write

mundane files

Used to feel so easy

write it all out

like spilt ink washing

across a page

or

ants in milk

oh whatever

now there’s cats

in my periphery

snakes

along the side-walls

and that psychic wound

of being here-there

heartbreak of the expat

Returned

like misdirected mail

never quite healed

no one feels

or maybe it’s just

a private burnout thing

yet I’m far

from sanctuary

or even

sanatorium

and the fire

or is it cars swishing by

on a hot evening

far from

a busy road

a capital

a mental load

a buzz

Is that why, cuz

I don’t have ideas anymore

they’re twisted and

unoriginal

the worst

worse than snakes or cats or cars

no imagination

please-

save me

no one published

this shit

anyway

thought my stories were

just OK

and the funny thing is

the poems are

here

while stories suffer

the yearning

the keening

buffer, buffer, buffer

it never ends

-please

Save As

I’m sinking in sunlight

creeping into

the mundane

and driving on the wrong side

in my head

all over again

 

Photo by Dilara Yilmaz on Unsplash

industrial abandon

missing my trips to the city

and how

the abandoned cokeworks

rotting away

by the train tracks

sent my thoughts

to that place

where things were so different

a secret world

I want to write about

immersed

in an industrial

wastelandscape

how can I capture this imagined

space

I don’t have those skills

or patience

scrolling in my bed

past my headache

reading about runner’s face

and Nick Cave

and grief

and grace

 

Photo by Darla Hueske on Unsplash 

Undertow

my sands are shifting

and the tides

always the same but

look at the minutiae

different every time

so how

do you justify or feel safe

always, it vibrates

buzzing with life or at

mechanical pace

like the train rattles by my place

at night, dark speedthought tangles trace

catch and drag

that undertow when sleep

is lying backwards

underwater and

looking up at the light

nowhere else to hide

and no place to return to

do, do, do, do

ideas massed like kelp piles, stinking high

how do I…

where is, why,

just write.