o

I confessed to being

of swine and to these illicit tendencies

to the juvenile robin in the

dead rhododendron

its feet skittering on the

brittle branches

its still dark eyes

it watched me mute

immaculate, waited

for food I supposed

the confession spewed

as clarion.

01-10__[phs]

POLITE NOTICE: when disposing of regency ladies in this convenience please ensure you use the PHS Regency Lady disposal bags provided.

n

My friend Jo Pilgrim understands

that this copulation

this imagining of it

this willing it into being

whether on paper alone or on bedsheets

on the fabric of reality

no more constitutes adultery committed

against loved ones and promises

than defecation, or indeed any of the

biological inevitabilities,

the work that our bodies must do to be

and by which we might mark

the passage of time.

m

I glimpsed the cup of the bra

of “the Hainford one”

through the gap between fastened buttons

of her patterned blouse

and was beset with desire

older, local, heavy, habitual

and prior to which I had scarcely noted

but since the cup and its contents

half full if not overflowing

I could think of little else

the cycle path beside the flyover

could be the site of our doings

she as bushy as a brute

and incapable of silence

chattering pleasantries even as

we went for anal

hot sun on our patches

her oleaginous rectal discharge

the tears of the soon to be shredded

wrung like the mucal exudate

from a raw welt

knotted like mammals behind buddleia

inches from pedestrians

cock pushed out with

every glottal stop

I’d hold the shape right

guide it through the territory

the angle of incidence

weak from the grip

render myself vertical

with a hold on the mighty tit

that bobs like a buoy

marking the limits of the channels of our will

with each of my deep sea drills

my excavations

rancid pubes marinated in anal run off

balls drenched in the sauce of her cunt

slapped into unfilled void

like swift applause

for my fanatic approach.

21-03__[BCNSTHRP]__0001

/ for many months the crows had been gathering, the place chosen in cawed consensus /

l

It’s typical presumably

to be drawn to our children’s teachers

their caregivers

their devotion to our young

renders them spouses, of a type

extensions of the spousal relationship

their professional concern

for the safeguarding of under sixes

who bear our genome

to be easily confused

– for the atypical narcissist –

with love or a considered attempt

at seduction

particularly when the caregiver

is tan and exquisite

and gentle of manner

though certain of the ways of pleasure

all bets off beyond

the caregiving environment

heaps of sublimated reprimand

finally vocalised in sexual violence

and at the parent day

I wait for the breeze to lift her

dress, for knicker fabric over pudenda

the buttocks of the caregiver

the smell of the cunt of the caregiver

in the attendant centigrade

the breeze truculent

the breeze disobliging

are dresses designed to preclude their

own ascent

at the whims of meteorology

I’ve waited years in increments

and for naught

the dresses they rightly scoff.

k

Would, I wonder,

it be permissible

to fuck a woman,

do forgive me, who

was pregnant with the child

of another man

in thrall to the altered states

of the external cunt

during a growing pregnancy

Malbec red and aflame with promise

I would hold the huge bump

from behind

it would be tight up to her dress

which I would lift

and lower too the pants

yards of them

a whole hand up her

like a handshake

different somehow

and from behind then I’d

grip my dick till it smarts

get it in carefully

couple of long strokes

then sink it to the cervix

hard and lunatic

and not give a shit

because the child’s not mine

probably stick my thumb up her arse

and finish quick before the guilt

dried her up and

wilted me down like a scorched

bloom.

26-09__[IFR {dis.}]

the abandoned paddling pools left syrupy with larvae on the peripheries of the disused industrial complex in grasses and brambles where grey bodies would be found

j

I follow the flesh like leaves

blown along the wind trap the

broadland makes of the common

the shadows of dead mills

superseded by pump assemblies

it is for the truly ugly

to so vehemently ratify

the severance of sex

from the bounds of attraction

to couple it instead with

the fundaments of biology

with physical release only

that grim judder

to beg of them, silently,

all of them

to beg that if they for even a moment

manifest the urge to

tenderly brawl

to acclimatize to fresh meat

then to do so with I

I with a passable degree of erotic competence

I with a bent for great guilt shouldered solo

I who will judge not

or will judge

but only by way

of a constructed prose work

written years later

that I can assure you

will not be read

will never be.

i

I want to come across every face

I come across

apologetic jets to eyebrows,

lashes, nostrils,

to hairlines even

a shared moment of utter separateness 

the jaundiced tincture of

the dribbled seed against a

catalogue of skin tones

my burnished glans rested on

cheeks like a dermal polyp

caress the fluid in like unguent

hawthorn stench

the fungoid scent of bared bits sucked

digits delved

eked vestibules

the bitter tang of anus

sweltering rim

relaxing around the rhythmic waves

the slithered contractions

of a probing tongue

some unbound gastropod!  

such wealth of anatomical diversity

don’t limit us to the familiarity

of a fastidiously mapped

topography

instead lose us

in brave new voyages

across oceans of skin

through the boundless lumen of

your southern passages

we needn’t converse –

what sense in doing so

there’s nil to say not said by our betters

such ritual is for the old

or else the young

for anyone but we –

nor even look

should we wish not to

such trysts belong to the body

and not to the mind

as long as our bodies function as

conduits of copulation

we are obliged to use them

to fuck.

___[w_w_t_dr_b_]__//

the very tree I lay

beneath for lunch

h

I was privy to meticulous premonitions of self-harm

an arsenal of safety pins stuck into forearms

fingertips scalded to blistering on a three-cup Bialetti

drawing pin to the gums

disposable razor blade

lid of a tuna can

grind teeth until tasting blood

and worse – of my death by suicide

letters of terrible sadness composed to the children,

the wife, the realization, then,

that there was no one else to write

hanged from the very tree I lay

beneath for lunch

leaves against the blue sky

the grey sky

every lunch I’d see my hanged body

and the leaves

the sky

face swollen

we’re crushed by this world and by each other.

g

I slathered the sun cream on

in white spurts like the spoils of pleasure

around her shoulders and beneath her straps

and then around the hem of her shorts

I crept my creamy fingers under

the sun was very hot

the curve of her buttocks

where it joined the leg

my heart beat

in the very hot sun

the sea was almost still

there was wind and traffic

the sounds of kites weaving

the elastic edge of her cotton knickers

I crept my creamy fingers under

and into the shadows

her cunt was wet

I crept my creamy fingers

and she raised herself to let me.

f

Drunk they roamed maniac

unstoppable

stairs no obstacle

boyfriends no obstacle

underwear no obstacle

fuck, life no obstacle

they were immaculate –

if only the dumb world could see! –

and heroes

alive with drink

they felt the world through

their meagre biceps

and to their very heartbeats

every cracked beer like a mighty defibrillator

to their sobering confidences.

28-09__[NESS]

first thought

\|||||||||||||||||||||||||

the arteries of the ness were 

brought to a standstill by the 

sheer weight of blackberries

an abundance of shocking ripeness

picked and eaten 

the peculiar aromatics of some

percentage of the berries

the presumable product of a

great atomic past

the wind atop the bomb ballistics building  was

fierce as a lover

and tried to undress

me as a lover might

drew violent song from steel

the lighthouse too would be gone like

all the past

next year or the next

into the sea

the shingle, the land with it

the keeper's chapel building in white

on the very edge    bore just

firelighters and cobwebs

while around it the world gave way

from the piled shingle

like alien flora 

rusted metal rose a twisted reach

the ghosts of the old laboratories

creaked and yelped

iron assemblies swallowed by

mounded beach

in long dark anterooms where

once lights burnt, ancient computers

the instruments of the post-war effort

now the place was run amok 

with legacy 

and it was wind and land that made memory

and the      ness itself 

a living terrain that consumed

its history by change

those hints that lingered 

of things man had done 

dwarfed by    the enormity of 

all  they weren't and hadn't