Passing Strangers

I shouldn't have written it; I shouldn't have told her.

but compulsion and self destruction guide me,

they always have, which is why I sit alone writing this.

I started to write her a love letter.

nobody writes them anymore.

how desolate have we become?

it started like this.

'I have tried to keep this locked away, not to tell you, not to expose myself, but you intoxicate me'.

wasn't my greatest opening line, for sure...love creates trash.

'a song plays in my head whenever we pass each other and you are the only reason why I put
one foot in front of the other these days. 

you consume me reducing me to a quivering wreck and no one has ever done this....I am a street fighter, I am made of hard stuff....love is for the others...love is for the the better people.....love I read about and never write about...love is fear..'

I am never quite noticed. never quite there.

I operate under a radar

where poems are written by the undesired.

killing the unsaid.

and where nights are long.

I am Shirley Valentine.

'I have tried to keep it under control, I have avoided you, tried to resist the clawing deep in my soul...my rationality is skewed....I have written you 3 poems....I know...how trite....I spill here, on an a empty page, in an empty room...we are nothing more than passing strangers these days, such is my desire to fan these fucking flames.....do I sound like a cunt?....forgive me? you are making me high again, and I love it.

I was happy with this passage...more me...more needy...self deprecating...

'every film, book, song, play, that has touched my romantic soul, has led me to this moment...my gods don't sit on cuntish clouds....I'm guided by prose, by a lyric, by images, by awkward pauses. you are a song from a musical and this is a fact. I don't drink, my head is clear, I'm not a fraud. 

I have reached deep to write this but my turn of phrase is limited. I'm a boy from south london...I have no art...but you define art..you, the personification of everything good in my fucked up head....just one look from those eyes crushes, heals, is a pill, 100 sessions with a shrink, shatters, cuts, and repairs again.....look at you..you're incredible and the reason I bother to write this shit.....where was I when you were looking? I love you and always will...I can't sleep, eat, function....'

she belongs to another, you see.

she is taken.

all the good ones are.

they're put here to fuck with my equilibrium.

'...my thoughts toward you have never been impure...I wish they were...a night in a seedy hotel would take care of this...it would be over, it would die, but this will never die...I am godless and yet I have found someone to worship, to muse, to adore, to finally kill me..'

our connection is palpable.

my desire for her is not carnal.

she has never been in my wank bank, so to speak.

sex would reduce her to 'just another woman.'

and it is to this end that I know I have fallen in love.

I have always told you I am cheap.

'...this is tough for me, it has ripped me apart, but despite this, I was a lesser man before you first walked in my path...part of me will die without you but a better part will live on....you are not an illusion and mine have not been shattered...you are precious, my a, b, and c...a reason to breathe, the answer to many questions, the lie I never told, the truth I found over coffee....'

violent words that did me no good

...few things ever have.

self preservation led me to this kiss goodbye.

to end the lullaby that has tormented my head.

she is the  poem I had always wanted to write.

sadly though we are now nothing more than passing strangers.

tragic, yet poetic.

somehow I lost myself again.


© T.A.Roberts 2013

Flowers For Future Funerals

she wore black and she was beautiful

like a day full of sunshine

but where a cloud was raining

in my ever so stupid head.

I was happy to have passed her.

these are my roof top reflections of a nearly man.

my reality? a sandwich in plastic wrapping

and staring at my image in shop windows.

mirrors haunt me, they are everywhere.

I walk the west end for hours searching for that one line

but return home with only dirty finger nails from tube trains.

the flower seller cries for the flowers never sold.

rosebud and redundant thorn discarded to the gutter with fag ends

and a stud that dropped from a rude boys ear.

revolution stirs and I'm calling time on clit tipping and salad hating.

there are far more important things to worry about,

like the masturbation of the masses over orange looking plastic women.

a fuck and a fag?....it's been years.

drip, drip, drip, like a tap.

fit to burst.

coiled like a spring.

I can't tell the difference between sunrise or sunset anymore.

but I know I hate daytime tv for it's the graveyard of the damned.

look for a clue in my soiled metaphors.

love binds people who have no road to live on.

sex wets people with no one to love on.

we need a meeting place for the heartbroken where

first kisses are recalled and mourned like a death in the family.

I hung my dreams out with the washing.

supermarket flowers were never you.

I found traces of lipstick on a shirt collar.

a souvenir of a past utopia.

euphoria was replaced by apathy.

memories of the halcyon days that didn't really exist.

time has just made the memory prettier.

melancholia and desolation stretch like an endless desert.

but now I fear only the death of pages....my inability to write.

blank pages waiting to be filled but ultimately banished.

poems I haven't written become landfill

and eventually fucked by ants.

but then I see her.

she wore black.

a south bank lovely who carries flowers for future funerals.

mourn the loves that broke you.

get out before slap hits face.

fragile she is, like a butterfly in a tormenting wind.

divine angel you are my sweet shop.

the origins of ice cream.

the lollipop of my immorality.

she walks bare foot and fears not glass nor scars.

it is only life that cuts.

I will capture her bliss on a sepia photograph.

I live in shadows, painting her in words.

filthy words enslave my dictionary.

everyone likes a beautiful woman.

but very few will ever love one.

trophies get neglected on dusty pedestals.



© T.A.Roberts 2012/2013

Fragments

I turn a corner or walk up some stairs

and she is there.

I wish she wasn't

because

I only get fragments of her.

I found some solace in her two second stare.

those fucking dark eyes will be the death of me.

the crush crushes like a punch to the chest.

a butterfly invades my stomach.

rationality has gone on strike.

she has penetrated and awoken the dead romantic

in my soul.

feelings left best locked away.

like sea breeze and sand.

fragments of a shit childhood.

all the colours of the beach shop.

cruel tricks to mess with our equilibrium and

reality.

a fragment of her scent is left to fuck with my senses.

it was all too much for me to cope with.

I hate love and feeling love.

I hate feeling nice things....

the sent of flowers only skew my shit. 

I would rather ponder why the twin towers collapsed,

or why every egg I crack breaks before it hits the pan..

I call it the lazy musing of a total cunt.

anything real sends me spiraling.

writing love letters to the invisible is the currency of the deprived.

fragments are all we have of other peoples lives. 

a fragment via her gaze on the jubilee line interchange.

a fragment of her over there sitting on a bench reading.

baby face pure.

a precious stone in a common park.

hippy like.

subversive.

brings to mind

music festival dirt and

sex in a tent.

how me to notice.

I try to ignore her and go back to my

reality of vomit gutters

and neon reflections forever there. 

I try to enter woolworth's but it closed

many years ago.

pick n mix was never quite me. 

close the curtains.

I need to withdraw.

suicide notes have replaced the wallpaper.

I deal in fragments

the bits and pieces that make up a life.

never quite complete...

always a step behind....

too shy

and filled with empty platitudes.

no alarms and no surprises.

death would be a comfort

but as I light a cigarette,

read Bukowski,

the world colours the way I had hoped as a child.

I hate christmas

and kissing cunts I loathe.

the news is bleak.

the bbc rapes children.

and that bird is doing my head in.

pinko liberal who goes on about The Smiths

and how they changed her life.

I want to fuck her though.

I expect

she tastes of poetry.

take me to meet your parents...

they will hate me.

her dad will ask me what we get up to....

I will tell him we try everything and I write a poems about it.

fragments are better for me than truths.

I see enough...

not too much.

I just ride an un-fancied horse.

it takes time to unearth a muse.

it's a dark art.


© T.A.Roberts 2012/2013

The Un-kissed Hours

I read books for company.

I read books to fill me.

finishing a book is a like a funeral

or the aftermath of great sex.

the un-kissed hours.

a void of the unspoken.

bliss at half price

where desolation reigns

but

where words are found.

there is nothing more intimate

than silence.

are we flirting

or just talking ?

flirting will be the death of love.

but I am bereft.

a worn out cynic.

solitude is a soul breaker.

solitude is a man maker.

just like vulnerable buttons on a blouse.

we all come undone too easily.

bravado just covers the blushes of

a socially inept fool.

a recluse.

never expecting much

but hoping

all the same.

at times I mourn all these years

not having someone to love

and to love me back.

life seems unfair.

some of us are just born not to be desired

or noticed.

condemned to writing about it.

but I can unearth a muse.

I bet you can't.

I expect you just drown in smiles.

sip the melancholia.

it may become you.

during the

un-kissed hours.


© 2013 © T. A. Roberts 

Primrose Hill

I am a peace envoy at war with himself.

went to the school of love but was taught hate.

I like the Theatre but have a foul mouth.

I enter a library to achieve freedom but leave with my hands chained.

I get my kicks from pissing in canals and calling it art.

conversations on stairwells and a lost life.

love only happens to those who don’t fight it when the lights go out.

sepia moments tainted by black and white memories in colour.

avant garde plimsoll wearer and full time lolly licker.

coco chanel.....

memories will have all of us..

cakes and cunt can taste the same but no summer was ever complete

without a picnic and finger nails sinking into a wet August Primrose Hill.

precious lips and dysfunctional eye lid... details I notice.

simmering glances from a hedonistic temptress.

I sit on the tube and regret my entire life.

ascending escalators and descending dreams.

twisted dreams and blusher stained pillows.

a love that died in clouds of cigarette smoke and my periodic madness.

some people touch your life but very few will consume it.

places I will never see.

flesh I will never touch.

songs I wrote that will never be sung.

roads never trodden and post cards never sent.

post cards from impossible holidays.

love letters of the lonely only ever read by the author.

comfort found in solitude.


© 2010 © T. A. Roberts

Spangles

I purchased a book in a shop for cunts and unemployed cats.

It was written by the biographer of cafe life

and the author of love letters for coffee drinkers.

I read it whilst sitting in a greasy spoon just off chapel street market.

burns on arms and good wine on lips.

the lady who served me brings comfort.

she has a London accent and lives for nicotine.

she is perfectly imperfect like the rest of us.

lust has long been replaced by the crumbs of an unloved biscuit.

melancholia has messed with her libido.

she spends most nights dry.

give me a word and I will write you a poem...

give me a stone and I will break you a window...

I saw the end of love in her eyes.

she is my mother and sister.

she is the ballerina of my soap opera.

I threw my cigarette into a bin that cared.

forbidden fruit is overrated and it gets messy.

I still seek reason in the gutters.

but

the first girl I kissed tasted of spangles...

and this is all I know.


© T.A.Roberts 2012

1984

I wrote a love letter in 1984.

to my tragic wallflower and sister of the dark side.

I woke up next to you afraid.

a beauty in slow motion.

I was born just behind her eyes.

one day your picture will hang in a gallery for the lesser people to view.

I suffered the streets to reach you.

do you remember the bus stop? I think it was a Sunday.

chalk hearts were melted by rain.

they were just testaments of young love and

delusion.

I was, and I still am , a melancholy mother-fucker.

I miss the park life of hand holding.

unclaimed jelly tots on a dusty mantelpiece.

I can say I kissed your lips in 1984.

old letters left stupidly in the bedside drawer.

a photograph left behind for the purposes of torture.

her eyes painted dark like the sky.

I met her at a Gary Numan gig.

my hand brushed against her chest outside a chip shop in

the fulham palace road.

and to say it changed my life would be an understatement.

hammersmith odeon was my kind of church.

watching her apply make up was my personal art gallery.

a dark angel with nice boobs.

happiness is easy, darkness was meant.

under the hammersmith flyover...

in another life.

I serenaded you with marshmallows and occasional plastic flowers.

tube platform salvation on rainy days.

catch a 37 bus out of peckham.

love is a stranger.

warped on a walkman.

the pavement cracks somehow reflected our lives.

the sun never quite shone.

our landscape was concrete.

I stole an eyeliner pencil and became me.

eyeliner made by eyes acceptable and warped vinyl records validated

my entire existence.

I got kicked around by skinheads...

who are now sucking off the state.

I was never ordinary.

who wants to be fucking ordinary ?

trodden on bubble gum.

dancing with damned.

rubik cube confusion and Our Price Records

am I in love?.....

love at first sight?....

phone me a cliche.

I want to go home

to coffee stains.

I started writing this on a fag packet, in a pub, and called it

a love letter.

a love letter to 1984.

she stuck it on her fridge

with an abbey road magnet.

it's more than I could have

hoped for.

one day I will write a line

that will crush you.

you with a

face like flowers.

texture like candles.

and  a

taste like spangles.

I was a cunt....

and I wrote poems

in 1984.

I still am .

and I still do.


© Written and owned by © T.A.Roberts 2012

Photographs Will Find Her...

bright young thing with the look of an artist.

a camden eyeliner princess.

indie rock queen folded with the elegance

of a homely daughter.

the verve of youth touched with the sexiness

of womanhood.

colour in the black and white.

something in that face ticks my tock.

but I am just an ugly cunt

who muses

the untouchable

the out of reach.

my kicks are obtained from knowing

the likes of her exist amongst the

dull and grey

dancing with the rain and gutter trash

to pale them into insignificance.

photographs will find her.

essential she is like summer days

and regents canal narrow boats.

London needs her because she shines.

fascinated by her I am but only in way that is wrong.

beauty?...no... beauty is limited..

her face has so much more depth

stories hidden behind mascara eyes.

parting lips that whisper but only I

can hear.

a face made to drench

angels in self doubt.

even mirrors blush.

I sat on a cold bench soaking in the rain

suffering the effects of too much drink

when I started to write this in my head.

I am sure she goes shopping for

nothing much very much.

tiny pulses are felt if you slowly

seek them out.

some lucky bastard watches her apply make up

first thing in the morning,

brush strokes of an artist.

she is the river I ran dry

but I will cry another one for the beautiful but

tainted youth...

tainted by the media and mr and mrs righteous cunt who read

the daily mail.

men froth at the thought of her on the tube

every morning.....

but they consider suicide when they realize they never

ever possessed

the cool milk shake look

of the camden eyeliner princess.

primrose hill will give her a place for

reflection and picnics.

a place to muse, paint,

write music or

whatever takes her fancy.

this a place to sit and imagine

what this beautiful ugly town can do for you.

failing that just get lost in love making and

cityscape dreaming.

photographs will find her.

she glides through the Market,

all dark glasses, glam rock chic, and mosh pit stalker.

I can imagine her dancing in the

electric ballroom

in the 1980's.

fairy dust overdose is what she took.

not all can see or feel the love

in an unspoken moment.

me the uneducated tosser

who found solace in public Libraries

and coffee stained cafes.

bright young thing

with the look of an artist.

a camden eyeliner princess.

photographs must find her

and I hope they will.

because

everyone should see her at least

once in their life.

Written and © owned  by T Andrew Roberts 2010 © Boris Danski

Untitled 2

she is my sister of the dark room,

the candy floss girl with toffee apple dreams

and an arse I would worship.

pierce me with a scream and I will write you a song with no verse.

it will be an urban bittersweet story with a twist of cunt envy.

coco chanel upon flesh so tortured.

the art house whore, that I am, can picture the tears falling

on a black and white face where the only words spoken are

oui oui oui.    

     
he the perfect cunt and dead flower blooming.

fucked a hundred girls but only made love to one.

broken soul trying to find his way home.

redundant romantic with unused one liners

common as muck and a London accent.

loved the love but hated the mess.

cut the grass but killed  the roses.

took a smile and made it a frown.

built a circus but sacked all the clowns.
     
cheap thrills and Dream Topping, the horror of

high street shopping.

hallucinations brought on by the pills

I had been dropping.

brown sauce on bacon, it

liberates one's senses.     
     
I saw another version of me in my local supermarket

oh and she was so beautiful.

she studied her shopping list and I studied the possibility of

mediocre me

with her.

no one owns me and I follow nothing

and that is why they make up stories about me.

look into my eyes and you know

I will fuck you.

but only because

I am

weak.   
     
let me write stories and poems about your

ankles

and how good they look in those shoes.

let me serenade you with my bravado and

cocktails of filth ridden words.

the contents of your handbag and glint in your eyes gives hope to

the lonely.

you are not fit for plastic table cafe and the secrets told by

coffee stains.

I know because you wear lady gloves and glide.
 
us tragic romantics are exactly that

tragic.

and we see everything but deal only

in crumbs.

lost souls with coffee stained teeth.

I am consumed by the dreams of a 16 year old but I am now

46.

all hope left on the train to cuntville.    
     
Boris Danski will rise again and walk by London Bridge.

close the curtains and block out the light for I need to withdraw.    
     
you made my typing finger bleed

and created a space in my head to accept beauty again.    
    
one of these days you will stick your arse in my face

and I will write 2000 words in tribute to it and they alone will only

create one stanza.    
     
I could have come to see you but maybe it was your

god who stopped me.

you liken me to the scent of a pretty flower picked from a

dirty swamp.

rough cut diamond and rose of the underclass.

splinters from dead trees..... but park benches offer me moments of

bliss and solitude.    
     
dirty rain on summer London streets.

it falls on me but I am beyond dirty.

tainted pavements always near violence and never close to love.

holding hands was my favorite game.     
     
I find dark eroticism in the ladder and hole in her stockings....

her on the tube train at 7.45am

it is morning but she has time to have been torn.

torn like all of us.

I am amazed by nothing much but can see the possibility

of a whole book

ultimately inspired by the damaged material

covering a female leg.     
     
Boris Danski 2010 ©   Written and Owned by © T A Roberts
     

I Tried So Hard

I tried so hard to write the letter I had always wanted to write but when I sit there, with pen in hand, I dry up. Fuck me; do you think I think this stuff out? Of course not, I write like I fuck. I go round the houses and eventually hit all the right buttons and then you are mine. How deluded am I?

I tried so hard to keep my concentration but the fag ash kept falling on my lap. I sat outside my favorite cafe in Soho, just off Old Compton Street enough not to be a gay place. Why such a deluded old fucker like me sees the romance in a coffee stain on an old table lord only knows. But I run my finger round it and lick it and somehow I taste her and the words come.  

I tried so hard to get away from the being me and slowly I am getting there. Have you noticed I am not such a self harm bore anymore? Rehab was 10 years ago but the marks on my arms are like they were put there yesterday and they remind me of dark corners and unspoken sins. They remind me of a 1000 wanks over her, and sticky magazines; of a bad night when I wet the bed; of the night I took too many pills and lost 4 days; of the day they took me in; of the day I looked in the mirror and saw a freak.

 Damn it, there would be no need to be lonely if I could bite the pillow and think of England. But hey I love the silky taste of a female and I am thirsty for it like a man lost in a desert without water, armed only with an iPod stuck on the same old tune. That’s me, playing the same old tune; waiting at desolate bus stops but the bus ain't coming.

I tried so hard to stop Loving my Town but how can I when presented with such smells and sights and the endless possibility that I really will bump into you on the Jubilee Line interchange? The park bench above in Green Park; all the words I have written for this shit hole; my playground and ultimate lover; the only thing that keeps me sane is this old Town.I slip into the art house cinema’s and lose myself in sub titles, alone with gas less coke and dreams of a boy that I no longer am. I cling to the characters of World Cinema, for they give me hope; it’s only on exiting the cinema that I realize that I am surrounded by people I no longer know; my London taken by aliens, strangers and those who only care for the size of their fucking pay cheque.

I tried so hard to stop being a fucking deluded talentless writer just to impress you; I tried so hard to be a fucking whore in the bedroom just to save you from the thuggish drinkers of the poor club scene and fuck me shoe ladies. I tried too hard and why should I give a fuck about anything? I walked into the perfume store and asked the badly painted lady to spray your scent onto a piece of card; I inhaled it and for a second I was back with you oh and it crushed me; oh it fucked me up; how cruel the memory is..

I tried so hard to stop crying, but my eyes welled at the serenity of you. If skin was heaven then you wear god. If I could worship you it would never be enough. You have always been my alter and the church I dreamt of building; one day the Moon will give up, it will see the fruitlessness in sharing a world with you; the sun will go out and cry ash; he will say, ‘I never knew she was here and my heat so wasted’.

I tried so hard to see you. I could see the back of your head in a crowded high street where I was stuck behind a 1000 people with their boring shopping bags, and they would not let me pass. You turned a corner and were gone. Was it you or had I just smelt the scent of your sweet perfume and my sad lonely mind just made her into you? Sadly the latter will be the truth for you died ten years ago and I sit here with a coffee stain being admired by gay men and writing my words; one of the guys said, ” You look like a thug but carry a pen that bleeds the ink of heartbreak...”

I tried so hard to put you to sleep once and for all, to end the memories of our ferocious fucking and colour by number loving; oh babe I can get the words out and they define me and cover me in shit, but they make me smell of flowers. I died in your eyes more than once and even saw a reflection of a better me; I saw my eyes and they were not so bad; I loved then and was someone; was part of something; the staples in my book...

I tried so hard to get the real me to show up but this clown kept appearing and he had a black tear falling from one eye and he was me as a boy; how I cry for him, for the me that once molded faces from potatoes and dreamed of fairies; who thought that Dorothy was real and that tornado's would take us all to a better place; who thought that I would one day touch the hand of a woman who loves me; but I lost her in the haze of cigarette smoke and excuses; in the grotesque mind that was taken by demons; too many spliffs, too many late nights...

I tried so hard to be the magician who could put a smile on your face by producing flowers from a hat but you are more beautiful than any flower and what moves me to tears may just bore you.I tried so hard to be a man just for one day but still ended up being this ugly cunt that people laugh at and no one wants; fuck them, I can use the words moon and cunt in one piece so its them who are lacking...

I tried so hard to write a symphony in words for you but this was the best I could do; you are worth a symphony so.......how dare I give you this?

Written and © Owned by © T A Roberts 2007