You are looking at me oddly
and saying, “No-one wears pearls anymore.”
Coolly. I am thinking you are
stringing me along for
decoration.

I will scatter seed like a blanket
and we will speak of it no more:
this is here and now and us and
not any other thing.

A billion songs driving into the earth,
dust rising and settling in their craters.
You, dimly away, hum along
to an impossible sonata.
You, here and elsewhere,
are the saint that can sing.

Good night, always a good night,
we are all together, hunkered down,
waiting for your windows to
subside, to darken.
We, here and elsewhere,
honour the saint that notices
little things.

An improbable prophecy offered,
a lithic blossom snatched
from the periodic fist:

Then without words you wander
the bright heart of an eloquent world:
Then without rancour you wither
beneath a thousand tongues of flame.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when you were elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my desperate economics in your absence;
You are my unexpected affluence, my blossoming prosperity:

You are the whispered promise of a day without night.
You are the promise of a night strewn with suns.

Were you always there at the corners of the world?
I would like to think so, that you were present

even in my poverty, even in my debasement.
I would like to think you were around a corner.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when I was elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my meagre aspirations
Scrabbling in dust to disinter a sickening fiction.

I shudder now that you might not have offered yourself
as my shadow past and exuberant future.

That you might not have said, Sell everything for me.
I sold everything, and months later, do not miss myself.

Perhaps one day you will
mortar them into a cairn,
an altar to the furious gods
of your occasional holocaust.

Yet today you are sowing fuel in furrows,
in deeper and deeper wrinkles,
your nostrils brimming acrid,
your mind lost in the strati.

A cigarette tossed against the scree
blossoms like a sudden star.
Again an agonising glance at
the undiminished stone.

Eyes inward you are unable to inspect
your irresistible fractal curls,
the mesmeric mercuric minutae that
draw me, eyes inward.

That you are that you are is
testimony and testament, the
unfurling world in jasper and gold:
the prologue and the plot running
through it.

My internal electronics sparking across the gap,
ephemeral imagined notes and the cascading
columns of maths conspiring to
havoc.

But it was just a dream, a time and half a time,
that original sin, that clumsy stumbling
away from it.

Air is life and your throat is a umbilical cord connecting you to it. But other things are life as well. They require you have such a percent of a harmful material.

Do you shudder at the thought of what you were? Of course, of course you do. Go back? Never. But why are you left bruised by the memory as if jealous of yourself being so… free, or complicated, or something. Why are you not happier to have pushed through your own skin to emerge something new?

I have done that. I am still shaking it off like a passing thunder shower. There is a place in my head that has clouded over and needs to clear.

And like that, it’s gone.

Blessed who’ve not yet begun
listlessly manipulating English
and calling it verse;
who scribble relentless words
like quartz singing from the quarry,
jagged and still three quarters slag;
who have something to say!
who are going to say it!

They have not yet bent double
under the weight of language
and its gravitas.

Just one kiss, he whispered, and
you’ll whisk away my walls;
the heart connected to the lips,
when one falls the other follows
and lies at peace in your
coffers.

In that I am inert,
in that you are radioactive;
in that I am tilling,
in that you are abeyant;
in that I am weathering the trough
and you are anchored to the prow.

To the back-broke industry of joy
we crumble naturally to the others’ shape.
The measured light-year.
The unforeseen electron.

In the Spirit I stole momentum from Jupiter,
and in exhausting combustion I slung beyond the pale:
THESE ARE MINE, said the voice in the orbit.
ALL THIS AND MORE, spoke the Sun.

In the Spirit I passed the event horizon,
and in the dust-bowl of gravity I became tidal:
THIS IS MINE, spoke a singular Hawking.
ALL THIS AND MORE, spoke the accretion.

In the Spirit I laid ink to a digital page,
and in the midst of the thesaurus I transcribed:
THIS IS MINE, said the plenary narrator.
ALL THIS AND META, spoke the wit.

the form that fills
vacant seats, the voice
that speaks into a void

left spacious in absence,
pregnant with opportunity
past and still passing.

It is a thing you find
at eye’s corner after
dreams almost forgotten

that you would cry for so long
and just barely now remember.

I am stuffing the sky into a suitcase, folded
more times than I can count into
the most luxurious rectangle.

I am lugging the sky out of a trunk, trundled
by some taxi driver like a spare tire iron:
a disturbing lack of precision.

I am grinning beside the sky, pressing
the button that makes you appear.
The door that makes you open.

I am spreading the sky on our bed, finally
the work of stealing it stealing over me:
we can sleep under it tonight.

Finished. But something disappointing:
the resemblance, uncanny, unnerving,
unswervingly different from my leading
lady. Then, I realise, my eyes are following
you matter-of-factly round the room, wondering
when you will kiss me. What am I forgetting?
I am always forgetting something.