Tuesday 21 June 2011

Holloway

A magpie cleans itself on his folium.
The clouds are careful among icebergs.
Apples green like erotic buds. The air shifts
In fractal choreography,
Freshening the fingers of the root.
Branches bend their hips like Hindu dancers.
For a moment a stillness comes with a glance of sun,
The wind pausing for a replete note of rest,
Before the city's saxophone blast.

We don't prepare for our passing.
We swallow our joys whole, forgetting to chew
Between each mouthful of light. We want
Salt and bitter citrus, treacle,
Instead of the slow malt aftertaste
Like paintwork on our curious tongue.
We want a shudder not love. Pressure not touch.
We think beauty is locked in the eyes and lips,
Not the toes, shoulder blades and armpits.
Our passions are gaseous light, suction lusts.
We neglect the wood fire chakras,
The slow cackle of heat and burn.
As a woman's soul cannot be traded,
A man's cannot be bartered or plumed.
Closeness is still theater, the body proscenium.

Thursday 9 June 2011

Riddle

Each kiss speaks its own poem.
Each touch is that of a sculptor,
Pressing his fingers into the wet world,
Smoothing out new forms of corporeal truth.
It is not a response to beauty. It creates it.
It is chivalrous, a defiance
In the face of infinities.
Even in madness, it finds new tactics.
It is not baffled by emptiness,
But sees loneliness as a possibility.
Sadness excites it, like a gorgeous, dirty city.
All noise becomes music. All hatred, a reason to live.
At its purest, it is furious.
More dreadful than a battle between two suns.

Wednesday 8 June 2011

Love Is No Refuge

Love is no refuge
It is no tonic.
It is no drug, distraction
Or anti-psychotic.
Love, like autumn’s bitterness,
Is inescapable, a disease,
A trap.

You know love
By its viper tooth,
By its bite,
By the nightmare rush
That turns the heart to white.
Love is not precious,
Not like diamonds, like childbirth
Or Liberty’s blood.

Love is launched, not born.
Love is hurled like desert bombs,
Mindless erupting dust.
Love is not political,
It does not keep loyal to a promise,
Love is volatile,
A violation of trust.

Love is pure self-indulgence.
Christ-like narcissism.
Love is Jihad,
A destroyer of worlds.
Love cuts and sucks
Like some leaf of poison.
Love worms itself
Into the body’s rivers,
Staining its bones
And ruining its waters.

Love is wrong, awkward.
A terrific sleeplessness.
Love knows no beauty
But prefers to be alone,
Tasting each jolt of sickness
That lingers
Swallowing its words
Till its throat burns.

I Am That I Am

Performer

Summer light like celluloid
Slips in strips through the
Bull-red curtain. Rain
Still resonant, as the walls
Are bleached a plague of blue.

Poems, scraps of mold
And food, stick-men sketches,
Traces of ambitious boyishness
Ripped aside in a lonely raucous.
Music impatient in a sexless dust.

Late evening weeps stones
Of daylight's rebellion.
Beauty's teasings dry on the tongue
Like sand. Hope buried in arid panic.
The room sweats a porcine humour.

Sunday 5 June 2011

Intimate City

The blood wings of the dusk
Unwrap on clouds of regal purple
And its fruit flashes peek
Between unruffled branches.
She sits exhausted in the umbrageous hush
Legs twisted, her boots touching,
Leather upon leather,
And her elephant ivory neck fresh
Under red flocks
Resting on her shoulder like
October petals.

*

It rained all day.
Such percussive confidence.
A damp, cloggy wool clotted the sky.

Off Tottenham Court Road
Above the record shops and burger places
And the air-dried street,
There is a pungent cloud of excited pink,
Proud against a spirited blue,
The awakening colours of Shangri-la,
The sky is the Buddha's belly.
This outburst masks the traffic's fuss,
And like a sacred word it reveals itself
To oblivious tourists, proles and alcoholics
Who see nothing but fox-shadows.

*

At the Cafe Metro and Electric Ballroom
The skanks and bints track the piss-wet tarmac.
Gaunt couples with oiled heads
Hide in each others' fondles.
The pavement is laced
With fag grease and paper-shit,
Sirens whistle in violence
Through the human flood.
The air's metallic perfume
Mixes with sweet leaf poison
And from the cars and bars
Boosts a music failing to mimic
Thunder.
From the trucks and the buses
A halogen luster smears like finger-paints
Over the moisture of the night.
A soupy swill from the fried chicken shop
Spills towards the drain, on a street
Liquored damp with muck and chilli sauce.

Three in the morning and
London breathes in bulbous breaths.
A cold, aural glow - silence, amplified.
The pregnant current betrays the
Predatory groans of jungle interchange,
The collaborative voice
Of infinite, exhausted narrative.
A cross-wire, insect silk
Of the same recursive, overlapping
Thought.

*

There are times when even the wind can't
Get between us.
When the sanctity of death is our shared space
And the city's glitter our palette.
But then there are times when even Eden's trumpet
Dies on your ears, and your beauty becomes a fortress.
Our art forks, like a leaf spine,
And your heart's lenses become spikes of glass.