outside in

rain is falling
snow is melting
some frozen sorrow thaws and shifts in me
outside is inside me
or my inside has escaped into the world.

all that mud
everything squishy and plashy and puddled
my heart like a frozen toad
opens one eye
sees the first green shoots piercing snow
thinks how brave
how foolish too.

be careful with what's left of my heart
my head, a canny old crow,
already is not your ally.

13 Ways of Looking at a Cracked Turd, or Exit Strategies Post Election 2016

1) PETA organizes "Operation Guinea Pig" to mock Trump's hairstyle and also to insinuate psychotropic drugs into his hair products...Faced with a relentless and apparently unstoppable onslaught to his vanity, exacerbated by the drugs' effects on his already tenuous mental processes, Trump's head explodes one morning. The entire operation was funded through the sale of bumper stickers in other countries that read: "My guinea pig is smarter than your President."

2) Steve Bannon's (mostly paid) gay lovers come out of the closet, releasing thousands of emails from him. Paul Ryan does a taunting dance in Congress, waving a briefcase of printed-out emails above his head, and shouting childish insults at Trump and Trump's current wife. Mike Pence has an apoplectic seizure and is rushed away to hospital, but dies en route because he refused treatment from a lesbian paramedic. Remaining Trump cabinet members "move farther down the bench", and ultimately lobby to impeach Trump "because stupid". David Duke commits suicide. No one weeps.

3) Vengeful Hillary supporters convince First Lady Melania to order all of her new clothing from their secretly selected group of fashion consultants, resulting in a wardrobe comprised entirely of couture pantsuits with coordinating Hermes head scarves. Even her lingerie consists of lace and mesh pantsuits. When Trump predictably protests her new style, she tells him, "You are not the boss of me, you big bully", strangles him with a handy head scarf, and is taken away shouting 

something about "moose and squirrel".

4) A battered blue phone-box, also known as a TARDIS, appears above Washington, D.C. Doctor Who must save us from ourselves. I hope someone films it for the holiday 2017 episode. 

5) Trump succumbs to a mysterious food-borne illness, later revealed to be accumulative arsenic poisoning via food sourced from a variety of food trucks: "Murderous Miguel's Tacos", "Halal Hijabi's Shwarma", "Capitol Hillel's Kosher  Killer Sandwiches", and "Malcom's XX Barbecue". Trump's minions admit that they failed to notice anything odd about the dodgy food truck names, saying, "It all sounds foreign to us."  

6) Joe Biden decides to take one for the team, and destroys Trump and the entire Cabinet with an arsenal of automatic weapons purchased whilst twitching, frothing at the mouth and shouting random obscenities.

7) The US and the UK agree to a ‘bigot exchange’; then argue over which country has to take more of them. In utter disgust, Queen Elizabeth reveals that she has terminal cancer, and straps on an explosives vest for her state visit with Trump. Her last words are reported to have been, “We are NOT amused, you intransigent buffoon.” 

8) Pussy Riot operatives secretly replace Trump with a crotch-sniffing, carpet-pissing, snappish circus dog wearing a mohair toupee. No one notices.

9) Viagra and Cialis stockholders and CEOs unite against the Trump regime over a catastrophic fall-off in prescriptions due to the collective depression’s effect on American libido. They force other members of the super-secret ‘Insane Autocrats’ Club’ to fund a coup against charter member Trump (coup code name :“Tiny Hands”) by threatening to cut off their own access to ED drugs and Botox. Kim Jong-Un’s contribution was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest.

10) Trump cracks open one morning and thousands of tiny but deadly alien invaders spill out of him, revealing his presidency to be an elaborate alien Trojan horse plot. They take over the world, tweeting effusively about their victories under the hashtag “#smallerbutsmarter”. World leaders trample each other to be first to welcome the new overlords, correctly observing that “things can only get better.”

11) “Vlad the Mad” Putin has Trump murdered by his own security forces over a private quarrel between them about “Who’s the fairest of them all?” He then has thousands of leaflets dropped on Washington, all bearing bare-chested photos of himself cavorting with tame bears. After a year or so of Trump, it doesn’t seem that weird anymore.

12) Thousands of overworked, underpaid, utterly exploited garment industry workers in various third world nations who were making Trump family product lines rise up in protest. Using funding from a number of nations’ covert ops agencies, they descend on Washington en masse, armed only with the safety pins on their lapels. After successfully agitating for a meeting with the President, their delegates rush up to trump and knock him to the floor, where they proceed to safety pin him to the carpet and call him names. He dies of sheer humiliation before security forces subdue his mostly female attackers, muttering, “nasty...nasty...nasty” as he expires. 

13) In an unprecedented scientific collaboration, hundreds of the world’s top researchers produce a working time machine. They use it to go back in time, accompanied by a team of Planned Parenthood clinicians, and sterilize Trump’s ancestors. Then they go to the year 1787, where they remove the Electoral College from Constitutional Convention documents. For good measure, they stop off in the year 2015 and kidnap all senior members of the DNC who pushed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate of choice. We all wake up one morning and rejoice.

sorry, not sorry

i am too old to apologise
for your shortcomings
anymore
if you are wrong
not just mistaken,
or unaware,
i'll let the score
stand. you may realise
that what we are becoming
is much more
about the song
of the forsaken,
and that i care
more about the size
of your core
values than a long-
winded, unawakened
puff of air.
you are the pause before
the drop. the prize
we seek is coming
and the door
it enters by is long
awaited. its making
was the prayer
of all the poor
and lost and wronged,
who, despite your hate, will rise.

mixing metaphors

pour me another fine cup of petrol to drink
pass me the matches so i can burn,
rather than think again
of all the things that wither and sink,
or flutter away like ash in the wind,
like water swirling down a drain,
the way love leaks out of a marriage,
like air seeping from a tyre
so you have to push the old bike home
instead of gliding there,
like everything that eats your care
and leaves you empty and older,
frail and cold as frost on thin glass,
and lost in a leafless wood
where the heart must forage
like a hungry deer
on thorny winter weeds and canes...
i feel it shrink inside my chest
until it rattles there against my ribs,
like a cast-off shell,
like dice in a cup before the cast,
like seeds that wait for rain.

anahata

my heart---
keeps timeless time,
and tuneless tune,
is a belled fool
fishing in a pool
beneath the moon
as green as cheese,
is a bell, is a cup,
struck and un-struck.

my heart---
leaps like a fish,
falls like a star,
as above, so below,
a stellium
shining in a puddle,
is the echo in a shell,
a voice in a well,
a city afire,
a wilderness of briars,
a prophet, a liar,
a beggar maid.

my heart---
is a compass rose,
is brave,
is afraid,
mismanaged,
mislaid, waylaid,
forsworn, forbidden,
a map with singed edges,
a whetstone,
a treasure.

my heart---
is dim,
is bright,
walks a line of light,
straight as an arrow
targeted true,
true blue enough
as it sings and thrums,
seeks and finds.

my heart---
is smoke and mirrors,
bones in the desert,
a signpost, a monument,
a midden.
it takes no prisoners,
no heed,
and pays no mind.

my heart---
is a buried thing,
planted deep and hidden,
a seed, a pip, a kernel,
keeping time til spring,
a watch, a clock,
fragile as eggs,
rock hard, a gem,
metal and marrow and meaning,
mortal, eternal,
a red paradox.

my heart---
is haunted rooms,
a humming stone,
brimful of cinders,
and sweating gold,
alchemical furnace,
memory box,
garden and grave,
mistress and slave.

my heart---
walks on coals,
swallows swords,
is a sideshow, a freakshow,
a cooch tent, an acrobat,
a lion tamer, a muddled mystic,
a four chamber circus
daily drumming up
continued custom.

my heart---
drives an endless red river,
an ouroboros of life,
pumps twin bellows
of breath,
and daily delivers
its pythoness poems,
pity and pith
coiled about
a pentacled codling,
which i must eat,
moths and all,
for the knowing,
for the loving,
for the living.

home by the river path

knee deep in nettles

i stand

brim full

with silence and sunlight.

an ancient self awakens

beneath the unmarked sky

spacious as the blue above

untrammelled by plane trails.

an eldritch swan call

harrows my heart

with kinship,

and i am one with the swan

the nettles thickly green

the silver sliver moon

the birches whispering in wind

the otter twisting in the water

the badger sleepy in her sett.

i think---no, i know---

we were finer when fewer

closer to heaven 

when it had no names.

the only true pilgrimage

is looking for home

where we left it.

zero card

It isn't what we thought it would be,
this world we have slipped into
like a coma...

Where even the elders are not so wise
and childhood has little innocence
and animals make ghost images
where they used to be.

Open a textbook and expect
blood to seep from the pages,
a litany of the dead and dispossessed,
the underbelly of Civilisation

Open a news app and expect
not to want your breakfast next
forgotten, the tea goes cold

Your daily dose of depression
rolls across the screen
scroll down, and see...

             This is the rising tide
             that will take all ships down---

Voting feels like shouting into the wind,
a million people jamming thumbs into
the holes in Civilisation,
staring at their phones
while storms and seas rise
behind the walls

Our children have not deserved it;
less capable and less prosperous than their parents
they will inherit promissory notes
and exist in the echo of things gone by

We made great beauty, at times,
but it is sinking like Venice,
proud poster child for all our
glittering, top-heavy, rotten at the base
Civilisation

Marching toward dystopia
with a case-full of patent nostrums
and duct tape and dreams
and bright screens of things to buy...

                But still
                I have not given up---

History is a long sad song
of things that rose and fell
We may fall in a slow unspooling
or a resounding crash of what was wrong,
and rise again

Wearing a patch-pied coat perhaps,
knapsack in hand,
striking out across a greening field
whistling up a dog,
or, dare I hope---a wolf---
to wander with us
on our way to that new world.