dead / sea
to arrive at the edge of the sea, uncertain as a wedding guest swaying alone at the shallow end of a depopulated dance floor. or to be standing very straight and very still, and wearing all the glamour you have borrowed from disaster: the lisping wounds of gangland, global weirding's strong black ecological cosh. stunning. you put the lights out. you are very modern, atonally sexy, full to the teeth of a pouting doom your lips purse into all involuntary. you want to cry: fuck me on a pile of dirty money! you have seen too many music videos. you are in love, with the gun's fatal tumescence, kurt cobain painting the town with his spag bol brains in a fever dream. never mind. there's a special quality to the light here, like wading waist deep in a slowly developing photograph. they couldn't begin to tell you about beauty, approaching the marbly seaside dark down the wrong end of a telescope. they couldn't begin to tell you, how beauty resides in being unformed. you always thought that loss could be lavished upon us like love. you suffered so many arrogant kisses, debunking your mouth with a mouth in the night. intimacy is a hand trapped between hot folds of flesh. you admit it freely, you do not know how to feel, but you are so lost now, like peter pan, estranged from his shadow. your dead are never coming back, and you don't want to feel the morning's sharp insult like salt against the skin. you want an extravagant disgrace, a sorrow sleek and fierce as all hell breaking loose or what's the point? yours is not the irreproachable grief of virgins, crossing themselves at a fork in the road. your grief is the place where farce and shame will intersect in memory. ask him again: how could you? oh, your love has its masochisms and its vertigos, its wounded melodrama: how could you? the black lagoon he's creature to disturbs the subtle function of an artery like lust. he flirts a better pain than yours, revels his infliction in a dazzlescape of lights on snow, a bed of velvet devastations. oh, a better pain than yours, a slow pain spread with ardent cunning, away in a manger, his mid brain chemically coddled. the ancients knew how women went deranged with grief and wondered the earth tearing their hair. the gods don't favour you, leave them to their omissions and dominions. you have failed, you lost another, and only the sea accepts you now. you lit a fire on the beach, the leaf-greedy fire found nothing to feed on but clothes and photos. benjamin called writing memory's theatre. strut and fret. your dead slum the current trailing furs like film stars. there's a performance and a haunting. and you do not know the difference. you are traipsing the high-wire, dragging your heels along a silver line in the only undisputed, depthless blue.
everything happens for a reason
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the general mood is befouled defiance. the hazards are floating free of their fires. ugly girl with the high-top trainers has swallowed a song like a sword. it must come out again somehow. oh you, fauxnician sailor, all washed up. your death is so played out, your long and tattered ceasing on a bloody beach in brighton. it was the sea inside that drowned you. walked away from us, from the jaundiced toil of cities, from a hurt so thick that you could stand your teaspoons up in it. weekends of clammy pique, bowing from the waist behind the yellow curtains, or sprawling in the local park, a patch of weak, white grass cordoned off like a violent crime. pit bulls, shit schools, cripple-lipped buskers slurring into their sinatra, driveways pubescent with weeds, cars on bricks. yeah, imagine, our cousin says sarcastically, how could he stand to leave all this? not leaving, then, but leaving me. streets, hampered and hunchbacked, eloquent with revenge. grenfell graffiti. drink distorting talk to politic in gutless pubs with drunken fuckboys chafing for a phrase in the sorry expanses of friday night. your worst thought was a desert and you walked out like a mystic and were gone. my cravings debase me: winter, the heirloom leaflessness of hedges, trees, dirty verges insisting their thistles. i have a need for pain, to stand facing the river, mulish and starveling. do you remember, the morning we lit the wood burning stove on the barge? coffee, cigarettes, a cold day's slovenly currencies? do you remember the night we climbed the flyover? we thought we'd touch the sky, we thought we'd leave a footprint in its glittering physics. below us a swamp of lockjawed concrete, the empty motorway an estuary at such an hour. fever ray's first album, a deep distance inclined to kestrels, the shape of a hare courting the hot pulse under an eye. you were starry, then, we made our own beauty. oh love, my only friend, i need you when no north is true. a vertical cemetery accuses us:there are worse tragedies than yours. i'm running, sunrise like inspiration porn. pink red orange captionable sky: everything happens for a reason. i have friends who say this. i am like london. cumaean, an unsuccessful suicide.
the dead will take root anywhere, even here, when coughing up the old congested dread that wakes us on some roguish night or other when the saints have fled, and we will have no more of their composures or their pities. the dead will take root anywhere, even now, and with the smell of resin and the estuary, their smithereens are whisking on the methylated air. they say there is no prayer for our protection. equivocal deliverance, the only kind we’re fitted for. agrarian provocateur! green fingered vivisector! god, who turns the corpsy furrows with a spade, and bids their bitter sap to rise in soil like instant coffee: fine and loose and dry. the dead will take root anywhere, surging again through the curdled mortar of pre-war houses, out into our dingy gardens, our small, obstreperous palates of stone.
long night, lone, eavesdropped and seething, inclement with calamity, and i should know. i come out on the roof when the day is a blue lingering and sleep cannot contain me. i lie up there, awake for hours, and nurse the earache of their infrasound. on long nights, lone, of skirmishing cognition, i hear them, captive in the static like a warning of a storm. you hear them too, or heard, they wait beyond your vision or your reason. we were children. they believed a child could be beaten into sweetness. we were children, taught to walk with our hands in our sleeves, little girls gothic with patience, little boys walled up in their wariness. there are things we can't unsee, and you have lain awake, abandoned by god, sore with stomach ache and acid wrath, goose-bumped, grim, and bittering your innards in off-licence vinegar, insisting on the stinging cider piss that kisses you goodnight forever. there are things we can't unsee: the light in amber tangles struggling through tinted windows; the dead rising up from rural churches, shedding conjure dust and crumbs. they have no joy in them, or peace; they are victims of heaven's corrective, affectionless love. whole congregations, dour-mouthed, and martyrs to the hardened artery, the pedants of disease, picking their scabs like delicate red and black brooches. you saw the woman too, standing without shoes or coat, opening an awkward scream like a wet umbrella, her hallway behind her, and framed for a moment like a hand held up in front of the sun. you saw the man whose face made mischief out of symmetry, wringing his hands, flaunting a swollen jaw. there was that gaunt aul’ boy, stumbling down the gallows path, his bindle of pious ailments high on his narrow back; a young girl hugging her threadbare errand, scallying and tousled, a hole in her cheek like a bad apple. you saw one other: the man who dragged an abject blanket like a baby brother, sucked the salt from flint to stave off hunger. he was quite mad. he called to us. we ran from him.
the dead will take root anywhere, they do not care for proverbs or precautions. i was a child, and i thought as a child, and i saw as a child, the whole world gold through penny-toffee cellophane. you and i, dissolving a sweet tooth in sugar. in summer i practised an endless piano; there were charioteers in plastic sandals, kicking up stones on the rathkeevin road. dogs in skinny gridlock; a piebald bitch like a broken plough was dragged along by her back legs. and you, running amok in jesuit plimsolls, ward of the state. you don't recall? the grownups spoke in whispers. i could not name the things i knew. you did not know the things you saw. the dead will take root anywhere, in endless heat, the living room, we shook the magic eight ball till the future fell out wild. the haywire magic of children: what does it mean, we want to know? and we ran to the sandy field, the rushy field, the well below the valley. always talking to ourselves, between ourselves in pig latin, backslang, faltering cant. our pidgin words were ominous with inquest. names hovered like wrongful arrests. confession was forgetfulness, was giving up: i want to forget, you said. the scent of hedges, fuchsia, wet and red. the light and silence held my tongue. pregnable pause in the day’s undoing. we mustn't speak, not yet. to emptiness: i saw him there.
they found his whistling head: large, and forced between two rocks. the head was singing, like a kettle. the head was white and bloated, made from spit and paper. a nest, an egg. they raised it up in a swaying light. a bird had broken open its eyes. his eyes. our dead are neither wise nor drowned. our dead will take root anywhere, as miscellaneous as weeds. you know this too; we’re oracles of all the land is rife and sullen with. they worked you over for years, pilloried, imploring, from stairwells and from quarry bottoms, mutilated, stupouring. we saw him there. i won’t pretend. you slip silent into their ranks. i am corked like holy water in my flat ampulla. ours is a sour luck sucked like a lolly. this inheritance has no remedy.
april conjures insult into symptom. i have often hated spring; this garden in its slow, perishable dominion. mulo, there are stale raisins on your grave; the black canal has set your bones like tar. you rave, and are peculiar to water. your eyes have met their lustering fate in moonlight; decay coerces pallid iridescence from the fine curve of your jaw, rib bone, hip bone, shoulder blade. at night you climb the weary waves like stairs, you stare at me: where is my golden crop, my flail; my grail, my golden girl? your apparition augers north. your death has changed the sea.
i used to believe in the one true god, and with misguided gaze would offer my eyes to the stars. but you, my lover, are myth-mettled: osiris, bird masked for wran jag, adolescent demigod, all wingspan, antlers, and blasted sight. alright. therapist describing grief as shattered habit: nothing will be the same. he's wrong. every day will be the same from now on. i will wander the earth in tedious hysteria, while you go grinning in a jackal-headed gangland; a crocodile cohort follows you, their cheekbones are sequinned with indelible tears. that's heaven, isn't it? lig and swagger and righteous kingship. makes as much sense as anything else, and what difference to me? you will not return. i long to come to you, rehearse a wading fate in dirty water. i cannot drown for lack of stones to fill my pockets. there’s only dust, sorrow’s irresolute alchemy, putting pestle to pill, day after day. there is mourning, and all its etiquettes of affected modesty: the veil i dare not lift for fear my ravaged face would salt the earth and the shock the children into silence.
lover, i had searched for you, among the juiceless tubers, bulbs like little shrunken heads. i sought you out within the cushiony lungs of churches; ransacked all the wet black earth with clumsy, panting greed. my need was such i rubbed the brasses smooth. on my knees in nightclubs, graveyards, supermarkets. you were not there. i did not find you sleeping in the long, clerical shadow of a sundial, where once we sucked the soft grey thumbs of mushrooms to see god. i did not find you in the gold tooth of the prison snitch, the nicotine pinch of his thin fingers, plucking the lapel of my second hand lagerfeld suit. i did not find you, orchidaceous in the botanical garden, inventing an eden by the sunken ravine where once we'd supped at doom's sharp savour, how i groped for your hand like a light switch in the dark, how we talked about the end of the world as we know it. i called to you; they said i’d cantered mad, clawing the spicy soil to pleats. maybe. there is a darkness we can neither withstand or swim. i searched for you. i searched and searched. death, an unmapple excess, distortion of geography. i tore my hair on building sites, listing in the shipwrecked kitchenettes of unplumbed houses. it was so cold. the wind got in between my ribs. i dug the loamy breadth of borders; pulled up the witchy fingers, interlocked in secret charms to bring down chimneys. mandrake roots like sickly infants. everything meant something then, tormentil and tansy, pennyroyal and yarrow. i searched for you, made inventory of ditches till the toiling eye was blind. i did not know it then, that you belonged to water. i know it now. oh, my love. rapunzel of the sleek electric tresses, let down your eels, your kelp, your skeins and your anemones. my gender-swapped ophelia, the worse for weeds, a crown of gothic corals for your head, and i could weep. here’s violet pyrosoma for your pillow. the walls can talk. the river is unbroken, a taut skin stretched like a drum. the black canal colluding in a sleep.
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i remember everything now. it’s not an illness, it’s an appetite with you, he said. i hated him that day, the day i turned the tundra loose inside and sand poured through the windows. a desert isn’t empty, the dead are of a nomad tribe. oh god, and is it shame that covers me, as certain seeds are covered? certain seeds are reliquaries, keepers of the tight green passing-sacred. if i should call out: sink me deep. if i should cry, besotted by the broken earth that tumbles me: bury me now, and here, and last. what of it? this passible delirium, a localised recoiling in the bone: love. they brought you home. i howled my fate. inconsolable horoscope. i wanted to gather you in like swords, to dry you with my hair, to hold your blackened femur pointing inwards, grind against this sadness like a saw. it is a thin blue fire, grief. i will never fuck myself free of this, for all my leaden repertoire of magics, slim cunning. if i could have one dazzling pin-prick minim of you, to hold, behold, i would take you inside myself. and i would give birth to birds, my love. i would give birth to birds.
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it has been said that i suffer on purpose; there is an art to that, and in an ugly soapstone vase the yellow rose aspires to texas not to sweetness. her fragrance is a craving you incline toward in vain. i swear i’m not in love with pain, but there is a splinter under my nail, and it is a piece of the one true cross. who has been bringing you flowers? and don’t they know you cannot siphon life enough by suction through a cut? the rose is trying to grow, trying to stand on a snapped green tendon. oh, how sad. i crush her petals out of spite. we are alike. i also rush to water when i’m hurt. not to heal but borrow back forgetfulness, and every sink a sea in which my injuries are buoyed. if love becomes an unrecorded weight, there’s joy in that, in going under, the way some bodies melt like floes of ice. a rose that cannot feed can only float. and you, some luscious drug has caught you in its velvety fatigue. the rose has put its yellow on like armour. paraffin seal for a paper boat.
how like yourself you are today, not ill, you said, but biologically beguiled. you’ve rolled around these pinkish-creamy walls all day. you are the sound of the sea. the hospice is mulling you over, concocts an unconvincing illness out of air. you caught this death, a salt wind under your sails. today your mind is cutlass-sharp, and you could trim the white rind from a ten foot wave. i didn’t speak of need to you, or ask you if you’d ever loved a woman as the sea has loved: without fidelity or restraint. i did not ask you where you'd been or where you’re going. yours is a sea of situations, not of places. precision is the highest form of cruelty. you speak of the land as a banishment. you have become prophetic: some depths cannot be reckoned: some books are better drowned at birth.
the doctor was stripping the flesh from a long, thin phrase with yellowy incisors. my love is the disaster by which i will measure all future emergencies.
a bad dream kneaded out of night, the mind’s resplendent dark spectacular acute. fear has her flamboyancies, her oscillating logics. i cannot sleep tonight, but anger empties my head like a rush of sugar. i'm storm tossed in egyptian cotton, welter and tempest and cabriole. i’m in the garden, barefoot now, where sound curls into small convulsions, where noises make my shoulders shake. i am afraid, of everything. i am afraid for you, of you. sometimes i think that you were the mask your sickness wore to gain my trust. i caught it out in the corridor; it turned on me with a disfigured fury. hollywood gothic, reciprocal shock. an image of lom chaney, camp grotesque beneath the paris opera house. bygone gargoyle, muddy eyed. i bit into a scream like a leather strap. hysterical heroine, i gathered my panic into myself, withdrew like a threatened anemone: sudden shrinking suck intake of breath awake at last. you tricked me! an antisocial hour, rolling the moment end over end like a wet mattress. cowardice becomes a kind of violence, my friend. you would know this better than anyone.
to love, according to one's bond. to bleed out by a million meagre wounds. some will say what bond? what wounds? heretics were drowned as often as they burned. people do not realise this. the sea was also an altar. is. these thoughts are formless. would you play lear or prospero? your charm is soluble in water. i'd make a poor cordelia, am neither ariel nor miranda. caliban, my back like the bottom of a capsized boat, rising, barnacled, from the shallow end of the gene pool. shouldn't call you father but master. i have no father, detachable child, i become stuck on you. my service is a curse. test the sacrificial shape of my affection on the surf.
when I come in i bring with me the reek and tattle of a flammable world. the only news i have is bad: machetes are fretting, all bets are off. everything you do becomes deliberate now. he’s hurt himself again, they said. but of course! you are a pirate, ripe for whatever mutinous escapade. i heard the nurses muttering: a deep wound, yes, but clean. the way they’d say poor, but happy, or she’s a dear girl, yes, but plain. i’m embarrassed by the paper that i bring, the leering fate it folds between its sheets: faddy threat, conspicuous atrocity. you mither me for going soft. you needn’t worry there old man, my days are made of enmity and vexed effort yet. i dance my gaunt attendance on a bad idea, daily. it isn’t god i can’t accept, it is his world. and even as we speak some woman is typing up a prissy-fingered list of all the ways i’m wrong. don’t look at me like that. don’t look at me to disentangle all your threads of lengthy error. don’t look at me for anything. my own youth is disgusting to me. the doctor comes, he smiles like he’s selling us something. when he talks he stands too close, i feel myself upholstered in his squeaky breath. he’s checking his reflection in my tinted lenses. he swims the swimming eye in rose and gold.
the cousins came today, touting their preposterous fertility like lilies. they offered me a lift, but i’d rather walk, besieged by a green and crinkly heat, along stagnant canals in bovver boots. I can’t make babies so i manufacture drasticness: buzzcut, eyeliner, a tattoo’s grim calligraphies, and sweat, so much sweat. the cousins repeatedly checking their phones: predictive misery, a text that says a nasty surprise is the only kind that we’ve got coming, reading aloud from the local news: autistic boy is bitten by an adder in some communal garden, thieves on mopeds snatching up mobile conversations mid ill-fated plaint, a man stabbed in the face outside a high road offie. the day began with bad omens: the tissue i put through the wash with my best black jeans, the hairline crack in the bluegrass rarity my brother insists was like that when i found it. and now there’s you, and how we drop words into you like children testing depth by throwing stones. the words fall down and down, we listen hard but you are bottomless now, somehow there’s a hole through your eye to the centre of the earth. i’ve never seen you so emphatically haunted. in my dream last night you were peeling off your skin at the wrists like marigold gloves. your fingers poked up through flesh, long wands of coral awaiting rings.
there are some feelings not applicable to power-ballads, dear. when you said if i wasn’t stuck in this bed, and i said but you are, blanch, but you are in that bed! and we had matching juice drinks, and you were sucking yours like a cut on the thumb, and i brought bananas which you described as the acceptable face of fruit. moments when your sickness is a kind of captivity, a cage you sing inside of like a huguenot canary. i astonish myself, i do not want it to end. it is less like clipping your wings than it is gluing your feet to the perch. little sparrow. little starling, insatiable among the scattered seeds. i hate myself today. i'm not here for you, i'm using you to fill the gaps inside of me. it is an ugly thought. send me away, i killed the others, i am not safe to love.
lucid but delusional, they tell me. i prefer lateral minded, days when memory becomes compressed air and paper snakes, when the dead slip from their gilded niches, grinny-gogging, unlamented, out for any irrational prank. you say it is time to go. but you don’t mean that. you think we might decamp to the old marquee, throw our shadows into flying vs across the dance floor. hospital porters lumbering like landlords, and you can see ian on stage, along with every other tatterdemalion suicide bid the biz sicked up. they call to you like mermaids, an under the sea dance populated by savants and boggarts, by our kinda people. in a kelp-webbed haçienda tony wilson’s waiting in a wedding dress that smells of youth dew, sentiment and oxidising metal. a brackish pint at the kim philby bar. a crust of salt around your mouth like mezcal shots. white worms, exhausted filaments. parasites that pick the seabed clean.
do you like my t-shirt? if i can keep you here just a little bit longer. if i can build a ladder out of logos, out of anthems. we talk about music, uniting old time singers to their quaint old-timey suicides. who was the gun, and who the pills? who took to a splinter of infected bone? sometimes i frighten myself with the narrowness of my desire. i’m still the same. i tell you cars are abandoned, daughters are deserted. it is true that I no longer expect better of people. we talk about what we wanted, and what we intended, how those two things are not the same. i intended to disappear, i wanted to be as thin as a crease in a white cotton shirt. and what do the beautiful people do when nakedness fails them? fucking: a stunt with buttons, the big reveal. I don’t like men touching me. my clothes are flags. pull my pennants away and i’m a cage of contoured air. the forensics of undressing. there was a time i was raised from the bed like a peat bog body, a bronze age tool for cutting stone. an unkind archaeology, those hands. i find i can say all this to you, but only now. you don’t like anybody touching you. alone in the dark, developing your fetishes like photographs. in this we are the same. you said the world does not belong to us. the world belongs to the cousins, those incorruptible pixelsmiths, perpetrators of precision. their iPhones make adjustments for erasure. the young will learn to measure the world by what is missing, find beauty in a blank space the way a poem does, to filter us invisible. ugliness premeditates a ghost. the camera used to preserve things too. the perfected image closes over us like water. a solid clump of turquoise, set in a silver band.
one to hunger, one to thirst. which is hardest? which is worst?
starvation was a winding path through a deep green forest. hunger is a compass and i followed him. i will not follow you.
some memories can jar the spine like whiplash: a mobile goes off, spraying us in the face with its melodious ultimatum: don’t you want me, baby? no, quite frankly. the air conditioning on, old ladies led about by their dainty sickness, mincing and shrieking in turns, in slippers; a fat one, baby-janing it outside the showers, popping her pout like a pressure sore. it’s hot. i require coffee so black it sucks the colour from our surroundings. you’re like a legionnaire crawling for water, holding out your arms. when I think about being here i realise i am accustomed, not resigned. i cannot cry, my eyes are dry enough to chip the glass of lesser marbles. i’ve been here before. its familiarity sits just the wrong side of contempt: chicory piss, the man in the next bed who is so fucking yellow, sat dead-centre like the hardest heel of cheese in a trap. the sleepy heads all welded to pillows, thin and flat as patties of meat. empty heads, unclassified conches through which the sea noodles again its contemptible eighties muzak. what? of course i’m angry! if i let myself love you, even for a moment i’d come apart like a dirty snowball. resentment is the only thing that’s holding me together. you should see it outside: unswappable wives with rocks sewn into their bellies like wolves; junkies conjuring dithery mischief from flailing sleeves, and a narrow dog, whining at a bus stop, enticed to shy allegiance by the crumbs in my jeans pocket. things are tough all over, cupcake, someone has graffitied on the wall outside of spar. the man obliviously bloking into his headset, the girl in impractical sandals, her pink feet cooked and trussed like meat on the bone. conjunctive lull of afternoon, a haze around the houses. the busses stink, inside and out. a boy with pushpin spots, his face an angry mass of geo-tags. today you were wide-eyed and roundly abusive, ahab on adrenaline. captain of the absolute, or infinite. you have the profile of some roman general, embossed against the light. conquest is a currency. the dying understand this. immortalise your sneer in gold upon an obol. or do not ask to be remembered, close your eyes.
memory tends ticklish and i can’t stop thinking: every roving focus, every slow dissolve. i’m sitting in saint saviour’s, amateur catholic that i am. the evening lends itself to genuflections and to reveries. the saints all have the gridlocked middle-distance stares of drivers in rush hour traffic. they cannot help me. i close my eyes, reconstruct your oddly kiltered speech. were you trying to tell me something? death dangles juicelessly, posturing over its melancholies, pointing them east like warheads. this misery is too tactical to be quite sincere. a ministry of paranoias. this feeling will not be avoided or embraced. there is no progress, only repetition, the bossy logic of disease. and this afternoon i do believe that all the wet brains on the ward were weeping, choreographed like a fifties musical. the mind rises up on stilts like a festival funny man. the mind and its half-baked circus skill-set. i have nothing left to offer. i am bowling for bright ideas. every thought is a ninepin, meticulously skittled.
cry me a river. i couldn’t come today. i couldn’t make myself, I mean. i got pulled under a song and stayed in bed. i couldn’t row myself to shore. now i’m getting coffee. girl i’m getting coffee from has an undelighted laugh. my last-ditch dirty jokes. her mouth is a blunt red pulse, wide and round with a new wound’s promising succulence. i always liked to let my doom off its lead in a crowded room. i know that you do too. did. it’s five o’clock, and the past tense is a distinct possibility. i want to run away forever, but i have no home to run from. i have £1:36 in change. there is no one to meet and nothing left to buy. there is no respite from the ethicless work of leaving, of being left. spineless ideation, and i said every disappointment’s like the first – slurring favour, squealing thrill – like love. and I said i don’t want to catastrophise... but i do. i want the salty river’s lick, a sleek limb in a silver gauntlet, carry me away, cry baby blue. i no longer expect better of people, have i said that already? i rage a lot. fathomless father, never one more worthy of the blame. i know you didn’t ask for this, but i have clipped your silhouette and pasted it up among the stars on my ceiling between the bank robbers squaddies, hunger artists. day by day your body looms, becomes ominous, prodigiously unappeased. i have been here before. and i understand mania’s treacherous energy, how it is to be young, a stripling suitor to a living end you never bargained for, with all your brilliant schemes gone glittering up through a wet slit in your reason. once and future enfant terrible of the london underground, i know how it is to live by maladjusted tumult, black amusement, six a.m., when you cannot confront the former self you’re shadow of. i wish that knowing knit things back together. as it is i’m slaking my slack mouth on prayer’s brazen nectar. i think that pain might be your last great ostentation. playing the dane in a dunce’s cap, a tricorne hat, half smiling. the moon is a tinfoil fascinator tonight, worn rakish in your honour. you are like the poor, you will always be with us. we resemble each other. you were a warrior, once, you’d grin and sink your teeth into any young and strutting error. my sorrow is a shore where things wash up. i wallow the received wisdom of the water, awaiting the change that is bound to come.
in all my sad dreaming, where the sky is excessively sapphire; butterflies are fickle hinges, joining the world to the world. and i run my hand over the cow and feel her future meat singing through her flesh. as we climb the declining light like a ladder to the tor, to the car, to the fort above the bay my memory has muddled this: the rain's tedious directionality, sleep's defeatist monotone, a man flourishing his misery like a royal flush. in all my sad dreaming, and the hillside hugs the heather to her superstitious bosom. people, their strenuous pity, my tears, at twelve, a long, silver brocade that runs from nose to wrist. my unhappiness is too robust, puny yet indelicate, and no one can feel true sympathy for such an ugly child. i think of it now, the sky above us like an olympic swimming pool, and i feel no pain. i could stay out here forever, the loose stars led astray in my telescope's lens, but i won't. a woman on a lichened bench coddles her pungent son, inhaling solvent gusts of him, showing him the broad and untranslated country: sudden drops, the sweet amoral promise of the spring. she doesn't say one day this will all be yours. she says you belong to the land, because he does and so do we. in all my sad dreaming. i have let love lapse like an inherited religion. until the old woman spoke i had forgot i loved you first. forgetting, in fact, is that of which my love consists. to be fatherless, to find no place for us among history's other spike banishments. in the back of my mind someone is always asking how was this english broken, and who has broken it? please, sir, it was like that when i got here. someone told me that you were beautiful. they used the word stupendous. they said your face necessitated websites. at a forum i went to men with the practised impersonal courtesy of airports wore t-shirts with your likeness on, your eyes are huge, your cheekbones embellished by infection. like a model. no, like something you might whittle out of green wood. in all my sad dreaming. i come to the country precarious, tugging my ritual fringe. war doesn't horrify people half as much as the possibility that all wars will end forever. the president, bellowing his rapt decree into a camera. it's late now and wakefulness is horrifying. out here i feel we might mistake flight for strong drink and swallow bluebirds, blackbirds, starlings, unmappable galaxy, augury, omen. our deaths await us like our unmade beds, fit to shame us. i loved you first. i cry for the little you belong to me, for having no name with which to orchestrate my own imperfect summons. if you'd come, here and now, out of the night, on the winding path above the headland, not beautiful, ambiguously derelict, and recognise me as your own. i'm far away now from the stupid ceremonious ecstasies of crowds. raise your arms to me, open my mouth pull the english out of me like silk scarves, like an infected tooth, give me a word for when naming fails us, something to call you. glory o, glory o.
a horned moon and the eye slides vacant / summer arranges her eyesores / backaches / agues / you speak / with the sullen frailty of a child / you were asleep / i was saying the rosary / a burlesque learnt by heart / gaunt syllables of prayer / a novena / to saint rita / to saint martin / to saint agnes / how you fill yourself / up with yourself / small god / the palm of your hand / flat / against the window's shivering grain / furtive faces of the holy family / sanctified operatives / in a cold war / against logic / the body / and no one / the tottering stink of the half-starved unwashed / bright distemper of an august day / outside / a stumbled acre / coltsfoot and meadow grass / small green spaces courting / london's small brown dogs / touched in the terrain / you are / nettles and feathers / a hurt luck you flaunt and brood upon / by turns / and you were awake / and the mouth gapes juicelessly / waits to discover its function / then threshes its waking / with curses / old men rehearsing / their sooty mortalities / sat in the garden / pussy me / my cigaretteless leanings / they came by their disasters honestly / omnivorously abject / in the blunt convulsing light / of some know-nothing era / axes gambol toward / their respective necks / fond / and then devoured / that's how it goes / what a world / i should know / from the people who brought you weaponised malnourishment / who hang their wants like medals / who cringe in cells like white cresses / wasting / yes / what a world / inversely proportionate / shadow of you / our conversation / reeking / gnawed on / the bedrock loosens / and you gather your teeth like amulets / disassembled / unassembled you / i cannot mourn enough to meet this silence half way / return / to my time honoured agony / to crisis and reprisals / bread so dear / life so cheap / and the drug / waiting like some downright retribution / the fucking streets are awash with it.
