After Come Sunday by Mahalia Jackson
 
We woke up this Sunday morning 
with the crows inside our heads.
Yes, we woke up this Sunday morning 
with the crows pecking at our beds.
Outside and inside this morning,
they forage for our dead.
 
And Ryan’s gotta tin can,
gonna twist it to a blade.
Our Ryan’s gonna kill a man,
cos his debts have to be paid.
The Bishops took the cornered Pawn.
...

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The Gifting

So here we are inside HMP Brixton.
The mood brighter than usual.
New spring hot sun diffuses mustard
through dust thick classroom windows.
 
Some of the lads are all Ramadaned up.
Hungry, twitchy, paper and pen ready.
The author and I go through routines.
Our room works hard, and all lies rise.
 
The bright boy from outside Galway.
His fake Scottish currency caught out
...

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Return to Waterloo

These once children chiselled on a bench – 
holding hands. A July southern seafront.
They are hostages to screeching pushchairs,
feral dogs, styrofoamed fish and fresh doughnuts.

Aged now and rugged up against theremin winds  
they are a poet’s monument to displacement. 
Lost within the century of being misunderstood
with its unreliable narrations of self-assessments...

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Fire in the Prison Library 

Wish for us the cigarette smiling gals 
of 1948. Lipstick curled, etched stockings
and a try if you dare sweetheart wink.  

Mainline good whiskey and Count Basie’s riots.  
Percuss linoleum with Ann Miller’s buckled blue.
Frame by scratched flickered flame.  

And it’ll swarm paper throughout this New Year.
The singed pages darting across the nets above,
s...

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The Darlings

So, I was seeing this woman for a while who was in and out of the music business. She once married a man who was in a band who will ever be our second favourite reprobative darlings. She had kids by him, two. A boy and a girl. Nice kids. Their marriage ended with a smashed glass of whiskey and that was that. 

She sang herself and had a fair voice. A warm drawl that was too syrup...

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Record

And they are spitting bars in the chapel.
I watch my back, my moods switched on.

It’s chilly. The prison dialled down until November. 
Price of the punishment, price of the economy?

A man who loves the gospel steps to the microphone.
Nervous and twitchy but immersed in his grace.

He raps in French, “Dieu est amour et j’en suis désolé.”
A chipped Mary weeps as the sun cracks ...

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Geese

Across an England October zinc 

sky, they come. Sketched at angles 

as if to resemble flags dragged. 

The Geese are migrating.

Rain falls and I shake from news

of other migrants panicking south.

A red, green and white land blackened.

Their lives weighted to hell or heaven?

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Raymond 

The season brings the oldness of a year.
A light straining out from a coal morning. 
The radio wears a cardigan with news
of how much the coming months will cost.
How Christmas will be tight for many.

These mornings. They will not cease horror.
The twists in the bedsheets, a loss of faith in myself. 
I could find a poem that answers the constant prayer. 
The one with newspape...

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Jumping Trains

They call this room, ‘The Pod’.
Outside. It’s slatted, curved. A brown tortoise shell.
Inside. I distribute Mirtazapine, Tramadol, Methadone
to the rapists, murderers and others. 

Sometimes it is silent. Sometimes we will talk. 

Yesterday morning I was with ‘Y’.
He takes a cocktail for his brain, his bones and back.
There is no family, no money, no hope of staying.
‘Y...

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There is Still Time

to wipe your tongue 
across greying lips
and kiss the world back.

For you are no different than us.
We have all committed the crimes.
Show us a denier and we’ll give you a liar. 

We have judged on the streets, 
on our phones, in their churches.
The sacred was for pillaging. 

But stop now. Look at us 
and we will gaze a return. 
It’s not too late to steal tim...

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House 

3.20am. Inside this kitchen under emergency fluorescents.
Head in hands — elbows on polished, scratched aluminum.
I scan the clocks. Thinking I’m already tired for tomorrow —
the beige days that will come long at me again.

It’s almost so quiet. The hums of fridges, maybe rats outside 
on a feed. Hours ago, I called the lucky winning numbers
in the lounge for the weekly Friday nig...

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Stolen from him at the college disco 
under a neon moon and Tainted Love.
The dance floor became a crime scene.
For here was the kiss of the century. 

He was working at the speedway 
with his petrol, his soggy meat pies.
Planning a ruck in the North Bank.
Tomorrow was Lincoln City at home.

But she was the bee's knees of Basildon,
the peroxide princess in waiting. 
Taken by the Ra Ra ...

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On the laps of our beloved smoking mothers –
I heard them talk about the world
when they were young.

The festooned nights of war-torn bingo halls –
where everything was just about right and unjust
about wrong. Where no one owned a phone.

How Steph danced with a Stepney Elvis –
love me tender, love me true. The mortgage 
and the factory belt. The disappointment of the pill.

Gloria an...

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For us, there were times of fine weather between
the walled towns. But now it rains inside our trains.

Once, the days and nights tapped out hot rhythms.
We danced mambas – drenched in salted sweat.

We dipped our dreams with blistered fingers –
raised life’s hopes to the turncoat wind.

In teatime kitchens, we let chips drown in gravy.
Today, nothing of comfort’s good comes calling...

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The dishwasher is reading Kafka.
The toaster has taken to drink.
The freezer has joined the picket line.
The whole kitchen is in the sink.

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The found couple sat on a bench, holding
hands. It was a July English estuary seafront

and they were amongst screeching children,
feral dogs and the smell of fresh doughnuts.

Old now and rugged up against the wind
they resembled a monument. Both were scared

of talking in case of being misunderstood.
A falsetto seagull swooped, hunting for chips.

And then this happened.

I’m sorry...

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Dirty old river
must you keep rolling
beneath a setting sun
for the boy who waits.

Mod suited, Chelsea booted
outside the Friday night hum
of trains traversing this way, 
                              and trains conversing that way.

He knows these arteries.
The tides and the tracks 
of London’s bloodlines.
He can count the pulsed veins.

As he stands, he is so nervous
that he puf...

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There were rumours
of decimalisation.
A new decade in modernism
at Manor House Junior school.

It was the summer of 1970,
of Esso World Cup coins.
Fools gold for gallons.
My Dad didn’t own a car.

My best friend's name was Zolly.
He had a Rediffusion colour TV.
A yelping dog called Bugsy,
a softened bosomed mum.

And Rosa taught me to dance,
swallow a pickled herring.
She wore her...

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I was telling Gareth Southgate
only this morning about
the convenience
of having my weekly 
train ticket on my phone.

He said that I had made
a sensible choice. 

He was also pleased
that I make myself a ham
and pickle sandwich for my lunch. 
Although he suggested
the occasional Scotch Egg.

We skipped down the lane to the station –
our hands were almost touching.

Gareth sniffe...

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Colouring Book

Wherever I’ve stood.

Buttershaw, New Orleans, Basildon.

I’ve always looked for the people

who knew truths. Not Gods, but folk

who could tell the story of the Blues.

I could speak of theirs and mine.

But over time, I’ve reached a point

where history only informs. It’s how

and what we do next that matters.

When we turn from blue to gold, perhaps...

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18th Pale Descendant

Maybe she’ll prize me a tattoo.

A red rose for any other crime.

She can score it on my shoulder blade.

Let it weep from time to time.

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We Will Be Men

My love and I go fretting
after the late summer sun,
then into the dusk of the
West Yorkshire towns.

Morley, Horbury, Dewsbury.

The night turns
but the warmth sticks, 
releases the musk of 
suburbia’s dying roses.

The windows are open
and I will once again try
to speak of the years that
take their toll.

Of the boy born from the
slabs of Essex.

The long ti...

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Other Colours, Other Clocks
After W.H Auden

A summer funeral home in a pound shop Essex town.
The flowers are chemical, the doves bleached pigeons.
We are a family in conjured grief, gasping at heated facts,
tasting an electrical breeze. “There was bloody water down 
his sink and ripped up reminders surrounding his bin.”
Here is love’s finality, its knife, needle and rumour mill –
scarri...

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Shame
After Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King

I’ve tried to step out the shame of this. Even now the guilt piles
high like records racked on an old Dansette. I was a youth lost
in a bedroom mirror, my James Brown moves flickering light
bulbs, fuelling hate in the building site politics of my father. 
For this, I became his family secret. The boy who surrendered
to the funk and the darkness of ‘Blue...

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Summer slow day

and smiles are hard

to give, where nothing

is said and done.

We cannot find new

ways to triumph,

where joy is staring at us

as if an alien.

Bloody England.

A belief in historical

fiction, where three boys

kicking balls are to blame.

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You can say the word, love,

until it loses all meaning.

‘I love you this

and I love you that.’

But, it is in the doing.

The action of the word.

Love must be felt in flight.

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I was telling Gareth
only last night about
the convenience
of having my weekly 
bus ticket on my phone.

He said that I had made
a sensible choice. 

He was also pleased
that I make myself 
a sandwich for my lunch. 
Although he suggested
the occasional Scotch Egg.

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Frank on Parole
after Tom Waits

Frank despairs at the untuned ukulele.  
The solitary instrument of desperate men. 

He’s up next with poems dipped in petrol. 
His ex-wife hasn’t shown up just yet. 

So, Frank reignites those old spirits –
all Halloween orange and chimney red.

That godammed heartbroken ukulele player –
still weeping for Tammy Wynette. 

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From one of those days

that you wouldn’t feed

to a mangy, starving dog.

                          To one of those nights

                          where that same little dog

                          gnaws dry on a skinny old bone.

Knowing all too well it's one

of those bones that you’ll

have to learn to walk without.

       ...

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If I ask you whilst our sun
drops – dripping its bleed
into a brown-loathed sea
what the worst words are.

You will perhaps shrug your
shoulders – look at your shoes.
It’s not, I don’t love you.
It’s not even, I hate you.

I will say the worst words –
when all is red and rusted –
when the tide retreats to reveal 
the shells of us will be, I don’t care.

Perhaps you’d tighten those l...

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From Dewsbury Moor to New Orleans,

Frosty Jack, Romanian Bourbon. 

Filleted skunk swooned upon a breeze,

all mustard lit in white urban.

We rage hard on tongue come toothless codes.

Offer kisses then ball up our fists.

Short odds between a frog and a toad.

You’re either torn or crossed off our list.

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The diggers at Black Cross
waiting for grief that climbs
its reason hilltop bound.

Sting of the hot funeral tear -
cold rain on wild-red curly hair.
Yes. She’d drink the cinema of this.

The waltz of born bluebells,
a stalled train before the tunnel.
Bending this season to her end.

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It’s early evening. I’m meeting
a man to discuss iambic.

He offers a drink and I refuse.
He asks why not, of course. 

I say one will lead to another.
Then to cocaine - then to crack.

Then to heroin. 
Then to black.

Let’s discuss iambic, I say.
My parameters are pentameter. 

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It all began so very well
on this blossomed Easter Day.
Which led to a misunderstanding - 
in a quietened, difficult way.   
 
Tiptoeing the Pacific shoreline,
Hannah gripped her black plastic locket.
Showed him all her sacred stories 
that were hidden within her pockets. 
 
A plastic six-legged spider,
a chewed Chewbacca pencil. 
A love letter from the tiny boy, 
her dreams of b...

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