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.