10,000 POEMS – Posted freshly most days
They’ll sniff around as dogs –
met nose-to-tail & inhale too
deeply on chopped out lines
in locked-tight cubicles – slip
a packet in a palm – pay u l8r
[if it is there at a night’s end]
They complain my other half
don’t have as much fun – but
then vomit up last night’s gut
[they recover in a living room
& kids ask why they do stuff]
All solace is blown – bulldust
Caught [with a rolled note]
Almost too-quick-blurred –
cash in & hide a narcissist
See – penurious [thin] lips
reprinted by lipstick – spits
arc from old pseudonyms
Stories yet to bore you all
Mine is art of auto-writing
as others chop at verses –
kill your darlings so dead –
then you put ‘em straight
Passion is my tired calling
as my redundancy stamps
It is felt by girls who won’t
gaze [avoiding reflection]
You were off your face – once –
in our past decade
whilst colleagues got blindly laid
on cocaine & lust’s
attractions [just once a month]
One admix [of drugs & booze]
numbed your pain –
but what was their excuse?
*tumbleweed-quiet*
We’ll roll in truth’s disquietude
So pause – reflect [no bent-to
powdered mirrors]
upon statistics & cold facts
thrown up by time’s
tergiversation of truth’s routes
Let’s check all re-drafted notes
of scrawls & jots –
after-the-event not much lies
undisturbed – they
will bide – only teetotallers know
Walls of Death ask to
be peered at [leant in
over shoddy welding]
until a howl of breath
then provokes a spin
into a swirl of vertigo
So sleep – sleep alone
[shoot-em-up carnival
clamours don’t count]
In Super 8 minutes of
thrill-rides roll her tale
[fat men turned on by
her lickerish quartets
& spools flicked upon
her jerked-off screen]
Ride & orbit her hoops
painted red & 360-odd
tyre-rattled pine planks
Your fitted door shuts
too tight – no rider will
get out of there [alive]
St Margaret rode on a
Yamaha motorbike – a
2-stroke affair of 49cc
No one dares mention
Acapulco [not drugs or
death of La Quebrada]
You won’t have vitamins
[but you’ll always eat up
fantasy in script & lines]
& motorcycles will idle –
as that next show is set
to rewrite poetic rhyme
You have taken
off your clothes
[in that strip joint
in your mind]
You’re dancing
on a table
[you lower your fear
of heights]
A cashing client
dusts
on your
snorting open crutch
& your sister blows
her lover [her tits –
she lets him touch]
There
are men & kids
emptied
[by your sibling rivalries]
May God
be kind
[to both your souls]
and you
to cocks you tease
I’ve been through all the vices & now don’t have any
Marc Almond
Let coitus & narcotics take a back seat
[there is always time on your deathbed]
Sip tea with your feet put up or commit
to an indoor religion – Quakerism offers
mute reflections out of Sunday AM rain
Masturbation requires creative thought
so relieve not with rapid wanks but with
poetry / Repeat episodes of Morse can
offer a beat for those who like unlawful
acts & a sprinkling of crossword clues –
there ain’t no cure for love – dependence
[on somebody else] rarely ends too well
Here – floatin’ – ish-whiffs
of desiccated weed on a
glass neck – of iffy-sniffs
of dope & somethin’s – of
beer’s belly-round settles
I prefer a bottle of Newci
because our local pumps
are n’ swilld thrugh – see –
look at my remains there
[shy b’low] an obtuse polo
mint seat – relief is clipp’d
& wiped – flushin’ m’ recall
w/out looking down again!
He dropped in and
shifted everything –
not my furniture
more of a loosening –
a reformation of views
without drugs or booze
as dark coffees cooled
in talk’s elbow space
Nothing in that time
was left untouched
by his too-close-to-truth
Revelations etcetera
E251019
Thanks to Helen Ivory @nellivory for suggestions via National Writing Centre @WritersCentre
She flipped-into old apparitions
Then Acne-kid stood in her kitchen
with his mouth turned up high
My missus fuckin’ hates me dealin’
One word-blunt white line fixer
He’s still on to it – arf a gram –
Fifty quid – No – No more for now
No point-six-measure – or nearishness
but – then – ten longer minutes later
he’ll do one (or – One more for mates)
It runs out yer nose – drips –
She fuckin’ knows I’m fuckin’ doin’ it
But Diamond Wife will not stop talkin’
I live it mate – her drunk mouth says –
One prefers a more tightened wrap –
as opposed to too-loosened stuff?
She likes ’em – those bullet capsules
with grinders
A quick-spun chamber
You’ ve not seen bullets? She hasn’t –
to laughter – You guys got my number?
Tess was never an unalloyed maid –
not Hardy’s vessel of pure emotion
untinctured by innocence
Such country girls are as scarce
as a hen’s brightly bared tooth
Too hastily judged? Or not?
She was metallic – below – to me
When bared – again – by a kindred
lover – our fusion rubbed to rust
Divisions of men – such she kept
mapped close enough to feel – to plot
and find her way – only her eyes shut
whilst her barn doors swung wide
to near-unhinged arcs of openings –
as her balm of blood – of love’s slaughter –
blew out on her cousin’s stunk breath
as he bent with her to snort at troughs
aligned by credit cards – then blocked
All a loss – it is no more a sweet place
Not for me – Sour scents off her wetness
turns on John Etkin-Bell’s ring finger
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
her odour as he wipes his creased brow
She dragged too many too close by lies
My heated tears contain stomach acid –
piteous shit – feeling sorry for myself
having thrown my empty gut’s content
into the piss-plated Made in Italy bowl
They will not scar my face – we only fear
such long-term effects on our throats –
heightened instances of – that is enough
for now –
Sit with me as I pop my evening’s dose
of slowers and helpers – shaped as pills –
and pray they stay long enough to kick in
and get me through a night I need
I am still sucker-punched – struck as such
through this day – but needs must
so let me sleep and find a brief peace –
I am sorry Son for saying I want to end it now
It comes and goes
Please hide a lemon
in your old man’s coat –
their tear gas is primed
but that citrus is hope –
suck on its stung flesh
as if you suck for your life
Your vote for democracy
has been long-denied
We all carry crosses
but some are not struck –
we’ll all hang our heads
Hangin’s not enough
Read widely beyond
their ruled short lists
Education is brief
’til you’re taught by the past
They don’t throw parties
like we did –
no sleepovers in puddles
of puke and-or-piss –
or found shagging bareback
their best mate’s lover
They don’t sink pure vodkas
for breakfast –
no acid – nothing dropped
without a full appraisal –
googling its providence
Unlike their bad parents –
who took to partying too hard
with only the letter E to look up –
They don’t throw up like we did
For a man who has done his natural duty,
death is as natural as sleep. GS
Here we meet again
you no longer a friend
you jolt – a waking itch
this drugged portend
This unnatural discontent
which sleep is for me
it is a sickly thing
It is as if rest itself
is my disease
It is as if my register
of a simple expectation
of a longed-for sopor
no more allows it to admit
Yet we will drift in daytime’s
impolite light
with eyelids weighted
by the night
just enough to stop me seeing things
This puzzle of so many pieces
which darkness has become
You – my new foe –
my agonist – my bedlam
E100419
There – incongruous in khaki
among the lurid colours of youth –
two sallow lads sat by the tunnel
at the love-etched bench
as if recovering from a hundred years
of trench warfare with their coughs
whilst the younger troops are bound
to school desks and repeated tasks
The soldiers’ drugs are sweet perfume
above the sour rot and kicked mud
of the early hints of a winter campaign
across county lines with bunched fists
Which drugs work?
Well anything illegal,
plus doses of alcohol,
or inhaling some freedom:
Not television-consumption,
and the inanity of such,
which is foul humdrum,
remove that crutch.
Let me read Ginsberg,
howl wild words ’bout sex,
meet strangers to talk to,
but not to fuck (not yet),
because fucking strangers
brings swabs of bad luck,
which need more meds
and I’ve said drugs suck!
Let me loose on the world
before it dissolves,
let me lose this shit time,
before the shit takes hold.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 