sometimes when I go see god
an i am smilin smilin
pretty pretty on my toes
an she aint please to see me
giving me the old flat eye
an i start thinkin same old same old
i am bad an piss off god
get me all crunch up like that
send me back into alone
til one day someday in the blue
the stars have moved an i remember aha
god jus god
doin always her blindin god thing
helpin showin pointin out
where I still bent up crunch up not a queen
an i aint bad an she aint pissed
an there we are jus counting days an rolling dice
an i come back to smilin smilin
dancing dancing on my toes

she said :
open wide your arms
like this
(showing how)
in a gesture of receiving
and I will give you
the World *

* she did

this town is working roundtheclock
to keep out living
and something here is dying – me
the black and grey the neat lace shoes
the walking fast the always somewhere going
thinking mending future fighting so hard to keep it out
the foreign undesirable detained indefinite at the lip
i’ve started going round the back to where the bins are
smelling what it is I will remember
what it is we’re made of what is living
the crying screaming bleeding heart cut open
joy of what it is to be a human something
in me mourns the place I used to live as
filling in a sandwich safe between the whorehouse
open like a frontsoff dollshouse
and the battered women’s shelter
the men all night like baying dogs
swaying on their hindlegs lola
i know you can hear me bitch
come down here so I can break your fucking head
drunk and throwing bottles at the stars

yours is every mouth
and mine is every flesh
and ours is every bad love
ever manmade
and ground into every bobbled fibre
that does the good work
and keeps this earth from spinning wild free
off its fucking axis
into any single
howling night

a friend’s been reading my poems
i like then he said
some he went on
look like they only took one second to write
they did i said
he laughed and said
i still like them
as in despite
and as though somehow
he’d stuck out his pale neck.
i looked at him until i had remembered the rules:
a week should take seven days
fedex overnight
and a poem longer than one second to make

before language
before all this got shore up
bird tree mine his
hope
before any that got put on
out where sky an water same same
out here kneeling
in the dark blaze earth
gonna pluck out new sounds
cut new runnels
same blood thirsty now
quick for new veins
boiling to bust open old words
get down
quick quick
to that one
wild
sea