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.

: 26 Nov 2007 21:11 |  Tags: Poem Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

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.

: 26 Nov 2007 21:03 |  Tags: Autumn Dartmoor Heath Keats Poem Poetry Rural |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Another Poem

POSTBRIDGE 

We 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.

: 26 Nov 2007 20:16 |  Tags: Dartmoor Poem Poetry Postbridge Rural |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem