Monday 19 September 2016

1 New Poem

Tribute Acts
Something still flickers, soft age
haze of moonlighting fish and chip
and vinegary black-white television’s
over-pouring ennui backmasks
tape tale too strong for telling
in beer can snap crack
or nerves of sincere Judas
coming across in tender-handed
compliments you pay to shirt
corner raggedness as signs of
authentic outrage, smooth
talking a sales job made
in social pyre for our
selves as whittled ornaments
from oak crosses, refined,
tempered by half-glass
of young years.

It isn’t like embers anymore,
grander stage for smolder of
televisions versions of  crying
sessions, a single wearing
of cut flower cloth for
rose boquet tosses in
off-hand kind of ways,
the hurried undoing years
you make up for in Christmas
dinner acts of middle splendor,
in standing in banquet hall
doorways waiting for the
moment to say of leaving:

“we never should have, not us”.

Thursday 8 September 2016

1 New Poem

Red As Rosa

It isn’t made like that anymore,
all neckline plunge, in-time white linen,
so slim a fiction as blessing cribs,
and one that could never handle a
crossing of hand wounds tender
for lacing logic of cross town traffic
lights you shoulder with broken beads,

darkened metro rail ticket offices,
you flutter between, dancer’s
grace on way from library stacks
to the pity swirl of paper lace
and chewed pen caps that stain
your face a rose gold shade,
pallid mourning magic through
dawn spaces you treed kindling
brought down from grassy hills
to city centres and sold at the
penny-pound (all I could afford)
straining acceptance of
this single twine space where we

meet as revolutionaries,
leave as shoeshine specters.

Wednesday 7 September 2016

1 New Poem

Equal & Opposite

No words for standing slope-thrust
in muddy mystic sort of stance
that takes up all memory of
summertime, all soot smoke stains on
backyard fire escapes, side bricks,
places you stay with rolled-up dress shirts,
pretend class kind of game, moving slow
to march tunes of considered saying, lock-pick
jingles for dosages when you’re alone and
don’t make it so simple, not balanced in
a car crash logic that it keeps to
run ever farther along to unknown
axioms’ following.

Screen prints of Berlin metros don’t make
you anymore a sophisticate that a
terse-turned sentence of ashen wit that
gets scribbled on grade school walls
and alleyway overpasses in haste,
looking over shoulders to see what
we could have made of ourselves
if only we’d better aligned watch
fragments with sun-dial speculation.

I never got the grasp feeling
you were at a shivering
thirteen pace, or wallowing transcendence
of four corner beds with their stolen
twenty-something kisses;

but neither were you me, so,
how could I know?