Rounding out the curve of a hip
It takes over it wins for an hour
It steals from you until you come back to waking
This taking
I’m scared of it slipping and making
Me old like my mum charcoal and paper
Clutched in a spotty hand shaking
Tannins tungs acrylics and sponges
Big wool rugs and coffee from plungers
Beans slow cooked in a swamp of sauce
Haloumi grilling, jasmine on the porch
Gee three, kerpow, my friends never call me
Forgot their birthdays, took it personally
Kay four, kerblewy, I don’t eat anymore
Reg-u-lar-lee, like my gee pee told me
Kay two, slammo, I wake up impromtu
And perform an act while I lie on my back
In the dark being sunk by lucky attacks
My rag tag fleet’s now a lonely blip
Oh go on life
Sink my battleship
Ah, love sister
Falling, fragile
You knocked on my door and
Told me it’s been raining
Ah, yeah sister
It’s been raining here too
And like you
I know
How much it costs to commit
To ten thousand more rainy days
Ah, sweet sister
I’m happy this secret’s not strange
What? you demand
Why, sister
You know
Just, how we are both so bloody brave
This love affair is gallery stares
It moves at gallery paces
Wide eyed, bedroom-still
We study each other’s faces
This love affair is a sweet duet
Timed exactly right
Shivering like two strings plucked
Two notes for a warm Spring night
This love affair is the words in a book
Bold and lovingly penned
Unfolding and unfurling
Beginning, middle and end
Shifting warmth
Low exposure smiles
Inches apart
Small hour calm
Weights and surfaces
Traversing touches
Faint potentials
A love, made to fit
Scenes, little close ups
Lips, hair, liminal airs
Still lifes in pillow forts
Dimly lit shorts
Between lens changes
Interleaved sensations
Little pockets of time
We film with our eyes
What vicious beast did you survive
That left you with wounds like that?
What vicious beast pried the warmth from your chest?
What vicious beast did you best?
I’ve fought some too, perhaps not like you
Though I would like to know…
Was it a lost boy with a pale face
Who would trace your streps
Who would silently chase
Who would keep apace
By standing closer every day
Your attentions strayed?
I turn over your words in my head,
The words you sung to me.
From the other side of the world—
Your bed.
I revolve in my mind, your kind,
Your voice,
Its tenor,
Its strain,
Its refrain.
Many hatted mad men,
Absent of certain sensibilities
That you and I gentle reader
Consider.
What other worlds revolve around ours
That we do not reach for,
That orbit us and spend
Periods
Behind our backs and out of our sight.
Pale lips flex her slim ivory face.
I imagine her life translucent,
Travelling calmly by capillary force
Along the sheltered side of potted leaves,
Lit by ambient sun.
How foreign, that sun!
Mine hurts. I thrust it
On enemies or I eat it.
It burns me with love for clamorous women
Heroines with vicissitudes,
Who had babies
Or never had babies,
Ones with scars, ones mid-chapter.
Oh my heart. Viragos
Who build themselves out of glass
Every morning from shards they find in their beds.
Your smile is as fitting as your shape when sitting on mine.
Your toes in the throws I’d spy and be thrilled by their curl,
Their stutter,
Their whimpering sigh.
Painted faces,
Filigree bracelets,
By the light of the chandelier.
Hemmed curves,
To be observed,
A handsome man to be interned,
Perfumed hair,
Fluted glasses,
A handsome man is making passes.
Hunger masked,
Who will he ask,
Please look at me look at me look at me.
Oh bitch, please!
A man so conceived
Will drunkenly fumble with you, then leave;
The picture of sadness your face will be.
But perhaps that’s how you’ll learn, like me,
That the woman in life with happiness truest
Is not she who has the most men, but the fewest.
I love you very dearly
But baby even I
Need to get my tax done
Yearly
Dear atheists why, do you think the sky
Is falling cos people dig steeples?
It’s galling
Occam’s Razor’s not cool when fools forget
It’s a heuristic tool to rate your ideas
Not hate on your peers
Even if they’re God fearing swill
Take a pill
Please chill
Don’t let bigotry run uphill
Stabbing at leaves at ten in the morning
Standing on your front lawn yawning
Beige slacks and a polo shirt at ten
Tuesday morning in sunshine and Ralph Lauren
“Hi,” she says with sparkling eyes
“Are you coming in your car?
“I want to know if you live nearby.
“See if you can dance with me!”
Stone cold I can feel the air on my bones
Where she leans in–skin warmth hair her air
I run I try
“Oh God, I’m so
“I’m so so sorry, I’m sorry, the time.”
Shutdown, baby, your stars are shuttered
It pains me to say, but your mother’s insane
She’s wonking away, so she can buy time to play more
Need I say more? She’s not to be trusted with things
Like you
And me
Starlight, here,
Take these wings.
The pitch black of his room
His own raised hand
Floating up, floating down, floating up, floating down
Briney gritty echoes of sand
Flotsam jetsam shadowed underpasses
Coins notes grimy bus stop stares
Stripy shirts thick rimmed glasses
A ringed finger curling a strip of wet hair
Slender fingers on a clerk’s cash box
Unbidden compressions of air
I used to be cool by the pool
Now I drool on a stool
I’m the lull in the visits my visitors pay
By the window I wait
I extrapolate
This existence, the minutes, the hours, the days
In my day children were raised in a box
With nothing to play with but splinters and socks.
What creativity such props would inspire!
Socks! Chanting around a splintery pyre,
Sock puppet theatres, splintery stages,
Torturing socks with splinters in childlike rages!
Nowadays children have Mobile Devices,
Minecraft, Scribblenauts and other such vices.
How can they learn, how can they function?
Using dinguses without compunction.
They lack the appalling boredom and shame
That made me the man I am today!