All entries for Wednesday 14 January 2009

a long, strange story of a poem

After the pangs, he woke and set out alone.

Sore heels and the city led him on.

The days unfolded like a diagram, little-coloured

and strange. All around the mountains shone,

confused compass to a bodied world. Once,

by the river, a girl walking masked

with long loose hair showed him how the moon rose

and the sun set on the wings of her collarbone.

Men walked alongside him, offered beer

thick and sweet as treacle, till he was tongued and bloodied

by the spinning world and the bitterness of hops.

They stretched lips round over words of space and place

and swallowed, leaving him more lost than before.

Everywhere a babel chattered in the trees,

aping sense and flirting long, soft fingers.

In the desert he knelt, and the tears

rolled fat as birds. Where they dropped a man sprang

strung with ribboned veins, dressed in himself like cloth.

He sat on a rock, and smiled, and spoke:

'My friend, you are here on the limb

of the limb of the limb. Don't you know

that man cannot live by bread alone? Allow me, please,

to congratulate you on your perversity in adversity.'

He laughed and laughed and large-eyed in the darkness watched

as a comet traced rippled fingers across the sky

and the paper desert folded into itselg, like the end of love.

: 14 Jan 2009 23:09 |  Tags: Poem |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

more of the learning curve

Another first draft. sorry. and i am half-joking, rather than a complete emo kid.

Street Theatre (II)

I suspect we are in trouble.

Roadside rubbish fidgets in the eye

as the camera lens refracts the street

and turns it upside down.

We are all recorders here, the days imprint

and harden us. Reports retort and echo

from the walls, the graffiti which

like the outlines of old masters peeps

from plaster, threading in the cracks.

At every corner the soul creeps out the skin

in damp, sour beads and metal dents the fingers,

kicks up dust.

Untitled (again)

The day started badly that morning in the shower,

when my skin fell off in sheets like water.

Making tea, my touch soured the milk,

and on the bus the fares had risen;

the conductor snorted at my

protests over arms and legs and pounds.

Instead, he took my eye-teeth, and

part of my lower jaw in payment.

At work my desk was snowed

under flowers from sympathetic coworkers,

who nonetheless avoided contact, as if i were catching.

I thought i was hiding it well, but they

sent me home early and told me to stop howling-

I was a 'disturbance to those around me'.

I am all unpeeled, salt-stung and unmade.

I never thought that love was like this.

: 14 Jan 2009 22:29 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem