Comfort

I Lost Myself Shouting Today

You didn’t get the dreams you wanted last night
And lately ‘they’ reported an increase in nightmares per capita
So get up and smell the smell of the coffee smell.
Give me a list of things you want from the bucket shop
And I’ll try to tick everything off.

Paint the carpet, wash the skies, shatter.
Count all the plastic bags back in, brush teeth,
Spoon leftover stew into wine bottles to keep.

Forever

I found myself hiding my lost self
My shirt lay face down on the bed, my trousers lay face down on the bed.
My coat was vomiting into the bathtub.

Downstairs, cacklers raised angles
Which bounced off

Loose parts rattled
I lost myself shouting today.

Your dancing got stuck inside my head and
I remembered a certain headache, what it looked like,
if I closed my eyes I could see it again.

Every day

We make plans to be better people but we’ll never be
Good, we’ll never be good, never be good as you.

But you
You should come and see us tomorrow
Yes yes yes yes, yes yes yes
Come and see us tomorrow –
Tomorrow we’re all getting dolphins.

 

Work Ethic

I love hard work.  Working hard.  The idea of working so hard.  Working hard, sweat on hair dangling from face as bend and lift or dig into or shift, or brain cells worn down from think.  Unshakeable from task, hand on shoulder but unshakeable, cannot be shaken out of.  Hard work.  Dedication to task.  Not stopping.  Never stopping.  I love the idea of growing as a person.  Personal growth, working hard, growing.  Producing, or becoming.  The idea, the idea of such hard work.  Is so.  Tangible.  Almost.  I lie prone, thinking how great hard work is, how good is personal growth.  Prone, as if finally stopped from hard work, exhausted.  Thinking about hard work, how admirable, working hard.  Yes.  Great.

People Also Ask

What happens when you eat too many pistachios?
Are pistachio nuts good for weight loss?
What is bad about pistachios?
Do pistachio nuts help you lose belly fat?
Do pistachio nuts make you sleepy?
Are pistachio nuts poisonous to dogs?
Is pistachios good for you?
Why does chocolate make you tired?
Can a pistachio kill a dog?
What happens if your dog eats a lot of pistachios?
Why are almonds so expensive right now?
What is the rarest type of potato?
How many almonds can I eat in a day?
What do onions grow on?
What is the difference between hardneck and softneck garlic?
Can I use an onion in place of a shallot?
Which part of spring onion do you cut?
Which part of the spring onion do you use?
Can you cut the springs on your car to lower it?
How do you cut through metal?*

 

* Sometimes when you ask Google a question, it is keen to tell you about the related questions other people have asked.  I have a fascination with the way the questions drift from your initial enquiry as they pop in to existence one-by-one forever, suggesting you can never know everything.  You probably can’t ever know everything, but the tumble of these questions makes for a very pleasing found poetry thing.

Bring Such Happiness

We lay down flowers to try and cheer up the dead,
something pretty to distract them from their problems.
It doesn’t matter to them but it’s sunny and raining
– any minute now we’re getting rainbows.

On The Shattering Of Eggs

On the defrosting of several chicken thighs,
chicken fillets, legs, bone-in chicken breasts
there was much chicken juice and then
we came to reconstruct the eggs so that
the insides of the eggs were on the outsides
it was like carefully dismantling volcanoes
to save the villagers from violent eruptions
and we realised at that point that we were
on ground as thin as thin-crust pizza and
that this was all soon after we had just had
the kitchen done out new.

Social Media

The policy is to scrap a lot of this housing,
to discontinue a certain kind of face. They
throw windows and doors on a scrapheap –
the houses look like toothless, noseless old men,
the children look exactly the way
the children of the future will never look.

“You must leave all your belongings behind.”

“I’m sick of talking about dreaming.”

“In times long past there was no worrying
that something unfortunate might happen.”

“No danger. Hard work and adventures.”

FFWD

Turns out

fast forward

wasn’t

that

fast.

No reaction

With his pen, the newsreader
etches an angry little face,
scratching
in to the surface of the desk.

Double A Side: Then And Only Then / Collage Of Facts

THEN AND ONLY THEN

Big raindrops.  The rain stops and you can see now how big the sky is.  Your heart reboots like an old computer left to gather dust, but which is, it turns out, miraculously still alive, though breathing unsteadily now.  Joyous, you think words to yourself, processing.  There is always so much to do – the clock wheels away in delight.  The winter sky is big and you are getting up late, going to bed early, turning in smaller and smaller circles.  And all those three-in-the-mornings when you’re awake, you are super-determined to do your absolute best the next day.

COLLAGE OF FACTS

The sad beauty of failures,
the quiet injustices in success.
This is fantastic, this is reality.

“Just how many leaves do the trees
actually have in them?”
we wondered.
“How many times will we sweep them in to a pile?”
“What can we do with them afterwards?”

Were they legal tender
we might afford to
embrace madness,
like
the local legend
we do not know
whether to believe
or not.