Unexpected feet; a report from a short time ago, during which there were still very few convenience stores north of the border within The United Kingdom.

There is a hill that has numerous pairs of disembodied legs protruding from the surface and over two years since their first appearance, the kinds of people who wouldn’t take the needy seriously if they knocked on the door with an honest request for help had removed the shoes and socks that shod them against the elements, thus, winters and summers alike played a harsh card across the now calloused, red, blotchy and corned feet. Some of them became tagged too, or felt-tipped with words of baseless accusation, casting doubt upon the possible standards inherent to hidden faces that the scrawlers had presumed were hidden below the ground. I had decided, given the lack of local care, to dedicate my time to making them socks and thereby keeping them warm, dry and their continued presence there protected and clear at least of my troubled conscience.

It has come to my attention since then that the phenomenon is a rare, though not unheard of experience across the globe and suggests the machinations of a certain biological principle of natural organisation, i.e. disembodied feet doing their best to make good of an awkward situation. In the Mediterranean for example, they've been able to survive upon generous food handouts, specifically paellas and I understand this to be a foot favourite. Sandwiches, here up north and amongst the hillocks, will have to suffice due to a lack of the corporate convenience store ... I can't get the sort of prawns best for paellas from the corner.

Note: The cries of "Dandelion", reportedly heard from time to time around the general areas of foot distribution are being looked into. I'm wondering whether there may be some parallel here, for example the Dandelion produces seeds without pollination through a process known as apomixis. Could it be that the bodiless feet might also be asexual and disseminate offspring after having their toes blown?

Interregnum

I am the bunion of river thistle, downstream of acorns and fire, scorched by the sun desiring my carbon. I am lost here though buoyant, scattered seed, stamen risen, parched, coloured, bruised and scribing the unutterable, tied by linguistics to familiar torments and acceptable codes, seeking recognition for bravery, finding acceptance in self deprecation and jest. I am the river thistle, a bunion floating upturned, a hedgehog accepting its fate beneath the moon as the darkness falls and the enormity of beasts look down upon me passing from the banks, their taxonomies mapped in vapour. I am the river thistle, downstream to the sea.

For the perfection of that which changes nothing.

One man laughed,
The other man didn't.

The two standing side by side,
Insignificant and standing on a planet,

Surrounded by stars,
Moon, nebulae, galaxy, sun.

One laughed,
The other turned away.

Cut

There is in the dissemination
Of illegal goods,
Prohibited and costly, born of need,
Defined by the subjugations of liberty,
Community and peace
Dividing ever further
The rich and the poor,
Alembics of distortion
That make it available,
Diluted, alluded to
And with an ambiguous integrity,
An illusion
Of credible substance,
Imbibed with suspicion,
Consumed,
Regardless with pleasure.

Black Line

Drawn,
Down,
Across,
To delineate,
Ascribe and emphasise,

My hand transfers intention
For better or worse,
But for whatever reason
You are my autobiography.

Just a few words for what...

The body is:
An outhouse,
Temple,
Church,
Cellar,
Car Park,
Sun,
Whipping Post,
Synapse,
Fruit,
Seed,
Dog,
Monster,
Forest,
Barricade,
Machine,
Painter,
Destroyer,
Index,
Glue Gun,
Lover,
Platform,
Star,
Son,
Sound,
Daughter,
Wavelength,
Time,
Light,
Juicer,
Blender,
Maker,
Ship,
Conduit,
Mirror,
God,
Library,
Sonnet,
Sold.

Armada

Nimbus clouds accumulate
As giant and towering sail ships,
Out in mass at sea,
Sailing along the lines determined
By their government
Of eddies and tides
High above, nudging and caressing
Their quiet communion of entropy.

Moment

I imagine a room of wax,
Filled with burning wicks and I look up to see
An aeroplane soar overhead
Through a clear and spring blue sky
As pregnant teenagers trace their own lines,
Across pebble stones, walking by.

Invective

She sits just behind me on the train
Between Canterbury and Kings Cross on a Tuesday.
She chews, continuously...
Like a...
Grazing animal, oblivious,
Entranced by vapid illusions
Garishly parading themselves
In colourful horror across pages of trivia
That she masticates over
And over and over.
Though she excuses herself politely,
Pulling at my head rest for a moment,
In aid of her rising to disembark.

Choking

Spinning out on my own bloody rubbish,
Jumping at the reflections,
Peaking from beneath the table,
Sniffing for the presence of creatures like me.

There's a room at the back where I keep them
Caught. Gnashing and leering,
Jumping, dodging on their hind quarters,
And leaving traces in condensation upon the glass.

Filthy with intoxication, sweating words like
Jaundiced eyes yellow with bile
And delivered slow; careful spears
In defense against this saline tide of mad.

--------------------------------------------------
The Spectrum Quilt
--------------------------------------------------

The world begins new everyday,
though some charm old guide books
like things not done -
in boxes

but

we'd split light with laughter,
instead make rainbows for a bed spread.

-------------------------------------------------

Significance

The poetry there invested beneath,
Every careful surface revealed amongst weeds;
The animism of concrete.

Winged Voices

Towering old,
Wild and unforgiving circles,
Pronouncements of the insane,
confounded, shrinking.

"I could have run around and around and around..."
Said the old man, panting,
Dizzy, swaying, deranged.

"Time to get off, time to get off!"
The birds mantra, shaking the bushes
And entering as warning
Along his body hair and through his pores.

What now? Was there some other chapter to life
So very different to all that had come before?
Another language, a different vision,
Behaviours and customs?

His hands lingered uncertain and without sign.
Being was all and enough to be silent
And then enough to see,
The struggling voice from every body,
Every creature, mountain and garden.

That moment, this peace, our heart.

Star

The Sun shines,
Carrying with it all
That photonic information,
Fragments, that together
Paint us gloriously
Its eight minutes past impression,
Bright and burning soul,
Of us each and every one.

La Mar

The little boat becomes as the waves,
The further and the further away.
It's not like a road, this sea;
Guided with a Tarmacadam barricade,
Routed in a certainty.
This is an embrace
As knees grasping a Colt,
But then, nothing like that at all;
Entirely at its mercy riding over...
The cold, magma birthplace of us all.

Beautiful Life

Fever,
Your glorious hand,
Whose arches contain immense bodies beyond
The sustenance and power of dream,
Command this temporal oratory
Towards an understanding, worthy in virtue,
For all that I have come to seem.

Bitter Eulogy

Rolling useless like an old ball in an abandoned pool, days turning slowly from darkness into light, no clear period of passing, life becoming unhinged without a once revolving order.

Wild dogs and gentle pets gather, tearing themselves and children apart, feral food for a new and dark surrogate force whose fist slams hard dictates; waves of blood and a stench of decay without false protection of cheap perfumes.

Hundreds of square miles of new and desperate urbanization's, old and carefully insidious, ghastly crafted, control illusions are levelled for their aggregate and make way for a truth that will no longer respect vein theatres of hope; faiths that mankind might somehow tear itself from destruction.

Like cutting down trees or culling Deer, Rabbits, Badgers, Bears or Bison, billions are slaughtered, leaving infighting and the mechanics of disease to counter remaining hysteria and a space for the brutal indifference of instinct alone.

Aspirations for a better world accelerated oppression and an orchestra of schema's that had only self deception as a cure to the aberration known as The Human Race. Their respect for gentleness and love, came at the cost of a disproportionate ignorance, stupidity and irreconcilable loss.

Affliction

Instead of rising from the damp,
Sweat tinted fabrics of sleep,
Swinging out and climbing into sky,
You choose,
Instead to remain,
Like a stopper on the steam of sleep.
Those first prescious hours of daylight,
Lost forever in the theft of dreams;
A greedy solitude,
Amongst the false protection of fright.

The Noise

The noises could be heard loudly, everywhere, clanging and abrupt, dogs bleating their ill training and visciousness, traffic noise staining the horizon like dry rot spikes, winding through the remnant foliage like snakes, a chemical spill, an oil slick, an endlessly rearing tide, absorbing everything beneath, consuming all relentlessly, until its digesting mass would devour itself in a terrifying and ugly event of greater noise and filth, pulsating like the maggot riddled corpse of some strayed farm animal, swollen in stench amongst the derelict undergrowth that splits open concrete of yet one more betrayal of land.

Beyond all this, far enough for distance to dull clarity with atmospherics, once proud and ancient monuments to time and forces, the very humus from which long dead gods inhabited; mountains, had been skinned alive, lanced and twisted from their ground by incalculable minions, working, tirelessly blinkered for each and every ones need for a little bite to eat and the production of stones for boxes, housing them and their garishly empty, schematised, billboarded routes between; the white noise producers of that horizon lines, utterly soaked and incredulous, dry rot hum.

This landscape, an enormous work of art whose author bears no name but infinity, silently endures its rape and dismantling of allegory, picked at, loosing pigment and the alchemical minerals of that untitled, timeless and amorphous opacity of magic, mans blood, his mind, unable to comprehend and attacking, cannabilizing.

River

As we see our landscapes slowly pass beyond the reeds that line these gradually eroding banks, I hear all the melodies whispering through the many mouths that are born to whisper what beyond the primal abstracts of need can never be sung, though distinguishable sounds illuminate our world with the mysterious wonder of shadows.