permission

do you know that you have permission? permission to be alive, to taste the world, to smile a big wide smile at the world. you are allowed to risk hurting yourself and others in your quest to feel alive, you are allowed to risk poverty through your generosity and injury through your recklessness. you can ruin your health and lose your shape through self abuse, you can lose your friends and step on lover's heads in your quest for ambition, because nobody will stop you, nobody is qualified to judge you, and nobody is really watching.
but now that you are free, just what do you want to be? if there is no judge but you, who do you want to be?
if there is no right and wrong, no god watching, no kharma to pay, just how would you want to live? if all your sins didn't lose you any sleep would you still have values that you believe are worth living up to? if nobody was impressed by your values would you still want them?
i am asking because so many people live on autopilot, following values which they have never truly considered, feeling guilt or fear of a god that they've never really believed in, or felt squashed by a conscience that they've never really thought about. are we good if we are good through fear? especially if we are not even certain what we are afraid of.
perhaps you have been seeking the approval of your friends or family, but have you considered how you would feel if they were no longer there to judge or approve?
if nobody was watching, would you still care?

performance

this is for you
and for you and you
thankyou

thankyou, for adding to the daily diet of drivel
for pilfering and plagiarising meaning
for reducing heart-rending emotion
into clever laughs and knowing smirks
for breaking into all our works and
pulling us down from our pedestals
making our yearnings easily repeatable
with council grants to re-emote
so we can self promote our heart strings
and play our brand of plaintive notes
for claps
and sit on your collective laps
stroking your good taste until you purr

but i am here to bite the hand that feeds
to say you! and you! and YOU!
and you will clap to see such rebeliousness and spiky bravery
like a smoker convincing himslef that the safety warnings 'aren't for me'
you'll never see that YOU! means me

the me inside your poised body
hoping to see and be seen
in this rather highbrow scene
the hidden me
only realised in dreams
the hunger fear and anger and the greed
the empty lost enormous need

poetry is decoration
the words are paint that colours bring to life
but behind the words lies the indescribable
behind the paint behind the lies

behind the entertainment lies the lurch
the jolt the jerk
when we awake and see what we really are
and what we've missed
and how huge the world
how huge the abyss
and the question
the question we can never shape into a word
that we can never form to hurl
into the dark
futile and dwarfed by the unanswerable answers that will never come

but i advise you
to clap politely
and to hope you weren't included in my scope
when i turned and broke the pact
that lives in every act.

because you and you and you
i love you all i really do
because i know without a doubt
behind our flouncing posing pouting
the human race really sucks
and every one of you like me,
are well and truly f*cked

alone

we're born alone
we die alone
and always know that ourself awaits
alone in the dark
when the talking has stopped
alone in our eyelids when distraction has gone
lying wrapped round a loved one
knowing that one day they'lll be gone
and we alone must carry on.
we get a glimpse
when our babies are born
that we're joined fast to others
and we're not alone
but we watch them outgrow us and long to leave home
we catch another who longs to hold us
and our eyes reflect the other's soul
holding closer than arms alone can touch
staring deeply hearts reaching out
knowing inside
that one day it will go
and we'll remember
that ultimately
it's a life sentence
and we're always alone

bristol sound

listen to the beat of swaying feet
that creak beneath bare trees
and hear the breath of yesterday
playing in the leaves

the tattered flags of rags
hung down scarecrow knees
the rebel sons of riot got caught,
exported to expire in toil on sunburnt fields

does it matter that the caves
that supported these proud banks
once groaned with the shackled branded and enslaved?
that the rivers of blood that shekled this trade
that built these streets with stains of red were paved?

that these docks uprooted and transplanted
entire nations to plantations
orphans, betrayed and underhanded
robbed of history and permanently rebranded?

so who inherits this dockside town
who bears it's ill-renoun and stands up in it's dock of shame

does it matter when the sun is shining
and the city looks benign
and pretty people flip flop down the streets
in chilled and breezy ease?

with every week a spectacle
to keep us entertained
content with bread and circuses,
we'll cheer the media games

we'll gaze in struck-dumb wonder,
at the crystal leisure domes
giddy with our reckless credit,
we'll buy it all if we are able
and stuff our faces till we're numb
with crumbs from the merchants' table

after all who cares, we weren't there
they're dead, it's not our problem now its theirs
their cries aren't here to stain our ears
those tears can't soil our eyes
their pain won't ruin our years
cos history's the stuff of squares

so lets chill out and party,
this banquet's hardly tasted
it's friday night so lets forget,
so lets get out, get wasted

glass

she was made of glass.

she was so beautifully made
an ornament to the world
that made you tremble
as she passed
but he didn't dare
scare or shake her,
way too fragile to ever make her cry

his trepid steps grew featherlike
his tread a whispered sigh
as he danced round her
with mutely muffled glee to see her
shining sheen of ether,
stooping to inhale her,
heat quenched for fear to break her
for she was made of glass.

so never daring to tease her
for fear he'd make her siezure
he couldn't tug her hair
or ruffle her nor squeeze her
he didn't dare
to make her shoulders shudder
for fear the tears might crack those eyes
that shone so dark mysterious
splintering her clear and crystal heart
for she was made of glass

carousel

if only our wishes were as real as we'd like them to be, if only the pot of gold didn't melt when we awoke clutching the pillow, and we could be every bit as strong and pure and beautiful as we imagined when we described ourselves... there's always a gap between what we would love to be and what we end up being. would a trip to the other side of the world bring the happiness that seems so glorius from afar? would exotic strangeness still breathe it's allure once the fragrant air of mystery transforms into the pungent tangs of stale body fluids... when we look into the mirror to see a hundred stories written on our faces in tiny etchings and wonder... 'is that all there is?'
so to turn to fleecing the souls of life's most lonely could justify itself to anyone who had known the unflinching pinches of hunger in a crowded street... necessity can lend an awful authority to one's own single-minded survival... but one day survival succeeds into greed, and we all will join in the circus of consumption, whirling giddilly around the carousel of shopping bewildered and bewitched by the twirling lights, only to remember our once proudly borne soul once we fail and fall off into the gears and works below, wondering at last... was it a magic roundabout... or a treadmill? so remember your soul, you are a brother and sister to us all

random word list functions

redundant clichees vie and pound the ground with their vapid sounds and if i had a pound for everytime i heard myself say 'if i had a pound for every time i heard myself say' i'd have a pound. if i was found in an unplanned land and landed on profoundly i'd shout for the sound of my last breath which was lost and wandering bereft throughout the length and breadth, my last stand, standing there astounded with my heart in my hand, unaware again of the gains and losses in the pain, regarding the trelliswork armour and deep tracery of scars and hardened weals from the urge to dare to feel, to dare to reveal and be alive, vulnerable foolish and open, it stings but i'd rather live than sleep. casual is ok but i'm already highly vexed what else do i need it for than some sort of perspex filter to armour myself with, already perplexed to see the scar tissue circling the heart, hardening and benumbing when all i want is to really feel, to deserve to be alive, to thrive and strive and take the flak with never a backwards look, never regretfully glancing back, but to take the knocks with pride for daring to share and care in a world that tells us we're not important and we're not there, and it's hardly clever to be clever in a world where nothing is really cool, where cool is really crap. i own the ground under my feet, the sky above my head and that's all i need to take my place. i'm beyond disgrace. whoever said my stance made sense, or that it needed to be understood, you'll find my thoughts buried deep deep down deep in the woods. look in the cherry blossom tree and you'll see me smiling eventually in the pattern in the fallen leaves. i refuse to be what you see.