David Morgan

Born in Berlin, grown in Seattle and Eastern Washington, for the last 25 years David has been based in London, travelling the northern hemisphere as a street musician and performance poet. He has written novels, plays and musical theatre. He’s won a fair few poetry slams, including, the 2010 Farrago UK Slam Championship. He recently completed a PhD in creative writing and philosophy at Newcastle University. He’s a longstanding member of the Writers Guild of Great Britain.

CATHOLIC LOVE

we lie on our bed and stare out at the terns diving into the deep

rising with beaks flashing silver in the sunlight

birds feeding for our amusement, fish dying for our amusement

we hear the crows laugh and the bed shakes and the empty wine glasses rattle

i open my mouth to you and swallow the sea

you are my childhood sin, the priest i lied to, the nuns i defied

you in your white dress and holy communion smile

ten years on and two hundred miles before i would find you

seven years old and the age of reason swallowed us up like a bible plague

how to corrupt what the young believe in and coin it into a power base

cover the world with true religion, fill a young heart with guilt and shame

stuff a young throat with catechism and light the fuse with grief and rage

lock me up in a dark confessional, talking to a priest through a metal cage

why do you have to know so much about me, why do i have to believe your lies

why did you put this beast inside me, do you think you’re safe

two hundred miles away is the big city

only two hundred miles away and i can be free

two hundred million people in this big country

and nobody knows me, nobody knows, nobody hears

the melodies bubbling up between my ears

plato and socrates, heffner and jack the ripper

over the mountains and across the river

out of the desert and into the trees. are you running with me jesus

you and your nuns and priests, you and your sin and sacrifice

you and your twisted love, you and your everything i don’t believe in

but can’t get free of. i am a prisoner in my own heart.

then everything stopped

i was staring at a girl with dark hair and green eyes, and she was staring at me

staring into me, and all the secrets and lies, the dreams and ambition, we both of us

could see them. we shivered in the cold morning light with the shock of recognition

who are you?

how do you know me

and if you know me

how can you love me

and i ran.

i was afraid of you, of the way you knew me, the you in me/me in you

we were too close, too soon, too young, and i was too dumb to know what i was losing

i crossed mountains and rivers, oceans and continents

i played music in a thousand cities, i sang on the street for nickels and dimes

too late, your children, too late, your husband, too late, the lost time like an angry river

and i come sailing back to you, your demon lover, your love like a wound

i sink down into the stigmata of your lips. what else but evil could be such bliss

yet oh what a miracle is the ocean of your eyes, your hot wet skin, your tangled limbs

your storm tossed cries, and i am the sailor of a million lost ships, drowning

drowning in your kiss

AMERINAM

Do people who die on TV really die

Some say yes

Some say no

Some say it’s clear as black and white

Some prefer

Radio

I had a dream where an old man in striped pants walked down the corridor of a nursery

He wore a hat with stars and bars and he carried a basket filled with bombs

He stopped at every cradle, placed a bomb, lit the fuse and passed on

I followed close behind him, stopped at every cradle, picked up every bomb and I too passed on

At the end I stopped him to return them

His heart melted into plastic as the bombs exploded and the babies cried

I woke up and smiled

nine eleven I’ll never forget it was the morning they found frankie face down in a pool of blood outside his own front door, face down in the dark because the landlord couldn’t be bothered to change the light bulb of course it wasn’t the light bulb being out that did it, whoever it was probably would have bashed his head in anyway but we’ll never know it was probably drug dealers but whether it was the old traditional kind or the new bastards on the block was hard to tell.

the ambulance came and took him away

the cops came and wrote down a few names

nobody cleaned up the blood for two or three days

nine eleven

there was a lot of collateral damage

if only they had got the white house too.

but that was in the afternoon

would I be willing to ride that airplane on either side of the knife?

no

but when I heard they’d got the pentagon I leapt in the air and shouted

yes.

we all sat down and watched – amazed but not in shock

when the second tower collapsed we couldn’t believe our luck

no yeah sure right they didn’t deserve to die if by ‘they’ you mean the people who really did die but then they never do deserve it, do they, it’s the axis of evil who deserve it the real axis of evil who die in their beds of old age maybe they die hard but I bet they don’t I bet they mostly die happy little fuckers who didn’t get to rule the world nobody does but they got to ride up on top so far up on the tip top tip top that we can’t touch them we can’t even lay one fucking finger on them and so we kill our own kind because they’re useful to the people we hate

well not me of course I’m only imagining what it must be like

I don’t want to die any sooner than absolutely necessary

not even for you

I’m a casualty too

gut shot

frankie didn’t die right away they kept him in the hospital for about 6 months while he tried to remember his name. then they released him to care in the community and he died after 27 days. I called the hospital about the post-mortem and the nurse started to cry. she had thought he was still alive.

www.davidword.com

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. 

Saul Bellow