Today my room smells like burnt eucalyptus
I don’t know where the fire is, but close
Nitre, or the surreptitious burning off
In a forty gallon drum, fireworks or garden scraps
I cannot tell which
A tricycle from the ashes like a saint
The rubber wheels and handle grips
Gone to char and treacle
Flames dripping with that jet propulsion whine
Or, perhaps – perhaps, all this has remained
For the worst part of a year, the scent
Of static ringing in my ears
The distant immolation of Vicks vapour rub
Rubbed carefully in cloth, to clear the sinuses
Left to shawl across a crooked tap
As the old wives said, vinegar, petroleum and heat
Against the ghost like shapes
Of our slowly cast adrift miasmas
We are bandits again, today
Ineptly stealing time
Through once again fogged lenses
The coffee is quite fine
Unfortunately cooled to dregs
Between clumsy sips and the reluctance
Of our misheard conversation
Beds are narrower on TV
People talk face to face
Unafraid of halitosis
Or other unfortunate intimacies
We populate our borrowed homes
With arbitrary things
To imbue ourselves with personality
And life’s outré laugh-track semblances
Wearing masks to unpretend
How we see familiar faces
In the shapes of cups and clouds
But just these peculiar vacancies
Where strangeness starts
From your face
An ageless breath has carved
Another empty planet
Start at the hard, policeman’s knock
We share something of the privilege of madness
At the door’s carefully narrowed gap
Sun-bleached curtain drawn
For an impromptu mask
From sidelights across a long night’s roughened mouth
To greet in weary remonstrance
(A mule joy nevertheless)
The carelessly dropped bounty
Of the morning post
A poem lumbers, gathers grace
A patch and piecemeal monster
Listening
To the threnody
Of a blind man’s flute
Feeling, in the air’s bird shape
An evasion and escape
From the demands of its creator
Until, in the misunderstandings
Of other people’s mouths
In the arctic fury
Torn apart
The streets are library quiet
A clarity, hid in the serried facades
Serrated trees and telegraph lines
Crossing at that infinite point
Where perspective fails
I put my reading glasses on
Finding in the shapes of words, clear and close
The world – not so far, gone indistinct
We abide in our houses, like rough, disordered books
The leaves of other people’s dreams
In that owling susurrus
A white noise blur
In my clumsied restlessness
A few loose pages rent
Gusting down the road
In obdurate branches, catch
Wondering if
By a kind, entangling osmosis
What stray words are crossing in between
If you eat these petals, before retiring
Through properties as yet unbeknownst to modern science
Sight will be restored
Mrs A Clarke of Winnipeg saw meteors on
A new horizon, she thought the chariots had arrived
Short-sightedness completely cured
Mr Robertson of Manitoba saw, the grain of skin
Like an isthmus in his child’s hand
Held firmly to cross highway 26, sick with salted ice
From the woods near St François Xavier
Home where the fire was the orange
Of his mother’s tongue, strangely bright and black
With summer’s laughing frozen fruit
Spilled accidentally in the kitchen sink
Dishes high as Babylon
The far-sought malaise, gone in the panchromatic
Wilderness of criss-crossing lines
Sarah Clawson, aged fifty-four, of Mobile, Alabama
Insomniac and half-prayered with macular degeneration
Reversed the waterfall rush, the flowers broken
Steeped, in a kind of tea, with sugar cubes
She could still get, because the factory was old fashioned
A bitter taste, but despite the door quite crooked
Swinging freely in the sycamore breeze
I guess, praise be, the frame’s bent too, she writes
In her thank-you note, vision now restored
The distortions in her peripheries
Where the dead once talked
Almost completely smooth, because
With a firm but gentle hand, the jags of fractures spreading
She crushed to sintered aromats
These falling petals
The phone shrills, eternally
Until it stops, beyond a threatening hiatus
In storm clouds starts again
An annoying reincarnation, when the machine kicks in
Of a robot voice, the timbre thin
And splintered, with the urgency of desperation
Yet, pronouncing stumble stilted
Admonishments and infractions
Warnings ending with that spy film click
Of an unseen listener, purpose all but unknown
The intent, inexplicable
Except perhaps to instil
A vague anxiety
As if somewhere, cloying in a desert land
A machine lumbered ingracefully
Towards us, having cut the line
Nothing left
But an ill-determined menace
A cat’s breath
In my mouth
That strangely intimate purr
As if I were a child feeding
On some wild nectar
In the cup of too wise savagery
The insistent hunger
When a voice in the white noise
Of emptiness, says suddenly
Is that you?
And as then, I still don’t know
Which one of us it was, or is
That speaks
Almost half awake
blanket warm
That strange lopsided walk
Of sterile corridors
A smile in the side
Threads of rotten teeth
Holding desperately to silence
Except the ventriloquist muttering
That untowardly thinks; you left a bird inside
Obtuse and andiron blunt
Chest too cramped to so childishly fly
Arms that half stretch out
The sinews almost disconnecting
Wishbone flexed
To that hyoid shout
That leaves me palely clinging
Against the ribs a cowl
A rose in my mouth
The glass has two faces
One folding in
The other folding out
Falling sideways
Through the airy space
That I halting breathed
The miasmic shape
That you left behind
Still quite young
I have a map for sunday afternoons
Going nowhere, just the roar of mountains
The whisper of wet tyres leaves a wake
On shining roads with a machine-like grace
The first reluctant drops of rain
Where it pools in my hand
Still cupped to lave and scry
Sets the mirror of the day to trembling
Distant thunder wraps her cloth around my ears
I imagine fierce and blinding
A ragged sky all crumpled
I wonder where those onward trains
Where they go, where they leave
These smeared signals black and white and red and green
Broken tendrils on the pane
I have a pocket full of earth
To grow a dandelion for my ticket
