1 New Poem

Dull Rainbows

Rustwater clank of rattling awake,
these post-Soviet planned models of
worlds, with their grease wheels barely
touched to track in friction form;

A meeting in soapstone
centerpieces, town names tongued
over with untrained whiplash,

belying those dreams of a Judt
reader all the same.

Back with the tin can charmlessness
of slanting roof cars, there lies
the snow-bound winter wash of all
that’s being sung on fire escape
stairs;

Ever-draining-colour copy
of old wounds we kept over-painting

with trinket-seller timing,

with flat-eared generator hum.

1 New Poem

Still Bleeding

Second-hand pains, worn washcloth
in downcast river triage,
that won’t do so much from these
red-white blood rushes I get
outside of exact modulations,

When I don’t want to speak a
single thing more poisoned with
firewater wash and boot-heel echoes,
as I knew it always did with
the muddy tracking over grass carpet;
still committed, but dulled with click-clack
tables.

How I heard still the trilling of front
lawn keyboards, in the brittle whine-chant
of police sirens.

Two being one, as cheap kitchen shears
to rip and tear at bones, to chip
away at map lines,

But didn’t hit the same damp way:
firework pageant,
forgetfulness.

1 New Poem

Bigger Things

Something to say was:
you taught me the difference,
between peppermint-vodka stings
of sticking throat in younger
dalliance,

those ways I always thought
it felt for boys whose shirts
fit bitter, who sat more
still, could focus on time
signatures.

Between all that and
stiff breach it feels to
not know what to call you
in tumbling digit-point,
except alive,

Alive in wan hues,
but without a word in
infinite scripts to call,

Making it so seeming bitter,
these half-spun living rooms of
faces scarcely held to minute
flicker of waxy imprint,

Marking the celebration of high holy
nationalists’ days, that scale so
far to stretch a sink water sky
itself.

1 New Poem

Marching

It goes in dry lightning time,
the unroofed ambition exposed
beneath bombastic clamour of sky:

how I came in as a foundling
on brow tile kitchen floor,
how it begets the bunk science
of heartworm checks, copacetic
constructions for the dawn’s

call of bracketed faces chased
through myth mazes of foggy
forgetting; fallen, stippled daguerreotype
in the word-spent witching hour.

You absquatulated, rushed as
electric windmill swift, to
be but dank rumour again:

a cold tomb kind of place to go.

1 New Poem

States of Movement

The glass still traces blood oak aromas,
a tilling kind of cross wind about cabin
planks: how you kept names in mind,

How little you brought up separations in
voice, the mild blankness of clock
faces, when we had nowhere to be.

This is racing to a kindness calm,
a criss-crossing shrug of rewinding
tapes that trace too much back,

Too much the literate piecemeal,
Monday nights with computation cracking,
spirals to same ends, as ever.

But I’m still here, still the light dust
of heavy airs, they find a long release
in, still pretending to float

Above the muddy-roofed buildings,

above the petty fading of shirt collar
kiss marks, diving back to cold ground.

1 New Poem

Doorways

I watch you standing, framed
in palatial stone, red and still
with crackles of unbound telephone
wire, hints of burning grass hillside
draw a smearing blood trace,
a sheet metal sprawl;

You lean against the chalk dusting
walls, finding rune carvings of old
gods upon them,

You are light, glow in the breeze
of six-lane streets.

You turn from the noise, back
to swinging cranes of capital
infusion, the umbrella stands
of blanket street sellers;

They looked so coloured, something
more than barren trees and Weberian
brick that stare back from
daylight windowsills,

I can’t walk through

so easily now.

1 New Poem

The Protest of Widows

I look upon the harp-string, still emerald
with graceful touch of old Eire’s whimsy
fingers, still ringing with notes of
scrap page brustling upon whiskey
sting of washing ice, the sunlight
orange-tinged through panes of Sunday,

the morning with police whistles and
charming coffee shop signs,
where I sat with warming water
radiator, the spikey paint job of
staircase handrails, where I fall down
in heart with pitter-patter logic

of staying in with equilateral
electricity, of having that choice
to organize the bric-a-brac in
closets or standing with dynamite
stick girls on grey stone corners.

How I came to be so believed,
talking about both sides of
chewing through a sinew spark
of crashing waves, too much drawing
of digital curtains from the problem,

but why did I have such choices?

Is it skin that I have lost in
scrapping up against bars of
dead iron gating?

No, the kind I still have.