Deliquescent Bodies (Love Parade) I hope for night; it comes; it is here; it comes with rain & river, & the lights are electric. I am offered a drink & the mercury blue neon over the door catches my eye, tears open the retina, imbuing the optic nerve with cold cathode gas, ionising my nervous system to the limit. Breathing carbon dioxide, I metabolize my own body. I am a pillar of ether by the exit door. But I’m not alone. We all matter less than we did before,

Something Less Than Human I came, through sea waves, misty-brained, My love songs crumbling to shadows, And I was halved to something Less than human. How could I grow Into something more than what I had become? Impossible now, the diminishing returns Of what was given me at birth. Smaller than a baby now, more of a creature Belonging to the forests, of stumps And traps and blood, the day-moon Hanging over me like a sad reminder. I was lost, having become lost, and

On the other side of the optic glass, Ishmael's albino whale of the sky Leprously blemished, ghastly white.

Coldly satanic is the phantom moon whose hollow shell is the alien body of a god who hatched and died too early.

The Blinded Samson (1912) by Lovis Corinth Samson 1 The LORD is a living dread whose absence in Shiloh is more potent than his presence. Notwithstanding the regenerative Spirit whose intimate impulse is felt by the inner man, no angelic return or godly descent precedes the rousing motions of body and temple torn joint by joint. No use for Delphic oracle or word from Jerusalem. 2 Absorbed by the moon, the sun gives up its light, the stars their sweetness, and the sky is d

A Skein of Black Water A Skein of Black Water The moon appeared to float on a skein of black water and a wind sang a high pitch B, 246.94 Hertz. And something else – a distant police car? Or a muffled bell tolling the lost river Dene?

The North Is Rain strikes terraces stacked in brown brick And wind blows through the underpass. Two fat-breasted pigeons Fly over York Minster; a single seagull Squats in Speke. I’m out there burying neolithic arrowheads On Kersal Moor & freshwater shrimping In the Irwell, or I’m cruising Upriver, crazy as a Lune & sauntering A Sunday Through Morecambe Bay, my bat-black cape Flapping all the way to Whitby Abbey. Of note is tonight’s Full fr

Night Sketches Over Lytham St Annes, Liverpool and Leeds, Manchester too, there's a full moon in white light suspended and all tonight’s stars are out, wannabe stars on dirty side-streets in designer gear, in dirty black cabs on dirty black roads. Drive too fast brother and you don’t see a cat’s green eyes rub past the dustbins; or a fox ethereal in light electric, sniffing a chicken bone. High on pleasure of the sensuous kind, they go on, each