Summer

I remember
That you fell asleep as the jazz musicians played
Used my shoulder as your pillow
And floated off into dream-land behind your shades, askew.
I caught you just before you tipped
And bore your weight
Two drunks in love, but only just.

I remember
That we drove all day
You narrated, editing out my mood.
Feet up, cold coffee, warm buns and that landscape of fantasy
Your excitement more than enough for us two
You slunk out for cigarettes in newly too-baggy jeans
And my heart followed, stealthily, peeking around corners. Unseen.

I remember
That you and I walked across that city at night
Twice we disagreed, and the third time I was silent, dreaming of escape.
You explained a history only i had lived, teased me,
But at the door, caressed with such tender, tender words.
The stars were out, blinking lazily at us
Together alone.

I remember
That you promised to kidnap me and take me with you.
It was then that your shining armour seemed to fit. We
Spiralled dizzy into displays of public madness: my fingers in your trousers; your Freudian
confessions in my ears. We played tag-team against the world
And it’s nerveless wife.
And won.

Remembrances blossom
Like ink in water
Like bombs
And one sags awe-struck at the pure fact of being alive.
A simple sweetness unexpected

I do not remember
The end.
The arguments and tears and final endless silence.
That I do not remember.

Morning Scapes

I can smell Paris.
It has a smell.

I don’t want a home,
(experience has shown me).
I want places I can stay
awhile before travelling on.
I see Durham, too;
feel the things made known
around Durham boys.
An/ Their inaccessibility.

To stay in one place
is to herald a future of
depressing monotony.
Fifties sameness,
relieved only by a spot of cleaning,
a drop of gin.
I want to get up and go, and keep going.
Not stop.
To stop is to admit defeat
is to bow before age as adversity
is to welcome death.

I got Paris on my mind,
and Bible kings by extension.
Perfect days
I want to relive,
but don’t
as their perfection is only in their unrepeatable nature.

Paris – a blur of colours, metro-stops, journeys, graveyards, internet-cafés. And break-ups.
Of night walks along the Seine;
dancing on pavements outside art galleries;
apologies from the man who blocked his own shot; and
photos;
photos;
photos.

Oh, beautiful past! Come back to me!

Poem From A Hammer To Heidegger

I am
ready-to-unhand you.

REMEMBER THE KIKUYU 16

‘My son was due to be in college on Monday, but on Tuesday we buried him. He was a good boy, not violent, scared of violence.’ – Robert Miriha, retired schoolteacher, father of Patrick.

Dutch silence-offenders
giggle into their conversation;
not a flaxen hair
on their beautiful heads
out of place.

How can there be laughter too,
and you?

Seven Hours from Oslo

The train eases into motion
slow and unassuming
as a lover leaving softly with the dawn.
It is your kiss I never got
that I remember now.

A snow desert bright
so brighter than
light or faith that it should be warm.
The thought
to roll and
wrap myself in it
cannot be made illogical.

Each boy owning himself is you.

All faces stir a little
the throbbing
of a lost battle –
a slash of red
breasts perched like a mound of loose grapes
a simple, pointed look
and I can rise
as often as I must
on that crest of burning self-oblivion…

... Only to be left emptier
each time.
And bored.
The man opposite
prettier now than first imagined
would do. A certain
Nordic charm.
Instead, I think of you.

My first real loss of any value
it is only to clichés
I can turn for any truth.
To hate while loving on
without assurance of my ending
is a novel torture I permit myself to bear.
To dance, to laugh, to kiss
has never been so easy
with my heart
left just outside the door
to wile, to wait
to watch

for you.

Dreamworld

To think you can
prepare for grief,
such rawness of
eternal pain,
is folly.

It is a splinter,
crippling all in its path;
collapsing worlds in on themselves;
burning away
at what keeps us human
until we are not,
and,
like a woman scorned,
will not heal
will not fade away
will not be consoled.

Loss results,
not in mere tears,
but fear.
Paranoia, vulnerability, guilt –
a martyr’s store of emotion.
Emotions
so out-of-keeping
with the quotidian that they are
too real
to be felt.

Time may delude herself that
by passage alone
she salvages hearts, but,
sadly, is mistaken.
Humans were created not
for such protracted
suffering –
dealing only in the basic.
So we face
a simple matter of survival:
we let go, or
we wither.

Or we stumble

love-blindly

out of one day
and into the next
going in circles.

Going nowhere.

Ode to Xas

I feel trapped in the bell jar that Sylvia described.
My beauty an enemy of time.

The mirrors that surround
do nothing to reassure, but
compound a poor decision
with something worse.

I thought to shut myself off from the world.
To avoid unhappiness at all costs.
But I realise that
I am sad anyway.

I’ve found that
any emotion is better than none.
Even pain.

Death is twin to life:
if you are born, you must die;
if you are dead, you lived once.

All around me
I see remains of the life I did not live.
Of all the friends I did not make. Of all the money I did not spend.
Of all the love I let pass me by.

Thinking there would be time enough for all,
and now
there is time enough for none.

Except to smoke the cigarette that I abandoned here
before.

Phonecall

You apologise
for the fact that
your feet find new life
as you receive
an oral pathway linking
you with your begetter.

As observer, my stationary position
offers the space and
privacy necessary for
your words to connect;
as actor, you interpret me
as being left behind – an
anchor reeling distance
as intimacy between us.

Am I your mother?

Four bombs of
metallic self-righteousness
are no match for
the explosion of
uncertainty taking place.

A battle,
hearts vs minds.

With no clear winner.

Sonnet

To see you standing there for me is bliss,
I need to find a way to let you know
I’ve realised this love for what it is:
a breeze that leaves me cool when winds don’t blow.
My love for you is like a shining star
that makes the heavens glow when there’s no light;
our pulse, as one, beats whether near or far –
the dreams I dream are wrung with high delight!
My love for you, though not beyond compare,
would fare quite well with other star-crossed loves.
These feelings are so elite and so rare;
your pure spirit, heaven-bound as the dove.
And though my love’s not worldly as the day,
unlike the dawn, he shall not fade away.

The House That Was A Home

We left the house that was a home
four months ago.
Exhausted
by false promises,
little action, and anticipation -
it was a home in everything but
words during that time. The time
taken for Heart to connect with Mouth.

The boxes I never will forget.
Big, small, weak, strong – a wall of
cardboard opposition; Trojan horses
that, try as we might, we could
not close our eyes and forget
all about.
Their contents deadly only to our sanity.

As a home, it was the backdrop
to adolescent fantasies,
was the place for
arguments and imaginary confrontations
with friends, critical thinkers and the future
The bathroom,
sacred with high walls
that accepted the weight of my ambition,
was a romantic setting for
falling in love, breaking up, and
making up years later
at the work conference of
my dreams. Mirror
in its lonely place above the sink saw it all;
permitted my eccentricities and
never told: my friend.

The living room, stage to my Sophoclean
dramas, promised a naïve reflection
charity activists, media acivists, and hairy, beardy band members.
Christmas tore my heart with its
painful beauty. Already I wanted to
remain within the looking-glass.

I broke my fortune cookie, as always,
eagerly,
too eagerly – not realising that
my future
was written on the surface in the palest ink within.

Black Prostitutes and Filipino Brides

For their illicit pleasures
they select the exotic,
the different and the rare.
In this land of pale hair,
pale faces, paler politics -
such uniformity rules only
by day.

She haggles as tourists in suits grunt their wishes,
calling into the phone
for reinforcements.
The two are schoolboys again,
giggling, drooling, at the
prospect of forbidden fruit
they would not marry
but snack on nightly.

A roaring trade is done and
the small hours burst
with their music
and their laughter – Africans,
even in this Nordic place:
offering the weak of will
a sample
of post-colonial delights.

Despite his look, I am not one of them,
but still they have my vote
above the meek, mail-order
brides, shipped in
fresh off the boat
to sing for their citizenship.

No smiles,
only the blank reflection
of another’s will.
They cook, make babies, heel –
both free and not,
their souls
long sold off for a Western dream.
Ugly, balding and obese, or not.

Leave My Head Alone Brain

'Leave my head alone brain, get me through the night…'

You thought I was funny.
‘Funny-looking?’ I enquired sourly
still not knowing
how much
I liked you, but sure
that it was too much to inform you.
No, a sayer of funny things.

I played the grown-up
to your decade senior
little boy
and enjoyed it – the I
in the middle
of your
maniacally energetic storm.

Music!
And dancing
and food
and sex
became the centrepieces
of our little world
of two.
And it was enough.

Or we were.

Leaving Köln

I’m alone
after you disappear down the steps
without a backward
glance.
Packed up, strapped in, and
ready to be
temporarily transported
into our past, I pay
only negligible attention
to the negligent
safety demonstration.
My vantage point above the clouds,
offering me the feel
of an Olympian nature,
tempts more than any book – so
Rand lies forgotten.
The view is marred
only by the gift
of some poor white woman’s concealer
on my window.
CWK 90.3 S/N – this technical language
as foreign
as the German I tried vainly to recall once or twice (smiling
blankly
when it would not answer), finds
in me
a warming ignorance.
I travel to escape
myself
- never fast nor far enough. But
this you cannot understand,
your tinfoil love
following me. A declared
unromantic,
you love me anyways.
Kehhhn’t help it, you drawl.
You have you’re great
plans/friends/boyfriend,
have found the city you will die in –
something many never do (a fear I fear I feel),
but torture yourself into
an audience
for my take on Tokyo
and make me happy-sad that I gifted you Murakami.
You follow me
in a smile
across borders, cultures, language, my difficult self –
the friend to whom
I never say
goodbye.

One Day, The Words For You Will Flow.

One day, the words for you will flow,
so gentle as a curving brook;
will fall in startling sunlit drops
to meet the river-bed below.

Words framed to fit the tale we told,
we shrieked, we spilled on gin-stained shoes;
a tale we built up, dream-by-dream,
then tore down, and will not re-use.

Such small streets spied us, care-free, tread
on fingers, toes, on me, on you -
looked on, without forewarning of
the verse you spoke, which then condemned.

A lover's tale, a sisterhood
unmatched by music's free-jazz son.
We tugged our umbilical rope -
it snapped; he laughed; you fell; who won?

The price of freedom is regret;
use of a limb no longer there.
One chain thrown off; a new one wrought –
old hopes, old needs no longer met

What else but men can cause a wedge?
Corrode a friendship loved and true?
No words, none yet, come cast their light
on life in our Giovanni’s room.

A Name is All That is Left of You to Me

A name is all that is left of you to me.

As my world widens,

you shrink

into a word I never speak;

a number I never call.

Our story aborted

(perhaps

no ending fits?),

non-ending brings

more

confusion than

sadness;

the bitch in me

gladdens

to think of the phone

that I know

will not ring.

Facebook tells me of your doings now.

Your secret changed us anyway.

The acid tongue

that was loved became cruel;

harsh wit became

judge.

You forgot,

I think,

that I do not worship false prophets.

A simple truth:

‘A house divided cannot stand’; and so,

I cut you loose,

and swam.

Asterix

Blue eyes and a shaggy beard
are my first impressions of you?
Wide-eyed with poorly
concealed naïveté, I look
to you for direction,
even while affecting careful indifference.
Your laugh,
a congested, wheezing sound
as you struggle easily
to push your humour
through the soot of your lungs,
wraps itself around my imagination
and is received
with the rapture
induced only by the original.
You are my first Intellectual,
in the shabby, carcinogen-consuming,
starving-artist sense
and I award you
my heart
immediately.

Airport

Delays
that stretch into compensation,
you hold my hand
though elsewhere.
Anxious skin cast off,
I revel in acting out
my own private existence.

We are unrelated now,
but you talk me through
this new stage of life –
the father at the birth.

Four hours overdue,
I am made airborne;
the tinny, man-made phallus
penetrates the heavens
and the depths of me.

We are unrelated now,
but you fall perpetual victim
in your acceptance of
the moments I dispense,
when, how, where I dispense them.

There is no ‘Stop’ button.
No room
for those who would come home again,
forgetting silly notions of independence.
I search for you.

We are unrelated now,
but you are always
my first thought in fear.

A Confession

I love you.

Such an admission should
not come without
forewarning, but
love is without reason.

Strange words, made stranger
by the fact that
I do not believe in
love. Or rather,
remain unconvinced there is
anything to believe in.

Love is?
A noun.
Knowledge that could
have spared generations of
poets, painters, writers
their artful melancholy.

But, somehow, I love you.

A novel, unremarkable
love that is both ordinary
and the very first of its kind.
A verbal statement that
qualifies as cliché
in any language:
Je t’aime;
Ich liebe dich;
and yet, is more original
every time it is spoken.
Word as emotion; emotion as
esoteric mystery.

Am I mistaken? Have I been
understood?
I am against, not the Crucified,
but the Projected,
as we strive
to out-love one another.

There is no way to end such a poem,
except with
lonely,
knowing

full-stop
.

Black Converse

Imagine a life without imitation.

Then, consider how
a life is a life
if it is an imitation.

Canvas covering,
gaping holes,
blackened laces –
you are evidence
of my false life.

In you,
I’ve walked a thousand
miles through
Beat Generation America,
80s punk, and
sixth-form college.

On you,
I affixed badges
emblazoned with
anti-
establishment
slogans, as well
as hopes
of cool indifference.

For you,
I bore stones
and wet feet, when
fashion pummelled function
to a pulp.

Scanning the morn
for incontinent clouds
became the norm,

but I
get the feeling you
were teaching me to
look out of
myself
and up
at the

sky.

21st Century Feminism and Other Disasters

In time,
you will grow away from me.

Your wandering, open
eyes will soon narrow with
self-imposed isolation
and misunderstanding
worthy of any causeless rebel.

Having you
was a decision
made,
not lightly, but
without real thought;
and every whimper,
every migraine-inducing cry
draws from me,
guiltily, the question: why?

Do I have such a penchant for failure
that I would choose
this of all paths? The
roads that stem from
here end at failure;
like Larissa,
this justified, true belief
is knowledge, but useless.

Binding myself
to you
is a mistake,
not because I cannot
let you go
when I tire
of you –
but because
it is you who will tire
and let go of
me.

The irony,
ironically,
is that I
do not even have
you. My womb
remains un-invaded; my
maidenhead un-punctured.
Yet, your presence is
around me,
a vacuum,
a bell jar,
robbing me of me
until
to give birth to your
bloody
ageing
mass is more acceptable
than doing away with the wolf
and crying incompetence!
All attempts at deviance are met
with social laughter and dismissal;
eggs predetermined
to be bred for humanity.

‘Just one more…’ shall
become my mantra
as I ferment for the
fourth, fifth, sixth
time.

Proposition Joe

Alone again, or
fallen from the fold
of intimacy.
Right
but wrong to think that rightness
fills the space now left beside me nightly.
You glimmered in it for a while;
slithered, snaked your limbs
around mine for a time,
like ropes
wound tight around my burning heart.
You stayed.
But cannot stay
because I go from here,
this graveyard town I wander as a ghost
past tombs of endless dreams – the flowers placed beside in youth
have aged as I,
their promise, mine,
slow-choked by unexpected frost.
Winter has come without consent.
And you, stranger,
you become it’s hardest lesson:
that life goes on
with or without;
that bodies, earnest mouths, desires -
spark,
fly,
dance,
then die;
are spoken of no more.
You are not special
neither I.

Calligraphy

Chance forged the path
back to you,
before you grew wings
and I turned away,
unable, unwilling
to bear attitudes reflected
only in the mirrors
of my past. The
Yoo is thick and spidery,
scarcely competent at
capitalisation; the
Eff, tall as a palm tree
with mistakes
for leaves; the other Yoo
follows on, losing height
to its predecessors,
but winding a
determined, rambling path
to keep company
with your Ohh, that
is more a
diamond, rough-cut
and black,
like your mischievous eyes.
Emm is engorged, perhaps
with the thrill
of translating thoughts
to paper, like an
accidental tourist, with
gaps of years in
its vocabulary. Aay,
though, is a
personal favourite, a
loyal, familiar
friend; an obstacle in the process
of learning – delicate youthful
curves, too sophisticated,
it is placed in the
frame of an adult, ruling
the word a grammatical
error.
I smile.

You’ve spelt out your name
as though
spelling out your life.

David

Paris was beautiful;
it shone
and opened up before me
as you didn’t, soothed me
as you couldn’t
and I knew I’d found my friend.

Hours of nothing made clear
what could no longer be
hidden by your beauty,
nor my carte blanche – which
by now
was greyish-black
with over-use.

A glazed look found me:
still painfully in first love, but
wanting you to
know I meant business,
and all the while
not quite believing
I was free.

Dazed, by Continental insouciance
so at odds
with the awkward,
very British
soap opera my life was become.
Though one with poor ratings …

We walked.
Past monuments, trick-turners, graves –
a beggar's banquet,
all of which
was found by the barrel of
my camera lense.

Baggage
drawn on in transparent ink
sank my old soul
and made my scruffy feet hurt.
The irony, I think,
was not lost on either of us.

Alone opposite you
proved the funeral. We dressed our grave
with un-spilled tears and silence;
with known fears and
the threat of violence.
I hated you then.
Perfectly.

Dream World.

To think you can
prepare for grief,
such rawness of
eternal pain,
is folly.

It is a splinter,
crippling all in its path;
collapsing worlds in on themselves;
burning away
at what keeps us human
until we are not
and,
like a woman scorned,
will not heal
will not fade away
will not be consoled.

Loss results,
not in mere tears,
but fear;
paranoia, vulnerability, guilt –
a martyr’s store of emotion.
Emotions
so out-of-keeping
with the quotidian that they are
too real
to be felt.

Time may delude herself that
by passage alone
she salvages hearts, but
is mistaken.
Humans, begotten not
for such protracted
suffering –
dealing only in the basic -
face
a simple matter of survival:
we let go, or
we wither.

Or we stumble
love-blindly
out of one day
and into the next
going in circles.

Going slowly nowhere.

Freud’s Birthday

The world did not
burst into song and dance
as I expected it to.
You did not care, dared to
risk my wrath by
openly declaring
your indifference. The prophet,
my partner in psychodynamism,
offered no homage to
our dying god, his reverence
elsewhere.
Minority influence causing
deference, we four settled
on benches drenched
in sunlight, which
masked the fear and truth of
hidden desire. Prophet
and King,
banded by blood oath beyond me,
I could not win,
but affected otherwise.

Interrupted at play, your
manner regressed to
childlike shyness, though
your silver tongue
you retained, pitting
your logic and reason against
passionate emotion. Not used to playing
Piggy, in the middle was
a lonely place; my shouts
fuelled your enjoyment,
combining sadism with flirtation –
a dysfunctional, erotic
marriage.
As King, you would have
what you wanted and
you took it easily, having no
frontline death to mastermind.
My attention, given out
of duty and deference,
centred on you and you
wallowed in it leisurely – arrogant?

An old hand at
childhood games I'd never played,
proximity had
an immoral effect on
me as I accidentally, then purposefully, then uncaringly
confused the
objet trouvé.
A heart? A hand?
The pronoun meant more.
I observed you indiscreetly
in the face of your
unwitting
seriousness.
It was not matters of
government nor academia
that so weighted your mind – me, perhaps?
A thought I entertain, though
it is grounded
less in truth than possibility.

I triumphed, though victory tasted
more of concession
than sweetness, and the
only dignity was in hasty, hostile retreat,
which earned me genuine remorse
and a key-ring phallus.

Shedding titanium shell for
wise, wise man’s skin in
a reversed exchange -
rightly or wrongly,
I renounce citizenship for
subjection.

Grazing

Sheep.
Head to the earth
Back to the sky
A life filled with the
Now-ness
of the present is all you require
Surrounded by nature as nature intended
A journey between here
and there
that you will never make
A train carriage with
it’s lonely occupant,
the concept of whom you
cannot conceive of
The contemplation of truth,
and desire and rules –
and whether there can be
any rules in desire, and whether
the presence of
desire is not its own
truth,
or rhetoric –
are contemplations you
will never have, having
no psyche to mediate
the instinctive
Nor conscience
Your failings, insofar
as failings are not
a human construct, are
all yours – and you claim them
in a way that drives
the existentialist to envy
No parent you blame for
preferring him and not Him,
knowing that
love is no obligation, and that
‘blame’ is not the word –
nor will they ever be
But you are a simple creature, and
your simplicity affords you
no choice – for which
you may
graze on in graceful gratitude
For all my misery,
in my complexity,
I rejoice
and give thanks.

Out of Office AutoReply

It’s always a rush,

whether an hour

or ten

is ours to use and panic through

before setting sail.

‘Where is my …?’ you ask,

though it’s always where it is

- the bed, the floor, the cupboard drawer; I direct

and you are

grateful, every time. Evey single one.

Have I ever had such gratitude?

But this dance,

once

begun,

must be choreographed to finale.

And we know it by heart.

I shout and dither, my stone pride aquiver;

you order me hither, and thither, and ‘whither?!’

Struck mule, I ab-so-LUTE-ly refuse.

And we stop.

And we stare.

Or we scratch without care

at old wounds

inflicted many bright-eyed moons

ago, like cats –

equidistant from the other

and someone new,

with no reason

just yet

to choose one over other.

You oil my stiffer parts

back into just-about-working order

and I am love itself.

Waiting

Summer; we are apart.

Sun continues to set at

the dawn of our love.

Our lives, different stories

for one moment written on

the same page – a

truce, made with hearts,

has put reason to bed for

ever. Remember me.

Summer; we are apart.

Time continues its passage.

Time we spend waiting.