Over Eight Months, Maybe Ten

Realisation as release; moments locked
together, careful faces pressed by frowns,
showing working - hard -
our plains of understanding changing -

intersecting. The thing of sex is moving, being
drawn to our domain. We
have built it - from its parts, its words,
its thoughts and from its lack of thought.

We can substitute the value X; we
can sexualise middle-aged men, naked jumping
into water; we can dash them open
red on the rocks of our brains,

can take this man still middle-aged, feeling
proudly, his still-young daughter beautiful,
have them enter arm-in-arm half-leering -
how sad - we say - is this okay? We'll
assure each other someday in this
hot and humid country.

Until then we'll dwell on these things, these
body-parts it seems we made,
(emotion is bodily. To rise as romance -
to go down as the rose already decomposed)
and always fearing fecund this creation;
fearing solid triumph, swollen punishment,
or nothing at all.

I Catch The Eye Of A Jogger

I draw an arrow from your eye to mine.
The thing goes thus:

A thought; a language coded by
a tiny infinity of sense reason experience;
a set of unfamiliar vital minor muscles;
a miraculously meaningful form
on a human eyeball; and then
through a thousand solid sheets of air, and then
the eyeballs receipt, the language
probably different maybe same;
and into the pastel-soft snow of thoughts,
inside the hard thing I call myself.

Did we just make love? Did I leave you
with close to what you left to me?

Mood

I have hidden myself in the back corner of Burger King and am reading Nabakov.
I am laughing hysterically at something terribly sad.
I am guessing at the life of a man about whom a dozen beautiful biographies have already been published
I am coughing into the silence of a cathedral.
I am observing carefully but from a great distance.
I am being tempted by the powerful idea of my being shrink-wrapped.
I am the unfinished sentence of a minor character in an unwritten novel.
I am looking with glad doubt at everything I have ever done.

Over eight months, maybe ten

...realise with me, in release, moments locked
together, careful faces caught by frowns,
showing our working -
our plains of understanding changing -

intersecting. Sex has moved, is moving, being
drawn in to our domain. We have
invented it, and now it is ours to explore
for nights of hours, in words, and literary deeds.

We can write about - X; we
can sexualise middle-aged men, naked jumping
into water; we can dash them open
red on the rocks of our brains -
I suppose we feel it
our duty;

can take this man still middle-aged, feeling
proudly his still-young daughter beautiful,
have them enter arm-in-arm half-leering -
'how sad', we say - 'is this okay?' But we're
well assured, by this hot
and humid country -
in which we dwell, in which we feel we
must flee forward toward -

and fearing our dwelling on these things, these
body parts it seems we made, us
curling to, unfolding from -
fearing fecund this creation
(bodily thinking: is this great
or null? Will romance rise or has its rose
gone down already decomposed?)
fearing this creation
will be loud; noticed made sordid by
too much of the - world
and certain, though dark -
a thousand starts
aborted, thinking -
of this endlessly, unto
some swelling punishment -
must because everybody -
following...

It is hopeless but you
know what I mean.

Happy Birthday (the humblest gift of five minutes of my life so far from yours)

Another few lines of automatic writing - semi automatic - another
five minutes of supremely passive fighting - another de-boned
attempt to deal with this crazy lighting as complex or as
simple as a city or a petal hanging into some hazy country
lane or some vast expanse of plain land behind hills
capturing in brilliance and hapiness (we know of this hapiness,
me and mine) a billion people by the seats of their pants or
whatever - I must turn this around this isn't what the
obscure editor made a request for had in mind. My brain thinks
in adolescent poetry Doctor! grevious mental harm
the long arm of the laws of literature and the shorter
arm of time and the shortest arm of resorting back to
that which you know has been trodden - into
safety. Certain types of crime - blank -
for the longest time (again!) exclaim + shout to
the sky, to the loam, the lime, the words beneath
my feet I alread wrote Must. Stop. Second. Guessing.
Myself. The bush agrees with a fairy host of
grey seeds soft launched into pure streaming air -
I could be thirsty for air if there - wasn't so much
about. One line - left (this is a second guess) so my
brian still sifting skips ahead and cannot stop I'm
getting closer - I tell myself - at least.

Alone at Grand Canyon

and something in me, reeling, snapped abruptly
at it's beauty. In my shallow mind, it broke.
A suprise to me - a shock - a new figment, colour,
fragment, pigment, shaking pageant-object for my reality.
There - I was broken down, so now when I close my eyes
that intense suspense groaning sense of vertigo
hangs around my head. I whirl - beauty makes me scared.

And reader - this is true - that view I saw
made me think of you your naked body
glory in glory of -
i didn't know this could happen.

New Orleans Sequential

Scrap metal-paper - blank slated -
plants genuinely exploding happily through
only-creased-concrete. Parade -
parade; shining free business'
piled up with money - then littler
business' all lookings, like cardboard
half-peeled away- which we all know so well
and like these people lurking - beautiful though -
in dark-bars with

______________John Cleese socialism
in the windows - then mcdonalds - then
French gates: this place is historied like
imagined red ribbon, ripping - french
spanish french - cornrowed, photographed,
painted, keyhole ghosttoured, upside-down;

Shangaria Chasset; gates of mercy;
mango MANGO brew-pub pizza
daiquiri cocktails; pray for my soul
sweet-little-sailship! A little slip.

Hit from the side, then; slight in enormity:
a sheer marble slap; steps sat-upon
by a man black with a newspaper seat
to provide-protect from the shock-contact
the wealth of the place would provide -
or supply.

I am, of course, fine, but the world
is too tired to explain to you why.

__And then, walking home,
we are all mugged - by the night -
in the most beautiful, many-leaved way.

__---

__(analysis:)
Cut into this, like a slim pack of cards,
just as you knew, and you always know,
as it should be but isn't,
are the houses rowing away, slipping or shattered,
or bent with destruction; or halved;
ripped; ripped; ripped; ripped; ripped;
like blacks into reds,
as it should have been here but wasn't,
and all this leaning dangerously in
through the opening-windows of the tram-ride
this stuff - really just stuff - is away,
__I feel I am as guilty as the sea.

Valentine

Light through attic window.
A new day - sunday - has come into play
and we greet it with small, stale breaths; then rise, and move
down into the yellowbrown kitchen of a shallow sunday morning.

Our mouths kiss the lips of coffee cups,
and, tasting smoky, I ignore you for a minute,
preferring the papers and their printed human weakness,
then return myself - like small change - to you.

Now the light is angling, from outside, for us
to curl up again, and be coffee:
mixed and warm; essential in routine.
It wants us, already married, to fall in love.

Paradiddle (abbreviated)

Day. A get-up; the wind-chime only
saying good-morning; breakfast; snacks; what -
if anything - lacks? So strange to sleep; but Night.

Day. Just the same I know; go to
to work; find the legs for another fifty laps;
the doctor cruelly has no name; Night, and
__I might not hear from him

again; Day. This is this, that is that; all grey;
grey socks. first; pale feet; then darker
concrete, smeared with light; run my hands along

the wall - no-one's watching; fight
nothing, hard; fight what's overheard
from the gaps in the happy people holdinghands; Night.

Day. Before I've noticed; I should
see someone; I should be absolved, in
blinding light; one-thirty-five a pint; people suffer
__delight; and endless cat-fight keeping me awake; Night.

Day. Day; another day! One of those times
one sees the line, or lines; day; day; day; each re-called
by that damned wind-chime; Such a circle; I say I'm fine;
__Such a circle.

Sketch

A short walk down the beach; a stone's throw
(for all its predictable trajectory)
between the sea, its stilling waves,
and the lonely roughened tree.

It is as simple as this: the wind
(which is circumstance) lifts a leaf
(showing life) and carries it (living)
to the sea (which is death).

and the tree (happy mother) has
a thousand still left.

The Escape

I. -

For a moment, I loved my country,
and smiled as I broke
though the low roof of the city
three bus-stops from town -
smiled as I saw England. Smile
__as I see England, and
it's dark green and grey,
but it stretches and rolls
like the laziest day
in bed with a lover
when it's raining outside
and it's good
to be alive.

II. But

Nothing, ever, is straight.
This iron-scented, gilded yellow
rail-track, here, begins direct,
speeding from under my feet, at my command,
but soon makes for a break
in the hills, where the final sunlight
falls, in curls, somehow shaped
by the calls of the birds in the blues
and greys of early evening.

And breaks into shadow,
as night falls, now, and me
still travelling, away.

III. And

I'm lonely now, like stone,
with only this hard-soiled country to love;
(and only coiled lines to speak)
a chance, only too much chance, to
stare at the still ground
between and beneath my feet.

And now, though I'm still,
there's a rush all around me and
I'm stopped. But I'm only train-station stationary,
like closed down machinery in a
working refinery, making only
reflections, now.

And even then reflections of one thing,
and only one thing.

IV. So

Three bus-stops; ceaseless trains;
silent towns with different skies sing by - in repetative refrains;
I changed my name. It didn't help - it seems -
but to better let me see me - tripping past -
hardly stopping but to rearrange these painted scenes;
__(the sane must be derailed and made deranged
__to suit my eyes - my eyes, my love, the same)
I must move on; the escape must be complete:
and some-thing must be changed.

The Crossword Setter

"One thing that is in my power:
I can see further into things than most,
even than your father. Even the father
idealised solid as memory in you. I knew

that - just an example. I've lived
the long life, by now, you know,
and am well pleased, at last, with
£25 for two sets of clues.

I knew - another example - for years
of the men my wife met
quietly, delicately, in dark-red hotel rooms
unsettling the very streets outside, so

they made me naseous; a sensation
later familiar almost to a comfort - the fear
of a soldier. This thing I knew well - the only
I wished I didn't - and all this not unlike

the lumpen, uncomfortable feeling of
that false, bronze perfection of your father, that character
these days behind you always. He - Him - so easily
answering the crossword clues of your youth;

questions in youth set by anything:
steam train-stone-lover-stray dog-white
china dishes - it was really a hopscotch of questions,
and wishes. Some hoped to be answered, some painful

when made simple by an adult answer, like
the one I've been avoiding, sickened, for years, or
like the crossword clues I store in overflowing racks,
that lord I know are only really facts
applied to other facts, and nothing more."

A Nighttime

Autumn - 12 Midnight

These things are leaves:
daytime hours; the actual leaves of autumn;
our working clothes, and faces,
and thoughts too often worked upon;
the daily treats that little money will allow;
the golden copper we treat as currency.

But all of these have fallen now,
all proved unimportant,
and from the bed of leaves formed there
the night is growing - first begging caution
but soon spreading boughs,
shoots, branches, new sets of leaves;
all fertilised by daytimes' weakness,
by sunlight's inconsistencies,
and that in us which is, with night, released.


Summer - 2am

It's summer: dark now,
but fever blanket hot.

Summer, and it lounges everywhere,
covering the empty cot, or slumping into empty corners,
or just haunting, crooked shouldered, my window.
It's burn is on my face and arms.

The sky has long been bruised to black,
but my eyes well know the season
and are shot through with its reds,
its oranges, its boiling greens.

In the emptiness of heat we're released,
or bend, to relax.


Spring - 4am

It's in these silent lovers' minutes,
as people sleep, that slowly, softly,
the night comes,
quiet and gently feminine.

The velveteen-skinned stomach,
that at this time forms the sky,
contracts, almost seems to gasp, then
with a sigh, is released, and settles,
all almost imperceptible, but I
I, who have watching,
understanding and recording,
am allowedto be smothered, relaxed; to be surrounded,
overcome, and to dissolve.

And for a moment,
everything is backward and correct.


Winter - 6am

The air seems somehow solid, now,
it separates the houses
and the horizon,
and it separates the people in between.

The divide is dry and clean, and as I watch,
so I see: the sky supports two trees,
huddled for warmth, and touching leaves
against a yellowing horizon.