Caliphate

You are alternate

Slip shod, rough shod

Diagrammatic

All expanded in prophetic curves

I grow your shoulders with lines

Fill your gaps

With shading for the bedside

With incense smoke whispers

Nihilist beetles unpicked my threads

But I had summers for eyelids

I lose you on paper and under it

I have drawn my love out

She retreats behind graphite

With her eraser smile

I cannot tame you with stationary

Rip you up

Start me again

this is my obligatory teenage rant at the 'system' and the media and such.

Bulletin

I am being informed that new drugs are being inhaled, injected, illegalised, relegalised, regulated, advertised and implied, that hoods now carry death sentence on four continents, that the internet has made soup of my brain your brain his brain, that within 50 years the population will triple, halve, move underground, evolve and grow new limbs, that every years five deaths are caused by drink ice-skating, intoxicated carpentry, solvency issues and the media, that cancer can now be caused by binge drinking, benefit fraud, cats and breathing, that the planet has exploded, deflated rotated and changed, caused volcanoes in Swindon-upon-Trent-upon-tee, and the polar bears wont quite make it, that your best friend is a fundamentalist extremist neo-crypto-fascist terrorist and the communists are back remember them? Now if you haven’t had your fill we are now beaming out on HD, blueray, hi-fi, lo-fi, no-fi, satellite, digital and cable on every minute of every hour of every 3-5 working days

This a poem i wrote becasue i was thinking about how hard it is to write romantic poetry because of all the cliches involved. You know, the usual culprits: hearts, eyes, lips, walks by rivers, etc, etc.

So this is my vague attempt to (and i apologise in advance for using this word) 'subvert' that style.

Autopsy

My heart

Doesn't beat

Doesn't sing

Doesn't somersault

Doesn't leap into my mouth

To sit full on my tongue

Doesn't fend off wayward butterflies

Mislaid from my stomach

Doesn't conduct a heated discourse with my head

Over shared responsibility

Doesn't measure out my remaining days

In clockmaker throbs

Doesn't turn to stone

To fill my chest with pebbles

Doesn't break

Doesn't do clichés

Or duets

It just pushes sluggish blood

Through ungrateful veins

Hopes against coronary disease

And forgets you.

Killing Time in 39 Words

Chimneys queuing

Like orderly suicides

On the soon-to-be lonely roof

Antennae testing the air

Like blind creatures

Tiles conspiring

As they watch passers-by

Destitute smoke

Giving its death poem to the sky

These things

I saw from your window

Louis Mayall