One or both of us is impatient though he speaks

and then doesn’t. Our eyes are wandering beyond

our tongues. Lashes into my cheek looking like sunbeams.

And then off again into a vaguer proximity.

Pulling pushes where we are gouged into sensation

(or not, as it happens). A deeper ache from the withdrawal

of those hands, or worse, their absence (from the beginning);

a plummet. Too full of hunger. (      Yawning with it   )

His breath is in my throat. I’m filling with stale life.

Suffocating for more. And still he says nothing else,

though there is a moment- my lungs heave back

his air I move my lips and steal his voice. His frown

so ungentle;

I think he was afraid.

Helen

Imagine arriving at that place,
and staying.
and staying.

"the hous is krynkeled to and fro,
And hath so queynte weyes for to go -
For it is shapen as the mase is wrought"

Green shade, green shade, a week without food

2

You are too much bones to be so soft,
to fit in the arms this close against the heart.
I cannot feel between us and afterwards
I am staring at my spine.

(And I remember that rainy day we hugged,
even to the dark sticking of your hair to your shirt collar.
I have entire winters of you stored in my memory,
but I can never remember the cold, sharp as it always was,
I can never remember the cold.)

1

Low walls of brick and tangled chain-links,
and backstreets full of windows that led to parks
and cornershops, junctions, gravel
and nearby somewhere
the occasional midnights I would not part with
for the healing of me.

Still impotent threads bursting[
they don't even snap,
not exactly, just[

falling off lightly [ maybe? or even
something less than that and besides               ].
Never a clean cut to them,
tufts of string too soft to notice,
[there or] gone.
That's incoherent or immense and my eyes are going

Something completely other
and curved like a moon,
masked under leaves
and their scent.
Strange enough to break a bone.
And it breaks more than that.

The scent of all these
leaves. Where the hell have I been?
Breaking over summers.

I feel the craving of you
down to my toes
and the soles of my feet.
Thoughts veering into dreams it’s too easy
but the fire alarm wakes me up, and anyway,
it’s near summer
and we no longer share a bed. We can't.
We seethe beneath the covers.