Stick With Iced Tea If You Like It

We are what we are.

Eyeballing a shot of self-importance and

Inhaling cake

When all we want is bread

Le pain quotidien

Wafer thin and wholesome we would sit upon the deckchairs of the world

In tea shades

And a leather onesie

Big enough for two

Siamese and at ease with the bare minimum:

White wash and chipped enamel

Colours outside the line and on our faces

Hands

Dimples

We are what we are.

Onagainoffagain

Wanting our bodies blended with ash, violence and ethanol

Like the Greats

We are karaoke in an over-priced bar.

And you are the biggest offender.

dialogue 2

Her voice frayed by cooing and fabric softener.

‘Oh, Richard.’

Twenty years and this lump of gold, now tight on her finger, still felt like a hoop she had to jump through, every day.

‘Stell…’

‘Mm.’

‘Stella.’

‘Stella…Tell me what to say.’

‘What can you - ’

Her sob was a flint through the air, tearing at him. She knew there was more. A dog whimpering, pleading for the final blow.

‘What can you say?’

The two pieces of amber, her eyes, burned, melting into slow tears.

‘Stell…’

‘Please, all of it, all at once.’

It was a challenge, a test of human endurance.

‘When did it start?’

‘Six months ago.’

‘June?’

‘In Greece.’

‘Greece?’ Her voice repeated but could not believe.

‘You, the kids, Stephen…You all went to the market, we stayed - ’

‘Oh, God.’

This train is not stopping at this station. The magnetic pull she always experienced, drawing her to the edge, following the yellow line like a circus act. In her mind she is Anna Karenina. Stella Green is just dust on the mantelpiece, under the porcelain dancers.

‘She’s pregnant, Stell.’

This was the feeling of now, would be the feeling whenever she saw her. Her and him. Now on Christmas Day. Birthdays. Weekends. Oh and poor, unknowing, sweet Stephen. Her baby. Telling lies to her only child. And this new baby: stepchild, grandchild, stepchild, grandchild, stepchild –

‘What are we going to do?’

‘Carry on as normal. Pretend it’s Stephen’s baby.’

‘Carry on?’

‘What else, Stell? What else is there to do?’

‘What else…’

‘Stell, the turkey’ll be getting cold.’

‘Mm. I need to get the spuds out of the oven.’

group wh(y)

Sausages in the pan, agitated popping.

‘Why d’you hit him with that bat?’

‘I didn’t, no.’

‘You did.’

‘Never.’

‘Then how come he in hospital?’

‘Accident.’

He spits, knowing she hates it. She tuts.

‘Oh he just run into that bat, huh?’

‘Yep.’

Staring competition, line drawn between them.

‘Don’t you lie to me.’

‘Lie? Never.’

‘Don’t you-ʼ

‘Never I say. Listen.’

Sausages flipped, fireworks, 5^th November.

‘I listen every time.’

‘What?’

Crescendo.

‘I say I listen every time.’

‘And what?’

‘And every time is lies’.

Lithium in a sweaty fist.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’

Blink.

‘Every time is lies?’

‘Every time. Lies.’

Blink twice, exhale.

‘Well.’

Rises, giant in this small room.

‘Mm.’

Eye of the –

‘sorry.’

‘Wh-what?’

‘You heard.’

Smile

Two long strides

His kiss burns between her eyes.

A target mark, practice later.

it's oh so quiet...

Pumpkin Shell

You don’t come in a box but you’re a puzzle

No instructions

No manual folded in impossible creases.

A palm print command

In blue paint on red rock I could understand but

This

This iron mouth chewing through my mongrel bones

This is some type of theatre, surely -

Believing you are the fourth wall then

Coming home to tea and toast

Burnt, marmalade, brilliant.

But again, the impossible velvet draws open

And we snap like cinnamon sticks

The smell in the air for days.

You know, I know, they know

If someone left a bundle on our porch

We’d blow ourselves a new stage.

Never a new door.

A door would be impossible.

golden oldies.

Blue and Yellow

That Swedish flat pack furniture will be
The blue print of
How we lived our lives from A to B.
good grief. good god, mercy me
we’re made to order from ads on tv.
We need blankets with sleeves
No one keeps us warm
The only way we get dates
Is by using chloroform.
And it’s a good thing our telephones are becoming our limbs
We can’t walk anyway because we’re too engorged
That didn’t rhyme
See what I mean
Discord
Disjointed
Dis dis dis
So much worse than any other prefix.
We get by, we’ll get by in our thimble boats
And match stick oars
Maybe we should just revert
To walking on all fours…

Lazarus Love

Handlebars are monkey bars
When nails are bitten and sighs heaved fit for
Romantics and drunks and travellers and liars.
The road wants soles not souls, not tears but tyres.
So hang off your handlebars and keep starting fires
And strip the plastic off milk vans and buses
Like industrial dancers, vehicles shedding skeins of bruising.
Tarmac is wine dark but it is not the sea, it is so much the shore,
The Rubicon cannot bisect it, but a cheekbone can.
And there’s the rub, the friction, the smashing plate tectonics:
A clavicle and a hip are junctions of destruction.
Amateur, amateur, amateur cartography combustion
We sit with our steering wheels, lives full of punctures.
Ballard says we can marry technology,
But I just want a home that’s homely.
Frankenstein has raised tradition from the dead
A Lazarus love, plus bandages, plus baggage
Plus barely know each other.

Runner

How do you lie with these maps and not get
Paper cuts
Unless you are a paper doll
Hand in hand in a row.
Unless the high noon sun
Unbuckles, knees in soil, and points the gun
At your head and says
Find a path, fingernail a contour,
On ground or on lover’s back
Even if it leads to your own front door
And it has always been your own front door.
Unless you, fair-handed, fair-bodied,
If wearing a little too thin,
And wearing a little too much,
Are pressed against our scripts;
Caverns and mountains and the inevitable glacier.
Cartography is professional agony:
Making a living in lines and crushed ice dreams.

Thinking Makes It So

Parachute! Parachute!
Time to, time to act!

Let the upright nanny come and she can take me back.
Don’t find kites amusing, just an escape route
Fire exits: not a last resort, but a way to commute.
Take note of every trapdoor, bookcase hides the stairs,
Pull out those dusty pages and see you in the Spring.
Hibernation with a back door, sleep with a sling
Shot.
Glass revolving door:
Oh you pretty, pretty, pretty, thing
A toy for a table top,
But no good for a flight risk, no, no good at all.
So eject button, taxi, and the elevator shaft!
Take me here, take me anywhere,
Let me steal a car.

Links

Links

Links

I can’t look you in the eye.

A little death undulating in an icebox will never amount to

Much. Like you and I

You and I and our hallway – we parade

Knowing my fraud like a Roman candle;

Put out.

Tst.

Our hallway, the elbow of the home

But we curl, like cats cradled,

Circle our own contentment.

Bathe in it,

Protected in the folds

When really it should swell out

Beyond the walls.

It won’t.

Tst.

We are just links.

nouvelle, nouveau

a re-working.

Antique tables turn:

Now, the atlas is pressing on my back;
Each vertebra is prone to moan or begroan this
Prehistoric spine not used to bending so far from home.

O, travel agents, or agents of standstill, cry

‘Fold down the glossiest pages’ -
I haven’t been anywhere and
I don’t know where to go.
These dog-ears tell you so.

Cartographers tyrannise with their contour line lassoes.

Mapmaker, mapmaker

Forge us a path:
We want the sea on the ceiling and sand between our teeth
A monsoon in the desert and a deckchair on the reef.
Watch us steady the anarchic waves

Just with our twenty years of non-experience, our buckets and spades.

Give us our Arctic shots and Jupiter drops,
Wave a white cloth and see us off.

anyone else really want a gap life?