Popular In His Network

They shaved their idiot,
Bathed him and dried him
Softly in Egyptian cotton,

They dressed him
Head to toe in silk
And encouraged him
To shout his made up language
At strangers and officials.

They smiled as he designed
Bizarre pamphlets and posters,
All black and blue and angry,

They listened in awe
At his bubbled conspiracies
And rubbed his back
As he belched insecurity
And cried at the sky.

They laughed at the mucus
That connected his nose
To his blabbering mouth,

They called him a genius
When he sang
His peculiar songs
And scribbled down
His rules.

He was nothing and everything,
A manchild, a myth,

That old man with power
All madness and tricks,

That tyrant with old friends
Who yes everything,

All whispering rituals
And fresh offerings.

Pickled Eggs

Here he stumbles,
All hips and chins,

His pudgy mind lost
In fractured worry,

Irritable bowel syndrome
Haunting his daylight,

His stomach creaking
Like a Hitchcockian nightmare.

His brain squats in folly
And his face curdles loose,

His breath can stain skin
And he stomps like a troll,

His eyebrows are alive,
They have their own moan;

Birds disappear,
Just thickets left rustling,

Rabbits fill warrens,
All life dissipates.

He’s here – here he is,
He’s a wandering frown,

The idiot from the other night,
The meat-head village clown,

They cheered his name for minutes,
But now no-ones around,

He ate half a jar of pickled eggs
And now he’s coming down.

Safe Seat

He wants to laugh above landslides
While the fields flood
And the roads complain,

He wants to magnify the evermore
As raised hopes float
Briefly through darkness

And the sharpness of his soul
Bathes in trivial hindsight
And podcasts.

In this small village hall
Where for moments
You could easily feel

Like one of the last men on earth
Or a new wolf pack’s prey,

There’s a golden few seconds,
A pop stopped unreal,

Why sit and hope storms
Are the end, or the beginning
Of something concocted
By sparrows and whale song?

Why wait for the uploaded photos?

We’ve gone for the easy option,

He doesn’t need prompting,
He’s totally waterproof.

A Shelf

I have a shelf
At the base
Of one of my
Teeth

Where sweet words
Have crept in
And left their
Mark.

I’ve tried
Filling it up
With fiction

But it’s
Sensitive
To knowledge.

I’ve considered
Ornaments
And trinkets

But it’ll
Never hold
The weight.

So it just sits there
Receding,

It’s sheen
Lost to bleeding,

It’s coat
Never gleaming

If it could sleep
It’d be dreaming

Of a mouth
Far finer than mine.

A Spider’s Web

We are creating
A spider’s web,

We talk in patterns
And weave our jokes,

We’ve spelt the future
And we’re feeding
On the trickle down,

We suckle on the Y.