Tuesday 27 October 2015

1 New Poem

As Follows

The cedar silhouettes’ drawing,
shade curtains, velveteen cutting
in boisterous shapes same-styled
as before, but somehow lighter, somehow brittle
communion wafer in sea shanty tune.

If I could have you in my wilderness,
sheltering from winter’s flurries, summer’s rainfall,
it would warm as hibernation’s burrow,
cheek-to-cheek clasping: a desperation,
but still-life together, dentist office portrait.

If you’d let me, I’d take care of you,
trilling piano chord, but then it isn’t that
easy, just hold and shaking, just down from
ledge-cliffs; it wasn’t climbing so much
I enjoyed as the cross-fall to end.

Monday 26 October 2015

1 New Poem

Newcomers

We're not so different,
our bumpkin bumper crops
like he thousand scattered stars
spilling dust-dawns across
our 4AM videographer scratchiness,
but entangling, knotty as the tall ship
ropes.

But, then, we're slowing, half-cast
in blue drowning liquor lights,
heat of breaking moments in cheap linoleum
kitchen countertop lamentations, spun
across the criss-crossing of talk
there always is in these reason
lapses.

It reads like myths on legislative
paper, the coming design of mosaics,
steeple and temple artworks mingling
as teenage footsteps softly hushed,
sleepy-headed; I could wish lying
each others' across for dawning
anew.

Friday 23 October 2015

1 New Poem

Knives and Swords

You cut through the humid house parties,
the false streamer flags,
the wavering digital bass,
with some sort of old world's grace,
with some sort of 30's film stock shimmer,
moving like a pre-Hayes vixen,
moving like a star dawn horizon,
from East to West, nervous hand tics.

And then you pierce wish-washy
downmarket club smoke greys,
rays of coloured cotton,
prismatic places far gone,
with a kind of ever-binding charm,
with a kind of new-found beauty
spinning like a drunkard's left feet
spinning like a lit fire's ceremony,
from West to East and back again.

You're surgical: precise without meaning,
tools of night-shade dress fabrics, stiletto
but not even those, no, never needed,
your blades' glints are yours alone.

Tuesday 13 October 2015

1 New Poem


Tea Stains

You leave as red clay to
pristine china, chipping bits and bobs,
alabaster rubbings, fault wire steel,

Christmas day trimming scissors crackle paper
dawning, torn errant in bracing sickness,
plate-cups on pikes, but aren’t spinning,

aren’t calling for release, youth’s folly,
but greying, retreat to pale shade draws,
nothing more having passed to lip,

but clinging in unwashed sink tone clamor,
the kind that never cleans quite:
overused corporate coffee pots,

British buildermen’s mugs.

Sunday 11 October 2015

1 New Poem

Cascades

In the running cloud running,
painted spaces for here, forever ago,
in grand expanse of oceans' tide,
cascading crush of eroded eons,
sediments and spaces between,

it never did matter.

It never did that you live
near Astoria Park now, spinning
about with East River glass water
with bottles and cups and cap-cans
scattering in concrete heat, bleating,

it simply didn't.

It's simple to say you
don't talk of bitter clovers
again, that fluttering typist ribbon,
inky parchment, smoke sticks on
fire escapes with reconstructed Bolsheviks,

caught your fancy instead.

Instead of Midwest archways,
nervous jitter-jatter of North Country hands,
untrained for love's surgical nuance,
unused to ribbon cuts' clarity,
instead of, frankly, my drinking shadow

it isn't all that.

All that meeting of glowings wonderous,
those things deserved from hair curls down,
those things spoken of small town girls
who follow dreams to spires spun gold,
turn to ashen trust for bitter fingers

just watched the cascades roll in.

Friday 2 October 2015

1 New Poem

Percentages

The build-up of blank pages,
grid line determination, ruled-out
and truthful agreement,

it was the first of wishes,
balanced breaking waves,
toss of blue-green shade,

what we could have signed to.

We could have been
Iosif and Winston, divvying up
Yugoslavia, ticking parchment,

dipping ink quills in each our
sweated feints at denial,
at principled diplomats

before falling

once again to settled logic;
two empires' demarcation,
surrendered nations' terms.