moving past moving past moving past

don’t fucking touch me

my skin’s like paper
sounds like paper
at least

Helen (IIII)

I can make you


he said

Helen (IIII)

I turn and you’re there
are no ways there
is no sense in this
question is a wound I
never saw you arrive

Helen (III)

| Why | are | you | always[ | stood | in | thresholds]? |

this is the stab in the throat
that bleeds five whole hours after.

you know his name
or this sense of his coat against your palm

O
wane. earth pushing back
stones do not want me. do not want

His fire tongue his brimstone throat
we were always drawn to the flame and the heat we couldn’t hold the warmth
I couldn’t ever get to hold

'The House'

"It grows larger
wall after wall
sliding
on some miraculous arrangement
of panels,
blond and weightless
as balsa, making space
for windows, alcoves,
more rooms, stairways
and passages, all
bathed
in light, with here
and there the green
flower of a tree,
vines, streams
casually
breaking through —
what a change
from the cramped
room at the centre
where I began, where I crouched
and was safe,
but could hardly
breathe! Day after day
I labour at it;
night after night
I keep going —
I'm clearing new ground,
I'm lugging boards,
I'm measuring,
I'm hanging sheets of glass,
I'm nailing down the hardwoods,
The thresholds —
I'm hinging the doors —
Once they are up they will lift
their easy latches, they will open
like wings."

memories, memories, memories.
Vodka and Coke.
features were softer.
faces, face, faces.
contours changed.
you are more bones now -
a softer I, i do not know

do I miss what is passed
or what is passing

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.

late hour

Something again in the smile I can't place.

                How it creeps in after years
    and the black bark unlit behind.

130

Eros once more, limb melting, stirring me,
bitter-sweet bitter creeping in, insinuating presence

"A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels."

Fall V (The Tree)

I don't actually imagine the fall
would be so terrible,
cut short the way it is
by those sheets I spent months
convolving.


Hardly a breath
between the drop and the

Stop.

Bridge IV (Styal Woods)

I don't know how old that sleeping thing of stone and moss is.
A few years ago they blocked it off
with a low fence you could climb over
(and I did).

In the forest there's always dead leaves
flooding the earth, still, settling into years;
though mostly they slip off
the bridge. It has no rails. Nothing from the edge
to their fall. And on the other side
there isn't even a path.
It just gives way to earth,
a hill, leaves. Again.

Bridge III (Golden Gate)

Apparently my subconscious
had a thing for clichés. I dreamt

it was the calm of a face
too familiar to recognise
that lured me down
off that precipice.

Bridge II (Parc des Buttes-Chaumont)

From where I stood
it didn't look like much
of a fall, especially with the green
of that light the river cast back
to the stones.

Still, they strung wires
beneath the ledge.

A strange net for fishing.
Though, in retrospect,
it was with some difficulty
that I pulled myself away
to walk around the grotto,

studied the pool,
the artificial waterfall.

The mirage is nothing,
    it is still and flat.
         Only when figures pass,
cut over sight lines
   is there anything to see.
A flicker, sweeping across their feet,
             and in a blink I can see
                     around corners, looking at sky
    that should have dried up
days ago.

And when they go,
the sky goes too;
         horizons slack and lose
their curvings, lines diminish
into sand,
like that cheap plastic
        hourglass
which you unscrewed
 at the base,
          left an awful mess
on the windowsill.

Someone dims the lights and she comes to life,
holds aloft her Spanish dolls.

Something in the dangling,
the suspense.
I find myself impaled by strings.

float

Sometimes the tide pulls me away for days.
Far, far out to the horizon

opposite the sun. The sea always spits me out
eventually. In the space of a month,

a week, a few nights, by the span of a
lifetime,

I resurface, hurl water from my lungs
my gut, my bones.

The taste of salt
and the most silent ocean bed

lingers for days.