Pica For Toy Zeppelins 

is out now!

After long plucking at marcour-affected jot pads, coaxing growth through tired revision—their many passages and pithy scribbles—I fashioned at last the base of a veritable pig-out: stuffed, dressed, and maladroitly layered with freshly creamed foetidness.

From that glut rose my newest collection, Pica For Toy Zeppelins: four hundred pages of pulped prophecy beckoning foul reckoning.

Cooked up inside are my seasoned obsessions with rampant body horror, anatomical gore, the pleasure of flesh most grotesque, the fractured gaol of self-contained reflection, and man’s kinship with fated godlessness and corrupted design.

It is a book that opens the wound, salts, burns, then salves with benisons to the rank leak of its fluids.

The title itself spoke long before the poems did—Pica, the clinical term for compulsively craving inedible non-grubstuffs, and Toy Zeppelins, those childish flights destined to fall—miniature dirigibles ineluctably inflated by purposeless ruin, swelled to pop and seared too close to the sun until grounded by their own hot air.

Together they spell the condition of creation: a craving for false transcendence, a gorging on what chokes and bursts in the stomach’s pit.

Each poem breathes in this tension—between appetite and annihilation, between abject and sacral, carnal shame and carnival shamelessness—where sanies and pus become acts of penance, and decay turns devotion.

Readers entering will find no comfort: their crown baptized, their vessel hacked and spat on.

Among the fevered pages wander the Dog-Faced Boy of Cwmbran Square, the Lockspine Temptress rowing her barge of flesh, saints stitched in worms, Babble’s orgiastic wash among dreck and dejecta, and the great lake of marmot milk where eyes drink until blind.

Each creature cries in its own dialect of filth and suffering, all chanting toward the same ecstatic ruin.

I wrote to consecrate the lowly, to forge art from the aftermath, to wrest beauty from all rancid fare—though I confess, I delight in the disgust.

Some pieces bloat with such excess that they demand an averted gaze, lest they themselves fester or slip into swampish, fevered fugue, where the air reeks of bone pyres and boiled century eggs.

Yet others are tender and let lilt to liturgies of rapture and reflection, brief reprieves where the blood hums through lucid mindscapes.

This collection isn’t to be skimmed on a luncheon break or in a splendid state.
It is to be endured by blistered finger and drooled on with mouth-watering feed.

Here’s hoping you are cut from the same crumpled snot cloth as myself and would want to explore these dire lands of curdled milk-things, desperate seers, rambling sicko dickers, dysmorphic succubae, grand middens of clogged filth, and soliloquies of mental damnations.

Pica For Toy Zeppelins is a hymnbook for the (sometimes) beautifully damaged—a circus for anyone willing to find divinity in decay.


May it stain you kindly, and make your mirror blink first.

Available in print: Here

Cover art by Suzie Matthews, later digitized via Midjourney Inc.
I’ve included the original pencil sketches and painted cover below—

Birds With Vertigo is out now!

“Faith is in the ache of becoming more than despair. Those who do not hold their breath are forever doomed to drown.”

This maxim I made preposes the content of Birds With Vertigo. Every greasy paunch needs its slap of ritual basting, and it serves as more than a catastrophic warning of the doom-filled grotesquery ahead. It sets the stage for an exploration of despair, survival, and faith in the midst of a fractured world.

In Birds With Vertigo, despair is not merely a theme. It is the landscape from which all growth must emerge. The grotesque, the absurd, and the fractured madness within the collection, from carnivalesque vignettes to verse scorning the demiurge, are not just reflections of suffering but invitations to confront and embrace it.

Faith is the stomach to wade and stir. There is plenty ugly dredged up to contend.

But it is my hope that Birds With Vertigo resonates with those who, like me, have felt despair’s grip and sought faith in its wake. Those who will laugh as the world burns, knowing there will still be truth to find in the ashes.

You can find Birds With Vertigo here.

I also want to shout out Cumsleg Borenail for adapting seven of the pieces from this book into an aural clusterbender of unsettling, sharp spoken word accompanied by hellish dark ambient soundscapes. Please visit his Bandcamp page and perhaps donate to the 'name your price' collaboration!