-hair padding, muting all street sounds. On one page, attempts at painting, soaked blots, dried solid. Across the folio, words. A carpet of Daily Heralds for the blackened man to hump sacks upon through the house to the bunker at the back, in the garden. Coal dust on the doorframe, where the hood catches it. Chorusing thanks over pie-chart fractions. Crawl into the hole under the stairs where browned instructions from the Blitz still hang. Regard a patch called the Egg Field. A gold clock turns under a glass dome. A wasp pullover bobs with a ball by the airbrick. A bedroom, narrowing to this world. Chained from picture rails, oval portraits of tinted babies. Silk slung over banisters. A dozen or so knapped flints pushed into the earth: a Roman road straight across the horses’ field, the wheat, the ridge of the Downs. Timbers, pram-wheels, string, scattered around the garden . . .

isbn 978-1-907812-07-1

£5.00    35 pages

—after Grachan Moncur III’s Air Raid

Fundamental shawl

                                                     oblong opportunity

threaded gauge

hoary species

                                        hanging

nail-bit weakness

on

             worrisome foundation of

                                                                air’s silent

facilitating shoulders.

                        Of organizing crows

                                                     customizing

                                                angled

                                    certainty

                        pinned and

draped

           a halo’s semiotic

calling

           heard by wavering gauze

                       embedding its foggy

                                  warmth

hallucinatory hoard of now’s relevant

                                                                       position of truant

artificial hypotheses.

isbn 978-1-907812-27-9

£5.00    14 pages

From the 39th Floor

Streets mapped as if by Haussmann midtown

Polaroid age of colour daily news traffic

increase uptown to extended neon billboards

billowing smoke and steam from the roadway

Almost half a century on the skyline remains

enforced demolition these streets carry histories

There’s some nice parts of Manhattan you can

see them from here

Couples in love wandering hand in hand

flocks of birds in small parks

taking drink in bars grey atmosphere of backrooms

authentic coffee from delis polystyrene cups

Go everywhere by foot exploration a natural way

to Lexington and 52nd Street stand above the subway ventilation

isbn: 978-0-9565418-5-7

£5.00 19 pages

EXTRACTS FROM LEVONA

you don’t really need and and and and and / the browser window cascades and the internet connection stutters and everything suddenly fails / there’s a crack of static and you wait / in the sky there’s a lightning bolt followed by a thunder crack / and you wait / GET AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER / you wait / is the storm coming nearer or further away / you slept on the couch for forty winks this afternoon and are no wiser / waking is it day or night? / have I lost another day / or gained one more in some strange backwards dreaming? / you must check your email / your social media profile / answer that friend request / upload those photographs from the trade fair / but learn nothing in the doing of it / the apprenticeship is over / you are now a fully qualified human being able to regret things / not stupid enough to piss it up against the wall / you have something to live for / those forty remaining years sliding down the rear side of the mountain / just don’t look up at those other hills / they’re not yours / what did you think? / the world was your Oyster card? / you were special not special needs? / you’ll be lucky to trouble the scorers the way things are going / we’ll meet you in forty years time / a five minute mystery on some daytime internet podcast on inheritance hunters now in its fifty second series / he left no dependants / there was a sister / he moved away / then they moved away / there’s a policy that gave him the majority of his wealth / they said he was a quiet man / had lived there forty years / bought the flat outright from his landlord / had a long history of internet banking / and an operation in his right eye to correct his vision / something of that / he left behind

(This is a short extract from a long poem)

isbn 978-0-9565418-0-2

£5.00    42 pages   

OF BEING CIRCULAR

Where it happens always happens

That it swatches right back a buckle

To me. It’s just not me anymore. Who wants

To break the tired round that always leads

You back to me. Here where a road is not

Here but dispersed across several dimensions

You have to retract it in time. This is not my

Journey into myself in a tough time, but a twist among

Others for what I wanted always – to not have or

Not to want to not carry the burden of that only version

Of me – to make it lighter, righter, taut like a sail across

The wind: the inexhaustible rough patterns of attachment

isbn 978-0-9563928-5-5

£5.00    27 pages

glue-sniffer——wasted ar

cynghanedd, "geir" ailadrodd y

cytseiniaid——"effnics" not a

brand of daps, pumps

pumped-me-blood diastole

times plaqued-plaguey arteried

townplanner of body says

thrombosis - sox, sex & stockings

hold up

  the post office ((local,marked for

  closure))

cut down flights——

carbon metatarsals broke

on inter-notional——max-out kudos

by, byebye tits & coquetry

isbn 978-0-9565418-4-0

£5.00    18 pages         

Back to the check‐outt 

straight off the bat the kids sed 

What's'yer reasoning on this? 

re/zoning 

re/opning 

re/sizing 

re/align 

ing‐lore 

loc 

uter/us 

and them 

simply 

saying 

re/plying 

pli/a 

pli/é 

‐ble 

play 

Or other somesuch ethnocrutch to levitate from. 

Tom's gone roun'd'twist. I've seen enough to sim/ply 

s/ay 

ail/ 

ments  

From the hag/g and hungr/ie goblin 

That into raggs would rend ye [rocks] 

And the spirit that stands by the naked man 

In the Book of Moonshine ‐ defend ye! 

That of your five sound senses [and the one not taken] 

Never you be foresaken 

Nor wander from your selves with Tom 

Abroad to beg your bacon. 

isbn 978-1-907812-21-7

£5.00     38 pages

Life after death's no substitute for life before birth

Put yourself in the hands of the Lord

it's not as if you could do any better

oh you could could you

think you're so smart? Answer this: BOFF!

There's only so much ambient apophatic deity

you can take before

the room fills with feathers

Coo down the Dove from Above

Coo         Coo

Darwin was right and had a better beard than God

Karl Marx and Whitman his only rivals

Jesus kept his trim if you believe the painters

and here he’ll serve you coffee and cake

and take you under his wing

The urban bees buzzing off the honey

in the lavender patch

For a while he was poster boy

for St Paul and the Evangelists

with a Number One hit in each decade

except for the last

Then the rain came down like Brazil

and he became a symbol

to make us feel bad about stuff

but we don't feel bad about stuff

and if he didn’t exist

we’d have to invent him

who else would we blame for the weather

isbn 978-0-9563928-3-1

£5.00    29 pages

The room where Bowie wrote “Heroes” 

I clambered down from the voice of resistance 

Burning into spinning black vinyl like the needle sharp sun burns into your retina 

But In this room its light is now strapped across my back 

That showed me again 

That the Berlin sun has a way of pushing back its own dark history 

And its quiver light present 

And in this room if evil knew itself 

It would have found itself here 

Now washed clean by music in the head, on the page, from the throat 

A stolen kiss by a wall, 

Berlin’s greatest message is that you are only ever 24 hours or one truly great act 

Away from total redemption 

And to be a part itself of this choir of resistance 

Singing from above the darkened shadows that danced on the ashes of their enemies 

Real and imagined 

The hastily gathered history that speaks to you through the patterned glass doors upstairs 

Patched together from half finished conversations 

Recorded within those walls and left to leak out slowly 

To thicken and collect like time until each floor finally gave way 

And now it fills out the corners of every room 

Like sunlight 

And so soon I’ll clamber back upstairs 

So in the womb like silence  

When you can only hear your own voice 

Coming back to you through a wire and a pair of headphones 

You still find you’re speaking to the entire world 

And for once the song you hold in your throat comes out 

Almost a carbon copy of the one in you once held in your head 

isbn 978-1-907812-16-3

£5.00    24 pages