'77/'86/'91/'08

Empty box, no wine in the skin
You told me, the eggs were addled,
The nest of the house outlived.

The dressing screens: was the velvet brown,
The oak stained black or dinge?
They regard me vaguely.

A whiff of talc and compact;
Rain on the lucarne panes. Flash ~
I saw the tower fall, sea-wave of bricks

Strobe the lawns to a knuckled shore
Wrecked with an aluminium galleon.
There was no television for a while.

"And Lo! I saw an angel
Come down from heaven"
You used the chamberpot, for

You were afraid of storms, at six,
A fan of Thor back then, I was not.
His chariot of wind howled cliches.

Today I saw a golden spark
Transfix a far-off ash,
A needle of heat, was it that

Sent me back: a ghost of bones
In clear water, clear muscles of wax,
Smoke blown through a straw in a glass

Like the poached-egg mushroom cloud
Bolus, convecting, concealing a scalpel
In our bedside water? Another challenge.

Or was it you crashed the thunderbolt
When your bronze-bone-jigsaw pushed brute
Squawk of 'hello' through New Year's slot?

Our lives, a naive installation
Of tissue paper and broken mirrors,
Glued by blindness. One touch tears down.

My ruin-tint spectacles are bolted on;
People break apart. Mid-life judgement
Day for all of us. Thank god we all dance well.

Cast as smolten agonist, fiery lead
In the plays of a hundred dramatists,
I transform into a glitterball.

Not the last time nor first, from banal rooftop
Receivers, lightning combed across my hair,
The concrete of a suburban pavement slammed me.

There is thunder in the air, perhaps.
That black night, that god-face of ash,
And the ditch-love drumming in the night,

The air as hot and heavy as tar,
The trees as oppressive as black coral,
The dread as deep as the sea,

What else to do but link hands
And flounder through, make love
In the breathless stasis of the skies?

You were hot and dark as dark
Gulped on our way up. Did you see
The pillar of fire, the burning bush?

Man, woman, which?
Brains embrace in sympathy.
It matters, says the world.

Cat of nine paws, my silly,
A nightsweat,
An ocean in bubble of sheets.

Love, friendship, which?
Resolve is all that counts.
It matters, says the wife.

I don't matter, I am not matter,
I am lightning,
Pure idiot energy of oracle:

Time is arcing to and fro, crackling across
The gloom of my clouded memories.
One of you did it. It's done for now.