It is difficult to define
With no black dog to lead
this pressure dropped familiar.
No symbol/ fetish/ effigy
to incorporate a misery that drains
the joy from all that I hold dear.
.
How does one trace the contours
of an abstract exhalation?

Somewhere near
a pendulum is stilled.

That which I loved one minute past,
that filled this hole of borrowed time
is laid apart her spent electric
body washed in turpentine
Her outline drawn.

Estranged.

                        .........

I follow where the way grows small
Where disembodied voices pull in
strange degrees of separation
I flow toward their thin remains
shape, ill-defined, subliminal
An acquiescent aftermath of
calculus unknown.

I am pressed italic, hither sent
to comb the sear of cloying strand
for relics of the days worn down
by nothing in particular.
There is no anthem or lament
no ornamental sentiment to wrest
the quickened lacks that sand
the shores of Anhedonia.

It's
the little
things,
my Liberty..

that day we caught
the train, you pressed
your lips against my
startled ear, insisted
you were soaking....

...laughed
at my confusion when
I said it wasn't raining,

your impish
observation ceded,
light, for me, dawns slowly..

...waited
for the tunnel thrash
to sit astride
and show me....

Shake
the beach-combed locks
and how this Spanish Plume
becomes, a vaunted
posturing of poppies..

The way is high
and undiluted.
Office blocks have melted
to a salty insignificance,
their oscillating convolutions
baked, on oven -cambers....

Catch,
her sorbet-samba glamping
apricot in sandalwood,
a paper-chasing chatelaine,
gone, daisy, down, the dockside pan.
Our Painted Lady tumble-dries
the bramble-crab, peroxide.

Her ox-eye, Andalusian tours
to rhapsodies of ice-cream vans.

Took, passing, as
my chosen word
a comfort-food of preference,
celestial confectionery,
indulgent mewl of movement.

It's a prudent lie
I stir myself

this spoon
of porch-light parable,
a home-brewed benediction
simpers, intimate angelica

infallible
as love....

Hooking
bullets from
the muscle, I
took just enough
to get me out,

out of these
discipled digs
of occidental artifice.

Saw virtue, as
a patient bound
found floating
with the carcasses,
in oceans of our
artless composition.

So sickened by
my part in this
repulsive codependency,
I'll charter me another sleep,
usurp the gutless drone

to shave my head
the stillborn dream
I open up my arteries
the garters of my
cartilage and bone....

am conscious
of the ticking clock

how
the bleached reef
of a window frame
intimidates,
says
something
of a heed untaken,
propagates the
cloud-seed doubt
with lightly spoken
fallacy,

recoiling
on a layman
tongue.


Am
aware of where
the sentence stops.

where syllables
of rhinestone rain,
call sibylline ,

reverberate

in thick
galactic suburbs.

How
soporific
doppler-shifts of
moving conversation
played me, staring
down the outpost
of my unbecoming
walls.

The poster read:

“Gone Missing”

The come-back-kid
has failed to show.
The Old Man saw him,
******* by the Rainbow Factory
wall, against the wind,
like a prayer no longer given
to the prism-surfing life.

He said,

“The come-back-kid, might
Not come back”..

He wrung his
swindled heathen, left
with haversack and Macintosh,
hummed ballad in a Sea-King crown,
the colloquy of shepherd lore.
head far too full to sing,

Caught riding
in a burnt out car of
rude December archetypes,
an engine feathered Westerling,
to think.

He went
to where they bury boats,

Where mud larks perk
for potsherd farthings,
red-shanked in the gallon slob
oblivious...

Far off the Ness
He’ll watch them go..

... on meteoric dawn patrols,
a contrast to his built-in
obsolescence.

In provinces
of platitude
He’ll form no evanescent tie,
invoke his tattooed waxwing
back against their lactic
saccharine, to beg
the notion die...

But leavened light may carry,

A bold ceramic dialect
that skitters off
the short-sun marsh

dissipates in linnet banter
winnowed from the winter barley
crossing out the county lines..


The come-back-kid
will not return,
a blue-eyed, fell, Promethean.

Disfigured by the absolute
He’ll beat his way
unrecognised.