16/04/2017

13 CHARACTER SECRETS


It is 2024 and a spy has run aground in New York City. As the world seemingly falls apart, he wishes
to be back in Zaragoza, back amongst the celebrations of the Fiesta del Pilar.

Retrace his last three weeks travelling the globe using the evidence provided; decipher emails, conversations, and telegram codes. Measure the worth of lies against his short-lived travel partner's diary entries, and if they were telling the truth all along.

13 CHARACTER SECRETS is a limited edition, self published poetry collection, on sale now for £10 with free p+p.




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Location: Cambridge, UK
14/10/2016

I am trying to be a lotus for the millenniu’nth time

I sit and try and be a lotus
after killing the third fly of the evening
with a pocket book of recipes and a
thirty centimetre ruler stolen
from bathroom dick measuring contests to our knees.

Young professionals tread these boards
and I watch, trying to paint them lotus.

I listen and learn like I was told to do
then clock watch, mop, cycle home to you;
I am still trying to be a lotus
even in wet shoes and no socks.

With less than five-hundred pounds to my various names,
an office-chair-cum-clothes-horse, eight USB charging ports
and a future that stretches to Sunday’s last reluctant second,
I am sitting, trying to be lotus figuring out the professional path
David Attenborough heard in his gentleman’s class: that son of a-

- I walked into an army recruitment vault with dreams of being Gulliver,
though was asked to leave out the cat flap cathedral door back into war
as they’d got their laugh and didn’t applaud.

Perhaps I should’ve been better at maths
where apparently a career can be predicted on a scatter graph,
and the pigeons of today were the pigeons of next year and the months that’ll follow the century after that.

I am still trying to figure out the hoo-ha of menstruation 
and ring fingers and collar sizes and the inner circles
of hyenas when the winter solstice splits the seasons.

There is no reason for this lotus procrastination
when what’s there to live for but a crooked world
and one bandage left. 

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Location: Cambridge, UK
15/09/2016

Video | Barnsley Bar (sirens as you leave)


Recorded live in a shed.

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Location: Cambridge, UK
10/09/2016

mix me up a morning

After the bin men left, after each call subsided,
came the scaffolders outside number ten
ringing poles up in peels, building as they went.

Unbearable and balling, eruptions of conversation
(early morning’s first wind)
blew on in over venetian plains,

cocked thin and open for their abysm grins
to escape smiling mouths as they
rang poles up in peels, building for the clouds.

Stopping short at the chimney crown
all their catch up and chatter and, I suppose,
coordinated avoidance tactic, team-building, name-knowing

flanking of their soft boiled love feelings
for their other halves were lost, in part, to
ringing poles up in peels. Building as they went,

Thursday’s scoreline and Friday’s fine-dining plans
found their way to me, asleep, naked from the night.
Their Friday feeling was a nonevent, a lost translation
down the cul-de-sac of singing Poles and three mixers of blast furnace cement. 

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Location: Cambridge, UK
06/09/2016

Video | Sleight of Hand


Recorded live at the Cambridge Hammer and Tongue regional finals 2016.

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Location: Cambridge, UK