Tim

Of late

that 8am journey

I take every morning

doesn’t seem so bleak as those previous to recent changes

(dare I say, revelations)

taking place within the office space where,

everyday,

ever since I started,

slaved for hours for basic pay

and made my way slowly

making cups of tea

to salary

‘til finally I could smile and honestly could say I had an occupation.

Now I wake at day break

without a single yawn

as I anticipate

what happenings lay await for later.

That day they cleared that desk space

and offered it to him

where they placed a polished name plate

which read only ‘Tim’.

Tim’s American

he drinks Americanos

with an extra shot of coffee

though after 12 it’s strictly camomile.

His uncle went to Harvard,

though he isn’t half as smart as Tim,

and when he’s dead

he’s set to get a great inheritance 

and he’ll never have to work again.

His suits aren’t just any suits,

they’re tailored M&S

dry clean only

dry cleaned each week and pressed.

Mine 

I bought online and didn’t get the size right

100% Nylon

trousers too tight around the thighs

and the flies bulge out,

it’s been said more than once before,

I bother females working on my floor.

Tim car drives like a dream,

It’s gotta be:

only him in it,

on a straight road

dry

no headwinds

but when it kicks in

it’s such you’ve got to see it to believe it.

It’s a SEAT.

I haven’t even passed my theory test,

I haven’t taken it.

I don’t have a provisional,

I guess I never will,

but then I get a discount rail ticket,

and if I could drive,

there’s still no one I could visit.

Maybe Tim?

Tim once read a whole book on kung-fu,

including how to do moves you won’t know have killed you,

and I’m just saying,

just incase,

you pace up behind him,

even if your steps are silent,

he was telling me about this muscle memory

which means instinctively,

within an instant,

without thinking,

all the training ingrained in him will kick in.

But if anyone harmed a single inch of Tims skin,

I swear I will kill him,

or her.

I swear.

That beautiful skin.

He’s pretty much got a six pack,

almost,

if the light’s right and he sits back,

and he’s just done some crunches.

We’ve hit the gym twice now,

I sat on the static bikes and watched him as he worked out.

Both times I passed out.

My trainer says my 2 litre Tupperware of humus

that I eat every lunch time is not enough.

So, since then,

despite the investment,

via debit card payment,

as a statement for a new way of life that I made,

I’ve decided for those coming up eleven and a half months,

the money I have promised them,

I didn’t even want.

And it was worth it for those 2 showers after.

Those 2 showers,

shared by 2 men,

naked to the flesh,

except for my swimming shorts,

unsure of changing room etiquette,

I’d got it wrong of course,

and once in

I could hardly strip

and alas

the second time

I’d forgot and got in in them again.

but what a thing,

let me let you in

covered in shower gel and shampoo,

Tim bare skinned,

not a stitch in between me and him,

him and I,

water running down our bodies,

not three feet aside,

he’s got

what we call ‘on the flop’

more then

than enough

as required for the job,

and one day

some lucky lady laid beneath,

will receive Tim,

and God bless those that sail within.

all that lather

that I wish I was

I bubbled more than any soap,

just for you and only you,

‘til both of us were washed and free together

and forever in our promises forever,

for forever.

Tim told this joke just the other day

and he had us in stitches.

I can’t tell it like him,

but seriously I thought my ribs would splinter,

ripping out my shirt,

spurting blood all over my 

so called collegues,

so much it filled the room,

and filled their mouths,

and drowning

their eyes will beg for forgiveness,

but I won’t give into it,

even Stacy who gave me those three days holiday pay

isn’t innocent.

They all laughed.

She laughed.

They all laughed.

Tim didn’t laugh.

Tim wasn’t there.

I hate the 6pm train,

late every day,

straining at the sides,

containing tired faces,

5 stops for my station,

the flicker of the light strip they won’t replace,

piss stains,

the unmanned ticket station,

vacant without fail.

home to the microwave,

radiating a rotating plate

of perforated Sainsburys basics

meals for only one

made with hate.

Thankful it’s not Friday night

each time I tuck me in

‘cause I can’t stand the 2 days of weekend 

without Tim.

(c) Dave Selby 2014

In That Kitchen

In that kitchen we try so hard to make food, but try even harder not to get called a fuck and told we’re useless and everything we did we might as well have not have done. In that kitchen the stoves get hot and make us feel as hot as it and thirst to stand below the fans for more than just the second we can. In that kitchen potatoes boil beside us, as we boil in suits of sweat and cause odours to bend our sense of smell away from everything that ugly, and try so hard to make a sweet smell in. In that kitchen we’ve bled from small holes whipped into our backs. In that kitchen I’ve needed more than what I’m paid to have a piss, but kept it in and added salt, pepper, butter into asparagus. In that kitchen - made of friends and sworn enemies with missing fingers - punch broke tiles and dragged knives across my arms, and took off fingerprints and left them frying with the chips, too scared to tell. In that kitchen, waited, working to smoke a cigarette and growing angrier each minute, ‘til someone lets it out of me by finding out how to make us all laugh. In that kitchen slipped on bleached floors and bits of food, and everything can be slipped on I’ve found out by now, no matter how many yellow warning signs anyone can put up. In that kitchen I hated myself and loved everyone else for letting me stay in that kitchen. In that kitchen I’ve died a few times and wanted to kill myself a whole lot more. In that kitchen I learnt how to smile, but not as much as I forgot how to.  

Dexter Selboy (c) 2013

For You If I Was Akhmatova

i watched and saw that she loved

the sun between eleven and three with no clouds,

as long as her hair smelled of heat

and her skin was brown as last year.

i loved my shadow,

which she reminded me was too big,

a lumber sundial,

always at the wrong time.

Dexter Selboy (c) 2013

You can get one free with every retirement

These ticks and tocks are markers of wasted time,
imagined punctuation only noticeable in utter silence,
 resting ears,
letting eyes lay covered
and leaving no taste on the tongue.

Waving forms rising and falling,
chalking up the only marks that matter.

Every second a space to be filled,
each rise in the cog a climb towards a moment
to be made memory.
Hand through hand slower than the one held above it,
ready to catch it’s significance in the movements.

The lines of these palms aren’t for reading,
it’s thin arms refuse to bend,
and the grip rests loose and easy,
throwing seconds too fast to be caught.

© Dexter Selboy 2012

Boots for Blues at four in the morning

“Just sit and listen”, he’d tell us.
“Dancing’s for fags and tall boys who don’t know how to tell stories”.
And the 88 black and white keys would lay balanced in front of him,
patiently waiting to help illustrate the tale.

His finger bones worked his hustle,
bending and reaching for the words,
shaping similes,
dipping under the odd idiom
and sketching out heavily pencilled metaphor.

A semicircle of drunken illiterates sat bent and swaying,
drifting into the days concluding fake believe,
wrapped up warm in a sleep shaped lullaby
more sweet than their own mothers mellow mewing’s.

Strings felt the felt,
hammered to their yawning song,
fingertips tapping rhythms like a
Morse code poet
(“If anybody’s receiving this,
we got cold beer and tobacco.
Bring women.”).

Quiet choruses of hand on hand on knee approval,
a slow bowled request sharply batted down
under
fading “Fuck you”s.
And now clear space for
a quiet voice someone remembered was theirs,
neck stiff, tightly letting out air,
the way a white man sings,
holding like with both hands,
as though it was the first girl he found
he couldn’t just bump.

One for his baby,
the funny valentine,
found slouched and pouting in a frame on the fauxhogany planks of the upright,
next to a tumbler of shop brand scotch
we placed on a pedestal just to piss out.

My best memories got typed up in those 88 keys,
punched inky relief’s, dusted off in second hand poster paper
(one side for you, one side gone with the has been),
carving the curves the 26 alphabet letters weren’t enough
to tell the whole truth of,
while my shoed feet danced silently,
leading my oil paint partner under a trailing spot light.

© Dave Selby 2012

154 lbs of dead wait

The way we found him,
I’m pretty sure that’s not what he wanted us to see.
His blood was running like a confession from his nose,
trying to feed some emptying reservoir.
There was a chance this was a cry for help,
but most likely
by this time his voice had become horse,
and all his shouting had amounted to nothing more than
eyes balling his,
and blank expressions from people he wanted to be caught by.

When you’ve explained all your arguments
and found no competitor,
unfortunately,
you will have to admit that you’re right.

It’s an ugly fight when you’re stood bloody faced
in the corner of a ring
you didn’t even want to be in.

© David Selby 2011

Half way up a hill, shouting for us to get on

It was just that one time that he’d fell asleep in the road of a morning, but that was enough to have a car ride over his leg and smash his thigh open. The car didn’t stop, it was too early.
I never really knew him till his thirty something birthday, when he rolled up to the gates at my flats, phoning and buzzing, tapping and shouting, and me thinking a whole night was about to begin. I didn’t see him that often.
At a music festival he’d gone blackout on Dutch pill dust, Mandy and Sunshine, we dressed him up like he was in the C.I.A. and he spent the next two hours marking perps and checking through handbags. When you’re awake for 32 hours and then have a snooze in a baking portaloo, things tend to ride out that way. He’d lost it. He told me how to gather my believers on a RyanAir, and when I suggested he drink some water, he demanded I,” Either listen and understand, or fuck off and stop wasting” his “time”. I wasn’t, I was trying to get it back.
After all this, the way I’d seen him so honestly, he stood there outside my flats, phoning and buzzing, tapping and shouting, and when I asked what he wanted to do the whole night, I saw he only wanted the drugs.

© David Selby 2012

Art Reborn

In the epic financial downfall
of late 2012
in an act
to conserve resources
the Terrible decision was made
for the axing of
the BBC’s most relevant
and demographically representative show
Eastenders.

Tears cascaded into streams
into rivers
into an ocean of regret
and many financiers were driven
to take their own lives.

I,
in my infinite servitude to mankind
took the decision to
(completely of charity)
fill the artistic void
felt by the masses.

Every night at 8pm
for one full hour
and for countless hours in omnibus on Sundays
live
infront of millions of viewers
would stand completely bereft of clothes
and punch myself in the dick
while crying.

For many years this sated
the Entertainment needs
of the masses

until 2017
when Terry Lewis
and income tax inspector
from Halifax
broke into the studio
and screamed
“This Isn’t Art”
to which I replied
“Art Is Dead”
for which I received an award
for Expression
from Russell Brand
at The Wella Shockwaves Awards For Something.

© David Selby 2012

Last night you told me you were an idiot, and today I found out you are a liar.

Every sunset is unique
but they always bore the shit out of me,
and I have now emptied my bowels
for the last time.

Yours sincerely
I have barely begun
but here’s my signature
all brown
and smelly
and a request
put in
for my final wish

that
when I first learned to ride a bike
I had never have stopped peddling.

© David Selby 2011

pissing through the trees in silence

What the Doctor meant to give him was six months, but what she's gone and done, is taken them away.
All those times you didn't do what you felt like doing. All the times you didn't smash your face through the glass, and danced on the old tin roof in the rain with your dick out.
So, I'm propped against the window, waiting to see if anyone needs waving to, and the sky is looking very Constable out there, and all i've got is a paintbrush and a bucket of turps.
The Doctor's given you six months, but all you wanted was a hug.

i've bought a tape recorder
now i'm are
a singer
and so is my band
http://soundcloud.com/dexter-selboy

Me playing live with the Shonky Trio in the Windmill, Mayfair.

two cloths don't make a quilt

February 18th, same as last year, and the moon's out getting chased again. A low grumble is flowing like tire smoke from the unlatched windows of the basement. Eyes take a few hours to adjust to the dimness of the room, but when they do, there's nothing to see but the sound anyway. And it still groans on. A movement like a thousands flying spiders webs tweaks you on the nose and tears start to well up, aching eyelids slide open, and a new sound enters the room,.. and it's spinning- soprano,warble-modulating and slipping up and then down, until it finds it's place, in harmony with the rooms grumble, and even though you can't hear either of them, they're louder than ever.

(c) Dave Selby 2011

Good Morning

The sun was burning off the dashboard, just as it was yawning its way over yet another morning. His feet were cold and bent up against the foot pedals, poking out from his work suit trousers, bound by stiff leather and shoelace. Fidgeting or maybe shaking, he wasn’t too sure. He’d be dozing under his blazer since he pulled up at about 4 in the morning, and when he wasn’t dozing he stared into the doorway of a block of flats. Just this one block of flats. Just one doorway for all those flats. There’s, say, sixteen flats in there, so that’s a minimum of sixteen people who could walk through that one doorway, but he’s only waiting for one of them.

It’s turning out to be an icy sort of morning where the grass seems to shimmer, but there’s still definite promise of a warm day to follow. It’s a good day to wake up on when it’s like this, it’s like the day is getting up with you, and you can feel like you didn’t sleep alone.

The door opens, and the only one he’s been waiting for steps out, burying her eyes from the sun, and looking slightly up like she’s breathing in the day. And then someone he’s not waiting for follows.

The frost is staring to melt.

They kiss, they smile, they hug, they smile again and he turns to leave and then he does.

He wasn’t waiting for this, though maybe he should have been.

She reaches her hand out for the door again, takes another breath of the day and stops. She’s looking at the car, and she’s staring at it ‘cause she knew one just like that, and this one’s got the same fucking dent in the drivers door and the trim’s coming off the body in the same fucking place and she’s walking towards the car and now she’s running and her mouth is open and she’s screaming and her fists are hitting the window and the door and the bonnet and her boyfriend has run back and he’s holding her he’s holding her her boyfriend’s holding her ‘cause that’s what they do.

And the engine is starting, the car is pulling away, and he’s driving.

He reaches the split in the road and turns off left towards the museum.

More fucking dents.

Copyright Dexter Selboy 2011 (c)

15:48 to Brixton

first piece of a series of collaborations i'm doing for creaturemag.com, with the amazing Bob Shaw.

O hark, tis national poetry day...

... and therefore the lovely fellow Matt Witt at http://www.creaturemag.com/ has compile a three part series of poetry from various poets to celebrate. This is a lovely website, constantly updated, which gives a whole host of quirky and inventive artists the platform to show of their wares.

so delve in

http://www.creaturemag.com/creaturemag-poetry-part-1/#more-1620

http://www.creaturemag.com/creaturemag-poetry-part-2/#more-1640

and find me and a bunch of other chaps scribblings.

more tomorrow.

xx

just 'cause you made a sandcastle, doesn't mean you're some kind of king

and when I get there

still

token of a present that isn’t yet on the first steps

the thought up ahead

waiting to catch up with dreams and meaning of beings, beens

and or

or and

and has beens

syncopated frames colliding to meet

the maker of scenes side reel

and I feels to I feel to I feels

and to find real

I asked the mirror if my eyes could pluck from me

and the words fell to nothing else

and my screams went unheard to those ears

that face was just lines

that chin was just a shape

and movement was mimic

we saw through two eyes; not four

and spoke with one mouth

heard with two ears; and the other two deaf

breathed just one fresh air

and when the question sought answers

none came

the legs remained lame

the arms couldn’t lift themselves

and I could see the strings

my friend could never be as much as I saw him

and the words he said could never mean as much as I heard them

my company was never much as I gave

and my words were never as much as their worth

I bowed down for no curtsey

shook hands

p’d and q’d for no courtesy

my body spoke the wrong language

eyes can only see what they understand

the mind can only construct the pattern

my green is your blue

my hate is your glue

and our norths can’t meet

I grew from something else

and your earth is my death

your exhale is my breath

and as you stand

my right is my left

together we chased our own rainbow

found the pot was empty

and so sold the pot

climbed mountains with no view

ran marathons with no finish line

thought equally of ourselves as murderers and geniuses

learned to hate out obsessions instead of embrace them

and did the same to our relatives

I learnt not to hold your hand while you held mine

it didn’t matter if I lied if you believed me

so I just said that was how I smiled when I was happy

and you did it too

how can it be love

when it’s like this?

does hate end up loving all the time

no one ever answers these questions

so

bashing this wall for as long as I’ve been

looking so far forward that I missed the door right beside me

eventually broke through stone and concrete

reached through to pull the inside out

and found

just the same

and the wall suddenly seemed more beautiful

its reason was just to be; not to block

and I’d turned the wall into a hole

that opened to show that nothing had changed

so I picked up the bricks

began to build

one by one

stone by stone

and as the last piece was placed

I hammered in a nail

hung a mirror

and I looked at each other

(c) Dave Selby 2010

22/12/09

it was what i had been dreading

the phone too

it trembled and glowed

its blue light

at the shock of what it had received

she hates to see me chipper

because i was the one

and i don't understand

how hard it is for her

i reply

some bullshit

because i can't say

one of the many things

i would like to say:

i miss you

i hate you

i'm trying not to rub salt in the wounds

i've hurt you

i've hurt me

i still love you

so i say

i know, i'm sorry

and she says

no, you really, really

don't know

just keep on with your chipper

fucking mornings and gigs

and forget about me

well

i can't

i want to

i hate you

i miss you

i've hurt you

i hate me, and

i still love you

(c) Dave Selby 2010

nightly woe

lady of the night

get inside

for

it is cold

although, admittedly

it has been rather temperate

and

the weather recently

has more than made up

for the bitter winter months

still

your clothes are few

and you tremble

like a puppy

a cute one

who is cold

or maybe

(even)

scared

lady of the night

get inside

(c) Dave Selby 2010

Review

he ran his

small

fat

hands across the hair of her outer thigh

and looked into her

good eye

leaned in

and brushed his mid-life crises

against the rim of her glasses

by mistake

they didn't need words;

she didn't know many

and he

had a speech impediment

some people are meant to be alone

(c) Dave Selby 2010