There is a stain, not quite like a face
On the Rorschach linoleum
Where your thoughts fell, almost
Blue and tinging red, the way ink thins
Efflorescing on the surface
To seesaw evening colours, the floor
A new, scattershot horizon
Worms and satellites passing
Before, indelibly, sinking in
From the other room
The cat squall of tv
As if drawn curtains
The invading green of northern lights
Could disarm a necessary distraction
They made an X-ray of my father’s jaw
To see if that’s where the anger lay
A snowy landscape, but in reverse
A summer blue gleam to the night’s
Precise and errant sophistry
Trees gone to half-mossed stumps
Knowing, therefore, that this way must be south
An owl’s hard hunting screech
Beyond mouse bones, on the horizon
In the harsh and overbearing light
The dome of St Peter’s
There is a window when we are close to Mars
Looming in the southern sky
With that machining aspect
Of our well known trajectories
While descending robots roar
At familiar landscapes
Made of a sudden, strange
Marked in red, precisely dotted lines
Image of Mare Erythraeum (adapted) courtesy of Google Mars.
Beds are narrower on TV
People talk face to face
Unafraid of halitosis
Or other unfortunate intimacies
We populate our borrowed homes
With arbitrary things
To imbue ourselves with personality
And life’s outré laugh-track semblances
Wearing masks to unpretend
How we see familiar faces
In the shapes of cups and clouds
But just these peculiar vacancies
Where strangeness starts
From your face
An ageless breath has carved
Another empty planet
