All entries for Monday 26 November 2007
November 26, 2007
PORTRAIT
Another boy has a head
like a peach
and drooped eyes like
an old lion
that is always displeased.
The forehead glides between shapes
of wrinkles and smiles.
Brief.
Jerked like a cough with
the ruckling face.
There is always a square fingered
hand
rubbing a tense
jaw.
THE HEATH
I wrote this for my first year mini poetry portfolio for Michael Hulse (back in the day) and found it today. I reworked it a heap as it was shockingly incoherent etc.
The Heath
Keats.
Aisle Graffiti.
Biro lines, whose brains have had the
memory of who left them,
washed out
by lecturing voices.
A gooey diatribe dragging
its permanent noise
over grey coughing tiers.
Bars. Squares. Insipid light.
White pages.
Bad thespians in the art of the leaves.
Autumn leaves that
You and I
smuggled into folders
full of notes -amputated- and various poems.
They are underneath our rested heads.
Tangible colour and reality
seducing
our elbows.
Our arms have been
detatched
by synthesis, by torpor, and we stare
and we long
for the crisp damp death of the leaf.
They shall probably dissolve, fantastical,
crumble
on contact with your amorous cheek.
Have our faces become plastic
moulded into blankness?
Is there a biro that could sketch them?
They are speaking to us
about words
about autumn
in this cocoon of phlegm, and brains.
The trees are shielded by electric hum.
The trees are curling and gone.
The journey here and skirts
Dance, eclectic, in the licking hackles
of the gorgeous air.
The wind wants its browning
children.
It wants our books.
It asks them back to its bosom,
to blaze and to die.
Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis:
Season of mists, they say, and today,
out on a yet inviolate heath
a man and his girl stuff soil
into each others throats and clothes.
Their hands are digested by the villi of wild thorns.
Galimatias.
Thrusting and breaking and renegotiating
into skins and the graffiti of skins.
Briefcases abandoned on the grass.
Another Poem
POSTBRIDGEWe canter up their scree slopes
with our backs to the wind.
Here is fierce, bold, a
woken snake sliding out over a man’s bare thigh.
Cold air ready to bite us off of the stoneway.
To strike.
And the gorse breathes,
rising out over and under the hands.
The day printing us into the underbelly.
Crisping, here comes the night.
To the west it can be seen, slow,
closing the heads of the valleys
and the faces of the flowers.
Burn-cloud tatters of the awe setting, the orb death:
The sun sets
and over the moor we
are not watching
for a pebble that clicks.
Beast shift.
Squeezed out
from spoor treads
into the sharp stream
from air.