Positive positive

The lady down the street

whose name I’ve never known

The guy in the store where I get

My banana every morning

The mother

The child

The troubadours and poets and

Killers and gods

The dogs - but not the cats

Truck drivers and taxi drivers

The vans full of police and

Buses full of school kids

From Germany

France and places whose language I

Don’t understand

All of this conspires to isolate me

Their shadows animated

Shift together and drive me down

Into the cracks

And I let them

Some passiveness overtakes as

I resolve to fade

To blend, to yield

The joy of being comfortable

Within solitude

Invites a curse of emergent distance

As magnets repel one another

As wind affects ocean

As birds fall from the

Sky

I smell thick hot coffee

Close my eyes and breathe in.

I bend but do

Not

Break.

the chz Podcast Episode 10

Written

The pen broke

Right there

On the white paper

A blue Rorschach and silver nib

The hand broke

Right then

A bone frozen and muscle failure

The brain stalled

The heart paused

All around birds flew and

Cars sang metallic songs

The eyes saddened

The tears remembered faces

Now gone and

The pain of those still here

The pen broke

The fire put out

The poems become of less and less

Use.

Rainbow head

Pre 9am

Main road mono

She passes me on the

Inside

With striped rainbow hair

Rainbow head

Outside and in no doubt

And other colours

Maybe every one

Up and down her legs

Backpack

Eye shadow

Mid-twenties I guess

Unconcerned about opinions

Defying the locale

Grey puddles en route

Laying still

Unreflective

While the red yellow

Pink green

Orange purple, blue shine

Not crazy

Or maybe just crazy enough

Finally

She turns a corner

The streets are greyed

I am tired and lazy and broken and

So

I count her as my

fuck you

To the world for today.

I want I want I want

The kid is in that stage now

Of nothing is enough

I want I want I want

Glass half empty

Grass is greener kind of shit

I don’t rise to it

Because just wait until we’re not paying

When he has to shell out for

Whatever

Out of his own pocket

It’s then you realise

Those feelings never cease

New clothes

New shoes

New car

New house

There’s always a bigger fish

A higher high

A rose tinted memory

Lying to your future self

            It will never be that good

Again…

I used to make lists

Strings of idealistic words

In the backs of school exercise books

Scraps of paper

Post-its – anything nearby

No target or goal in mind

Just lists of things I needed

(with hindsight this was a way to keep the world in order

to keep the wolves from the door. Hindsight doesn’t help shit)

But

30 years later

Nothing changes

Except now I don’t write the lists

I keep them in my head out of shame

But it’s all the same

Then

Now

Later

I want

I want

I want…

Yaad

Those times are over kid

I was there

In part

Briefly experienced it;

Whole house

Front yard, back yard

A dog

A cat

Both maybe

But those times are over

Kid

You get what you can now

You sit back and suck up

The last of what’s on

Your plate

And be thankful for it

Sure, snow rarely falls

But the summers still come round

And the people

Those next door

Across the street

They still live

Just farther way

More distant from each other

Drifting out and out

With the rest of the universe.