Lightning spit across the alloy face
of the dishwasher I was filling a half moment

before a high black throat unfastened
with a sunken bellow that scattered rain

like sodden hair along a sheer pane scalp.
Hell, a storm? On New Year's? What an insult -

because it's been a long year down
for the lonely and eroded angels, the poets

whose orchestras of synapses decay gently
into fresh stanzas. I don't know about you,

but my inbox was a chorus of No, No,
Not You, Never You. It ate me

inside out, but I pressed on in new poems,
both mine and yours - I stumbled blindly

into rooms full of your renewed voices -
reassuring me that silence is not the way.

These are not poems, you all told me -
they are beacons, telegrams, phone calls,

they are pleas, they are screams, they are alive
like the cursive lightning scrawl that paints

the kitchen and bids me stand up straight.
It's been a long year but I came here to say

my mouth is filled with thank you;
strange friends and colleagues, thank you.

To all of you, and your hard work this year.
Your poems were read, and remembered.
Thank you for all of it. It changed me,
for the better, and was appreciated.

You - paltry. Pleasant to stretch
To limits in thought. The thought
In turn warps
To accommodate. The
Accommodation
Barely manages itself.
It winds its thin long arms
All around you. I steal
Your simple presence
And hold, hold. I drink
To the gentle hum of nerve
I invite everything.

The night stoops low
With a curious face
Its crooked movement disturbs the wind
The wind rolls its eyes, continues
On to wherever, whoever
Would bother to follow and see.
Stay

Or don't. I will entangle you
In my wrong constellations
My joy is perfect. My adoration
Correct. My brittle focus
Breaks on word and sifts
Through through to wherever,
Whoever would dare
To tame me. Come

Or don't. We wait -
Your ambiguity
Fools no one. Not me,
No one. It whirls
Into itself, pretty with wit, and
In a moment's shift,
When dizzy it falls,
You know where
It will fall.

My teeth are blunt from leisure
I refrain from bite, the flesh
Is just short of spice, but it
Would suffice, would that I
Willed; would that I. My jaw
Bolts shut like a fist and I ****
My body in on itself. Close, all
Movement close, I shall take
Nothing of this. I shall
Lie here, pale and pure as
Sterilised steel and let the
Earth steal what is due but
It will not grow, not one sour
Bloom from my sterile stew.
Let it taste and grimace,
Ransack then my sallow face.
And cold or old, my jaw will clench
Ever as bold and when all is done
In heavens and above, let it
Bellow upon God's flat face:
I did not take. I did not take.

Thirty minutes to go
The clock blinks, smiling
At the fidgeting class

Its green eyes shifting
With sly patience
Pulling everything along

Chairs scrape the hard-wood floors,
Rush, collapse against walls;
The second resets
And they are back again.

All heads sag
Like ochre leaves
We are all trees now,
The dry air of knowledge
Eats our skin.

What?
The soulless buzz of fans
Their bland sobriety
Sloshes, swishes

Past our feet
Like bees
Their honey dripping

Flooding the brains
Muting all images
The professor is a forever sound
We hear, we hear, we grow old

Twenty minutes to go

Factory blackness, fingertips almost metal
Moon a cinder, mother ash. All about
Stretched walls of godless steel,
And a house like a chapel, unlit and firm.
I had known no such vacancy. Brevity
Of moment, bright with wit. Brittle now
In memory as the world works again
Tell me, were you the darkness that
Awoke me, or the dawn I sought
To pull forth with my will. My madness,
My disbelief. Were you mother?
Shivering, I piled my limbs to pyre--
Were you the interrupting current
That sped through wires
and shook the nerve. Were you myself?
Still and stone despite the show,
Shaken, stale, never the same again.

On the wicked turn, that sour slant angle
Of my face that slipped
Beyond the veil of hair: everything I am.

I fumble, my hands contort, the hinges
Of my fingers know no tandem
They work only to dissolve
The slip into conversation. But
Your gaze moved - just enough.

And all the buzzing hum, you heard too well
And however firm I steer the sea
I cannot stop the sinking
You rush within from the little crack
Perhaps without wanting to, perhaps
Even with pity, and then I am full

Bursting, heavy with intrusion
And all day long, my heart drums itself
And I can sense the strong Incoming,
Slinking through to inspect
What my stubby hands could not correct

Then the night, then the dawn,
And then day day day.
Then something lets loose and
The plank unravels from plank and
Then there is nothing to fear

However stark the spotlight of shame
How sweet it is to have sinned
How sweet to flirt with flaw
And to push it little, little. To push it
Vain and bare, past the edge, down
Through nothing and then

Firework: shards are glittery with grief
The wine stretches its limbs to the world
And the ground drinks it up.

Ik ik I get it
It's 6 am, I have not slept and I am
SO HAPPY
or was before I stopped.
I think. It was, it was... I am an eletric tower
My fingers are copper
It was like a surge of joy, electric, buzzing
I could not stop i could... I had to dance
But i typed instead to people so many
People who were
Also typing and then i was in there
In the wires, i was dancing, my wrist
Had started to hurt but the people
Kept coming my way to talk
In my ears, they were, in my eyes
In my eyes eyes my fingers were
Mine but what a possession it was!
What absent pilgrimage, i
Analysed myself. I was... it was a dream
I say. I am awake. I forgot to sleep.
I say, it's okay. You are body
At the end of the day. I am. I am
But i say it everyday so much i say it
So much. Body, body. I am

I must sleep. It is dawn. There is
Finally silence in my mind
There is Finally room
For air