I drink in the silence's spicy chill
in the midnight awakenings
and in heavy tides, it gurgles down

and settles a thick black insufficiency
in my legs

I run and run
and all the running will not do

and heat like flickers rises
and sweat runs down my crackling limbs
and something bites off
and something eats

and I run reckless and bare
and all the running will not do
and it is all like charcoal and ash
and a stout smoke

and the night rises rises
till I cannot see it

words elope
perhaps all alone
in nights sweet
and nights black

I am a child
fumbling my hands
on the faces of land
and the world topples
bounces about

this trembling scrawl
tentative almost
as the rickshaw
coughs and shakes

I don't say when I say
I am in love with words
sometimes the dance
sometimes song
sometimes the people
they carry along

I don't say— I don't say
I watch away
it is the child that writes

viscous noise rumbles
churning in a chamber of ****

like impossible realness
its sallow bulbs drip

onto a breathing bog of muck
that rolls its rotund wells around

and bursts bleeding
its tongues of moss

its tumid limbs reach up and out
sizzling shatters on walls

it mingles with the shadows;
their gaunt deformities dance

it drains in ringlets
beneath chairs and shoes
it slides past the tiles
and echoes down down

it leaves vinegar flies
to hatch in a fat rancid air

for Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it ***** out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That ****, that ****, that ****.

in this classroom
words are hurled

in air,
the grotesque pencil scribbles.
in air, monstrosity
colour and colour to brown monotony

briefly?
talks tide
throats oscillate
leisure is an angry child
wreaking havoc on paper

listen, here,
just a halted breath:
air thins
page on page does not bleed
but it tears alright

it is like a Koel’s cry
in the midnight tremors of time
it is sweetly sour
like orange juice or an Autumn’s flutter
shrill like a woman’s touch
or day’s gold
on some purple curtains

I don’t know…

in this blue dark,
with silhouettes of a forlorn city on glass
it sounds so real
I linger here listening
blinking with the clock