Friday 26 August 2016

1 New Poem

All So Simple

I circle this colder corpse, still,
an impulse to remain after blood
dries and wandering hands take
their toll of pocketfuls,
waiting for all silence to stop,
resolve itself to green mystic
waters again and find ourselves
once more growing as cedar-pines
we were in first-limb movement
at that hour when everything struck
as crossing of key-locks, rather than
a clang of misshapen metal.

By now you know it’s some
illusion to believe a twine
bridge could hold all measure
weights in keeping separate
their sorrows, their showings of
feeling where once it was a
blank footlocker sort of thing;
but you never recapture that
with all the mushy cardstock
in a whole city, all the
debonair talking in bookstore
backrooms’ learning,


it just comes naturally.

Sunday 7 August 2016

3 New Poems

Arc Light

Bending blue in afternoons,
sea docks’ wooden lap-laugh
at metal hulls on shoreline tangles,
signs of heartbeat across our
close-miking conversations, when
I go out and figure things
in ruler-slide breaths of face
in cave side etchings of pounded
doorframes, the friends we make
smiling and forgotten with
shatter-gust of soft summer rain.

It’s there you find an ice-hollowed
echo of timeless features, a drastic
chisel of motions made whole in
unseen fissures, skipping frames,
dulling-fade mind’s eye picture
dipped in rust water, like starring
out station wagon windows at 13
in a stardust crusade that made
us feel together, under a same day’s
premonition we could have felt
in rock candy dress fabrics,

if only we’d listened harder
to splashes of rain water against
beach rock, and nothing much else
to hear.



Table Manners

Silverware was set for you,
bleached cloths, spotless crystal,

all appointed with aristocrat’s
wrist-flick splendor, living waxwork;

so you did, with your locks of
bushy-bundled hair, take to a certain sort

the type that never came with knife pairings,
but a sort of eye trick illusion, disguising.



On Paintings of Surrender

When we clash, running to human
points of fleeting touch to steel
as flesh kept under cabinet key,
we light up olden day skies, a thunder-crack
of lost teenage fumbling, with hints
of soft speech we gather from books,
continental conversations.

It isn’t so much to bend a knee
I came, but to draw pencil leads,
sketch some places that couldn’t have
been so gray if only we’d had
greater courage of shutting up when
slipping points called for it,
when we weren’t so proud of ourselves
for quoting columns out of context
and being too clever by half to fall.

But I still don’t wave trillium
bouquets aloft for a certain sight
of you coming back in daydream air,
only for crooked view of
such, more tampered with by salty
washing, nights of ice glass and
spirits sentimental.

Saturday 6 August 2016

1 New Poem

Placebos

I don’t take to sugars
the same way some others
have, with washing of mouths
in communion favour;

they sting instead of brackish
water, of spoiled box wine,
cheap stuff to chase away
forged signatures.

Itch of cotton takes over,
ramblings of bottle breath
wet and sunny against
a playing morning’s curtain call,

but it doesn’t look the same,
all starfire-crimson, as
when I felt a collapsing
of old spectrums to one point,

a choking throw-up to still
dawns as always they were:
the pill bottles’ clutter,
empty with chicken-scratch labels.

Wednesday 3 August 2016

1 New Poem

Accidents & Emergencies

We met in ward light,
hands bandaged from climbing cuts,
scaling places we couldn’t control,
with paper and pens and violin trills:
world seemed so sharp, without graces.

But we spoke like prisoners, batting away
winking sunshine, locked in jabbing
rhythm to see which gave first:
my flat regionalisms, your wordly
cross-splendour.

First things handed as struck metal,
a running of corridors we get let
on, as careful dancers do when they
can’t face a breaching of light,
a cutting of fabric sheet.

Then it was open, warming song
of jumping fumes from open street
air, covered pound notes in cooling
of August fabric, but something
more than that to melody

of scamper-flashing ambulance lights
you could be heard to say:

“Is this in A, is it in E?”

“No, both.”