Care

Three words fell from the tongue. It took

A lifetime of enunciation to get them right.

A flurry of fingers, detected a fight

It was war.

Within her own mind, affection evidently

An insomnia

Of some kind or other, she concluded

Chin at the wick of the candle

To watch the skin shiver.

She imagined herself

 Alight

Suspended in beauty

For an instant. Her rounded howl

Closed in on the night

 A Melancholic abstinence she dried

Through fear, every lock of her hair.

Why wonder, they told her

As withered flesh parted, envisaged

The chisel crunching the calcite

Wrapped round the heart.

Or even the needle, was good for her

Slipping the face shut beneath its black chiffon.

It was all part

A mad assembly, tinged with religion

For a minute, in the hours the historian will look back

And grimace. Open mouthed idiocy

At the last woman

And the love they tried to replace with dashboards and pistons. 

Copse

Whilst a-wefting woe on woodlands edges

Your cold curtained breath across the breeze

Slipped to speech, aligned in misty wedges

Salt blistered hopes across the seas.

Each floss and cream of night-time airing

Became the treasured touch of empty hands

Instead fixed in skin, sun-spots layering

Which you had plucked from day and brought to land.

O! But how grey were the copses features

Which lit, the candle coiled within your flesh

Ringed the clean smooth bodies of love’s creatures

And crossed upon their path, aligned to death.

Reaping

Collected in some correlation

The wild refrain-refracted night

Laid in your eyes – and there again

Brindled, burnt in rings upon a sky.

Were they angles - well?

What would matter

The mind in each inhuman crease

And sealed the wax which went to suffer

Upon mere two, their wicks still weep.

A pulse in tail of pastures heavy

Porous, poised beneath the siege

A stumbled act, in wet wool spinning

Sinew backwards into ends of sleep.

Trails of life aligned between the bough-heads

We crushed whole, in palms of liquorice leaves

Untouched – the mixed jet juice

Of man’s own myth

New veins below the opaque sleeves.

Pavement

The stale shrew shrunken

Like breadcrumbs, spit-ball-bathed pale

On a pavement, half-opened

Pulse glut grimace failed.

Your shame. Our words once

Woke illocutionary, littered each other

Lusting for blood, when surveillance suffered.

My nails on your cheek

Chastised chinks in the wood, as if adjoining

The vice of your heart, and the mind of the other.

In blood, or

Perhaps it was gold. But you were ashamed

My face failed you

Bitterly, the lamp-light you had stumbled through

To battle my own conscience. Swill wayward

Your dreams

In each awful clasp

Unconscious, Round the back of a failure. Rusty nails reigned

Of eyes, inside, a lapse into labour

Of life, and of toil, this meandering macabre

The chassis of corpse. Burned

Broken in nine

Sweet flints – the sooted air shook to rain

Washed the face of the final scenario.

The hot circular scream of abandoned babe

Red as the frosted fruit which fell

In faces, and grew

Abstract faces, in ages, into the groves.

Bet

I will knock you down

The die who serves drinks for ten

And itself for two.

I told cards, stubborn-faced to the

Table

If they didn’t turn up...  They already were.

Someone signalled vaguely, behind

The bar.

In sympathy I thought, acceptable

Black. Hard changes apparently, determined

Young men cutting backgammon, cigarettes.

Connective tissue still dragged

On the unsolved system

In Roulette wheels, Babychams. Spinning eyes in revolvers

A tragic mess

Almost competitive

For the retina, the spades said

Cheating the holes of old hearts

In perfect fields. Adjacent parts.

Triple eights.

Grammar

 

The burn and birth of a word became something

Different

Rubbery lipped - lurched dry to their own ash piles

Positively smouldering. Slit. The defaced hour’s wanderings

Ready to die – well, simply meant

Nothing. Any of it

Toasted – wept on the walkway instead of the wipe board

And I moulded myself to a body of grass on a seashore.

True,

I couldn’t let this go, the

Tip of your shoes on my laminate heart

Manufactured dark, the waxy coracles at each corner

Dripping past dry

Falling past you

Back, back, back

The bite of the moon.

Out

Frustration fathoms stained

Rings of Chances, the unfinished canvas

In ammonia decay

Is listless.

Reciprocal rancid though – the words which roll

From the leather mouth

Like some foul emergency

Unheard of

Residual heat slimed off a wall

Into a pouch. Rushed,

Angers curtain comes to settle

Like a sick film

To choose light becomes a moral battle.

Insistence of ills.

Mind screaming

Soliloquies feeling

Shot and ruptured and ripped

And spilt.

The shell-dust conglomerate

In each ear, guilt

The hot sharp sincerity

Like fox-scent.

The redded edge of carcass speared

Bent to pretence. It’s spread of thick

Long whorish legs

Riddled whole in my mind, where tears rest like birds

Coves of bone a-jaw, mildew

Scudding ears.

Unbeaten – well

Disproportionate weekend.

What did you think you could offer? When

Gored

My skull, a grey hole

On the horns

Of the devil

Lulled and dishevelled.

I count hours down

Till they slip to the pretence.

Everything mingles

Minces freedom

From its littered window.

You can watch the heavy eyeballs

Blithered, vociferous

Lingering inside a shot skull

And believe this autonomy

Was owned without fault

Of the slipped bedding pane I attempted

To cross. Each year

Raised hands to my head

Felt the shot of

Stone-cast cold in Midas sleep.

In that the peace-pill of one

Slipped to seventeen.