Poems – Page 7 – dilettante ink

Bacon & Eggs (A revenger’s opera)

I broke two eggs

In that soft, one handed crush

You taught, a thumbnail for a spur

Hooked with the slight compression

That misshapes a world

Put them back together

Admittedly in somewhat different shape

All transparency gone

To a gleam made obtuse

As slippy, opaque destiny

Butchered to order

The sign read

(Hand drawn with

a crabbed and aching wrist)

On the corner of Argyle & Ross

The facade poisonous in dermatitis flakes

The dirty lead-white, scabrous underneath

Burst blisters watching, mouthing

How they hunger, how they weep

Cleaver raised, and falling like a curtain

A sizzle

As if the sea insisted

Something missing

When you turned off

The waxy flame

A dead thickness

In the nose, on the tongue

An old world

Of stones and moss

Where the fat, not quite rendered

Wears a misbegotten smile

I thought of you

There is
As much light
In a glass of rain


As the work
Of flowers’ basking faces


The strayed mischance 
Slanting by
The boards’ sopranino-clef


I thought of you
Left the glass
Drained to the pale silt
Of passing Sunday afternoons
On the ledge
Almost unseen
The way a drop
On a broad green leaf
Swole to a cyst


Pours away


A swan passing
With that complex
Treble-clef insistence
Of her bent-necked attention


Veils and shrouds
Are almost the same
In the way they hide your mouth


Broke from reverie
With the kind of equine start
That warily insists
Hand inadvertently flickering
Against unseen adumbrations 


That slight, eroded horizon


Fell to winter’s shards
The blood drops leaching 
From lax fingers, raised to lips


The warm, silent taste


Too bright to dismay
Another shallow sunrise

Dead Wallaby Sunrise

While you

relentlessly shop

To sate your triskelion god

With small household accoutrements

Paring knives, cup hooks, sealing wax

I go out at night

Howled when black dog ate

The yellow biscuit moon

Swole the colour

Of fog blown traffic lights

Threw it up again

Poisoned tongue and aquamarine

Ruby where the tyres

Flayed the skin

Drove on hard to the point

Where all white lines disappear

In oblivion’s sunrise

I will myself to sing (sub voce)

My brute euphonies

Eagle, crow hop, hung on a string

The day spills out entrails

Almost, (not quite)

Hungry again

Death & Camellias

The fence buckles

By a camellia’s weight

A cloying honeysuckle breath

Calls wilted petals falling

As if long drought surceased

In a tea cup’s avalanche

Jawbones prow the earth

A grimace clowned and sidelong

As if this were once a circus tent

Not a marshalling yard

Where brays anxious met

The impelling silence

Of hammers and serrations

When the earth uproots

In trenchant cascades

The ivy hideous, shivering

A wave, bent on the fulcrum’s back

In upheaval’s raw display

I wonder what pretty monsters

From desiccate honeycombs

In husk pale efflorations

From the secret earth, arise

The six techniques of highly ineffective mouse traps

New day has a fabric rip
The pyrethrum scent of last night’s neglected pans
Basmati and burnt metal
Slept with the sun inside
Woke weakly flailing
In your bite, a hard, machinic smile
A ridge against my wrist like sunrise
Broke a mouse’s neck
A small, uncoiled scream
Dragged up the hinge
The bared teeth, gladiatorial in glory
The tongue an ugly twist
Imagining a thousand crucifixions 
Along the Appian way
These brief lives another paltry annoyance
Marking the dwindling distance
Between failure and victory

Jumping off bridges

Jumping off bridges
You hoped the river
Made of glass
Would easily divide
Around your bird-boned weight
A fall, in mirrored rising
To a prayer’s clasped point
Almost as long as the world’s held breath
Shoulder turning
With that immaculate
Block and tackle inevitability
As if the curvature of the world
Were real, not just the lying distance
Where earth and sky collide
Where curves in opposition meet
In the wind-rush shout
A sun-pale flash of your smeared face
Realising, the world, neither curved
Nor made of glass
But, fragmenting apart
You are

From the isthmus of my eye

The wound is sunset
      volcanic glass


           the sea


       between the cradle


      in the lee
              
    a swell
stretched in a glimpsed hiatus


The cigarette burn you left
                 still brightly watching


         from the harbour
of my chest


A ship with nowhere
but this destination 


You said sorry, how you slumped
burnt copper dreaming slept
the way old lighthouses do


The fabric holing
with that mesmer’s grace


Spilling ash and flickered thoughts
the glare clenched in the spasm of your fist
gone wave break lax


Afterwards
     for salve a sting, the glassy shine
        of long past knotted healing


 The grain of sand
    in the isthmus of your eye
  all that remains


Watchful
    in a different glass
(still wide awake)


Of the beach I dreamed

On the intervention of angelic beings for good or evil in the mundane world

You are semi-aquatic
The silent metronome 
Cathected, a pristine serum
In jungle loops
As if you had begun to shed your skin
The translucent arteries displayed 
In their machinic glory
Imagining the melodic sound
Slowly drowning
The way Icarus did
The doctor finding
Lodged in your side
With cupped fingers, genuflected
Between crookèd hip and folded rib
Burned from the stitch of breathless running
A kind of knot
Quietly, in amelioration green
Saying, thank the angels and abominations
If the child had not been sick
Treasured, coddled, machined, subjected
Devoured, destroyed, made made
Drowned in the sea inside the sea
He would have died

Dancing with myself

now I am old
I will shine my shoes
until the leather has
a vexatious gleam

From the caldera
I can see the stars
turning against the heavy blue
of premature evening

Elbow gravelled on my chin
as if time were closer here
fingers hooking a crookèd nape
all extraneous distractions
careless and forsworn

Too tight, the laces
left undone, aiglets
trailing like reckless moons
as I (almost) fall
we slowly spin

Herod versus the daisies

If you can count
I will live
on the head
of a pin
or on its point 
where the rent is cheaper

Antipas won three break points
at Tiberias stadium, the dead
in their coracles, chagrined underneath
it’s too late to cry
I poured away the milk
the sink’s throat’s ugly gurgling
saliva slick at the side
of your mouth
where every day betrayal sleeps

The wind rails
at everything that stands to oppose it
fly screens stammer
the blue-bottle’s sermon drone confused
how it got to this enclosing side
through the criss-cross interstices
enticed by slow decay
that noxious pyrethrum smell
as if a field of daisies died
to kill a lost insect