February 2012
16 posts
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon...”
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth (via mango-lassi
)
Poetry 365: To You, Frank O'Hara →
What is more beautiful than night and someone in your arms that’s what we love about art it seems to prefer us and stays if the moon or a gasping candle sheds a little light or even dark you become a landscape in a landscape with rocks and craggy mountains and valleys full of sweaty…
2 tags
8 Count - Charles Bukowski
from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
my typewriter is
tombstone
still.
and I am
reduced to bird
watching.
just thought I’d
let you
know,
fucker.
3 tags
The Interchangeable Nature of Literature and Life...
There is a crushed ant on the rim of the bathtub
and you ignored it, too busy brewing remedies
in a disconnected kettle, the tepid water or the
temperature aging you falsely. Get any deeper,
and you’ll contract something venereal.
There are magic tricks and then there is chemistry
and there is the inert. Life is a game of scrabble.
Words are other words and other paradoxes.
You understand the...
3 tags
"One seems to become a myth, a fabulous creature...
- T. S. Eliot
2 tags
The normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes. There’s also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills, like a god. It is the ordinary made beautiful, it is also the average made lethal. Normal is the indispensable murderous god of health and I am his priest.
- Martin Dysart, Equus
“If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet.”
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (via thisusernamesucks)
3 tags
placements
It seems that time to you is less
significant than mine –
in parallels
failing, flailing parallels
your love is a hermit crab.
I know that
when I asked to see the pleats
of the horizon (the points of the sky that are
decimalized and rounded, rotund to the point of
a sideways glance)
at once you became it:
embrace the sea
and it shall enfold.
There is no matter of impermeability to
an...
2 tags
“MELANCHOLY. Sign of a refined heart and elevated mind.”
– Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (via sonofapritch)
5 tags
3 tags
On life.
In being,
we are pieceing together
li(v)es
from confetti disasters,
gluttons
both ill and curious
and tiny plagues of momentary
indicies;
flushes of rouge.
The good as rats on warfarin
are dealt with in ones,
twos, threes
but when they wash in
like the tides
even your lungs will fill.
You drown.
Contrast is lost in the froth,
in the very spit, of a
joyful monotony.
And...
4 tags
Four Quarters of Fifteen Minutes in the Suburbs
I.
If Happiness is
the one conversation to which
the pylons aren’t privy
then Sadness
must be the silent tapdance
of the blackbirds
on the faceless concrete.
II.
I’m crucified on the melting
pyres of a six o’clock sunset.
Will you resurrect me at the
traffic lights?
III.
Notions, maxims, axioms
all hung up on the radiator
have fermented
in the dirty weeks of...
3 tags
punctuation is used when something ends but I'm...
days knock together like dominoes
a false fluidity with each jilted dive
to the ground my brains chattered
inside my bones because
without definition the colours
bleed like I never have or could scab
red and swill brown life and death
aren’t really different matters they are simply
an avoidance of their counterpoint
so we exist in cycles bumping
onwards like flat tyres because...
January 2012
11 posts
4 tags
I couldn't give you an ending but I'll start it...
The light was sinking sand
and it devoured the postcard
night
.
and us as moths,
diligent moths,
falling at each others
fingertips.
.
You ordered coffee
and I declined:
two milk, two sugar.
.
We settled somewhere familiar
tentatively at first
.
I think because routine is religion
and that’s something finite.
.
If we’d jumped under a bus
or from the cliffside,...
4 tags
Green
Rebellion is juvenile entanglement.
Skirts are rolled
And lips stained red
to conceal pleura
poisoned
black.
.
(but they won’t understand
because they skipped eleventh
grade biology).
.
Isn’t the real rebellion in
proper uniform?
.
And like rabbits, blind to
the color that infiltrates the system
as the whim of megalomania,
If the Wizard likes green
All of Oz will wear Emerald.
.
I thought...
3 tags
Tug-OF-War
Stumble forwards (backwards?)
lurching
wretching
spilling
into the air without time to catch
though the rope still burns
Self-spun
- wasn’t it?
Or was it a hangman
masked against his own recognition
We only fall in evenings
because the windows are mirrors.
Opacity, boundless in its own right, is
understood badly.
So, yes.
It was.
The pages embrace,
publically...
3 tags
wait
It’s like time melts
and disappears
down
the gratings in the pavement
before it has a time to pass
and the pennies scatter
directionless
and break the air
with scabby optimism
disappearing
5 tags
This Winter is Warmer than Last
The snow is not settling
and this year I am glad
because it won’t stain the
suede of my boots.
Where I grew up,
the possibilities of a white winter
were, at best, flatulent.
I knew about possibilities because,
when I was eleven,
or maybe ten,
I won the lottery in the very
loosest sense of the word:
A lump sum of £47.
Fourty-seven,
or maybe fourty-eight,
trips to the corner...
3 tags
Between us,
there is more than phonetic
similarity.
On a brighter day,
I could’ve choosen a more
original vice.
But today
the pomegranites were on sale.
5 tags
I’ve never seen my eyes so green.
Whoever labelled the colour
with jealousy
seems fairly cruel
but probably correct.
The walls are hollow dividers
and not brick at all
A power tool shrieks blue murder
whilst I smother mine red.
together the room is awash
with aubergine.
My mind blushes an
alternative grey.
3 tags
Evaporation & Sublimation
The day I tried to promise
to make you tea
the silver kettle was empty
and unplugged.
Today, I poured cold water
into the teapot
and the brew
couldn’t be salvaged.
It’s alright though;
You’re gone
and I have lost my taste
for hot drinks.
3 tags
Alone with Everybody
the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there’s no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds ...
2 tags
punched-in, cuffed-out, divided, held like a...
2 tags
Listen
December 2011
26 posts
5 tags
Guy Wires
These converging lines
are not crimson ribbons
but Sangria dipped
guy wires.
.
My plaited hair supports the
mortar, but tourniquets
the plumbing, dampened
over years of adjustment
I wondered into.
.
So, when the order comes to take arms,
I’ll sit upon the century post,
Centre compass.
.
No man’s land
No man’s mercy
For a neckerchief
That is bloodstained.
6 tags
Bruises & Bedtimes: A hybrid.
Ultimately, selflessness has been my Achilles heel.
What is left now is routine. I’m drowning myself in my quotidian self-examinations, smothering my lungs with perfume and painting my lips like butterflies.
Within a week, I will be back in the blissful mundane. All I shall worry about are top buttons, bedtimes and deadlines. I shall have tea in high places, belong to an accent and play the...
5 tags
Drafting Memoires
Lucid and forgettable, now is no time to be dancing
amongst scintillas of the alien.
.
Jaunty refrigerators, livers broken and jaundiced,
Nothing puerile in motion, nor flitting.
But this, this is perusing the finite. She,
or indeed he, will know.
.
Tributaries and creeks in fond lineation
smother lovers with sails.
This chaos will become capitalized.
Peace is restless in noise...
1 tag
On really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa...
There are chances and choices - sometimes you just...
2 tags
4 tags
Homonyms
Pour gasoline or kerosene
or sewing machines
on the browning grass -
chatter chatter.
.
Treading Rhodes to canals
whipping the blinkered dawn.
Nymph, you say, or just
Nymphomania?
.
Cigarette butts sparking
untrodden bracken.
I’ll brand it with my sole.
Soul?
.
Revel in the convention
In the humeral.
5 tags
Rivers
Neatly, in crocodile lines, we’re gliding
on the burning chimera of friction.
Flying, or growling, over hyperbolized
inches embellished on paper, turning trees to
pulp, pulp to snow and snow to rivers.
Rivers to trees.
5 tags
Sunset by Dawn
On the dawn
I’ll ride a falcon
through a field of
spluttering lovers
to the precipice of
a laughing economy.
Plastic platinum
traces the
sweating palms of
lust and loathing.
Two things,
less evil than
kindess, more
demanding than
death.
5 tags
Life in Six Boxes: Part Five
Maybe this time, the waves will drown in the salt
Or suffocate from the fury of seagull hurricanes.
.
Maybe this time, we won’t carve up the oak with a
Chelsea grin and label our splintered soubriquets.
.
Lip prints and fingertips and bad prescriptions
Smeared the patio doors with which we collided,
Steeped in sibling rivalry and patent shoes.
.
And tiptoe into a left footed waltz that runs...
4 tags
6 tags
In the arms of an orchestra.
It is funny to remember our lyricism
and tiresome to forget which of
our instruments caved the swolen
crescendo. Counting the bars was
easy when we began the fugue, but
now, I only see black helium balloons
leaving with their dignity and a
broken score.
.
Tonight, no matter how I try,
I cannot tap a melody.
3 tags
To anybody who may have a spare ticket for Bon...
I will sell you my soul for it.
8 tags
Hindsight, Unrequited.
Planets to suns, moths to light, you to me
Eyes blind to each canary warning sign
Hearts fumbling through the hands of gravity.
.
Wade through crepuscular obscurity
To hazed horizons where the fires align
Planets to suns, moths to light, you to me.
.
Enamored, our hell fires seem to be
The blooming embers of the late benign
Hearts fumbling through the hands of gravity.
.
Throughout the throes of...
7 tags
Into the Fray.
One foot before another, backwards up
the aisle, the altar pegs the distance between
it and the murky white petticoats that are
sweeping up confetti. I walk.
Who would have known the invitations
were sacrificial? Not I, my very own
marble cenotaph mottled by the draughts
that caught us pulling godlike faces.
Somehow, now, I cannot tell what is ours
and what is mud or where we laid...
4 tags
Sherbet Fountains
After our quaint rendezvous, aspersions
lunging through the underworked lacuna
just like tiddlywinks, I necked another
sherbet fountain and suckled on the
ruthlessness of a licorice stick, middle
finger to the moonlight. I waited,
.
For the fall out to settle and blew
circles in the dandruff pitted from
my crystalizing scalp.
.
Was it wrong then, to tease my
cellular snow flakes in...
3 tags
As the bon iver gig in Toronto gets closer and closer, the reality that I don’t have a ticket is slowly killing me.
Sell me one someone. Please?
5 tags
Skin Deep
For all the hours spent stippling forged
zodiacs in the vapid stratospheres of your eyes,
a little temerity peppered your hypothesis
on why I read the Sunday papers.
As you guffawed, you sneezed on superficial
(who happened to be drunk and ruddy
under the kitchen table, nursing his bloody
knuckles on the spleen of the tiles).
.
He was the only one who
recognized the constellations
...