every poem, novel, recipe
and joke
exists quiet in the ether
the poet doesn’t create
she discovers;
with a notebook she uncovers.
a subterranean homesick miner,
reverse engineering the blueprints
of a universal designer
in a universe without life, does maths exist? does moral philosophy? do poems only exist after the are written? or are they just waiting to be found?
brexitus rex, a fencepost;
no entry for french blokes
yes hello we are here
it is act two of don quixote
or quixote like quick’s oat
(though i prefer key oh tick,
like chaotic)
in which we ask,
will the windmills we recall
from the first act charge back?
in which we find,
that windmills
don’t charge on poets
happy new year.
i started publishing the poem a year after i started writing it. and as i published, i continued writing, but within a new context. in cervantes’ don quixote, book two was written after book two was published, and don quixote’s resulting fame was part of the story — the other characters he encountered has already read the first book. the first novel and the first example of metafiction. so if you are the sort of reader who throws the book at the wall when the author is introduced as a character, i’m sorry to inform you that this has been part of the challenge novels present to readers since the start.
o wean in a manger,
your chocolate trough
it’s a preposterous amount but
somehow never enough
i have a theory
that love is pain
different but the same
if there is one thing i have learned, it is that love is pain. love will always hurt. you have so much tied up in it. but it is worth it because a life without it is devoid of the highs and lows that are emblematic of the life poetic.
i’m a basic bitch consumer
i just wanna be humoured
eat this pish
it’s a fancy foreign dish
while i appreciate expertise
i’m keener to fetishise
passionate begginerism
call for a strong and stable new era
are the good souls ready
to forget forgiveness
and embrace the love
that burns old epochs down?
dear reader: we embraced the love. it was a shame to burn the old epochs down. but one must live now, in the present. it’s the only show playing.
and aside from one final chorus, this is the end of part two of the love epochal. and it’s a happy ending! please join me in part 3, giletdonism, in which i start a new job, embark on a career as a poet and writer, and embrace gilets in my casual wardrobe.
we share lunar nectar
from the honeymoon phase
i’m melodramatic.
a little bit insane
come on to it,
we’ll get through it
furnished on pews at church for the bell
for those in the business
of avoiding hell
a prayer for vast,
wasteful riches
research and develop a needless
needle’s eye
and call it camel sized
to scadge a tad of marked time
then a renegade point one nine
in and out caused a firm, wide flummoxing…
i’ll be driving the laptop home
for christmas this year
happy/merry christmas, delete as appropriate.
my love and i shakily reunited, exchanging christmas gifts. she got me a guernsey. i got her a little scroll in a charm on a necklace. we decided to surrender to love.
work was busy, but i had a new thing lined up, and i was getting itchy for a new year, a new challenge, a new configuration.
my darling and i went to church to hear the choir. sadly it was their day off, so we just endured a freezing cold sermon. at least hell’s warm.
earth is comprised of water, mud and metal
so is the human body.
and as we pump pollutants into the air
we literally incorporate them,
a singular ticket to where?
i’m in my prime and,
unlike miss jean brodie,
atlas tugged
people expand in space to take it all
when i just want to be so small
hitlerism is coming back
and i’m as depressed as i am scared
and i’m suddenly not sure,
is everyone humouring me or not?
i’d just read primo levy’s masterpiece ‘the periodic table’ and was touched greatly by it. the vile inevitability of war, hatred and suffering, coexisting, always, with the fantastic beauty of the cultural world. as the bombs dropped, the poets worked on in the dark.
the culture war will exist forever. because there will always be the poetic and the curious on one side, and the bullies on the other side, who think that poetry is an affront to them, because they dare not try and understand it. and even now, when the bullies are fundamentally in control of america and the internet, they strike against poetry, and call us elitist, when all we are is a disparate mass trying to make sense of the hatred in the world, and imagine something nicer.
veteran of the wars on terrorism
drugs, poverty, intellectualism
now let’s declare war on concepts
and rush into combat
clench fisted and limp wristed
the joy of the process is doing it again
g sharp minor has all the black sharps
do you remember the shoe people?
i realise
i myself am a slow cunt
who thinks it so important
that the words look nice on the page
with nice punctuation:
in all the nice places!
you know, we have grown up in a traumatic time. since i was born it’s just been empires collapsing, financial crises, wars and pandemics. the nuclear arsenal rests above the fireplace like chekov’s gun.
i remember once standing at the roundabout on dumbarton road, by the thornwood. with n or m. and talking about the shoe cunts. rather than the shoe people. a pretty weird kids tv program. and we moved from shoe cunts to slow cunts. people for whom time travels at a different rate. meaning they seem slow to observers. in retrospect. clearly we were talking about ourselves.
how could i be complacent
now that i know
the minor key is
just a line below…
is there a word
for the sense of being
so fundamentally insignificant
on the scale of the cosmos
but so important
to those who love you?
if not, can i suggest
we are all imbued
with great minifiance;
as every speck of stardust
lights its own constellation
and is lighted
and it has been an honour to share
our hour on the rock together
i was dealing with my mid life crisis at this point by focussing on music lessons. i picked up most of what i know about music by just mucking about. and in my 20s, my music theory knowledge was dross, but i had a good enough ear to write some songs that were good enough to get on the radio every now and then, and to get the opportunity to play lots of gigs around the city.
after i finally gave up on the dream of being a renowned rapper and producer, i pretty much forgot it all and concentrated on learning about debits and credits, and on writing prose.
anyway, i’m still pretty crap at music but it is very satisfying to be able to perform a few songs on my melodica and i know my scales now.
a message from a fond reunion,
hidden in a bottle
overdrafting on my sidling savings
a big bright banging badhead
brings a boozeless bath
often when alone i think,
“this is exactly what an insane person would do”
and that means i am sane
i feel the agony of love
and recall that the future never happens
consequential couples day was covered in stanza 5 of the love epochal, published may 2025. i will quote as it explains it quite nicely:
every coincidental couple share or will share a day
(assuming all live lives that lap over and aside)
when one is either twice or half as old as their partner.
we only live in relation to each other:
brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children we are all
anyway, the day that my love and i share is 11/1/1999. 1111 999. it’s a message from the universe. i don’t believe in soulmates. but some people do make a lot of sense for each other.
and the future does never happen: it appears that we are eternally doomed to live now, in the present.
do we believe in the power of love
to conquer all?
hate doesn’t beg patience
and demand generosity
maybe i’d have preferred life in an asylum
in my bedtime mind pops
my first foreign trip without my parents
there i am, eleven,
living in a world i don’t want to live in
still here, alexithymic through fear
decoding signations from the incarcerated adjuster
interpreted via reddit memes
between being diagnosed with a terminal illness, then undiagnosed, then diagnosed with autism, i spent a lot of time with therapists from age 38 onwards. i was first diagnosed with depression as a teenager. i remember waiting ages for a referral to therapy. finally getting there, jittering, a nervous sweaty wreck of self-harming, substance abusing, poetic teenager. i just sort of wanted to unload on someone about this one time, when i was eleven, that i was bullied relentlessly while on a trip to austria without my parents. the trauma of which i had just buried as deep as i could, before trying, flailing, desperately, to make myself an entirely new social circle at high school. and i’d since left high school and found myself in a similar predicament (although this only occurred to me 20 years later.)
that’s not really the sort of thing we do here, the therapist told me. i felt utterly humiliated.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 