Luke Jeffrey Wilkinson was born in Manchester in 1990. He is predominantly a poet but is currently working on a novel. When not indulging his insane delusions of grandeur he enjoys listening to music, playing guitar, reading, playing poker and watching Manchester City.

 Contact: lukejeffrey12@gmail.com

The Suicide of R. Budd Dwyer

‘Now my life has changed for no apparent reason.” R. Budd Dwyer.

Disturbances captured
In high definition technicolour.
The electron glow
The swirling vortex
Of the computer screen
Wherein a collision
Of the Post-Structural image
Resides alongside
A tangled mass of
Hypertext and Hyperbole.

It’s a small world and a child
Hangs from its rafters.
Another video unsheathes
An ultimately human crisis
That transcends political
Affiliation.

An envelope offers the
Comfort of the steel muzzle.
The agitation of immaculate hair,
Frayed like a smoke halo.
A nosebleed so profuse
And liberal it arrests the conception.

The homogenisation of alabaster
By the red cataract
Over the twitching brow of
The pallid Cupid’s bow
Imprints on the voyeur
And burns with the clarity of
A phosphine afterimage.

No matter the dislocation of time, or place
Of execution, as vicarious witness,
The fingers of humanity
Drag you into that conference room.
Morphing into nauseous journalist
The spectacle offers no distance,
There is no sense of separation.

Gloomy Sunday

The car a chrysalis,
I cocoon in the warmth
Of the central heating from
The spherules of rain water
That coronate the windows,
Mordacious and mocking
My carmine eyes.

The marbled birds eye maple
Grain of oppressive clouds
Hang heavy like the sodden trench
Coat dragging the surf
of flesh between my
Shoulder blades in rapture –
Exalted by saline despondency!

A streak of Cubist staccato
Vivid over the pallor.
The partisan fingernails are morticians
Teasing the graves of violet clotted wounds.
No God to fear for recompense
His caprice the only compensation for
The endeavor of imagination.

The explosion inside, traumatic and sudden.
My limbs and my organs propel
And land, cumbersome, like foam,
In faltering, revered memories.
Right foot in Pere Lachaise
Left arm in Mullion Cove.
My vitals are sycamores,

Pirouetting entwined,
They splatter robust at Newstead,
On Boatswain’s steps,
In the shade of the urn, shielded
From the cold of the immortal stones,
Cocooned in the warmth
Of her tender embrace

What is Love, Anyway?

You are the cicatrice
Your ubiquity marked
On my skin,
The externalized forlorn.

You are the reflection
Of my condition.
The blossom
That pricks like thorn.

You are the concept
Of a terminal bout
Of selfishness
In its most violent form.

Awakening

“A teddy bear does not depend upon mechanics to give him the semblance of life. He is loved – and therefore he lives.”-Pam Brown

The mellow pastels of the ripening
Sun recalls French New Wave Cinema. The
Flat seems to seep and foam from the gaps in
The pavement slabs. Chirrups from the shallow
Throats of the morning lark penetrate the
Curtains, the corkscrew perforating the
Eardrum rusts. Tasting iron on my tongue.

For fear of their own delicacy my
Eyeballs are moated, not by tears, or rheum,
But by cotton wool. The image conjured
Is one of a supermarket Scotch Egg,
Sliced in half with close precision. Hard boiled,
But not altogether too unpleasant.

Flirting with the blooming duvet covers,
I am trying to feel the gentle thrum
Of the mattress’ heart beat. While jewelry
Glistens like hair diffuse with argon oil.
The floor is tiled with books, the grouting a
Dense blend of whimsy and Coca Cola.

The wall-paper pasted with inky slits.
That might be my imagination, though:
The walls aren’t papered; in fact they’re painted
A béchamel white. I’ve been awake for
10 minutes and already my calves are
Constricting. The lactic acid sprawling
Like oil, slick on a nappy changing mat.

I was oblivious to your presence
‘til this very second. Now I’m awake,
I’m overwhelmed by it. Cover me with
Those bitter morning kisses that caramelise
On my lips. You know, I read that lips are
The formation and evolution of
Scar tissues? Well our swollen scars dissolve
Into one another slowly like blue
Into red. They form purple. And you are
Tangible, now. You’re there at the clasp of
The purse of my lips. I can formulate
You into some kind of a coherent
Sentence. You are sculpted words centred on a
Potter’s wheel tongue. You are the devil in
The flesh. The Corporeal majesty
Of fauna’s pride, lust, and her avarice.

Ilse fades, evaporates into night.
A flicker of splendor and now she’s gone.
That staircase wit again. The morning and
its soft pastel hue are dimmed. I can’t feel
Your presence anymore. Solace fading.

All too brief. Too brief an awakening.
Your essence bleeds away until I run
My fingers through thin air. The duvet is
Heavy now, waterlogged. The jewelry scuffed
And lusterless. The long gloved fingers of
A headache cloying and strangling again.

Bury disasters of war. Keep quiet.
No quiero. Tampoco. No hay Remedio.
The cotton wool half encasing my eyes
Wraps them up. Consumes every cavity
In my head, every empty space in my
Viscera. My organs proudly display
Their plumage. I am stuffed. And everything
Seems so opaque now. Dusk and a few stars,
Lonely in dissonance. It’s so dark out.
So dark.

Nude Descending a Staircase

A composition.
A meditation in ochre.
A nude, indiscernible.
A  fevered abstraction.

A violent reproach
From the obstinate.
The more progressive
Finding something relatable
In the chaos of geometric preoccupation.

Aching for a movement
The Section D’or. Bloomsbury.
Fauvism. Surrealism. Cubism. Futurism.

The complex planar faceting

The passage, preserving
And expressing with eloquence
The wild surmise

I
N
Side!

Endowed with philosophical
Musings, with implications
Of some inner explosion.

Braques. Picasso. Duchamp.
My                             Love.
As I lay dying,
I couldn’t forget
This
Desperate swelter
Of images

Having Another Episode

I

Nothing.
Tediously, nothing.
Interminably, nothing.

And then you came
like some form of osmosis
or some tumour of colour.
The benign conquering
of an anaemic lung.

II

I am raised death,
puppy-fascinated by
the damage on
my attenuate skin.
A moated bite mark
a razor ribbon sash
or two
the rifting knuckles.
My kaleidoscopic eyes
pulsing unfocused
and shifting between the
Stygian crypt and the vibrant
flourish
and the blah blah blah
unremitting loquaciousness
of the inner monologue
and the iambic flub
In the alcove of my ears
that just won’t recede
and surrendering
to futility
and finding solace in
the warm maternal down
of the duvet covers.

III

I see the pigeon twirling tumbling
groundwards she falls
and hits the grass a sod lump.
A feather separates from the wing
that reaches crooning waste.
The eloquence of the shot
that ripples through the scrub.
A punctuation of tranquillity
in the aftermath of violence

IV

The way your perfume smells
when it’s a few days old,
A chemical euphoria
stagnating between the sheets,
Radial nerve exposed,
tendon still intact.
The slick that grows tepid
as it wells in the indentation
you left in the mattress.
That perfume smell, the
Separation of plasma from
Haemoglobin

Young Savage

I feel desperate to consume
every scrap of you.
I could drink your blood
Every night with my dinner
my tongue engulfed in
frothing flames of desire
and still not feel slaked

I could scrape your
bone marrow into a stock
Your carcass a Eucharist.
to poach your breasts
and gorge eternal
and still not feel satiated

So instead I’ll settle
for the acrid bouquet of
dead lilac blossom
Sunday mornings
and stealing bites
from every kiss.

As You Lie Sleeping

Your lunch must have had
A soporific effect on you.
You fell asleep at about six,
Exhaling, long and relaxed
Lungfuls of air,
The invisible plumage
Perfuming your body.
I snuffled in closely
And watched the tremors
Of blood babbling through
The artery at the hollow
Just beneath your skin,
Beyond the crook of
Your collar-bone.
The faltering rise of
Your breast filling with oxygen
Syncopating with the
Acceleration of your
Palpitating heart.
The two rhythms both
Languid as ragtime.
The measure of the orchestra,
The biological ballet,
I confess had it’s own
Soporific effect on me.
I yawned an arpeggio, my
Hummingbird eyelashes
Fluttered a scale.
A satisfactory final note
Sustained, I fell asleep
By the brook of
Your jugular.