It was foolish to entrust
These histories and archives to
Some librarian’s pedantry.
It takes eyes and not hands to preserve
Such youthful crimes.
It takes aching ribs
To extricate something
Of all this hymns and cries.
I sold my looks to gain entry to this –
I lied about my old age
But you wouldn’t be awoken out of
This disappointment feed –
Said it kept tabs on you,
Never deleted your number.
For fuck’s sake!
The teeth are falling from our gums.
Our negotiations all carried out
Amidst sticky sheets and corrugated feet.
The faint whimpers that
Disrupt your sleep.
The futility of all future life after this day.
Lies gridded on angst
Consuming all your brain-time
Like a threadbare vigil to some
Fallacious black saint.
Fattened on stats and potatoes,
Gambled all your hopes in earnest glances,
Wasted your anger under the misimpression
That it was an inferior currency.
And for what, now?
These days I lose it easy.
Like my father, not angry,
Just forever bothered by little things.
We citizens are only faithful to bad jokes.
The women get all the blame,
Fetid mattresses pile –
Dinners deliberately spilt.
Perhaps the end of the Nile.
You lament everything changes
But yet it still looks so similar.
Cookies and crisps for breakfast.
The station-orange juice makes your fingers tacky,
The sun whispers a witty riposte,
World looks like it hasn’t slept for days.
Lurid neon posters leer high, above
Shameful betting shops and a nursing home for
Dough-eared recalcitrants like your nanna.
Says one: “God is dead: long live the queen, or
Failing that –
Some old dream of a
Pope-reincarnation machine.”
Ivan’s pissed and bitching –
“Ain’t right,
How bad things happen to even kids,
If there was a man in the sky
He’d do something about this”
Kids like us can’t fathom these things, besides –
“You gotta wait”, comes the reply
And to everyone else that’s fine.
Inoculated not to expect or even raise lips
To happy situations.
Our silver compromise:
Crisp lager, getting to the next level,
Updating Facebook friends about
Making porridge, or even
Doing the laundry.
Dutty prinz.
This ain’t right, and tha ain’t right –
The citizens feels self-assured
Via the noisiest headlines.
Even if no-one reads or makes love anymore.
The impossibility of repaying debts.
Returning south,
Confronting a psychotic newsagent
With my little song of life.
Learning how to dance with angels,
No, we should try.
Dan Taylor 
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