A wreath around you
As if I mistook
A sapling for a mountain
Teeth of glass
With that diseased opacity
Of expelled liquorice
An aeon’s season
Of scree and debris
The draggled hem
Of summer’s discarded dress
Red dust in your veins
In your eyes
Autumn’s evening amber
I didn’t cry
Til they played
that stupid song again
Kept spelling everything wrong
In the innocuous text message
With unwilling, clumsied fingers
Easter’s discounted chocolates
In cartoon disaffection
From serried array
Numbly watching
The lights in stars
A linoleum sheen
Wrote a few disconsolate lines
Found in them
Little consolation
Everything is strange
Keep calm
This is just the end of things
Remember the smell of stale bread
Toasted until almost burnt
This is our body
An extemporary sacrament
Subluminary in substantiation
Transient, but satisfactory
As another sip of tea
Out the window
Above the swamp
There is a blue sky fat with buttered scones
Around your heels
Stagnant water
And the drone of dragonfly wings
Call life extinct
A breath, a residue
Your woodsmoke heart
Maybe earthquakes make alarms
The whistles of trains hauling rumbling cattle cars
Warn sharply of collision
Here the benches are hard
There is gentle laughter
As dogs sing
Have some jam and cream
Sweet, isn’t it?
My hands fell off today
On Commercial Street
Where I’m not exactly sure
Near the post office
Or the pub, silver dog bowls
On the path outside
With that algal taint
For mongrels dispensing oracles
A lolling tongue and lambent eyes
Lantern bright and bemused as a lamb
Finding in each passing imbroglio
A curl-lipped growl
Or cruel and doting master
– He’ll take yer arm off at the sleeve
If you pat him – I shrug in reply
No hands, you see
Just a raddled sleeve
I think I saw them on the verge
Over there - rat scurrying
But when I proffer, to my chagrin
My much vaunted ignorance
With a vacillating gesture
From the ends
There they are
Pale, sick anemones
Against a tide of mournful howls
In full bloom
We pressed dandelions and daisies
Numbed the tongue
Just milk-sap
Teardrops from the stem
Torn and, negligently broken
Don’t eat the flowers (you said)
With that charmless, bitter poison
A mercy
My mother called them
Marguerites and monsters
As if they were saints
Or easy sunsets
Tore them out
The desperately pale roots
Still aching
A wither already on
The petals and the beckon-hearted leaves
Sun following
Evening’s sleepy eye
Blood and bone and dreaming
Megalodon fragments
In the earth-dark coagulation
Gerberas in hungry colours
Brazen, with that dizzying
Pyrethrum intoxication
But
Still not quite the same
Falling
I eat leaves
They have the gritted
Pungency of autumn
As if humus were the mired death of whales
Between the narrows, the soughing shore
Rain tastes like, an oscillating erosion
Breathe, breathe a breath
There is a leviathan
Waiting in your throat
To hail flukes
In a last flung shout
Of escape
A pencil weighs
As much as the sky
On a rainy afternoon
Without much left to say
Sullen old moon
Refuses to rise
The half-lit, oven glow
Of a fog-windowed kitchen
Maybe bread, maybe pale
Glaucous cake, full of holes
When satisfactorily baked
The skewer clean, the jam
Glossy in its violence
Incise a few stray lines
In the mystery of powdered sugar
Illegible, with only
That writhing semblance
Of half-baked meanings
Nevertheless, with a cup
Of sweet mild tea
Charred baking paper
Unfolding like a leaf
A worm from the chrysalis
In triangles and tall
Unstable squares
Kind as a smudged and balmy evening
To the taste
An echo in
The fishbowl glass
I think I mean, a reflection
Of the bluely, monstrous rising earth
Cars passing, Sunday slow
The dry cereal sound
Of the world rigidly consumed
Locked jaw, gravel stoic
Mouse hunger, too lazy yet
To go for milk, cat food
Croissants stale
As a morning waning moon
The marks of trammelled sleep
Still in your face
The coffee tastes
Almost like pollution
Pull at the reins of sleep
you curve away
caparisoned horses
jangling with
a head thrown preen
motes and stars pinwheeling
I thought I had you
the circus brightness
of your smile
the acrobats of laughter
But, a rain dull echoing
of shod iron feet
On the roof
a mocking skeleton dancing
It is hard to know
if redoubts
are weak as second thoughts
The shapes you left in sawdust
now uncertain
In
the tin-can morning
jagged-sunned
safe, but for a raw edge
behind the death-knell curtains
I put on my floor trousers
laying like a dog
dust the colour of the moon
sieves down
I step raggedly through
motes follow, worshipping
There’s a myth
that strength and vulnerability
aren’t mutually exclusive
From here you can almost see
the willow by the bridge
But (too bright) today
I will just hallow the memory
The shadow of the bed’s
barred iron brow
stretches narrowly and wide
to keep me
As if such creatures had enclosing wings
Crumpling by the escarpment
to the floor
I do not dispute
