the blues empire

I got
me a lonely plot

and I built it.

from column a to column b,
rolled out like a canopy,
the monopoly on misery,
the blues empire.

girls up against words,
TKO-no-contest.

I was here first
with trademarked hurts,
copyrighted curses

and verses
with patent pending.

reserves of misery
that are never ending.

and I,
I will stick my oar in.

and send my profits soaring.
soaring,
soaring,
ssssoaring.

the sun hit bellecour, rifles won't stop singing. j. moulin, nuns and monks offer themselves to the ether and "blue eyes" won't stop stinging. the rudderless plebs of the provinces. we tried to forget, but the scars won't let us, or the books. and so was born his generation's loudest voice, a word carpenter. sat next to an empty seat forever, staring into the irish sea forever, wondering if his…heroes ever felt like this.

pretence, pretence, pretence, to clearing out his desk. reduced to selling his bottled sweat on the internet. he's in his 3rd choice home talking loudly for everyone, sipping tapwater, straddling the typewriter. and when he's done his rotten, his rotting soul, smashes into the s..southern pole. and there..he ..thaws the….icecaps…….thawss., glacier NOIr and glacier..er ..bLanche,
and the rest of em.

it was blues man, it was blues.

hi-noise

folks all mentioned in passing from preston, lancs to prestatyn.
all the fields and hills just pissed emselves laughing.

whats the grandmother saying?
she's saying a town of heathens-on-knees all praying.

the pixels and sluts turned their men into mush
while respect and restraint..and restraint had washed away like cheap paint.

so pull the pulse to your finger.
and bury your one good ear.

yes, i have heard of all of those too.
but what is the intended meaning of all those words that you use?

what is your prefered interpretation of the sound? come round
to mine, we will cancel each other out.

and take shameful pride
in commiting all our crimes
in 2/4 timing.

getting warmer...

i experienced that peculiar brand of shame that usually only comes with having a biblical name.
with nowhere hair nothing eyes deep sigh uneasy air
triple crowned son in his anglican gut wonders if the wandering is best left to others,

through himselves he weaves the mantra he can never be man, master cast , with plasterrrrrr
he carves it into table - 2 x 3 -

"when you first notice immortality is beginning to abandon thee".

she wrote - boy, you won't even live to a footnote.
he proclaimed,
my only aim is to leave a stain.

-----------

tame her with frantic early morning emails.
spell out 'i fucking love you' in chemtrails.
bathe in bravery.
become famous, for your defiant pathos.
arrange a transfer to speaker's corner
to argue the case of the both the latter, and the former.

and your days
everafter
will become
slightly softer
easier.
and warmer.
and warmer.

adn warmrer

typewriter

QWERTY. QWERTY. it is as good a start as any, QWERTY>

i don't know what the story is. where it starts,. where it ends.
i'd just returned from reading every book ever written and if the answer exists, well..
it chooses to remain hidden.

i've got my own word for everything.
from canal beds nicking poetry.
see me looking up perplexed - i'm the artist, but..my pukka pad is spotless

decades o' dust bouncing upwards --he thought his time had come and gone,
he was wrong
QWERTY!

and since you left the stage he's been
burning all he reads
out of respect,
he opens the W.I.P file of his au-to-bi-og-ra-phy
and does a findandreplace on every instance of your name.

commited his final soliloquy to tape.

smashed it and unravelled it.
and mailed it to the beckett estate.

push the bullet in

converted his words into zeroes and ones
hunched over, they were his gift to the beyond.
he was still giddy at being let in the circle,
becoming privy to words so wise and witty.

but of late he couldn't help but notice
he received fewer glances from colleagues in hallways.
a sudden drought of pleasantries usually spelt out
demotion from peer to peasantry.

now the drought had hit his studio home,
his letters and calls all seemed to dry up at once.
he wrote his friends to ask them why and was
hit with an avalanche of out of office replies.

the very next day in a blind panic he burnt
all of his years of degenerate work.
it was too late. the word was out.
round up all moaners and misfits.

he must have missed this.
between mither about free shit
and that mess in the kitchen.

on the afternoon when they finally caught up to him,
held his skinny wrists and pushed every bullet in,
his thoughts remained fixed on a mysterious list
of a various faux-pas and their respective dire consequences.

sunflowers...

and from cotton clouds he descended waved his wand and mended and restitched these regions as legions of men all gathered and clamoured for a touch of his leathery hands.

the ghost of ghandi continues to bounce to an fro about this valley from the leisure centre through superdrug and the circus onto the con club and up to the academy.

he always seems to end up in tears these days.
whether he's reading from the births and deaths,
or the yellow pages.

enter stage left and enter stage right as every night somewhere unknown sunflowers pulling their way up through astroturf as the serfs and the royalty all look skywards lost in the quality of the build and still the world and his wife want a man not a god who can repeal iron laws and seal them in vaults.

its been weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks
since they put pennies on the eyes of their dying dioceses.
stricken with wasting disease.

I was sure that there would be a sting in this tale I grope blindly through each line in the hope that it will reveal itself the ceiling is so low already and still he continues to grow and grow I said "sir may I wash myself in your river" though I know that you built it out of cabbages and conifers.

the invisible millstone around his neck.
he sees a perfect border slice from east to west.
the bulk of the villagers curse their fate
that their days should be stripped clean of symbols and themes.

doped up on cash.
fattened and bored.
I zip myself up and
I ping myself home.

where every second lunar eclipse
I bring two chapped lips against her broken hips.
alright.

open collar.

from the barren moors i ventured down
to skim some of the funds from the dead brick town.
but in a twist, a madefortv shocker
i turned myself into open collar corporate cock-sucker.
i became super-sized, subsidised, angloamericanised.
two or three buttons akimbo,
i took off my specs, announced my exit from limbo.
i grind my pretty teeth round and round,
the sound is enough to supply the tempo.
the harmony, the melody should already be burnt into your memory.
i jettisoned my primitive laws at the door,
arrived with sean corker in a 4x4.
i began to live the life diverse
combining lynx shower gel & gillette anti-perspirant.

i'm an ex-fieldmouse and i've come so far
carrying round my conscience on a scratched cd-r.
showing off my soft-skills I have to determine
if today is a beer or a coffee day.
in a cotton shirt replaced jesus class
with vitamin pills and muscle mass.
i took the volley full-on, and here i stand
doing the protein shake to the establishmenthouseband.
the only competition left between us today
is to see who can be subservient in the most subversive way.
what is wrong with this picture?
i was just passing through i became a permanent fixture.

years and years later when it all broke down
the room was full as fire laws could ever allow.
the equation is glamour/banter
semantics:tragic.
in distress,
I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press I sent an SOS to the gutter press i said yes,

(they found me wincing. they found me wincing. they found me wincing. drinking daddy's whiskey).

the anchor age

there are misters
corrupting victorian vistas
and i'm the kind of man who likes to see
from the top to the bottom of his streets (and from the bottom to the top)

don't take it out on the buildings it wasn't the buildings fault.
don't take it out on the buildings it wasn't their fault.

why do you look so down?
you're king of this roundabout. with an asphalt crown.
and there are plastinated bishops and priests
who will pay to pretend to believe for a day
and it's a treat.
and it's a novelty.
faith is the final fetish of these twenty something centuries.

I'd been shaking the lonely hands our last local heroes.
I had a vision of a perfect canyon
cutting from capetown to grand bretagne
and the knowledge that built this town
Will see it returned to the ground.
To the ground.

And every year, without fail
It's LL bowen & Mrs. Greer
here to teach me about
the inexistence of class
they come to deny they come to erase
a past, a story, an anchor
i listen intently and when they've finished I thank them,
and when they've finished I say "thanks".

early morning, profit warning
what do I do with all my dying money?
identify my USP
and throw myself into the icy sea of questions unanswered,
my actions are abstract, the words are my anchor.
the words will be my anchor.