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
You made pyjama soup
Lemon, eggs, basmati
In a witchy broil
Sleeve dipped thrice for auguries
The way Macbeth’s crones crowed
A particularly unpleasant hunger
Soft as eyes, and sour sweet
In transit
A spot of black
Against, slick-bright
An unknown planet
A veined eye still watching
Toast mostly blacked and cut
In strips thin as a walking forest
Smeared on your lips
The glistered, noisome mask
Of any revenger’s tragedy
The battle almost done
Just dregs and crumbs
Of midnight’s salt & pepper folly
Hungering
For the reassurance of your face
Jaw thrust forward, a monstering
Marionetted palsy
Of strings and pinions
Inexpertly manipulated
I met you once
In another world
Ate a stale biscuit
Threw it up again
The sky in soot and butter
Curlicues and approbations
When I was a dog, for a while
Glass house, all lies, no windows
Barked at the moon
At her silver mockery
Barked again, in the dark
When she was gone
Stars like tears
The poet said
But I was just a dog
Alone and
Not done howling
