Little
metal
bells.
Tiny
silver
ringings
Washing thinly waves of air.
Undulant echoes
Which soon will be
Not there.
They then dance
Into memory
If you wish,
And that is how her sentences
Live:
An expert brush
on
Rice paper.
White prism.
It was never, never a white light.
The rainbow unites
and dissolves in invisibility.
It clarifies, is transparent,
apparent that whiteness
has it’s own opacity.
I loved you.
With your donkey jacket
and hessian bag.
Your fat Fonz face
Your hopeful notes of set lists,
stage setups and half nicked songs.
Your half bottle in your inside pocket.
Tuesdays in the pool room till the pubs opened.
Then the tales, the adventures.
You became voluble when soluble.
Courting oblivion,
You tried to pull it back at the end,
But I could be so unforgiving.
I sit at the beach where waves
slash the shore . On a chair, I sit knitting
the sea with the sand
my feet in a red basin
Filled with warm water, as the tide pushes in
And laps over the basins edge
The water gets colder.
My feet and lower legs are marble
I can add to the picture
What I’m knitting is green and blue
And glistening and stretches for miles.
It’s never ending and my arms are tired
But I know I can continue,
(I have a bag of words to feed on
And what I’m knitting will be
My blanket at night)
Even if this never ends.
We fuck, desperately
banging atoms together
in the furious hope
one spins off,
to clandestinely collide with otherness,
like sweatbeads flying from flicked hair
as our consciousnesses lose themselves
seeking to mingle blindly in the ecstasy of now.
We collect silences,
haphazardly hammered together,
and this carpentry of
nothingness,
where unsaid half-sentences
writhe and interlace
like an orgy of cold-blooded snakes
or the awkwardness of overfamiliar strangers,
has been built
by two folk well aware of where the nails go.
Your hands’ veins
all knotty twine,
purply-blue,
draw me
as you fidgetingly finger
a fag packet,
then,
flinging it to your missus,
two fingers
burnt yellow from habit
remind me,
at my age
you were already a smoker
but stopped when I was born.
Just like that.
I didn’t listen to the drum
banging away daily;
instead I sung the song,
but the beat insinuated
and infected the air-
crept into lyrics anew.
So all thought-language is barred.
How long until the wind
whispers contumely?
You opened a hand,
You let it go.
You looked down,
The hand was a fist.
You opened the hand,
You let it go.
You looked down again,
The hand was still a fist.
You opened the hand
And let it go.
You closed your eyes,
You could feel the fist.
You imagined opening a hand.
I sense you
jutting out there
a promontory
I can hang desire onto.
What a piece of work you are.
A devotional is in order.
A paean to who you might be.
