Paul Sands
we chose hooks
remember
those nights we placed hooks in our eyes? waiting in our sleep to catch the white tailed lies that swam inside our bed do you remember those nights? we should, instead, have walked the chrome stacked streets that rolled like silver eels amongst stub ends sailing on tarry keels in that vanishing space between the night clubs gaudy hush and a needful capital morning rush before the coffee, before the bread, before the morning headlines but we chose hooks do you remember? none so blind
I did not see you there
onion eyed panda tight in the corner with your full proof cohort sucking on the empty vapour I did not see you there cold in crumpled sheets counting the winning lies harsh knee clenched pillow lying in spinning divides I did not see you there mired in absinthian spectred familial grief reconditioning the same hackneyed lost motif I did not see you there I did not see you I did not see because I stopped looking Blue Sky Drinking
Coltrane may be riding with me
but these blues are different waves of linseed breathing into the pastel edges and rising through the cocaine lines scratched into a deeper hue and under this hullaballoo I drive to the water past the sanitised lies of tarmac and brick until I can sit on the banks and choke on a pig in a poke as my roast crumbles and drowns in the foam round but from then three whole hours with no human sound where I watch the fowl ketch downstream with their downy cargo pursued sometimes by the spreading chevron of an earlier brood that breaks in two the single mirrored cloud audience to the bovine students of Constable’s bucolic porn as slivered fry, like shards of ice, roll in the shallows of this blissful silence. I have no need for words even for the carrion, mistaken from far as sofa or chair, a simple nod will suffice while the damsels dance and date and die the violaceous thistle downed and crowned shouts “gather round” to the birds and the bees and I half expect to see a mole and rat sculling with a hamper astern and I check the arm of the yard and discern never to early for a cold one after all it’s only self preservation but not before a bus flashes by screeches and cries as the driver waves and flagellates her empty seats for it’s now a buzz so full it is of wasps and bees ding-dong
they lined up
in their smart suits and executive hair outside the foundation stone of a nations ruin ready to eulogise, to heap praise upon a legacy of division the traffic slowed and the tempers frayed in a burg where there is never enough most had left by 8PM save one expecting maybe a ghost? returning at the earliest light most had moved into town I popped my head inside a truck and said "she's still dead you know" one yet remains awaiting the stone to roll back my wife, the daughter of a miner, council bread and margarine raised nods, obligingly at the checkout as she scans their custom and cloying praise "its nice about the flowers isn’t it" “yes” she replies “they look great on my fireplace” and then she reads people writing that “the miners were greedy” and she spits "tell that to those with emphysema, white knuckle and crippled joints go stand by the graves of the hundreds that died better still come here and say it to my face" (Note: I live on the road that Margaret Thatcher was born on, the home of the Roberts Greengrocery. Yesterday and today the town and road have been assailed by media from around the world. What they expected to find I do not know)
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Squib ☊Rigid truths and squared guaranteesTexture this boy
His morseled fantasies The graceless torrent of impotent gods Wary as the wasp on the chameleon's Trapeze tongue For even as the microscope remains Boxed, in cotton, in woollen peace Rags may still record Fidelity's soiled tapestry Once stung, the swollen speech Of reason's soured and thickened song Bastards the condensed apprenticeship Fields a howling, childish drove where Dreams so quickly cloud to sheep I could so easily...shhhh You shall not impeach me for the rhymes That I decline good morning, good morning
this house is awakening
It yawns and stretches aged bones, as last night’s ghosts scurry home with the copper blood running warm through worm pricked floors I lie, like you, while you lie, as we, under the nights warm stink and the claw and the purr of the cat’s half lidded lazy gaze as the foundations shake with each passing race of 18 wheel freight the breakfast chorus is missing, presumed drowned, so this morning demands a virtuoso performance “how do you want your eggs my dearest, square or round?” too early for her to answer a question quite so profound “still inside a bird please” whispers the cat hedge fund
Jo on my shoulder he has my ear.
picking out worms, putting in pearls but he goads “run!” he caws and in a harebrained haste I race faster than the flash flicker fire of neon engagement I beat my chronic heart across the room but did not pause and left it pounding against slatted ivory walls, those brittle buttresses of my soon to be archaeology and in the same instant I am far away yet rooted, indentured, carbon draff Jo values the worth of his investment and he gnaws what crisis?
nowadays they have to pinch the ends
of their cigarettes before they cross the threshold no longer allowed to herd the crumbling swarms of ash across the gingham veldt outside the window, on the pavement, lies a bible and the radio declares their readiness is high seems like a good night to let the smokers in and warm around a last embered light on the table I browse the “priest“ they called him in the centrefold, deep in the heart, a flyer, man’s journey into christ, I guess we’ll find out soon enough the veracity of the divine but until the young-un and the white horse riders have decided who can piss the highest leave us to the daily diary and its tales of days of fucking each other’s husbands and wives I bought a Dylan Thomas book on the way home, from the junk shop, when I got it back I saw blood on the back cover I licked my finger to wipe it off but she said “no! you fool“ sure it carried the plague of some cursed lover I plagiarise myself a drink is most definitely in order the tawny coolness tock tick toxic keen as the sharpest dissection and then you can find me not just like everybody else but just like everybody else, lying, hemi-hydrate, below the bridled tension of life’s meniscus business class
I am yellowed by indecent sights
and drowned from hawking snake oil by the wafered byte amongst the dialectic devices and a little below the belt advice but your face sewn on and sugared sheer smooth, iced Pierrot white, means it is time to remove though I should mention my scorn for the circus fool and my cruelty fuelled twists of hate five fathomed fingers shelled by the dollar hungry well spastic, cupped and feathered ignoble in a fizzling slow rare light street wet not from rain no more indulgent my shame in a corner where the rats cut a dash in Boss as happy to pick my pocket as I your bones in the sweating fist of night or the blast of this mad dog’s febrile noon how kind now is the Englishman for whom your knees bleed? may it never, yet it doesthe monsters used to live under the bed
now they walk the streets, most often, with halos around their heads cold sunbeams stiffen my hyphenated bones and even singing does nothing to evaporate the frosted water in my veins splash my neck slap my face I’m sick of talking I get no satisfaction from my lower case hate |
