words & pictures
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
