RAINDOLE DRESSING GOWN

Take down your battered St. George, kid

Your racist uncle

He got decked in the hall

By your new step-dad

We sat in the bus-stop

With the dagger swagger dickhead

With a table-knife down his trousers

One Daysaver morning

And the wasteland still slowly rotting…

________________________________

January 2012

DON'T JUMP

Reaching for the ledge,

Holding onto the edge of the mattress.

Conscious of being held in dreams

_________________________________

Late 2011

ARSENIC ANGEL

Angelectic –

She drove me to the morning

Carried me to the morning

She defective deceptive

Who’ll turn on detective

Apoplectic/Angelectic

Pull the word apart

And dissect it

Tear the scenery up

And direct it

______________________

December 2011

THE END OF GAME

THE END OF GAME

Don’t take my pauses for full-stops

I’ve walked this way before

Years ago…

Don’t take my shyness for cold

I’ve sat before this radiator

Years ago…

Your arms the cradle,

The bough unbroken

This no more the world of stamps and goods yards,

Home phones or negatives

I could you tell you all too quickly

In phonetic poetry

Warm the cup

We’ll lift ourselves out of this

Take the stock

We’ll float ourselves above this

This trust the wisdom
The confession unneeded

 - Won’t you take my nodding as rhythm?

The tiger leaps in paper frieze –

The graphic gives date

The walk gives fearling

_______________________________________

Late 2011

(UNTITLED)

(UNTITLED)

I was shouted down –

Locked out and humiliated

I was smoked out –

Laughed at and intimidated

These feelings aren’t real, are they?

They’ll pass like the train

Which in dreams I’m forever running for

Forever missing

I was passed up –

Broke down and misunderstood

I was cast off –

Out-foxed and forgot about

This is false attention-seeking surely?

As invalid as the ticket

I presented on the train I just about made

Forever never there

_______________________________________

Written on a bus, late 2011

OLD LANGLEY SIGHS

OLD LANGLEY SIGHS

Three fake Santas on stolen bikes,

The scene the amateur drama workshop

Tried to ignore.

Should they need a ghost train,

Look no further than

The dark brigade

Hitting the accelerator

On approach to Platform 1.

The wrong side of the tracks is all that’s left

And coldly there lonely fishermen they

Throw lines from the stumps of old factories

__________________________________________

December 2011

GRACE & DIGNITY

GRACE & DIGNITY

Let me carry out this sentence with grace

Tend the land under your feet

Do the work in your eyes

Play with the words in your hands.

If I should be burdened

Let me hold it with dignity

Hold it together.

And I shall show this love in deed.

Let me scour this broken wasteland uninterrupted

Applaud such a young feat

Show my working to your y and x

Keep the certainties un-played

Only when the mirror is clean

Will I see behind me

Let not another’s thought decide/define me

I have the right to write.

Keep me lost in my work

In such harrowed times.

Let us grow closer

Where the tracks divide

Should old interference be forgot.

(De-centred dissenter in my descent)

So fast the tunnel –

The hill in decline

The poets of white noise

Get deeper in mind

Stolen from my own reference library

Lay like snow on the ground

                                               I too drift.

__________________________________________

December 2011 

HANG ON IN THERE

HANG ON IN THERE

I write this in the bathroom
Waiting for the water to run.
Another day on the slide,
Another day off I can do without
I heard a voice say -

'Hang on in there'

Another application,
Another day unqualified.
The man on the tele he said
'There's work out there',
It must be me who's lazy
I try tell myself to

Hang on in there

I need my freedom, but the rent needs paying
Those who say otherwise got the money to say it!
They tell me stop dreaming, but I'm wide awake
And there's music to be made.

Another night in,
Waiting for the call to come,
I check my phone all the while -
The charger's old
I had to fix it up with sellotape -
I hope it lasts out.

Hang on in there

Short of paper
I wrote this on the back of my CV -
I've been reading it a lot lately -
Ten years of work
That don't define me at all.
My girl tells me to

Hang on in there

Hang on in there.
___________________________________

This is a song I wrote sat in the bathroom one morning last summer, sat with me guitar whilst running a bath.  The title's nicked from a soul song I was into at the time and the music was inspired by John Martyn.  Sometimes you don't have to invent anything with lyrics, just write the truth melodically.  When I went busking in Walsall, this was the first tune I played.