The Botanist's unfinished plan.

In a forest away from public scrutiny,
there hides the daughter of a revered Botanist
who in the later part of life created his ideal embodiment
of Mother Nature.

There in her follicles
four hundred thousand seeds of ivy lie.
Her hair grows and grows, and vines
through the forest as days go by.
Summer is easy and carefree but
in the winter there needs a prompt
so every morning she calls out-
''Sunlight! Sunlight! Bow down your might!''
To which the colour of chlorophyll spreads delight.

She tried life in society,
thought of growing up against a family home wall.
Camouflaging herself with the other Hedera hibernica.
Disappearing in that sort of half-life kind of way.
But seeing the people and how they lived
the lack of stillness, the lack of beauty,
the excess of noise, the cars, the pollution it all caused-
it's true that without indecisiveness, and to feed the Botanist's plight
she knew being among the wild felt right.

The new look of intellectual

no one speaks of my new face
i painted my nose blue
i added more hair to my eyebrows

i thought i would look more intellectual if
my brain could be seen by all
so i found a man (Dr Chan) who replaced my forehead
with a transparent window to my neocortex

he told me 'the look' is catching on in Paris and Tokyo.
they're speaking about my face there
soon everyone will want this

soon beauty will be all about the brain

[illustration by Paulo Rafael]

A Blakean Park

Little girl go to the park
hurry before it gets dark
feel the magic and mirth
fall between heaven and earth.

Tired man go to the park
hurry before it gets dark
forget work and do not moan
for soon she will be all grown.

Tilt

In her reflection
a vein on her neck looks obvious.
She’s never seen it before.
She holds her breath and jogs mildly on the spot.
Its thickness multiplies by two.
Then multiplies by two again.
It runs from her jaw to shoulder
and from this she realises-
her orgasm must look sinewy.

she rolls onto the ball of her foot. And sinks.

Gil Scott-Heron. April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011

I heard about Heron's death today and I am truly sad. He was an exceptional poet, musician, and activist. I included him in the opening paragraph of my poetry assignment only two weeks ago. Here I speak about his influence:

''Leaving a democracy to live in a Communist country serves as an unlikely introduction to poetry, but that is how it began for me. I was teaching English in China and quickly became shocked at how aspects of the country operated; in a nutshell Mao was considered a God, global empire was pushed at the expense of its people and horrific injustices like Tiananmen Square were swept under the carpet. This is when my appreciation for poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gil Scott-Heron began to grow. Living in a country for eight months where popular networking sites like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were banned along with many Google pages, Heron’s 1970s poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised became relevant to me then, as it had been to others in the generation it was written. I began to appreciate how poetry can be used to dismantle personal prejudice and how it can initiate new ways of thinking [...].''



Few people contributed to performance poetry in the way that he did. The only light in this loss is that his lyrical talents will be more appreciated and enjoyed now more than ever. RIP.

The Importance of Pausing

my tongue is too small for my mouth
it has to stretch for dental consonants.
the roof of my mouth wishes it could kneel down
before my tongue and bridge the gap,
washing over this vertiginous feeling
that all this extra work is causing

i need to breath properly when i talk
separate each word with an invisible knot
make a sentence
and pause [known as tying the knot]
pause again if i’m emphasising a
point

             [pause for three seconds]
                   i'm scared to kiss
             [pause for three seconds]

sentences begin to run smoothly again
but as soon as i lose myself in excitement, frustration, importance;
when words matter the most, everyone goes,
''Pardon''
''What''
''Come again''

Bukowski

It was a good day
when I met Bukowski.

He held my hand.

Real tight.

Then he carried me over his shoulder
from the post office to his place.
His door was marked ''Hank's House''.
The walls were stained yellow.

He sat me down on his drawers and
untied my rabbit fur boots and
placed them on his windowsill.
He stroked them for a while,
as though they were one of his beloved cats.

Then he laid down on the floor next to his bed.
He told me to think of his chest as

a spring board.

''Imagine you’re trying to touch the ceiling and
jump''.

I thought this was strange so I asked why.
''Because I want to feel the weight of you on my
heart.'' he replied.

So I stepped on his chest

(his skin felt loose beneath my feet) and jumped.
As I did he caught my ankles
And my arms went thrashing through the air.

Dinner Date.

Berlin

Photographer: Gerrit Starczewski

The sun has told me a secret
(I want to tell you)
but he warned,
'If you flout my confidence,
I will not grant you eternal sunshine'.
So with a clandestine smile, I say-
'Your secret is safe with me'

Elemental

past elasticates into present

chanting in the midnight of dream,

there's a jazz of stars making a melody

with the moon

milky way is full of floating lungs

being swooped into black holes

skulls are laughing at their own lives

when a birth to end blasts along
being swooped into black holes

past elasticates into present
when trucks of human garbage

barrel down motorways of materialism

shiny shop front make big candy eyes

causing Orwell to vomit 

landing all over our heads
Murdoch can't even smell it
when a birth to end blasts along
landing all over our heads

Isosceles

A
brain
burps in
the face of one
   dimensional beauty.
It's a charming noise
bouncing  from the walls!
Hearing the frequency change
because the walls need plastering
causing hiccups in musical  digestion.
Go into the kitchen  it's smoother there
you'll see  a soft egg quivering in a basket
had a tough life (not the free range variety)
scared shitless of the tongue, the bile, the colon.
A triangle strolls over to look at this lonely jelly form.
‘Don't worry, you're decoration, only Vegans live here'.

BRADFORD BUSES

A silver Fiat drives alongside the bus, there's a dog in the back of the car, we stare at each other; this is the most meaningful exchange I've had with anyone in a long while. The man in front of me conceals balding with a comb-over moderately well, I can see sunspots on his head. He's wearing a sheepskin jacket, the wool's gone yellow, some may mistake this discolouredness as vintage worn, but my nose detecting nicotine tells me otherwise.

I chose my seat poorly. The black silkiness of an Asian lady's hair comforts me.

Bus halts, it's nine-thirty in the morning, that's when all the OAPs are entitled to get on for free, there's a queue of them. Flap caps, headscarfs, raincoats, checked wheeled bags, sapient wrinkles get seated. The last in line struggles to stand as the bus driver jets off again, She's not old- late twenties tops. Her breasts are epic huge, and clearly she is not wearing a bra, God help her. She sits next to me, God help me, and once again I'm reminded that passing my driving test is one of life's imperatives. Our legs touch, instinctively I want to recoil my leg into the little room I have left, but I don't want her to be conscious that I don't want my leg to touch hers, so they remain touched to save any feelings being offended. If it were summer I wouldn't be wearing tights so we'd be skin on skin. My left side would be glued to her arm and leg, whilst also having my right side melt against the glass sun. This is the only time I will be thankful that it's not summer.

Off the bus and walking down an alley cutting to college, I notice 50 pigeons on a roof, they all raise a wing at me, I give them a telling smile of 'if I had a handful of maggots your mouths would be filled' and they puff their breasts in salutation. On the right are a row of terrace houses, there is a cauliflower in the last patch of cement garden. I walk towards a group of tigers on Horton road. They are orange streaks, maximum lip-liner, and bed hair deep in vanity. Their bras are stuffed with attitude, a car beeps.

Under Nature's Law

Her mouth is bloody.
Her shredded tongue sprawls out
Like a birth of worms engaging the birds,
They hungrily tug
And sing O Joyful! Joyful!
Her spine makes a row of eggshells.
Eyes unused, looking like spawn
Looking for tadpoles.

Squid

I draw my initials in the
condensation.
Then move my fingers onto your back
and make the same rotation.

Skin's getting softer and softer and softer
like the head of a squid.
My outer thighs are pushed against
the pink sides of the bath
as my inner thighs are pressed against you.

I ask you some questions but you just
reply in sighs.
You attend to my feet, at least.

Unhinged

5:26 the screws loosened
As the truth peeled away
From the walls.
Stacks trembled
Oppressed by the weight
Before me, you unhinged.
Descending further.
The sound of fire splitting
You& I

Fooled by the roses in your eyes.
The earth rings through me now.
Perished are the petals.

The Correlation

Sam arrived today, replacing Derek, and before Derek there was Peter, and before Peter the bed had spent a long time easing an A-Z list of illnesses to recovery. Some chronic, some temporary, some accidental, others fatal.  Sam had a broken nose, jaw and internal bruising which put him in the temporary bracket. It would have been labelled fatal had he received another blow to his head, he could smile about that, but as he tried the true centre of irreducible pain pushed flat on his heart.

Confined by these four white walls, and an absent of movement there was little Sam could do but wrestle with his thoughts, which mostly concerned girls.  Girls fascinated Sam endlessly and confused him inexorably.  It was the one thing in his life that he just couldn’t figure out.  And if he couldn’t figure this thing out then he couldn’t figure out the entire architecture of the Human Relationship, so would have missed the major part of what it meant to be Human at all. It was that thought which paralysed him more than the pain burning from his jaw to each retina.

He needed to move away from these four white walls before a tick landed in the psychosomatic box. But he knew all that awaited him were patients shuffling around on their sinewy yellow legs, stiff and thin like uncooked spaghetti. It was catch 22 on the ward; you'll recover from smashed bones and a burst diaphragm but you'll be crying at the loss of  your grey matter. It was so easy to picture the correlation on a graph. Length of time in hospital equals degree of insanity. He thought about documenting his hospital admittance in the good name of science, but the more thought placed upon his mental stability, and the pleasant nurses the less convinced he became of the theory. 

‘‘Do you want anything Sam?’’the nurse pointed at a trolly which revealed various liquids and little dishes of runny tapioca pudding . He dare not ask for a blowjob, so opted for some Vitamin C in the form of orange juice.