CANCELLATION EFFECT

Valium and coffee don’t work

When you want the Middle Way.

Valium and coffee won’t work

When you want your crotch calm.

Valium and coffee don’t work

When you want the exacting view.

Valium and coffee won’t work

Unless you’re wanting to recall, or

Forget the sweat clasped in hand.

The cells slipping and flinching under

Internal perspiration spinning warm

About the skull is never the synthesis

You’re looking for, unless to replicate

Whatever Valium and coffee may mean

To you, alone, in clueless combination.

STAY UNDER YOUR SHEETS

all these great poets

were bedridden

beyond and before

Keats and Proust

all sleepy-headed whiners

lying supine

on the whitest of sheets

softens the teeming brain

for ripe foggy thoughts

hair upon the pillow

wide and small

brushed aside

renews the white vessel

red coughs cannot undermine

the snowy world

of rising jagged ridges

of shadowed rivulets

completing the foundation

for rocky, runny thoughts

in this haven for shiftlessness

when to read

is only to write

as time is still

amongst the shafts

of the tiny Himalayas

the squirm

we can call a movement

within the discipline

of hospital corners

and the wondrous white

of no-further

yoked by white

these three layers

the dull patchwork

that sighs mediocrity

and takes no prisoners

of ambition

of fame

only the occasional sock

or a particle of dead skin

a tall order

for the gown

of a virgin

(First appeared in Crack the Spine, Issue 4, December 2011).

YOU WILL FLOAT ON YOUR PRIDE

Being very much from the old school of ‘I’:

I beckon, I plead, to see your multiple flairs.

I call back to what is chiselled on my heart

And report the findings for you to undermine

Yourself with. Ugly avarice is given cheap

Garments, by speaking the world’s truth in

Unfiltered air.

Now open up your head, let the breeze blow

Past so many failures of betrayal, leaving wild

Vagaries less distorted. But you have already

Jumped. Although you will float on your pride.