I only recognise you
disappearing through a corner
I know the back of that body well.
Impossible concern
for the state in my absence
all leaving entails.
I've rarely seen you
coming on intently
perhaps the angle's never right.
I'll jostle for position
as iron lines my jaws
it appears that (well) I never tried.

And furnished in thought
we're like forms for filling
you move closer to the drink you've bought.
I'm tired already

you barely even know

my direction home is steady.

Yet she's stood

A cactus sits within an intricately decorated pot,
Alone on the windowsill,
Un-noticed as the door closes again.

The early-evening sun plays on his face,
Masked by a glistening beard,
Washed by tears.
Sat, back toward breakwater awash with moss,
Throwing stones to make waves.

Yet she’s stood.
Facing out at the window pane,
Eyes crossing paths with the sun, producing
The shadow of a flower on
Collar bones to break a hundred hearts.



A.T.

The Human Problem

One day the last person in the world rang her up and said it's time to deal with the human problem. She let her mouth open at the experience of the external voice, no more the vibrating rise out of her belly and throat but the sounding out of another.

It was then she drew several leaves with her black marker pen out of nervous procrastination all over the tablecloth. It took her a series of crated days to respond, and when she did so, the hour found her withdrawn and ill.

Coming over sloping greens outside sun-beaten business schools teaching the post-crunch methods, already drunk two cans of ginger beer, she hesitated by the ice cream kiosk and observed the dusty Italian with the dripping Jewish nose serving choate children two 99's costing £3 each, melting chocolate sauce creeping onto their baby lamb fingers and getting everywhere.

She wouldn't let it be dealt with, not by him, whom upon reflection she now regarded servile and pernicious.

Next day he rings again and they talk, but not about the pressing issue. They have tea over the phone, she studies a photo of Dennis Wilson as they talk and fantasizes the voice belongs to it. They go onto nature, public and private, as breath becomes more and more casual, and she's onto pouring boiling water into her third cup of now tasteless tea; she doesn't even know the shape of his mouth, or even the height of the man!

And on their fifth conversation he tells her again that it's time to deal with the human problem. Of all the words she may have responded with, of every word in English, French and the languages of Southern America, she could only articulate the quiet puff of two lips sealed very shut for a long time as they open suddenly, dry and cracking.

o.w.

Lost weekend

Another lonely night in a lowly cabin,
Eyes waxen in the candlelight –
Overlooking charts and plotting.
Thinning hair combed back toward a weathered neck, itself
Reaching from a white collar
Heavily patterned with salt and faded lipstick.
A wife and children left behind –
Two buoys, bobbing,
Eager of his return…

But!
Another woman’s current;
She, in a blue-green dress, floating in dance
Him, racing over her
Dreams carried on the whispering wind
Filling welcoming sails, taken as a tonic
A towering Spinnaker, up and yonder;
Distant

There is little time to think big of much else,
Is the company of the sea enough to an Island?




A.T.

A room with a (re)view

Joseph Dunn
w/ Danny Brooks on Drums
The Chichester Inn
22/03/10

Voices at a murmur, soft, but continuing. They are trying to speak to one another, but stand underwater and incoherent. Finally they find themselves rushing from behind the onlooker, trying to catch up.
In front, above the rippling water, on the raw, earthen shore, stands Joseph Dunn. With little movement he works away, calling tradition to aid him. With a new tool comes a new dimension; a drum adding the heartbeat for the soul of the voice. Cymbals treading water, gently splashing in the River Adur, like children enjoying their last moments before the sun’s descent. Then, across from the bank, in the lowly fields swoops strings caressed. Complete, it is nurtured to form rich speeches before battle; before the shot of the snare, before the rising notes flying from six bows of Nomads, before the swooping call of the man who stands before them, all in a gaze.
Below, quietly, the audience float in the beauty of his sound.



Adam Thomas

To be lost (in the Garden of Earthly Delights)

As lids close against lights on distant shores,
Wrinkles stretched to a blink.
A whimper against ill-fitting shoes and staggering,
Across the grass to nowhere... anywhere.
Seven bags held close by various limbs, weight down his thoughts,
Revolving around the battle with the day (the biting wind)
Clothes discoloured and worn, threads torn (chewed at)
And he, only an apprentice of age,
Vexed with problems too deep to tell,
If, I, you, and we - from anyone any answer on him would likely befell?

And then he stopped in front of me,
And I could do nothing but stare.



A.T.

Through the lips of the watering can

My promise to you -
Watered by many tears,
To grow to fruition,
Dizzy-heights
Then we will lie back, rested.
Hand, in, hand,
Forever.



A.T.

And again the tiresome pall
That jumped you going to some setting

You've seen the rest played out
In the reflection in the water before you

Dust breaks in the constant now
Handles this like a faded palimpsest

She asked you goodnight
And told you how you were

A tragic kind of effort at being holy
Was the shaking cross in their hands

Rabid storm of which will never cease
You on your humble jetty making sense of life

You've asked the setting shaking dust
Handles effort like a rabid storm in their hands.

o.wilks

kind model

I see you see no puncture in me
(You're an eggshell I think, or I think you're the perfect shape of trust)
you're not misguided in that,
for one pollutes the other with all the mind's eye cares
to project onto them.
We don't need to stare around
at the barren; not when you've all the fullness there
in that heart-nest of yours, that timid lacuna
swelling with a searching that's pure and all corruption's cure.

Ucheobi (My Window)

A Portrait of the view from my window and it's metamorphosis over the past decade and a half I have been fanscinated by it.

My window is a perch from which I watch daisy mangroves envelope a lonely
back-alley
And the plodding tragi-comedy of an everlong skirmish 'tween the wilting sublimity of God and himself;
Last year,
I saw His attentions turn and slowly spurn, greenly and gracefully, onto a carpark, which, in it's adjacency, had caus'd offence;
His wrinkled genitals all seaweed khaki and mottled and matted brown and thorny like
A crown he must have borrowed from himself or taken from the shelf to scare me
A few miles up and a good while back.
And fast like snapping lute-strings chas'd Spring and Sun and a garb of flowers
An alb of blossom white, a stole of lilly pink
I watch'd, undistracted by the textural paean of black-birds in song, while
His pretty creepers sunk (and still sink)
under the tread of van-wheels
Still attempting to swallow and reclaim - with justice glowing in every petal -
that little scarr'd car park that looks far less than half His age
while six wooden fences carve plots of sad land per diem
for lodgers uninterested in the mania of clashing dukes on the battle-stage
behind and beneath.

It took near a decade but my gaze
Still lingers, dry, through my window
Flickering -
Anxious for the next fight.


D.B.B

There's music in my bones

The Backbone Flute
by Vladimir Mayakovsky
translated from the Russian by Andrey Kneller

Prologue

For all of you,
Whom I've admired or still am admiring,
Hidden like icons in the cave of the soul,
Like a goblet of wine at a festive gathering,
I shall raise my heavy, verse-brimming skull.

More and more often, I'm wondering-
Why shouldn't I place
The period of a bullet at the end of my stanza?
Today,
Just in case,
I am giving my final, farewell concert.

Memory!
Gather into the brain's auditorium
The bottomless lines of those who are dear to me.
From eye to eye, pour mirth into all of them.
Light up the night with the by-gone festivity.
From body to body, pour the joyous mood.
Let no man forget this night.
Listen to me, I will play the flute.
On my backbone tonight.

One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong

I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me.
But the room just filled up with mosquitos,
they heard that my body was free.
Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night
and I put it in your little shoe.
And then I confess that I tortured the dress
that you wore for the world to look through.


I showed my heart to the doctor: he said I just have to quit.
Then he wrote himself a prescription,
and your name was mentioned in it!
Then he locked himself in a library shelf
with the details of our honeymoon,
and I hear from the nurse that he's gotten much worse
and his practice is all in a ruin.


I heard of a saint who had loved you,
so I studied all night in his school.
He taught that the duty of lovers
is to tarnish the golden rule.
And just when I was sure that his teachings were pure
he drowned himself in the pool.
His body is gone but back here on the lawn
his spirit continues to drool.

Leonard Cohen

Distance ever closer

The days are in no sudden rush,
Dazed waiting; heartstrings resonating
Outstretched hands enveloped by shadow,
This beauty inducing blindness
The sad eyes, they speak volumes,
Accented in a second language:
“Chérie, tu as tout mon cœur,
Pour aujourd’hui et toujours”

The remaining petal explained your feelings
As I walked on in realisation -
You are a dream more real awake,
A promise with feelings in reflection.




For my love, Emma Platt
By Adam Thomas
08/12/09

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats

I came across this today and immediately thought it magnificent:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face a mid a crowd of stars.

W.B. Yeats

The Deep Past

When I look into the deep past,
Is it a pool of scorched grass that
Peers at me through the looking-glass?

Is it the doorway to some outside room,
Where every hand I've shook is castrated
And given its own private nook?

Does the little light pierce a foot in Brazil?

How to tell if the time gone hates the time come?

Long vault and sharp retract, a glance back,
Where rocket-heads flame and the vast list
Of names wave me away with their
Double-barrel wrists.

How to tell if the I gone hates the me now?

And when I look into the deep past,
It'll remain deep and passed.

O.Wilks

The Overload

A Terrible Signal
Too Weak To Even Recognize
A Gentle Collapsing
The Removal Of The Insides

I'm Touched By Your Pleas
I Value These Moments
We're Older Than We Realize
...In Someone's Eyes

A Frequent Returning
And Leaving Unnoticed
A Condition Of Mercy
A Change In The Weather

A View To Remember
The Center Is Missing
They Question How The Future Lies
...In Someone's Eyes

The Gentle Collapsing
Of Every Surface
We Travel On The Quiet Road
...The Overload


By David Byne