Despite those nets of tuna fish…

POETRY

AFTER ALL (OF US)

dolphin-human-698x3922If Dolphins Had Thumbs, They Would Probably Destroy Us All, Says Science (Riot Fest)

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.

Please do not eat the grass

POETRY

It’s amazing to consider how far we’ve evolved, but while humans ‘protect’ our cousins in zoos, the great apes are observing us. There’s a reason smoking is banned at London Zoo, especially around the open-air enclosures…

Monkey Black heart Bog Rolls

How the residents of ZSL really feel about being humanity’s guests is further explored in Cyrus Song (available in paperback and e-book formats).

Pan troglodyte propaganda

POETRY

A future traveller found a sheet of headed paper in one of the infinite monkeystypewriters. ‘The human guilt complex’, or ‘The Simplicity of Human Complexity,’ stacks of an evolving soliloquy were left in the Unfinished Literary Agency‘s photocopier. 

Alien skull Monkey Soliloquy

The writers continue to evolve, and they’re apparently handing out flyers in the street. They’ve learned to publish. 

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 SharkShawn Byous

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

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.

The matter of mortal history

POETRY

MORTAL INFINITY

Monkey Black heart infinity

On behalf of the inner self

POETRY

Every now and then I get a little bit lonely, and I have to talk to myself to tell those people we’re all okay in here…

Monkey Black heart Think I thought

Staedtler Noris 122

will_self_checkout

In my inner self, I’m fine.

I’ve been to Eastbourne too*…

POETRY

Swallowed an Apple tablet…

AVOCADO CAPITALIST

Avocado 2 poem

*So What (The Anti-nowhere League).

Projectile dysfunction in humans

POETRY

THE PREMATURITY OF HUMANITY

Dehorned Rhino Poem4
‘Memorial to a Species’ Brent Stirton, (EcoWatch)