Getting to know you

     Look at you and me shuddering.

     Little green shoots peep from under our lids.

Outside the house, everything is plain and powder white
like they had it at the beginning.

You mouth the word “love” and I swallow up
the air that comes my way.

     Sometimes I wish that things were more complicated.

An ickle story

Some scruffy type on his guitar

all bust up from the Nineteensixties

is singing Frog went a-courtin’

outside Poundland. 17 starlings fly

down his throat and then eat him

from the inside, bursting out with

their tiny knives from the worn out skin

into the very hygienic light. They leave

the remains behind, spread out

on the pavement; here’s what you call

a stinking antidote to History. His dog,

licking the pallid lungs, stops for a moment,

turns to me and says, Are those his wings?

I say, Who cares? Where do you think

he’s going to fly to now?

Two Poems

The Hide Out


In Ain, the radiologist is packing up your troubles.

     married by the tenderness of each sentence

Listen to the ink darkening.

     combing the light out of her hair

Could you be the loveliest creature? 


The sugar is there on the table quietly.

     some names whispered, as a lover might

(We know all the flowers in the garden are boring after a while).

Shift

A day lasts as long as the light tells us it does before 9 and after 5.

     Oblige me with your time

The rota's sodden and'll stick to the glass.

Don’t ever think that I don’t.

She is always early.

     very still, making numbers appear

     and wages shrink then into a rouged fist

It’s held about an inch from the back of your head.

Bus notes 4

We were moving slowly up Cape Hill.                     
              A double jointed girl
              bent her fingers back
for her baby brother
who looked hard with wide eyes.
               When she had stopped,
he turned to look at me.
               I smiled without feeling anything
but a quiet desire to hold the gaze.
He turned away
and grabbed his mother’s thumb.
               I felt the muscles in my face and made them
               do the movements one more time.
Is this a way of making something really said?
               The double jointed girl was watching me.
I looked up front and felt the engine heat.

What do you get

         The clock is secreting a tick and a tock.

         A name appears on the skin.

This is a heartache.

         It’s hard to adjust as a debt is flowering.

This is a statue.

         They’re smearing red sweeteners on the lips.

         I’ll 
         never fall in love again.

Bus notes 3

There are children
(who are always monsters)
standing on the flip down seats,
awake like the scene was some amusing disease.           
           They can make noises like words
           and words like noises.
           They can do things and
           make our arrangements disappear. 

tenderness

better them
than us
he says
with his eyes
shut up

For the Personals

                 I’m looking for a line in bilious lyric
                            for this never new age,
             to be dirtying the scrubbed fingertips, 
the scraped tongue,
                       with the word germs, the bit of plague
       dug up and sleeping in the jar, 
to be leaving the crystal traces
                               on the nice clean sheets.

                                     I took the gravity box and smashed it, and then
                       slipped in a tongue 
while I was giving ma tante a goodbye kiss.

                        I would be an enemy, 
an enemy to the traders
                in yer actual ever minted truth; 
all those boys (and girls) afeared
            of made up words, of the jiggery phrase
                 that shakes and shits up the family and the poet
                                 who really loves real people 
and writes in the hope 
of sharing what he really feels.

             I’m looking for nothing but, a book
                      cut up silly ways and gutted 
for augury, for pleasure,
                 for what not, because I want to, 
because I can, Son.

                                             I’m looking hard and long
                            but I can’t see a thing, 
I can’t see nothing.

Bus notes 2

            I remember that Queer do
            in some place just off Leicester Square.
There was the man in the Freikorps uniform 
dancing alone to R. Dean Taylor on the floor.
It wasn’t long before I was dancing too.
            (Later, I invented my disgust
            at his get up to hurt the friend I'd come with).
Music is always doing things to scenes and bodies:
rhythms marked with the weight of heads,
a foot tapping, the Stadtmenschen gathering in the square,
and the good political sense of every smile.
            In the condensation on the window
            I draw a five line staff and leave it blank.

Bus notes 1

While the bus trembles in the jam,
I’m reading a book, a history of language,
and the pretend work is catching up with me;
it’s hard to keep my eyes open.
           The pisshead pulls the book from my hand,
           takes a look at the cover
           and throws it at my head.
We would read this as a political gesture and
shiver sexily in the hair shirts
our mums and dads gave us,
           but it’s hard to keep our eyes open
           to what’s really happening,
           what’s really there.
We are no longer readers.
There are no readers anywhere.
           The day is nearly over
           and it’s getting dark.

Coldish

Be as ghosts to one another.

It’s winter officially. This is ghost season.

There’s no place to fuck without dying from the cold.

The fish are infected with ice and sleeping in the pond. They dream of human extinction.

All these sounds I make instead of words rile you.

It isn’t a joke, you say. Then you laugh.

You put your finger in my mouth and we’re frozen together.

We'll be married until the robins and the thrushes stop dying.

This is history! [part four]

You cannot follow where        
    The idea was to make them see the reigns with their eyes    the 34 percent who say they believe in ghosts 

    He treads the boards,                with his signature ciggy.  

               Go into the woods until the moon is showing         from between the beech trees.
In the clearing you gather yourself like        so many dirty letters stuffed under a mattress

We were always waving the guarantees about, swatting the details away           You cannot
               There is nothing, she said, that you could teach me.  There is that.                    So, everything that once worked didn't after the grand faux pas                                               Try our computational humour                                    a name pinned to the chest,          everyone else keeps quiet. You ask them questions and they say yes or no.
    Hearts are on sleeves this season      x is the new y is the new x
               who would do literally anything for a pocketful of dirty change

It's everybody's Winter now

1.

                                       patches of lukewarm learning everywhere

                                                     while some faces indicate destroyed evidence
 
                                                 for this evening , the bad joke soundtrack playing slow

     

2.

                                                          How's things?, she says:

                                                      Here is so much of

                                                          nearly nothing, a thought

                                                                  after object or                
                                                              some other skinful

3.

                                                                         Where are the instructions?

                                          Assume.      
                                                                  This is the key.
       
 



                                  Let the light be in his face.    

4.

You don't have to be yourself this evening. Just wear the jacket I gave you and look as if you're listening. Don't try too hard.

I'm watching him from the corner of the room and I'm thinking, I just want to wipe that smug grin off your fat face. When we get back, we're going to have words.

Let's get out of here. There's too many people talking at the same time and I need some air.

5. 

                                             as he catches her opening helloing smile

                                coming out of the half dark of the kitchen    as he

                                         makes up the smile where it ought to be   where

                                   it demands of us the reflex    the show of teeth

                                           as love he remembers      he remembers a smile

                                   he remembers to smile and how to smile
                                 
         

6.

                                                       In the back room
                                                  they all fold their arms
                                                       and sit up straight.
                                                  It is beautiful to look upon.                  



 

7. 

                    

                                                                       A lover, she says,

                                                     and a friend. A friend, she says.
                                                                       He's slipped

                                                     into his pockets,
                                                     (my little sugar mouse)
                                                     a frightened noun.

8.

                                              Later, C is to be crowded out

                                              of his cut glass mind with the
                                              Pyrrhic cases of harrassment.
                                              As always, the thin kid
                                              wearing Commes will take notes.
                                              Approaching sober, he talks
                                              of his "sexual history" or
                                              "histories" with feint blush,
                                              spits an olive stone from between
                                              his unchapable lips and puts
                                              the almost tears on show.

9.

   




                      Haven't you any sense?
               .
                                                                       A drunk's piss glazed shoes

                                       tip tap along the white path
                                                  the thinning hairline of

                                    his living (so called)
                                                     and now what's over
                                                                         almost showing
                                                                              like dead snow
                                                                                         on his loosed mouth
                                                                                worn like
                                                                                  a forgotten hat

10.

                                                   a cluster of kids

                       around the duck pond
                                        are bringing expletive ornament
                                                                                to this Brazilianed pastorale

             

11.

                  
                                                         The fingers, stiff with cold,
                                                         clutch the stem in fear as
                                                         Y empties the contents
                                                         of the bag on her lap.
                                                         That trompe-l'oeuil past infects
                                                         her grey old man's body
                                                         till there is dancing to
                                                         the here undoing music.

                                                                       Haven't you got, she said,
                                                                                    homes to go to?

                                 

12.

                                                                   Somebody will make
                                                         a picture of the Moon
                                                              by breathing on the glittery sky ice
                                              and writing with a finger
                                                        and then everyone else
                                                             will drift into
                what looks like      
                                                    like sleep

                     are these
                                                     falling                                    
                                         dirty

                 splinters    
                                       so thin
                       
           to go

                            under

                          the nail                        
                                                  what you


                              call heart
                                          ening

                              I ask
                                    you   ?

              I ask you.

Sonnet 008

The glare from behind his garrulous self
Left his face a patch of questioned dark.
He had a voice like a clean whiteboard.
The new lessons hurt us like allergies.
Each same day; we were to be convicted
Of our prejudices, spit out mother’s milk
And become the sign of our vanishing.

God of mucal births and arrhythmic deaths,
Keep me from such propriety, I pray.
Lead me to soil the polis’ pressed sheets
With fetid streaks of louche, guttural speech.
Give me a bruiser’s gait till I outspan
The tidy corner they gave me, to be-
Come the unplaceable word. Yes. Amen.

This is history! [part three]

ego trip, worked in guile and crystals           knitted gristle fuzzing
       the act is born symbols, the weight of what                         to find hidden patterns, the more the object glisters      He won't be touched.         and so, new life myths      long strings of friendship bracelet                              The numbers are lawful and growing                
We need a machine that can smile                        clinging onto each other at the roller disco, more of them symbols blister popping fast                               the doeeyed kid, making tears, says "I have needs".                                     Leaning over the barrier, Napoleon makes his Masonic signs and then laughs in his sleeve              

raise the watchword, a glass in a shaky hand             a liberty whisper from the office floor     carried to no uses on the disinfected air      the devil, whose “works” or “pomps” they were called to renounce (and the rest): who wants him gone?        No spirits left that we may be led       astray    a stray god   a stranger G space D                words could be made with strewed paper petals    discarded ends           Is it really like starting over?

    She rubbed another match against the wall.