Bread & Rivers

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

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