1. The Cotton Optic

Brittle air for blue lungs
Shuttle fare for radiant tongues
Untie your sleeping sores to wake up scratching
Rejecting death reign in a moment of bewilderment

Redeem (redeem)
Demand (demand)
Contort (contort)
Reality (reality)

Basement and backyard skymachine bleachers
A corroded drone is all that is left
Abate my eyes with bear traps and snares
The fear pounds in your chest
Like claustrophobic demons

Brittle air for blue lungs
Shuttle fare for radiant tongues
Untie your sleeping sores to wake up scratching
Rejecting death reign in a moment of bewilderment
And the fear pounds in your chest
Like claustrophobic demons

The mummified trauma of daylight delusions
Dilapidated posture dazzled by filth
Baking soda smile – Jackknife in the passenger seat
Sit back and watch retired ambitions croak

Redeem
Demand

It hits like a kick in the gut
Smashed through the floor
To find (out) what I was looking for
Rusty brain matter floating in rainwater

Redeem (redeem)
Demand (demand)
Contort (contort)
Reality (reality)

Fascination is wearing thin
Hag-ridden abscessed teeth of hope
The wrecking ball toll of crushed coal dreams
Decoding the pearls in the whirlwind
Disposable antidotes as fragmental cutthroats
These plastic superhero suits are starting to choke
Choke choke choke...

Redeem (redeem)
Demand (demand)
Contort (contort)
Reality (reality)

2. Brass Dogs

Street lamps stoop and kiss the street
Cover their eyes in the blazing heat
Turn the night against the sky
Fold it through the moon
The light slides down the reptile tiles
And gently lie

Run you through the streets of night
Run from the sound of laughing
Knock you out and hold you down
I hear brass dogs barking

Break your head against the wall
Strike the night it's blinding
The stars are sharp the moon rotates
It doesn't glide it's grinding

I've wasted time within your mind
Time that I came clean
Show this stallion city buck
And trample my subversion dream

What's it like to shout your name
Ten thousand voices asking?
I try to speak it but I hear
The brass dogs barking near

Down around the back
Stand up pushed down
Backs against the wall
Pushed over pulled back
In the alley taken behind
Like a puck on your back
That turns as you turn
Turning with you
Like an imp on your back
That titters as you turn
Worming into you

Trample city flay your hooves
Call us home
Our city, our city, our city
Our city breeds a twisted creed
Corpuscular creatures seethe

Try to sleep then just be silent
Coast the edge of dreams
I'll curl around you but I hear
The brass dogs barking near
I'll curl around you but I hear
The brass dogs barking near

Trample city flay your hooves
Call us home
Our city, our city, our city

Down around the back
Stand up pushed down
Backs against the wall
Pushed over pulled back
In the alley taken behind
Like a puck on your back
That turns as you turn
Turning with you
Like an imp on your back
That titters as you turn
Worming into you

Tin cans skitter the ground
Mimic the sound
Of brass dogs barking
The brass dogs are barking...
The brass dogs are barking...

3. An Enigma In Brine

We are lost within the flesh
Led by the sloping of an inner arm
No face outside these eyes
No past outside tonight
We are as we paint us
A vision installed
In many ways stunned
To say it would be to sing
As green meteors swim
Gently up to him
Mirrored surfaces
Who is within them?
Hands in water peel my skin
My teeth and my hair
My eyes move like lunar seas
The mirror moves and I jump in
To catch my breath under the sky

Wash scars and use this eye
Roll it from the navel to the pubis
Circumnavigate (the) wet hip
Turn these bodies around
Dash them on the shore
Watch their slender centres
Spark and burst
And slide their tattered skin
Between barnacles and limpid

...And remember what still
Grows and thrives
An enigma in brine
Past this daily decreasing horizon
I am image I

Wash scars and use this eye
Roll it from the navel to the pubis
Circumnavigate (the) wet hip
Turn these bodies around
Dash them on the shore
Watch their slender centres
Spark and burst
And slide their tattered skin
Between barnacles and limpid

This is where they want to lie
To love the winds and the tides

4. A Cloud-Formed Teardrop Asylum

Tired souls hunched in familiar bricks
Drowned in sleeping sickness silver skeleton palace of mist
Heart-shaped carnival of sores locked up in cupboard doors
Looking up at the starry sky won't make your scarred life
Light up bright

A thirst for questions have their black reply –-
Hide in cloud-mouthed skyscraper
Haven for no thoughts but mine
A muscular memory of February
When proud absence left me
(We are alone amongst millions...)
Subway stations filled with forced equations for my earth to burst
The retina is so hungry I could eat a hearse
Peeling adverts perfumed with roman numerals
As we shuffle off to our jobs like funerals

Drawn by wounds to the throat of ghosts
(We) lost our way back to the vault of youth
Codes forged in my minerals when the earth grew old
Love's labours lost back when lives for lies were sold (our lives were sold)

Kodak coloured souvenirs
From a furnished furnace of fears
For learning to be mad
Is the poverty of happiness

And I know that it is clear
That I'm not here
In this cloud-formed invisible asylum of tears

I am ready to face my fears
As my consciousness disappears
To the internal sanctuary of seers
Where the clouds last for years and years

"I placed a blue death mask there in my book of hours
That those who dream of an earthly paradise may read it as men"

And I know that it is clear
That I'm not here
In this cloud-formed invisible asylum of tears

I am ready to face my fears
As my consciousness disappears
To the internal sanctuary of seers
Where the clouds last for years and years

5. Aeon In Cinders

Washed in weeping
Aeons of ashes
Pull a curtain
Across the sky

Cadavers crawling
Like creatures intrigued
Living like fossils
In pools of kerosene

Getting to know well
The geology of hell
Mapping the porous moon-
Leprous dermis of life

Terror and dread
Sick to the teeth
Perish the thought
Die or dream

Set it all ablaze
Set the world in flames

6. Tyburn

I am touched
Not by the dirt beetle
Nor the crevice of night
But my empathy is with a star
Confiding on my shoulder

Sound travels down this hill
And the wind rolls up it
Trembling with my budding hands
That shake about my head

Curl up
Between my gnarled thighs
Dirt beetle or lost child
This time is slow and my voice
Is inaudible
Six feet deep

Under the ground; gurgling
Your palm pushes near my toe
Shake dirty curly child
Through the night grow(s)
And through the night it grows...

I think that (the) spring is five days walk from here
I'll wait through and watch it come undone
There's a frozen whisper near me
That will chuckle come daylight

Curl up
Between my gnarled thighs
Dirt beetle or lost child
This time is slow and my voice
Is inaudible
Six feet deep

In a near ditch
You tilt your head upward
And shake my bony hand
With your blackbird glove

Curl up
Between my gnarled thighs
Dirt beetle or lost child
This time is slow and my voice
Is inaudible
Six feet deep

7. Radium

Devoured heavens that haul the shores of my thought
In the empire of night I'm a victim of an audible heart
The building's nuclear gleam
Cruel houses of lost prayers
In temples of a nervous breakdown

I tread the boards of a dream
I kiss the mouths of dust

Radium
A spiral of human continuum
Radium
Occurs in the alkaline of imagination
Radium

Radium

The corrugated emptiness of magnetic lonely locusts
That catch my breath
Like daydreams of chattering aspens
At an opulent hospice
We'll nurse our hearts
From the fallout of sunsets

Radium
A spiral of human continuum
Radium
Occurs in the alkaline of imagination
Radium

Radium

Sometimes startled by our own darkness
Death has neither an end or a beginning
I must be dreaming, because I need myths and sickness...

A father must feather his followers and feelings...
To manufacture and create nuclear fusion in the minds or radiation therapists

I can't think anymore
I can't dream anymore
I can't love (you) anymore

8. Ghost Formula

Heaven-sent sunset red
Spin in the evening under the windowsill
Hawthorn valley floor
Rain beaded grass
Soft breath, motionless and wet
Empty jaws of the rivers maw
A backwards memory
Like Arabic writing
Tears of diamonds
Vanish into the gardens
I remember once when I was young
Something was wrong

Under an old fence
The unlit labyrinth of nonsense
Unformed nouns and vowels
Drip into the floor
Like insects from the nest of my skull
The light looked different in those days
As if an idea could imagine for itself
And in the afternoon
We all took off our skin
And set sail for Neptune
Using our flesh for a sail

The drizzle of wheels in the heat
Summer is the cruelest city of deceit
That pains that you claim will reclaim you
That gains that you gain will regain you

I'm making ghosts out of clay
To scare my past away