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.

What we saw

Calluses are dreamt away.

Faces fit and fingers are still.

The lid’s arch flattens before sweat and matted hair.

Patterns are accepted.
Orders are givens.

Timing is everything.
Distances are set.

The room is furnished.

The catalogue falls open like a longing mouth.

There is a well kept path through the forest.

We are always fed our set portions.

Satiety is written in every other face.
Every other face is made complete.

You are yourself a picture of contentment.

You are a likeness, a silhouette to hand.

You are a comfort, a reason, a ready shoulder.

A Hymn

The grey aims are all done.
Now welcome the new flame,
That kills with a remorseless light,
The order of the same.

The labors of each day,
Administered in time,
We leave to Measure and to Death,
With each unruly chime.

This small world has no pow'r,
To keep the flame apart.
The fixed economy of law,
Dissolves in every heart

Now teach me to forget,
The duties hard and clear,
And welcome, without certainty,
The King of love and fear

Some kind of Halleluiah

He put his heart in a box and buried it deep, beneath the figures of speech and the civil smile.

She traced the map of his conscious life with fervid eyes - familiar ruins and flat blue rivers and listed streets. Everything led to no particular place.

She looked to the body's glitches (rare and bright). Sometimes, there were sweat traces. Fingers twitched. He drew himself in as soon as he saw her thin thread of a smile.

One day, the growing stink will lead her to the troubled earth. He’ll pass her the shovel - a broken boy again - too tired for lies.

Last Orders

A cheery one for Christmas. I'm not sure where it came from.

Something’s crawling at the eyes’ far edge.

A worm of old new light slips through the fence,

Unthinking, silver, hungry to partake

Of ordinary vision’s hang dog flesh.

This final light is everybody’s due.

The Inbetween fills out our meagre scope

And what we are becomes much less than dust.

Each sentence shrivels on the drying tongue.

It’s time for you and I to kiss goodbye.

The ghost of us, evaporating fast,

Leaves a tender music to be sung
Here, wrapped up in nowhere, in no time.