Sunday 4 May 2014

05.05

all my efforts have failed to curb the browning of the peace lily leaves’ tips.
          the tips of your fingers were white
before the thumbs went grey as an elephant on contact
           with the frozen ladder rungs.
the whites of your eyes were not white
next to the crook-armed moon as you forced your body down that frozen slide.
           excessive water goads the leaves
into pantomimes of drowning. thirst turns the flower stems to straw,
           white flowers hidden by browned foliage.
I have tried raising the blinds on fine days, I have tried unrelenting darkness
            but light is neither the question nor
the answer. it is to be another week of misery for me, another week of feeling
            nail butts soldered onto my pupils,
looking at those withered apexes the way one looks at the legs of a burnt spider.
             I return to the soaked back of your dress,
I return to the slivered moon of underwear beaming through the soaked red polyester,
             coat, stilettos strewn across the tanbark.
probably we are too old now to fuck ourselves up and make a clandestine exit
             from the big party to go and play.
I cannot look up at hairy wrists and crosshatched bulging veins on the monkey bars,
              and when I look at your back I see death
and this is how I know I will die a long time from now, alone, repulsed, and hated.
              in all my efforts to curb the decay

I choose not to notice that the leaves, though brown-tipped, grow as never before.

Monday 28 April 2014

29/04

I run a bath, my first in years.
The cobwebbed exhaust fan is broken.
Behind the locked plaster door
steam settles like dust over mirrors, chrome
draw handles, basin, towel rack
overstuffed with the gaudy blue towels
my mother has always preferred.
I am in the tub
before the water has risen
from puddle to pool, too hot, kneeling, hands
on thighs, legs blooded, shoulders white.
Outside, an electrical storm rages
but there is no rain, only skies
too high up to guess at, imbricated
metals and blue and bone, red
shingles wailing through the air.
I stand up to look out the window
above the vanity, open to the screen,
water reaching barely to the top
of the titanium rod in my fibula –
flood ruler for a man of worry.
While the old oak whose branches I could touch
does not sway, the copse of eucalypts on
the highest hill in the park two streets over
thrashes so madly, I wonder
how the roots stay in the ground.
Then I lie back, sleep away the heat



Thursday 24 April 2014

24/04

Strawberry stem, though poisonous
I pull you from that which you protect –
I cast a grey glass mold of you
to nestle in my sternum, a star
fruit pendant – now you keep me from harm
as the charred debris of
humanness cools and hardens, nomic-
vested, renegade as fire.

Together, we walk to the park
where there are lakelets muscle-bound
by eels, their white-bellied bodies
like the serpents of so many creation myths
thrashing, a million-eyed
monad on the shallow mud bed
I could seize fragments of with my bare hands
to throw into the trees.

Watch the space fill up again
as though flesh were some magic compound
but you are not watching.
In truth, I converse with you just as I do
every single hair upon my head,
every ridged birthmark, every drop of blood –
they are quantum talismans
as you are, but with one difference –

yours is magic believed.

Tuesday 22 April 2014

22/04 #2

What is known of it –
almond husks split open and emptied
on the cool loam beneath the almond tree.
Some form of
life has done this. Are these the kernels
feeding the larvae of the Tiger Moths
who proliferate so secretly
then carpet the brightest windows
and choke and burn in the sensors?

In Vodoun
when God comes
to animate the body, it is called white
darkness.

I know of a man’s hands,
knuckles felted with black hair
breaking the wings of a crow
but it is not he who does the breaking
or the drinking of the crow’s blood – rather
what has become him (the sacred
parasitism). His tongue laps every sweet
dew ball from a bluegrass field
like a sick animal, canines excruciating into fangs
faster than bamboo grows,
eyes multiplied by four and gone red.

In the Maze
my brothers
dart to avoid my body, its marked
whiteness.

There the parents of a child
floating in the telic centre – this maze
centre is a perfectly round pool of water –
an unreachable purpose
always with a pair of beautiful, age-lined faces,
one dark, one light – perhaps Finnish –
and the child of the hybrid
colour, disposition, cannot cut through
the tall hedgerow with its soft cuttlebone
teeth. The child has nothing to eat, gaping
holes in both sock heels

to contend with. Imminent night.

22/04

each bite in a leaf
a Canyon of Arun

each ant
an ethno
scientist

each gun a gun

Monday 21 April 2014

21/04/14

I am going home to see
My Mother and Father.
To reach them
I must cross oceans
Made of more than water.

Sunday 20 April 2014

20/04

Missing for months, the boy’s
red plastic spade is found
by lawn mower blades.
As in all cases, the discovery
demands a terrible noise,
the shriek of the pulverized –
glancing shards see
the father shield his eyes,
returning even to the little he
through an open den window

the cat unscreened.