Delirium Tremens

Elk Arse Vet

I'm a writer from Catford and a poet out of Lewisham, where I started writing on the streets, like a budget Charles Bukowski. A mental with labels, Pinhead with Post-It notes, and an anagram of myself, I'm a humanist and an apolitical Chomskyite. As a scientific atheist, I believe science and religion can co-exist. With so many looming existential threats to our planet, I write of the end of days, while trying to imagine a world where humanity might unite in a common cause to save the home we share with those who were here before. In a more positive future, I see a fairer redistribution of wealth and a universal basic income financed by a tax levied on those who collect our personal data. I'm a liberal socialist, an anarchist in the name of freedom and liberty against fascism. I write portent and hope, fiction and faction, under my own name, and as a freelance copywriter and ghostwriter. I've had over 60 stories published online and in print. I've published two novels (one critically-acclaimed), two anthologies and an award-winning children's book. I'm working on other books and I continue to write short stories and poems. This blog is where I give everything a home, a logbook of my real and surreal journeys. This is my life, and you're welcome to it.

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Poem

2 Comments Posted on March 15, 2020March 15, 2020 Poetry

Actual Bodily Harm by doggerel

POETRY

I write poetry whether anyone asks for it or not. If they didn’t, then it’s usually for me. And still if they didn’t, I’ll ask – only a very few people – if they’d like me to. Sometimes they say okay, because I can write poetry which is violent, makes them take another look, and see how others see. Bodily harm in poetry is just invisible tattoos with a blunter instrument…

THE INVISIBLE TATTOOIST

Broken Mirror Poem Impact

There’s a difference between wanting to be helped and being found. When help doesn’t need to be wanted but it knows it can, then it longs to be given. I can’t help writing poetry, even in terrible dreams. I’ll always be a writer who can find beauty in horror and vice versa in the mirror.

Leave a comment Posted on March 4, 2020 Poetry

Tending the Echo Beach garden

POETRY

Swimming through the grass, cutting names into trees, writing words in the sand, before they’re swept out to sea…

My Surreal Shark Shawn Byous

…a park bench, floating in the ocean, but the names we carved in the bark will always be there. Otherwise we’re alone.

1 Comment Posted on March 4, 2020March 4, 2020 Poetry

No walking frame required

POETRY

The weather is cloudy where the sun never shines, wherein lives a poet of sorts, writing about mutual facial weather events, tears by proxy and fair weather friends, right outside your door.

“We’re not truly gone until we’re forgotten, and the grief we feel is joy. We don’t know that because they’re not our tears…”

SLEEPWALKERS

Sleepwalker Cloud

I believe the departed still walk among us (most recently, my friend and neighbour, and my brother-in-law; before them, more friends and family, with my auntie Margaret apparently paying a visit whenever I’m watching a royal documentary on TV), and most of the time we don’t know they’re there, because they live in a different physical form. When we’re reminded of them, I think that’s because we’re subconsciously aware that they’re with us, that they’ve spoken and we heard them, or that we felt them touch us. My dad’s still around but he’s alone. I hope he can hear me.

I believe we’re never truly gone until we’re forgotten, and the moments of grief we feel must be joy for the departed, because they know they’re being remembered, like we’re waking them from a long sleep. We’re crying tears of joy, but we don’t know that because they’re not our tears.