January 2009
13 posts
For Paul
The other day when you were cleaning out your room you found an old birthday card I made for you. It was made of a strip of paper, folded into a concertina pattern, on which I’d drawn a snake. Inside is a poem. I remember making it for you, in granny and grandad’s house, using their exotic, foreign crayons. I’m nowhere near you anymore. You told me this on the phone. You said it’s the best card...
“And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes,...”
– Shklovsky
It’s 12:35 and Parsley is drunk.
She rings me up and talks about junk.
I had a very bad day but it’ll be alright.
All you need is sleep for a little insight.
“Full truth is deeper than articulation. We find it hard to recognise this...”
Just A Dream
What is Paris to her? It isn’t “The City Of Love” to her, although love has everything to do with it. It isn’t romantic. She wrote a small poem about it in her diary. I remember that, but only a few images remain of a whole-
The sink in my bathroom looks like a crème caramel,
The stairs drip,
The Eiffel tower’s ugly face leers out from the riverside,
…something about the weight of the...
Illness
Back to basics.
Back to life or death.
A creature has crawled into the tissue in my neck
And laid eggs which grow and consume the dying pink flesh around them.
I hibernate in tuna sandwiches and music
That hums through my thick ears.
In a way it makes me happy.
It slows me down.
The termites in my sinus’s whisper in my frustrated head.
Take your time, take your time.
One of these bugs will kill me...
Weather (For Bex, sorry it's a bit rushed!)
God’s run out of colours by now.
The end of the year, and the wild blues have been
exhausted. Sunshine yellow is empty. Grass green’s
tube is rolled up like a snail’s shell. Even blood red is
only remnent in the shrivelled copper birch.
All that’s left is Lowry’s palette.
-
A thick fog has descended on the street.
This is the stuff of horror movies.
The black...
In the dark, I finally found it.
Addictive Personality
The city is a magnet.
It sucks in all the junk, the metal, the people, the sound.
I am dragged feet first, toes itching.
The ancient wisdom of landowners and cotton manufacturers,
Interpreted the gravitational pull decades ago,
Rooting their tall brick houses deep into the earth.
Only these and the leviathan trees resist the force.
The grip is evident in the arching pavements, the potholed...
Happiness II
You always did want me to write you a love poem.
Your small insecurities gathered, like crawling blood vessels
In your pinked anxious eyes, as though my words would
Prove something to you. As if.
If only you knew of the poems I traced out
On your tongue.
Did you not hear, the sonnets, hidden
Between the gasps of my laughter?
The endless ballads that sung in my footfalls as
We walked side by...
And
And haha, sparkley taxi because he has taken time to wind tinsel around the handles and the framework. What a joy! And it is worth all the money in the world to be endlessly cold and then have a man drive you in the warmth all the way home. Human beings are lovely. And I don’t need to talk to him, he will just take me anywhere if I give him enough of my pieces of metal that personally mean...
Happiness
“It’s behiiiiiind you!”
Stop asking, clown.
Turn around and look.