Hard stomaching my insides
even before
these dull black undulations
of Guinness inside of me.

Sequestered in the echoes
of disembodied chatter,
the flagrant words
splutter to the floor;
whereas those same words were before
streamlined in marble aqueducts,
dispatched like love-songs to G-d;
meanwhile a door has opened.

I felt you take my temperature
in a fever-dream, I felt
even in dreams, your quart-clear hand
on a pale damp forehead;

The cold silver stethoscope
counting percussion in my chest,
with no whale-song nor rainfall,
no sound at all save for
the sirens and the foxbark.

Then after a while,
a night of mostly true silence
that left you with nothing to hear,
                 only the ****** functions:

Internal blood pulsations
rhythmically throbbing you find
some cells dying, others being born;
the anti-bodies of body,
the anti-thoughts of my mind.

She will make it better,
at least alleged to,
when, while her nocturnal
might she, with brown bandages
might have still acutely concealed
lips (now purple),
and the same eyes: Blue.
And I knew
that whenever the daylight lit,
didn't I slouch toward it
to be born?

Me, then, knowing no better,
to be warm,
and not yet cold,
not knowing of coldness
or anything at all,
any of it,
this 'this'.

When we shook off the mud,
and all in all in all, with
a wind westerly breaking
foreshadowing shatterings
of antarctic brass monkey *****.

Still some mutterings of mite,
practically blue and purple,
still some mutterings of 'might',
wherever first you felt a light go off
and slouched toward me,
with that stigmata your palm caught
in the crux of a rose-bush.

Wilting on a winter morning,
when foxholes sighed like
moon-creators that have
never know sunlight.

When all things thawed
and turned towards daylight
and shook away the frost;

Windblown brittle bird-nests quivering,
same wind that lashed your
goose-pimpled skin
beneath your raincoat,
your spine shivering,
beneath our blue creaked
lips twist two pairs
of gnashing white teeth
again,
This.

Wanting you mouth upon me
as if sprinkled in MSG,
I kept going back to it,
as if smothered in sugar,
tongue, licking it up quick,
like on a flickering candles wick,
I'll handle the blame,
carry the weight,
'till all worries drained away
like coffee granules strained
into the bottom
of your French press,
'I'll die in Paris' you say,
'in Montparnasse, maybe,
in November,
perhaps I'll haunt
that tiny old cinema
that only holds
12 creaking seats,
and stick the springs
into their backs.'

What is left of late?
Uttered the mouth out
to a sky, dull,
deadened with clouds,
snagged by cranes,
like scythes slicing heavenward;
49 crying horns sound.

What has happened?
Unhappily not happened?
What is left?
               Only the husk
and the head,
strange with sawdust,
and the eyes glace through glasses
as if through fog
at the rain,
    the rain,
    the rain,
the clogged drain.

'I'm told the dumb trace passes.'
said yourself, through the
pencil sketch of a smile.

With a passing glance of folly,
we, like gulls
mull over broken brollies.

Fluttering like bats abound,
each a failure to the
dampening shelter seekers,
their soul soaked,
their intentions drenched,
returning (rained on relentlessly)
     to their nest,
to dry,
to try and rest.

Alone now,
so could now,
the face felt
unsure whether
to freeze or melt.

Surveying the sky
whilst falling to the ground,
down I knelt.

It was when my waking eyes
shank into the dent in the bed
                                that I knew.

Torpid, little tense in the neck
the phone dead,
my hand snaking through
       a mesh of wires
to get to the muzzy
                  crux of it,
it was yourself
I turned up tangled in,
found ensnared, redrawn,
in throws, and throngs
            of a clonic cupidity.

That was us
who mangled in the night
like cobras with empty stomachs
Churning round
small nocturnal animals
         in the dark,
even in the dark,
I swore your skin was pellucid.

Sleepy-headed still,
I skedaddled outside
to swallow the rain,
and slumbery remember summer,
when I hopped as light
as bird from brier,
up rises my spirit,
down falls the foot
caked in muck,
schlepping slowly
through the mire.

You've slept in my bed
it seems, for as long
as memory serves,
just one of the many things on Earth
I've noticed and subsequently
           can't unnotice,
like the way in one hears a clock
tick.....tick.......tock......
only when one is listening.

I have noticed
that dent in my bed
grow into a dozing silhouette,
noticed the garden-gate
creek in F minor,
silver cobwebs in the loft,
               distant dogbarks
and a pomegranate stain
on your mother's blouse.

Once, so thickly laden
with expectancy,
                     now I know
that I am
                        no longer
                           Waiting.

Guarding the door,
like a bulbus Heimdall,
a blank pumpkin sits,
internally unhallowed,
without gashed gaping maw,
nor knife-notched nose,
nor eyeslits: triangular and odious.

Its inertia, serendipitous,
not for a moment did it greet
children asking
"Treat-or-Treat?!";
Never a one did it glow for.

Encased within, like
those stringy pumpkin guts,
is the puckish Pagan spirit,
craving bones ablaze in a fire;
Lost Loves manifested as moonlit
flaxen apparitions,
finding them Angelic
(yet unchanged),
easily as a ring
found in barmbrack.

A return to the turnip.

Ambling along ferns
rusted that same shade of pumpkin,
pondering the dead, and where
I long for them to reside now;
Rose, with her heaven,
Ryan, his Valhalla.

To each their Kingdom
of eternal inviolate peace.

Under a certain light,
with calm mollifying gleam,
at the touch of a hand
aphasia sets in quick,
sudden and sweet, and
submerged in a pool of milk,
I become a toy submarine.

When candles did die,
burnt to their wicks,
I hear you sing,
holding up half of my skies,
convulsive muscles flex,
as if a broken thing
was longing to be fixed.

Surly time stilled passed?
Though from its presence,
we were absentees,
too preoccupied with
our arms stretched outwards
weightless as bodies
on the Dead Sea.

A shaky hand that
possesses paper cuts
and letters of lovers' past
is bleeding brilliant
as a sunset.

Bespectacled milky eyes
twitch in and out
of consciousness
like a revolving door
with no exit.

Misshapen ballerina feet
seize up and cramp,
often their hue goes from
the colour of raw meat,
when until becoming still,
settle into blue.

Warmth goes,
the whole of the body
like a pound-shop doll
after too much play,
is reduced to
an artifact only to be
handled by white gloves,
in a dim room smelling faintly
of dust and mahogany.

In such rooms
often there are
recollections of
the whole of the body,
dancing dances
of rapture and grace
on the tips
of ballerina feet.