Self I Sing

(for Uncle Walt)

It’s days like these are the test
Feverish in slicing air
Dog-tired on greasy platforms
Wind-scratched, huddled in our coats;
All the leaves resigned to falling,
All the sluggish bees on pavements
Angry at dying;
There’s myself
The one catching leaves
Before the pavement hoards them,
Jubilant and overwhelmed by you
Not crushing blades of grass and
There’s myself
The one who gets on buses
Awkward and dark-circled,
Clutching ticket hands in pockets, hands
Where all the nails are bitten;
There’s myself
And I am not consoled
By dying like the leaves
But not consoled by
Any god that kills us differently
I’m not consoled by any god.
There’s myself and these days the test;
Must try harder.

Cant and Wont

'Don't say in a letter what you can't in my ear'

Fuck phallogocentrism
I’m sick of semiotics
And the signs and signifiers
Permeating major discourse
On the fabric of the axis
That articulates the disparate
Realities of constructive
Phenomenology;

And I hate hermeneutics,
The conceptual didactics
Of interpretative powers
In the science of the sub-structure
Of methodology;

I Kant stand categorical
Imperatives decentralising
Tragic spaces,
Interplay and sublimating
Intersubjectivity.

I know I know I know
Verbosity’s a virtue
Verbiage your vernacular
Cant is your wont

But you could have just told me.

Frank

Tailoring O’Hara slacks
I’ll be frank, scarlet never was
My colour or my kind of girl
I’ll run instead of talking and
I’ll sing instead of working and
You’ll find me sipping coke
Somewhere with one of many lovers
In those lemon yellow shoes, the
Ones that look American, which is
Why I think you like them, which is
Why you think I wear them, which is
Enough for the moment, which is
All there is.

Like the starlings in the hedgerows
With no notion of tomorrow
Delighted by sunrise;
This is the last straw
Chewed to spite you
By somebody else;
In the morning I will love you -
Remember myself.

Rhombus

Please don't keep your hands
To yourself, I was
Expecting heartbreak-
Last year I was here with you,
Or someone of that name-
Square window and the spots
Of daylight through it are the same,
But you're not him
And breathing's easy
And everything's changed;
Freckles on you
Tracing out triangles
Make me unafraid,
Parallel lines of morning
Meet in corners of my town
Shaping up to miss you
If you stay around.

March

North wind beats the edges off
The summer, kicks the heads
Off daffodils on
Wordsworth Avenue,
Pebbledash houses fight it
Out with their blunt glint and
Eyeless windows tensed
Against the cold;
Smug at recalcitrant sun
Teased out of cloud.
That tattered St George's cross
That flaps and flags up the
Truck stop, shown up by
Aged miners' homes
Neat gardens with handrails
On all the doors.
I feel sick with shame
Always coming back here
In one piece.

Procrastination

(For Rosie, and less important things)

The wood pigeons are weighing
Down the branches of the trees
Outside, the light throwing the
Roof tiles into relief and me
Off topic-
Past saving
Face or time or words
But who needs
Face or time, when words
Can make time
Feel different, or faces
Out of things I’ve only heard.

That clock shackles me to minutes
Locks me in its clicking limits
There’s no time for art, you are
Just born and then you start.

Harry Met Sally

The second when
A good night turned
Into your lips and mine
And a doorway conversation
Into blurring all our lines
And your silence giving way
To make a clamour of our sighs
Your hands on me in the hallway
And the world asleep inside

I didn’t think you had it in you,
But you did
And so did I.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

'She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.' - Oscar Wilde


King’s Cross
And a head full of questions,
Waiting on my gorgeous wings;
My feline pace anticipates
Your answers,
I will dig my claws in.
But the thing is
I’m a sphinx without a secret-
A riddle you can resolve
With your lips.

You jump the barrier,
A smile I can’t explain away
Give me the right answer, and
You just might live.

Miss-Adventure

(this one won the prize)

With your rough fingers grazing the soft skin
Under jagged wool my bones are exposed
You look at me with eyes pretty as sin
But you’re too close and we’re too close to home-

In company on threadbare velvet seats
The clink of glasses muffles our glances
The din and dim light heightens and retreats
As our hands make their silent advances.

We never walk together, going home
I walk with others, talk of starry skies
And even though we know everyone knows
We savour opportunities to lie.

Tomorrow I will utter not a word
Of kisses I’ve stolen, or heartbeats heard.

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

Abstraction Street;
Derrida’s blind
Twitches
At my approach
Like an eye
Run on no sleep.
Sharp face obscured
By French windows;

He’s right to be curious.

My hobnailed boots
On Eliot’s
Delphiniums,
The conserved lawns-
Contrition
And the individual
Latent, while I
Play with stray words;

He’s right to be furious.

Mr Arnold
Nose pressed against
A frosted pane,
Earnest whiskers
Bristling, at
The nerve of the sweet
Philistine, who's
Stealing his light;

He's right to be serious.

I’m moving in
Ramshackle house
Built on
Sand and flat vowels,
Drama in the
Kitchen sink,
With a roof that
Lets the sky in;

There goes the neighbourhood.

Botchwork

(For flat vowels and high places.)

‘And of the two men who had made automobiles, would you go to the man who had made a good one, or one who had made a botch?’ – Ezra Pound

Town, like an open air museum
That smells like a sewer
Three o’clock, the postcard sky is
Blue as hands of market sellers
Dirty puddles hold reflections of
These ancient places,
And you keep showing up
In other people’s faces
Night-old water from a wine glass
Tastes like toothpaste, and I’m trying
To smooth out all our crossed lines
But my brain hurts from feeling
Your sharp edges so keenly

Something isn’t right with me
A mountain of botched motorcars
Pound down my throat;
But method without madness
Takes the magic from this craft,
I need a break with tradition
I won’t come back.

Preoccupations

1. Papillon

Peppered with the tarmac grit
The stubby childish fingers made
A prison for white wings,
The futile green-veined flicker
Plucked from estate dandelions
Not Papillon, but pieris napi
Helpless in the coarse pink clasp
Of the wrong hands.

I remember clear as dreams
The black proboscis severed and
My first grudge borne
Against those clammy palms that
Dropped limp wings on to the gravel
Not understanding why you did it
Not knowing that you were crushed
In bigger hands.

Small Talk

Seeing missed connections, I
Comiserate delays,
Wishing merry christmases
To strangers in train carriages
Who say 'Have a safe journey, won't you?
And have a nice life.'
Here the women come and go
And talk of Michelangelo
Has never been important.
Instead, our short and well-told
Lives are stop-gaps between stations
From stranger to acquaintance
From here to there
How I am to how I will be
Because of this journey
And how this journey is
Because of where I've been.