picture

she’s eating away at the margins
light floods from the corners until all that’s left is exposed
into nothing

and all the figures have scattered

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.

"First there was the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house"

Leaving what stays for me, staying for what
leaves. I’m every limit this flat flat world
falls from. (Erosion. How I am renewed
always by what is torn from me.
)

In an earlier summer I found myself at a cafe in the Marais, with an American traveller who had also ended up in Paris that month. It might have been late morning. She’d had the place recommended to her, so she took me there. I hadn’t eaten anything for a few days, but in that moment I ordered an espresso, not a meal. I wanted to try a coffee for once, and it was the cheapest thing on the menu. It tasted as acrid as vomit, with a texture not much further off. Strangely now I’d give so much again for that awful taste, the bags under her eyes, the crumbs littering the table all over.

Instead I have a second-hand copy of King Lear. I found it this afternoon at a stall under the shadow of a bridge on Oxford Street. It belonged to someone called Katherine; judging by the notes that cover each page it was probably used for her A Levels, or earlier. There are many kinds of ink, and with each one she tracked a different theme – all marked off with a key on the inside cover. Red is madness, green is sight, blue is nature, and yellow stands for “ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ”. As you move through the book they creep in more and more, until each page is saturated with kaleidoscopes of notes, even verging into deep purple for sin, loyalty wrought in amber, and a washed out grey for endurance, and I feel in all their small ways the words, not the words even but the inks, tell a different story entirely, and one of far more various colours, if they could only be all gathered up into the cradle of a meaning.

He passes by in blue
and says nothing;
I don’t believe him.

"I am surprised with an uncouth fear,
A chilling sweat o’er-runs my trembling joints:
My heart suspects more than my eye can see."

So it turned out that I did look into the mirror, and he did open his stone eyes, and in the end it happened as I said it would, which of course wasn’t much of a solace. Two moments of the heart thudding. Each a breed of fear.

“I hope this lasts,” someone said. “I hope this lasts.”

"Anyway what even is a ghost but a coda?"

The end of some great tale only now trailing off behind a half closed door, dead on the lips or dying.

The quiet sound
of your life, continuing on, is the finest memento mori.

The tree, the tree, the tree.
It's far from close and I wind about it
again and again convolving through myself.
The fissures of the bark answer life to the lines in my palms.