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Tom McCone Mar 2014
Upon a web strung across vast fields of
pure and distant velvet nothing,
perfect back-traces of the flickering past
revolve in place, in silence,
signs puddled for an instant from abandoned
corners of clusters. Polaris sieves a movement,
severs Octantis in a slated blink of being as quiet
reaches from further clutches, as a light quivers against
the dark, enshrined in its own solace, drinking from
a garden of heaviness; a sigh slips, echoes and lingers.

A tidy emptiness wavers in the tide of
time-shifting constellations, pulses lost in the single
night that never stems. A fine dust propagates
under the breath-patterns of its own constituency.
No symbol spoken, the still moment reaches and
encompasses all, heaving in glass moments compressing
beneath layers, bathed ablaze and curling through its
own precessing maw. Gathering, spiralling pieces of
uncoalesced millenia hurtle against an again hurtling
arm of a freckle gathered on a point of dust drifting
between caverns diving through the weight of walls holding
all that support their standing. A drop of light quivers
from each mouth, hides in crevices where smaller droplets
stand firmer at each junction, stand shining quietly with
no motive, dials slipping. The dripping lays down sheets,
climbs no corridor, designs a movement of no consequence;
dries out, knowing full well all the while. A ghost remains,
or a breath, both ultimately of finite import:
an exhalation or mote of dust.

Rain won't fall, the creek remains and, in tumult etched of
rigid symmetries, forges splits in azure. A broken fullness,
a glimmering product to permute and dissipate repetitions,
the slow formation of a complete emptiness.
In fine tapestry woven through the murk bellowed, the pattern
twists, coiling fingers through itself, the coalescing rotations
play out silence in no coda. The creek was never there.
Rain makes its way.                                                                  
                                       Capsular soil gives, capitulates petrichor,
defies dust aridity to cling in soft bundles about the child,
clothed in broken wings, tail clambering, all fine splits decided
upon countless repetitions passed. Light hovers and lights stand,
spin, in turn, as intervals chew tails through no static
motif, each gesture a mockery of predecessing broken ground
as fingers sliver ever toward known constancy,
blankets of warmth, an unclosing eyelid. Thus shuffles
awake the clamberer, to stretch and arc against potentials,
to fluoresce and bathe in radiance. A greater scheme
mingles at the tips of outstretched arms carrying wings
to break and flesh to guide a canopied architecture into
clearings laid out below twinkling webs to fold through
and let breath be taken as pawprints slowly form the
fingertips of a new architect. The children of the
child watch silent as motion trickles from centuries'
fortune. An emblem hangs in soft light on a ripple over
all-but-still water, cohort as glittering fragments strewn
beside. A bird's cry is lost in the marsh.                        
                                                      Again,
moments of absolute movement lay out beds of stillness, of reprieve.

At sea level, the curling faultlines feed open plain from
glass tears and monuments fleck the landscape of horizon.
To a pivoting sequence carves tiny bound structures in
self-image, a boiled-down replication to forge immemorial
traverse, a hairline fracture led blind through lakes of ice.
Still, to carry forward in a display of conviction, fine
splitting lineage diverges and cross-pollinates. First a
step, then a meadow, a panorama, three scores of
underbrush, seven mountains cradling a single pass,
two endless expanses of peat, one river for the life
of a child, three nights of no sleep, a resolve,
six iterations, one modification, seventeen snowfalls,
one feat built slow to grandeur, three months at sea,
three years at sea, three thousand years, seven oceans,
four hundred billion innovations, a blink of an eye. From
closed wings rise ordered patterns to clamber, always
asleep, to punctuate that immutable grove of light now
organized in transient gleams of projection and
nomenclative claim. Hollowed bellies of these
unstirring colossi, in turn, self-assemble and
writhe against an upturned gradient: disorder
bares teeth, crafts homogeneity and stumbles
on as Polaris dutifully continues in slow march
and reclaim of a ghost still cycling and hiding.

Finally, the moment takes grasp of all else
and itself, and parts tides of now-distant lights
through the ceiling and collapses where, between
word-laden walls, a tiny and terrified piece of
it attempts to reveal to all else that the moment
is already
gone.
written for a reading; never read anyway.
11-12/03/14
Tom McCone Mar 2014
hope called through a
window's pane, the scratch
marks in the single glaze
opens my letters; they
sit down to honeyed
conversation out in
the back yard. my throat
rakes small tendrils
billowing up through
the gravel, i slumber
cradled between soft
hot patches of afternoon, i
call nobody lover but misery,
still.

moribund, late light
crosses the neighbour's
rose bushes and cries
from the fenceline. all
is broken like me, but i
do it better. that, i promise.

now, finally slowing in eyelid
beat counts, my dreams tell
truths of my own small life; the
ones i won't dare live by, but
instead lay down and watch
ribs lain below
asbestos skin: i lose
hope's screaming in the garden,
knowing no fingers would want to
cross their lines,
who'd edge up to ****** up
tired little i?
nobody. that, i've been promised.
Tom McCone Mar 2014
but yes, i could
smile at you like an electric fence, could
**** myself over in
a field of happiness, resemblant,
there i stand,
on fire or just waking.

of course, neither of
us needs that, though. my
motions jar and disseminate truth
throughout me:
of foundation stone, or
of necessary monuments i
am hardly built, i
cut breath, breakfast and no class, i
can fall under a bus or
in love with you,

and the dull ache would remain;

and these days would still part.
and some small town would sleep,
all the same. so say
anything, or just idle and
stay and i'll go spiralling
down all the same.
i'll wake up, just watch.
Tom McCone Feb 2014
unsurely, we could have
slept, still: all made
small slitted movements,
all ablaze
in serenade for
something like
life, hanging sterile, like
presheaved diamond litter,
across broken lines
through the dark.

we breathe.
we trek out motions,
taking step in each other's
shadow.

and i, caught, dividing
through the time either of us still
could sleep. well, i
can't sleep. i can't
wait it out. i can't
do this. didn't
you say how i'd
lie? well, sugar,
i can't lie.
at least not tonight.
Tom McCone Feb 2014
would I could I have gotten
you, but I have this:
but I hold my downfall
between bubbles, or
between slurring fingertips;
pressure
loss, diffident
indifference,
bitter delirium, I
wake through the
marshes of all
thoughts I call mine, but
she, with quivering hands,
pulls trumps and
bares teeth and

i, small creature i,
decompose another fraction,
break and bend and
swallow no pride, tonight.

so hallowed, these lives!
like I lie, in-between
awake or no such dream or
the pursuit of impossibility:
an appetite turning these
wheels to drive us each home to
each of our own tiny
fallacious undestinies,
where lined veins underhandedly
tighten and leave,
stumble or bleed;
traces of the same want and amount of nothing.

from lustgarden cradled in concrete i
turn corners, i
recompose, with eyes alight. i
bare teeth, i
wake and bleed,
and still see.

I still breathe.
{sometimes I wonder if i'm even evil at all}
Tom McCone Feb 2014
personification and retreat
I am here like I am here
like I am or have been here
overridden and steadfast
folded like wideswept domains
I broke walls I count splinters I pack light and swing heels I am broken most of the time and I kind of like it
it’s easy to construct
socket set memories
a forest of meaning sprouting up defining swan songs
and their resonant structures
crawl down the valley all sweet and serene
29/11/12
Tom McCone Feb 2014
another stumbling block:
this one still called i,
this one,
stuck in this season's still belief.
one that
if any further summer
would be seen from
previous years, would
back streets still hang
dense in these heavy
melancholias? how
could i have bred this notion?

how could this shirt
pocket hold
such small demise for this week, right
beside the place you,
with uncertainty,
may someday call home?

the lights flare, i
curl up again.
i'm okay
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