A Room

This is the room with a view
it is for you
A basket to tend your soul
A moon of dresses.
There is another room. A shower cubicle.
But who are these strangers in there?
Leave. Take your stories with you.
Who is this tour guide visiting my home?
Why is he saying somebody died
here? I need proof.
This is the room with a view
it is for you
A patch of shut irises
A fence to lean their fists of shifting indigo.


Halved

Her eyes are worded cruelly,
it's in the glare: two lighthouses
flashing on a coastline face.

The left arm balancing two worlds:
holding and hiding, giving and taking,
gift, non-gift, apple, non-apple.

She queries the love of paint,
the brush, the hand, his eye,
knows it's sad and she, pitiful.

Or, maybe she doesn't think that
at all. Perhaps she's planning
a dinner for two, shocked

she's forgotten parsley, thyme.
But the snug fit of her terrier's neck
to the gap of a flicked-up leg,

content on the couch as a halved peach
in a bowl full of full peaches,
makes me believe, otherwise.


Talent

Raw sunshine snaps a breaking bud,
its commitment drives away death.

Blue wing rests on a rocking chair,
an old puddle destroys the whole.

I search for the mouth of darkness
in a body of flawless sky.

It speaks beyond the holiday jet
and infinity's ink drawings.

Worm touches bold silks and spits –
futility silvering now,

glistening as a pale denial
or glory offered up in spite.

A fox looks through a beaten slat,
he thinks I'm more precious than him –

black in his eye, all that I lack.


Cycling in the Flowers

Whispers and breaths:
births, deaths and suspensions,
billow, swirl, swell –
the dug-up oblong ready.
Behind, hedges cone high
as bishops and Edwardian palms
spike into white bricks.
Others' voices rise up stems
as if they are mulched in the soil
as nutrients, or natural laws.
But he knows, this child,
doesn't sit once, to listen,
steers indifferently through:
lilac, pink and yellow –
colour pale in his eye as time.
While clouds unravel as if pulled
by kittens, or insincere
fingers and I wonder will the sky ever
coil its skein of twine, He
laps the green again –
a musketeer without a battle.


This Leaning Sunflower

I need there to be
more than this crown of thorns
leaning into this wall of black.

I need there to be
a theatre of ghosts
behind a curtain

I need there to be
a hand I remember
and a pot of nettle tea

I need there to be
missing teeth and sewage
puppets and spinning tops.

I need there to be
a leaning sunflower.


Morning Dew

The old door dangling like a broken wing –
what nocturnal beasts crept around last night?
My skin lost to anti-climax; a budding –
yellowy: almost fresh, almost innocent.
I watch silhouettes die: sailor blue true,
poppy passion flashes, oatmeal and mud –
die, die, and die.
But there is dew, a fast rising sun,
a slim shadow of bird, worker of night,
with stick or spear and a female calling
beyond the faint landscape bloom, lavender
arrow hills and bumbling mossy footsteps –
almost slipping away, pearl as sleet rain.
I hold black breath inside magnolia:
a cup of pure; I am drunk by nobody,
yet completed as any One moment.
But, here scars of snapped sticks' fire –
a reminder of childhood warmth, perhaps,
the screech and groan of a peeling door,
the draggle scent of beast along my spine.


Beauty

When I step into the luminous lake
To the wilderness of reflection,

Step out, then deeper and deeper in
To the enormous eye set in a clock,

Am I its wayward daffodil to arrange?
Aged skin its sticky plaster to remove?

And the path winds like California
To the slab of metal where I am made;

Ringlet once more dangling off a gilt frame
And then, again, the slow build to dust.


Dwindling Black Violas

There is no roof enough high
for these fistfuls of lost breaths.

Black velvet burial suits,
yellow trapped mouths in violet:

small freedoms cut short - unlived.
The city bleeds on: grey veins,

like that of a monster made
in pursuit of its own head.

And I sprinkle them all here:
soft petals of everything,

that had a hope but could not.
They merge like distance to light:

flicker midway, disappear,
land in gutters and puddles.

Maybe to drift to the canal,
more likely to the sewer.

Black threads in patchwork:
merely binding, never squared.


Like Tamagotchis

This woman I admire the most
has rosettes for eyes, pink as asses
bathed too long, rubbed with talc.

This woman dangles orphans
in her plait, skirt hem and flip-flop beads,
smock pockets peg full, cash empty.

This woman drives a Volkswagen
that never breaks down, angels,
she says. And wind, I think.

This woman's eggs were stuck:
fifteen flushes, fifteen squirts
of bleach, fifteen fresh starts.

This woman speaks from her heart:
her words warm with a pulse.
She leaves them everywhere;

people like me left to nurture
them in our own lives,
like Tamagotchis, like babies.


Looking For It

Often young cuffs could turn grey hunting
in drawers that scuffled hard before they'd submit
then squawked, squealed to a squashy shut.
Face floor-puckered and bed thrust beyond
a swirled sheet onto an empty stage, just beetles
making a dark crossing, nothing more there.
Then God's sad defeated frame leapt from a rack
bundled up with a daily newspaper stack and
on a wardrobe roof fingers were shaved and bitten,
between hanky and bill in a bag they stuck.
On a sliding carpet peeled back, flew, pushed away
to beneath nets on a windowsill to a fly's back.
Through glass over skipping grass to a monkey bar
in an empty wrapper of a rhubarb and custard.
With a picture crossword out flat on a lap
the sleepiness of Sunday afternoons
when all were peaceful and said quiet things.
Here, with everything else gone, not here.