Gone on the road

The future is cancelled

Until further notice.

My lover is a leaf in the wind;

Every autumn the trees are bereft.

A moth draws in and out through a house late at night

Intersecting the talk in a warmly lit room.

My lover is dark water running.

I am a blind man in a car crash,

for the time being

2am 19.12.2006

Floodlights in the yard:
Starving Russians standing in the cold
and naked avenues of light.
Why do they sing like this,
invisible night birds
burbling like summer blossoming sun?
Belie the dark grass furred with frost
and rabbits, each a shadow round.

silver and orange in hazes
striped like sky tigers
It's a long way from dawn.

At last, here is the place,
the landscape hung in chloroform
and pearls, circle echo owls, echo owls,
ayearning cup my hands and call.
A deepsea ghostfish, bulbing.

Down to the low city, tree by tree
tentacled and dead.
Blunt scythes loom in, gargantuan,
webbed branches; slicks of web.
One leg by the coast,
dragging circles in stones. Another here.

One sky above the gravamen,
Dark, brainlike, and old.

The Vigil

After two hours of burning, I get dressed

and smoke.

Past the mirror

where your eyebrows push together 

and are deflected upwards like opposing magnets.

Wooden-toed, tired;

sun like a showerhead,

shoe-filled bed.

Cut, cut, cut.

The bright dust has left no company

but doors in parallel lines,

benign nurses.

I crave curves and blurs,

examine my fingernails.

Tomorrow in six hours;

tonight was bad like a fruit.

Book food

Very cold.  Posters curling up

With mould.

Now, reading

My mouth has opened, thinking

I pant happy shallow breaths

Like a dog’s mouth after drinking.

white lines

Life gives you lines : Ad lib

Life gives you lines : Write criss-crossed

Life gives you lines : But the compass is lost

                                'K, have you got a note?

Vigil II (what came next)

I may shatter on this precipice

between these weary, restless whites of doors and beds

and hours and hours sat staring at your dead white face,

willing you to wake.  After two days

you start to toss and shout, slick body torqued in sheets.

Just once your eyes break open, shriek – GET -

 FUCK – GET OFF ME –

 - You’re gone again.  Late night

blows over empty cobbles, cold

and spreads the stars in space.

Lack of sleep like radiation burns the shadows into place.

Over your face

the freckles fall, like spots of mould

up a damp white wall.  I watch

I hope you wake.

Date Rape : Prayer

Date Rape

Waking up, half-drunk

A roll-up, headrush

In wonder I touch

the brown patches

                              of blood

but nothing comes back

Go pee

               seeing

                              no pants

and no tampon –

and

   where are all

                     these bruises from?

Tonight, exhausted

                                             In sleep comes

flowering pictures

That choke me awake

Evaporate                                                                                      The raid turns up

                                                                                                         my underwear

                                                                                                         two used condoms

Screeching through                         

A stretched balloon too thin for it to stretch through

And the bruises have gone blue                                                               

The lines that look like fingers      -                            

Blooming                                                                        

Prayer

Lord Jesus.

               Justice Please

               Justice Please

               Justice Please

                              Amen

                              Repeat

Girl, Lantern

A cage of coloured glass

Cradles a candle

Girl reaching up with both arms

Blonde dreads, dirty sundress

Glimpse the inside arches

Of her feet

In darkness

She passes her lantern into the tree

It’s a night of wine and small fires.

Curled up like a girl in a bath

The bright cage of candle glass

Is borne up in a breath,

Like a baby, her term running backwards.

Every day she grows smaller and further away.

Pralines

I unwrap a chocolate, hoping for strawberry.

It’s praline - fuck – cast my eye on the others,

Sat in lime shawls. They’re all

Fucking Praline

Reading the Book of the Fur by Dell Olsen

Bathtub.  Fur lined.

Image nesting in my mind

That I might be a hard bald egg

Straight sat up in a coat of fur.

So I peeled eggs all winter

And all that was there

Slimy white heads

No fur.

This is how the end went

                                                I could hold you forever -

                                                I said

                                                You said

                                                I feel cold and dead.

taking a trip I mean forever

All that night they sat together,

Then when light, stood naked-footed

Outside in the early morning

sun, smoking and flicking

Seeds at each other.

They watched

Revenge films and drank and

Smoked weed in

vigil for my life.

I did not know what else to do!

            and no matter how far i walk my half,

the distance grows

            and it seems that ‘-i want you’

is a non sequitur

            and we are all,

still, the carriers of your

manly boredom

pouring down the puppet hole.

Untitled

I saw you –

Holding our son in the crook of your elbow.

He doesn’t yet exist

So I kept silent but

I’ll carry him in my cold mind

Until my body does.

Hiding in the Library

Ribbons of tiger’s eye

Wrap the wet planet

Outside

           

Inside

A white lamp shines

like a tooth

           

In a closed soft mouth

of books.

Emergency Medical Unit

Emergency Medical Unit

translucent faces

like pale children’s

portraits,

watery eyes towards me.

In the dim ward

the only noise is my exhaustion

retching in the early morning

one old man is wheeled in

he cries

pity for pity

give me

fresh water

Nurses hurry past him,

brandish his plastic cup and

bellow in his hairy ear, here

See– Water’s here!

His glass is filled

Wailing still

please

fresh water

Birdclaw

Listen

the storm,

the dead beehive,

sea a grey flag

torn out behind

red-slime cliffs,

trees drip

fat like

hanged pigs,

wet 

blister packets-

eight long years of knives on flesh,

arm hairs erect,

 hard red skin

carved up like pork

with crackling

Dirty water pools in the dark tarpaulin
I know what I look like.

Clutch floor

Birdclaw
Eight more-
Eight more-

Love

Back to the clean earth,

the sky is a sleepless

blue cradle.

When I was elevenish

I left the window open

and listened to the church bells chime

in parachutes of song.

Now wind knocks the bluebells

like tiny feet on a tambourine

and I get the same feeling –

That you are here again,

your hot red heart

entwined with mine,

like wire mending a fence.

Mum's crocuses

Mum’s crocuses

She’s planting fifteen years this spring

our sort of fate in a fairy ring

crocuses, and snowdrops’ jizz

then later foxgloves touch the dirt.

Bluebells blinking in the shade

observe the ladies walk to church

for this year’s spate of funerals.

And even now she plants us all

three pots of bulbs

in the loosebox til the spring

purple clits in a purity ring

Electric

I go in and pay my electric bill –

The till racks open like a grand mal fit.

A ghost refrain

makes me whip out my phone

but the screen is dark.

The square church,

stray leaves

birch bench tarred dark –

I leave the shop and sit down.

Fields slope in furrows –

scars in an angry brow,

mud, a bone, some feathers,

sun burning, long and slow.

Autumn 2014

my lover is a leaf in the wind;
every autumn the trees are bereft.

is spring coming