Poems
Butter
White gold black.
Gesturing towards the east.
The world’s bread, and the text’s.
Farmlands, words that
make us think of farmlands.
What’s aspired to?
Crystal plains, pepper bushes, dairies again.
Gardens.
The poem must be at the optimum temperature.
The diaspora of
the hungry, and of the colonising allegory.
Harder, softer, between twisting
thumb and finger.
Tongue shifting gaze that strays from the plate
to your flesh-slivering shirt.
Gate
Give words an
opportunity and they’ll come through.
Add a character
S, maybe someone’s husband or a homeless
person; they
might acquire a name later, if they survive.
A reader might
come to care for or despise them (the words or
S).
The words are
like weather: with a verbal quality, not just easy
sunshine.
The more a
writer sees
or can take, the
more comes through.
The gate counts
too.
S moves through
the words, buffeted, worn at.
The herd:
hooves, horns, muzzles; S upon a fence of mare.
The writer gets
out of
the truck and
undoes the same chain or series of chains.
Rain.
Wind.
Lighting blues
the beasts’ faces.
Their hooves
move through the icing.
S a bride or a
snowman or a cake.
Error.
Ocean as park.
S as captain
approaching shore.
Let in but not
let in.
S’s double: S2.
S2 though
duplicate, more solid.
Doubleness as
shield, forcing.
Neither act.
Each line a
street, making a grid, naturally hard feet on
bitumen, cement.
Surrounds
electrified space.
S, S2 as rehearsals.
You couldn’t
put this on
stage.
Anecdotes of S
in the hills overtaken by monkeys.
Breathers.
S2 hiding,
holding.
S prays.
Why?
The secular
world buzzes at S’s head.
A plague.
S speaks: ‘I
promise.’
S2 has been
reading backwards.
Books blow
through on the wind.
S says ‘I’m a
gate.’
The word
stillness is there.
S tells of
memories newly formed of
Alphabet High.
S becomes Sal.
S2 cannot
recognise Sal and dies or becomes Z.
Words get
lost/killed in the transition or on the highway
Sal gets
an address with
its own fence.
Sal finds some
mirror writing by Z but it makes no sense to
Sal, and was
mainly made up of the letter X.
‘I drink coffee’
said Sal.
Sal reflected on
Z being dead.
‘Z was no one.’
Sal differs from
S without being aware of this.
S sounds
proliferated.
It might’ve been
like being in
a birdcage.
S sounds and L
and A sounds all at once, pale blue-coloured
vocal.
Sal lies down in
a soft biscuit, wearing their pink jumpsuit and red
tie.
Rabbits nibble
at the skirting
boards.
They appear to
be rabbits.
They wear
leather and chuff green rollies.
Words distract
from character; rabbits are characters fucking
everywhere
and easily
shocked.
A rabbit loses
its r from having it knocked against the skirting
board.
It swells into
R.
R distracts from
Sal.
R is walking to
a cupboard
saying ‘I drink
coffee’.
Beyond the set,
ads affirm R.
Sal’s unable to
get up.
Words drip
through the filter.
‘Something’s a
writer.’
‘Get out of my
bathroom’ S screams.