Dubai Days manuscript

The Casual Tyranny of Modern Life



18th Dec 18


All the way in.

Scaly skin.

Key in hand.

Live and breathe it

Because making a stand

Against the brutal machine
Is futile.

Flustered, she runs

Into the cocoon of her home

And finds things to substitute

Her lack of salvation.

Anaesthetise.

The pillage continues.
Is this the complexity I’d thought I’d overcome?

The working classes shut up and knuckle down.

The privileged mince around

Bored by their own voluptuary.

The insanity, grotesquery,

Mercenary, greedery,
Flagrant stupidity,

Unabashed hypocrisy

And sanctimonious piety.

The Dead Don’t Mourn the Living



28th Oct 18


The dead don’t mourn the living as much
as the living do them. One day this life will be over.
Like writing in the sand when the waves wash in.
We are feathers on the tide. We go the way of all
flesh. Is that not the only universal irrefutable truth?
Our lives are meaningful only to us and only
for a bacterial moment of time in the infinite annals
of history. All our posturing ends in dusty graves.
All our bones are dust to make the soil more
nutritional for the worms we think so little of....

The Dead Have No Regrets


16th Nov 18


The ashes of your gods and kings

Have been scattered to the four winds.

Volutes of smoke on the crackling pyre
Have spiralled into the ether.

Your wisest, most valorous and most beautiful
Have vanquished under the sediments of time,

Their bones and relics
Crushed, pushed

Into the earth’s fiery bowels

To be gone forevermore.
The ages are tinctured with blood

And fractured with forgotten regret.

The esprit de corps
Has erupted into rebellion

And the rebels have been splayed
And hung out disavowed and disembowelled

For the flies to harvest upon

And defecate into the open wounds,

Their eggs.
The alpenglow of peace

Is fleeting at best.

What prevails above beauty
Is brutality,

Butchery,

Gaucherie,
Folly

And knavery.
The dead have no regrets.

The living live on in their deadness.

The Dead



Mar 18


My heart is crippled and immured

After the battery and neglect it endured.

The stars have torn the fabric of space to shreds.

Where perdition festers, purgatory digs up the dead.

The Disfigured Cripple



24th Sep 18


On a bleak wasteland

Stripped of all living things
And covered with stained stones

And industrial debris,

Two men stand
Looming over

A bloated, disfigured figure

With one arm
And no legs.

A torso with bludgeoned face
Crawling and grasping at the parched land with one
swollen hand,

Grimacing with pain.
The figures stare down

At the struggling cripple.

Silent.
Motionless.

















The Emperor’s New Gown



5th May 19


You’re the honey pot that flies,

Which feast upon excrement, swarm around.

At the vanity parade, standing ovations

For the emperor’s new gown.

The Gilded Mental Asylum of Dubai



19th Sep 18


I’m in gold hot pants

Surfing down rainbows

On the back of a unicorn.

I was born a bum and a bandit.

Lost and found it.

Take a yam and pound it.
Thankyou sir you’re an idiot,

A brainless sack of skin and organs.

Body like a jelly fish,

Head like a sieve,

Brain like a walnut,

Sharp like a donut.

Don’t be a donor, nobody wants them.
Send the sycophants death threats.

Tell the lollypop man to cease and desist.

Hard to resist

The insanity and majesty

The beauty and brutality

Of Dubai.
Must email the king

And ask if the palace is open or shut,

I am out of time and out of luck.

Sit on the Burj Khalifa

And spin on it.

I’ve been on it.

Now it’s your turn.
The toast burns.

Yellow fat across the brown crust.

It’s not what but who you know.

Hello,

I must be going.

The Great Unknown



Feb 17



Armours slip

As limbs are unwrapped

And belts are unstrapped from buckles.

Where the stems of the honeysuckle

entwine arms around the trellis arch,

And then rivulets burble and dash over pebbles,

The bulwarks and bastions of the old order dark

Lie rusting on dusty stone and faded path and
mottled grass.

Through the glass, the last of the sand grains

Strain through the tapered waist

And life is robbed of every rutilant light and
membrane.

Glazed eyes beckon ends when the 'thens' slip into
hinterlands.

A grieving wasteland

Caked in sepulchral snow.

A paw, feathers and blood.

A ring wrapped in velvet and mud.

Hands still.

Murmurs of the heart slow.

Crows caw shrill.

Illegible messages clawed on brittle bark.

Something eldritch inside flashes dark.

A dungeon.

The dudgeons

Of your middlescence

That once thwarted you
Now no longer taunt you.

Memories of lives past no longer haunt you.

It is come

To suck final breath

From out your punctured lungs.

Plunge

Into the great unknown.

























The House that I Live In



Nov 17


The house I live in

Is a small place with a big heart.

And in the hearth

The coals burn gently warm

When there is a storm

Raging outside.
This is the chair I sit in.

This is my spoon and bowl.

This is the bed I lie in

And which I'll die in when I'm old.

These are my shoes.

They have worn down soles

Having traversed the globe.
This is the candle I light

When a friend comes to call

Upon me.

Whatever this world has taken from me,

It was nothing I wouldn't have given anyway.

Just as night follows day
And the sun sets in the west,

In the house that I live in

I will keep on giving

Because it's my will that keeps me alive

And I pray through the sorrow,

Through every barren furrow,

For the seed of a better day tomorrow.

The Keeper and the Crypt



Aug 18


I want you but not so much as to hurt myself.

Holding in the night,

I’m so tired.

I cannot abide your bygone eras.

Your fears are years wasted.

And the washed-up prophets
Don’t care anymore to act as oracles

To save you your bear traps.

That moonlit night that was kinder

Faded into a blinder morning

In which you made an effigy

Of everything we held dear.

The cries of terrified children
Didn’t stop you.

Your daggers turned upon yourself

Didn’t haunt you.

Those blackened sunny days

And black eyes and broken noses

Didn’t stop
Your acts of inhumanity

Against your own humanity.

A pebble skims the shore

And this land abhors

The game

And not the player

But your brighter days
Were an affray

To the right to deserve them.

I’m telling you

You are the keeper of your own crypt

And the corpses crept out

Out of sheer disgust

To abandon you
In your own abyss.

The Last Flame



May 18




I'm looking out for danger.

In the neon lights of the city which churns out
stillborns.

Castrated, and shorn off locks.
Fearing the fleeting hands of the clocks,

She let's go of everything.

Because nothing is worth the dying for.

The wanting and lying for,

The giving and crying for,

The living and loving for,

Are no more.


When joy knocks at the door

Of the broken hearted,

They don't answer.