Don't you go telling

These little blue books    
tucked beneath the skin
told the tale of the hurts    
(like nobody knew)
that patterned us
What I did to you you took politely
the gifts with the surprise poured out            
 
We were forever clouding the air 
with tiny gracious smiles
pretending to forgive each other
working at our fine stitching


Should we ever shake free 
of the disease’s history             
we would come back 
to a plain hunger
and the irregular senses
let lovely bruises be 
the tokens of uneven pressures
and mattered delight


Our arthritic tongues complain
because we cannot be bored
The sun is cruel to everyone
curing us as accidental meat
so that regular people
can have a butchers


We'll throw the rope to the raggedy shore
stripping to our shivering coordinates
before the energy of almost there 
a bleeding and corrosive light


Let all the blue books everywhere 

burn up to the silver fine ash
that waits for the green tips 
of our paysan fingers
to dip in


Now love, let’s you and I be friends
and shake our dirty hands

Sonnet 005

I was small. They sewed in another gut.
Tucked in the midst of the viscera,
The thin worm slept, waited for the set day,
Curled and warm like a promise not yet made.
Now he wakes, stretches and whispers the word.
Dressed up for trade and all ready to eat,
He sends me out with all my dreams tucked in.

They will find for me a place to be seen.
This is, I am told, a gift; a dry kiss.
Sunshine is everyday now I'm arrived.
The kids with their still hair have it down pat.
I try and keep it tight, take steady steps.
With me, the blisters give the game away.
The thin worm is dying. Do I die too?

Calcium

           We inches along
                                                thin       and rinsed
       
        the grist is a word         stuck in the gullet

                    with the caught breath

                                               the bad smile

 
         plagued out

   
                crawling behind lines
         of the letter we unwrote

                      We’re to be said!

              

                            Here!          This is us!

           

             dark       brittle and tunnel dark

                                            Now here!         

                 stops      unfitted        thumbed over

We serves the blistered boy

     with the tongue shut in

                                          ||       the body is

                                              our salty bruiser

                        We word for him

                                and says your thinks

                         are turds                 spat crusts.

You there!             the chronic and unseemly ghost

              This be our patch: now shift!

Our boy sweats jewels    

                      He   bleeding   WINS

Sonnet 004

Over the stream, hid in the copse’s dark

There are the beasts that wait, grave, unnumbered,

Still to each other, lost in their dull heat.

Tenderly, they stroke their sleeping hungers,

Watch as we burden each other with hope,

Barter the older traces of ourselves

And go to the work of our forgetting.

Look now into the space between the trees;

Each breathing mass assured of its return.

Our lullabies are coming to a close.

There’s no recourse to the categories,

The templates of style and the shaken hands;

Only memories of fervid desire.

You say the words, lines learnt, what do I know?

Accidents of note

I fell before your rotten smile,

Rich with lust and iced with guile.

You had me bruised, bare-arsed and small,

In thrall to that disease that you call love

In time we found a little space,

To play at home, where we saved face.

I couldn’t stand the kindnesses,

You let fall from your lips in lieu of love.

Now what an autumn noise we make -

Shedding clothes for history’s sake.

The hierogplyphs we shift between,

Are scrawled upon the ruins of our love.