If there are black and white etchings of charcoal
Puddles like wounds and the rain is
Falling slower than it should and further sideways
In a fine splintering mist
One side of your face freezing and the other like glass
Shattering with the sky and rain.

If strangers all wear the same red coat
Walk in the same direction
And the sun crepuscular through the gates of mist
Turns them to ash
Leaving streets littered with coats
Hats gloves scarves and the skeletons of umbrellas
Like dead crows

And you are trying to find a coat your size
Hoping to become ashes rather than taste them
Become charcoal sketched across the cracked mirror pavements




Then she is the one that
Sifts through ashes
Of old photographs
Finding all the ones in which
You had smiled


Wearing a plain grey coat
Running an unopened umbrella along railings
as if they might make the sounds they used to in childhood
The rain has washed the make-up from her face
It glows white and wet like streetlights
Hair sticking to her forehead like seaweed on a plate
And she couldn’t be more beautiful



But you aren’t smiling
So the moon wont remember you.


Amnesia seeps from your eyes and burns the pavement
While your mouth keeps hold of all these poems
Like shadow puppets forced into a box
A mouth full of bees will do anything to escape
And it is art the way letters tumble like black grapes
And pearls from your Dionysian mouth
 Crawl as insects into their haikus neatly as snow on fires
Like a mothers finger on a child’s lips
But you have never looked so disgustingly lonely


It makes you blend in
As much as you are different
Buildings make an extra effort
to throw their black blankets over you
And you always take the shortcuts.
The quickest and loneliest way home


The bees scramble in your room yet silent when the lights are off
The dark moving full of whispers and tape recorded ghosts
Still gossiping. Still swearing

Your thoughts do not settle the way they fall
As snow on fires,
but rise up in embers
Fall as ashes
Rise as smoke
Fall as rain
Rise as echoes
And fall as snow

You hate the sound your ears make when listening to themselves
That fine transparent tone
A string humming, and then all these songs emanating from it
like luminous mountains on heart rate monitors

 It cannot switch off entirely. Nothing can, not even silence
So you know death isn’t a true ending, Its as curious as life
It has its colours and patterns and your dreams cling on to them
Your conscience wakes restless as a child’s hands play with whatever slight
Thing may be around, and make of it an epic

Imagining
The way poems
Happen
The way she
Happens
Into moments

The one minute she isn’t there and the moment she is
when the page is full, the rain has stopped, the train has arrived
When before those small occurrences
You felt like you had waited forever in a desolate station
Watching a flock of birds weave in and out of the steel geometries
As if threading the sky in vast circles of going and returning
In a different formation
And the one that has flown alone as if sick of such mesmerizing patterns
Like they had been practicing all day
Its wings tired and the sky like the bath is to a drowned spider swirling
Only with no hole to escape through other than in your eyes
Acknowledging. So it takes off


Like yellow chalk on a playground
is the only place it wont be affected by rain
Like the pavement artists masterpieces for only a few hours
but I remember them
thoughts of talking to you on the phone one windy day
in a faraway town
makes me think of your voice on every breeze
Seems to carry me away like a leaf
Never far away




She smiles and this is how you notice her
So quickly in the crowd

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