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.
It’s like when you get
soup, out
the tin and give it four
minutes in the microwave
and it comes out all
boiled and bubbly, and
boiling, you know, impairs
the flavour but you have to give
it two or three
minutes anyway
or it’ll burn the roof
of your mouth off and as
you wait for it cooling you think
if I’d only set it at three
it would have been hot and perfect
and supped then and there
and now here I am waiting
three or four minutes
wasted time later
rueing the past, anticipating
the product of my actions
knowing I’ll never make soup again.
The sky smashes
blue down
on surface-thin sea.
Horizon evens
the up and under.
A trawler chugs blindly
lugging itself
out of sight.
A seabird bashes
through to a cold underworld
killing fish: thrashing
wetly.
Still on the shore
slow waves
lap and lap.
