I don't mind

My first poem in a few years. Happiness is not conducive to poetry.

Don’t mind me

Paying too much attention

To the creases in your shirt,

Under your eyes.

Were it up to me

I’d see you happy;

Were it up to me

I’d see you free.

I’d see you off-

Mind how you go –

Knowing you’d forget me;

Just as it should be.

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.