morning

Here, in the morning heat
of another day
my heart goes
wearily recollecting nightmares.

And out of the altitude
in the blue and green glare -
through the plummeting scythe
of trucks along the beach road
the small hum of my love
grinds its wings.

beneath trees

Like the far drone
of an air-conditioning unit
the sea lands out there
in the dark.
Some trees, beside the roadhead
fan the song -
old unswaying calloused pine epitaphs
which break the view during the day
like inkblots
and go unloved.
We parked beneath them
to watch the slow lines of surf come in
pixilated by the night
and to listen, impatiently, alive
until 11.54

on leaving things behind

I want to descend, faster and faster

And meet you, old self

Halfway up a staircase or somewhere

Racketing back to get what you forgot.

 

We are always leaving something behind,

You and I, half finished

Books on trams or under tables,

Or a scrawled note about

What you were thinking for instance

Barely ten thousand feet up – which you left

jammed in and lost beside the in-flight menu.

 

Some part of our selves is always getting betrayed

As easily as that.

 

What was it you wanted to say 

From that seat where the perfect system

Of the city makes sense  and dwindles out the window

In the underwater, grey, airport light, first thing?

 

You lifted your eyes to the world

And said remember something or other.

 

64.

Toward Sicily

We left by the rail again, lurching
through the barely lit station and stink of it
and the bundles of clothes asleep in the hollows
nightward, through an invisible distance
And trees we didn’t know the names of.

This line of us summoned to an endless corridor
To crouch together anonymously
Like a chain of mourners
in the hellish dust, readying ourselves
for the new limits of exhaustion.
And through the haze of glass and smoke
And darkness in the cabins
People dreamt with their mouths open
Trying to cry something in slow motion.
We envied then from the aisles
The luxury of that deepish sleep
And shifted blindly for one another
in that too small passage,
condemned by our bodies, experimenting
with our heaviness and our necks
like new swans while people stepped
amongst us, gently as if we were children,
to smoke or piss if they could bear it
in the light and roar and namelessness of places.

There was no language we knew capable, no gesture.
But if we could have spoken then
In our low conspiratorial way
of things unconnected to all that sadness
You could have slept against me
With my hand however way
In your dirty unconcerned hair.
Oh the happiness we blinked and missed.

63.

Three letters from god to an old friend.


1. The sea


I don’t think you resented anything then
Even the aloof way
I spread the table and left
before you woke.

We unparlysed each other its true.
I don’t remember much before you happened,
Just some sort of long, half waking afternoon
watching rain in the flaring magnolia.
My thoughts moved under sea
Like weeds in a current going nowhere.
But I turned myself inside out for you.


2. The garden

In the garden there were no poems
Just the illiteracy of sun and in it
Trees seemed to burn with no reference to fire.
The dust was far away.
When evening happened on the water
you looked out towards
no such thing as the horizon.
And what was darkness when it came
Flooding the evidence?
Did you wait, drawing breath?
Pelicans came out of it.
You did not dream.




3. The sky

However briefly, coming up from the underworld
or the world
where the languid cities are assailed
at the line of the sky

yes, briefly here
at ground level
even without storm, or rain,
that condemnation of blue
or grey turning blood coloured or milk,
that booming sluice
occasionally stops you.

Stand for a minute, there
in harms way, and
in the stray light
which lets go and breaks like bread
above the heavy traffic

Say fuck, or goddamnit
or invent something else
I could hear you with, again.

61.

Rome


Sometimes we walk a fine line
Where the buildings rise up
like specters and rot,
only half believing themselves
and a curtain turns high
in a dusty lit window
regarding me like the life
I took a wrong turn away from,
Somewhere.

Tonight it was that life in which
I was not lonely, but still strange here,
carrying each day as if it were a glass
of the only water for a hundred miles
across the bare floorboards of my happiness.
The one in which a woman who was moving
In the next room, barefoot and out of sight
Loved me back.

We pass beneath that window
Arguing about which way to go.
I desire everything, sadly
and our shadows catch us and
move ahead beneath the streetlights
till we drag them in again and
let them stretch behind us,
like live capes.

62.

News at strange hours

A sideways rain came at me fitted
with ice and the land shone
though it was afternoon and dark already.
I half expected to see
a red arctic moon emerge
to suit the strangeness
of being here again, a world away
from the last few months
and the heat which pushed its way in
everywhere and drenched us.

I heard news at strange hours,
snatched words
you stole the time to send,
from your middle eastern room or rooftop
your crack den you called it
while the sirens tightened around you
and your friend melted her hash and
puked into a kitchen pot.

I talk in my sleep,
giving all our secrets away
and angels or crows pass dangerously
close through the slimy bleakness
at half past three every morning
twisting the plot of that dream
in which we are happy.

60

Flight

Here you are, lofted
In the dizziness of flight
wanting to cry out
but what for?
in the sudden world of noise,
the lifting weighted roar of it
which churns against all odds
as the dark earth moves away.
Doubt everything in your thrown back
chair, get ready for half a moment since
you half feel already what it must be like:
that elongated moment
of absolution and tenderness
as the known way unfolds from itself,
or some hard wired hope like it.

Look out through your own reflection
at those hinterlands of light
the last phosphorescent edges of the known city
retreating into the slow night
like bright, improbable islands,
Dimchurch. Fairlight. Hellingly.
whatever they were called
veins of gold now on the sleeve
of an ash-turned body,
inscriptions which a proud forgotten
people make upon the darkness
just by driving home at last, numbed or
waking to a cry to walk the corridors
and comfort one another with electricity.

59.

Come with me in
to the dire straights

and there in the streetfog
breathing fume,

we'll turn
half known, in some direction

and face out

with our hearts streaming out of us

like water in a gale force

58.

A sideways rain came at me fitted
with ice and the land shone
though it was afternoon and dark already.
I half expected to see
a red arctic moon emerge
to suit the strangeness
of being here again, a world away
from the last few months
and the heat which got used to pushing
its way into our unconsciousness
and drenching us.

I heard news at strange hours,
snatched words
you stole the time to send,
from your middle eastern room or rooftop
while the sirens tightened around you
and your friend melted her hash and
puked into a kitchen pot. Jerusalem.

I talk in my sleep,
giving all our secrets away
and angels or crows pass dangerously
close through the slimy bleakness
at half past three every morning
twisting the plot of that one
in which we are happy.

57

It came down from the undisclosed heights
feeding on winter.
Down enough to the rubbley land
through the light and darkness and god knows
to where I lay, shedding my skin
in the fold upon fold of sleep.

And maybe a thousand years evaporated
in the time it took to pass again into day.
But what awaited us, we the ceaseless,
when stepping once more into the sway of morning,
we took our next waking breath in the weak sun
and faced out , windward, already forgetting?

A bitter spring crept up through the earth.

56.

And I saw the wreck force up the white dust
(sea birds describing unhurried circling distances)
and calmly, calmly we were anointed
in the grey light and
terror stole another inch.

Why in this place with no laws
or known boundaries
does beauty still reckon with us
still beat the air with mist still
leak its rancid gold and rancour
and answer us?

From every muddy puddle we drew breath
and climbed the flat unending fierceness.

55.

I turned to face my face
in the darkness of the shadow
of the wings.

Lavish dogs teemed
behind the fences,
sensing who knows what
in the green air.

Autumn lay upon the ground,
turning to mud.

And what did you say
that drew the tears up from my life
into this day to day light?
From darkness to darkness
from the blood level to here.

I heard you say something
as I came up for air.
You let me breath
before you forced me under again.
"And so shall you live."

54.

You go within, but to what?
How everything in the night waits for us to come back,
except for the moths, who are insane with light.
And beside us sometimes, the world
of another who is asleep, runs on imperceptibly
alive in the maelstrom of unrecognisable space
and moves as the spirit which so they say
moves in all flesh, moves.

53.

Mouth of glass
that mouths the morning
that takes the night
and hunts with it
and knows the astonishment
of rain.
Mouth that sleeplessly runs
the length of me
that sleeps beside my ear
like a murderer
that smiles god.

52.

On almost all such days
seagulls such as these pass
high up and watching
while the dry lightning
hallucinates over there
bending to the dust.
And they go to wherever
white as sun for a second
and sand white and muddy
carrying the homeless
condemnation of the sea.
I wouldn't even have cared
if I hadn't of seen them returning
later, three crows breaking slowly
from the blue; silent, blackened
with news from the otherworld.

51.

We remembered our dreams
in the kitchen. Two white dogs
moving elsewhere through
crowds of children, flared
and faded.
I took you drunk flowers
and spiders small as germs
and we walked the edge of land
hearing Russian and Hebrew and
wind peal from the dark
moored shapes of boats.
Something glittered and ran
through our fingers.

50.

Word upon word telling me how to see
the sky, but I cannot see the sky
couldn't tell you what terrifying colour it is
that hangs there or what wordlessness rises
in the morning, making out of the better dreams
whole worlds of real fucking animals.

Life of everything I am too quick to notice
or the light which catches the instance
of the underside of a seagull above me-
disappears without me. Coward!
Traitor who came all this way to the gates
in order to bang his head against the lock.
Fool, who lives and breathes and lives and breathes.
Throw yourself under the wheel of the world for once.

49.

Sleep
listens at the doors
of many rooms at once
and gossips about your friends.

Sleep
listens at the doors
of many rumours at once
and gambles for your clothes.

Sleep
likens the rooms of memory
to ones you've never seen
and scrambles your codes

Sleep
likes room to move
and once it get's going
goes.

48.

Take the mere magic
of this half rain
for example
beat it gently
on the roof of the car.
Let the windows fail
in the fog of a few
simple words and
if we get another chance
don't move your hand so quickly
when I reach to touch it.

47.

You look out the window
and there is darkness
how long has it been?
and you notice the moths
in the smoke light and
the dust rising off the sea
and the sound of one of us
moving in the house
in the unslept hours spent
opening and closing books
and fridges and going outside
to breath and memorise the day.

46.

We stood alone in the black street
yes, again, departing one another
in the terrible way we have perfected
in the oblivion of language
infected with ourselves.

And without you I emerged
into a city in the last throws of night-
the quiet ornate absurdity of these things
chairs and statues, pictures
in the empty waiting rooms
chandeliers without us
the changing patient stupidity
of traffic lights, your breath
in the deepest part of me
your little fire, your swarm of birds
your north wind, your sea
which drowns my sea.

45.

Rain
and then something else,
happiness?
no
always the memory
of another
happiness.

We drove along the coast
like some commercial
for heaven, with the top down
and nowhere to go.
It was midnight in someone else’s car
and we were other people,
the sort who play their music
too loud and drive too fast.
In my other life I couldn’t have cared less.
It took you for me to understand
this speed, the excellent sadness.

And once, when we hardly knew each other
And were both drunk
you took my hand in the middle of traffic,
and taught me to change gears.

44.

Fatten me on the earth
on the awe of dusk on
the summer which fell
on our faces once,
one of those mornings
amongst the newspapers.

Maybe I wanted to fly once
to come unstuck
amongst the other worlds
where time is never enough.

I can sing, badly, but whatever.
Enough is enough sometimes.
And maybe I'm too unholy
to tame anything and
nothing will land at my feet.
Maybe none of it gives a damn.

But the light comes over
the evening and you and I.

43.

Wing of man
everything else happened
so quickly.
You teach dreams now
on the outskirts
and get by.

42.

And some gleaming other day
in the beaten down grass
take my skin to yours again
where the fallen world reeks
of autumn and traffic.
We can be reckless again
in a certain light,
unremarkable amongst
the crowds of living people
who will not recognise our faces
or remember.

41.

Ten years I sat
in the window
as the days below
fed into the pool.
There were those who believed
we should have gone on
and others who grew old
still believing the stories
we told ourselves.
Still others, and here
I count myself, knew
amongst our blood thirst
a higher order-
that the doomed alone
pitch their tents
at a dead end.
Only monsters in this way
understand the workings
of the human heart.

40.

I stare into the sun
which forgives me.
Sound of the blue sky
breaking on the body
of an aeroplane,
streets which bare
the scars of last night,
the smells and lost charms
the old aches and pains
I am forgetting
which once paralysed me
in blackened doorways.
Bring out your dead,
your sickened loves-
let them dissolve
in the corners of this city
amongst the birds and fast food
where my heart still turns.
Let the algae flourish
on the still waters
you will never once more
step into.
Let us practice
our betrayals again
in the light
of new statistics,
let the sun burn in the afternoon
on all the rooftops,
let it blind us with forgiveness.

39.

And then some mercy
not much
because the night was cold
and you were far away
came upon me
and she left with my money
before I'd even
gathered what to say.

38.

Ghosts have tired thoughts-
it's a left over habit
they'd like to be rid of.
You could see them
if you could see them
at night, trying to find
somewhere to leave these
ideas we have about things
walking in each others footsteps
beside the grey and
other coloured sea edge.
Sometimes they find
the right silence or a place
not worth thinking about
and bending to it gently
abandon this world.
If it goes well, it's like
a hand being taken
from another hand.