40

Each man has the unalloyed right to be, at one time,

Or more, a scrambled, bedraggled, hedgeslept Jesus

This or that God knows that I took mine.

So back, so forth,

So much for that.

Born on the banks of the mad, maladjusted Straits;

A mess of medus, Marx, mumbles and moonshine

And purpled, rainworn slate,

I bawled, I suppose, to announce my arrival,

Screeching at and with life; crumpled of face, yelling tailtrod cat.

Awareness yet to fall.

Later, I assume

Still out of tune:

Salvation of sorts in four rusted strings, legs spayed, bass spitting ire;

Bloody fingered, bloody-eyed, bloody-brilliant

Sweatroaring to the choir.

A herniated, half-fried mash rabbleclack from nowhere to where

Half-bent in the head from household highs:

Winterland warriors forswear.

Closer, to heaven,

A cliché at eleven.

Jesus, I write, is the One True Light. The hymn is sung

Cathedral-echo, sanctity. Mankly festering

Unbeliever can crag-cawk also under silhouetted idols,

A dual solo with Watchbreaker Paul, all his heft, his frown

Of  hate reappropriated here. A miracle, an irony.

Sharp shards of treblevoice a piercing crown.

The appeal

None more real:

Marco, blessed Marco, 19, manfully striving,

Has his arms around my neck to fasten my chain.

He’s breathing fast and his eyes are flickering -

I wish I was. I’m older but he’s stronger, I now know,

In soul; questions everywhere, an atmospheromone brash

But I back out, it passes, he goes.

Aftermath

Polygraph:

Debbie, 40, so she says, Kat-like, frizzled at the edges,

On MSN at 3am; unusual, I am, I love it backbody,

She computers late, rush-ready.

Merseyrailed and mohawked I alight to electro harrumph,

Disassociated, terrified, excited, grubby.

Suburban taxi brings amphetamine sleaze-triumph.

Nobody

Believes me:

Lien, then, as we avoid a movie. Gin and sin, we giggle

Suddenly opposite the police station

There’s a field; it’s dark. We fumble and wriggle.

I can’t find it: I’m shaking and hammered. I roll off, roll a smoke

And toke myself away. There’s pride at sort-of,

More-or-less Becoming A Man. Meanwhiles, her knickers stink of puke.

So I pour

Just one more:

Jostling against an ossifying mundanity, I fill in the forms

And the idiots pass it through

And a month later, we’re still drunk, sodden, warm.

Thunderbird Blue, Lagerla, the Pure White Spirit of Russians,

Lager Girl, Cider Woman, Frosty Jack,

The notorious Four Litre Challenge.

Giro cheque

Not here yet.

Awaiting the delinquent sacrament of midnight’s clack

Nervous, scrawled, fuddled; surprised and frozen.

But in another universe I plunge and kiss you back

There, I don’t need to fire my face at the coming breeze, brine, sweat,

Pupils disrupted, mind ripping away the ages as I walk away.

But, ay, sweet truth that everyone deserves in life such a yearning regret.

A storm

Enthralls:

Each line has its own rhythm, as snickled sweet snot dribbles

Neckwards, backwards, inside, upwards,

Re-electrified, laser-eyed, shouting at a skunksome sky in scribbles

Of weasly arrogance; more than alive, driving

Shards of spectacularly fleeting nuclear insight

Out of the world, into another magnesium moment: inverse, farcial-brave.

Time lost

To rank rust?

Each man knows the right, at one time, to be

Scrambled by God, by Jesus, to hedge and to mine.

To dragback a little more of this or that ill-logic amoral or free.

And now? Well, what now, and why now?

These tableaux of sweat and ridicule, fluid in imagination

And in deed. Knowledge is dead; a rank, deluded shallow.

Beyond accumulation, these lives are of as little meaning

As the fracture in time that dropped me here; no doubt

On other planets, if they exist, if this one exists, but fleeting

But here

And there

I link myself back to the faces in the wallpaper

Those forms and shapes and shadows in the drapes.

My child-eyes, terrified, identified, and my screams all were

Of from for the future: trapped, transparent, faces of wastrels and rats

Waiting for harridan lies to land. With deadly vicious beautiful gravity

Any god knows this; so stays silent of acts.

So it was, so it is

And so shall it be

And so much

For all that,

For all

Fall.