As you knead Your eyes distend like rivers Behind half reflecting glass Frames marked with the bird foot marks Of your anxious imposture Imprison half your face As if gulls had fled The knot between your teeth As if you could in misered focus Taste skittish thoughts In that hard bitten fibrillation The more piquant Rank sourness For a palsied freedom I do not know how you see Through that constant pouring A cattish nonchalance Scrape with the axe blade of your hand At some casual irritation The fissile texture Of flour on your skin As if inside, a statue were emerging Eggshell and porcelain –Bisque I think they say Like the soup Somehow in birthed paleness, lithe As if the outer self A thing of frowns and creases Of variegations more imposited than arranged Were the shell, the now ossified thing You have like any wiser being outgrown
Author: C S Hughes
Fat Man At The Beach
Put salt in a jar
That convalescent blue
Shook it until
The sun-flecked afternoon
Groaned seashell promises
Lazily rolling
The lap of drowning dreams
There is always a fat man at the beach
In the background, walking against
The shore like some chagrined duck
Or penguin, skinned raw, useless wings, hands like cranes
Making round desultory pecks
As if
Beyond all proprietal regrets
Still tentatively swimming
Theatre Of Grass
Rain birds chisel A heaving silvered sky I think how The polish smears reflections Until just the wake of it remains In lines as thin as chemtrails The weather will one day end, you said With that delphic nonchalance Of blue emerging from occluded winter An eggshell’s upturned mask Exaggerated so The sentiment is more easily read Across the vast arena of your thrall I wonder if the grass Remembers where you fell Sways the shape you left In evening’s bristled yellow We have a house of melodies Not regrets, holed like the lace Of blowsy curtains, a shadow’s Brief forgetting on your skin The fabric, thistle dry When it gentling scrapes Against your brow, and lips and chin A genuflection, anathema On your eyes, another Involuntary blink Through dust in sunlight’s sheaves Almost the start of weeping –except Gathered around the street (The drone almost tired) scattered flowers make A library for bees, the honeyed Aftermath of thoughts Dolloped with the burnt wing fragrance Of returning spring
Trouble Sunday
I will wear my morning coat Buttons not half as big as the moon Done up crooked and crooked done down Till troubled as Sunday afternoon Against my nails the tick-tack sound That she only understands In her chagrined gleaming I turn skywest my crinkled brow Beg of her a brief blessing Feel her calming breath and hand Cool my cumbered thoughts awhile Smooth as the nightsea’s far lapped sands Sleep warm inside my sleeves
Aeroplanes
The beach is made of glass Walking backwards On the far side of the rain Footprints erase themselves In swiftly drawn tongues lapping I am inside my Melchizedek A message, overlong Stained with salt, curled within Break to find the ocean’s scrawl –Almost indecipherable We chastise to the whine and palsied shake of aeroplanes Bright and corkscrew shards Just a casual threat In the thought of sudden falling Now a sun-struck chisel mark In the poise of distance Almost gone
Execution, Afghanistan (War Poem.119)
Low level violence on the news
Wounds like pig face
Do you want me to drop this cunt, the soldier shouts
His need, his fear, almost palpable
The sharp, disconsolate caesura, weak disguise
Do not see (it says)
A dove half-hidden in the grass
In lapis, rags and bones
I will cling to the sleek thigh of a fast departing plane
With love like desperation
Fall like birds
Forgetting how to fly
We are all heroes now
Almost
Grasping freedom
Half blue day
Got the clouds on a string (or do they have me) I don’t know why or where they’re going – what they so burdened dream in gathering swell, in trailing dissolution thin hand raised against the sun where they end and I begin a perturbation on the face in the disavowal of their exhalations gone repletely smoothly only that in the fleet urgence of our conspiracy their hesitant pull so easily lifts
Cemetery Dog
Cemetery dog pulls at my hand mouth wet and hot almost – soft earth kind but for a few hole-punch reminders half wild, half wise with bones jostling underground in their occulting game how like reeds they echo come play, come play just for a while a knock, a skirl – at my wrist a warm wind growls
A Bird In My Sleeve
The rain harangues Curtails the rags of afternoon To a kind of twilit comfort Of these few close held rooms You are in my sleeve Sate as other Sunday evenings Hesitant as a bird Crumpled as if you were already thrown away Like the stone the tailor threw A knit as camouflaging As any grass-thin shadows Your voice, close enough For doves to misconstrue Still, against the staccato dark Of shades rigged tight as seabird sails In any failing storm I don’t understand How suddenly you flew
Beneath The Sun’s Chagrin
I want to see your face again
When you first saw the sea
The car seat smell drunk as the newly dead
Uneasy in their corrugations
The waves unmercifully high
Poised above the glassine under-swell
As if eternity were the stinging slap
Your dour grin collapsing
The shush of traffic slew
As if you had nowhere to hide
Just the fist clenched hope
Beneath a recalcitrant sun
That I will flee and sleek
With other shoreless creatures
Risking constant reiterations
Or, standing hard against the tide
Hips braced, chin askance
The sand a living thing beneath my feet
Hand raised to shield my eyes
Against your oncoming hail
I will burn and fall like anybody else