Speaking to mirrors

Shouts come back as if in an echo chamber

Blinded to the fact we are speaking to mirrors

What we say, the replies we receive 

Mere reflections and copies

All these screams make silence

apathy, indifference

No coercion needed

No words stifled 

No voices stilted 

No word left in minds 'individual' 

No sounds found in crowds digital 

Taught not to speak 

Not cause we can't 

Cause opinion is invisible 

Fireworks and Rivers

An explosion from nowhere

Eyes following the blaze as it streaks across the sky

We ooh and aah from a distance

Yet if we were any closer

We’d scream

That’s how detached I feel sometimes,

Like I’m watching a firework show

I don't want to touch but I have to watch

Aware of the danger,

Aware that I’m saved by distance

Other times they creep in like the rivers through cracks

I gasp and choke 

Patchwork and Rubble

Not a river but a patch work

Which I wrap myself up in

Not natural but crafted

Part reality but stitched with my own desires

Threaded with seeds of intent

Obscured, disjointed, fragmented

Shards and rubble which

I pick up loose and plaster together with deception

Constructing monuments to the past

I stand in their shadow

And pretend like they sprung from the ground like flowers

But what are lies only a memories made false by coincidence? 

There is only a now.

We are a mess of contradictions
A million different fictions
Constantly opposing forces
Driving us to different courses
Products of circumstances
From culture induced trances

We say we're this or that
Anything beyond simply human
Merely you or me
Knowledge - power
Uncertainity - insecurity

All these names, all these boxes
All this information, all these causes,
No room for the present tense because of this pretence

We talk like our brains are machines when we are all in one
Well then there's too much oil on these cogs
Cause they turn and turn
We go round and round without reason
It pumps out more and more and does not stop

We can't admire distance that wonderful afar
Because we simply think we are who we are
And that's it
As if a machine does not have a switch

We shop for solutions as if they are put on shelves
We look for leaders without looking to ourselves

We live lives based on timetable
Habit and repetition dictate who's able

But there is only a now, nothing slower or faster
You can't split the truth into a before or after. 

I'm addicted to quitting things

“You know that’s bad for you?”

Relationships are like coffee and cigarettes and chocolate and alcohol ... actually just anything  advisably quittable.

You quit and then you start again and then you quit and then you start again and then you quit and then start again.

After the initial despair, crippling withdrawal and general misery

You remember it as an experience which you overcame, its history

You forget how good it felt

Just a minor jam on the conveyor belt

Look at me I’m so busy  Law di daw

I am just so together, I could guffaw

Now you’re some proper independent type person

Then for no good reason, you find yourself cursin

You feel pissed off and sad and like something is missin

So you start the wishin

And so you start again

And you go

“Wow I forgot how great this was, I really missed this”

Until the point someone goes

“That’s bad for you”

And you go “But I’m happy”

And they say “You’ve had enough”

Where “Enough” is a metaphor for fostering an unhealthy dependency

And also a metaphor to stop sitting in the student restaurant alone

Sobbing into your lasagne and staring at your mobile phone

So you see yourself outside yourself and go ‘shit’

And so then you quit

So maybe suspect men should wear clothes with warning labels

That would really turn the tables

With photo’s of charred rotting hearts

Right across their private parts

Except maybe this would make me temporarily transfixed with morbid curiosity and a sense of unreality

And not awaken me to the lethality

It could even provoke me to start talking, display my geniality

In fact the only difference overall is that it is easier to find somewhere to buy my coffee quickly and when I need it

Than find a person and that thought makes me so sad I think I will eat some chocolate.

I have met some odd people

Yesterday I got in the lift and there was a lift attendant

But I live in a block of flats so I did not know what this meant

The lift attendant said ‘I am your memory’

I said ‘Whatever floor three please’

The lift attendant pressed basement

I said ‘I want to go home’ but off we went

 The lift attendant said ‘We are going deep into your mind to confront your childhood’

I said ‘I’m making a complaint bud’

I said ‘bud’ sarcastically as I was growing angry quite drastically

The lift attendant said ‘I hate this job, the pay is shit and my union; the union of consciousness is ineffective in defence of my rights’

He said ‘I really don’t want to work anymore nights’

I said ‘Let me go home, I’m tired’

But he ignored me and so it transpired

That my flat mate found me the next morning crying in the basement

And she said ‘What happened to you?’

And I said ‘I’m now a murderer and that’s true’

She said ‘Dear god who’d ya kill?’

‘My memory’ I replied

She said ‘Stop drinking so much’.

Yesterday I went to the supermarket to stock up on the weeks supply of noodles

I was considering stealing as I have no scruples

A shop assistant burst out of nowhere and said ‘Can I help you?’

 I said ‘No leave me alone’

She laughed and said ‘I am your self -monitor and I have just what you need’

Just as I was trying my best to recede

She handed me a bag of carrots whilst saying ‘Have some passing pleasantries’.

Considering I was a murderer I did not want any more enemies

So I ignored her and started gathering noodles

 She said ‘No you can’t have any more blunt honesty’

 I said ‘Fuck off, I don’t like you’.

The other day I was sitting by a stream when a man rowed by on a boat

 He said ‘Would you like to take a trip with me?’

As he was attractive I could not help but agree

So I drifted down the stream listening to his hilarious stories

Of his interesting past and all his former glories

I said ‘I’m not sure what’s happening but I think I’m falling in love with you’

 I thought about it for a moment whilst he was silent, I had déjà vu

So I said ‘Well who are you anyway?’

 He said ‘I am your ego’

I said ‘Shit’. 

Blind and Blank

Your mouth like a hundred curtained windows; drawn shut.

Your face, a thousand unfilled copies; blank.
Your eyes like those of a million cart horse; blinkered

Your floodgates hold no water,

I can’t even swim,

When in truth, I want to

Drown

Can’t even

Float

Not

Even 

A dead sea

Constriction

Suffocation

The way of burdensome emptiness rather than

Overwhelming questions

The ones that can’t be answered

But you pose none.

No solace in this silence. 

The Unbearable Grandiosity of Inferiority

Feeling so inferior

The thought that they don’t

So you are better because

You do.

Even though,

Your flaws are far many and

Theirs seem few

Yet you take great pain,

Not just to acknowledge but to

Count and name them all

Feeding them scraps like dogs under the table

In secret

Your pets, they gulp hungrily

And you love them in a way that surprises you

Because you know they don’t deserve a full dinner

Do you pity or is it genuine?

Enough to keep them alive and you

Never deny yourself

There is grandiosity in that

“Oh benevolent master, feed me what you do not want”

But it is an unbearable grandiosity,

A shameful one that must be kept secret,

The guilt

Sense of superiority over knowing you are not. 

I ate my imperfections one day

I ate my imperfections one day.

I put them not in an oven,

But my neo cortex

I baked them

Ate them not with a spoon

But new words

A sensation like no other

An explosion on the tongue

What can only be described as

Perfection incinerated

The most glorious feeling

Filled with the depths of pain

They burnt and they scalded

They ran down my throat like a raging volcanic stream

My insides melting, they consumed and took over

Do not bake your imperfections,

Like fire and wood,

One gives birth sustaining new life,

While the new life tries to

Destroy what is keeping it alive. 

Beauty

Beauty you stand alone,

Isolated and exposed

On the pedestal humanity raised you onto

Yet they remain blind to how much more you are

Your potential

Not just beauty in that which is pleasing to look at,

But all beauty

That terrible beauty which crawls under our skin

And whispers furtively to us at night

Pain is easier to express

But beauty is difficult

Because it stands to defy our condition

Whatever it is that is

We resist to call it beauty

We merely look

Yet yearn to submerge

The misconception that beauty

Is to be admired

Not to consume and become,

A game, folly for fools with no regard,

Leave beauty to them and

Concentrate on more serious matters

Beauty are you lonely?

Or do you find company in the gazes of many?

Solace in separation?

A unity with all because they think you are untouchable