Flickerswitch

Flicks of electricity,
Legs of light wave by.
Bugs crawl the walls,
I sit chasing them in the corner of my eye.

Exhaustion is so close to madness,
Similarities blur that fateful line.
Black spots and legs head ceiling way,
Snap my neck to show there's nothing at all.

Melted thoughts drip up into the corners,
Light bulbs reveal cobwebs in my mind.
Midnight comes and goes,
With my state of conscious and the morning tide.

Highlighters and Tipex

Don't know why I'm sitting here,
I question who I'm doing this for.
Is this what I dived into,
As I double over to stare at the floor.

Text books roar with laughter,
Their codes mean nothing to me.
I sometimes wish I'd been a painter,
Then from legislation I would be free.

Pen runs out as my eyes close,
Inspiration tumbles off the page.
Barriers that no-one else built up,
Clamp tight to hold in my rage.

Casual failure burns like acid,
Retake the time you can't get back.
Paper controls your wage slip,
While confidence fades to black.

Thought Infusions

Watching you glide and dance through the water,

Cloud of essence in your wake.

Synchronised swimmer on a tag,

Staring into space for the two and a half minutes I wait.

Tea cushion you calm me,

Life saver at 6pm.

Ending of bad days,

Solidifying peace in my porcelain.

Chase bubbles with my teaspoon,

Doesn’t that mean that I’m rich?

Thoughts dissipate into my eyelids,

No sugar to hide the bitterness.

Psychography

The blank page is stained,

Ink bleeds into spiders limbs.

Spreading through the fibres,

With arachnidian pace.

Beige pulp tainted,

With the neatest script.

Obsessive pause before touching the page,

Then letting go for words to take control.

Loosing time to pages,

Hours to rhyme.

As the heart like cartridge,

Drips into words.

Tracing my signature,

Like figures on skates.

Deliberate Accident

I heard a failed firework,

Went to the window to twitch the nets.

A razor chill ran up my spine,

What was a cold, black discarded peak of tyres,

Had become a blazing funeral pyre.

Windows blinked at the reflections,

Flames dwarfing street lamps at midnight.

As the buildings hide out of sight,

Behind pillars of smoke that dance in the moonlight.

It makes you sweat with unease,

As insignificant humans try to tame the writhing beast.

It snaps and screams,

Then begins to moan.

As it meets the inevitable mud pool of fate.

Drowning thousands in profit,

To sign the claim that saves you.

Decades of family hours,

Crackle into an anonymous shop shell.

The Dwindle

Add it to the pile,

Black gadget obsession.

Replace what you already have,

Devoid of necessity.

Re-enforcing hurried lives,

So quick to share a passage compared.

With invisible glue you paste on facebook or twitter,

Vocal discussions reduced to discarded litter.

Text speech for your stories out loud,

Have stolen voice box, Braille or your best friends reading hours.

Cd’s and cassettes of audio book fame,

Abandoned in libraries of yesterday.

Tubes in a decade,

Full of tombstone clutching commuters.

Sitting in row upon row,

Waiting for what to do next from their computers.

A minute to buy, download then read,

Why such a hurry and craze for speed?

You’re eradicating the pilgrimage of the famed emporium isle,

Wandering through bookshops to pause and browse for a while.

Up to three and a half thousand books to be stored,

I was thinking when booking a flight last week,

How on earth will I get my bookcase on bored?

Reality check.

Not all five stars,

In your Amazonian skies.

Whispers of software ice ages,

And an electronic pinstriped abyss.

Your infatuation with convenience

Takes four months to fix.

No crinkles, rips or raindrop foot prints,

Only perfection without grain or pulp.

No longer will typos or double chapters,

Create priceless one offs for the collectors vault.

I tried to fold over a corner,

But neoprene snapped like my knuckles stuck in a queue.

Instead a pixelated angle of an impostor,

An ironically clever dog-eared fool.

The involvement of accidental bath water,

Has now come to an end.

Will you snuggle into the radiator,

To be read once again?

Fantastic memories of autographs,

And childhood waiting,

Hugging my indelible census of signatures so close,

To glimpse the fame in ink I was anticipating.

And what happens now,

Are we reduced to a cd pen signature per screen?

At a tonne a piece nail them to your wall,

Next to the crucified article staring from your pin board.

I caress lines of script with my finger,

Smile at doodles and frown at crossword scrawl.

No fiddly buttons,

Just me and my humble pencil.

The breeze turns my page,

Avoiding the unsquare digit dance you must fight.

With your jumped up flash drive’s E-ink,

Emulating the true original,

But will yours survive the same luminescent centuries in time.

For Goodness Sake

For goodness sake,

I sit here running over memories.

In the dark at day,

And in the light at night.

Tormenting myself,

For what reason I don’t know.

Leave me alone,

They fly round my skull like ghouls.

Exorcism of the cranial artery required,

As I stare at my eye lids.

Wondering when it’ll all subside,

Its scrams into the silence,

Jabbering away at the back of my ears.

Faces snap,

Morph into someone else.

Can I hide in here for a while?

Running away didn’t help,

Staying here has made no difference.

What am I meant to do with this shark I can’t jump?

Confidence is in the eye of the beholder,

I bought a telephone I’m scared to use.

Competitive edge to beat what I don’t know you’re doing,

Racing blindly through the mental forest of posts.

Refusing to find an answer,

Even though I need to.

Stare at a light bulb,

What does it mean?

Its switched on I suppose.

I read a thousand alternative meanings to the words I feel,

It doesn’t change how they work.

Favourite things are back,

But no one to share them with.

Consciously erasing what people will judge,

And I re-wrote that bit twice.

Changing words to suit fashions,

It’s like an old t-shirt I love but only wear in doors.

For someone with short term memory issues,

I chuckle at the fact I remember every gory detail from years ago.

Forget what I wanted to buy this morning,

Yet can remember hatred I want to drop like a bag of rats.

Escapism holds the key I’m sure,

I’m using the things I love as an escape.

Which is good but not working,

There’s nothing left to confront.

Typing words for hours,

Hiding outside at work.

Sneaking into a teapot again,

Hoarding biscuits to try and keep me afloat.