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.)
Words hopscotching around
pollute the page.
The reddest of hearts
rend themselves into blackness.
I want to leave it at that
and chance you read the spaces.
Maybe one more word.
No.
Milk for eyes.
Desiccated skin.
Dull bones knitting.
Sere mind
sits roomy airless.
Memories shrivel
to the barest of pasts.
The jumper’s neck hangs.
Feet retreat from shoes’ edges.
The chair you sleep in
sighs when you slow-rise.
But this is no distilled essence.
Something’s lost.
The sap gone.
The juiciness connecting now to then.
An emotion paints itself into a new picture.
You are less than you.
Edit me
Someone
Stop me,
Before I lose form.
Standing here
On someone’s distant horizon
Awaiting an editor
To reshape,
Digest me.
Stop the on and on.
Strip me to my essentials.
Put your hands on me.
Tell me when enough’s enough.
I took a stiletto,
rammed it, right in-
slick shiny steel jabbed
to the gut of understanding.
Dug it in, deep,
twisted it
to the bowels of recall.
Manufactured memories
spilled out,
fingers
messily red,
unhinging themselves
from my cataracted
version of me.
Splayed freely, slimy persona
awkwardly gasping
strangled by new facts.
First, the egg-smoothe babies of May
which the cat stalks and swallows. Then,
shiny black specks on the high White ceilings.
They move like tiny clouds. Imperceptibly.
Spun on the trellis, a concatenation of successive webs.
Crawling through gaps in the skirting
they scoot across the floor.
A dot of a body with impossibly long legs,
or like today’s one, a body the size of a thumbprint
With rugby players knees.
They either freeze unmoved for days,
or scramble the minute you go looking for a tumbler.
They peak in September, half the size of your hand.
Last night, with the light off, I swear I heard them walking.
I sleep, knowing they’re everywhere.
Hauf a wa’
stood alangsides
the forraway back
two streets doon.
Bombed-oot hooses
still hud live wires
stickin oot, waitin
tae go aff.
Wahn wire hingin
fae the first flair,
jist
oot o reach,
beckoned n sparked
an we’d take a runnin
jump
but never goat a
grip o it’s winkin eye.
We made up fur it
by gettin an auld battery,
nthen wahn ae us licked it
while we a’ held hauns.
