Alchemisland

I keep squeaky clean 

Try taking it easy 

But I’m easily wound up

Like analogue toys beneath Christmas trees in 1953

Find myself seated seething 

Inside on another fine evening  

Sky: fire, highest, heathen, amethysts leaking

In the painterly gloom of a creaking hull

I bring to account the full dullness

Of my weak-bulb life

Robes of itchy penitence, I slip into them easily

I become dependent on penance and vellum

Pen, parchment and pious punishment

Better to harden, harshen my heart

My darkest iterations confined to apartments

Compartmentalised for the time being

I know when I’m going mental

It’s sudden and always different

But the symptoms are the same

It starts, every time, in the eyes

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Passing time like a patient gaoled in a straightjacket

He was perfectly straightlaced in his day

But those new neighbours put paid to peace

They made such a racket, whole battalion going hatchet

Back at billets before a dawn raid. Were they raised badly?

God damn it, a man must reserve his right to attack back

When police vans arrived, bluing the drive, he was still hacking.

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Pessimism’s vindication

Wine dope balm opiate to a self-hating impatient

The acid which evening becomes during summer

Days long as yawnworthy strings of numbers holding coded data

I find the sum of it all measly 

An easily forgotten romp in the trees 

My life without cycle, one season alone

Cold, wheatless wheezing winter, ceaseless

Frozen steeples like the feared ice spears

Of some mysterious people, who disappeared

Drowned, rendered butter in history’s illiterate bog.

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What am I missing?

All these trips and missions 

All these bunkered admissions 

I’m surrounded by hardened tissues 

Glistening with old emissions 

Like the trail from a snail

I continue to confuse my muse

With my self abuse 

I am the scarred, abused nude 

An artist’s view of me

I looked askew 

I looked cute in Kew Gardens

We skipped the queue 

Only one that I told truth to 

Another one I give the boot to 

I’m zooted, watching YouTube 

You’re getting changed but I’m glued 

To what’s on the tube, what an attitude 

When we met I used to ravish you 

It was psycho love, the rabbit stew 

Bunny in the boiler, instinct basic too

It was more than fairground 

Playground antics 

Love abounded 

We were fooling around like teenagers 

I didn’t frown for ages, so prone to malady 

Mirth blanches to familiar melancholy 

My sodden soul’s water rotted rafters 

At last snap in half, collapsing

I used to have to constrain my bulge 

Used to have to stop myself 

Indulging in her 

The second she appeared in the glazed 

Glass panes of the porch

Grass stains, knee impressions 

On tennis courts 

Iced Pimm’s and confessions.