one of those days
when strangers on the street
seem distracted
by some unknown force.
like a storm that might be coming
like something cold
has bubbled up from a deep well.
one of those days
when strangers on the street
seem distracted
by some unknown force.
like a storm that might be coming
like something cold
has bubbled up from a deep well.
come here
and lie flat
your stomach
on my back
there are pieces of us every
where
and only this simple
ceremony
can gather them back.
you are asleep
in the passenger seat
and at the wheel
i am years older
than i appear to be
another day on the road
and the street signs
are beginning to take on
strange significance
like fortune cookies
or one word horoscopes
everything becomes a map
we can’t understand.
you said
everything. all at once.
i said
not this. not right now.
and there was something
explicit
in your touch.
16 hours
of devotional song
and the heavens
were only just beginning
to open.
your dreams
pay you the service
of being transparent
and i allow you
the perfection
of doing
the only thing
you know how
the tyranny of language
is the moment
it doesn’t exist
and everything
i’ve told you
you already know.
for 5 days
i slept in your car
the seats rolled back
as far as they would go
my hot breath
kept the
cold windows
moist
as the inside of a ribcage.
you were on the radio
most days
you played old love songs
a broadcast to no where
i kept the motor running at night
nothing careful, nothing tentative
about that constant hum.
your hometown
the gentle claustrophobia of family
suddenly forgetting something
you have always known.
in my house
the far-off sound
of people kissing
we drove through
a city of lights
and all around us
silence
somewhere
in another room
someone is being sick
the western motorway &
simon & garfunkel
we had herbal concoctions
to last us a lifetime
a desk job
an endless time-sheet
and sick days to spare
we worked out the odds
and went the way
of the lighthorse
***
a daylight moon
my foot to the floor
you were tall
and eternal
and i was
falling asleep
at the wheel
A high powered radio transmitter and all the information in the world. I still couldn’t reach you. I wanted a monument that was invisible to everyone but us. Like a still body of water and the sound of the city at dusk. Or a reflection.
Later I was in a gift shop in chinatown trying to think of something significant to buy. There were charms for health and prosperity, but nothing to slow down time. And definitely nothing to stop it.
We set about building a vanishing city. We took apart pieces of politics and body parts. We painted walls with the imaginary shade of twilight. We powered the population with involuntary mechanisms. Like heartbeats. And revolutions. I stayed still in the shadows of our cities’ tallest buildings and though about c words. Like ‘civilisation’ and ‘collapse’ and ‘cunt’. To us community was something unraveling all the time. We did not want to put people together, but to pull them apart. We made governments and religion that were nothing more than the sound of wind through leaves. Or an afterthought. There was no such thing as manifesto. Only shopping lists and the places where posters had been torn down from walls. We were always afraid of loosing language. So we spoke in riddles and some times in song. Nothing was written down. Nothing was kept. We thought archives were vanity and libraries science fiction. Every morning after we slept, we burned our beds to the ground. Our photographs were invisible records, like a distant voice on a telephone line. Everything absent, everything incomplete. Everything open. Nothing at night and nothing in the morning.
we passed 5
roadside shrines
in an hour
i felt the highway
tear a way like a page
every word written
was whispered
and there was nothing
paul kelly could tell us
that we didn’t already know.
i was watching all those things
which are quick,
become things which are
slow.
a photograph of the sun
a patent leather dungeon
five pixels of gaussian blur.
sometimes all it takes
is the colour
of the light
through the window
we built tunnels
to the depths
of our bodies
but in that
yellow light
i felt it all
undoing.
there was only
landscape
now
that pastel house
a museum
like the vanishing point
of the road
endlessly
undoing.
everything you told me
was true
the stars burned
sulfur
holes in the black sky
and i waited
for you
to stop talking.
you take a long time
between breaths
and i note tiny details;
the way your skin feels
somehow self-conscious
the sound
of raindrops
on the roof.
i’d written
ten thousand poems
to an imaginary city
a world of words
writ
against impossible
skies
where silence soared
like high rise buildings
tunneling towards the sun.
we landed
in the capital
at dawn
your fingers
squeezed to your
temples
and the sound
of distant
helicopters
all the simple
parts of our lives
vanished
and at that moment
i gave up on
ever remembering
what happened next…
we went to the edge
of the city
to pay our respects
all around the outskirts
we found tall buildings
filled with pigeons
i marvelled
at the tangled overpasses
forming nets above us
a struggle of highways
thick enough
to catch the bodies of dead birds
as they fell from the sky.
i needed a place
to process words
endless nights of dreaming
in a foreign language
and the translations were
becoming disturbing-
a dream logic
stripped of its familiar
syntax
listening to the dead tones
of old lovers
always with words
which have all been
heard before.
it had something to do with
violence and everything to do with sound
we ate Vietnamese food
in the suburb where I grew up
and waited for the panic to stop
it was dawn when you finally came round,
a blue car with the music
turned up
across the road I saw
the colour of our shadows
turn to white.
i am mapping hyperlinks
to your skin
all morning
there is nothing but
indigestion and
google earth
a sign of things to come.
somehow the words
just seemed to stop
before they’d left
your mouth
i could see them falling
like old fruit
into silence
and i tried to guess the colour
of the vowels.
i felt a burst of heat
from the space where you were
standing
there was a distant ringing
and i thought about
poems
that were more like pop songs.