Poem: The Ages of Print

Tomorrow's chip wrapping is the first to go
yesterday's dead already coddle my roe.

Then there's the leaflets for food so fast
The green bin has gobbled them before they've hit the mat.

Porn, crumpled under holly – abandoned pups, dirty eggs laid dead of night,
cunts torn out, blacked out or worse, moustached and goggled. Scorched minge; glorious half-life.

Next, those that last through being overlooked.
Christian comic books. The Women's Library's unfiled tracts.

Annuals which hibernated teenage years to adulthood's irony.
Hardbacks cannot be chucked. Illustrated Treasure Islands

heft the same taboo as Reader's Digests, damming up the chazzers.
Signed Histories of the English Speaking Peoples, yellowing

duodecimally in fire-alarmed cellars. Ciphers as yet unconjectured.
Value these: Dead Sea Scroll, Euromillions winner, love letter.

Now, we place this poem. Bonfire, museum. I trust your soft clean hands.



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I wanted to write something about all this printed material we're surrounded by, how we sort it, and maybe what it feels about itself without knowing it. I'm quite happy to have written a poem that's not facetious. But genuinely, let me know what you think.

(Diplomatic immunity) There's fucking in the dorm

and you can screw in your earplugs, but you can't turn off
your curiosity. He imagines the French girl murmuring
'Yes, circumvent my Maginot line, steal through my
Ardennes,' and as the German pistons in, recalls the
Spanish girl gyrating her drunken arse near his face
as he pretended to snore, heart palpitating, how he'd had
to wait till she and her friends had all collapsed, sleeping
the wedding cake reek of Amaretto, before stealing to the showers
to crank it out just to grab five hours before the morning train.
'I'm too old for this shit, Riggs' he quotes to himself, thinks
'as these kids won't have even heard of Lethal Weapon, so
that quote is its own proof. I am here for the renaissance,
but they are closer to their birth than I am to my puberty;
my death may be nearer still.' He topples an empty
Liebfraumilch on his way to the bogs.

Some kind of Voyage up my own Arsehole

Leap! raw red piles like a bouncy castle threshold
There the sweetcorn of self-doubt
A trapped bolus of indecision (like a Haywain)
The black scabs of burst hubris,
Five undigested meals cooked by dead girlfriends.
a Hungry Hungry Hippos ball
sprouts of despair
fat fat fat &c.
Lampreys and tapeworms tying themselves in slimy sexy knots.
Dante and Beatrice, both voiced by David Jason.
Duct tape all up one side
An appendix with its own appendix (?)
Pancreatic lipase dunked
in a bit of yellow feather.
Moonraker panel,
a different obscure reference.
Bit that looks like lichen,
like compost, like Quaid,
lego man's hand,
caving in bit,
dense black bits,
A key.