Mission after failed mission of overtightened shirt cloth incomparable to the air-brushing wizardry of a celebrity book of spells; calorie-counted celebrity inspiration, feeling the burn; “one more minute, don’t forget to stretch and warm down”.

A plastic-propped peep into a better life where everyone is shiny and the right machine can make you God’s own barista without even having to watch the accompanying DVD box set.

All on the never never. ’til the never becomes the now.

In a surge of nature versus big business our crude seas wash over us in an endless tide of promises and slicked birds who drown in the failures of our present way of life.

In the background; an urgent pitch to call now and pay nothing for twelve months. A lesson unlearned.

In the foreground; stands a poet working out the best way to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a dog whilst he waits for his toast to turn tan.

So this is what we’ve become.

To the sound of screaming,
turns the eyes and the ears of the ordinary
agape in horror at the desperation of a jumper
as he splashes through the glass
fixing a final flickering gaze on tear-welling faces who,
with tightened lips let pass a whimper “oh no, oh no oh no”.
The rain of rock crashes chase away trivial reality,
the lattes, the must-do meetings,
the synchronization of calendars
in a kerosene flash; thanks to religious brutality.
There, urgent amongst the
surging clouds are those in
black turned gray. Gold-hatted
knights who shout for your own good.
Scared like the brokers,
fathers like the chairmen,
rushing like the insurers
but they choose to run the other way.

I often pause to think of others.
Like the couple on Beak Street I saw leaning
in against the March wind, pinching
still-fitting 1970’s smeary gabardine
mackintoshes around them like over-stuffed
sausage casings.

He; gaunt and with that sunken on-the-way
from this life look, she; rotund and
waddling with cheap home perm flattened
under a clear plastic penny market rain
hood whilst her free hand drags a
shopping trolley between them both like
an unruly and unwilling square tartan-coated pet.

She chose to wear those opaque tan tights
and they are so cliche, aren’t they,
with her seen-better-days blue brogue comfortable shoes
which shuffle shuffle and scuff along
next to the groceries and the gray nearly-ghost.

He looks like a man who has resolved to
hang on a day longer if he can, for her
sake, or for someone’s sake if not hers.
I’m sure it’s not for his.

His gaping-mouthed breath, like it
must sound loud enough to startle although
the bus window and the rattle of empty seats
mask it from me, sucks his cheeks in and out
with the effort and I see his eyes scrunch
up unseen as he keeps up her pace which he taps
out with a walking stick, stomp, stomp,
stomp like he is grinding out cigarette butts
with every step.

To where and why do they walk so painfully
in this bouncing rain?  What are their
names?  Is this yesterday’s sour wine of
relationships I see through the dragon puff
of diesel exhaust or a glorious culmination?
Or perhaps mainly their reality, unpoetic and
unremarkable except to someone like me who
often pauses to think of others.

To love means my heart does little skips when I
look at my wife  and she hasn’t noticed I’m
looking so I can see the complex mixture of
browns that blend so perfectly to make the color
of her eyes.  It makes me smile.

To be there means to make The Little Kid put on her
Aztec hat, not because it makes her look cute, which
it does, but because it stops her face getting red
and puffy in the bitter wind, even though she looks sweet
with those fluffy red cheeks.

To be at peace means to notice the snoring of the dogs
as they lie stiff-legged in that sun, plush against the
carpet and to smile, again, at the silly sounds a little dog can
make whilst it sleeps.

To be happy means to take all of these things, live
them fully and let them sink slowly into what makes me
who I am right now; a happy man.

To be lucky means that I can tell you about them.

Liquid solid flows with the puff, ochre stripes washed
grey with the powdering of divinity. The lines of his thoughts
across his brow, deep and drifting, running over to wash the beckoning
fingers of smoke’s fate, launching to drift on torrid
currents of time and fickle happenings, thrown back and
forth further and far from the loud “haaaaa” of the exhale.

Their prose and statuary, towering in their microscopic
magnificance amongst the whisps of their fleeting existence
unseen by those who did not look for them, breathed in to
be a part of those who did not make them; even those who
did not pause to question or care if they were likely to exist.

If, at that moment He should clap his hands or
spin to attend to some other diversion they might
scatter in the draught. It’s a fact; you can’t unscatter
smoke.

I woke gently, but all of a sudden today to
the sound of a cartoon voice singing rhymes
in a fake Manhattan accent.

The dark is hollow, lit by the sound of my snoring
dog which bounced off just-familiar walls and
rapped against the ice on the windows. A
rumbling echo-locator beacon mapping the room.

The Omaha cold has a smell. An aroma that you
don’t get back in the nooks and crannies
of British suburbia. Over there the cold has an odour
of rotten wool or skanky grey cardboard. But here,
here it is… incisive. Like the edges of
a pattern cut into a good quality glass.
Etched. Purposeful. It tricks you like this.

And here the wind doesn’t nudge you about and
flick playful flakes at you; it pinches your ears and
slaps the raw open palm of its hand full and hard
against your sore cheeks and tweaks the end of
your nose to make it drip drip drip sniff.

Home-coming is the sound of ruddy-faced people
knocking the life back into gloved hands followed by
the communion of banging boots free of snow that
doesn’t melt. Watching are hurrying snow plows
littering dirty white drifts at every road junction;
sullen funeral pyres where Nebraska’s December
buries the bones of our long sweet lazy summer.

Up, with a cuddle for the roused snorer and a
pat on the head for Toto’s double before I stitch
myself into my great galumping snow boots and
ram my “ear hat” down hard to thwart frostbite’s
chances. Fingers straight and stiff in waterproof
gloves; required, essential – skin dies here in minutes
if you let the swirl of the wind start to snack on it. I kiss,
check, keys, check and head Oates-like to the car.

Half-light twilight and the crackle of trees flexing
nakedly in the chilling breeze that bites. The blipper
clunks the door locks and, with an OCD glance for the
right park light, full red dial, full blast fan on; both
heaters set to beat the ice away from the poor
shivering windows.

So I begin to scrape away winter from your windshield.
Methodically because that’s how my mind likes to do
these things, the way I’m designed. Square scrapes,
neat edges, top to bottom. The sound of the blade
bounces off the garages and walls. A rasping, juddering
staccato cackle of frozen resistance. No bird sounds,
no traffic noise; just me and the scraper and…
that…
damn…
stubborn…
frost, thicker than the glass I’m hacking it from.

He’s got that blankie still. Rotted with the
drool of comfort years and glazed with some
real sweaty summers. Snuggles it close as ever.
An anchor in the squally seas of change.
Creaks those cranky joints together with
a huge Kirky-boy sigh and thumps himself
into the cloth with squeezed-together eyes.
I swear he used to smile.

Now he just rumbles on that blankie, day and night
with those wobbly-paw half-yelps of him
chasing down sleep sheep or some night rabbits.
Or he just guards at that bottom window and sighs
through his nose at the disappointments. Waiting.
Early days he’d point the flop from his ears,
whiskers shivering, and bob his head like Ali if he heard
a car coming up the road. It’s knocked the shine out of
his eyes, all that fruitless checking and weaving.

Now all Kirk’s got left is the stare-and-stare, glassy eyed,
into the distance. Not a flicker except a blink to wet those
big brown pleading pools. But he hasn’t given up even though I’ve
explained it all to him until we’ve both had enough and
wack down by your couch. I’ve written to everyone else
and told them, cancelled things, notified, crossed the T’s,
but, I just don’t know what to say to Kirk.
Kirk’s the problem.

The shadows hide things.
Malevolences who loom at the edges of my sleep.
As I start to sink into the marshmallow quicksand of my bed
they huddle, a gaggle of threats in the corners of the room, plotting.
They know me. They know the real me.
The me that runs away from trouble.
The me that’s scared of everything.
Overspending me, lying me, cheating, crying me.
I am deafened as they bang the drum of my heartbeat,
a roaring, storming crashing sea of a pulse in my ears,
relentless;
beating, beating, beating, beating.
Have mercy!
The night terrors whirl slowly in from
the menacing giant squid-ink black abyss
of my bed-time sight. Their voices whisper
to me; “bereft, bereaved, bequeathed: the pain”.
They creep their fingers into my mind
and squeeze out the happy thoughts;
“make way, make way for the doubts,
clear out, clear out for the fears”.
I shake my head, desparation shake,
writhe to loosen their grip on me.
Swhirling spirits, they gather themselves
together, form into something dirty, something from
the precipice pit come to feed on the sap of my soul;
“we will riddle you, we will rack you”
the zepherous whisper as I burn in their hell.
“Money, money, money”, there’s the taunt.
I’m forcing myself to think of beaches
and sunshine, deep breaths, deep breaths, but
they’re pulling at my tortured twitching legs again;
“we have you”, the pain, the pain, the pain.

Friend
Click this text to hear Alex read this poem
This is the spirit of Kerouac. Hotel Chelsea spirit,
English-style.

I mean it though. To you: I used to call you friend.

I cried and you listened to my sobbing.
I laughed and the laughter bounced back.

And we lied about understanding.
It was the easy thing to do.
It wrestled with my rational side.

You were my morning friend. My good-time
friend. My comfort.

I used to call you friend.

Do you remember the songs?

Happy, clappy songs.
It wrestled with my rational side.

We were wreathed in sweet-smelling smoke
and chimes. A childhood duty,
kissing feet, wiping cloth, reading
what we couldn’t do and never what we could.

Authorised words. Approved and translated.

Then songs about being happy to die because
there would be something there. A song relying
on trust. A tussle with my rational side.

You were never my rock standing in a sand-filled
desert, filled with emptiness. You were never
the hand that guided the art.

White man. White woman. Nails in the wrong places.

Olive in the skin. Oil on the hair. Painted
by the gentiles.

Words that banned things. Stipulations,
prostrations by action and abstention,
by observance in reverence. Until the difference
between the free and those who still listened
grew greater in my mind.

And the difference between the free and me
became so paper-thin you could rub your
fingers through it and they would touch.

Such a fine gap. It wrestled with my
rational side.

Move on move on. More wraiths of smoke.
Breath in for peace, hold and release.
Breath in for solace, for solace, for solace.

Mind walks, takes a run up and jumps into the
dream sky of possibilities.

Made our friendship look very different.
Less rules, more creativity. More of
everything: colours, creeds, good and bad.

I used to call you my friend.

Breathed in, moved to the jungle beat.
Made our friendship look very very very different.
Gave you a new face, a new size.

I danced in the warehouse. I danced in the street.
Everybody was there but I was on my own.

Then I hugged the trees. I squeezed their bark
and ran my hands up and down them; my connectors
to the Earth, a divination of you. Stroking them
with my palms and hugging the hard woody trunk like
a lover come back from a long journey and you don’t
want to let them go.

Your face looked so very very different and you
lived everywhere and you were truly beautiful.

It wrestled with my rational side.