Good luck (for Monday)

There's a poise
A cautious tremor
(focus)
Hovering in the voice next to me

On the phone
He sets up a business appointment
Except when he hangs up the conversation
I realise he's just asked somebody out
On a date
(is this assertive)
Say, on Monday?

Courage then, amidst disquiet;
Wearing a scarf and cuboid
Black woolen coat in a heat wave
Says something
About blind properness as habit
Perhaps unthinkingly a launch against misfortune:
Defended

Nobody that young
Carries around their possessions
In an M&S bag
Held with perpendicular intent at the side
I guess (or hope) his books
Are in size order
To protect the longevity of both
- because it's just good sense

While I'm lazy as a window sill with a book of stairs, a pillow
There he strides away;
From a mission accomplished
By minutes

Maybe his back doesn't ever
Move with his arms as he walks
Or maybe he just wears good shoes

Over

Under caverns move
Stars on an unlikely shell
The house of autumn's bell
Crest and dented in magnetic driven sand

A shore crossed with footfall
Mirage
Journey into the west
This exo-cabin
Ex of a giant creature's distant sleep
Belongs to straw fields
Wealth that crept up behind us
The descending party
Of night-fall years ago that I remember

Is this?
Life wanders around in synaptic patterns
Forms circles within a heavy snail's home
Smart characters of
Exhilation
Awaken a
Daddy long legs long in breath
Well-read between pages of the time it takes to be dead
But alien in a bottled world
It cannot fly away from

Here
A click is life and death together
Beneath the carbon echo drone
Neither burn alive but for the shapes of numbers repeated
Nor rightfully expired; I try to forget
But virtual memory makes everything a trade
Ink seems to cower from

The worms cannot dream under it
New conversations flow
Without gathering dust or settle
But where's the mettle
In only ever saying 'I know'?

Hyperlink beyond the recent
Walls the sea knew better than I and time
Saw them built and yet decline

So: I did
But do not now for knowing
Wage sharpened war against roof the and run out into nothing
Hope for
Some fluid architecture
To build my eyes again in difference
And the tactile scattering of rain
For without death to be over

Management Speak

Tens of coffee cards each with one stamp
Vouchers for Christmas, expired in '99
Matching socks of one
To-dos undone
Notes around the pages of a newspaper, like statistics
Diary of a life kept in polished shoes
Had it been: instead, no news -

Just books and stoves
And stones from the coast
Because it's light

Fall to sleep

I went far today
To a place we walked, over hidden cachets
Of roots and crystals and tennis courts, years ago
That compound time
Now released in the air would recoil

Today there were filing cabinets hanging from creepers and half-cars
Pondering a stream of red shoes flowing against green and yellow woodland leaves
Placards melted from the rooftops of a distant city not for sale as the
Rain of an evacuation storm; falling scraps of all the desperate last summons for justice
And emergency policies clutter the ground, even out here.

These particles are
Already sourced in the soil, building tea-lights into the trees
Casting a lean yellow warning light on the
October mist-soaked valley of moss and effect

We had walked here on a clear day with mirror blue
There were cooing cows in the fields and
I was going to say
'I think you are an atom'

Beyond the reach of red tape
I seek to find a shelf
In one of the border houses
And fall to sleep

By Satellite

There is
Nothing that the time will tell
Interior windows peer into offices
For which no office is held
And no secretary files the blanket slate
Of blocked out words on paper

Years later we were in the same park and walked
Under the same trees but didn't notice each other
The records were available now
But without purpose

The pollen that flew between us simmering
And circling on amber waves
Flew without direction

Kirkstall Abbey Ruins

Litmus hoax the
Old soul's antechamber against still tall
Drip-feed yellow vines
Stands a bullet arch into the stars
Plotted with no quack's map home

A wrestler of animals
Wrought from celestial
Half-headed gods in typography
With arms over and into arms
Stony, pious
Despairingly beautiful in silhouette

I wrote first from the flat earth to everywhere
Skimming the crop-circle landing site with my fingers and toes for clues
From the nineteen-fifties

Dew
The ground is still soft from the prints of one or two
Who saw the whale as a comet
Disappearing

Twist or Twist

Self-latening
Knotted helix wander
Through a caravan brick pile
Theatre of resting strangers on green shoulders
Permanetly engrossed in their closet winter shoreline story

Lampshade sun droning on about
This time last year
Same sensation
Different circumstances it
Cools towards the channel
Sieving the air for brambles and moths
Archiving

Home
From the carpark
We walked here across military fields
In supple arches to this postcard-themed
Park of cloud hostels
Marigold
Fibre-glass clock tower
Isolate grammar in conversation

Each plot a dot of white ink
With chocks in the soil

Drive back
Because the town closes at six
Boarded up from the scouring
Trampling waves
The cold wailing cannonade
Spraying up in chords from the tiles

Between molecules and
Dancing tableware
A piece of time has departed

Beneath the storm
Cliffs of emerald water

I was a windmill

Bring me
The cold and fire
The crest of a wrong
Turn
Bring me
Coarse air
Dewy spider web in hawthorns
Bring me
November
Bulletproof

Get serious and fearlessly
In love
Get sent home
I was a windmill
I was arrested

Stay out of trouble

The movies have a lot to answer for
I think they have to answer for
Everything that has not moved

In a rainbow
Colour is thrown at me from the surface of petrol, a soap bubble
Refracted Hollywood architecture
Interference reds, blues,
Greens so pin a badge on the next time this really happens...

(But I was of no mind for a documentary)

Leave after an hour
Walk home along canal flash railway electric
Heavy rolling-eyed headlights beam up millstone violet clouds
Terrace orange on dimpled water
Crane breeze of a silent theatre from across the tracks

Forget the elbow that wasn't there
See by the filament a single drop of water
Falling from iron-bridge bones into a tarmac lake
At home open a window, a zoo, a cathedral, a pilot-light
A license to stay out of trouble

DDA

With limbs and
Arms a
Slight
And heavy heart
The years have dug to build me
Hands, nerves
Prints
Eyes, knees, nails

Ears
For midnight singers
From the natural world to riot in cave black heat under stars

Charles, Richard, Daivd
I can't imagine anything worse that certainty
Sundays are for the insects and water in the universe

Nightway

4
8
Pass under spotlights drill
Silted fluorescing beats

Thick nuclear linen
Ghost cruicible tunnel tracks join
A consonant pnuematic stream
Of dashing white cells' late Morse code

Either side the biggest
And most linear sprayed out
Haunted arms glowing
In heedless old surveillance orange
Feeling out beyond the circles' grades to dial night

Within these orbits fall
Self-deleting files to dew the carpet-dust air
Green up-standing rows of slim lean over
Obelisk roots and tables
Concrete the barely troubled low shadow arc
Silo columns scribbled with cracks and one eye leading
The other

Fire-line horizon
Traced curves and freckles mark a lowing valley
Behind verge sapling screens
Crisp lit ancient tin spoke fingers swaying in the broadcast

Thread down to
A flood chip basin settled from fallow country language
Gated rail-fenced TV recording shells
Container malls, diverted hatch rivers and homes

Exit fissure climb left and
Weave tincture kite-strings in silver, red
As fibre crystal optic blue
Blinking notes repeat a changing stillness

8 times
4 times
4 times
Two