Your buck of a builder arrives
in his sign-written truck
they belong
to your dull stepfather –
both the van and the man
and in your imagination
you have used his hands –
calloused – to fix things
in your mind – everyone knows
how these things develop
You returned from a night in Brighton
red-eyed – smelling of men –
of booze and wrecked
He had driven you and your sister
home
Such a gent
Your single dice is rolled and fixes
the next move of your red counter –
and then things – like probability –
also occur by your releases –
all observed by him – Markov –
who winks at you and your tits –
We are grey with tiredness –
our dog will sleep until our gate
is pushed to allow steps on gravel
and your return from Markov’s place
with your trolley bag of dirty linen
labouring behind you – suited to city life –
There – stand and stare at bare flowerbeds
and desire for small hints of weeds
to not return to this squared garden –
Let us no longer play games of chance –
Markov has your breasts cupped
and will now roll you across his bed
There is a story they tell
in this part of the world
about screwed-up cousins –
Of how they brought down
already-shaken houses –
for those bound by words
and not by ways of blood
lines – which they crossed
in a fixed-rate hotel room
His wife told him – on Sunday –
that she bedded another man –
last Monday –
A bloke who –
if named now –
would see
them both equally shamed –
before their shared families –
It’s almost bloody biblical –
He said –
It’s not their first go –
at such stuff –
they’ve done it before then –
and often –
Finding out last time –
his advice to his wife was –
Never again – Never – Please –
‘Cos of who – ‘Cos of place and
‘cos every other circumstance –
She’s away working –
He told me –
I don’t have a bleedin’ clue
what happens now – Sorry –
I needed to – dunno – offload –
Pretty crap stuff –
I nodded –
Then his gallows laughter –
Nice way to end a tough year!
Here is a heel-scrape
of composite on tarmac –
it announces my approach –
punctuated by my stick’s click
of loosenings – of turned threads
on its retractable –
snappable –
black shaft –
And – by the way –
how can I hold you
with my love now limped
by other indiscretions?
It is hard only in my gut –
enough to be sick
because of turning thoughts –
of you opened up –
and me still limping
I stand – alone – at an open gate –
I have missed midnight’s kisses –
then – me-the-fool – fleetingly lost
the worked-at vows which we set
on our half-recalled wedding day –
a ceremony thirteen years earlier
where we sliced up a countdown
to the last hour’s holding of hands –
with our slid rings on held fingers –
our bind to the old laws of the state –
silver and gold bands of such weight –
I stand alone as this New Year sings
I sought the purport
of a four-letter word
after coming across it
in a loan long-expired
I looked to definition
in its Wikipedia entries
of disambiguations
in need of citations
But do not believe
everything with labels
not even a short story
of four vocables
Love is an impact crater
on the far side of the moon
Love was a film
starring Salman Khan
So she tipped – like a slipped-off creature
under the water – tilting back – to arc
below – to birth a falsified richness
of twisted mist – of dry-cold-on-wet-heat
and I held no appall at her staged nudity
which I stood over – there her magnified skin
of yet-kissed white – of yet-sucked circles –
and that interruption above her turned legs
She let my eyes dry her raised limbs
with an idiot’s roughness – back then
such was her kick – in and out of the water –
she lifted a leg and I was ineffective
Before the gig I had been couch-anchored
as she stood just-wrapped in her towel –
with unfitted – with flirts – with a glimpse –
and me on the guest list for her show
Old lust – our ragged plot
of strangling weeds –
of poisonous shrubs
turn to interleave
I no longer prune hard –
here they still grow –
even tool-turned beds
take foul seeds
as true
You employ a man –
whom you poorly pay –
who digs in hard
with hands-on-spade
He labours for hours –
the rough cover he tears –
as he clears the unloved –
you taste his turned air
Women slip from winsome
under their senescent faces –
their hands steal the looks
off youth’s eyed-embraces –
They pleasure in pastimes
of tease-tricks and flirts –
they command your heart –
their hard rules will subvert
I want to reach out
and trace your lined beauty –
of furrows and laugh lines
worn freely at forty
I will kiss your eyelids
of stitch-tightened skin –
because here is your beauty –
it is still within
I found value in my love for you
under Aurelius and Epictetus –
so I purchased a one-way ticket
to end my lonely sojourn abroad
I wasn’t tempted in empty deserts –
no fingers took my potent virtue –
no foreign lips encouraged sin –
But I saw mirrors on their pages
and I watched myself translating –
framing – like Christ – opportune times –
I saw my mouth speak in tongues
telling you to taste my poison
Now I unpack my emptied bags
having brought back nothing more –
I left behind heavy possessions
which I no longer wish to share
I leave clues in the bathroom –
empty blisters of pills –
Leonard is everywhere
singing of stiffening thrills
Affection is not infecting
the bodies in the beds
and children speak in whispers
because of what is said
All I want from your presence
is engagement and thoughts
instead we stare at screens
and read others’ fingered words
My weight is dropping daily
whilst the world fattens up –
I would pray for forgiveness
but I’d be praying far too much
With your old lover
are you revisiting
playgrounds left empty –
gripped swings and see-saws
of a groped adolescence –
of snucked-suck kisses –
behind rusted bike sheds
and lonely youth huts?
Then a quick-lifted skirt
to his stronger fingers –
Now replaced
by a sureness in him
EDITED 170219
Behind my eyes,
becalmed in bed,
as the rooks clatter
in the lime trees,
and the last barks
of a dog trails off,
I am in the entrepot
of my memories,
picking at the skin
of scar tissue love,
I peel back time,
to make the past bleed
with the lifting
of rough scabs,
and with this peeling
comes a sore wound
which will not heal,
because I scratch it
into an angry mess:
her mark remains.
