Song For A Sweetheart
again being played to the one
without a counterpart,
unholy chasms forming in the shapes
of stomachs and lungs and
a gap for where the heart should be,
taken like every lost jigsaw piece
to the hand of a child, one not
yet realising they’ll have to be with someone
in the 20 years or so.
To wait would be to trust the timetable
that is pinned to every figment board
in this town,
printed in red and finished with crosses
on the bottom, shame they’re written by
the hand of her, for her sweetheart counterpart, not for this boy
from somewhere people only pass through,
not care about.
I’m with you Clayton West, a ring road
to the main show out of town.

From a platform, he was pushed
down onto the ground.

There he landed with a great cry, a lonesome sound,
where the beasts took him with teeth;

molars and canines in the form of sticks and swords for sheaths,
beat him till his lungs gave in, until they no longer heaved for a breath.

Collapsed sacks of skin in a broken body
on a broken roof
somewhere without a name,
just a news channel hook
and gambit,
theme tune and a corpse laying bare on a video screen,
shield your eyes, place a blanket over the body and boy.

Architectured backs hide secrets in their bends,
rising up from foundations built on brown tanline sands
secured with concrete cloth, tied to posts either side
of lengths and widths.

Ask the professor, he’ll know how to demolish a building:
he’s a degree in unfolding the unnatural
and his last paper was in firming up the dunes;
with wooden poles his tests were conclusive
almost allusive as he marched on at night,
but we saw him, with others under car park, notorious, car rocking
lightly in the light, light.

Due to administration cut backs his papers were never reposted to sender
and now I’m bound by glue
that leaked from their spines and lines
of the book
to you:
we’ll never not be apart
but shall remain forever not together.

Filaments fixed on your eyes all night
and the possibility of a chance, of an opportunity,
that I’ll be able to talk to you,
because the club lights are blue
stretched like animal hide across your own hide:
complexion clear cheeks still rouged
though tidal club glow is still blue.

It’s pathetic, worse than any diabetic
with their HumaPen Memoir insulin
length of pen, recording the time
and date
and precise amount of pain
they inject from the last 16 doses.

My pen is my keyboard and records
miserable times
and forgotten dates in cafes
and precise amounts of pain,
though this diabetic is a pathetic poet
and he knows it.

Half cut teens dressed in high street dreams
stand and survey the beach,
combing it for male shells, to clarify:
guys who think crucifix tattoos on their lower leg will save them from hell.

A mother whose job it is to look after surfboard and parasol,
yes you the mother looking my way,
you should ditch the marriage and get on the road,
hug the coast with tire squeals,
hug men with body sacrificing screams in
cheap French roadside hotels that don’t clean their bathrooms that well.

Girlfriend left to sit the sun out whilst boyfriend joins husbands in the surf,
reads but really she’s breathing,
passing the hours and folding over page corners,
don’t let him see that you don’t love him.

Tablet kids who watch the sea on screen, in apps,
when behind them is a torrent of live data swells and boils
causing swimmers to tumble and coil up close to the sea bed,
some parents, increasingly the same,
forgetting why they came to the coast in the first place.