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.
Liam and I are in our old flat, packing up, ready for the move. We put boxes out on the verandah. Our cat, Zappa, who doesn’t get out, sneaks through the open front door. I worry Susie will be annoyed by this. Tired of the packing up I lie on the sofa and pull a blanket over me, as I fall asleep I notice my shiny black leather shoes. Susie wakes me. She’s not angry and suggests I go out to look for Zappa. I go along the road and see Zappa disappearing slowly over a grassy hill which I can’t get to but I know if I detour round the woods I’ll meet up with him. As I circle round I notice the animals are slightly wilder round this way, and as I’m thinking I’ll never find him an eagle rises huge in the sky opening its wings and hovering there. My first instinct is this is a threat to our cat but I am in awe of the animal and realise this thing of beauty brings no danger. After watching it for a while I decide to head back to our flat. As I retrace my steps, Zappa comes happily over the grassy hill from where he’d gone and happily jumps into my arms. We both head home.Such a pleasant dream, from Susie’s reaction to the missing cat, to the happy reunification, but most of all for that magnificent eagle.
Your sharp little pencil,
its fine lines slice
deftly through the dishes,
the prepared meals, the niceties.
Where the fleshy heart of intellect
pulses on the undefined
frontline of desire.
You are a new Sun on an unexpected morning.
Not reading French, I read you in French
and grapple the ghost of your clever hands,
prod recesses which surface with re-viewing
and trust to Faith the translation which haunts the shadows of me.
How we romanticise lost wars,
close eyes for the first
kiss of the first bomb.
Throw ourselves into
the killing carnality.
Diarise manoeuvres.
Tell virgin soldiers lies.
Get patched up,
return to the front.
How we cling
to the possibility of victory
when every daily defeat tells us otherwise.
The band of brothers of lovers,
the walking wounded
who have wound up dead and alive.
A murmuration swoops, curls
blackly against creeping dusk
seen silently from the window.
I imagine the camaraderie in furious wings
the machinations of large populations
where all are bound in keeping an even distance
and rarely stare a neighbour in the eye.
I don’t deny the beauty of it, the collective mind in flight
but all this is from where I stand, and
not the birds-eye view of
small town minds where small good mornings
and bare civilities keep us comfortably apart.
