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

seriously

it's always
a blank space inside your skin
public mistakes

nothing to show you how -
that shows that inner workings
can succeed

explain the boxes inches from you,
the photos turned down
inside him

Tell me of single home-cooked meals
of people who let you
think this is a life

All because you ran and called it leaving

surmise*

you're arch noir plots
dense, turgid
filled with the ease of
a writing
conducive
to fictions deep and
startling

a prof and a detective
battling each for
some moist control
over the nubile
youngthing

those kisses, girlish
and disarming
a serious love for tender
wounds and stinging
elegies

you'll be
missed like breakfast
skipped, like electro shock
sometimes, at night
I wish I could slip through the
cracks in the floor
experience your soul



* in memory of Dorothy Porter (1954 - 10, December 2008)

Rosetta

it isn't cold sundays and
condensation dripping in
found corners - the known room
a moss-topped
bed, chair in ochre.

it's not that the problem's
been slept on -
there are other puzzles to
solve before being
bathed in cat-hair and bought
band-aids (in one too many
shapes) better then, with age

it's not lists of home-wares,
matching glasses, stained
far far up their creased
sides
it isn't scratching armpits
(purring and purr)
less than insistent
well considered silences,
it is weariness and my condolent chatter, the
out-loud way the bereaved go
further into reasoning chaotic and
retrospective, tinkering with the
hours of Monsooned Malabar
and cheap battles over
trail stops at times less ripe

it is the distance and twin
conditioned prodding -
it's knowing and still wanting
in the morning, the day
as foil and bright with the colour
of (you)
it is losing sleep to catch crickets
in hand-baskets, eating cherries
to prove how much
I...
use a word, this hieroglyph
on my tongue and you,
carved and indecipherable
behind pane-glass and out
of touch

but history's been revising and excising
our good times so
it's
gargoyles and dark bills, numbers
and semantic texts - inadequate
friends meddling piece-meal in the
fields we divided, fencing is
the work driven for, pound
in posts (good wood, good wood)
and make a line to cross

that's it, see?
it's ours what's buried
under the turf and walking
sometimes
after the rain
(but not naked) I can take
a creeping sense of your
progression out and away to
our separate hemispheres,
leaving the equator (neutral
blue) and the 51st parallel behind
bookshelves and smiles -
watering the azaleas with liquor
will do for now Green-thumb