The Michael Barrett Collection

Dear Tradition, Dear Heartbreak (Poem Collection).

Death Again...

Sorrow hands sew the hole, the tiny hole of frustration, the hole I denied was a problem until vanity un-relaxed me. These socks were a gift, a gift from a murderer who hangs around with the gang in the gutter. Drains fill with rain, dank memories there, dark stains in my brain that stink, it's death again.

Often they are cold lines, damp lines, on the paper that I write, inside a leather case that is cherished. Fire and smoke burnt the lines, fog and ash killed the mouse that ran, back and forth, back and forth like pen to paper, like foot to sock, like sock to shoe. Un-cluttering the room that caught a flame, I can comprehend death again.

Corruption has stained the hope of happiness and the joy of life. Another unjustified death, unthinkable, unthinkable. How do you sleep at night? Discuss, if any, a process to how you sleep at night. Love has died, love in the form of a child. What is your defined image of death and what makes you ever think that you can own it, what sounds of dying do you need to hear before you know death again.

Civilisation is still reasoning with the unnamed look of a plague, far-reaching from normality. Bereavement could charge violence into the compressed fuse, irritation dominates my belching stomach, a pit of green it must have been, as the vomiting noises came with a spray protesting the go ahead to hell. There we have it then, no human rights, no role that is decent for us to play, nothing is wishing us well, upon the horizon death again.

When the World Was Mine, I'd reinvent Myself a Million Times

Human fracture: I lie about everything I am, but at least my lies are my true desires. Invitation: Come and be the rendition of my heartbreak. Invitation goes astray, the irony in vanity: You can be the painless version of my demise. Fertility modern, life defeated: Splatter my fruits, poison my wine. This portrait is now a sullen image: Hanging to a theory that's furthered my divine tendencies to look like sweetness and light, an erotic fixture that you can't taste when you bite. My ode gone astray: I'm not the giver of life; I'm just in love with its possibilities.

Energy of Desire and Mundane Blood

Crying before your own funeral,

I notice, you've starting drinking again,

Standing with that sudden flow,

Long legs, dancing insensible, funeral bound, drunk and ageing,

I am separate from sentiment; I am a cynical form of dread,