Rain makes the street young
gutters fill high as the curb
Cars try their best to splash passers by
Who swerve like a needle off its record


The red lights trail in the wet black streets
Like blood from an old samurai film in black and white
Over exaggerated gallons of it
Slow deaths and Macbeth like anguished Japanese faces
Excruciating in the silver rain, glint of blade showing eyes
Full of what you don’t see in eyes these days

come away from that window, she says
Into a dresser mirror with lights around it
Reminding you again of black and white movies
her eyes like fairy lights not in colour
The faint scars on your back like train-tracks down your spine she doesn't mind.


Help her unzip the back of her dress
The zip purrs revealing first her slender blades
Like opening an umbrella

She keeps you dry



You remember being amongst those outside the window
in the purr of wet tyres and hurried steps
Feeling like you had been away for so long
and had to learn gestures from scratch
Until they were second nature
The un-acknowledging nods
half smiles not in sync with the eyes
feeling like
A blues note in the rain
But the people like jazz

Its not that you don't know who you are
Its that you don't know who they are
And they don't stop. You cant find a way in to the rhythm.
Like rain slowly down glass and yours going sideways with the wind.
If you wrote your poetry on the walls no one would stop.
And that's your voice

Its like your talking graffiti.
Splashing unwelcome colours across a comfortable shade of grey.
Trailing your fairy-lights and tinsel the wrong season.
You take your dreams somewhere else.
The stations are the same. It seems while you slept the train never left.
The clouds have followed you. There’s no getting away from the grimness of the city
Its in your home, in your heart and eyes



Waiting for the next train you see two women kiss.
They both have short spiked hair and body language that is like
ticker tape streaming from carnival floats.
Almost like they were half practicing dancing alone
and sitting not ladylike on the bench
but on the back of it like they were younger than they were.

Various rendezvous happen as planned.
And you always find that unsettling. That order
when your life is all over the place
and your thoughts are colouring outside the lines.
Everyone has their script in conversations.
You know theirs. But not yours.
You listen to their personality’s inside the gesture and rhythm
and other details they don't know they have.
Yours has been folded so many times. Its an origami crane.
More fitting you save it for rooftops and hope it doesn’t rain
Or tuck it in-between bookshelves
for someone you don't know on the other side. They will understand.
But you will not see who it was.





In the bookshop the poetry section got smaller today.
A single bookcase.
You have to kneel down to get to Poe.
Wade through supermarket poetry about potatoes and aubergines.
Feeling alone in that small section. Knowing the books
will always be in the order you left them.

The world too got smaller when you stepped out.
People passing under streetlight glow
and disappearing like snowflakes in their five seconds of life.
All gloves and scarves and mists of breath.
The same old lights in the city from ten years ago.
Same tinsel in the windows.
The world like a snow globe never settled.
People like the flakes all hurrying past.
And you still that child holding your fathers hand.
Always wanting to stop and ask a question.

Why are they in a hurry.
Why is there a man on the sidewalk asleep.
He’ll be covered by the snow.
He's still there. From years ago.
Is this life father. Its a long answer. Not right now. We’ve got to go.
Presents for people in ten years you will not know.
Even family. Grandma rose.

 It snowed at her funeral too.
The soil was hard and the lid speckled white.
Rims of hats collecting flakes.
Imprints lost like it never happened.
All the gravestones covered.
 
It snowed when the house burnt down.
We watched our presents in the smoke
and thought how beautiful it was to sit
in the snow in a blanket still alive.

It snowed when you saved me once before.
Half conscious it fell slowly into my eyes.
From being pushed under water. Not outside. Not by a stranger.
But I've never been able to remember her eyes.
Just their lost intent. And I imagine seeing her again
someday soon. In a park with my stepfathers children.
Those ones unharmed by him. Never knowing his cruelty.

What do you do when you see that.


The snow covered its own tracks.
All bruises vanished. No bad memories.
Just a kind of inner semblance.
A dead constellation you sometimes wonder about.
Those things that never happened. Not thought of now.
In my independence.

In my half presence. Practiced gestures.
My place in the tapestry. Woven through all the tragedies.
And then tangled in this rhythm.
Can't find the beginning or end of this string.
Just a middle. A neutral state. "A train parked in the rain."
is there anything more sad Neruda had said.



A taxi cab waiting
A hearse in snow
A train not arriving
all these things I know
and yet unknown I go
through the streets without you
because of those vehicles
because of the half fulfilled
rendezvous



If you photograph me. It will be precise. This
stillness. Outside
this bookstore. Stood in the streets calm clamour.
While the snow makes it young.
No details but ours and they are fading.
Makes you feel old.
Thinking back. And the memories not fading.
The season always the same inside.
A mess of Christmas lights and autumn decay.
A blurred half- exact image.
Everything In halves. Every thought.
Its apparent now how she makes you whole.


The rain in conversation with the street so far away.
The dress slips off her shoulders like twilight falling from night
The white moon-like chalky skin with its ethereal glow.
Illuminating parts of your body.
An eye. an elbow. Places only she knows
Like the sea brushing against a rock.
Two candles flickering their shadows on the wall.
Somehow in sync. (that's how you know)
And burning out at the same moment.




 

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