words & pictures
I will wear my morning coat Buttons not half as big as the moon Done up crooked and crooked done down Till troubled as Sunday afternoon Against my nails the tick-tack sound That she only understands In her chagrined gleaming I turn skywest my crinkled brow Beg of her a brief blessing Feel her calming breath and hand Cool my cumbered thoughts awhile Smooth as the nightsea’s far lapped sands Sleep warm inside my sleeves
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
You are the radiance I saw In the gangling height of poplars Leaves bird-white and poised Swaying with a skeleton laugh The ghosts of Mao’s sparrows Told me to flee south Through the ordered pathways Of a cultivated land The harsh geometry Of blunt roads bleeding into dirt A hollow fist of silos Travelling with the bare-faced negligence Of wanton hope They once baptised me in a tub As if a bucket were a river A river an eye opening To a heightened realm, where The bemused damp strands Of thinned hair Against my scalp A mocking kind of laurel As bright in the moment As any glow a Byzantine would wear Side pierced through with arrows Heart splayed in cupped hands Proffered like a bird Or Sunday afternoon baklava Embryonic, drowned in honey The bee almost perfectly preserved With that furied, alien look Grown monstrous, under the glass bell The thick slow taste Of songbirds In the golden day Disproving Ferlinghetti’s theorem We disappear like metaphors
