Gossip

     What we heard

Was not what he said, She said.

Nor was it what they said he said she said,

Nor what he said they said she said, okay?

It started as a whisper, a loving word between them,

A sweet little blossom

That turned into the biggest, ugliest tree with

Dark twisted roots

It’s not what he really said to her because then she would not be so upset

So I think what we heard was probably just someone’s own sick version of events.

What really happened was…

Look, you didn’t hear this from me. 

Phidelius

The man in the ragged clothes looks like God

                         Or an older version of Jesus

                         As he dips deep into the rubbish

He shuffles backwards, unsteady on his feet,

                        Underneath his grubby robe, a bound leather book hides

He removes it from the stained and dirty cloth,

Carefully removing it from under the rope that keeps it to him

Holds it aloft, between filthy fingers,

Climbs aboard a plastic carton,

His eyes watery with love,

Or maybe hate, or maybe stardust, or whatever he’s been snorting today,

“Here is the word!’ he shouts

As the ambulances scream past, lights all flashing.

                     ‘Here is the word… the WORD, friends!’

‘And the word, my friend’, he spits to the unwashed,

The abused, and the damned on our street

‘Is the truth. What I hold in my hand

Is the Book Of Phidelius.’

‘

 ‘Whatever, old man!’ Cry the street rats.

‘Whatever,

no truth here for me!’

And the actual rats aren’t even here anymore.

They don’t want to hear this. They’ve all gone. Retreated .

Back to the sewer for a fag and a quick nap and Mum’s cakes.

He spills and chokes and coughs out parable after parable. He’s not even holding the damned book anymore.

Pretty little pieces of trash like sweets chewed swallowed and thrown up

That’s what we are and we have no rules, no authority figures, and certainly no God.

Preachers better beware- no false prophets and all that shit. No redemption for the likes of us,

Whatever this means it’s like watching TV

It never happens here.

                 This man is a force of nature all on his own,

He flourishes like an actor in the final throes of Shakespeare

He leaps, stamps and twirls, it’s like choreography,

Even the street rats are quiet

Their pasty faces and dull eyes show a flicker of life;

They are in love with this thing, this performance;

‘Yeah Fee-Dell! Fucking talk to me!’

Some girl is high and she’s getting well into this

She’s got a filthy face plastered in makeup

She stumbles on her patent platforms, nearly breaking her ankle to cross the road and dance around and around him,

The cigarette in her hand making little burning circles in the air.

                                    

Nil By Mouth

Not a drop can pass my lips 

No more diving into the glass

so I can see and touch the bottom

it’s smoothness it’s coldness on my fingertips

I collide with ice cubes on my ascent

Now I’ve climbed up and over the condensation on the rim

I can no longer taste the liquid inside. 

I can no longer smell it, nor feel it in my blood

bubbling under the surface to make me a madman,

To make me a crier, a spitter of curses

to make me an abuser of fences, doors and windows.

I am no longer attuned to the sensory overload 

of the vodka-and- lime

I am no more a drinker than a dying man in the desert.