Here is where the side holds unwashed dishes, moulds expanding
slowly from the centres of unfinished mugs of coffee,
spreading white ambition to an edge
they cannot reach.
Here is where the parsley has got old,
shooting its spindly fingers into air,
yellowing.
Here is where the forest sleeping grumbles,
yawns its wide open mouth. Inside it
the leaves make tiny movements;
their sound is like slow
static, quietening.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Things We Left Untouched
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Late Night Poem
I wrote you a poem on my body,
Lying naked in my bed.
I scrawled the words all down my torso.
I wrote your name. I loved you then.
I felt. I felt
These marks were real,
This ink on skin,
It removed the distance, brought you in,
Inside, close. I drew the outline of your ghost.
When I woke
It was all smudge on the sheets,
Deep blue smears on my Caucasian skin,
Half-ideas blurred in the sprawl;
A more suitable expression.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
In Reverse
(an old poem)
In reverse she seems to take on a new life,
Deconstructing the rules of gravity and time,
Leaping back through the frames:
Unsaying the things she had said,
Uncausing the things she had caused,
Unlearning the things she had learned,
Unwalking the path she had walked,
Undoing, unlaughing, uncrying,
Unsmiling, unspeaking,
Unspooling...
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
Still
after the film is over
in the quiet house
where the flickering pictures lit up
the walls but no longer now
keep your mind
or shine in your room
like a still beacon amongst the time
Pear
I picked up the pear from
the ground,
the dark earth clinging to
its soft body,
and imagined taking the pear
home with me,
gently washing it under
the tap
and christening it
in a perfect round bowl
of silver paint,
to take back to the orchard
to see what the other pears
would make.
And some might say: ‘yes,
‘time is wearing on us too,
‘and we’ll soon fall to
‘meet the ground
‘and bruise.’
And some,
still hanging from the
branch and fresh,
might not bear the thought
of old, worn flesh
rotting in the leaves, the
hand picking up
and squashing it with ease,
and wish instead for
something silver
(glimpsed through this
imaginary cleft)
to cover its surface in its
comforting swell.
And standing there, my
silver pear lifted
to the light, the silver
paint began to drip, drip
onto the orchard floor;
and as the paint began to
drip the flesh began to
re-emerge from under the
silver sheen
and I saw the comfort this
had all been
as what it was; nothing
more than distant
astral dreams,
far from the stony, earthy pear
and its salvation prayer
in the orchard
where no-one comes
anymore
and which is full of death.
Life in this orchard is like
the dirt
clinging to the pear or
the pear
clinging to the branch;
and realising this I
dropped the pear
and left the silver dream hanging
in the air.
The leaving, the dropping, the scattering
the various kinds of end;
the emptying of the room,
sandwiches and cut-fruit
wrapped in tinfoil to keep fresh,
notes buried in coat pockets,
memories of the dead
leaves whipped up in a frenzied breeze
and longings left unsaid;
these are the weight in my hand
at the end.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Outskirter
In one of these wilder countries
of rattlesnakes and whitetail
where boyscouts catch fish and make things and sail
you’ll settle
a paper napkin
brushed from the table and falling
(slowly) to the unseen floor
on the outskirts;
close enough to real life
like seeing through TV
it's convenient, flatpacked
in doses: 6l, 2.4mg, half a pack
vitamins, betablockers, paracetamol, milk;
screensavers of the sea, dotted with clickable sailboats,
substitutes.
There,
your blood will turn
or might as well turn slowly black,
semi-hard, glistening like tar
just laid.
Monday, 12 April 2010
She Moves Through Light In The Evening
I
It always starts with light, falling
in this case through a car window
as streetlights pass.
It is soft at first, cinematic.
The yellow bleeds out to dissipate
at the fringes.
The zoetrope-like slits falling
across the seated body undressing
the dark that veils
create the vague illusion of her
moving, looming inside each
regular absence.
II
Things soon come undone, fall
apart; she starts to move through
the untangling
towards the foreground.
Other thoughts appear: Indian ink on
unhung canvasses.
And questions too:
does she think like this? has she
watched the light fall across her body
and tried to make sense of this?
did the same light touch her
when she passed this way?
all seen as now,
in the fullest flood,
in the buzzing synapses,
in the blood
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