About time for some more juvenilia

It's well over a year since I dipped into the vaults and showed you just what a lousy poet I was thirty years ago, so it's a long overdue treat.

Maybe "treat" isn't the word most would choose. I've been transferring some of my (slightly) less terrible stuff from the hand-written notebooks to disc and decided to show myself up again. This selection of poems were all written at the same time. I was about nineteen - perhaps a couple of years older. Then, as now, I loathed discos but was persuaded by a couple of friends that we should try visiting clubs for a few weeks instead of just going down the local pub. It was a salutary experience, and one I have steadfastly avoided ever repeating. It did however give me something to write about. They go under the generic title of New Songs For Hollow Faces. The revisions that have been made to them are very slight. A word or two added or removed for metre, a verse dropped because I couldn't work out whatever the hell it was meant to be about and a few spelling corrections.

1. Excursions Into Hell
We visit ever more outrageous worlds,
Searching only for novelty.
We ignore the claws that catch at our skin.
They do not impede our descent.
Bizarre creatures pirouette around us
Beneath the garish lights of Hell.
The fractured sound murders all thought of speech
The heat steals breath from our bodies.
A storm of light breaks apart in our eyes,
Further dissipating sanity.
This is an excursion into Hell.
Following the terrible Maelstrom down
We chase the thrill of the new.
We surface amid mirrored laser beams
And satin seductresses.
We cannot reach into their souls and hearts
For they have none to be reached.
We become the future.
We become ourselves.
We join the revellers.
On excursions into Hell.

2. Faces Without Names
Faces without names
Words without voices
All around me are ghosts.
Sins without shame,
Futures without choices
Unsupported boasts.

3. The Sin Of Solitude
Solitude is silence
And silence is a sin.
Wait in anticipation
For the music to begin.
When they peak in rhyme
And you do not understand,
Ignore the singers words
Feel the rhythm of the band.
Not even in your fantasy
Allow silence to intrude
For silence is a sinful
Vicious interlude.
The interact in mime
Without communication
Together but for ever
Bound by their isolation.
For solitude is silence
And silence is a sin
Wait in anticipation
For the chaos to begin.

4. Part of the Heat

Like suicidal moths
On kamikaze paths into the flame
We plunge through the doorway
And into the heat.
Sweat stains our elegant clothes.
Our eyes hook upon other eyes
As other eyes hook upon us
With passionless fire.

We do not compete.
We will not join the dance.
We will choose no partners.
We will not become part of the heat.
Instead we slake our thirst
On draughts of cynicism.

5. Lies of Consent

Finally the manic mood catches me.
Off guard for a moment, it strikes at me
And pours poison into my mind.

It does not go unnoticed.

Eyes turn. Fingers Point.
My laughter balloons out
Visible but silent amid the furious sound,
Skittering like an animal
Through the mirror ball confusion.
I am lost.
There is no longer safety in unity.
There is no more deceitful truth.
There are only lies of consent
And more, and ever greater pain.