1945

Child-lonely now, the worn spirit next to me fades to near-nothing,
offers only the irregular accident of skin glancing
against skin: an ancient, bone-dry, sly indifference.

The pregnant bathroom is down there on the second floor
(or maybe the first), mocking still, and this darkness is death-total,
his refusal to let me belong here crying out clear, pure, exquisite.

No clocks are left to remind me of the life we live in daylight,
so I count thoughts for a choked age in the aphotic
silence and then stop, frightened, as he turns over,

feeling the familiar please-don’t-wake terror as he snores gently
for two breaths. And then, ungentle, there’s a snort and a groan,
sneer and resignation, so id-spilling that I whisper ‘Shut. The. Fuck. Up.‘

And he wakes then, almost, stares up with those eyes, smiles,
then rushes back to the other place, the place that lies outside our worlds,
the fictive place that fires the rage. I tread down through damp caves

to the bathroom.

 

 

 

 

Party Haiku

The old social club
Sweet words about someone else
Can’t belong to me

 

 

Letter To Leonardo’s Nemesis

I wonder what you did, Jaco, the night after you slipped it in? Excuse the Carry On, mate,
but it’s so, so hard (I think you’d love it, really, all this provocation and obfuscation and casuistry,

all the apparent embracings of Flesh and Soul,
but it was so, so, so long ago: who knows what really happened?)

Yes. I understand you, amico, all the fears and the squirming please-me’s and the need
to stand upright and proud – and as for that man with the money and the wit and a thousand kinds

of madly-rational genius? You fucked him and then they – and you – tried to drown him in
spit and spite and sneer. Yeah: you dropped your treachery into the tamburo and they took innuendo back

to its sweat-stained birthplace with cruelty and with cold envy. And you know what?
No-one remembers you, yet he’s been beatified. I guess you got what you wanted.

 

 

Blimey. Really?

 

I don’t want to sentimentalise or romanticise or idealise (or feel the need to change every ‘z’ to an ‘s’) and I don’t want to envy these kids sat next to me, floppy-haired and talking about ‘old school drum ‘n’ bass’ (or be gloomily heroic) and I don’t want to want to be younger or thinner or richer (or wade into swamps of cliche or trite self-helpness) and I don’t want to have a guilty predilection for Desperate Housewives (or watch another comedy panel show) and I don’t want to be able to write poems like Larkin or sing like Aretha or pass like Modric (or be on this train) and I don’t want to feel contempt for the unimaginative and the sour and the bitter (or stare at the blank canvas of the rest of my life) and I don’t want to regret or to ache or to need (or change too much)
                                                  I don’t.

 

Difference

Turbanned and compact
Evil-spinning, googly-wristing
Aliens who seem better than us
At everything

They appear over Tucker’s
While the white kids sniff glue
And they beat us, hammer us
Back down

And we admire them
As we envy them,
Take our balls home
And, carefully, secrete our fear