an introduction to the love epochal

my poetry is about process, as much as it is a poem. i think of the love epochal as one long poem that i hope will never end. maybe someone can pick it up from me at some point. pass on the responsibility until the robots replace us.

it is just a series of random poetic thoughts i have. or overhear. a lot of business jargon finds its way in. little bits of gossip about random people. lots of thoughts in the bath about philosophy. but ultimately it’s a sort of diary of the life a fictional, autistic poet who is trying to approach the world with unconditional love but can’t help hating fascists while also being busy and overwhelmed generally by the day to day experience of life.

i edit the poem and post it pretty much one year to the day after each bit was written. the editing is a dialectical struggle between coherence and adherence to the linearity of thought. at first, i just put it more or less in the order it was written and just edited for rhythm and rhyme.

after performing a few times, i started aiming more for coherence, re-ordering to try and link the thoughts into a series of almost self contained little poems. but you can’t herd poets so generally i fluctuate between these two poles never fully committing either way. perhaps to the project’s detriment. who knows. i’m just an artist. i don’t have to make sense.

i also write little blog posts inspired by the day’s poetry. and i sometimes make spoken word versions of bits from the poem, and videos, and these things can be found on spotify, youtube, apple music, all those things. and that’s what the love epochal is.

brexitry in the uk (inc. chorus iv.)

i’m an analyrical

political animal,

fresh from facing off

a foreigner at the botanicals

i’ve reached the top, surprised

although i did start in the

middle (class) i realise

oh well, no pulling back

teetering on the brink

of my cul de sac

maybe i’ll hoist

a union jack

yeah i made my billions

by betting big

on brexit

i’m a big swellin’ bell

a beef sauce boudicca

and now it’s done and gone

my creativity diminished

naked on the stage

in the empty bar basement

shouting random swear words

for my own entertainment

they say a weird brother

is a sign of a weird family

drunk under the table,

call it strong and stable

let us adorn for the gilet years

whatever starts with hope

will end in tears

it’s the hint of sulphur

underneath the blend

ah well, we’ll get there in the end

that concludes stanza 14 of the love epochal. join me on tuesday next week where we will commence stanza 15 of the love epochal. i hope you are enjoying part three: giletdonism.

why not check out my instagram and youtube? or give the love epochal some listens on spotify / apple music and similar.

anyway, thanks for the support and i look forward to writing more poetry for you next week and every week after until i die.

web

@poet’s corner, 21 jan 2026

web. the web. it makes me think of the culture war that’s been vibrating my pocket since about 2013.

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 mined further into 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, who think that poetry and irony are an affront to them. but they can’t win. there will always be poetry.

this is called

atlas tugged

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

as we lazily recycle a century’s

old colonial nightmare

my next tenuous link is that we are born into a complex, kafkaesque web of demands and constraints that nobody can really make sense of. a complicated global mass of billions sort of winging the rules as we go. but as a child, i guess i thought someone was in charge. turns out, nobody really is.

this is called

obligation, parts i and ii

as a child the buildings §

and roads scared me

in their scale

the work of a million lifetimes,

where did they come from?

and what was my obligation?

all my life i’ve suffered

discrimination

just because i’m shy and lazy.

and inattentive

imperceptive, defensive

stand offish

and prone to mischief.

well, today i made

a lovely little loaf.

am i a valid toiler?

instead of,

or as well as,

a poetry mine despoiler?

have i met

my productivity minimum

am i entitled to a break yet?

i posit that if workers suffer

ceo’s should go to jail

follow the money to personal wealth

and pierce the corporate veil

i am terrible at job interviews. i am naturally averse to self-celebration, and not fast at thinking. a bit overly literal. dumbfounded by even the most predictable tell me about a time when. however, there is one question that i could answer endlessly – tell me your greatest weakness.

this next piece picks up the idea of the poetry mine. are dictionaries tangled webs of poetry, and is it our job as poets to untangle those words, and spin them back, into their right place?

this is called

reverse engineering

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 blueprints

of a universal designer

following on from that, this is sort of the philosophy of the common law legal system. when judges set precedents, they aren’t creating laws… they have applied legal principles to novel situations, and hence sort of, found law that isn’t new, just they never had to use it before, so they didn’t know about it.

so this is called

a very short poem about the criminal justice system

convicted, bailed,

acquitted, jailed,

the four court outcomes

how nice that they rhyme

so it’s easy to write poems

if you’re on trial for a crime

and i would recommend writing poetry if you are going through that sort of experience. trial, divorce, diagnosis, bereavement. lots of good material.

i’m returning to web as internet. calling back to web 1.0, circa y2k.

this is called

the failure and possible redemption of language

we don’t yet have the language

for the time in which we live

the 2010s, the 2020’s,

don’t feel lived in like the 90s

like naturally stressed 501s

two sizes too big

in each direction

y2k was the last mass adopted nickname

there is no confidence yet

in the unfolding millennium

so i propose a radical redetermination

y2k of d2k,

then d2k.1,

now 2k.2,

or, i posit “point two”

in practice

that’s all from me

ending

@poet’s corner 10 dec 2025

fellow poets, the end is nigh.

this is called, the hoarse foreman of the apocalypse

life under actually existing capitalism continues;

a unique combination of boring and stressful

the yoga word lost to an armed counter revolution

be mindful, namaste,

despite the flames, be restful

the firewater fades to a numb, dumb dysphoria

as we tag along

behind the hoarse foreman of the apocalypse

on foot due to cutbacks

i think about time a lot, the hopeless impossibility of the past, its unchanging nature, its doubtful provenance. but do facts remain or do they change over time? the despots of the past become sanitised by history. they become great men. nearly always men anyway.

but we don’t need great leaders. we need stability, peace, equality, food, shelter and entertainment. we need good company.

this is called

endless time

how would you feel

if everything happened forever

if every moment of your life was still ongoing

everything always in total contradiction

i want the unexpected

off script, dumbfound me

astonish me quick

with your attention to retail

when they finish the history books we’ll see

we just have to just accept the past

it happened

i was once diagnosed with a terminal illness. that was the start of my midlife crisis. i was then completely undiagnosed on my 39th birthday. a misread x-ray was all it was. i went to decathlon and listened to madonna.

i remember the days after diagnosis. feeling so heavy. feeling like i could forget to breathe. this is called

lonely consequence

maybe we can choose

our consequences

and gain energy as the

days accumulate

have i mentioned my inability to visualise the future?

scared, listless,

unreadily forced to bear witness

a dusken golden moment lighted

a sudden recognition;

that leaden feeling

when they tell you are going to die

is loneliness,

as much of it as you can have.

my on and off girlfriend and i were finally turning the dial fully to off. we were taking active steps to move on. it seemed like that was what we were going to do. i decided i would focus more on my housework. but as usual. the temptation to check in arose.

inconclusive, in conclusion

anyway, that was yesterday,

with that we close the chapter

for now the winter sun flits

over scarecrows, toclips and frosty nips

and it all begins to feel conclusive

but then the things as usual

start to get ambiguous

and once again of the good souls

we must ask forgiveness

and one last thing. this is the last chorus of the first year of my epic, ongoing, poem, the love epochal.

the redemptive final chorus

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

benn’s law

from snowy summits are mountained limbs of venomous frogspawn
here is to the life pudendal
blessedly unaffected by format rigidity.
going home, i see the most expensive chocolate bar
i’ve ever seen, heard of or read about
and in a fog of lousy vibes await an operative positive.

i was in the pub with my friend i.h. the other day and conversation turned to inflation and high prices. mars bars in particular. i remembered distinctly (meaning, probably, inaccurately) that a mars bar was 27p when i was in my youth. a particular memory – i was at the swimming baths while my brother was taking a lesson. and reading the adrian mole diaries. and i’m sure i read him spending his pocket money on a mars bar in 1982. and it was 15p. so i reckon i read that book in 1995.

1982 15p
1995 27p

that’s an increase of 80%

so 13 years later, in 2008, you would expect it to be another 80% higher? rounding up that’s 50p. and i’m pretty sure that’s what it did cost in 2008.

so in 2021, how much was a mars bar? the model says 90p. I would bet you 90p you could find a mars bar for sale for 90p in 2021.

a mars bar today costs… £1.05.

so based on no underlying data other than my own memory of the price of mars bars, i was able to determine that the price of confectionary will increase by 80% every 13 years.

or, more snappily, we can extrapolate from our data that the price of confectionary doubles every 15 years. and i call this benn’s law.

(and we can take the calming news that the inflation we have suffered recently is relatively normal)

and yes, i know this ignore the fact that mars bars have also shrunk. the real rate of inflation is higher.

a mouthfull of blood

hazy jane mountain range and a mouthful of blood
the chip shop salt and vinegar on the edge of the breeze
decline is the consequence of a millennium without conquest
bring all ye visigoths, only the sack of london can save us now
sometimes perspective illuminates

this is an excerpt from my may 2024 stanza, ‘the sack of london.’

its 4 july and the 249th anniversary of the american revolution. and it seems to be winding down. we associate america with freedom but its useful to remember that it was founded as a white supremicist slave state. it has a horrendous history of violence and imprisons more of its citizens than almost any other country. it is also the only nation to have used nuclear weapons against civilians. now, almost a quarter of a millennium in, the constitution is being stretched to breaking point – a nation divided between two similar but intransigently opposed blocs. and the republican arm seem intend on establishing some sort of achristian theocracy.

sinkin’ fast

this is the last part of part one! i will be dissecting it in the blog over the month. i’m not going to post every day though. this six months of contect has really taken me more like 18 months of work, so i’m slowing down a little.

the poem continues of course, but from july i will be posting less frequently while i work on new music, and on my first novella ‘comin’ up: a neurodivergent memoir’ which will be published later this year.

chaos vikings marchin’ under summer’s radiation
space tunnel violinist, what did we do to you?
reflect on convalescence’s end, my reaction improved
stars are parts of empires, feart to boo a ghost
i schedule noxious imbibition and obnoxious noise projection
with colleagues, on a rager, dipsomaniacal
the bread, my sour domain, hers an egg on top
perfection is a conspicuous imperfection..
pun-ridden dogger-elly sub-nonsense in
ifunereal nomenclature and dress
but i did have six toasts today, all of them doublers
(lentil, tuna rocket; salmon shallot; ched spicy)
you meet someone you know from gossip
our hour our sense our self
in each case you can choose to cooperate or cheat
and hybrid work means shivering alone
by a lockfast window on a sunny day
my favourite track, the album’s last
round the oval, and pound the quad
on the verge of an irretrievable memory, a texture, a vague sense
tangled shoe, cockapoo, over you, road rash tattoo
honestly what are the odds? the prophecy came first much too soon, then again a bit too late
we all rely on the good souls who forgive us.

have you tried the toblerone,
insolent infant?
it’s cheap if you can afford
a lot of it
i have a theory
identic twins in tandem
are set at random on their paths
different, but the same

all through the night, we have no past, we won’t reach back
dilatory breathing, with the inmates chewing fat
i always laugh when i chop onions, ever since my pet cat killed himself
liberty’s light will lead us there, libraries gave us power
elongate the environ of the emblem of they who shall be emancipated
pishhead magnetism combines us, their yolk won’t define us
(con)serve – not conscripted infantry but torpid flabby midgetry
superiors drink-sodden day-to-day erudite popinjays
oh god this ship is sinking fast, just hope we make the buddha last
if everyone had to pay market rent on their home forever
the market would reach an equilibrium that would be better for everyone
except the rentier class, who belong in jail, and may well end up there
were there lots of you? well that’s a posse
honestly i’m just trying to live the most wasted, safe life
antediluvian nipponese amble celebrants and another two bunnies
the next poem will be called the gilet years
sugar rush stroll, the last of my 30s, then back to the wall
more nippon, this time kitchen, with an ambassadorial element
i’m 40 tomorrow and honestly everything hurts, throbs, stings or is otherwise stiff
champagne dog run sling factory tour bonnie umbrella
honestly right now i feel ok about myself,
grateful for what ive been given and have achieved in my four decades so far
maybe i’m ready to start reading novels again
found the partick co-op for a just poetic society
if things are going to change anyway, they may as well change for the better
ditched blade draped bed and became bin overladen
something about ikea bed linen
i watch a boring football match in communion with a centimillion europeans
all good souls forgive each other

have you tried the toblerone,
insolent infant?
it’s cheap if you can afford
a lot of it
i have a theory
identic twins in tandem
are set at random on their paths
different, but the same