1 Skateboard Blues The day is loose As old Chuck Taylor’s Worn thin on the side that scrapes the road Negligent laces flailing out With each bent-kneed chasing kick You will fly Before you break your bones Down a mile grade To a ragged curve The skeletons of half-constructed houses Windows vacant with the violence Of embryonic lives Watching in centurion stillness An actinic flare from satellites Full of esoteric patterns A distraction glinting in your eyes At koan speed The grit bites the polyethylene With amphetamine vibrato The swerving car, the looming cliff A brimstone voice pronounces On the whipping air How the sun is roaring You make a choice and hit Shouldering the bitumen Gravity and friction Tearing you apart A skipped-stone re-entry In decaying orbits All satellites eventually burn Tumbling in piecemeal deceleration down the road Forgiving her, her hard and molten surface Softness just a vagary of time Stumbling home She holds you like a mother anyway 2 The Northern Line We leave at ten For the northern line The morning still as hunted birds Quiet as statues (the inept kind) That scowl and scowl and scowl But never make a noise The glass has shaded imagos Of others and the self Peering in as we peer out Jostled lines of luggage On parallel lines of shelf With the Damocles threat Of unruly boarders (We cringe and mutter blandishments) Making statuesque complaints The day – train long Crosses roads with crucifixion bells Jangling off and on, the widows In their voodoo coiffures, scowling (Playing mahjong, worn as scrimshaw in the berth the next along) The way crows peck and cackle At desultory bones Thin as sunset, at the roar Of elements and intersections We’re almost there, she turning says Face hunched, the butterfly, tightly pinned To the landscape of her hair, in the half-light Flickering A shadow passes, (pointing, she scrapes a clumsy wing) We lurch on again Spilling tiles like the end of rain 3 God Made A Monster God broke my rib to make you Tikanis said, with that mad Patriarch gleam, of Charlton Heston Kneeling on the beach Cursing us from his fruit box pulpit Disowning his own madness The luminol on late night murder mysteries (On channel seventeen) Speaking in tongues Of gout expletives Wondering, then, in the septic glow, who god made From my broken jaw That in silence never healed Or the toes of my left foot Without that desperate ape dumb purchase A hobbled curl to walk The radius just below The ball joint of the wrist Grown bat long and turning From the threatened cliff With an owl chagrin At the failure to grasp The small fleet prayer Echoing in the concussion Of skull concaved By that knot-wood, rabbit-punch fist Resounding with a brim and lucha sermon In revelant smoke and fire What monster in these wounds God made 4 Lawnmower Song Mercurochrome leaves a stain Falling through the lawnmower afternoon On cotton sheets tied in hard knots Climbing weary trees With a droning four stroke threat The handles lashed with electrical tape In black bands like mourning A stone skips, against the dune of rib and arm As if I were a desert river Flowing backwards, with the static sound Of the fraying evening, howls like the birds Left by slowly eddied blemishes The water with the algal taint Of a lost green world Sucking at the leech of blood With a chlorine hunger Gone pale as plasterboard Broken so the interstice of chalk Compresses a thousand angry lessons To the remaining constancies, of a vanished sea Lapping still; In a life the human heart Beats three billion times Each moment a new strange twist At the cage, as if escape were possible Not just a song it sings Of blusters and frets Until the thread of all such strings are stretched Tight around the blade, until the motor stops Too weak beyond the face Of recognition 5 Above The Eternal Freeway In the breath of summer We fell out of the cat soft night Looking for stars in jagged edges I said, Billy there’s siren trouble now When you threw the stolen typewriter (Car crash orange, Lettera 32) From the sway-backed overpass To the chrome and roar Of the eternal freeway To see what kind of poem it wrote In the maw of scattered keys and broken teeth It said something like the death of stars Or (maybe) the birth of universes Paltry in our humdrum calculations The pressure released from the scream Of burning filth and halogen A scattering impetus We fled into the argon dark Bruising the arms of innocence In percussive corrugations On our fence-tin cradles A jaw crack fury that the indecipherable words In miracles and oracles From the skewed deceleration Of tyre punctured lives Bore only this 6 Car Crash & The Breath Of Stars I imagine, the interceding years Gone in the fading glow Of the taillights of fast departing cars Insistent and as terrible As a hand of broken glass Cupped from the tremorous water (Leant perilously close) Burning under bridges ‘Oumuamua rabid in the sky I suppose, my father is a rail Where we crashed, chrome wreathed around In congratulatory laurels My mother is a tree, somehow shadowed in the road Somehow gone, the enigmatic objects In the dark far distance, emitting indecipherable signals (The squalled, undying hiss of AM radio) With causes and with consequences In the enclosing shroud (Fragments swathed to the curving edge of dark) We can never understand Only that, trees like stars, like the burnt out shells of cars Deign only speak, in their private languages In words as bright and lost, as gasping exhalations
