Alexander Hawkins

Peacocks in sequence
on the dysphoric path

jockey between the mariachi,
...

An explanation, not a justification.

A joke too soon mocking the latest rent-a-grief victim,
unnecessary fiddling with cutlery and then, suddenly, blue air.
...

Work in a bit more reality, they said. Eke out what you can.

Watch a waltz criss-cross across foully fragrant parades
to dodge a payload of puta falling from impertinent parakeets,
...

A problem lurched - even pickled or loxed
pinkly sweet, it was no less perturbing.
That network of the noosphere, now faux-luxed,
alert, had frissoned with falciforming
...

Morning demands different rules.

Life is a mess hidden by the patterns of public transport furnishings,
like confetti vomit or nauseating square spirals
...

Look into the largest largeness
beyond the brutalist choir

booming out stark music,
...

A sequestered Sphinx
is just compacted silica

and yet here sobriety serenades
shaded surroundings.
...

Paralysis skulks from under Scandinavian furniture
into the gutter, spangled with unglamorous colours contradicting
a special Spartan mantra, grimly faded
in whatever decade happened twenty years ago.
...

Put it out there - prospective problem populants
have ditched unexpected pragmatism and are pushing for resolution.
Someone needs to go brave it,
show them their greying nebulus of submerged prospects,
...

Solemn manoeuvring toward anticlimax.
It's closer than they think. Along the way fantastical drama
from outstanding outsiders will, with partisan thudding,
encourage great mayhem, rendering queasy quotation marks
...

Melodic clacks thrice rebound
a gluggy head, tippiest toes

hopscotch around insomniac dragons
...

Internal combustion engine exhaust noise encroaches on my sleep.

The first punks of principle could've used a dash of turpentine,
wash out their prickly pride there and then before the next generation
came along and left all the lights on.
...

There's a calm between the breeches, though a chill now chides the gilt edge.

Here the world is just like any good avenue, pocketed by noise static birch trees -
except these are at half mast, fungal, bruised and bad inside. A stifled itch
...

In those repeating months of Spring, recto
and verso historians, Goya-eyed
chronologists and sly virtuoso
arch-revisionists cheerfully spread wide
...

There's an undulating throb in the Mammonic temple
that really resonates in precise conditions; i.e.
when masticating over particularly nasty pink gristle,
when overwhelmed by an oppressive mountain of guff,
...

There are legends of legionary squalid scoopers
fishing out dirty coppers from a silvery font
after an uncommunicative visit to the community centre,
where they draw the line between dole queue and pig trough.
...

Under a buzzing mechanical Cyclops,
the carefree run carelessly
through fields of fire-cracked sizzling rapeseed
backlit by the pure blue of firmament's filament.
...

Let's take off all our clothes. It's time for shamelessness.
On nights of self-reflection, we go skinny-dipping with our self-perception.
We join the stars dancing on the water
and we emerge, red-skinned not red-faced. A collared dove coo-coo-coos
...

Eagerly chiselling my sugar-coated self
from the syrup tsunami that flooded this town
after the molasses storage tank
burst in the night, I might take my old plane out
...

There'll be no leaving it alone now. This flaying of fumigators
and braying of bellyachers is a call to armistice
for laissez faire lexicographers across the land.
...