Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before Same old story But still compelling Blossom reminding What blossom is for Question the trees But they’re not telling How they obey An impossible law Question the mind But it’s not telling How it gives back What was gone for sure Something stirs In a blacked-out dwelling Forces the lock Of a double-locked door That face again!
Twelve? Thirteen? She arrives in advance of her parents, fat as I was thin, wrapped in a towel, pattering to safety — a bench where she sits obscured before abandoning herself to the indecency of a walk towards water, (though who’s to see? To care? The retirees? Me with my puckered stomach?) My eyes meet hers, hers dart away like fish; this is not the place to say You’ll be all right, the body must become itself, nothing to do but swim out, follow.
Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering us at last from sense-making. The trains are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block has lost another dozen yellow squares but they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s morning we’ll awake, washed up again among the bills. Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up to get behind your lids. Come, give me your hand.
Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering us at last from sense-making. The trains are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block has lost another dozen yellow squares but they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s morning we’ll awake, washed up again among the bills. Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up to get behind your lids. Come, give me your hand.
Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the door, the trick of day too quickly turning night, the radio’s relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick of now becoming then.
Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.
mooch about and waste time starting things they’ll never finish. The next world is nothing to them but shadows, some don’t have patience for any of that crap at all – What, grass, they say, waving their wobbly arms, You mean you actually believe in grass?