Reuben Talking to the Idaho seminary boys With a twig from the chamber and a flower from the tracks, Neatly-pressed cassocks curtain Converse boots, And their eyes beam vigour and their words ring bright, With their eyes in rapture on a gaze so fixed, And their skater-teen dialect intoning their faith, At the coach station underpass we smile and diverge, A kernel of faith, a dead flower and a stick. On the twilight coach home from Ozwiecm. Does the sleeper-flower recall being once a mere stem? Peregrinations 'cross the pebble shore, The sunset, a Blakean period smear, Astrewn with tee-pee pagan beacons and pyres, Built by kids from the gift of a sunk timber liner. Murmurations of birds like we never saw, Gather dense, danse macabre, above the old pier. A teenager sketching a pile of old tyres, We walk arm-in-arm past the twenty-four-hour diner As the sky beds down, a chill plummets southwards. Through the pub window, over a cigarette, mouthing: 'I love you' will never suffice. An essence so rich cannot be put on ice In the lexicon of our lobotomised yelp. I'm kicking my boots free of starfish and kelp. In the early shot of the dawn chorus. We're aware the world's a playground built for us. What the twilight coach from Ozwiecm taught us: We're humbled that life seems to implore us And them, to keep on keeping on.

Poor Jason, Wrote this song at seventeen, dedicated to all the love he's dreamed.. Poor Jason, Wrote this song at seventeen, dedicated to all the love he's seen.. "It's warm in here. The air is clean. The hay is dry. The view pristine. I while my days In useful ways Contending with A dry malaise. Your absence breathes Into my eyes The weary mist Of compromise. Poor Jason, wrote this song at seventeen... I don't regret. I just forget. But come the night, Deluged, my sight Returns in screeching Solar flares. Whiled hours beseeching You to care. Bereft, I flew, Guess I left you, Some months before You fled from view. Poor Jason, wrote this song at seventeen... Goodnight. Morphine chokes my vista still. Anaesthetise the heart that kills. Goodnight.

Tobias 'In any creature's radar of desire, That behind the pane is most sublime. Skin tested by the coals that boast the fire Lies balded-nerve and mercy-slave to time.' Tobias saw the sky as iambic pentameter. Like he ever meant to hurt her. Tobias slammed a fist, a pen and then a fist again. And cursed the scent of men. 'If libido is a litmus for the soul Then man should fix his faith to sterner spines. Is love derobed of flesh an empty bowl In whose dust 'Lover' chooses to see wine?' Tobias heaved a sigh as even he fell lost for words. Of boys he'd always dream. Tobias eased the silence, musing 'sex is too absurd'. Apalled the page with screams. 'If love is letting one be loved by all, And loving is accepting of the whole, Then maybe we won't ever love at all, As consciousness alone castrates the soul.' Tobias, suddenly pious, took a humble step away, Yelled 'man, these words are gay'. Tobias, hating liars, tore the page with rabid nails. 'Of course love bears its ails.' Tobias lit a fire, all callow by the coals, Plunged his hand in whole. Tobias got all high. As the blister whispered sleet, He grabbed another sheet. 'If all we have is what we'll never know, Let love be the last agony we throw.' Tobias eeked a cry upon concluding in such style. A veiled and vapour smile. He laid his pen to page and head to rest, A born aesthete and rather self-impressed. Tobias dreamed of 'why' as an epitaph that night. He hoped to make that 'was'. Tobias said to one boy, when asked 'how'd you know we're right?' Smiled and said 'because'. 'In any boy's barometer of being, Seeking the sublime engenders pain. A pupil scorched by love is truly seeing: A pupae flexing wings in The First Rain.'

Otis in cloaven stilleto, Drags his feet, 'cross the asphalt, Fissures the street. A cheesewire incision, Reaching deep into molten black chambers, He tumbles and snaps his leash, father cries 'No!'. Below throned on calciferous mount, Within cowel and crevatte, The underworld janitor watching him fall, Puts his claw to his craw, Clears his throat with a thuderclap, From the igneous gulf he he extends a 'hello' Otis tiara'd in amnesiac starlings stands, Dusts his knees, rubs his eyes, Ruffles his razor-wire hair, takes a sneeze, Takes in a lung of the putridest, foulest and stagnantest air, And his guts start to throw. Gazing back, glued to his throne Like an airfix gone bad, The Bone Harvester, kelp-clad and dignified Smiles at the boy through black-pudding lips, Points at his skinny white hips, Hollers 'Dance for me or I'll never let you go.' Under ragged saber sky, Lightning cracks like a blade On the roof of the cavern, Seals shut the whole hole he made, Darkness descends like an elevator Severed from its wire, Otis lurches All baffled anxiety, fast stubs his toe. The Harvester hacks out a bellicose roar, 'Only losers get bruises, you're no good to me Black and blue'. A circle of candles three-foot In diameter encloses the boy. 'Now dance!' Shrieks the janitor. 'Go!". 'Now listen' says Otis 'I don't mean to patronise, To dance without music is ludicrous and unwise', Rather like pulling your underpants over your pantalons, Or doing a decathlon under any circumstances. NO.' The Harvester wrigglin on sternum-backed chair, Wears perturbed on his brow runs a hand through hijiki hair, 'Noone's requested this prior to you, I'm all vexed, all my 78's Are warped to fuck, I wish you luck finding song in this squalor, Not even a heartbeat to follow, no wind you can harmonise to, Just the arrhythmic clatter of bones and the hissing of molten stew, One day soon that could be you. Otis blinks his huge lashes, his eyes like molasses, He keens in his resonant tenor an E, quaked the cave Like Wagnerian Valkyries once shattered glasses, The bone-strewn floor shudders in synch to The oscillating tremors of terrible echo, and sweet sustain Shimmers like jewels in the ether, The janitor weeps, At his purgatory beneath a world governed by music. As Otis sings over the echo a chord stakes out light In the grisly grim portent of night, and angels are birthed in the beam, Streaming forth a dawn chorus in argentum filigree, Bathing the Janitor in sound, bones are bleached and the ground Thins to ochre, the song's a real choker, a ballad of the virtue of song, In the time-honoured style of that Orphean one. The cavern collapses and Otis set free, climbs the beam of lightsound, To the surface, whose ground still hums luminous with song From the subterranean goings-on of that afternoon, As he tilts his head skyward, he glimpses the moon Through passing black cloud, in whose shroud he sees wrapped, A warm, calcified smile, hears a laugh through a thunderclap, The janitor is loose, cushioned safe in the airbag of heaven. A truce between silence and sound has occured, between stasis and motion, The land and the ocean duet, a sound Otis will never forget.

Michael Michael craves his heart ablaze. Metronomic, flat, mundane, Life creeps him out. Michael necked a pill. Seratonin filled, laughed again, Shat it out. Michael thins to wire, His eyes start to burn. In dreams his heart implores The world not to turn. His appetite exceeds his fire. Exponentially fix-fixated. Once the sky is elevated, How's it hanging man? Sex-slave, bareback and broke. Michael's leash extends as he chokes, A weary song. Michael chased a dream. Dragons don't remain serene Beasts very long. Michael snaps his leash, His head tumbles thick. Duvet festers, lamp goes dim, Tragic great white hope Extinguished way too quick. Self-abasing, nauseated, Dreamer snuffs out dream. Behavioural model decimated, Baptised in the bloodstream anew. Soul transfusion, good sea views, Warm fine sand and moist, saline air. Michael is recycled, Only this time his lungs pump.dead air Michael is reborn, Under scarlet dawn. His eyes scarred and sewn. Michael scours the surf. Limp hands comb the turf. He's alive but alone.

Jordan took flight in the passage of night, Left his Lucy sleeping. Treacle-feet, fever-eyed, Blessed with a need to taste real life. Emotions clutched tight to his chest As his Levis slip slack, knees quake with lust. Palms cradle cheeks, in the motel lift, Tongue tracing pleats. Jordan fixates on the cash he'll invest In retreat. Of boys that he's loved, this one's Kindly and careful and Meekly keen to trust. Chasing him crazily, racily under the quilt. Jordan neglects to recall for a moment The blood spilt. Lucy's in bed stuffing pills in her head, There's no guilt in being free. Assimilated all city-style, Faceless in shades. Supine under sulphur beam, Contemplates changes he's made. Downcast and drunken a tear falls for Each life he's played with, puckishly Gender nostalgia has clouded His leanings with shame. Is libido as fluid as the river That lent him his name? Can morphing his sexual identity Remain a game, indefinitely? Bivalve in taste and yet spiritually chaste He's adrift. Thinks he might find soul Within any black hole's seismic shift. Sacrificing a general ascent for A temporary lift, his heart errodes. Jordan fucks blindly, insatiably, Something to do. Sprinting away from the truths He should be running to. Buries he's cock in the first pocket He comes to, dumbly fires his load. I guess he wants love but Commitment belies compromise. His heart's restless, myopic and Fugitive flame steers his eyes. Empathy shot with betrayal By those who should lavish him with care. Beauty transcending trust, Measure a man by desire. Gauge his intent, subtract innocence, Assume he's a liar. Cynical, oversexed, paranoid Heart wrapped in wire, The poet's snare. Jordan seeks love in a richness Above and abound. Jordan finds solace in the marriage Of vision and sound. Jordan's a good kid, I know and that's why I intend to be right there.

This song is for transubstantiation. Take into your head what you become. This goes out to the poet's salvation. Countering the nebulous and numb. This song is for love's emancipation. Freed of all the hellspawn of the mind. This song is to wreak annihilation Of the forces nature deems unkind. You know who you are. You know who you are. Tonight we are alone together.... Ethan said to Lucy, 'Girl, I don't know what you want from me'. Lucy smiled, 'I just want you to be instead of wanting to be'. Ethan turned upon his heal quick, Lucy turned another trick, And all the others died or fucked or laughed or cried, The stairwells creaking: Fables never die, as long as we ask why We are. Tonight we are alone together...