I
feel the nails
in the horses hooves on the carousal
They are paused in flight
Like the marbled horses of Florence square
Unable to break free
Poems do not stay in the air forever
I remember the kite having such freedom
While I was left holding a string
And this is how I write
1.
The morning of the worlds funeral
Pressed there between pavement and gritty façade
In the vein of dried petals or wings
Featureless, thoughtless as breeze carried papers
Little point in reading yesterdays faces
Printed in the darkest ink
On the greyest surface
Paused there in the middle of someones view from a window
as someone with no umbrella in the rain
in a crowd of people all holding umbrellas
yet dry, somehow
as though the rain was only sound and melancholy
In lacklustre vista
these eyes seem to uncover a deeper mystery
This breath in the mist
An origami, otherworldly
As the lonely un-kissed
As rocks near but not close enough to the sea
Cups of espresso (from caffé Nero)
Winking at the sky brought out on trays
Early morning, small sips
Waiting for the funerals
Rehearsed in silence
For the trial
For a stranger to turn and smile
Stranded there between Preston and Stroud
There is a verse etched on a bench at each station
Will anyone ever read the whole poem
Sitting there on the windowsill
watching angels move through crowds
Lost in crowds, watched from angels in windows
We pass as though in fog
All you see are the lit end of cigarettes
Like a constellation of fireflies
Sometimes red lipstick smiles
Are on the only visible part of a face in the greyness
Flickering like red butterflies
Sometimes touching
You see a whole person under lamplight
As if on a stage
If they have no monologue
Then fade
2.
candyfloss on a wet, windy morning
Whilst helping those less unfortunate
They are smiling from so far away
Because I am constantly thinking of you
I wonder if we are all like this
At such a distance from ourselves
All rivers feeling like they have
Never been a part of the where they end
Bright. luminous shells rare
On beaches
Even the sea strains to take
I think of one house with blue walls there
And a certain open window
Your eyes part of the sea
3. they played violins in the rain
Outside the rain swarms the pavements
Cars go blind.
Children sleep to the sound of windscreen wipers.
Like two violin bows.
A woman puts her head on the glass
and thinks of the shopping in the boot.
A man keeps hold of the wheel as if
any minute the car in front will wake up.
The car has stopped and lit a cigarette.
The rain becomes harder waiting for the lights to change .
They sit like prisoners in their own boredom
and hurry to be in a more comfortable boredom
with everything in its right place.
The child in his bed and the shopping in the fridge.
The rain on the roof.
The harsh red light like a foreign man doing his job.
The windscreen wipers not changing station.
The static outside and the world with a lost signal
and all the other cars are unbothered by their hurry.
On holiday it is being lost on roads
were you have a view of sheep. Cattle grids.
The relief of opening the front door
and seeing the hallway lights go on in the cold corridor
after hours away is their last pleasure.
They don't believe in meaning so there is no lack of it.
Everything has been put away.
at last their day is finally done with.
I wish cafes had windscreen wipers in the rain.
Darkness spreads over the moon like ants over sugar
and turns steadily to indigo. other than you
Echoing loudly and glowing
The street is empty as a dream.
Soon it will be bright blue.
The street loses its mystery.
Is childlike after the rain.
4.
children understand the magnitude more than we do
The mosaics in the sun waver
Like drunken harlequins
Stained prophets suspended in light
Almost painfully
One child in the church is concerned
The priests voice is like gods
Lost in the rain to a passing crowd
This is the same child that
When amidst celebrations and dancing
As a ship parted company
All lit up at night
Thought only of its not returning
5.
field trip
Leaves scuttle along the pavement
Like an army with its golden shields up
A child drags his feet like tanks through
A battlefield
Doing that leaf march
for the sounds it makes
And how they wash over his feet up to his ankles
Some of the clockflowers are bare
Sparklers fizzled out
Pulled out of the ground and blown to bits
As though from a dream
A tractor as though also part of nature
Sits lopsided on the edge of a road
The seat has a small puddle of rain on it
And a dead ladybird floats upside down
like a dropped umbrella
Sticky plants are ripped out of the ground and stuck
To the backs of uniforms
Dot leaves are rubbed on nettle stung fingers
One child runs ahead and steps in a puddle of shallow ice
Cracks in a precise and satisfying way as only his weight could manage
The teacher walks behind them as they rush ahead
Like leaves trampled through
And they disappear as if in the uninspired view
Their memories not stretching back to this moment
The tractor still asleep on that road
The ladybird gone but a few leaves
In A puddle still on the seat
Not red but rusted
The wind chipping away at it like Michelangelo
Paint brushes off like clock flower petals and
Chalk drawings
6.
she put her hands on my chest
like searching through the songs of a jukebox
The jukebox
lit up like a small cathedral
pretends to weep with joy
while it descends into loneliness
Backdrop of a city lit up like
A thousand preludes
Our kisses changing
Without our thinking
The whine of fingers down guitar strings
Improvised in mourning
As the dreams change at a certain part of the morning
As a funeral goes on and on
As a star dies light years wide
Without blinking
A ship sinking
With all its lights on
Her eyes so pale blue
Like gas lit stoves
Or doves
Picking at bits of bread on soggy pavements
Like a dull watercolour perhaps
Beautiful nontheless
Her hands like snow
So white in contrast
to auburn hair and blue eyes
In that they vanish even as you hold them
Simply because there is no
possibility of her staying
7.
old memories outlast new memories
I remember as a child
For months
Watching a park being built
But never saw it finished.
The diggers moving serenely
And the first silver sliver of a slide in the rain
Once a few of us climbed through the railings
I lay inside a tractor tyre disguised as a swing
The rubber was warm in the sun
And a girl climbed in to complete the circle
Someone swung us for a while and we closed our eyes
In the half built park
When it was dark we were the last to be found
Whoever had swayed us had not told
Remember we looked at the moon a while
As if it wear a toy in a shop window we would
Stare at and could not afford
8.
dreams are kept somewhere else
Daylight slips its letter
Between the slit of waking and dream
But opened it is something else entirely
A book dropped In a puddle
And the ink turning it to oil
Where bipolar rainbows swirl
While I am carried in my body from place to place
Like a saxophone in its case
I feel like an ants nest
Letters carry dead letters
Conversations creep in and out of me
Leaving no impression
An open lid on a jar of honey
Is like waking up to sunrise
All my thoughts in single file
Out of the cracks in reality
You can't seal them all
The unreal will always find a way in
And every-time you dream
You spill sugar
9.
bathing in the dark
The sun is crepuscular through the buildings
Like luminous dials on a radio
It is rare that the right station is found in the usual static.
And its almost surreal. we are used to the rain
and the dreariness. we go out to be under the sky
the way there are Muslims who bathe in water in their thousands
for one day of the year. We don't want to be cleansed.
We have the beauty of un-poetic walls.
We flow as torn from telephone directories
through the narrow arteries of a city
with black lungs and nicotine stained
in which we all stand Chinese under the streetlights.
Asian in the shadows. Jewish with our heads resting on the walls
praying to the emptiness.
Have we sinned is something we seldom ask. but in reply it rains.
When it does we are sheltered.
Listening to it like someone elses prayer.
Pieces of the sky fall on our doorsteps as newspapers.
The wind has blown them from other countries.
All in turmoil except ours.
Although I am unconcerned by my nature.
I wade through ignorance like a moth in the rain
between streetlights and act as a luminous butterfly.
Knowing I can not create an earthquake in china.
Not even a whisper in this street.
10.
we cannot attend each others funeral
The sky has leant against my back
Like hands in prayer
To emptiness
Your thoughts are loud enough to wake the universe
From its sleep
curiosity multiplies like germs behind the eyes
Like rain on car windows
Your mind is a child drawing on the wet glass
the clouds move like priests playing chess
Shattered prayer beads fall translucent
There is soft thunder
Like a baby crying at a funeral
Scolds everyone
A child who feels that his father now
Knows his own thoughts better than he does
And will be there only when he is
About to do something wrong
And a woman whose chest has opened
her heart lowered
Her lungs have filled with soil
And her mind has shut out the sky
As the lid closes
A few are concentrating.
Waiting to offer faces of condolence.
To stand as practiced at minute silences heard over the radio
Listening to that bell gong
I wish everyday could have such reverence
That impenetrable calmness that seems to hush the sky.
Put everything in slowmotion.
Some people have never stopped and contemplated life this long.
Birds make imperfect figure eight patterns above as if the sky was being stirred
before settling along a single telephone line in attendance.
The clouds move as slowly as they can
As if the whole world had attented.
And walked away at the end.
Like a last train leaving a widow
and two children in a desolate station.
The widow tastes soil in everything.
Opens her mouth when it rains as if it were a part of him.
She seems beautiful in her melancholic acceptance of emptiness
she has inherited like a heavy saxaphone case
only her late husband could play.
Or her children carry her like a suitcase
stuffed full of his clothes she couldn't bear to throw away
They wait at platforms.
11.
The sun makes statues blink behind railings.
I lean against the sky as if on a strangers cool
Gravestone in the shade
Flowers left there seem more lifeless than flowers in a vase.
All our names are etched in the clouds.
We don't really know where they are going.
They seem to have a sense
of their own fate like pigs led to a slaughterhouse.
You see the sky turn crimson.
And hear a babies squeal at someone’s funeral.
You feel one more person will be listening to your thoughts.
Unable to have their own.
A shadow has left my face
And is dancing in sunlight like a bow on a silent violin.
I imagine what it might sound like.
A cloud has unhooked itself from my shoulders and joined the others.
Because the sky is so grey
The pavement seems to shine.
My thoughts and dreams have met
as colours on the wet paper of a childs painting.
He doesn't realise the beauty of it.
But his mind was more concentrated
and calm and inspired than dalis.
The houses walk about in the rain when no one is about in the street.
As a woman gathering flowers in a field only she visits.
They quench their thirst for a silence that isn't so dry as the conversation between mirrors.
They swap places until the sun discovers them
They wait for as we do for the day to draw its close like theatre curtains.
The seats are hard and we have been holding in our voices for too long.
When we step outside the moon is already there.
We will never catch it moving.
it skips from tree to tree when we aren't looking.
The trees play catch.
Everything moves and we think our footsteps tread the earth to revolve
and stops spinning at night.
While the sun is left on charge.
The statue makes such an effort to keep still.
Its eyes have seen the world and remembered nothing.
The sky has coloured it in and never been satisfied.
The moon bears no resemblance to anything.
Statues blink in the sun.
12.
sunflower girl
I move slowly like a wolf towing a survivor through the snow
My own thoughts seeming to be a bitter wind
Against my own face
Wanting to go in the other direction
My thoughts like a firefly escorting a ship through the dark
As a windmill in the sea
Offering little but a dreamy stance
or a lighthouse on land
seems I should be somewhere else
The clouds are sleepwalkers
Detached sails leaving
Like refugees travelling together
Carrying nothing to where nothing is needed
A single fleet of sails towed by seagulls
Like handkerchiefs waved from departing train windows
The blue eyes of the woman left standing on the platform is the sky.
She thinks of birds and rain and
How she wishes she were as free as the thoughts
that circle around the rooftops of her mind
She wishes she was blind again
As she was until age eleven
When she was half violin.
And everything beautiful could be touched.
How her eyes would look into the sun without
blinking. Like sunflowers.
Her eyes like empty skating rinks in which she alone
would skate with her imagination.
When the bandage slowly unwrapped from her eyes
Like clouds parting
Like a child opening a gift. The world suddenly unsafe.
How she imagined the sky was not quite so pale.
As if eyesight as much as everything had aged.
And the colours made little effort.
The eyes no longer curious. Look into the sky as stones underwater.
And the people. Seeming blind themselves.
In their own personal darkness. And her eyes
seeing less than her hands feeling
through the world no longer mysterious.
The pages of braille sit like large dirty butterflies.
All colour rubbed off.
she tries to rub it into her eyes.
They leave. Take flight from her face.
Discover the world through their wings.
I read from a book of poetry. Tell her this is what the world
is like.. She doesn't believe me.
Blackbirds darting to and fro
Telephone lines with no verses in between make margins in the sky
Exhaust ashes spill from even hearses
Leaves tyre trails in the snow
The world is really braille.
Everything but white sheets ghostly operatic
without voice on washing lines sketched in charcoal.
Her eyes peaceful as a crows tracks in snow.
The white of her eyes goes on forever.
She discovers rather than plays her violin.
It is her clearest way of seeing.
13.
The dream on the morning of a strangers funeral
Voices shake like cutlery in handfuls
You listen to their bent perspectives
As they fit their rectangular lives into the oval shaped holes
Like a Picasso painting where
Everything is cut from the same fabric
So the square guitarist drinks from the triangular cups
drinking blue coffee as time gets stuck on the hexagon clock
As if you might never step out of this café
This moment in pause
The chime sounds different. Like angelic jazz.
Picasso walks in. And everything loses its shape.
The guitarist becomes so real that his guitar
no longer sounds the same.
I don't know where I fit in now that I am shapeless.
I walk into the rain. The café disappears.
My hands are the same as Picassos and no longer rectangular.
I wonder if I can paint .
There’s a guitarist sat in the subway .
I paint an impression of him on the wall.
Easy in cubism but not quite Picasso.
I go back to the café. I see a shadow wavering
in the sun on the wall that reminds me of medusa.
I think it a flower but it is a woman whose hair is swaying serenely.
Roots are sprouting from her ankles into the chequered floor.
She sits eating casually a pomegranate with a straw.
The door opens and sets off a series of cogs and pulleys
that rings a chime behind the counter.
The clock has no hands. It is a snow globe full of numbers
The wind from outside sends white petals floating
as if the clock had smashed but it is the woman who had clock flower hair.
Which grows back as raven foliage.
She approaches me and shakes my hand.
I feel my fingers like roots starting to entwine around hers so I let go quickly.
Your supposed to be dead I tell her.
Then stop dreaming she tells me. I hear laughter.
The door is half open and a gust of leaves has blew in
and attached to her netted gown.
Three cats come out from under her table
which was part of her skirt when she leaves.
They run along the wall as shadows.
One leaps out into my arms .
It has almond shaped eyes. Keep it she says.
It licks its paws and turns the pages when I write.
I tried planting seeds that I had found in the café.
As if she might appear again.
I always lose my cat and think it in the shadows.
Sometimes it has no face but there are green eyes in its shadow on the wall.
It sinks into my shoulder sometimes and I see through its eyes.
Birds are bright and luminous. Angles jump out at me.
The streets are filled with people who have the same expression
and I notice all the different artists amidst them. I wonder if they own cats.
14.
Moon trauma
All I could see were expressionless faces
Amongst stark expressionism
Lunar conceptions
The moon as the eye of a horse
All you see is the beauty of its galloping
A muscular piston like a cog amongst stars
It has wings though still it gallops
As if there were surface up there
I remember a swan necked woman
Is it strange I found her beautiful
Her breasts were half concealed by lava
Bathing in the neck of a chimney
A dog was howling at the moon
She was beautiful
What did it mean
They call it an exhibition
The artist isn’t there other than in her paintings
Wordless, the way we don’t tell of our dreams
Above the entrance it says “I will let you into a secret”
And the exit says “but you must not tell”
Those who tell do not dream and it is only then
The paintings reveal meaning
The woman ascends the lava
The dog is envious, we all are
No matter how many times you read “Howl”
You will never laugh with beat poets in moonlight washed gutters
You hear the smashed confetti and the dogs.
As if I had only just opened my eyes
I walked outside. The sky was red
There was no expressionism
Just mute faces in the distance full of emotion
Screaming at prams
Drunken howls and the moon in the bottom of a bottle of absinthe
Not a beat generation but one that never showed up in a first place
The sky an empty battlefield
There is a day moon
Out of place
Like a trainee nurse
The sky on its operation table with its open wounds
A shaky needle
A wavering breeze
The moon floats of and a child watches it as if it had been let go
From his own hands
Silver
Like the expensive ones
A fathers lost coin, the child holds his hand instead
The moon reminded me of his mother
Murky under reflections
Hateful. Innocent
Gone away
But never out of sight
I don’t remember her face
The moon becomes less
And less recognizable
A needle shakes in its grove
It hurts
My heart beat is irregular
I don’t have long. None of us do
Each step is tugging at my chest
And I think the beating is so loud everyone in the street hears it
I make it home and I tell no one
I feel my heart gallop even though it has wings
I wonder if the woman in the lava burns despite her lack of expression
Would a caged swan try to spread its wings through the bars
I only know that in death my soul will fly right out of its cage
The woman in the lava knows this
She is waiting for her wings
In our dream she ascends
Tell no one. They wouldn’t believe you
The dream needs belief to make it to your sleep
Or you will only dream of the day outside
The white sky, white moon, the blank page. The faces
15.
Chimneys bloom in winter, the sky turns yellow
Although I can carry you on my shoulders as light as wings
You are made of bricks and I am the smoke ascending from you
My grey dream snakes unequivocally in patterns you hardly recognize
But in seeing the skies reaction you are proud
I cannot snag my stem from your ashen throat
I swirl otherworldly
Your heart burns me thicker than the blood of a cigarette
Until you reel me in as you inhale me into your weak lungs
It is only you that can run your fingers through the sky tangled in my hair
You have your feet snug at the ocean bed like iron
I breathe just above the surface of a dream
In the deepest most unfathomable exits
I can still feel your hand on my back
The chain lengthens, not even a funeral shovel can snap it
If I am smoke it is your body in the furnace
If you could recognise the patterns above crematoriums you would smile
Birds, clouds they leave a gap
If I go first, however much later
your smoke will follow the same trail I left
There will be a pattern you recognise as me, not yet symmetrical
Remember that cloud you said resembled me
Fingers softly brushing a forearm, that’s something to miss when your gone
I cant wait to share these new colours with you
They are deeper than before as the ocean is to blue
The way they are held
Like your eyes are to emerald.
16. The women in your life are green
The women in your life are green
Madeleine has blue eyes
You wonder if a cat is envious of a bird in flight
If the flowers would rather be in the sky
The ocean is both, but it is in the grass you drown
The blades cut you down like only they know how
She has been thinking of you lately
You feel it when you look at your reflection
Her name is on your tongue like rain but you cant say it
At night the fields drown in blackness
And the ocean is dark also
The woman in your life is green
The cat couldn’t be more content if it had wings
And what would it do, chase birds
Madeleine’s eyes are blue
You lie in the grass looking at the sky
Realise there is nowhere else you would rather be.
17.
The less I remember, the more I dream
The stars are starving like new beaks open
And only rain coming with the scent of new books
The moon is the same cold prison porridge bowl
Those who have tasted the sky say it is salty
Its bitterness doesn’t leave the mouth
Like the taste of someone you do not love
The stars are starving, they have been ignored
Dried like starfish preserved in vinegar
Rough as the moon you think of as smooth
It ages in its mirror though it has no face
A vain medusa. The stars writhe and hiss
We don’t make wishes anymore
It is better to not think of them at all
Do your best not to imagine the outcome
Then it might happen, unexpected as rain sometimes
How dreams happen only after your mind is blank
18.
The more I dream, the less I remember
The lack of brightness in your paintings
Reminds me of dreams, those terrifying yet beautiful ones
You don’t have anymore
otherworldly figures in structure-less realms
A shaken water globe come to nothing on days mantle
Where your art hangs glowing above an unlit fire
Yet barely recognizable
A woman combing stars out of her hair
In a room without a source of light
I imagine you paint in candlelight
Its flickering lights guiding your brushstrokes
A melting hand, the feeling someone is watching you
As if by remembering your dreams
You were wiping a strangers breath from a mirror
I imagine you combing the stars out of your hair
Smudges of paint on your forehead is when you are most attractive
19.
Birds eye view of the funeral
My poems to you seem for someone else.
But what I could write
Fills like an old fashioned airship and floats away with the breath from my lungs.
Since breathing only feels right besides the ocean or on the phone.
So I rest like a phone in its hook and wait for your voice to resonate through me.
Every time I pick up it isn't you.
But I wonder if I stepped out of the booth I might miss that call.
This is where we suffocate. Inside phone booths.
All side by side along the street.
The birds sit on the lines above a world that rings and rings.
They circle above a sky filled with radio signals and wirelessness.
Wondering what all this communication is for.
When all they witness is silence and only their singing breaks it.
20.
why we are silent at funerals
Pram wheels glide along the pavement in a thinning rain.
It falls down the clear plastic shell.
The mother is fifteen.
As many are in these streets.
Everything is young in the rain.
They push their prams as if there was a heavy lead doll inside.
The world has fell on their doorstep before they've had chance to step out.
The buses now. Sink down for easier access for prams.
It happens at every stop. Where people stand in the shelter like books
in a bookshelf whose pages are only read by one other person
at night looking over them in moonlight. Whereas I have always wanted to tear my pages out and throw them against the wind. But then they would be lost
Altogether. So like them, one person traces over my skin at night like braille
and deciphers my childhood into a violin case
in which she can fit herself against velvet.
There is no where more silent than travelling with a group of strangers.
The bus moves silently through the traffic
We all listen to the rain. Like clouds.
If we talk. We mention the rain.
It is all we will ever know of each other.
21.
Holding hands at a funeral
They sit in a jar of water
Polluting it a murky grey
As if they had exerted themselves before
Into the colours
Resting as a priests hands after baptizing a child
The way water might drop from a leaf
Into the hollow of a flower
With acknowledgement
They way we let a stranger pass us on a stair
As if our shadows knew each other
Had met in another dream
I feel that if we were to sleep
With each other
We would rest afterwards
As paintbrushes in water
The sky turning a murky grey
Having exerted our colours.
22.
A long drive to someone elses funeral
If you have ever watched seagulls
In a pink sky and not felt rapture
Only the feeling the familiar sight
Makes you for a moment appreciate life.
It is when I look into her eyes
my heart doesn't quicken
I remember a moment of rapture
And the lack of meaning I felt
In my stomach afterwards
How she held me as if it were unavoidable
Unfortunate how exhilerating we could be
The moon doesn't burn but imagine the lack of it.
If you were to crack it open you might find us in flat sepia.
As much as the stars are burning. Each night they stand. In whatever constellation they land.
Not like wedding confetti.
But two strangers clothes heaped on a floor
Quickly gathered and gone by morning
The same time I open my eyes to a face still sleeping serene as the moon
Knowing that it is always there each night.
23.
at the funeral I saw my mother under a black veil
My eyes hold a stillness
The way the ocean rages
And comes to terms at sunset
With those who have drowned under its waves
And their widows never looking at the ocean
In the same way again
Blameless as god. Blameless
As a cruel stepfather
Years later kind to his own children.
The way a clockflower holds still
And the slightest breeze could set it off
She knows this, when the moons reflection
Rests on the surface
The ocean stays still as possible
Not to break the image
He doesn't recognize me. The man who
Put the rage and silence in my eyes and scarred waves down my spine
My hands in my pockets are still as they pass him.
If they clench it is for the tears that never left my eyes.
I owe him this strength. A stillness that can't be broken. A calmness.
I remember the lost look in his eyes.
The way his fingers would open like bandages
Look at his hands like they had been possesed.
His fingers hanging there uselessly
Waiting for my tears.
He may as well have struck the wall
I would sit there like they sky having no answers
The rain passed and twilight the colour of bruised moonflowers
His eyes gone to glass. Stood there abandoned like a child. Apologetic but unable to say it
And I remember I would sit there colouring in
Before words had replaced the colours of imagination. Finishing the picture
Thinking of my younger brother
Almost glad that he was far away. Safe
The way the moon distant can rest on the ocean.
Maybe I was the most inanimate thing in
the room to him that could be broken
His fists will never heal. They are brittle
Would turn to chalk if he punched a wall
He still has that empty look in his eyes
As if there was something he had left undone
As if there might be someone out there feeling
As broken as him. Feeling scarred on the inside.
Remembering each day his anger.
But there isn't
The sky always seems renewed after a storm has passed.
As if nothing could change its mind or catch its attention. As if everything were depending on it
to hold that stillness so that everything else continues.
I remember most the pictures I painted. They are lost now. in childhood. As if they were chalk on wet pavement. In one there was a man with his hands in the river. Around the throat of his reflection.
I remember us walking through town. My hand pulling away from his. Not wanting presents like bribes not to tell where the bruises had come from.
I never told. I remember him sat weeping in a corner.
I sketched him as he sat there
24.
half of life is remembering
Like an insect in amber
I am a sepia figure in your eyes
Your memories of me are fragments
If I am a mosaic and I break
Am I still a mosaic
Who remembers me may each have a piece a different colour
You had my eyes
And they were emerald
The soul is a bride alone at its altar like the moon
And at the other side of the earth the groom is burning crimson
A sun that sinks into the stomach
Clouds are never satisfied with the place they are in
If you don't settle you dissapear
Unlike snow
The way your soul settles into itself
As a star folds inwards
Before the moment it explodes
The bride holds flowers giving a feint scent
Your life for a while
Red withering in white hands
25.
and the other half is dreaming
While you were looking at the stars
I was watching the perforations fall
Eyes like black holes devoured them
Eyes so dark its a wonder I can
See through them
The world behind blacked out windows
Behind your eyes hold wonder
Like light through stained glass
The world inside out is a dream
It folds as much as it turns
I look at the moon
As a man pitches milk
It fills my transparent body
My skin cold as doorsteps at five in the morning
But I pretend I'm a bird made of chalk
Sketched on the walls
I feel my bones drift
Like coloured dust into different landscapes
Someone who is knee deep in his own sky creations
Who also fades when it rains
Disappears unnoticed
Leant over the pavement creating chalk oceans under feet
In the bustle and shove of grey hurried leaves
Outside of autumn
Pleading with the trees to take them back.
Like the bustler only carries coins
Sips coffee that tastes of songs played in the cold
I would trade my wealth for his voice
Coffee tastes better in a mouth lined with velvet
Appreciative of the sound of pennies in an open case
Goes down his throat like his songs in the subways
The echo of coins splashing in the rain
He is the last to leave
And the only one not in a hurry.
26.
the world sinking with all its lights on
My measurements have been taken
When I brush past a stranger in the street
Each day a stitch is sown. Death is busy
But soon my suit will be ready
I will walk into the light shining
Without anyone noticing
Until I can no longer step out of it
The dreamt of people will be there
As if I had only gone to sleep
Nothing will break the dreams semblance
I will forget you. Forget altogether until
You visit. Your head resting where you
Fell asleep in the open pages of my book
Is felt on my shoulder.
You spray my perfume on your neck
And I taste your skin
When you bathe alone I feel my thoughts still
I can not see you. We are only long distant lovers
Life is only as empty as it was before we met
Life teaches us to wait
The sunflowers are waiting
They sway as if underwater because
Of their colour
They are stars that have outgrown and swallowed
The black hole
And have you ever looked at one without feeling
Your thoughts rushing like water to the plughole
they absorbs everything. They are wireless routers on the breeze
Information in noughts and ones on the pollen
Bits of conversation minimalised into haikus
The sky is a platform
Everything is passing through but we are all waiting
Like rain boarding a cloud until its next stop
When we wait is when we age
You can feel the wisdom on the breeze carving its rings under your eyes
While you stand looking down the road
For the luminous number eleven
The clockflower waits to be swept away
One of them has to wait longer than the others
And stand alone amongst the corpses
Until someone makes a wish
They simply ran out
We milked the moon for every last bit of romance
Disguised as stars to get close
It doesn't matter we don't burn
But we were sunflowers
Our own hearts black devoured us from the inside out
Like negative film from a camera or dreams held to sunlight.
Like inverted umbrellas filling with rain
And snapping unlike flowers
We have to wait now
Next time we know what to disguise ourselves as
Well not let our heads go when the wind blows
There is this single universe. alone
But there will be two of us
two left
Like a birds footprints in the snow
We have to wait.
I circle overhead. I've to sweep you again
Sweep you right out of your body
We won't need to disguise anymore
For now you have dug yourself as an anchor
That underside of space in blue floating above
That’s where I am, I'm on that ship
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