I just read this article
on how to make people
love you instantly- look long into their eyes/ twitch less/ smile slowly so
they think you will only ever smile at
them thus

100%

We guarantee. That. Even though
people are now text
all text, all binary coding
-connected, yes- But numbers have always coexisted happily
the point is:

if by some chance
you meet a person/ smell their scent/ watch the light pooling
on their dusty skin

you now know how
to make them love you
(instantly and forever)

I've learnt only a few things
these past years (not instantly)

living people leave their ghosts everywhere (you know this)

Art is a good way to forget you're not special.

Along the way there are stories and putrefaction and sometimes both
at once

And libraries. So many libraries.

But with all of this, I still wish I'd known
back then
how to make you love me instantly,
forever
not a small wee bit that one
moment
that one
night
that long time ago.

Another beloved strides out of my life.

Some smoker pauses
head bent over their cigarette
matchstick poised to flare and shimmy under
streetlight
but the waiting moment stretches
infinitely

With sweet shock I realise there is a breeze
playing around us both
made suddenly material
in the space/ the pause between
spark and fulfillment

Then can we wonder how things unseen
or only felt
become visible when
inconvenient

Yearning

for the moment

pressed somewhere into the weft of my childhood
Aslan smiling
-if lions can smile-
when three small British children find out
that they need never leave Narnia again.

First impressions passed by
as if too busy to try to please anybody
so
variously,
You were a land dispute in a cold place,
a piece of bacon on a ceramic plate,
a curtain-rod edge that rolled under the bed,
a letter of apology posted slightly late,
the back of a sleek anonymous head

I don't know what I felt for you
so vague, distressing
coloured in shades of irrelevant
Which is the best thing, considering.
When we were together, dinner was fine
conversation stilted but passed the time
I suppose
I'd rather think of you than of nothing at all
Perhaps you are my valentine.
****.

It's already December
This year snapped my spine and spilled
my vertebrae across twelve rivers

before collapsing
I opened doors
that should have stayed locked, bounced glass *****
against concrete floors.
I ended rather than enduring.

Drinking ****** defeat
I shrank into beetles that belong in the dark
with rock and mildew mud and bones
I lost my own. Undid my feet
and crawling slunk into an anonymous street.

Pale slug with deathly eyes
embedded in a patch of sky too dark to see
except at some drunken dreadful hour
when
the light is all wrong:
me, at the end of this year.

Would it have been fair to ask another to rescue me
I don't know.
Perhaps not, being so unfit to return the favour-
To demand the labour of loving someone so far above one
as to want them endlessly.

I am finite and small. A bare
and ugly wall. In another world this would
be acceptable. Not mine not now.

Not even a dead cow but the worm that swims through its
swollen gut. I resist
nothing, I represent less.
Tonight I confess: death is the more honorable option
If I had any honour.

With none to my name I suffer the worse fate: to persist.

To persist.

Three notes of so-so music
and you appear
unwarranted
Arresting

Stop being
the bondsman of my heart
the jailer of my soul
this
love is unjust.

Slipping through winter-grass
you falter, pausing
fall softly back
against summer's wall

Here
in the haze of dust and trees
are shadows playing
of antlered men and women with eagle-heads
saying

"Come by
the paths winding through bedroom walls
standing tall, overlook the
gardens that stretch through books
they smell of lemons.

Come, here you may
follow trams winding through sun-slumped cities
follow the paintings of emerald fish
swimming across marble floors

and you can tour the first world countries
and you can stare into the eyes
of passers-by on trains
watch lights like necklaces plastered against rivers
cities forsaken by gods and rains

Here dogs will sing of your virtues
And chariots their tyres will spring
here markets will sell you filigreed
silver
and ******* fit for kings
(complete with crowns and things)

You may stand aloft on slender buildings
watch traffic swirl by your feet
dip your fingers in amethyst rings
dye your hair in deepest indigo
feast on  rose-coloured sweets

While
stepping
through rain-damped streets
dazed by  sulky pressing aquarium
heat

(aided to press on only by
clay cups of spiced tea)

become transparent
dew-lapped
milk soft
mushroom with lacy edges
variations of delicacy

Exeunt
And
Journeying
be mulberry blooded
carnival skinned
roam through our words heeding nothing
but
dreams and the dreams of dreams."

So saying
these shadows
flick along yellow grass.

But remember kind reader, they
never sought these ways alone
They have never been to mourn
at funerals of lovers or friends

they have not heard the sound of death knells.

So listen, maybe you stay for a bit
Then leave their songs for someone else.
--- --- ---

Imagining yourself a one true love,
know
these are lunatic lies
arranged in the sky to wile away
the monumental guilt that tessellates stony relationships

You're a young man
starting out- there's
heroism on minor scale
a dreamy-eyed smouldering
some sense of discrete self-evaluation
a modesty of taste

I am some madder
version of who nobody should be
amoral, unkind, with nothing to redeem me
save the love of ragged street-dogs, and the owning of books.

Why fall into togetherness,
as if it were an easy game, to arrange in terms
of size, splendor, jollity, dice?

And that done, why pretend nobody loses?
At least admit to feeling lost.

You're
memory
of a silhouette walking
to me
you're as real as this poem is.