Poemapologiser 1

Despair

Do I feel my body?

The blood flowing.

The heart beating.

My window is a picture,

The tops of trees;

The sky;

Full and green,

Heavy lilac blue…

Your skin under my fingers,

Your ribs hard under that skin.

A photograph a poem a painting,

Can you see how

I could make any of those

From everything.

Rock sand glass

Rocks and glass

Glass sand rock

Glass and rock.

I adore the bruises you bestow

With your milk white teeth

The blue veins thrill

At your wrist.

Anxiety got the better of me,

In the kitchen I fell

Onto slate,

And did not get up.

Till you found me.

Wrapped arms around me.

Nothing in your eyes but

Compassionate confusion.

The Makers Wife

Coins of cool copper skin

Dress her skull.

In a further truth of years,

Those known in youth

Would not recognize her

Head bowed,

But would flicker recognition

At a raised face,

Staring eyes.

The eyes that shivered them.

The young men shiver.

The young women shiver.

The eyes that laughed

That cried

That danced

And sighed,

At word of trust-

At sights now dust-

And stirred their lust,

For one touch,

Just one touch.

A touch.

He tired in her

A cosmology

A need to trace the form

Of air currents

And constellations

Of the cold sky and the warm

In her belly stirred

A translucent limb,

An ivory army

That wavered and fought

With its military

Molecules netted then –

Whitely stopped their course.

Redly and raggedly began her grief,

He howled down the moon

And gnashed his sculptor’s teeth.

He became nought but a shadow

She all but a cloud,

They danced a shady route

Through lonely light,

Accepting the blows

Of wind and of doubt,

Allowing the world to winkle them out.

Display the shapes of memory

In photographs never shot,

Forcing them to accept

Synchronicity,

Duplicity

And an air of constant rot.

He moulded iron as stars,

She cast word as stone.

He slept in tar and feathers

As she lay on bleached leaves.

Crackling.

Rain shudders down,

Her walls are sand and board.

The air oppresses decency

And she cries out to them all-

Shuffling down the corridor.

The shadow of a man

Who spent his youth in the pursuit

Of being . . .

Their love grew like an orchard.

Barren it chewed

For years.

Fat and twisted roots

Fed on soil and fallen rotten fruits.