Monday 22 June 2015

1 New Poem

Konkret

Humdrum humming of gradient steel,
chewing gum pavement, cut with lye glass,
Radioshack mock boomboxes blaring deep house
in past-work hour mocking a fool's
panoply of bright-checked shirts, stetson
whistles and views of billboard bylines,
gave you some placement, anchor in
two-slice five-dollar ticket counters,
the hard-sell donation box merchants,
the 888 Craft Market lead paints fumes.

But I can't fault it,

when I fell back on despondent's jeer,
pretended sophistication for someone used to
facade accents, half-stories of life, embellishments,
to get through the morning's perception,
to get past an urge of collapse.

The Bellwoods maples, whacked together
hammer-chisel with art pattern invisibility,
with white fence sophistication, never did
a great deal more than sights of entangled
arms on Church St. alleyway bottles,

but, then, for you:

I fall hard, I fall fast
to parchment, to concrete.

Monday 15 June 2015

2 New Poems

Smoothing Stones

A ripple is an echo by other names,
in other tongues, other epochs;

it is a chosen stone, careful dropped
as quill ink on fresh-printed parchment,

but lesser permanent, lesser meant,
blind but to its writer, by terms.

Listen closely, it can be heard:
the hesitance in verbage of tea-time blandness,

though content with flattened verse, it stirs
of deeper longing in private hours,

it cries between pine needles' space
to come back to spaces where

you and I ripple upon each other.
Or is it echo?

Could Be All Yours

If I could freeze clocks on you,
the glacial porcelain facades of
Swiss maker's hands could finger-count
all hours running out my youth in cold,
in unaired hotel rooms, in library benches,
I'd settle on love's birth in a single metaphor:

you were reading Kundera
in a room of light banter's banality,

every impulse to crafter's wine,
dusty bookshops, thesis work in
the Sunday pubs of suburban London.

Still, the bottle dust, the record books,
the hard-parcel pieces, the Guardian default news-tickers
give way to clicking the same three Chait articles
to smirk slightly at their headlines.

In other terms,
to lonesome.

Saturday 13 June 2015

1 New Poem

Feverish

You run my hands together,
five fingers in grand combat
with the other: chess boards,
Cold Wars played out in
millimetres, half-seconds

when they stare across the way,
catching glance on bike-lock bridge,
atop nervy intonations, hard swallow
sea waves, follicle grease stringiness.

They are alight with distractions' air,
kind making visa appointments,
train ticket plans, impossible to keep;
shamrocks weaving in patterns with jasmine.

Some calm, cooling, collectivist cure,
crushed and reformed in super-pharmacy plastic,
some thing to throw these irrational temperatures,
that buckets from the garden hose couldn't.

Friday 12 June 2015

1 New Poem

A Dialogue On Alone

“You'll know one day,
when you spend your last fourty forints
on one-way crosstown trolley tickets,
tracing fingers on red line maps
with no way backwards through the
Warsaw pact cables and Ascension Treaty steel,

with no real plan except for saying
you love like a Sainsbury's Christmas ad,
like a 3-star hotel lobby hymnal.”

But, will you, did you ever?
Having never seen the building sides
in Bucharest, the shoulder-wide shimmer
of Gatwick train tracks?

“How would, too, yourself,
bereft of all shading, ambition, embittered,
but for the longing of fractured hair strands;
does it not make the same, in the end?”

It does, a bit;
I care not.

Saturday 6 June 2015

5 New Poems

And Fate

The call of blessed emerald,
casting spell of salted sea,
first tipsy-drawn mood of the fishing boat
captain in rosewater supple,
shades of graceless gods, lore of
ticking clock face ever-believed for its
boldness, how you find your heart again
between the Thames banks, beneath
suit-cut clatter of City call-men and
silent disco goers subtle flicks of
wrist.

What some say to sagebrush sapling,
the just-bloomed bud of restless connection
greening this way, that, root-tapped,
is smothered in the coal fire of knowing
better than belief, better than constellation maps,
better an horoscopes and untamed incantations:

that theirs is no destiny,
only the bricks of Highgate.


One Week That Summer
I never knew I was a dancer
until Lebanese liqueur and loud places
between the canals showed me just how
time can spill, tendril in ink sky as
stamping shoes give way to nervous
sock feet in kitchen chairs.

Still, in the bleary whir of electric
musicians, ghosts casting presence,
hoping for sure-spoken magic,
something more secure than this
rippling of flesh in low-light.

It frees from duller hours,
from places of silence where
minds can run free as steppe,
chase own tails in lifelong spiral,

but throb dull as dishwater
brackish, course with headache
crimson, confuse with genuine

shoulders to deem worthy of
gilded lily cry, that I never

knew myself to be.



Someone's Conquest

I was never a challenge,
in slumping pound shop dress shirts,
not some untouched citadel slippery
with vine cover, shape of ancient deities
imposing.

Was that the problem: you longed for
climbing hooks, false footing, the traps
and pleasures of new world overcome?

When it was only the ever-smooth steel
motion of Rideau Chapters escalators
I had on offer?

No, no, too wallowed in the realm
of sections in bookstores we never
went: Harlequins and self-help?

But, then, what is Rosa Luxemburg
to Sunday morning's lovers?

Only a memory of things
left away.

Conversing With Shadows

On those days the sky was wine-dark,
oozing blackened blood in the flaying cut;
it preoccupied wire-crackle sparks
the notion of infinite harms,
milestones of sheet bedding taken with
tear-filled eyes, but at least taken.

Talk through tea time and 2AM,
of how broken heritage was to come
down to smashed compass pocket watches,
how none of everything makes you real
some cosmic sense of its everlong embrace:
untouched, unknown as first sunlight's touch.

But more how to immolate ever-pledged freedom,
the glories of oaken flame setting stage,
bringing a Northern snowfall's certainty,
making ourselves into shadowboxers, and
perfectly matched.