poem — signal flickers at the edge of reality your withdrawal still a running concern which my brain avoids but my soul devours so sip and spit and stroke your story mine’s made of phantoms blinds and slight lights knotted notions and futile functions and your pretty face behind that veil and your petty backstabbing and all floorboards collapsing and that staggering bath of heavenly light from your eyes

poem — persecute thyself i murmur my mind strays wild everything is meaningless and beneath the sun all is fleeting shadow and a light from heaven flashes from time to time bothers me deeply the more knowledge the more grief and i suppose i am not really me the talented trade trainee thoroughly…

poem — Granular cataract streams within, it spirals towards failure to recall, hearsay of sands soaring: Shady shapes at dusk drain spirits in relentlessly startling and saturated slabs. Is it not ruin for the wicked, disaster for those who do wrong? Alas, I am tumbling, slipping, stumbling over souvenirs of summertime. Eyes wide shut, distrait, blindsided, endless faded reflected snaps, rootless ruthless hints of sunlight, and the rumble of a sudden slide.

poem — You break into my room in my slumber; perhaps it’s really you, somehow, and I know not who else, I can’t see that well, your words are an exasperating buzz from a short-circuited TV set, and a woman taps my shoulder, and, with a distressing accent, announces: You messed her up real bad. I feel a bit uneasy, so…

poem — Grew up-down and out-faraway. Arrives at. Waving. [*sudden*] Drowns. Kosmo’s pool party. A whimsical dress code; a required precise mechanical skill only manageable through the most thoroughly finely tuned act, evermore hey so compellingly untainted and indispensable and yet oh as a matter of fact so continually ruined and faint…

poem — Still and soothed on the seeable surface; submerged, it streams in such strong spells, an inhospitable, implausible, impractical hindrance, purportedly producing predicaments, upsetting pure perception, the tumultuous tide traverses any indomitable intellect. Warily wandering, we’re wide awake when the closing curtain unexpectedly collapses. A cold corpse sinking — sceptical, scornful — escaping the spectacular substructural spiralling stream.

poem — The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way , a slender fading silhouette plummets astray down that dreadful heartless holy hollow; that bygone hour of splendour now gives way to insidious tumours multiplying sorrow. Shrinking in shambles as I dive into the fray of that malignant ill-reminisced morrow; sneakily spreading day-by-day, dwelling in this soon-to-be food for flies, for to return, and view the cheerful skies, in this the task and mighty labour lies.

poem — I’d have you know, even though you’re dead, of this cold and crude perception ilness, a disruptive harmony detrimental to the tempo of my stillness; of this leech drinking my intellect, the sheer outcome of your coolness; of this sinister thick dark cloak, and its insidious thorny smoothness; if you’d just rise up and help me flee this reckless fucked-up motion sickness. © Henry Martin 2023

poem — Phantom text, a hallowed seen reverberating paralysis thru my excommunication. There’s a parable in this silence, a tale of muted mourning and fragmented analogues. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. © Henry Martin 2023 Note: the last line, italicised, is borrowed from the Old Testament, Proverbs 13:12. Read more here.