It is snowing.
Please thaw my house. Please
thaw my
Heart.

“Hello”
“Hello, and you are?”
“I am here, you can tell that by the fact that you can’t see anything behind me”
“Looks like we’re both just occupying space”
“Always”
“Why do you wear that suit? When I see men in suits all I see is a collection of different proportioned black and white shapes and I imagine they want to wear masks”
“Most people like to show off even how ordinary they are, of course when the suit comes off we all like to be kooky and different, but who isn’t these days”
“You sound like an office man”
“You seem like a Rachel”
“No”
“The red ring of lipstick round your glass and the way your shoe points nuzzle each other makes me picture that name”
“I don’t look like my name, like a celebrity or a country or something”
“Can I have your name?”
“Only for a second”
“I wanted something which was yours, even if for just a second”
“You didn’t ask to see my face and that is much more personal to me than a name which I imagine I share with many other people”
“Probably the same as your earrings”
“What’s your name?”
“I took it off for this evening, it didn’t go well with my suit.”

We are in the ungodly hour again,
that sixty-minute stretch,
embedded in the nighttime,
of undisputed stillness.
A fracture of the evening
occupied by deep breaths
and oddly-human silhouettes.

The town butcher spends overtime
breaking bones, working
on the swine, and counting  
the progression of the night
by the swinging bodies.
They’re cold and sinuous
but he likes their company.

The town preacher wastes time
as he knows to pace himself
by half hour intervals,
squeezed between nightcaps.
In every period he remembers
slightly less that, a boy
is to be buried by the morning.

The town beggar walks towards nowhere,
he blows an alcohol breath
into his clasped hands
like resuscitating a needy mouth.  
from his ceiling-less living space,
he looks into black windows
just like we would look out of them.

The town dealer is on nothing
living back some hours he lost
Inside his head, looking, from a distance
through his eye sockets.
Now he’s on a strange sobriety and with a text,
the Londonese and the hood come back up.

In the ungodly hour,
no storm makes an eye around me.
In an un-pretty always, things just happen
to fill the timeless time.
We all assure ourselves
we’re all alone.

I don’t want a sunbeam
give that to Jesus.
Don’t bother me with purity,
don’t let me make shadows
out of you.

I don’t want a butterfly
batting along on the wind.
The wind of my word,
on the gale of my opinion.

I don’t want a pearl,
something that needs to be made.
Made from gritty sand, held close,
and pressurised round and edgeless.

I don’t want a rose
called what I want it to be,
cut where I want it to be,
on my lapel, for when it makes me look best.

I don’t want conversations like schizophrenia.
If you want me to be able to explain you in four lines,
I don’t want you.

She looks
me in the eyes,
for just a moment,
as if it helped her to say
“I am only going to date you
if you just go to confession first.”
I think she wants me
to clean my soul
before I shave my chin
for her.

I unlatch
the wooden grate
and feel what it’s like
to look through the holes
of an Irish potato sack.
It’s the kind of guilt you feel
not having enough
******* for the recycling,
again.

He accepts
my quiet words,
Metabolizing them,
into fuel to keep nodding,
and I think of that stolen ******
in the back pocket
of my Sunday best,
between the fabrics,
and pressed by the polished wood.

Back to the sack insides
still, he wants to know,
the anatomy of my soul.
He wants to trace the outlines
of my spiritual blood vessels
all the way to my spiritual
heart, tucked behind spiritual
lungs. So he asks,
when I’ll come again.
I’ll need another two dates,
for the three date rule, to apply,
I think.

We wrote our names on the beach in animal bones
as a vivisection, on our love.
there, she’s whispering into shells
into their Fibonaccian, trumpeted, dresses
and full-cheeked into a razor clam flute.
I, too, gave my blood to grease our domestica
and hung names on stars over the nighttime sea
always accompanied as I were
with the shark-eye, death, of her looks.

We dressed up the walls of home in black and pinstripe,
filled the place up with lit and lightless places,
Shadowboxed, shadowfucked, and silently argued.
Spent hours inside, laying floorboards
and then laying on them
to stare at the sodium lights
and discuss the inkblots on our eyes.
We vivisected our lives,
and splashed it on the walls
and carved it into the carpets.

We set alight to christmas trees
when the kids were sleeping upstairs.
We dressed in each-other’s reddening horror
and answered the door.
Valentines day was full of bone bouquets,  
the gripper rods grew through the carpet
so on them we danced.
I prayed for the first time in the first year
and every one hit me subesquently
like I was its anvil.

I should have gone to war.
Because it makes forever shorter
things can only happen right now.

I watched everything in our domestica,
like when the static moved off the television
and played on the window
gutting me of my escape.
The smiles hung on our faces like lupus,
We had people round,
we cooked and coughed and choked
And their faces peeked round from the doorframe
and laughed.

The domestica lives
only to be a bit of fun,
but in the very same span of time
that decided to **** the birds on my windowsill
and my children’s love for me
and my dexterity.
We’ve happened to the whole world too
I promise you, my love,
my little hospice fire,
my flat tire at night at nowhere,
the lie you recognise means it’s over,
A field of a thousand three-leaved clovers,
the brightest night when you’re hiding,
your heart attack on holiday,
your bloodstained bed sheet
And sleep, whilst outside
the sleet and snow makes every emergency
harder to get to, and still the morning
much more beautiful.
I, you, we happened.