Forget Sentiment

Sometimes
you pour your heart out
in to a few empty tea cups
to see how it settles and warms.

Sometimes you chew
on the remnants of days
to taste their dull bitterness again.

Clouds pass
and rain falls in the garden.
The wind whispers her name
and you fall asleep
knowing that it isn’t for pity
but for a brighter sense of the world
that you strive everyday.

Spreading out a map of the world,
you colour in all the places
you’ve been in your dreams.
Paris is deep blue
and all the southern states
are gently shaded in pastels.
The coasts have been highlighted
so that they’re slightly heavier.

This poem that you have been writing
is filled with too much of her.
It imprints the ominous outline of her smile
and pulls the strands out of you one by one.

Forget history.
Forget sentiment.
Perhaps some things were meant
for you alone. To hold and harden
like the brightest diamond.

Love as a Metaphor for Life

January days are wet
and love-soaked,
like my heart.

Walking for hours:
god’s face appears
as a carpenter or
a stonemason.
A magician
or the dead.

Calmly removing raisins
from the sky, words splash
against my awkwardness,
leaving it bare and
essential.

Maybe it wasn’t you,
per se. Maybe you were
just an instrument. A
vessel for my fear.

Corners are crooked
and dark. Decisions
are easily made and
quickly regretted.
The day begins again.
And you weep for the end
of it, every night for the
rest of your life.

Cropped Photos Only Show Smiles

On and on
night after night, it continues
Like a toothless saw
against hard wood,
just getting more
jagged and broken.

Twenty two years of
bottled aggression,
monogamy and
indecision.
Testing the faith
of every fresh young face,
every heart not yet
crippled from
the weight of the world
and the length of
the road ahead.

And if this all
does indeed lie
ahead of us,
the way it does
in bad films
and tv specials,
why is it so difficult
to forget your face?

Midnight.

I look into the white eyes
of the purest of girls,
the purest of women.
She turns her face away in scorn
as words wash over me,
Making small incisions in my tongue,
in the spaces between my teeth.

In my mind,
all the wide open spaces of my heart
are as fields seen from the windows of a car.
I am driving with people
whose language I do not speak
and who’s faces and feelings
I will never understand.
Not in a million months of tears.

Their hands
which are covering their mouths
are nailless
and pockmarked.
Their mouths,
toothless and hollow.

But I have been bleeding all this time
and now my face
is empty too,
and pale like the faces of
the purest of girls,
the purest of women.

 

Untitled

‘Cos dreams are full of
long lost friends
and good days come to
weary ends.
And while I may have danced
and thrown my head back in delight,
it wasn’t me you loved
that night.

Break me to small parts.

In the days of your blue mistakes
I would lie open eyed and disconsolate
repeating events behind my eyes.
Nothings on the end of my tongue.

And now.

Now I creep from room to room
looking for something I’d thought not lost.
Hoping and praying and not knowing
one inch.

With
each person
each new word
I look for the stilling of my restless heart.

Stilled times and speeding trains.

Rushing backwards to you,
hundreds of miles of hours.
Through the greyed glass
all the clouds are layered
and distinct,
hiding the sky.

The people in their
oddly shaped houses,
their oddly shaped faces
looking not seeing.

This time is so tasteless
and bland, all those neutral
colours and corners.
Where are your subtle textures,
the slight minty coolness of your lips,
the warmth of your breast?

When words have no effect.

This is a view of you in your dark green glasses
from the little photographic plate
inside my head.
Your tight freckles
humming along,
and your short hair
that I stupidly felt the need to explain.

You’re a painter and a poet
and better than me
and I don’t blame you.
I deserve this empty house
I’m sure.

But the more I look at this little globe
and the long, dark, slick expanse
of the wet courtyard in front of me
the more I feel my distance from you.
I’ve never missed someone’s hands more.

If it weren’t raining so hard
in the small green overgrown garden out my window
I’d go outside
and hang my heart out on a rose bush to dry,
because if you looked you’d see
that it’s raining pretty heavily
in here too.

Trouble.

I had the thought to
slide my face up against
the hot, rough skin of the tree that grows in our front yard,
jagged brown bark,
and maybe tear a hunk of it off.

A lump of steaming flesh with that
glistening yellowey fat
shorn right off.
I would stare stare stare.

Actually I think it would more resemble
some whiting flesh.
All feathery and soft and cold and silvery
and quivering.
I’m not pink inside.
I’m not a seeping red.

I can imagine
how I’d feel with
such a large chunk of me
missing.

This is the voice.

This is the voice that the plane makes
as it wades through the cloud.
A turmulous dull roar that you know and need.
Its flight is like join-the-dots.
One to ten.
There’s no difficulty about it
except not killing everyone on board
and a few on the ground too
of course.

This is the voice that I make
as I sit here on my drawing perch.
It’s cold and I’m confused.
Looking at planes all day seemed like just the thing to do
an hour ago.
I have too many choices, it would seem.
Like join-the-dots without the numbers.
So I whine and complain
and my passengers never get anywhere.
Where were they going in the first place?