khetto

So stalk the gutters barefoot, counting the drains,

until your feet turn black and your

eyes turn to diamonds;

and the colours of your iris

change with the swells of your pulse,

and blood chants in your ears

with past words spoken

and the stillness of vision

frames the brickwork like a picture.

but the stars

the stars

the stars through the clouds crowd around

in awe at the constellations on the ground!

and the lights speak in code

until the enigma is cracked

and you suppose that it’s souls,

transparent in the light.

So, like black petals that fall from a bush of red roses,

ash from the sky falls.

the heavens are burning

and I can but watch.

ELASTIC

The world she inhabits is cold to the bone

because the brickwork broke loose from her childhood home,

and with the violence condoned in unanswered phones

the demons they come in their drones.

So leave her alone and don’t ask any questions

because the best that you’ll get from your see-through intentions

is a thousand yard stare with lips slightly parted

and a hand, forceful, between her thighs.

please leave me be

Today was the first day of the new season, when the sun stops being warm. It was the first day I could smell the change in the air. New oxygen stops being plumed from plants. Excited shrubbery stops dancing in kissing winds. The shoals of leaves blacken as they begin to rot and die. The trees become crooked skeletons, brittle and hanging; their eyes closing for the imminent winter. They don’t want to see what becomes of this city once the wind starts screaming.

I want to become a skeleton. To rot and die and come back with fresh eyes in the spring. But when I rot and die I’ll be fixed in one long black spring. There isn’t much light there. Trees are lucky. They only ever live in the summer time. I guess trees never get suicidal tendencies.

The dead overcoats rest upon the cracked slabs of concrete which encase their mothers. They file into every gap, refusing to remain swept against the walls. Their last stand as the soon to-be-gone. They populate the rain-veins that frame the bubbly tarmac runs of metal rats. Gutters, punctuated by iron drains with words like ‘Bermondsey Metal Inc.’ bumped across them, become intimately packed with crisp leaves, turning to sludge with rain and rain and sleet and rain. They rest amongst the dust, cyclically becoming the dust. The leaves, brown and polka dotted with black illness, curl up to wither and die; curl up to shelter from the hurried steps of empty commuters and scared alcoholics.

The leaves, humble in their death and ability to rot, are infiltrated by tie-died plastics – spastic bent bottles baring no natural form, cigarette packs scream yellows and blues and cheapness, jagged foil cuts erratic lines and shapes thorough the dead crop. Rain-washed pale reds and blue-ish whites shard out through the melancholy brown, scratching for attention.

These will not die. They have no place in the morgue of the organic. They will live on for hundreds of years. Eventually collected and buried in some dead womb of disregarded earth. They cheapen the deaths of the little brown leaves. They cheapen their lives and worth. Please leave the leaves be.