aka – Piss-Soaked Papier-mâché
I barely know what day it is,
There are no clocks in limbo.
The ticking of the clock is wrenched,
Irregular
& I can neither see it
Nor tell which direction it’s coming from.
Something soft and vast rolls past us, fast.
Spreading out like smoke, it cloaks the streets and makes us choke.
Pew pew pew, is that a church seating plan
Or a laser blast!
The architect’s artefacts litter the hallway floor.
Befuddled blinking blindly I trip & I fall through the door.
Rushing it leaps up to meet me, discretely hoping that it doesn’t want to
eat me,
False equivalence leads ambivalence to come surging, phoenix-like,
from convalescence.
Drained in desolate streets,
alcoholic tendencies drive me, inevitably onwards, towards defeat.
elsewhere, clowns commit housebreaks, to steal obsolescent vaccination studies,
from the filing cabinets of biologists & virologists.
MIGHT WRITE A LITTLE BIT IN BLOCK CAPITALS
LIKE ALLEN GINSBERG DID,
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Barren wastes stretch from here in the hinterlands all the way out to the frontiers,
where rat faced politicians direct newspaper editors into hypnosis booths
& opposition leaders into suicide booths,
Limbo is strange
& alien. Deathly silent.
Aimed my ire at the expectations I possess which rarely
if ever
let me down. In fact,
my expectations are often exceeded.
Political footballs kicked into children’s faces,
knocking on the doors of the Doctors & Nurses:
“Can we have our ball back, please?”
No. Fuck off
you gobby little conservative, with a small ‘c’, piece of shit.
Learn to live within your means.
Try drinking fewer lattes
& eating less avocado toast.
Have you thought about getting another job?
I hear Asda are hiring.
You should just pull yourself up by your bootstrap.
I like the bit where he gets angry at the postman.
I’m printing lo-res images of fine art
On my Kodak printer & sticking them on the wall
Of my dusty, junk filled spare bedroom.
I sit in here like a romantic poet,
In a patchwork hoody
& Star Wars pyjamas
Reading Ginsberg & Burroughs
On the kindle app
In my iPad.
Is this real?
There’s some serious heat coming from my laptop
So I’ve had to stop playing
Disco Elysium
For now.
In another poem I’m writing,
I purposely avoid punctuation.
I only break this rule occasionally
To insert an impactful caesura.
I’m fairly certain it’s not impetigo
But the itching & soreness fade away
Into reams of damp, dank newsprint
Left filling up gutters with piss-soaked
Papier-mâché.
This poem was originally called ‘Limbo’
But I’m considering changing it’s title to
‘Piss-Soaked Papier-mâché’ –
I probably won’t (but I might).
