Sunday 25 September 2011

This Memory

Words are mere dust to This.
This.
Let music
And the gentle silence of our thoughts speak.
Speak of This.
For words are mere dust to This.
This always
This.

Spilt Time

Almost a year now. Of course we spilled over
somewhat: we always tended and intended to.
The lingering irises that day, in constant flux
of dilation; friction of young stubble on cheek;
brush of hands on Marylebone High Street, and then
the meeting and reassuring safe-clasp,
and rediscovery of lips.
Then phone calls, Manchester, the Cambridge Hotel…
but nothing seen through to conclusion, always
severed at that moment immediately before definition.
The metaphor of the parting-drift
at train Terminals: a few steps of dragging boot soles,
then the trailing off as gathered momentum breaks
the adhesive of sight line, and the gluey-remnants of touch
and fragrance are left to the elements and shower-gush
to pick away at, like nesting birds.
The fear of committing to
spilt time.

The Scar of the Shard

So many nights of ease carried
In this skull’s somewhere cavern,
But the scar of the shard I kept from her
Writhes smug,
Oiling guilt.
The blade that separated me like milk
When I needed to protect myself.

The Cloud-Snuggled Girl

Refluxes of spinal memory:
Of synaptic failure,
Inadequate mental reflex;
The strain to match and mirror
What worked behind her eyes
In speed-flitting thought.

Marvelling her
On the cloud-snuggled pedestal
Assembled and etched by me:
Engraved, embossed golden
Doors of the tabernacle, bedded, petalled,
Pulsing…

It does spark with injustice: the tinder
Lighting blue-red, burning my inner ear.
It’s an infiltration – like waking that night
To hear the exeunt of shadowy movement
And the door slam
And then nothing but a protracted sense of
Invasion, grating, tender-deep, falsifying.

Tuesday 6 September 2011

Underworld

Getting up and Getting old – Metropolitan Line graffiti.


The morning ferry drifters. Drifting atoms
Through sweat-grafted tunnels – crust,
Dust, molecular particles of below air.

Stretched silence grating on matchbox
Stubble. Stillness to shudder in the monotonous
Jogs and bumps of axles and metals on jostling track.

Unsteady flicker-lighting shows black and white
Film behind x-ray eyes, fidgeting… unravelling in rolls of
Stills: decomposing thoughts, something stale and fraying.

Some eyes are rust-shut in sleep, perchance they should dream.
Dream: that forgotten state of innocence, of unsnibbed,
Unclasped freedom; of fertile grass and imaginings

Upon that mattress of springy greenness; and the scent of damp
Earth, and thoughts bred of timeless hours: oozes of tangerine juice,
And youth, and lips…. A spluttered hiss cuts across the

Commute, but soon the lazy, etched foreheads roll and pivot from neck hinges once more,
Slaves to the blustery mechanics. Some taughtened sinews seem to
Fight the buffet of steel on wheel on suspension, and the lure of

Suspended reality – straining not to succumb to the hypnotic rhythm of the
Underworld River, where oars cast ripples into cave-echo, and rock and
Haul and drag souls further up and deeper in to the resonance of darkness.

The Timeless Hour

This is the timeless hour
When the sweepers drive by;
When, in the swathe of this chrysalis
Two bodies learn to breath together
And whispers make sense of the world.


~

Those sweepers of a timeless hour,
From a bygone hour
I can't quite place.

~

Deeper in to the resonance of dark.