you are a fool for the figures of beauty.
walk the painted line,
walk for painted love,
watch your heels sinking
into flaking facades.

you will try to write the saddest words,
rearrange them in chemical disarray;
learn,
draw your distance,
for honesty is still
your greatest weakness.

but if you keep on moving,
you will feel yourself breathing-
and that will do,
for the time being.


06.10

To some level I was always your sinless survivor,
thrust heartfirst by amateurish palms.
The dull tapping on your bonnet
that reminds you again of children’s tales.

Like before, I had stolen your tongue,
coiled your vocal cords around my ring finger
between old silver and worn bone,
and wrote songs in minor keys
about other people’s lives,
and other people’s obsessions.

That day the earth completed,
I found some quiet beauty
(curled around my fingertips with her’s)
of immovable, obsidian grace,
and smoky perfumes borne of a liquid haze.
Under lighter nights, her reflection
calls back with the curled lips of the nymph-girl,
St Theresa of the ivies with the pressed lavender shawl,
still transfixed by those strands, yet
the air tastes different, drier than before.

and the softly held, the echo
of renaissance cafes and lipstick prints-
like carmine butterflies, blood wings, that
I did not need yet, just to lean in closer,
to the silvers and lilacs, vignetted by boyish hands,
curled at the eye in a toy spyglass;
polished, primed.

Now the threads you pulled along the beginning
are dusty, latched, tugging on dulled nerves and
old capillaries, resonating through artery walls
whilst blood flows lukewarm regardless,
still strumming to a hoarse rhythm,
to still my coughing
and hold me alive.

06.10

I took a black and white photo of you
not so long ago,
and since then your ghost has faded
into memory, into grain and rust, slipping
through the cartier-bressons,
their humble sepulchre too grey for your skin,
yet elusive, lightfooting
further afield, with the mapplethorpes strewn
bare at your feet, wrung by your ankles.
your image still lies, unfolded,
dog-eared like an old journal page
with coffee stains intact,
and I’m still searching for your face.

deja vu

awake. mind, dried to concrete,
chipping brickwork serenading pillows,
grazing your cheeks, brow,
like shattered confetti;
at some saturnine rite,
in some macabre vernacular.

still your mother's son.
but perhaps you will find youself
taller than her,
and older,
with lighter steps.

white. sunrays, drench me deep
and wash me of memory.
a dry stinging on tired skin
to remember your silhouette.

some days,
you could use a little less
deja vu.

to sleep

Wry smiles.
How the music begins to make sense,
Startling, once-elusive.

For whatever is said
Towards the beginning,
It is easier for some.

He had watched their space,
Cast it with their shade,
Reached for their light.
He had watched somebody else’s breakdown.

For God’s sake,

to sleep.


05.10

smokeless room.

Smokeghost visitings,
strong ephemeral hands, twice now.
I could not be held upright.

I had no answers when they asked,
grinned back through heavy haze because
I honestly did not know.

And I said then
that I could live forever
in fifteen minutes,
and I still could-

Give me a smokeless room,
Dylan,
a clove cigarette.
Just long enough for a third playthrough
of tangled up in blue.

I am still collecting
cuttings and trash,
to find something with sense,
scrawled there on the handle,
in a dire need of clairvoyance,
to slip under the door,
before it sinks
past.


05.10

muse

Can you remember the last time
you cried, for anyone in particular?
Hands have held you, shaken you, scores of
pale wrists, empty ribcages under anaesthetic,
and with numbness overflowing, you’ve cleared your vision
to find Rome burning in cluttered silence.

You’ve never felt this close to drowning,
nor felt so sure that it was for real this time;
that she would stay to whisper to you
every one of your truths.

Who is she?
To find a face and utter a name
would be to climb into lucid clarities
too much for you to bear
for any number of tomorrows.

You will cease to function,
to exist,

on the day you find your muse.

05.10