Last night
I held out my palm
to catch hailstones

to store under floorboards
where all bad things are kept
like spoiled apples,

letters paralysed by tears,
junk I bought
then jammed into toasters

so at least I could say
I put them somewhere.

It feels chillier
when nobody's about,
and the roads

and alleyways
are clogged
with silence,

the inescapable
winter blackness.

I find your name
on my window
drooling away,

a skeletal row
of faded transparent roots
and when I woke

I desperately wished
you had put it there.

Winter,
and with winter comes a girl.
She greets the weather as a friend
she has not seen since last Christmas,
grins as the snow
scrunches and squeaks
as green Wellington boots
on a wooden floor.
Two men walk past her,
reeking of yesterday’s brandy.
One has sloshed a lot
down his front,
a dark claret patch
like a seeping **** on his chest.
Someone is playing an instrument,
a saxophone,
and the sound
sprints fluidly along the streets
into taxi-cabs and terracotta
coffee-shop windows.
She smiles again.
One dustbin’s been KO’d,
trash trips out
in a puddle of colours
like unwanted confectionary.
A teenage couple are kissing,
their heads a swaying metronome
and the boy grips a Starbucks cup
with one limp hand as if to say
here you have it.
Evening gushes over her
like a rush of bad acne
but she loves the sun
as it pecks the cheeks of buildings
and the jingle from her phone
which reminds her,
the movie starts at eight.

on an evening when I’d string together whispers
little beats from the sleepy hearts
and I’d find comfort in the gaps between
the places I could store a sigh or two
my glass hiding spots
and there is a constant loneliness
in feeling no roots beneath you
no tie to the bones in your fingers
some day I will live by the ocean
so maybe then I can feel an impression
of something forever pulling me closer
a salted embrace

In the hospital I am drinking coffee
from a plastic cup, it’s edges have melted
into my hand, we are one, the coffee and my hand

There is no time except the movement of two
hands, in reverse, the movement of one hand
chasing down the other, in reverse

There are plastic seats that scratch through
the cheap cotton covering my legs,
they are thin, worn leggings, covering my legs

The doctors pass in secret, we are not supposed to see
to see the doctors pass, in secret they move like
ghosts we are not supposed to see

My grandmother is not yet a ghost
she has flesh still, incandescent and bright, it is on fire,
it glows pale incandescent and bright

they walk towards us, the doctors, these ghosts
and we see them, these ghosts, these doctors
we are not supposed to see

we go to her, my grandmother
incandescent and bright
she is glowing in her hospital bed

already an angel, an angel without wings
the wings that she has are burnt to her back
she won’t be flying anywhere

she is sinking, sinking into her bed
incandescent and bright she blends into
the white sheets
seamlessly

we watch her, sinking seamlessly into the white sheets
we watch her burnt wings crumple beneath the
six stone weight of her

when she stops breathing, we all breath
in and out, we smell the charred bones
that death left, with each breath
we take in what’s left

we leave the hospital bed, the itchy chairs
the ghostly doctors we leave behind
our coffee cups, cut free from our hands

we breathe in each step, our skin
burning for fresh air,
we walk step by step

and the light from the street is so
bright, so incandescent
and bright

Lights were on,
you were home.

His car,
watermelon green
boot static in front,
lit up as treasure
beneath a streetlamp globe.

Snow pinched
windshield,
fingers numb,
gloves with pentagonal
holes 'round the wrist.

Got out,
cold hit me
like the train squealing up
at Canal Street
near 2AM.

That's where
you found out
who I was.

I thought you were
another twenty-something
from Greenwich Village,
discount hairband
and a wrong shade
of eye-shadow.

Eighteen months later,
I can't even remember
what colour your eyes are.

Knocked the door,
a reckless mistake.

Heard a murmur,
rowdy thump down stairs,
a ****** of glasses
(wine? Surprise.)

It had been a while.

You were expecting me.