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.