You are a modern man

You are a man of today

And you belong to all the beasts of yesterday

Drumming out emotion

With reference to thickness

To the ability to slide beneath these

Hot radio

Just slid there

Send a calendar to your father

Send a picture to your mother

Neither need ever know

That the one contains the other

A pathetic stew

A feeble home-brew

Heating meat from the bone

Gives you something to do

Chrome shysters

Apple-bobbing burgomeisters

The chemical composition of which

Is new

Moth or mosquito

Take me to Geppetto

Teach him of the errors

Of his son’s embarrassing measures

A mythical figure

A comical snigger

Drawling out

Drawling out

Drawling it out

To be spelled

To be counted

To be taught the sweetness of decay

Born in the shallow heat of the human mind

Teach the poor, ailing father a few lessons in magnitude

Oh, the poor fellow

The simple distinction is beyond him

A simple tool enabling you to bang your head against a wall

A simple tribute to death, performed by the deed itself

A sure-fire way to argue with no-one

A remedy for decay

A rack for self-display

I’m not trying to defend it

I’m just trying to remember

No valleys

No sheep

Just a motorway

That charges straight through

And dumps you in the Irish Sea

Then hooks you back out

Under the same moon

Half a different side

A handful of stars thrown around somewhere up there

Bowels are reaching for something

There’s an overstimulation

As if to make up for threatless absence

Skimming lines of cloud

Skirting rudely around

A face of platitude

A low line

A dim array

A bright transport so far it’s as dull as my own

I throw another stump

Bounding from barriers

An acute desire for crudeness with a story

Defeating every kind of fire

It’s true that this side of the far line has served me better

Serves me better now

Not as well as before

Those few years eloped somewhere

And though I’ve been away

It was me that got left behind somewhere

I’m disabled by the unnature that persists

In hammy, small, recent constructs

By the labour that failed

Not without some projection

Or hope

A shimmer through high bushes

The point of the arc of a house

Adding me down

Again

To a buried sum this time

I’m waiting under your soil

Through it I see the silver fringe of coniferous trees

Still afraid to specify

But getting there

I’m not the only studied one

Crippled aloud, I see your friend is not mad

Just alone

Alive

Suffering a shell

Like every other