Monday 26 January 2015

1 New Poem

Sweeping Up Plastic Cups

The discomfiting timbre of couch room
stained wall echoes about but for electric
boombox whir, pitter-patter drop of tindersticks
on digital ashes in digital urns swell

with the cold sweat of ages in tune.

Chipping clink of tentative wine glasses
held floating in bending whole
of human history in this moment,
when the sheet-sung string drops out,

leaving the sound of shoeprints,

the scrape of half-attuned ear.

Sunday 18 January 2015

1 New Poem

The Night Drivers

The orchestral tuning-up hum of
electrical gas lamps on promenade letters,
projections stream flinty, hard steel
breeze floating on shipyard currents
to the breathy kiss of interlocked
stone finish.

String pluck pulls on nervous
tendon shape, pushed back and back
again in mind, and tries to stumble,
triggers trip of gold coin glitter,
but settles, as it goes: dust to
bedded sea.

Pulse of heated breath too, paints
skyline bursts a quickened shutter-shock
capture of glass stains; a cross
of train-track crissing, a slim
wonder of brittle billboard Midwest
blesses us.

Thursday 8 January 2015

1 New Poem

On the Surprise of Silence

There is such grand freedom in shutting up,
in stopping the cool-heeled clatter,
the temporal stream of cloaked river-shade,
to stand supine in echoes of things eternal;

to know how little one's heart did
matter in heavens' long-lined blueprint,
to know the having not of nerve to
kiss her was nothing but humid summer

airs in the middle bit of one's life,
that time you can still remember of
being still small town kids in dreaming
of escape through the wicker-wire,

of being a twitch-flame from
tongue-in-cheek illusions
of drawing room hands in
clockwork spaces between notches of spine.

To silence all that, in spite:
some miracle.

Saturday 3 January 2015

1 New Poem

Pictures in Capitals

Punchcard rickety, the tram-clamor
of tiny feet in struggled shaping
to forbearing fathers runs over
as trench earth thought, turning about for
no recourse.

It takes the stormy motivation
to be something, someone, somewhere
but at this time only, to wake
again with thrice-brewed ashes,
again forlorn.

Still-life, you stand about single-brick
spaces, humdrum and humbling of
self; you bring new life about them,
bring memory to middle-brow
restaurant chairs.

Friday 2 January 2015

1 New Poem

Ideals For Living

The handwritten shape of penthouse windows,
shaving light, soapstone carving knife
tumult of consecration curtain flap
upon the scene of city's midnight:
the capital kind of living.

A cracked screen slit of bicycle wheel
clatter on pavement funded by
downtown restoration committee dollars
perched in the abandoned brewery shadows:
the provincial sort of living.

Shaded cool, reflection of purpose-built
airport glass facade, tailoring shoes
to the globalized tick-tock of
AP wires on runway tram payphones:
the disconnected kind of living.

Mantelpiece portrait in hearth flicker framing,
the tortured run of boned finger across
skin still supple with springtime's fancy,
but too wise by the cold for youthful folly:
the closer sort of living.