The air turns thick,
heavy with heat.
The clock goes
tick tock, tick tock,
over, and over again.
We count every second
with bated breath
waiting for our freedom.
The sun shines brightly
through the doors beyond,
beckoning us.
It whispers,
"Come join the world
filled with laughter and light.
Shade your tired eyes
and bask in my warmth and glory."
We wish with all our hearts
to finally escape
our monotonous prison
and run into the land of joy.

i was but a foetus in a womb when Chernobyl happened; the women were told to drink iodine... never knew why, so obviously i was bound to end up like a mutant, given that the radioactivity winds where more potent than those of hot glass Sahara... if you're still stuck in Einstein's physics in terms of causality: cause and effect, i know by a golden standard that you're still confused... Newton's theories about certain things might have been wrong... but a punch is still a punch on the receiving body: a plum coloured blotch, a limo of the puffed up punched cheek of the area around the eye socket.

most these poems could be forgotten in an instant,
a blink of an eye to account for 365 sunrises
on an orb, dense with salty waters,
most of them could become dinosaur bones
on the flag of Wales, just like that! snap! click!
there... prehistory tangled on display
oddly rushed into a crowd of waving hands
with its fluttering creases...
but then i know what poetry is for...
it's not for galleries, not for exhibitions,
not freak shows... not stadiums with amassed
crowds shouting drunken grunts...
poetry isn't for that...
take Alla Ivanivna (aged 87), living in
the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a remote
place called Poliske, once inhabited by
20,000... later 20... 17 of which died,
leaving 3 ghosts... well, souls...
a rickety hut, snow through half the year,
Columbus birches (explorers of the forests,
the scouts of the forests),
she's there living on 40 euros a month,
her food gets delivered,
perhaps a stove to warm-up,
she survived the **** invasion,
the Soviet-induced famine,
her husband died when she was 20 in
a car crash...through the Stalinist repression,
and then Chernobyl...
and then she quotes TS Eliot -
an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing,
there... that's poetry... that's what poetry
is for... it's not an art to be shouted on rooftops,
it's not a honing device for you the bee
and the vast swarm to come looking for you...
Alla is a gallery, the purpose...
she remembers the good old days - and
she remembers a line from a poem...
memory is poetry's greatest ally,
actually poetry is a kind of memory,
perhaps a tool to peer into a vast vault of
images, given poetry is sometimes unheard
and encoded with these crude symbols...
you keep one line from a poem rather than the
whole poem like a trained monkey schoolchild
and your life flashes before your eyes over
the dim bleak vegetation of Ukrainian winters -
it's almost like a slap against Kant's categorical
imperative of working out your life with
one maxim, or with several, whatever;
and that's why it so ******* hurts to craft*.

I thought I knew what love looked like
now every time I log on
I get lost in your eyes

I thought that I was stronger than ever
but your smile makes me feel weak
I thought I had matured and grown
you make me feel like a schoolchild crushing

Whatever it is, it won't matter
Whatever it is, it can wait
2yrs4hrs
Whatever it is, I don't care.

Will I be enough?
Are you real?
Are you warm to the touch?
What does your hair smell like?

I thought I was crying
until you made me look
now
it's
fine

we have time

Winter lingers like a petulant schoolchild:
Clouds jostle for position, darkening with rain.
A sudden chilled wind rushes from the storm’s
Leading edge, stirring birds to flight.

Natural drains roar with the shower-fed torrent.
Trickling streams become dark-mirrored cascades.
Wind-blown branches whip sharply, some toppling
Under the relentless beating.

A fleeting slice of sunlight rolls across the distant hills.
The first stirrings of wildlife crash through the thickets.
Robins race for food.  Songbirds raise tentative voices.
The charged air is filled with the smell of wet
Foliage.

The rains would soon resume.  His usual crossing
point had already vanished.  He settled back in his
Lean-to shelter, finished his meal, and pondered the
Approaching darkness.

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.

from father, footrace, fistfight (poems, June 2014)

(available on Lulu)

duologue

we’ll start here, turtle.

this is what I say to the grey thing I’ve been talking to.

the only buffer between engagement & constant engagement
is life
during wartime.

I conceive of a dropper
but hold it empty
above my eye.

because it is the one word without a beginning

suffering
because it is the one word without a beginning
is not limited
by its
vocabulary.

we wanted a sophisticated god
but in immediate
unison
called it
god.

this is the grey cream
that gives her privacy.

I am drawn to a sort of journalism
by association, a campestral formlessness
attached
for example
to the term

carpet bombing.

how is death, here? in an orange ball of yarn

she is not ahead of?

she has to stop, turtle.

to declaw an electrocuted kitten
she didn’t
electrocute.



isochronal character

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.


impossible beast

the whole town was in the parade. the newer babies had a float to themselves. at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father. I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory. somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire. I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness. my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart. she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.