renato dall'ara

• His new girlfriend works the door there, he does not intend to pay her / Pictured reading Karl Marx beside his parents' pool, facing ridicule he bleated: / "That doesn't make me rich, no way, it's only outdoor and it isn't heated."
• All I want tonight is a friend and a fight / Say it to my face if it satiates your appetite
• Let me level this as an indictment: only a part-time grass, but a full-time asshole / They would play my requests at the guest list's behest, any disco all across town

sad suppers

• Don't call it a come-on, in spite if not because of whatever / If extent of my ambition is a lawn to mow, a charger to tether
• Never once a miser with the misery / Clever compromise, I replant potted history / You can't eat from spinning plates / Can't lick clean the mess it makes / Seen all there is to be shown / Darling, I'm coming home
• Still flutters pitter patter / Feeling embittered, battered / Behold the once and future me / Sad suppers for the saudaddy
• Until I see the route the crows fly to you, then I will want no part of it / Save you epiphanies for the sea level. Save them for the Broadsands / Save them for throwing out time at Scribes West. Save them for chucking up in your own hands.

i broke up in amarante

• I co-piloted the swift / Dreamt I'm anchoring that midfield / Like the anchor in my midriff
• I drifted through a month alone / As I broke up in Amarante / Nursed a two-beer buzz four whole weeks / 'Cause it's the only way to feel sane
• I couldn't even hum in your mother tongue / Just a thumbs down raspberry kiss
• (It seems unfair) / To be a rotten horn of plenty / (It seems unfair) / To be cadaver for a curse / (It seems unfair) / To be an overflow for empty / (It seems unfair) / To try your best but feel the worst
• I threw an empty bottle from way up / It thudded into the maw / Truth be told I spent the afternoon / And I threw fifteen more / I'm woken by a honking horn / Hungover, spread-eagle / Strength between the clicking crickets' knees / Enough to crush my skull

a slow, slow death

• I started to diarise the coming of flies when gloom is descending / So when it's back round again, I know it's a false start and not an ending
• Preoccupied now for days by nostalgia waves I hated the first time / A gambler's fallacy the more I repeat I won't be the punchline
• You. On a lilo. Are an island. Of the pacific. / And then me, me, me. I am face down. In a puddle. On the high street
• I got your initials inside a heart tattoo / We two in vermilion, we two a lovers' coup / I know little but I promise: / There's a slow, slow death if you want it / If you want it
• In time will I have to lie these memories are mine, not in fact my father's / A schoolboy hero replaced, domestic disgrace, a sad sack, a martyr / We here are common as dirt, 3 lions on our shirt, with high expectations

the fall of home

• Left your home town, for somewhere new / Don't be surprised now it's leaving you / Another weekday night alone / The rise of rent, the fall of Home
• Battery dies on your monthly call / Budget cut at your primary school / Another family friend fell sick / Gave the fascists a thousand ticks

5 flucloxacillin

• Five Flucloxacillin rattle in the pit of my purse / Among the ones and the twos, I never finished a course / Doctor said, "Don't drink on antibiotics" / Reply, "It doesn't matter, hangover's always chronic anyway"
• They say if they had got the victory / They'd act with so much more humility / They say if they had got the victory / Well, I guess we'll never know
• Am I a piggy bank of obsolete currency? / An order of merit from country known for tyranny? / Another blister pack pops, but I still feel much the same / Thirty-one, and depression is a young man's game
• Found a fiver screwed up inside a prescription receipt / From the salbutamol (No, a gift from the sertraline) / Hallowed be somnolence brought on by the tramadol / Damned be the knowledge that's it, now you have tried 'em all

heres to the fourth time

• And all we got's the need to breed before we rot / When all is spent and all is lost, when all is said and done
• In full: just over a fortnight, nude, drenched in the lamp light curtains let in from the street / We lay cross-legged on a mattress, no questions about us, she serenaded me
• All these sick scenes played out in my memory / Wake up, I'll tell you everything honestly:
• Here's to the fourth time! Call it 'The Time Before The Last Time

for whom the belly tolls

• May I have a moment please, before the guillotine, to lament on her wet hair / Tousled over her left shoulder wearing a Corfu t-shirt she took as her nightwear / I could slip on my own salt sobs seeking the cold embrace of the fridge freezer aisle / Catwalk into the dog pound, now with my flesh wounds dressed to spring-summer style
• For whom the belly tolls / For who the tap drips dry and the bath water runs cold / For whom the belly tolls / For who all time ticks by until one joke becomes old
• There is beauty in the world, I have been told by people I've nothing but trust in / Piled up with the cotton buds, among the toothpicks, inside the dark of the dustbin
• (No knot in the waistband) / Persuade me to give up and leave quietly / (No reason to grandstand) / File me alongside the obscene
• May the way that I go be regrettable, gruesome / In exchange for one thing: "I beg do not take me today" / Babbling "please let me stay"

got stendhals

• Got Stendhal's bad, it struck me dumb / Venus in steel toes with fake furs in hand / Your doorstep, first place podium / I stood in awe, carrier bag of cans / Two puckered lips and a t-shirt suntan
• I assembled former ghosts at a seance / Said I missed 'em, you only have to say it once / What I truly fear, maybe selfishly / When I finally rest, someone will summon me
• In time a monument will cast / Two shadows in the middle of a square / Mistold when thousand years have passed / As clima-fit suit, as towelling bridal wear / Four puckered lips and some vows to swear
• At least when we're encased in concrete we'll be safe

a litany / a heart swells

• For lovers who line the beach whom moon entertains / There's always waxing while our crescent wanes
• I'm shouting out a litany an echo calls back
• Now I feel the misery in your breast and mine / is one and the same and I feel close to fine
• Your hand is on the pen but you can't sign the pact / I'm shouting out a litany an echo calls back

hung empty

• They're singing Bread of Heaven but they're baking it with our dough Living as common criminal, but acting local hero / Wish I'd savoured that awkward little silence that grew up to be a deafening hush / Curling up, cuddling a big red button to push
• The students spilling out at the bus stop are forcing me to walk in the street / I move against the tide of the tourists, I am lacking but they're looking replete
• He's playing dickhead's advocate and every date's a house show / I'm dropping my defences 'til libido's my libero / And if you're keeping track of the notches, even if he had a four poster bed / He'd be sleeping on a pile of woodchip, plucking splinters from his head
• I'm hung empty: all night, all afternoon / Hung empty, horse and, not bride and groom / Hung empty, the world spins but we'll barricade the room / Hung empty, hang onto me, and we'll quarantine the gloom
• I've been penning odes to continental bottled lager / Bring its mouth to my lips: "oh holy holy, I do not know what I'd do without you"
• We kneel at different alters but we all desire the same: / For someone else to seize the bow to find a truer aim / We're small steps down a steep slope. Exist as living proof: / Not right to call this old age, but it certainly ain't youth no more / This certainly ain't youth
• I wanna shrink to a size to be coddled between the cobble stones / For you to grow to a height to drape a shadow over all of us / Oh would you let me rest in your flesh rolls? / Lay my langour in the calm of your shade? / Sink into its dark until I lose my hands in front of my face
• My vision is fading, it's blurry. There are finger prints all over the sun / I'm glad to be loved but I'm lonely and I feel like I'm the only one
• Feels like I've been waiting on it, nearly all my life / But what, if this is it now, what if this is how we die?