The world’s a fist,
         I shatter into the night
As stars… burning out
My mind is going, I can feel it.

You didn’t, did you, Sarah?
Empty my womb?
I can’t hear you for this deafening…
            Asylum tiles and the sound of flushing
Trust is arid in my belly
(I pass you the sugar, two lumps you take
The sky is blue and there’s a rose on the table)
I love you, Sarah, hear it?
You can tell me, tell me the punchline.
Lips on a teacup,
            Spreading for milk-whites
Splitting your face in cracking wrinkles;
My body is alone, Sarah…

       - - - - - - - -

Lust is under conversation in the
            Beating of an eyelash,
Words wave the air, bending around
            Lines; chaotic with meaning,
Ptosis
Demi-Gods, we become of ourselves,
Then ignore what we’re given

Danny Boy leans,
            Muscles tasting his bones
“I have something to tell you”
Want is within me
Like whiskey on my breath
Ptosis
Your hair, Danny Boy,
            Droops like nectar,
With shimmering of arboreal lights
(A fire in a clearing)

Sensitive fingertips of stubble
            Dance of Dryads.
I’m losing myself in you, Danny Boy,
Something secret’s in my mouth…

A bottle passes from hand-to-hand
Ptosis
“I’ve had a good time tonight”
A lip curls
            With a thousand Mediterranean ships,
Juvenal expressions

Then clicking a doorhandle
            Is in your fingertips now
And horizons, pull down the sun
            Like God’s eyelid.
I wish I were more of a man.

       - - - - - - -

Pats on the head, back patting,
The patter of serious intentions,
Tang on the tongue with the coffees
Curled, folded around subjects
As tablecloths stained
            Brown stains, After-Eight,
Paris in a cigarette.

Mr.Umbridge suffers another word
            With Jamie, skipped
Across the tabletop like ice
            Smelling of pot-pourri
Though neither have ever smelt
            Like humans
If they exist it isn’t there
With their hands amongst the menus,
The hovering ring-fingers,
No, they are vibrations plucked
            On harps in their heads.

Swan feathers in the breath
            Of a sigh curdle,
As Jamie hints at faux pa
(Still fingers cut the air with
   A butterknife, slipping a scone
   Into Umbridge’s pursed lips
Their wallets beat in their chests)

The sunlight pales on pastel
As a wagon trundles past,
Coffee vapours roll wavelike in the wind
And Paris is in their cigarettes.

        - - - - - -

Mountains swelter, surround…
Fiji, Prometheus; eyes of Homer (look)
The book opens at a page
Black lettering, white canvas,
“It’s all too much”

Winston lips a black coffee
Café Negro
Could have been served by
            Zora Neale Hurston
Head in hands, fingers ensnaring like the parasols
Around that rise like Pantheons

The language of names
Tweet in Greek; birds
Eat the crumbs around his feet
Effortless as radar
“Where to begin?”
Growing a sixth sense
            To hear history

The mountains of books leer,
            Imitating bricks
To be shouldered dustily back
To the library, in sacks, coffee beans
Have foreign, effortless names

It must look funny
(the waitress smiles and her jeans twist at her rump)
Sugar, Coffee Beans, Working Women,
And a black man with Churchill’s name…

      - - - - -

“I’m not happy”
The gaps, it’s senseless;
Without.

And the hole inside wriggles,
    A fishhook
“Not again” wasted moments
“Not again” unto breaches
Fighting on beaches

Experiments in skipping the void
…In dancing the pure line…
In between Madness and Beauty;
It’s a patronising
“And…”

Work: (whispers) “I think its time to call it a day on this one chaps,
               I’m not happy, but then who is, eh?”

You’re going to die out there


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