Thorn

There's no point in talking to the machine,

it already has what it wants (probably more)

as you shuffle towards guillotine blades of glass

whilst slug-skinned men watch you through cameras

and unrelenting algorithms contemplate your brands.

Faces more built than sculpted from puffs of acrid smoke

shield themselves under profane, polycotton shrouds;

hiding from fluorescent figments of the imagination

as their train tunnel eyes unmake the truths

concocted by their slang-drenched bluster.

Push bar to open: the shadows rush in to cling

to the edges of where light is enthroned amongst

all the banter and merrymaking which merely

echoes a long forgotten curse which turned every,

single word you said into a prelude of the end.

Ripping your memory from my pillows is like

a suicide jumper never hitting the ground;

that fraction of a second extended into perpetuity

where consequence and cause are exactly the same

and all I have to remember are things I want to forget.  

Promise

Even the shadows tremble

when Time unfurls it's blood-steep arms,

and the clock with its twitching hands

at once beckons and warns.

In the digits' distant world,

all things fall apart, and You

who where once the centre

I no longer can hold.

The Old Ones

There as the dinner table is set

you see it in the middle distance,

someone nodding in agreement

with something they haven't heard.

There's nothing worse then being

normal or "grown up" you know,

as drinks are precisely poured and

food sarcastically served.

You watch the death of friends,

but not all at once or certainly,

as they grow fat and mindless

on a diet of pleasantries and lies.

Dim chatter rattles in the windows as

the neon-plated exo-skeletons of flats

under construction protrude from the dirt

like foreign stereotypes of English teeth.

"Lovely" evenings end all too soon

but not for the woman in the carpark,

stood there on and off for ten years as

the sentinel of a memory that no one ever had.