words & pictures
The bed falls towards the centre of the earth
Beyond the roof’s reptilian back
There is something earnest
In the dust of stars
As if the night’s sparse rigour
could sustain your waning exhalation
Until you were empty and it was full
The rumbling descent of slowing cars
Occludes your ghosting breath
Lights an alien red
As if you breathed out
Another world
That
In dark obscured distance
Still running you breathed in
I put my hand out, like a fire accept yours is gentle, with that tremulous shake of fallen leaves turning slowly to the bronze of earth beyond the dunes of your shoulder saw in the unevening sky the roundness of your disapproval afternoons as lithe as cats I imagine you always have that face a prosopon, de rigueur downturned at a scrap of yellow there are foals in autumn’s colours the leavened wind has an insistent touch as soft and irrevocable as Midas steam plumes their nostrils and furs their backs in their gait, unconstrained machineries take sudden flight (as you turn, come back inside) the evening spills her horses
The sun is blind
The old man said
Steps as elusive as wet clay
Milk blue opals in his eyes
Arm outstretched for leverage
In a mantis feeble invocation
The sky a fleck of spit
The road across the cliffs
A muddy chalk
Suitable for marking games
Of war and hopscotch
Casting stones
One knee bent
The trench foundation deep
In a kind of homage
That winter
We did not eat ice-cream
Thought how you wore
A cardigan like rope
Though really it was unseasonably mild
As late spring dancing
One and two and three and four
The pebble skipping
As if this were
A calm still lake
And not another
Stuttered evening’s fall
Still, a hand that reaches out
Measures time
Quite differently to the straightened mouth
Of discomfited laughter
Inelegant metaphors
strained at the bit
From inside
an insect gnawing
exulted
when the mandibles broke the skin
Excavated
that disgruntled earth
a machine that
mouthfuls spat
Curled to a walnut shape
heat escapes
through scalp and anus
as if we were
some alien
and
obtuse kind of planet
The sites
of old injuries buckle first
bicycle crash, careless menagerie
a slight body weight
elastic in collision
where once you flew
cleats and laurels
over the minotaur
a monster gnawing
at your thumb and wrist
the crabbing slew
gravity’s sidelong spill
an arced trajectory
the stoic, downturned face
a theatre of cheap betrayals
enmeshed, the jackboot heart
where the andiron slipped
an upstart fire lick
the doorway guillotining
in the inadvertent pneumatic hiss
dull magnetic eye
through the safety glass
as if the web and constellation
of all things, in the enfilade of your dismay
so easily fell apart
Pulled at the thread
A red crochet like love around your wrists
The night is mostly walls and fences we are small pieces of the sky falling through her corrugations Roaring the roar of bicycle spokes blurred towards the traffic’s restless cliff lip split in defiance streaking blood skittish as reflectors Thin-skinned soles, breaking, skate grasp, let go, the road’s grit crumbling affliction A star around the machine’s taut throat hidden by deceit’s accretions of flaked lead paint, an oscillation with that metronomic blur as if beset by wind-torn shrieks wept meteor a blinded giant flailed about A guttered bite halt and leap that Newtonian triangulation of arrows and arcs argon blurred a Pythagorean shout A new sun rising while the wheel lazed in radiations devolves to froed spite slowed as slowing windswept pulses a twice bitten lip Your smile lost pebble-skinned scowl a constellation’s strange fixed warning flagging pennants and careening misdemeanours a snake slewed track the minotaur bars bent in acquiescence despite repose bull’s broken neck nevertheless defiant
The sea is always In throes behind you Or, uncertain where the shore Bent in praise before your feet I thought it quite perverse How the red shoes Were your painted mouth Fingers soft as raindrops Other vanities calculating In their iterations The mona lisare of your wrist Lips divided Each breath salt, and hurt The lace undone Turn your neck aside, as if (No less easy) You would almost sing
I remade the chair From a few broad rails The curtain’s billow and drape From the goose-down shiver Of winter’s long-drawn exhalation The iron bed, stalwart In curlicues and abandoned heaps That you, in your cool insistence Preferred neatly folded I was never like that –fool You admonish with the laughter of the imagined dead In that cloud-drift adumbration Still Could not remake the stillness of your face
A jellyfish squirms by Oedipal as meringue You are far out to sea A stone pier defiant The alarm shakes like a buoy The bell almost insignificant A cello ha-haroooms Clears her hopeful chest Sidles to the fronds of lace A deepwater fish She can With a clawed-shell fist Glass-cold and pressed To jaw and brow Deep and slow as galaxies Almost hear The dorsal hum In the heaved dark, wandering A sound as bright and lost As a beacon
Newton lives on the anticline Watches the dulled horizon with spyglass reversed How far it all is, he thinks And from this angle, oh how close the stars Gravity is mostly imaginary Wallpaper birds are seldom still Stealing faces and strawberries Chairs move in fixed points around the sun If we idly sit, if vacant They remain a kind of sundial Waiting for circling shadows To forego in their orbits All the harmonies of the spheres And in that expected (but unpredictable) Falling apple shaped hiatus To reach a less Substantial conclusion
The red earth graze
on your chin
makes your tilted face
round like the world
An iceberg tooth
incites my lip
as if I were set adrift
colliding, capsized, lost
(tethered nevertheless)
in your unforgiving latitudes
Brow cool
and fever dry
as any
brazen templed sunset
I suppose I must be the yellow dog moon
with my lopsided grin
bridled on a half-mouthed horizon
changing my mind
(and back again)
a creep closer and dark
with each circumnavigation
Still
when you gently
bite my face
I start to die again
