Every solitary word has a weight.
Centuries of weight.
The heft of now.
Times there are
to plough through this
just to get the day done.
But the natural gravity, heaving down for each, remains.
It is always there to see, to feel
If you would but acknowledge this.
Haul it into the sanctity of
Your hard earned understanding,
Drag it to the fireside of your meaning.
Monoliths of flesh and bone:
Impermeable, unknowns.
They’d talk in shorthand
But only of work,
The business of the day.
Carving hard mythologies
For the foundations of childhood,
Where the fragile truths were dangled, arms length,
And familiar lies embraced.
Waltzing with a trolley
down the aisles of Homebase, I find
your eyes, your eyes- page 49,
Jade Cluster and Mossy Moor.
Your lipsticked lips are reproduced
as Sumptuous Plum or Summer Coulis.
Your skin, apparently Sorbet splashed
with Toasted Terracotta freckles.
I struggle to find your hair, though,
there being no classification of blacks
to compare with the infinite range of whites
there seems to be. Jesus, Cornflower
Blueberry, Violet, Jade, Nutmeg,
Apple, Almond, Barley,
because white is obviously a shade of nature.
These guys get paid for this.
Selling the nature of paint.
If only they could see
your firelit body flicker,
give colour to the burn inside,
the freeing of sweatbeads popping,
the Coral Flair would read
Bloodlust Flush or Pinked Desire.
What are the colours
for Wanton Abandon?
Unhappiness:
hear it fall
like a body in a sack
down
cellar
stairs.
Anxiety.
The ang and the buzz of the x
like a cattle prod zinging.
Have you ever played Operation?
That zzzz of failure.
Truth.
The only beat possible.
The hangman’s gift.
This beat is forever.
O moon
Big moon
stuck, hovering
mushed silently by wintry night
tracing paper
cloud slits the fullness
sidles on,
pale yellowly,
a ghostly cigar spat
from the O of the moon,
the moon as mouth,
O.
O.
When we burn,
Yesterday’s fire returns:
Of necessity, mirrored
heatlessly in our diarised words.
Fucks do not leap off pages.
A hand’s limpid
touch barely lands on the screen
Yet out here, a pulse
frantically pumps, skips
and waits
for a phrase to dance with,
because the heart knows
that new sentences
excite themselves into your past and sometimes land there.
A butterfly’s slow wings blur and burr soft air on my skin.
Grazing the invisible feed of desire, never quite landing.
You hover in the updraft of bodyheat.
The parallel lines of my want and your touch Recede into poetry.
Your voice kisses the page.
It’s been a lazy day.
I’ve been making a meaning.
Not actively, not hewing or constructing one.
But in the reverie of moments, sifting,
seeking discoveries in the relative simplicities
of commonplace words and things.
I float in and through liminal space.
A deep sea diver familiarising himself
with watery discoveries.
I float.
I circle and return, and peer again.
I watch how sentences sit on the seabed
of the everyday. Then how they shimmer
and shift in the liquid glow of attempts at understanding.
I sense how things are and despair of communicating this.
The lazy days, the days of apparent time are hard work.
It’s a struggle finding a new language.
What is a poet without words?
A sea.
There is always a sea to look at
With your back to it, facing away.
It’s there-
Rhythmic, rumbling,
In the dark, behind you
Asking you
“Turn to me. Consider me.
Be fearful and fearless.”
Understanding is not a surrender.
I’ve read men
all my canonical life,
the double-male gaze of me and books
unchecked, God-given.
Now suddenly, it seems
I’m reading women,
not from the outside,
and it has changed how I look.
Now that sex is mostly a dead option
and clubable fuckable authors evaporated
I have arrived here.
I have fallen asleep and woke up.
(He lied.)
