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Personal Piece- Contains upsetting material - A Small Selection From The Many
Down Deep
Birdsong sloughed assnakeskin
The marinated dreams
Spilled like a child’s icecream
Our waves aren’t what theyseem
Reflecting violins.
The shadow of the sun
Catches bone in its eye
And what the wrecks imply
Is not for you and I
As spider silk is sung.
Cold leaves reject theirlimbs
Slipping inside the dusk
That with a gibbet’s musk
Hangs brief colours of trust
In hearts where no shapesswim.
Winds over naked hills
Snap at the softened sea
Splicing their guarantee
Into all there is to see
When the wombs revert tochill.
Under a night-numbed swell
Thick as the blood of whales
Stroking through ghosts ofsails
Watch as the shore lamps pale
Waving one last farewell.
***
Rudiments
I am
Black wood bent under blackstone
Thoughts of shore-shell andkicked sand
Harried by a sharpened hand
One wish short of a wishbone
I am
Closer than the stars tonight
A stream breathing turpentine
Often a knot in the vine
The first death of the lastlight
I am
One word stretching over time
A drum beat preserved inglass
This thin wind shaving thegrass
That mutter of mangled rhyme
I am
Ash falling across skinnedmeat
As blunt as a bloody snow
A harp string tricked to abow
Other shoes on other feet
I am
An affordable taboo
A headache without a head
Still better if left unsaid
Honest as all burning blue
And what is not me is you
***
Back
Morning’s precise bleaknessstretches
The light like old skin,sticking fast
To the walls of my cigarette.
There is not time left toforget
Or rinse out the words.Strange sketches
Of a stranger, or stronger,past
Thrust out from the palepage. The last
Fragrant line, cold now,fetches
Its fists and beats itssilhouette
Against the glass of myregret.
This something, this never,so vast
Inside. Still the silencewatches.
***
Tangible
The quiet lapping of words
Against wood in the leaf-dark
Between green glades bringsto mind
That crackle of lilac silk
And the long light of yourchords:
Little birds over the ice.
***
Mass
The original reproduction, you watch
Me through my own eyes, crying fragments of night.
We are pinned insipid in the carnival
Of the ignorant mouth, a muzzle on thought.
Orphaned meanings receding with our hair; each
Shakes sticks at a finite sky. We are as coal
Smashed from fire; our bloodless page belittles
Itself rhythmically. Bent by the settle
Of a sackcloth sun, silence soaks the flowers.
See how their blossoms appear quite black, like full
Stops. The garden is shut you say, but briars,
Dissonant and lovely, shoulder its strike. Whole,
My meat rack relics will be clinging skin-tight
To this trick; preserved for the value of dirt
Into a fresher fold,
As naked words grow old.
***
Cleaved
This is the last garden, with its green
Stinging. Notice the pond-skater scratch
A moebius sigh. Crippled routines
Are cast as its thick heart sticks. We snatch
Up pine shells for our pockets whilst mists,
Ancient as all love, crack at the catch
Of warmth. What is it that still exists?
These beams of bracken cannot hold their
Harmony. New rope rubs at wild wrists
In the oak glade with the used trees, bare,
And somehow bland. We can only wait
With them, repurpose our wits to stare
East as the sun sets, or, as the straight
Pain pulls down dreams, relinquish light. Stuff
Up the leaf-sounds. I will simply sate
A head no more sublime than a rough
Axe haft. Perhaps it is now enough.
***
Stirred
In the holes beneath thought, beneath all blue
Words and grey words - just words in night - I still
Remember nineteen-ninety-six. I do
Not think it with the same shapes, and the shrill
Air is only an ash with his opaque
Words and grey words. Just words? In night I still
My sounding head for the heart’s cry, to shake
Back from the beat of what, drifting over
Air, is only an ash. With his opaque
Hands held like pieces of flame, time’s drover,
Drenched in his own certainty, herds us all
Back from the beat. Of what drifting, over
What torn skies does this light, still stinging, fall
Cold? I dream only as I ask does he,
Drenched in his own. Certainty herds us all
Towards the dim west of will so we see,
In the holes beneath thought, beneath all, blue
Cold. I dream, only as I ask: does he
Remember nineteen-ninety-six? I do.
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