Student on an Estate

Their fierce eyes are upon him.
His clothes and accent betray.
His birth and history are known.
Thoughts and opinions deduced.
For he is from the world of learning.
From a red-brick place: a tombstone to irrelevance.

He doesn’t manually labour.
Doesn’t lie beneath cars.
Nor does he take Auto-Trader to bed.
Instead, he spends weary evenings
Wasting grey matter on futile subjects.

He sees the truth in other lives.
But not for him that privilege.
Their fierce eyes are upon him.

Mr Brown's Debt

His debt stared him out.
Had the face of someone who didn’t want to be ignored.
It demanded attention: Me! Now!
He saw it everywhere.
He nailed himself to his debt.

Yet he was no product-addict or bipolar shopper.
True; money had poured out of holes in walls.
And each secretion had a string attached.
Still, during the flush of each spending-spree
He remained oblivious to money’s true meaning.

He looked around the plush, sterile bank.
Saw an advert which yearned for student custom.
In this reception, like a catalogue interior,
There were settees to sink into.
The smooth unobtrusive light
Helped him relax… a little.
On the surface, the manager was polite.
You must, at all times, be polite.
(That’s what the training taught him.)
A smile cracked, like a fissure,
Upon his blotched, pale face.
A nice smile.
The eyes betrayed another message.

That night, he couldn’t sleep on his debt.
It infested his mind.
Picked away at each neuron.
When he closed his eyes, the debt remained.
Even in his dreams, it remained.
The morning after, he was found hanging by his debt.

Being Empty or Being Alone

Ask nothing from life, save only life alone.
This is the bare minimum, surely.
It may be the ground on which other desires can flower.
But being itself must come first.

What is this being itself? Being-alone?
Being erased of content?
Is it less than a vanishing point in the distance?
Can we hold it, let alone grasp it?
Or is the notion of grasping, even holding, precisely what pure existence is not?
If the mind rubs out its own baggage,
Won’t desire conspicuously remain in an otherwise desert Zenscape?
That desire to expunge the self, Zen-like.
Or that Cartesian desire to keep to the Cogito alone.
The desire to cut out the meat of the empirical self.
Only a mind already throttled by Reason and Education
Would want to rid itself of Reason and Education.
Rid itself of its graduate’s robes.
Those who don’t think much will find the extinguishing-of-the-self idea esoteric.
It is only the Intellect itself – the proud Intellect – which would put on a hair shirt
Or whip itself into the submission of nothingness.
But when the endpoint of possible no-return in reached
How does the mystical or Cartesian self-annihilator
Stop himself from following the markers back to ego and contingency?
Won’t the treasures and temptations of that universe of thought
Forever call him back?
If thought is truly dead, or if all presuppositions are thrown out,
How does the mystic or philosopher know he is in this otherworld
Outside the world of logic, sex and dog shit?
Wouldn’t he need the equal of an experimental water chamber
In which he can float, with eyes, ears and all the rest
Blocked from all things sensory?
A mystic in a water chamber, like Plato himself,
May say no to sensory distractions and temptations.
But wouldn’t the flood of memory drown him instead?

Father and Son

When the Father lived, the Son died.
He was crucified on his father’s cross.
A cross the Son carried and his Father made.
But he wasn’t his father’s reflection.
The Son's mind didn’t mirror the Father's.
Even when the Son tried to reflect back his image,
He failed and failed again.

It’s hard for the child to be the man.
It was hard for that child to be that man.
But that child tried to lift himself up to his Father’s height.
And the few times he did, 
The ladder was quickly swept away.
For his Father was taller when he stood on his Son’s ego.

The Son's reason and heart battled to claim the ship of self.
The heart said: Father does no wrong.
And reason replied: He can do wrong. He has done wrong!
The battles were as unfair as the war was long.
Each little battle took place in the Father’s domain,
And played by his rules.
The Father made the Right and the Wrong
Which made each bruise bleed in shame -
"Punished for being punished."

The Son's mates never knew the tightness of the Father’s reigns.
How they cut into their mate’s skin
Each time the boy tugged away.
How the Son struggled to escape.
How he struggled not to escape.
How the easy option was so very hard.
How the world shrunk to the size of his Father’s ego.
In the forest of Father’s rules, 
He struggled for breath.
He hoped to find his free self hiding there.
But when he found it, it quickly ran away.

Chat Show

Chat show hell.
Voyeurs in the audience.
Exhibitionists on the stage.
And me? The voyeur of voyeurs -
Transfixed by the inanity of it all.

Like Romans at the Coliseum,
The audience screams for titillation.
Screams for vice.
Screams for someone to pay the price for its fun.

The sacrificial fool basks in his five-minutes' fame.
He teases the audience with misdeeds -
All conceived in a wet dream.
The audience is as shocked as a nympho at an orgy.
Still, the game has to be played.
The script needs to be followed.

Like a lion tamer,
The host throws the audience titbits,
On which they gorge like mad dogs.
He controls the audience as Hitler controlled his.
There is form to this chaos.
A gradual crescendo of outrage (orchestrated to a climax)
In which the sinner is brought out to face the rabid.
He's barely safe as the audience strains at the leash.
It is red-eyed and foaming like a medieval crowd
On the scent of a hanging:
Like those zealots who lust for Myra Hindley’s blood.

The host relishes his power.
He teases and tempts; though keeps control…
Even the shows final showdown -
The cathartic release (in which fists and expletives fly) -
Is carefully orchestrated.

Oh! Isn’t this fun!
Dear Host, please let there be blood!

His Work is Never Done

As some say, his work is never done.
He produces reams of the stuff.
But not a jot to offer the world.
His goal is omniscience - if only in his chosen domain.
And yet he doesn’t realise this.
At least the proposition is never put.

Never knows enough for the job.
This final book, then that, then another final one.
And then he’ll be remembered for the word.
His critical mind has himself as his target.
Never enough.
Could do better.
Needs to improve this.
Needs to tighten up that.
And then, and then, and then.
But then never comes.
Instead, he grinds on and on.
Oiling already-oiled wheels.
Fuelling a full burner.
And waiting for the day that someone, somewhere, will tell him, Go! (in a masterful voice, of course).
Someone can always do it better than him.
Everyone has a niche or a style he could neither emulate nor copy.
His own niche and style is the wrong niche and the wrong style –
Something that never makes the grade.
Or comes up to the scratch set by others.
So he struggles and works on.
Hour after hour. Day after day.
Until the product is polished, airtight and flawless.
The kind of thing God Himself would produce,
Or at least the great minds that watch his every move.
But it was really lesser men he put on pedestals.
Pedestals built by his own imagination.
Crowned by his many acts of self-effacement
And the magnification of the others’ talents.
He hoped to join the Company of Mediocre Men.
Till then he would play his daily scales
To master the craft of this, that, and the other.
Till the day when the light turned red
And he’d dare expose himself in front of analytic eyes.
Only then could he escape from his self-built solitude.
A solitude in which only he consumed his work.
Only he knew all its hidden secrets.
In this private little world,
The private language he spoke couldn’t tell him he was going right or wrong.
He needed at least one third person to cast an objective glance in his direction.
To say what is true about his stuff.
To say whether or not it deserved to take its place
In the inter-subjective realm outside his flat.
Until that time, he could have been barking up the wrong tree.
Or barking up a whole forest of wrong tress.
And he would never be the wiser.

Light On/Light Off

For no reason, the darkness lifts.
What reason could there be?
The mind’s lights turn on and turn off.

His tormentor decides when his victim has had enough.
But enough of what?
Enough for what?

When the light returns, as it always returns,
The dark is soon forgotten.
The pain is too much to recall.
And only pain can capture pain. 
All else is vain recollection, born of the itch of guilt,
And his thanks for the better days.

And all along the world outside
Kept its elliptical orbit around his dark head.
Though now he sees its darker spots
From his new position of light.

Creation...

... sets the blood running up to the brain in its house of bone.
The whole body is on its edge.
It buzzes like a machine.
Nerves excite themselves in the pulsing flesh.
Sweat drips slow as a cold day’s ice.

Now the floodgates are opening.
Out pours the lifeblood.
Now nothing matters but Creation.
It screams for attention.
Its nags torments the early hours.
Keeps him on sleep’s wrong side.
The idée fixe will be certain.

But often he squeezes. And squeezes. For a nothing to come…
Now the diarrhoea of Creation splatters the walls.
Is this the birth of an unruly child?
Sometimes, other times, Creation is born only after a long last.
It is often such a slow secretion.

Bloody Sundays

Sundays are too reliable.
With or without fail, they come almost once a week.
(Well, it's but a year till Christmas!)
Sundays are like the bore who knocks at the door when you're shitting,
Or on the phone to De Niro.
Sunday is a death-day of boredom's thousand cuts.
After which death is still not whole.
Sunday comes and leaves it no-mark.
Then goes on its was again.
Only it always returns to make it no-mark.

Husband and Wife

He’d sniff her weakness. (That smell of subservience.)
Then he’d move in, slowly, for a slower kill.
Her body: the battlefield he’d chosen to fight on.
And her pain always eased his frustrations.
Why? For some sick reason.
His wife and her pain became one, an age ago.
She’d lived the strangled life of her strangling marriage,
Two steps behind his more important steps.
Did she expect more?
Did she want the more she’d seen in other lives?
Bound to be offered by other lives? By any other life.

Then the day came, as surely it was destined to,
When she burnt his dinner in an act of pleasurable, but slight revenge.
Burnt it black enough to crumble under knife and fork.

That evening he burnt to that catastrophic burning of lamb, veg… the rest.
Firstly, he whipped her - like a prison guard - with his articulate, foul tongue.
She had, after all, committed - within his Empire - an act of sedition.
To him, the ruined dinner simply portended worse acts to follow.
But only, he thought, if the transgressor, his wife, were not punished in a suitable way.

He soon realised his tongue wasn’t enough for dinnertime’s crime domestique.
So he brought his fists into the equation of his just punishment.
His fists had, till then, been clenched behind a rigid back
Which affected a posture designed to intimidate.
All such postural gimmicks were parts of his over-done, over-acted, manly affectations.
Shows that included what he took to be the displays of a true patrician’s deportment.
A patrician, he thought, not unlike his own true self.

One Silent Sunday

Like jeans on a line, Sunday hangs heavy.
It wraps its gloomy shroud around us.
Its varied time-killers.
Through the dull morning.
Through deathly afternoon,
Then on to evening.

Come Sunday, they recoup for Monday’s race.
They sprawl deep in sofas.
Slump and slouch for hour after hour.
When evening comes, 
They can smell Monday’s burning oil.
It appears at its small distance - a portent.
A reminder, for all Sunday’s victims, 
That it’ll be on time.
On time as it always is.
One second after Sunday is spent.

Lady Killer

Could you recognize a serial killer?
This one buys roses for his wife.
Each day, on return from work, two children greet him with bona fide love.
Even the dog wakes from its sleep and wags its mindless tail.
His wife, without fail, pecks him on the cheek.
She thinks to herself: He’s mine! ... Or something.

A dinner-party raconteur.
In his firm, unspoken grip, he holds men’s minds and women’s hearts.
He charms the ladies with his dark looks and urbane persona.
In the wider community, his foothold is also strong.

One Sunday past, at St. Peters, dressed in a perfectly-ironed suit and perfectly-polished shoes, 
In a perfectly-polished voice, he read from St. Paul’s Corinthians.
The congregation listened intently to a voice of subterranean faith.
Below the recited passage, he noted a missive
Not often spoken aloud in our Pious PC Age.
Silently he read the following: “It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman.”

Five miles elsewhere, three women lay down at peace. 
Deep inside a forgotten skip; abandoned to Dogging Wood.
Dead.
Each corpse was methodically, meticulously, dismembered.
And all the while the public and the family slept.
Soon after these unbecoming deaths,
The death-smell’s putrid dissonance harmonized with inorganic waste.

A School-kid's Pure Hate

His hatred festered as only hate can - deep in the gut.
It nourished him.
Gave his life the little meaning it had.
Made sense of Monday’s shitty promise:
The five schooldays coming.

The week sprawled out in front of him.
All those crushing, tedious hours.
That awful journey from controlling class 
To controlling class… 
To controlling home.
And then back again.

Yes, Sunday’s death-routine too

TV-Silence/TV-Death

The luminous, seductive face

Glares into millions of other faces…

Into millions of homes.

TV-fans stare into its deepness.

Entranced by its small pleasures.

Too soon beguiled by the sharp screen.

As we sit, deep down settee-comfort,

Neo-Medusa turns us to stone.

Stone-dead.

We are dead stones.

TV-slaves consume pure data.

Get fat on commonplaces (none of our own).

Snared by its vicious glow.

Sucking TV-dummy for Freudian pleasure.

Our ever-present, ever-false, friend.

Straight after switch-off… TV-silence.

We are not amused.

The silence speaks.

It pounds our heads.

We fear what’s within us.

We fear the rare silence.

What’s with it? — this TV-silence?

Our hidden, real isolation?

The void - just Being-There.

Our tacit misery.

So what’s on TV tonight?

Another Angry Poem

He pours forth his anger.
It gushes, in torrents, across the page.
That page has waited well for the words and their rage.
And his rage is pure!
Untainted by compassion or humor -
Roadblocks to the true expression, of true pain, in true poetry.

His world is rotten.
His soul? Dark to the nucleus.
His pen? Just run out!
Just before its purest rage to this very day had found its ink.
Had found its paper.
Now that rage must stay in his hard head.
Must remain un-penned for ever.
A few sick people care for his sick work. He hates them too.
They must forgo this dark gift to them.
It will remain sunk deep in the dark mind of the dark poet.

He still believes, with a firm faith, that all hate him; as he hates all.
He knows no one gets it.
Gets his grave verse from the graveyard.
He sits down at his desk; thanks God for His gift to him.
And what is that holy gift? True poetic gloom; true poetic misery.

If this world were all right, he’d simply cease to write.
Ah yes! No more of those diatribes against the world.
No more spurting gastric juice over the stalkers outside.
He’d remain inside his Other-proof refuge.
But he’d know well the revenge for such a silencing -
One last fleg… one last filthy fleg, right into the eye of the world.
A fleg into that collective eye; still safe on the outside.
Still in its castle blockade; trying to starve our anti-hero out.
From where it spies and pries deep into his insides.
Into the outside of his inside.

White Power!

Oh sweet white powder!
How you bring alive the sleeping cells 
With your white power.
You know well the mind’s needs.
Know which the neurons to turn.
The chemicals to release.
Know where to go to liven up the mind 
And set the body on its edge.

White Power, you duplicate those chemicals
Deep within the brain’s basin.
The one which set the body on its edge again.
But the stirrings of these givens
Are pale copies of the sharper edges 
And wilder stirrings White Power brings.

In its razor-edged state: the body buzzes sharp.
Cells electrified by synaptic charges 
And other fine tunings in a pulsing brain.
Neurons, of just the right oscillation, 
Conduct the myriad nerves
Which meander through limbs 
To perk-up the body to readiness.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 
Isn't enough for us.
That drove the other’s green age, 
Lacks the verve to wrench us from TV.
The force that drives the water through the rocks 
Leaves our blood tepid and still.
White Power stirs all to extremities.
Dylan’s bio-currents are weak and frail to us. 
It can’t rise to Power’s cerebral heights.

Yes! Yes! Of course we know!
We know of the slow way down to the dark inside,
When the mind envelops itself 
And switches off the receptors to the concrete world.
That feeds on its own phantasms –
All spun out when cut off from the Real World.
The city-stench of routine, waste.
The wasteful routines.
The routine waste.

Mirror, Mirror

Love looked admiringly at Love.
Reflected back a vain perfection.
She asked: How deep, how far, can I go?
Then fell for her own image.

Fresh from her preenings,
Love took notes.
Compared. Contrasted.
Dreamed of the tall, the dark,
The Happy-Ever-After.
Then joined the dots to conquer all.

On the way to Happiness,
Love went blind,
Lost her way,
And settled for the dead-end instead.