I wake up

I wake up dead

I had been dreaming of cardboard

home made signs on unclassified roads

which directed me to 20,000 saints

or 20,000 whores

it’s hard to decide

everything is everything else

nothing is nothing

let me sleep

my bed my kingdom 

I’m sick of having to make sense

if there’s still such a thing

 the holes and the cracks

that await filling or recognition

who has lived before death

I am overdue a bombweed and overgrown motte

Grand Tour of Europe

with a redundant cinema gravedigger hunchback

to disinter Nazis to kill them all over again

mould and its cousins

fungicide and its offspring

the art of leaning on a farm gate to view

wood lice jigs

tail end of a hurricane

the select few cut-up cut-out

cry when miners die in the sides of hills

in the tombs of the underworld

in the caress of water 

cry when they say your name

when the pain overpowers

when the clues expire

cry as men cry

faces to the wall

the tears of candles

the clowns of town down

the anti-condensation flotilla at full tilt

freelance apologists freely lancing

cwtsh into the huddle

taste her tears so near

impressing me as much

as I had expected

but not in the manner anticipated

women with bruised faces

the views from floors

fight for your smile

you know the one

and I will fight for the right to fail

and the secrets we think we are keeping

removing my shirt though it’s cool

nakedness of diaphragm

for what I am

the long arms of brambles through fencing

Impressionist paintings in river reflections

the source of the Nile

the source of fibre

persisting with bent nibs

everybody lies

everybody smells

everybody disappoints

everybody’s done loot

this town’s got much to answer for

eat what you are

food replaces sex

those poached brains

shopping as sport

lions as lambs

distance will bring us together

Squeeze me

The giving and receiving of gifts

until the batteries run out

in facial re-enactment

I paint my kitchen with vomit

and sleep on it

re-imagining the Mabinogion

as a quest for middle class confectionery

and its adventures

in a contested leaderless land

Blackthorn ectoplasm

with muted daffodil trumpets

gone green in morning fog beard

the shadow of a hovering bee

on my bare chest

a meat crow above a grey gutter

pointing

Poetry is one letter poorer than poverty.

We come from the fields
along the valleys
past misshapen road signs
on stream on flow
for your riches
the curtail cut crops
of splendour of daughters
the keys to quays
the quays to keys

we come from ruin cottages
cow-sheds with rafters
of revealed dog rib-cages
from which we fly
on the backs of wasps
which capsize in beer
like humans do

remember us
for we will arrive on time
at the table no one leaves
exult salute
ballad bullet
parry then harry

anyone could slay under
the influence of a border
that’s what that line orders

each corner
is a border
of murder

Women sway to film music
in a champagne-dampened field
like women move,
like nothing else moves or could move.

They’re about to fuck with our countryside once again,
the Frankenstein’s monster of post-1945 agriculture,
its deformed wildlife,
its experimental livestock,
the silenced birdsong,
the high fences,
the bludgeoned hedges,
the haunted wonder of how it used to be.

Your imagined landscape’s a shithole
full of shit and holes,
guns and traps,
barbed wire and gates,
ruin and disease,
truth and fiction,
husbandry and industry,
darkness and light,
love and hope,
you and me.