Quarter to six in the morning. Some relative
Vauxhall-type taxi belonging
Amongst the mould of cheap biscuits, magazines
Midst-journey songs. Stalled.
Eyelids enthralled, cobwebbed in sleep
Those grey slow-cooked veins appeared almost
To dampen the wishbone indent at your cheek. Blinking
In the breaking ebb of radio waves
The enthusiasm of a salty sting, the creaming
Limbs of sea. Stomachs stirred
Their sentiments of eating, now six hours since
Tea and biscuits.
My heart had a mind of its own
Explored its own glittering cosmic walls,
Conglomerate chambers, grand canyon. Grounded
With a groan. You ate a raw onion
Unfathomed. I tasted
Your breath like a wish, bit down
Like a promise – uncovered a kiss. Your inspiration –
Holes, yes that was it
The book I read in a number of minutes, I
Confess I wasn’t counting. Numbed the
Slits on my forehead
Cold fingers and prose. The catacomb kindred
As we swerved from the road, the trembling flank.
My bag – embryonic sin sewn on the wrong side
Sloped from the boot of the car and its caustic
Womb. I dissembled the carcass on the sidewalk. American
Soap? Sun spangled pinprick pores of your face
Like mildew on plastic. From a mushrooming cavity spewed
Some concoction capable of plastering boards.
A portion of laughter, seemingly ecstatic.
Warmed by company, you yawned. Unmoved, proverbial
People picked at littered exaltations. Like gulls. The caw of wind
Caught its own breath, translucent hands roamed
Through our scalps
Boarding the coach. Co-ordinates encoded in soil
Illegality of concrete – now underfoot. Great
Expectations still groped. I thought
Of books – Breakfast at tiffany’s, with brown
Rolls which broke like a messy divorce. I
Immersed mine in broth, watched
The sponge soak up its last irrelevant rays like a
Chandelier cloud. My dad drained his milkshake
Like a child.
Somehow I pictured, through my infantile bereavement -
I cried, well, of course I did. Well, Nestled at the nape of
Your neck, close contours of throat
Throbbed through our mistakes. You walked
A few steps in front, I avoided the mention of my
Blistering foot, saturated sock
Smote the eye of its storm like of Saturn, of Jupiter.
You tell me, you’ll be the astronomer. I strode
To cover the indents of footsteps with my whole
Human weight, feigning further those
Provincial craters. I hurt. Quietly wept.
Someone dragged, wool snagged on wire
A barbed bark tore and told you to wait. For the
Next. Reformed icicle implements of
This strange rain, adopted new dimensions to break
Bad news, bite our faces. We stopped at some mine
For a sandwich, balanced between this
Lost labour and leant against truth.
Ah, no-one dared stop you.
Fine thickness of dark hair, tore up ground
Glinting, saturated – Sweeney Tod’s blade
Bathed by calcium moon.
My reverent pace – aligned each breath
Every crackling gasp leapt like
A white noise overture. I wanted this fate to recoil
To hold your hand – we didn’t do that then, though?
Music notes, syllabic staccato brain-children
Roamed, their audible tap, tap, tap
A plausible bomb strapped
To sugar-shelled skull.
Snapped. Distracted it’s
Focus in kaleidoscopic roundabouts, perhaps
It knew that you didn’t want this. Supermarket-stewed
Meat smiled a glue-like conglomerate. I felt
Satisfactorily doped, chewing over some topic
Discussing the apparently half-melted cumulus clouds
And the feeling of home. Was I chronically ill?
Nibbled tortilla, age-spotted
Like the lobe of an ear, still growing – yet un-pierced by affections,
All memoirs so stoic – not that you’d know.
Your face bloomed on blue canvas, over the holes
Of torn tarpaulin and gauze
Sealing the wound at the back of my foot. As I slept
My shoes filled with water. Like eyes
Or Poseidon’s tomb.
With an inhuman paw after dinner, I washed our pots with cold
Water, the dried entrails of saliva
Chilled by each metaphor, dribbled like liquid
Sleep in the shadows
of tent doors and walls.
The shower block where I couldn’t rinse
You off. Sore as each evincing goosebump
Spread cloth-like. Saladin hairs twitched.
Thunder flickers thickened to clods of singed earth
At our heads. Pretty sighs bitterly
Slept, her nose, her glittering cheek somehow shaped,
Fused to your chest like an eminent growth. Pneumatic
Reverberation of breast, as I silently cried
Rolled away alone. Sorry.
And yet
Let moss pry at my eyes like a creeping crustacean
Flared like a pretext – would have been good
In a gallery. Oh yes, your mood in the morning
Drained with a nausea of cold camp-site sausages, my skin
Singed, caramelised under folds of anorak coat. The smell
Seeped sore like a detestable volume.
It was that I watched you, dark pupils brassy
Inside semi-sleep
Slid into the mouth of sleeping bag like a sunken
Virtue, or sailor. Pulled up, choked off at your throat
Like a reverends collar. Isn’t that quite ironic?
Morning memoirs of your stoic smile
Unfastening the guy-ropes of mine, with your same
Sanguine expression. One day I intend to paint you
That brave, timeless face on a canvas print. Save
Dark acrylic seizures, condescension
Of speed stuck – Formulating only a tenth, or some immature
Measurement of what my heart meant. Radiant yet
Somehow sapless, unspoken.
That last listless film
As if devoted. The Polaroid captured under a
Quilt of other affections, this pathetic rapture.
You wanted
Sleep, yes yes.
From the adjacent bed, forlorn in my own storm
I leapt, jumped, whatever else
Like silt shot from a speaker
Split in two by the lightning.
My body still warm, you’d feel me, finally
That chemistry or physics or biology or whatever was left of me
Spooled inside your arms, the half with
The heart in one piece. The other
Making strange petroleum pools in the dark
In these eradicable nights
It bleeds.
