Award

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.