Flywheels enamel
with heartblood,
aortal ticks hesitate

before the dull bang
of a fallen fist,
the fat knuckle

of the next hit.
Tick tick the
small ones,

the eaters of dust,
stone-eyed they
fall apart like lost time,

the weights that
regulate all
are unbalanced.

A bird has
changed its body,
downgraded to

a requiem of light bones,
a lost map of flight,
a throw of crashed feathers.

Black as old water,
empty as a gutted fish,
still as a prayer,

skinless as the
crashed sky,
eyeless with dismay.

Let me be a casement
that you open when
you look out of a window or
a sill full of warm moss
to rest your hands upon.

Star to let
to a cat-lover
and friend of

less perfect dahlias,
to putter-outers of
unwashed milk bottles,

to curtain shifters
and spectacle sinkers,
to all those gods

of Victoria's terraces
all waiting for
the flat upstairs.

What is left if nothing's left ?
The tap loses teeth-blood,
Each empty cup smiles with malice.

We have fallen over the fence,
Our pictures torn, a history in bags,
We walk like a cluster of wraiths

As dull legs trudge over stones.
The old will wither with frost
When the night comes sooner.

And if the children cry in the night
There is nothing more to say
Than that the stars are hungry too.

At twentythirtyfour
On the eleventhofseptember
     a neuropathological tracer

Jumped from the box,
Lost poem; a title over rain
    men waving tins at a tractor,

And the later sleeping wihout
Rest; rooms full of waves,
    the ineluctable modality of water.