Once a young girl visited the local shop where the kind elderly man there made teddy bears with his own hands.

She was extremely excited as she walked inside the shopkeeper’s large workshop and was greeted by a seemingly endless sight of hundreds of beautifully crafted smiling teddy bears.

However, after excitedly peering around the shop in starry eyed admiration, she noticed one rather rough looking bear that stood quite conspicuously to her from amongst all the others.

This bear was stitched all over and wore rugged patches that were faded by the march of time.

She reached for him and then rather bluntly said to the shopkeeper;

''It looks like you've done a beautiful job of making your bears and taking care of them, but why is this bear so neglected?

He's been ripped all over and is covered with so many ugly patches!''.

The girl’s mother flushed with embarrassment and was taken aback by her little daughter’s rather terse words, but the tender hearted and kindly shopkeeper simply smiled.

Walking from behind his antiquated work bench with hobbled steps, he gently took the tattered bear from the young girl's hands and held the patch covered bear ever so closely to his chest.

In fact, with eyes closed, he took a few seconds of deeply reflective poise as tears rolled down the rough leather of his wizened cheeks.

He paused softly, head now bowed in an almost hushed reverence.

As hundreds of his bears seemed to look on at their creator, he finally broke the solemn silence and gently said;

“Why this bear knows my love greatest of all.

For every patch was put on him by my own hands many times.

You see, no other bear here has received such greater love and care, though advancing years has worn him down to what you fear to hold.

He is older than time but wears love over his scars.

This one is so very very special and I do believe he is ready for one such as you, for you are the only child who has ever even acknowledged his presence, as hundreds of other children have passed this one by.”

The little girl’s heart swelled to match her oversized eyes, as a smile grew wide upon her face.

She reached up for the patched up bear, and as she then hugged him dreamily, one could not help but think that the bear himself quickly smiled then fell asleep in her adoring arms.

The old shopkeeper’s words kept ringing through her excited thoughts as she walked out the door, head buried in the pillowed belly of her newfound furry friend;

“Older than time, but wears love over his scars”.

She smiled like the sun.

Night’s martyred dove

Opens exit wound eyes,

Decaying prey bird memorial

Offered to black December fire,

The powdered curtain drop

Unearthing Lazarus

Waxing poetic

To dust bunny skies.

God boldly downs

These bitter chasers

Raining wine and winter hymnals.

Matchstick

To the earth

Awakens

Drowsy malcontents,

Hemmed around

Voyeur sun windows,

Melting dreamscape borders

Into rubber flower schmaltz.

Suburban plastic castles

Unearth

Salted slug insomniacs,

These blood eyed priests

Fidgeting with house keys

And empty hum of conversation,

Awaiting the carpool processional.

Somebody, somewhere

Motors changeover mantras,

Greasing streets

With commuting hell blues.

Processed escapades

Riot in your thermal skin.

Oiled sonic palms

Trouble 8 bit waters.

High fidelity screams

Meet furious indifference.

Viewfinder reflectivity

Enhances the unrendered void.

Heated laboratories

Induce fainting spells.

Teardrop outlines

Magnetized bride.

Niveous pixels

Feed synthetic love.

The hardwired moon

Radiates neon laughter.

I don’t mind.

It’s all I have tonight.

The Pusher Man

Misted in silvery strokes

Fades to black,

Antiquated telephone voice

Spearing viola moans

To tagged underground trains,

Pained horn bled notes

Dropping saxophone ghosts.

Amphetamine Andy’s

Thunderclap heartbeat

And drumroll steps,

Parade kissed bullet legs

On a sparked manic dash,

Streetlight hideaways

Chalk teeth concrete.

His brimful black battered fedora

Drops dull pearl stars

Suited Liverpool grey,

On monolithic Eden’s

Tangled subway maze

And

Disintegrated temples,

For death’s boxcar laugh

Arrives with pompous circumstance

And motion turns to melted butter,

Dream buzzed dragons

Prowling at the end of the line,

Vending white cross raptures

Around the B bombed corner.

The King Of Zeros

Rides black beauty rails,

Chasing the feathery tickle of death.

Death’s lottery spins fate

Through glassy eyed celadon corridors,

Halved to separate

The obsolete from lazarists.

Wheelchair throned hospital cadaver

Slave to anesthetic delirium,

Hatching dreams stale and eggless

On this anniversary of mother’s milkless feeding.

Revelatory,

Yet too far lodged in the throat

To disengage.

Walled to charmless beige

And posterised spill of lazing moon

Ruptured sarcomas

Needle a ruby rash massacre,

Bedsheets a quilted black mass.

Morphine teeth

Sink phantasmagoric oblivion

Into starched canvas flesh,

A watery itch detour

From armouries of howling nerves.

Ammonia halls

Crowned mothball pall

Shrink back

As charity’s shattered vials

Violently perfume beastly glum.

I shall fear no snake pit exhibition,

Saith Lazarus.

Prime time live

Proudly presents death and destruction

Sponsored in full

By pontificating parasites

Via shockwave theatre.

Ode to a plugged in cattle prod silence.

The last DJ on earth

Would rather play Judas Priesthood

And sock it to the suits

While damping the brass,

Than abandon the plebiscite

To stun the televised cannibals.

Cue the muzak.

Tonight’s gallery

Of lobotomised talking heads

Vomit mannequin mouthed soliloquies

That were dipped

On the lips of children’s blood

To keep their stockholder shills

Fat, sedate and happy.

And the stakes are so high

That they'd cough up a black lung

For just a million dollar minute.

Now quick

Cut to commercial

Before they show tax hikes

And sun broiled body parts

Somewhere between Kazakhstan

And Disneyland.

The martyred ego

Slain on the killing room floor

Makes for must see TV.

Kill these ripe stars blistering into nameless scars

Phantom free fall holograms

Erasing no name memory tapes.

Swan dive slow motion suicide

Phonic treachery and layered silence

Wrapping umbilical cords

’Round the screaming void

Spilling loose traumatic phenomena

Seeded from the brain blanking paralytic.

Shutdown mode

Muttering stutters and slivering recall

Erasing no name memory tapes.

Words are reimagined versions of subconscious truths.

That is all.

She said

Autumn came to die

Upon moorland bedside,

Parting the poppy flanked tide,

Cerise cradled petals

Breathlessly noosed

To the weave webbed tug

Of November’s cryptic movements

Towards a flake salted earth.

October will soon rouse

Her firestorm tragedies

In straddling waves,

The nostril steam and sepia fog

A shrouded processional

From wild horses parading a bolted conquest

Amidst the battering ram of razored rain,

Indenting valleys to an asymmetrical wasteland,

And how viciously soon

Shall stone bone trees

Be powdered and masked

In December’s endless coughs of mists and snow.

These Black Down Hills

Will surrender their thinned shoulders

To the splattering blots

Of doom eyed magpie flocks,

Singing thundering flaps

With winged newspaper spread

Cutting a heavenward arrow

Bounded but dull,

Littering the darkened loom

Tasked to them,

Through jaded skies

Voided of sun,

A blood moon eye

Etherised and sinking past derelict horizon.

I came to England

But left my heart in Dartmoor.

Today I was visited

By the ghost of your laugh;

How it floated overhead

Fading into fenced off frontiers

And steered its spiralling renegade mark

Amidst the utopian tease and drifting splendours

That afford daydreaming wares

To an exhumed age’s shrinking whispers,

Then downward and grounded

10 feet below

Touching fruitless roots

Too deep

Too soon.

Once blue skies dropped black balloons

And the sun chased gold hued coffin clouds,

Your ironic evaporating entry point

An exit to a dead drop stop.

Hello again, my disappeared friend.

But the coil cannot bend

Nor your chariot return to us again.

Beyond an alm cupped palm’s

Haunted capture of tears,

Stood our sun splattered day

That was held together

By the fair weather tethering

Of teenage tape,

Wild with exultant glories

Whistling psalms through

Whiplashed loose leaf notebook trees.

Now age creeps on,

To harvest these bones.

Hello again, my disappeared friend.

Today

Your laughter was a spirited tribal roar

Heard from here

And the distance to God.