2003-10, send

I listened well to be honest. So many cats lately! On the back of a truck, so many cats howling at me, cats I bespoke, cats I visioned… on the back of a wine-dark truck in utile light. Pumping the market. Trucking industrial. Cracking my window, one of my male windows, cracking him in my palms like a nut, his shell lower than mine, listing lower (I’m sure we were up at the start but then we flocked to be lower and lower), darkening him against my breast like a pattern. At one cue I felt my right back was exposed, my dress had flown up, and my baby’s head was where, against my nape. And most of the world behind me. But as a suckling item, not as a sexual item. As a nurturing crack.

I am deciding to consider fasting to make sure I will shiver my carefully-authentic elf-chasing persona while he is among me and not just corrupt in a ridiculous bodybag of jelly. Surely I won’t. Surely I’m more grown-up than that now. Surely I have it for what it is. Whatever it is. Probably he will whip me but I am not helping him chunder. I am not. Not not not not not. I speak clearly.

No, that parroting goes in a different vein. What about the song about his bees? Would I go parroting that in the box? Maybe, maybe — I love it, maybe it will alter.

How are we helping? We push out children. Amplified witches everywhere. I become my own interrogator. The musician has hidden.

I decision it means I should wake her, haven’t woken her for the world, should stalk over and decision her. But deeper it enters everything, not liking touch to find anything intimate, tossing exposed and then decisioning up.

But I will wax glad to it whatever it is. It’ll probably kill everything, everything, everything. As Amber visioned it will trip temptation much but afterwards they’ll compose a symphony about it. A harmony. A whole fucking opera.

Someone works in the hideout of my shed and sometimes at the faultline but I am not thinking — it’s a background shivering.

I am hoping to continue my presence.

(London to Dublin 2005)

Up like a shot off a shovel in Aer Lingus’s
shamrock embrace seatfabric woven
with the writings of Joyce and Yeats sky
melds with sea in a one of blue plane
if you fall fall now

Captain’s longsentence voice how arr ye
ladies and gentlemen welcome flight
attendant you OK there pay
in euro break a note Irish
breakfast on a plastic tray sweet
juice bacon and egg sausage
pudding smooth coffee soft
bread sky melds with sea in a wideness
of blue I plane cloud
blue cloud other plane cloud
blue if you fall
fall now

Cloud cloud green coastline
green green where I I
I want to be and Ireland’s Eye
in Dublin Bay and riverbits and buildings
and bluegreen watching mountains an airport
on the outskirts nearly in the country signed
ATH CLIATH signed
DUBLIN
fall
now

I don’t need an airbridge faeries
float me across the tarmac breathing

(First published in Cottonmouth)

It’s 35 minutes to midnight on the 4th of January.
If I can tell you that this one room

holds all candles —
tapers, tealights, pillars,
plain white power-outage poles,
small votives for struggling souls,
delicate dinner-party decoratives —

in all scents —
sandalwood, ylang ylang,
rose, smoke, vanilla, mint,
and many nameless synthetics, novel,
teasing, but ultimately leading back

to the natural — and if I can say
how this one shop sells all
the bells, drums, chimes and microphones
we could ever want, and all the crystals,
with their real and imaginary functions,

then I can show you how this one tune
includes all notes.
Light and dark
up and down
infinity and one.

All flavours of quarks
All chantings of monks
All parts, all syntheses,
all theses
All sounds of all systems.

When we taste and leap and whoop, the tune cavorts
When we moan and clutch our rags, the same tune begs
When we go as deep as we can, the tune goes with us
For as long as it hurts — the tune stays with us
When we come up screaming, the notes are our output

When we dance in the rain of our making,
the tune is the dance and the rain
This tune, and the next tune,
and the next,
yours and mine

But it’s thirty-five minutes to midnight on the 4th of January.
A man is barking like a dog and I don’t know why.
Is he having an orgasm? Beating a woman?
Or just drinking and shouting?

No name for those steps I sat on,
where the sun sings through the leaves,
where the old stone is painted and marked
by pilgrims who give what they have,
words, marks, symbols. I used
my little knife, carved a crude
tetrahedron, its sides not as equal
as I wanted, to say I’d be back
some day.

Did my tears drip onto the dust?
I photographed my feet to prove
to myself that I’d stood there —
as if it isn’t burnt into my memory,
as if it isn’t in the screensaver of my head,
as if it wouldn’t always be there waiting,
my symbol weathering with the rest.
As if the newsfeed would never tell me
that the steps and walkway may be removed.

I guess all us pilgrims are causing a problem,
hiding in there, making noises at night,
tossing things over the walls,
stalking by the graffitied doors,
scritching with little knives,
worrying the children and gardeners
and the dogs.

But… so many of the places are going
in the name of now.
Where will we say our words?

The notes and beats and lines
are stored in my head.
The keepers might say I should need
nothing more. And the sites
are theirs to destroy, theirs
to replace. But I have breathed
in
those places so imaged on the Net. I have sat
on the dusty bench and got the actual mud
on the cuffs of my jeans, in the treads
of my boots.

Theirs to destroy.
Dare I ask?