You slipped out of the noisy corridor / into perpetual dawn / with the first birds stirring over the broken back fence / with footsteps moving over the frost
Every evening the man brings home his trailer / of vegetables. He bruises them rushing over the kerb. // In the house across the way a mirror waits / glowing and alone for all the lighted day.
and all the instruments that need to go / into the autoclave have gone to that chamber / of steam and all the debris is whirlpooled / down I am set free in the streets / victim and champion / red and rubbed lips softer than anything else
any poem can be a diminishing thing / taken from the sea & standing in for you & / a remedy we eat what they eat but thats not / reality the spoon falls in the phone rings
My mind was like an angel sinking. / Among the ruins of four walls you showed me the sea – / how it and the starry sky were constructed. / It was ebbtide. I undressed. / How many hearses in the coming year?
Whose inked spurs to the dialectic / snaking down the rancid page – / yours? mine? a third’s? / Those epigrams were dying on a lip: / were they mine you edified, undid?
Below, the land is quilted / like a chequered past, / cosmetic, infinitely private. / The in-flight service is delayed / and I am glad, but not the Americans. / Just as the captain predicts / a smooth flight we hit the turbulence.
Lived in a boot. / Hand-made calf-skin, fitted dead snug. / Rolled down tongue so it was open-top. / Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t know where to knock. / Not hundred per cent waterproof but good enough. / Drank beer over garden wall of ankle cuff. / Lived in a boot.
