Tuesday 26 November 2013

2 New Poems

Two Dolphins, Swimming

Shining,
the carvings of kerosene on Trebant-sharp
lime green paint job, some cobblestone side-street
in some town whose names eludes English tongue shapes,
skin slipping beneath canal water and noon-day shadows.

I took deep a breath of country air.

Staying,
the feel of clean sheets and hanging portraits of Christ,
five days' diet of wheat beer and dime-store pastry,
with light bending in ice-mended glasses,
in powder gates and tourist camera stops.

I look at the castle wall as swaying in double-time.

Swimming,
the coats of grey-black in ocean print,
dip-diving as bauble-brooks with heart patter tune,
so unlike the facades of spraypaint steel,
of vicious rusts calling us back again.

I bit my tongue in crowds, in private too.

Time Of Your Life

At fifteen,
with wicker torch of youth burned bright in some,
but not you as smothered ash, you as soaked kindling,
held with the breath of angels wished to bed,
you were something to sneer and bereave, separately.

At twenty-two,
with winter jackets and pocketed rail passes,
rushing to get somewhere you'd read in storybooks,
away from that old gospel's temperance of being,
you were left with finding only wicked mirrors in shot glass.

At thirty,
with the edge of blacktop falling behind memory's stage curtain,
promises made, broken as bottles in the green grocer bin
when all wanted was a shared light to hold,
you will be the same as broken ever, accordion wheeze.

Wednesday 13 November 2013

2 New Poems

Saying Things

I said yes;
I'd meet you in the space between clouds
and canal craft-work of skyscraper towers,
and birthday clothes to icicles turning,
and just a little of the Northern Lights' green.

Hearing it was so much warmer in California,
in Palermo and at midnight sun in Ibiza
meetings were made scarce by time, flights
finished past an hour of sensible waking.
You were never so cold as skating rivers
here, never so cold as Christmas in a
desert wind dry.

The greatest slow dancer in the universe,
the moon and back to hold in graceless
charm, the stars to shine in charmless grace,
you'd offer as long as it wasn't here;
I said no.




Dog-Eared Back Pages

Everything was in flames;
that tattered, battered old timey bird clock
and living quarters they pushed, pushed, pushed
upon us in grey-haired finery, something
charming to say, we'd thought about
this timing beforehand with the cake carvery
the ruddy rush by Thames boat sails and
broomstick curtains we has to pull shut as
quick as flashing knives in duelist style.

But never like this, no, never the molten
cause reflecting in porch beams you'd nailed
together one summer dusk with a wet chewing
air to it, reflecting in glass reconstructions of
the English Civil War and rose-coloured stamps
in collectors' books to look back upon.

It was licking, lapping houndstooth manner on
door frames in handprint impressions, matches
to gunpowder and rivers of blood on the
furnace hamper drawings and cuckoo-cloud
dreamers we all were in our youth,
stains we'd look back on in abjection, in
wide-eyed bemusement.

With the locking, the skeleton key catacombs,
I'd take a last look at embers' broken
nose wheeze and four-stone weight upon
crooked shoulder, with those things

I took a deep breath.

Tuesday 5 November 2013

2 New Poems

The Way It Ends Up

You said with the cigarette swirl, demonstrating
flight routes, the shape of Prague's astronomical clock
chimes and everything you remembered about Copenhagen,
that, “you still end up eating Subway sandwiches at
uncleared cafeteria tables, you still end up in some
corner with pens, paper and regrets, nursing an
overpriced Pilsner and tracing your fingers on the
edge of a Lonely Planet pull-out map.”

You know I'd be one of those people in Beaches
one day, growing a front porch garden, painting
siding colours that would huff-up the Etobicoke
Homeowner's Association, voting New Democrat out
of a vague sense of guilt, and talking too much
about Joni Mitchell and Neil Young in some
flicker-light barroom on some street without proper
signage I'd take three calls to direct friends to.

And I knew you'd live in Little Portugal or
Chinatown, chain smoke cloves out your
window above an all-night noodle house,
try to drown out your neighbours with lutes and
piano keys and thrift shop swing records,
skating on frozen town fountains and handling
out anarchist newspapers to businessmen on Bay Street;
clutching something of a future past to remind,

these white-walled and too-bright cafeterias days
are only a phase, were only a phase.



Lyrics To An Unpublished Song

The blue and red light bouncing from greasy cobblestone,
from brick walls where we'd had close calls with love
behind pub letterings and language law compliant
street signs, looked as heavens' infinity,
revolving in time to breathing sighs, slurred words.

Skating on river-thin ice, lakes soft in
the centre were our two forms in repetition,
and you with the same things you said every Friday,
that every girl I didn't get wouldn't be the
ones I'd have loved the best, anyways.

In impossible movie theatre distances, buzzing crunch
in the fizz of soda bottles and the short-selling of
popcorn scarfing lads, I'd inch a bit, this and that,
read as card player's do in projector's all blue
reflection: you were as radiant, blinding, as ever.

Sunday 3 November 2013

2 New Poems

At The Time

Someone will always have nerve to say,
in the blurry bathwater gue of drunken
Hallow's Eve, recrimination session at
breakfast table's alarm next to the whole milk
jug, that this seemed like charming gold.

Someone will always hand you another can
of whatever it was they were having, hoping
to trip weights in favour measure themselves
imagined as boldly spoken fortune,
beneath the discotheque's pounding pan-flash.

Someone will always pass a next dirty glass
devil's talking turn amongst hurly-burly boys
and girls you'll apologize to for next year's
feelings today; no mind to place's carving space,
that special someone will always do,

And you'll take it down anyways,
you can't speak a word without its vice.

Pretenders

Heavy wears the headed crown of thornful
regret of gold fashioned from half-glances,
coming on like lighting bolts coursing through
vapor clouds that mingle between our lips.

Guild with jewels most regal, in kind of
frozen blood and tear from Queen of Scots
coronation; the illusion of power in heart
of castle keep, in well-chiseled tablets.

Clinical, piece-by-piece and back together,
inched across in jeweler's eyeglass reflection
the curve of every crystal from both sides now known,
but never their methods, their meanings.

Friday 1 November 2013

1 New Poem

Clashing

I want to clash swords with you,
in a Chelsea morning wake up
with river's flow of the fiddle and
drum scrape, apologizing in immediate
regret for things I didn't mean but did,
when clock struck midnight pumpkin faces
and sodden drink overcame sense.

When the sun comes in like toffee cream
and sticks to everything inside from bookshelf to
blanket, I'll be bounding up with slicking
hair and pinstripes to hide it away, how
much we were alike in darkroom development,
how little was our collapsing into now.