Endeavouring

‘Grant me chastity and continence
but not yet’   The Confessions Book VIII

Like Morse [& St Augustine]
my desire for sorrow swells
in readings & discrepancies
& ageing & in old intentions

Anxiety is in my every hour –
not in a lost past / My fiction
creates loneliness in a lit cell
of rented space / We end up

poor in temporary lodgings –
paying for bright biographies
& hope to be lent an apology
before a modern novel writer

has entwined our plots & lies
Time can be limited by love’s
hard labour & its indifference
in books we’ll never look over