Strange the weight a date
can hold, when what you've
lost just can't stay put
as a number shut in a box.
We are in the same city
under the same noisy sky,
and a year ago we looked up
and held hands outside. But
now we are not, and all I
can think of, is you red lipped,
smiling and twirling,
of men lying and you purring,
as those ******* flowers
boast and explode in the sky.
And to think of what I said to you,
or what you said to me,
of all the  I love yous and tears
and sweaty beds
and poetry.
Strange the weight a date
can hold, when every bleedin year
fireworks remind you why.

The snow falls, lands and melts,
the puddles swallow shoes and dry,
and the pavement is left with what it felt,
and lets out a long, concrete sigh.

In the way your flesh seems softer
and your bones more brittle,
when surrounded by the hard steel
of great grunting machinery.

In the way your youth seems younger,
your canvas nearly blank,
when foreheads lines like staves
sing to you the elegy of life.

"Seriously man,
green cat eyes.
I kept losing myself
in them.
I don't know."

But what is it.

"Like when they look,
they really look.
You get me?
Think a sun's ray
in a dusty room,
like that,
but green."

There's more.
How can I put it.

"And her nose,
man it's the smallest
cutest nose I've ever seen.
And you don't doubt it,
because she's probably
never even lied.
How could she?
What with those green eyes."

Beauty is truth etc. Well it's not.
And this pub ain't no place
for pottery.

"And her hair man, her hair.
It's so curly, all tangled up
and wild. But my fingers
run through smooth.
And she purrs man."

I want to rub her belly.

"Ahhhh I just..
I just.. I don't know really.
I just can't get away from
those green eyes."

Such empty words.
Just the skeletal sounds.
I'm missing that sun and moon
and bluest blue. But I think he understands.
We all do when someone is really trying
but just can't,
when expression moves inward.

"I don't know man."

I was just
winding her up
when I told her that sometimes
she was maternal with me.

Just a wind-up,
but I was ******* her breast,
I guess.

Anyway, she jolts up
and leaves me lying there
with my wet mouth open,
the bed splashed with
the tumbled contents of the ash tray,
and I could sense a ******
confrontation heating up.

I prepared the extinguisher.

"Don't ******* say that,
I can't ******* stand that"

She scathed my like a child,
and I realised I had awoken a dragon.

I sprayed the scene
with exaggerated attempts
to reduce it's meaning.
Palms up, face loose,
a goofy ******* laugh.
She was having none of it
and left me to think about
what I had said.

I should have been
sat on the stairs.

But she was a mother once.
Well, nearly.
Her instincts had been all
fired up only for an operation
to take away the need.
She felt that loss,
the mother that never was.

And now she had to put up with me.

I think I might be a pervert.

I mean, a mere bite of her lip,
stroke of the hair
or flick of
her hip
sends fire around my body
criminalises my mind
and throws me outside,
to look pressed
nose against
the glass,
breath blurring up
the window,
and my view of her ***.

Yep,
I think I might be a pervert.

Aren't you?
I mean when it's hot,
don't you get thirsty
from
sitting beside
the fountain?
Course you do,
we're all perverts,
even those baldy
monks up on some
breast-like mountain.

I'm a stand-up citizen,
I'm a thief.

I'm a leader,
I'm a coward.

I'm a friend,
I'm a murderer.

Stood in the dock,
I deserve redemption.

I ought to be ******.

I am my own split jury.

On the road just passed Ballinasloe,
with tyres hugging tight
to tarmac's staccato white stripes,
the stone walls of Aran seem so long ago.

Bu that is only the distance,
And she is more than the proof.

The island's sun has tinted her face,
Its sand has clung tight to salted skin,
The cliffs have sped the pace of her chest,
And now it's the Atlantic that floats within.

Like a swarm they squeeze frantically,
armed with proof
slung around their throats,
pushing forward they point and grab,
not stopping to think
of that dying slave.


But look at you all,
like pigeons to the crumb.

One white page.
One black dot.
One white page
with one black dot.
That is all.
You see it.
Good.
Now wiggle that dot.
Just a tad.
Watch it shake.
A single vibrating cell.
A fly in the wind.
Trembling up. And down.
And down and up and right and left.
It's a ***** smudge
ruining your clean page.
So rub it out .
With your pencil thin rubber.
But it dodges like a boxer's head.
A darting fish.
You want to get rid of it.
You want a clean white page.
Plant your rubber down.
A dramatic staff in the ground
cracks the white soil.
But it circles you.
That fly, that fish,
that blurred boxer.
That singular cell.
It circles your staff.
Your statement.
Magnetically.
A metal ball.
Orbiting your invisible eraser.
To erase the invisible dot.
But it is there.
Circling faster.
Wider.
Angrier.
Leaving a trail behind.
Too fast for the eye.
The sultry smoke of speed.
The slipstream of a cannonball.
The page is warped.
Earthquake epicentre on the A4.
Shook by the fault lines.
Jutting canyons drop down.
Ledges crumble and crash.
Sugared pie crust
hit with a hammer.
Everything collapses.
Invisible things are also under
the spell spell of gravity.
Hit on the head by invisible apples.
But it's not invisible.
It's not a cell.
A fly or smudge.
An agile boxing fish head.
A cannonballing canyon pie.
It's not even a white page.
Nevermind the black dot.
It's nothing.
Not a thing.
Not invisible,
but  the kind of nothing
that can't be seen.
Yet there it is.

I have seen the great pyro minds
manically set themselves alight,
a nightly burn that glows with
shotgun epiphanies,
masturbatory madness
and affectionate fights.
Exhaustion eventually extinguishes
and they awake as ashes
in the introspective sunlight.

A daily process of life and death,
a cerebral freeze and thaw
that cracks the skull
and punctuates all the *******
that comes with being alive.

I lay ****** on the beach
curling
my
toes
in the sand,
my hands shadow
over my face,
as the lapping sea's sound
flowed by old toothless fishermen
playing dominoes over the only shaded ground.

I watched an ant
climbing grains,
and thought how the soft yellow
that surrounded my soft trance
must have seemed endless,
and the soft
ruffle of the waves like a roaring bellow
for his
scuttling legs and faceless head.

I watched the women's bodies,
the firm
flabby
all salty and wet,
bikinis hiding secrets
I desperately wanted to learn
and keep just for myself,
a cheap pleasure
left denied
as I lay
aroused in ****** unrest.

And then a boat shored up.

Four fishermen
dropped
a
shark
in the shallows
and took to it with a blade.

Off with its head to
retrieve the hook,
fade red into blue
like smoke exhaling out,
a clean slice from headless neck
to already fin-less stub.
In less than five minutes
they left,
and their ****** mess
stirred up all the woman,
who I had
already mentally undressed.