yule

let's just say, to be honest
it was me
not there, not here
not the bright
but all that...bottle
rocket petulance...
was it worth it?
another long white without
and yet, a dim glimmer
an ember of the plague year
sitting unsundered
in the deep purse of last fall

snowfall

I didn't ask you about
the snow today
or the way the Heath looked different from each tree
a moustached man here,
a fallen squirrel there
tinkering at a forgotten nut

I didn't ask you about
Berlin or Copenhagen
or the Climate change agreements and their targets limits
a smaller factory here,
a starving child there
gnawing at a gravel bit

I didn't ask you about
Cancer, raptorous and divide
or the way that the news hit you there with him and them and I
a chill in the spine,
a harsh cut down the silence
that lay in you like sleep

I didn't ask you about
enough of the sad that welled
or the way you looked at me like I might not be
a beat beat beat away,
difficult, denuded, there
in your bed, your eyes

I didn't ask you
cause you said you were fine
and I didn't know any better and there's only so many
'Nothings' you can take before you stop asking
Are you okay? What's wrong? What should I ask?

...

Ikarrii

I remember Olympus, shrouded magnificant
a rare earth privacy, our people always liked the cold -
it's the air up here, clearer cleaner
the thoughts of the teeming, a slash of smoke in the dawn
a candle-vigil set about a Feasting table
the Later-days they'll say, of Cair Paravel let to ruin
when a soldier tumbles through
and our temple-mount, the royal-seat that time
is rendered under a begger's dust, a matyrs cry to
detonate the inner sanctum and bury my cold
high place - an archeology of debt and a seeping
snap of lock and pick and chisel
make me whole, a 3d scan of my insides
revelling digital intimacy, a
demi-mode modelling agency for dryads
that's the coke way right? the neat dark
interior, the blocked up passage, a King-tut
dig, the threat of curses, the dark thrill of
looting your skulls baby
so I'll throttle-stop thunder nightmare,
rain a fire on unbeleivers, a good old fashioned
flood
break the high walls of Uruk, smash the Ianna Temple
fuck Ishtar, fuck her like a swan...
that's how you'll know us, Bull-formed
savage, stinking of cave-sweat, carcass - deer skin,
we're fallen, for now...

ajax

this can't continue now, can it?

Go die, Come (let me) love you

Knah mernir, yegoor sirem

I feel you survived Տէր Զօր (Der Zor) somehow

Bayts, Mayreeg jan, seeroom em iren

Inch bes garelyeh Seerelis sirel?

Oh, Asdvajz im (my God), okneer injz (help me).

Mayreeg jan, nereer injz (forgive me), forgive me.

Of course you haven’t failed me.

(patience)… to be alive is to be patient. This land has given me new hope, a new
beginning. Today, park asdvajz (God be thanked)

bari luis Seerelis (goodnight)

and so why is that not enough?

yes (I) am







* after and inspired by torange-yeghiazarian

οι καυμενοι *

there's a passage to the back - if you wedge through the dead mice faded slats - where you can see the gully and if you're quick, can slip-slide down the embankment and onto to fern floor. When you penetrate there's a hush, nothing but old puffs of green moss, the odd rock, a bird making an almost word noise, like a lost call to Mecca. It's the gloom at first, but I can see in the dark, push past the big dead Black-boy (though we can't call them that anymore) and if you squint into the rock face to your left there it is - a passage, a gap - a slit almost hidden in the rock. It's a Nargun-place, I swear it moves each time a little, then deeper in you'll find her. A Mister-minute hat, with a little zip down the side for a key I suppose, sits on her skull with a little of what may have been tawny hair, but in a bob, not the fashion anymore. I call her Kate - that's all there is really. In the cave, we have tea-parties, seances, ballroom dances and grand parades. She's faded now, but I like her sparkling wit, her careful grace. I brush sand from the entrance, trying to keep the gully at bay, the ferns out there but I know in the end I won't be able to save her from the mud and the rock-wall increments. So I'll crawl out, past the ferns, past the Kingswood shell, last night's bogan fires and back to the picket line, bleached board house, the cool coast air and you...




* after Patrick White...that bastard...

vigesimal...

I can count
this year's communications
on one hand, I think
the times real was said,
something broached
a subject, a taboo
so you and you and
you and me
that's enough said cause
what are words?
I'm sick of talking about it.
Yeah? Yeah.
Just last week...
I find that hard to believe.
I'm going.
No, don't - just...this isn't...
I'm so angry at you...
I know

moccasin

what doesn't kill you makes you...
there are plenty of ways to live blind,
enlivened by lust and a deer's white-tail
flight for
green and
green
there's a corollary need, a virgin-cave
present in a moss-topped over night
sense
felt in the brass of a centre-fire cartridge
down the long rifling
through a orthodox graph - an x-and-y
and no beyond
down wind and smeared with pellets
he can see your breath so
there's
hold
and hold
and
not so
so
to fight the pulse-bounce, parralax
distress and calm sweet down onto the -
squeeze not pull
snap
snap
click
snap
like nothing you've ever
slumped, corrosive (you'll be surprised how
quickly the skin comes off - in a one piece, a
flash leotard, a pelt for all seasons)
mine's a doppelganger, some Dorian
reproach, he for I and I still on
through Adirondack slack hilled
weevil trails and the
weird Manhattan spine
glimpsed before a truck-stop plunge on
the grey-green trail

down

Think of me as the one you never figured
the job you couldn't work, the one
that got away
a heist-plot planned and programmed
a celebrity-free crash course in dienetics and
the distribution of wealth
that's how they'll see me, righteous
and divine, ridden into cap-gun
Camelot rapturous and sublime
not a soap-box dynasty, a flicker in your life
more a beat-down mimicry - a soul-fly
enterprise
that's the way that rhythm works you see
ticker tock ticker tock down down with me
a rap for all ages, a white-line
yellowlabel inch by inch crazy
that leaves a retina burn of that girl
this house, his hands
my my my
the familiar bed, the working-bee Panda
something in the way he holds her -
nah, not this super-princess
robot vice positronic brain-beats
she's a simple switch, on-off-again
that's the mode, a la you see
it needs simple fool, oh yeah,
that's me

Tompkins Square, NYC

It's six years gone and I find
myself dead or alive ( catch me
on the first bounce) and I want
squares, common!
a mis-print dollar (what dyu got?)
I can't be like - something's got to
be traded - now the intervening time
denudes passing sentiment until
eleventh hour miseries (michael
jackson, soda) mean you're not doing
anything over again
throw it over here! and you'll
get their money (older men, the
subway) and if you keep them
out later, the ones who cheer you
up it's the first nerf fight ever made
(in that it's sub-mechanical) touch-down!
don't do it.

this whole sham makes me sad

like it's been a year already...

now he sees why she called after the concert...

and i am still not getting what i want
i want to touch the back of your right arm
i wish you could remind me who i was
because every day I’m a little further off

but you are, my love, the astronaut
flying in the face of science
i will gladly stay an afterthought
just bring back some nice reminders

Astronaut - Amanda Palmer

some reasons and/or excuses for my former life

Can't remember, what went wrong last september,
though I'm sure you'd remind me, if you had too ~

Comfortable - John Mayer

To tell the truth, I'm not sure what
happened, and I wish you'd remind me,
if you could

it was...sudden, a tense loss a knee-jerk
something, a conviction of the best way
forward clay-charge with no oversight

like we knew what we were doing, asking
everyone for directions, asking children
to dismantle a church,of deep religions,
that they had no business in

it's all the public slips, feeling my answer's
out there, in them, spattered over bbqs, beer
cocktails in your new dress - and they've, them,
with pearls, to me in your gin-gossip

they're easy to hate - given keys
to you, many many, without the instructions
...it's fission for kids...alchemy for
cherubs bent on candy-thin lives

they'll never know, incapable of knowing
what we felt like, and the hard, hollow (lost-wax method)
that sinks into this silted body, a rumbled
unsettled teeter in foetid canals

missing link

I want to write ___ a letter,
describing the meaning of everything I have
ever written
and send it, hidden in a chest marked
'Fossils' to see what happens.

poem on glass opposite a court of justice

I found it really funny
when she asked
you if he was okay,
then asked
you if you were too

isn't it odd, still
that no one asked
me that, not even
after, not even yet

I found it really funny
how nice he was,
the look of terror
behind his kind eyes
but then

I remember being him,
meeting a beard
and scoffing
because I'd had you
and he did not

so I think the fear I saw
was mine
reflected through
Seven stars and back
into my horse-terror eyes

the white's all flecked
my heart pounding
I want to make you laugh like that
I used to make you laugh like that
How does he make you...

But those are those 3am failings
I always talk about -
the worst lesson, and here it is;
is that you're okay, by all accounts,
maybe you never weren't
and I'm still here, doing this
in the small, odd hours

that doesn't seem funny anymore...

a quiet night

haha - that was all 3am failings,
this time round it'll be
a
sure thing minted in kebab
sauce truth, cause you know that's real
not
a
surcease, more the difference between
what's in your wallet
and what you find on a groggy Sunday later
a
how and slap-day why, crashing through
jackets for stubs to suggest how
what
you found makes what you had
and that's; weeping on speed-dial
international jitters
made real through republics
and a thought that he's...
haha -
that was all 3am visions,
turned kneaded baked
and I'm not that way
inclined anymore.

In a city of lights and castles...

Have you -
not this time
Oh. So it's...
Me? No
Not yet
And you're -
Unfortunately
Without him?
We'll see how it goes
So what -
Did he do -
that I don't?
I'm still not sure.
But it's out right?
Mostly
But that's an ancient city...
I know
Sometimes I think,
well, that you shouldn't...
Why do you get to know?
Names, dates, times
I still live in assumptions
a fever that -
how can you still...?
I wish you well
From a distance, when it's rumours
That you can't see yet,
It was never you...

thoughts for a play mostly in my head...

Coming home,
Drowning
The body in the house
The old man
Lemon fights
Show me yours, piss like a dog
Losing dad
The cancer.
The girl down the street
Sarah started the fire.
The woman is her mother.
Tony is her father.
Gevard her grandfather.
Gilgamesh.
They search for immortality.
She’s dead for the whole play.
No one can acknowledge it.
Except at the holiday home, spared the flames. Near the water tank on the farm. The old swimming hole.
A dream place of floating – dark, secret.
A golem lives in there.
He makes a bargain for the girl, a bargain with Tony.
They dance.
The golem drowns. The ritual is complete.
The fire burns animals alive. Gevard remembers.
As Tony cannot.

dealing with a kind of chaos in an indeterminable time

what do you want me to say?

too soon?

dogged

how to say
what not to say
would be
remiss
I don't feel like telling you something that I think
you'll think is designed to hurt
but I've not
choice
I'm trying, you see, to avoid hypocrisy
the diligent use of truth
in the pursuit of right-seeming
beauty
trying to avoid the accusations
I levelled at you
being turned around, in a brighter London
and stencilled
on a furrow on my face
I'm trying to tell the truth
but it's a slippery proposition
and whose truth
and when truth
all disappear in
the worry that I'm about to do
what I begged you not

una primera y última vez

the last time we met (I can say that now, again)...
still really a first time - for a while the last of many strings
trailing through a snow-surprised London - I noticed

your hair is long; you look like a brighter, better you...
only now I know sometimes, underneath,
we're both the same, more than we admit

it's been hard to extrapolate that for such a long -
my talents only stretching so far into intuition
before they fall off into cavities of imagined lovers, slick with...

there was a last time we met, and it seemed
we actually talked, and the world didn't burn and no one
made you take down any of your lovely walls...

the last time I enjoyed it

A small essay...

I do not generally write here as 'me' - the John you may see in the right hand corner of this page - something simple, an outline of a man;

Australian.
Living in London.

Theatre director,
playwright and poet

The reason I do today is...complicated...this is a public space, in the sense that I post things here voluntarily - I include them all as 'poetry' (a few I have been lucky to have published) but for the most part this is a select online record of something I've done since I was 15, a habit...writing 'poems' to deal with, record, enunciate and expand the world I live in and the feelings and emotions I have - often in the moment, often intensely or obliquely. More like capturing the sensation of something in words.

It's my default setting as a writer, not plays or prose really, something in between - a poem. Poetry, like Bukowski says;

...is what happens
when nothing else
can

It's come to my attention that there is, well, other attention paid here. From some dubious sources. I make no real effort to publicise this space, I like the beauty of the internet as somewhere to be publicly anonymous. I delight in the thought really that someone, somewhere is reading this, these things. It's about being read. And perhaps understood.

But I genuinely forget sometimes that, if you wanted to and were determined, it's possible to find this if you knew say my last blog's name or my surname even. Or if someone had given you this information. And it would be easy to read this, and confuse or assume that the things in here (the you's and she's and he's ) were meant as a record of the world as it is, not perhaps how I see or how it might or should or could be.

I'm not the most clear poet sometimes...

I think it was put in my head early on (it was high-school and then compounded in university) that 'good' poetry (the stuff we studied) was by necessity complicated - that it needed a professor or a book or a course to explain it. That that complexity or obtuseness made it 'literary' and not parochial.

I've come, of course to know this is not true and is in fact a dangerous pretension; study can of course reveal facets, great unlooked for gems in a poem, but it cannot substitute for the experience of reading (often out-loud) something again and again or perhaps just once. As T.S.Eliot said;

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

So in a funny way this is a post asking for...forgiveness? no, I don't regret the things I've written here - and a lot of them are real when they occur (often, unsurprisingly at 3am...) but maybe I'm asking for something more like compassion, I suppose and for those that would meddle in the lives of two people already struggling to live out and beyond each other, I'd say pretty much

fuck off.

nominative and objective

If you think all the you's are you you're wrong

If you think all the I's are unadulterated they're not

In the soft animal body of this poetry I'm hiding
everykind of longing and revelation

But now the lost Rosetta leaves pale & academic
scrabblings, and the sands are coming in

Heaven forbid we talk, that'd be...revealing

I've worked it out - you're afraid of a hole in the logic of
your absence?...or that all that's here on offer are recriminations &
mad demands for closure and truth - like they were
yours to give

I said I missed you yesterday, low and bouncing
but it was in the middle of a dance
floor and I (or the MDMA, you decide) seemed to feel
that dancing and that dj and that I were destined for higher
nitrates, a burst in the night

Don't believe the hype that there's a complete set of lives here, hidden -
under the bed is nothing more than a tent of doonas and the weird
round hope that I still could, if wanted, walk right round
and sit, nearer you

That was a you you, you see...

nobody's wife*

when you got...
I just couldn't
when you came back
she was no body's wife
one more thing
she sends her regards
time to get -
it was a good run
what can I tell you
my brother
today like no other
I guess that I miss you
I guess I forgive
you stood in the rain
soaked ribs splayed
(I still don't own an umbrella)
if you ever come by here
yes, well
the trouble
as I see it, there for
maybe I learnt when to get out
if you've a memory
of the set we created
that looked like the house
we shared once,
a tapered diorama
like a school urchin's
fruit-box, filled with
hanging packing-tape
planets with hasty rings
swinging and glittered
it wasn't
to scale
just to see if you're better
putting together
your own own again
I hear that you're building
a gin-bottle Babylon,
a kinda record to your
progress, scratchings
of triumph right?
a cigarette now
since you went away
you seem more you
than ever, it's gorgeous, I love it, another cocktail?
another locked park
meet every train at the station
you came home without living
treat me to a
flake of your life
and I'll get you cut out
by fire-men
tickets you don't use
stubbs and suggestions
maybe I learnt when to get out
from you




* after Leonard Cohen

The Crane Wife

I've lived alone before, and I can do it again

I know you're looking...

How was the premiere?

I can't feel my hands.

it seems this time (3:05 and ripe) that we're not to blame
for a mingled note, a carotid decibel
like a drunk making follow-throughs on whispers,
a spittle homily to disgusted convocations.
heard that he heard about your glamour
and sought the dandy-fine couture of your hand in
slight and ill
how then to think that you, without your plans or
happy days, can't have thought this through...
when in this hour, fixated breathless on a drool-
stained pillow, alternating and aggravating the air-bubble in
my brain (posterior-fossa) - near the part where the cerebellum pokes
out into a spine - and thinking of his thin hands, his thick eyes
pouring and pouring
over you
and why, in this decorum, you didn't care enough to see
the arc of imposition - the fine way you fuck him
and the needles in my nerves that run the length of
the Finchley Rd and down, out to the pebbled sea
and Brighton's lost summers
where, if the fish & chip van doesn't come
we'll serve without

help me bury

He remembers catching lizards in laundry baskets with a mother in a house where the
latches fall off and he is trapped (except for the side window) in the little glory of his room. then Sunday and there is a little
bundle, neat something mewing
sounds like a cat, he thinks, but this cat is pink and it seems to have no hair where there should be hair a strange cat, he thinks but obviously, it will leave.
the cat doesn't leave and instead grows, grows up and out and attached to his mother
all of the day
(and sometimes secretly at night too you see)
so he remembers sneaky one day to push the little thing out the door, roll it down the steps to the drive and down the dark gurgle-hole at the end out to the oysters
and the bay
and he remembers the bat swooping past his mum and her quick, high 'shit' the frizz of her hair then, the arc of the bat and his mother all grown up, pink sweater and
culottes and all and
he thinks there that that little world, his glory, was remarkably large
if you include the dead bats and the pigeons and the rat (half rat really) that time
that riddle the ground of the side-passage you'll have a good idea of the temptation
he remembers finding long and slender white - the knee bone of a hu - horse...horse..
because this acre held a gelding or two in the last rural tipping of the shire into
suburb.
and If you take all Sunday to come back, halfbound wheelchair and all and don't move
again for those three hot weeks, we'll all together drive sombre round - a man-mobile
of strength and worms and dirt and nothing but the tears we're holding back
I'm asking you to walk, again for the time and all, you reached past my face and cross-
snitched an ornamental tree upon my heart, thank you.

Favourites...published & un-published...

satellites

Elias

>>

No, not really, no

seriously

Rosetta

ectomies

Oberon

somewhere near Palafrugell

ash

SaturnV

autopsy

dis-inter

silverman

oxbows

wracking up

felix

Exercising charlie

Para-aortic

desert

how it went down (version 2)

1 year 9 months in - there's a knock on
the phone, an arching maybe
spanning a week and weekend -
what is that?
they'll know, the ones, the white-suit
slick-blade scalpel crew
you, the you, deep down from
14, from 12 from times before South
Australia, say 'run' - the you, that
loving you, the now, the always you
says 'stay'
and you do, through 4 year, 5 year
nearly and so
in stitching our canvas to the
ebb of my intentions
a little piece, lost in the
filtered red-water lake (it's tea-tree
you tell me, and I, I don't believe) a little
piece of you goes missing,
that's the way I don't see, they took it
I took it - and didn't see you
ragged and hemmed with the 'run, run'
pounding through your head
and me, smashing glasses (it's just a crack)
and muttering like my father at
televisions, the world and all
the promises of high-school captains
and kings of men,
didn't see the stitching
or you, crouched, hungry
trying to suture
us, again, without me
I'm sorry

how it went down v1

I think it's July 16 when you sit me down, say
you feel, that you
can't make you anymore, say
sorry as you take back
the mystery flight and the sole condolence
tear up the Absolut posters, the nightmare before.
I think it's Sunday when I say 'this
isn't working' and you
you know i know you
never meant it to, want to want not quite
there right
so it's still
not cool love that i've a need to fill, say
sarcasm to imagine gone
and you you backing down the drive
all the time whisperin 'I do, I do'

satellites

all that really matters to me
as I hit the atmosphere
calling myself a rocket
is that somewhere
that smile, so beguiling -
rests carefully on a face
I've not see for a year

oh sure, the digital
anomalies that pass for
our passings these days
make sure we feel, connected
to the indelicate web of
parched lives, nineties
and whole

I've waited so long for
someone to take me back home
now that that might be (you)
I think it's the big...
well...apple...you see
so why can't I say that in
person, tomorrow

and forget the consequences, live
in the leap ahead as you push
I push the steep, the rough, the
impossible off the scales and out into
space, floating away
where I can hang, with you

and watch the earth spin

Dear Frank...

if you come here, leave me crumbs
so I
can follow you back from
the edge of the rut that runs
through my bedroom, over
the burn mark near the lamp and
under the box
you forgot to
return to the apartment
we shared with a cat named
Leia.

geo

I want to fuck a
geographer. I want
her to know my
watersheds and key
indicators, is it salty
or fresh. You know
the riverkeeper
analysis? that's
what I'm doing, you
know her? Every
single swampland,
every single flat.
There's technique
run off in the data
but I don't like
programming. If
you've a little
knowledge of
ecology you'll ask
what about all this -
you're trying to
get the restoration
work on the wrong
wetland. But he's
not someone who
helps, too alluvial,
too prone to
flooding on the
higher reaches,
igneous and shale-faced.

Elias

hear my voice
it's telling stories
telling just the truth
about the innocent elias
lying next to you
innocent elias

Elias - Wolfsheim

the high-chair gives him away,
crumpled into each pine buttress
he gurgles, deep and satisfied
not making eye-contact with those
grey slate singles, just
bubbling away
as babies do

at first his mother doesn't notice
the length of my stare (is it rude to say,
all babies feel this way?)
so I've nothing to worry about
for
the next minute

and here at his table
this wine-red messiah in his
new minted skin starts -
sings parodies of
music hall hits from
eighty years before

how he knows them, through
the spittle and carrot pulp,
is a mystery to
the last minute of my
gaze - one I intend
to find out

tell me!
all your secrets little man -
appearances can be deceiving and I feel
that you survived Dier-el- Zur
perhaps and lived on
to transpose with fat fingers
my father's faith

so tell me
the depth of a womb, the quiet retreat of
a mother's chest
(one I've not known in years)
help me to see
the ageless mass of you
as new, a bright bursting
shock of hair

not, with passing
squeamish time the deep seat of your
ankle fat, the stubby wrist
those pale endless eyes
and all
I can know of you
was her

bromance

I fall for the men in the
lives of the women I love,
the husbands and fathers
who become, for a time
new best mates, 5 pints
down and close as hell.
I help with their terror,
we share the same
passions afterall - just
look out for my girls
buddy and we'll be fine

>>

I wonder if there'll be a strike,
some bright peel, a tolling in the
distant valley that says
'it's over, go' - something to
herald when he first
to her and that thing
between us isn't

a pencil rub left from
the last time 'need' was said
in common tongue under
the ripe purse of the moon
(impress on them
the severity to
track the imprint,
right?)

notes on arson

so the silence broken
by blood drives and
flying embers, flung
far from you in snow

Kingslake is Dresden
bound, choked in
ash and super-heated,
(mid tea-party)
till all the Dolls warped

await another call
from the bonded
city , dialling M(e)
for reason

all I want to say, when
Melbourne's burning, is
how I shouldn't
but I do
still

I'm afraid for '94, that
we can't evacuate to
Grandma's stuffing
gutters with
slick newspaper

the fire's there alright,
last night it jumped
the river - quiet, fleeting
and landed somewhere south
of Southern St, and me.

bio

the danger with talking in I's and You's is
that you never know which You you're not

Song 2 – 'Finding Warren'

It isn't long till we see the track, a little brown strip of washed rock, a dusty gulley - a fire-trail. Peter says nothing the entire way, he keeps pace methodically - sometimes I think I hear him counting steps, his face a mask, sweat beading on his forehead, where his eyebrows meet.

It’s Peter who spots it. He put his hand out, on my chest, it covers both pockets. He points and grunts - his first sound since the numbers trailed away at the top of the Tanami ridge. A shoe. A blue shoe.

I can’t see it at first, there’s so many burnt out cars up here, kid's fires, party sites you know? Faded Coke cans, one has ‘Barcelona 92’ on it. In of the wrecks - '68 Holden I reckon - was a shoe. A blue shoe. It just sticks out – isn’t the right colour for anything up here.

That’s when we see the rest of him...

No, not really, no

I'm not as well as you might suppose,
your timeline ticking out the back
my movement's drafted to the new-
age calendar for condolence and black tie

publicly, no arm-band for inquiry
nor gown and stalking cap -
mine's a sooty seamless dress half-
hemmed above my un-shaved legs

yes, it's eye-liner
that is a bomber-cut ball gown
in solid sarsaparilla and salt-etch
needle-work, a falling water-table

given this prom-confusion is
ineligible worn - how then are you to know
to ask so and so if I (through my perspiration
and bluster) logic out the hate?

I'm as righteous as I seem only to
seeming sight a dignity entrap -
snare a passing sympathiser, a dinner-party
mourner or a bright street-urchin's son

someone to make to ask to see
the place where it happened,
the depth of the way she walked
out and out past the bridal falls

for now, these tatters and theologies
rule only my intellect and fail,
in conveyance of the real and true
parochial, my un-okay-ness with it all

so you just ask 'Are we cool?'
the most ridiculous of questions dear
given the lack of status I now hold
if I could scream this I would.

No, not really, no.

2nd

tonight you can read lips,
and hers are begging you to
remember

at the game

I don't know tonight
what
indiscretion you and your
got up to

that each across the city
stood
under sky-light bursts
crimson and flared and

for you to wait was
too too much;
a sad sunday
when the rain's set in

I'm the push away
to make her feel
looser, a lighter
better she

and we, now anointed
have less than days to
part, I'm still cut out -
carved - indifferent

sweep through
lacerations of the scalp
and fevers of the drift
in your dreams to

now, the sick sliver
ineloquent wedged
between hark
and harken

our new separateness
driving with your eyes shut -
a vanity you set your
mind to

there's another part to play,
a rainy day
a regret, structured and festering
in hurt places

this end has become
a spectator sport -
piled high with cheap beer
at toilet queues

and I'm not fair anymore