Another thirty-ish minutes of life lost to indecisions By my lethargy By her rough mis-reckonings of tightly wound watches and bare clock faces You will never get it back Did I ever want it thrust upon me? Did I ask for that rum half an hour? You have no choice in time’s ways That furled-up...
Now – be forever consigned to coughed-up-banter nights at your threadbare old boys’ club – propped behind spewed pints of pump-drawn gut-brown beer Your bent still good arm lifts three quids worth of bowel-stripper Last orders and so a knocking back of pints from unequal paid down rounds And then that hundred-yard stagger off to...
Here fifty-six lichen-dipped granite bodies sunbathe – some lean – some almost swoon in April’s upset of unexpected weather Here clippings and rolled stripes of grass mark long-sunk slopes under headstones A cartographer had taken up mowing and looked back upon his day’s work as a map folded open – to be figured out For...
We swam before fish in that meandering gutter of long runoffs down from Kemble in our eel-shone skin – equal by breaststrokes and coloured cold white like a pair of split cod I waited for you to lift yourself from her wet veil – a single upper body heft in to warm air – mine...
That water-spinning hum
in The Riverside Cafe -
of draining dishwashers
and coffee machines -
is a prized white noise
needed by me to settle .../
VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet. ESTRAGON: I was. [Gesture towards his rags.] Isn’t that obvious. [Silence.] Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett A whole ninety-eight cents have recently been credited to my low-tide bank account from Yanks’ penny clicks on my must-do-better lines in newly-hewn sob stories without no strummed blues which now appear...
I just took a taste of my waking breath -
it is no wonder then that we do not kiss .../
I'm lost - Danny Boy -
in this town of my birth -
I'm being pulled apart
by others' decisions -
by the inflexible rulings
.../
Paced – my set flat route of pliable rubber yards – of flashed-by-dashes on my soon-endless run on that springing path of a conveyor belt – then up an incline fixed by my lightest touch – but slowed by my death in that sweated place – My running times show – but have yet to...
This second life was ordained
by a drawn-out judgement -
an almost-expected epithet .../