Category Archives: poems

five days

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.

a gift shop in chinatown

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.

the vanishing city

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.

shortlist

what happened next

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…

the space where you were standing

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.