it's been an age since I've been here - now;
there's a long slice of clay-minded toddler sleeping fitfully against my leg
there's an older version of us staring out from the duel mirrors in the morning
somehow we got old, the meet at 20 thing seems a long-distance joke -
do those thin beautiful people have any idea how good they have it?
I've lived back here long enough for this country to drain me of hope, to
extinguish the quiet, personal joy I used to feel in my work -
and make it oil slick with doubt and festering ideas about being owed
some form of respect, as if the product of my entire education was a burning
need to have more and more badges...
I cant say it's been easy - being swallowed into 'dad' when I was only just me again.
What they don't tell you as they hand that mewling bundle of joy straight into your heart is that you are
forever and always compelled to compare, internally, eternally - yourself as 'Dad' to your Dad as Father.
Every bump, every 'What?!' chopped out of clenched jaws is an bat-echo wingbeat of him, stalking through you son's childhood, your ghost at his feast...
How to exorcise that is a project of a deep inner calm that eludes me - you can't fix yourself on no sleep and tendril-debt and a hard tumour of hatred for the life you let yourself lose.
You've only contempt for yourself. Even amongst the joy, even amongst the triumph - there it is...
what did you give up boy? what did you give up?

I knew I'd meet you

Something in the way she moves

I've still the ring you gave me one day in Leicester Square
twisting on my finger, an anxious rabbits-foot charm to
ward off the full-forward doubts pressing out my brow
There is this place, where you and I and everyone we've lost lived once,
a kind of greyed-out sleeting paradise where I played in snow
and got shit-faced terror drunk and slid baggies of
high white knights under tables in Music Theatre bars, filed with starlets and
queens and curious boys with lyrical memories and then there are
quiet Southern sunsets and Oliver and sadness and spag-bol hearths to take care of me
I'm sorry it's been so long between poems, I've been -
pre-occupied with rebuilding a kind of triumph here as if to fill in for those
slate-grey early days that seemed to me more the best of this little self than any other
and I miss them, and I miss you friend but I've some oh so adventurous delights here now, broad-patterned and bright, they're the new victory, she lying here now, her hand gently on my stomach (where no one gets to touch) and as she breathes so do I, oh so do I and so I stay

if i could press the crêpe sweet sweep where your eyes meet your tongue i would

Can you say you miss a place like a lover?

Then if then I can say the Thames wends its way through my waking, 

and even the thought of a Heath roll ramble brings high hearts to my beating soul, 

some drunk Camden shit-camera red-stripe abandon fills 

the clavicle I left on Finchley rd when I scrambled so far north 

I forgot my poppy-seed inebriate scares and left 

that hated Dollis Hill-scape, all mold walls and 10quid whiskey but 

I found - tucked in Hampstead woodlands, between rabbit forts and acid

Break up trips - some part of that ancient deep and beating place that was then if for me

A scene engineered to let you slip between it

Winging along a rush-walled city, sliding and sloughing and seeking

My own related anatomy

I'm not there when it happens,
I pass by later to see red
and brick and rubble
much later actually
there's already a shrine of sorts
a bus-shelter shape, not even
half-filled
with tacs, the odd photos, a shoe -
these people three, I don't recognise them
it was the thing not the people
that fell, but when it fell and
as it fell more than bodies got
crushed

In which Carson unties my tongue...

“I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”
~ Carson McCullers - 'A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud'

a night without

a night without
a slide back through time, to a peach-fizz yesterday bereft of cymbals and carnival-seeking
it's a hollow half-pillow hug and a curl not quite the right circumference
a Magellan of the daylight to map my restlessness
and in the swelter a brief fly singed between a black plane
beyond a river not meant for swimming
and a here when found, a trial

Her here

So I've home to the here here and the you here and the not here - and the documents you left; a hat on the wrong chair, matching sneakers (pink for casual runs), these crumbled sheets...I don't know what tomorrow brings, it must be full of certainties - faint ruffles, our yawning deep such that we've no solution but to love. This method, well I call it living and now you've departed, there's this gap - a heaving arch my sole bed - so now the you here, not here, tonight makes even leaves have secrets and the my here ache to know

the divine comedy

So I've bullet-holes up my sleeve and yet, the tricks ring false in the sweet arena of our new youth - and when I to you (that disappearing but sings) and ask why this me - you smile all arch and fringe and beauty, pop and olive and hold me till I quiver

There was a time when you put the boy before the pain - but what can you do to prove it?

I've some kitchen-ware affidavits - a cunning wrapped testament to matching sets of dreams

And now, in this high shine when I find the spine of me blistering and bountiful - I tire to remember when there's brighter sparks in my orbit

And they're most almost lovely beyond

it's only in the quiet deep crash of a river-front steam
that the evening, all sweet and sorry, seems to suffer
an excess of altitude, doubles back in on itself, the street-wise
confluence of things we used to be
I can't say to you I love you because when I leave the you there -
a hanging triptych - it batters out the night and flickering insects, eagre
to leave their wings fixed to my window bank on my leaving -
so when I can say, to you say, that there's this ragged thing
and when I beat my breast it beats back, I want to look a fool to
show that there's a something there, where you're not

that's not fair...you don't get to remember me like you never left...

the two brewers

...so tonight you try not to say  I want you  I need you  I miss  you but they tumble out onto the pavement & my scrambling fingers (numb with cold) just cant pick them up...

#yourewelcome

So last night, I performed this which included some of my writing from here. Which was fun.

And everyone laughed (in a good way) and even cried a little.

I may even do it again.

she

 

she’s unsteady at first

the neat quarters of

yellow a procedural edge

and

step

over

this patch of dirt a

foursquare pulpit, the

first thing she sees is a

hair tie - pink closed as 

an aperture - a stray

strand stuck in the iris.

‘Here’s where she fell.’

Kevin’s gruff, the speak-easy

front for this half-price

cop, ‘And then she crawled...’

hands and knees

hands and knees

‘to here.’

the scruff and pillow of the

toppled grass,

each blade slid horizontal under

her (panic) rush (frantic)

'Where’s...where is she?'

‘Hard to tell.’

'What?'

'There's not going to be - much...'

Someone must have, seen

the sweet, draped knot

her dark and slick skinned under

him

'Show me.'

that poem's gone

 At night, on this night, I think of you - there's a gap, a fault line running down my bed, dividing feathered veins and slipping into the sea

best laid

Oh I had such plans
but I'd drown them to have you -
not living, just carrying time
and the mix (of masturbation, and
the sob of tiny hands) your
calling once a week till
I have to go, quietened in the
light of glass ceilinged kitchens
where a coffee you had once is
still ringed (it's maybe moss now)
and your hair-dryer is tucked under my bed where
you snuck it that first week, the bold
first parley when I knew you little
and now, when you've someone to
talk to and your friends crawl back out
of the wood-work, blinking in singledom
with you (why do girls always break up in packs?)
that you say to me, you're okay...
and the gap, the dorsal leap flung back
is that when I go, you'll be fine
and (how) am I to take that...

she left
she leaves
and i've only patterns
the same way, the same words
as before
to find 'space' to find 'me'
('without you' but she won't say it)
the soft goodbye
as you slide out
from me

From the remarkable Paul Squires, his last post before he sadly passed away last year...

Gene Kelly Tattoo

July 16, 2010 at 8:01 pm |

that which you can see
coming
you already have

it is the unexpected
stumblings over (airborne joy with tumble roll)
which constitute the treasure

into outstretched
sunsets
merriment and dance



He will be truly missed.