paen

I just got a poem in the mail that rhymed an'all
a real poetess at work, some scratch mind honey-bunch
sweet little thing, a blue-eyed mistress of quirk
and it brought me my deep seat out loud
a hunch sob from a heat place, the cough and cry of oh and I
a perfect syncro of you.
So now that that's the distance to here, oh yes,
keep em coming, I say
and I for my sins will return this tin thing
and ask where is Wally today.

#okayineedtocomebacknow

You're sleeping, I hope, tucked up in the that farwayarchway place we shared
I've not the means to say how but reaching back on a straight-edged bookshelf
I came to you, through New York New York and that one Mumford on a deck,
losing a coat (ah the rants) but finding you, that's the greatest trade ever
so how facing a slick run of river, some whipper-snipper growling out the distance
can i seek and say, I'm with you, there, tonight my sweet

this time round

there's a side-swipe world on the other
and the sides I've taken aren't you -
I can stare at two rivers all I want and not
find an outline of your hair or in the sky
a limit like your eyes but as I feel here, the
old world seeping, bubbling up slick and sodden
drowned papers wrung out and blow-dried till
they say what I suspected
I miss you and miss you and miss you

There is the nothing that you're not
to be found in the recess
and a hat trick normal stance, the backbone ridge of kuckle knucle in the smaller portion of your mound
on a be-a-man high, my flat tyre quotro flinging me through Finsbury dark
and over Tollington mounds, the monolith temple (for some black-robed Balkan orthodoxy) all upturned crosses brushed and brushed
a man in thongs cycles past me, hunched, intent
where will he end up curled and crying tonight?

spindledistrict

More than is known about the last emperor was his love of spindles. He lived, secluded, in a garden full of them, quietly ravelling and unravelling their cotton headscarves in the wind. Once, when a sad peasant came to see him, he asked the broken man Why did he come? the man replied, 'Because he knew the secret of predation and excess'. The emperor laughed, and laughed, rattling the spindles, coiling the cloth around their tip-top heads – he laughed so long one of his attendants fell backwards out into the gravel courtyard, down the steps and smack! on to the base of a giant spindle. All breathed in. And held. As it wavered, cotton dangling, other spindles sighing sympathetically, considering if now was the time to shed their flaxen locks and soar, a beat, then two, a third and nothing. Stillness, fizzling quiet. The last emperor merely smiled cheerily to himself. The attendant dusted himself off, ‘You must see what I mean?’ said the distraught peasant. Hmmmm, thought the Emperor, Hmmm he thought for a millennia, when finally, kicking aside a roughly peasant-sized pile of bones, he simply said, No.