under the table

I have

nothing to show
but my hands,

coiled into
conches.

if you held on

I would let you speak.

toby

observe. there are cracks in the world.
at first small and threadlike, picked out in red
across these spades you call my hands.
when we curl our palms like peanut shells
dancing in rotten black bins on the street,
the cracks curve over and under and disappear
under the flat moons of our fingernails.

our fists ringed with hairline fractures
of the skin, which flatten out and vanish
with the tightening of our hands. left. right.
we are shadowboxing, face to face, fist to fist
but cushioned between with a slab of air,
gritty with pollution from the motorway below.
we never make contact but we feel it just the same.

now in your face there are lines forming, whirling
like water pirouetting on open drains in a hurricane pattern
around the soft black round gutter of your mouth.
would that I were there to see them grow
and reach out like tender vines across your skin,
and in your throat a Scottish accent stirs and sends out tendrils
vapour-thin and insensible to the eye.

in later years your voice will crack,
splinter from inexplicable spurts of growth
and your bones will ache in time, you piano, you,
time falling like hammers on your throat and limbs.
I remember the smell of your head
was like newly varnished wood, an oasis of smoothness
in the cracked-and-weary hospital ward.

observe. between us there is a gulf or chasm,
scar tissue bubbling at the borders, edging an open wound
too wide to bridge with any falling tree or oar:
only the teeming morning flight, filled with cracked lips
shouting splintered welcomes into mobile phones,
forms a double stitch across the gap
and fills out every crack.

eunoia

eu
your hair was sweat, curled ribbons
carved into the shape of waves, seaweed-tender
as they moved across that sea-bed face. I saw your spine
crack like a flustered
whip through the blue-lit air. your skin oozed salt
until your curls lay damp on your cheeks, and reflected
the brightest of roving lights.

no
years from now we will
meet in city streets, hold
hands, share sweat, our
two heads lit up with the
pleasant taste of twinned
saliva.

i
I turn my face to the wall and it
doesn’t move. the walls
don’t shift with the taste of your
breath in the mornings, bitter but sweet on the fractured skin of my lower lip:
here’s

a
to a new beginning.

concerning daniel johnston (an old attempt at a pantoum)

when you are low the world sings in a different tone:
everything shifts more slowly, like an old dog in the sun.
drainpipes buzz with shit and water. a kind of disquieting moan
shoots through people like the bullet from a jaded gun.

everything shifts more slowly, like an old dog in the sun
lying down to die in the yard. music, like some sort of nasal drone,
shoots through people like the bullet from a jaded gun.
people’s faces fade to the colour of desert-bleached stone.

lying down to die in the yard, music, like some sort of nasal drone,
and humming grotesquely, splays out like the drab habit of a nun.
people’s faces fade to the colour of desert-bleached stone,
and then they bawl as if the universe had only this moment begun.

humming grotesquely, splayed out like the drab habit of a nun,
the sky cuts down deep to the white flashes of bone
and then it bawls as if the universe had only this moment begun.
at the back of my throat, the tap water is as sickly as knockoff cologne.

the sky cuts down deep to the white flashes of bone
drainpipes buzz with shit and water. a kind of disquieting moan
at the back of my throat. the tap water is as sickly as knockoff cologne.
when you are low the world sings in a different tone.

cannibalism

his eyes were
white, I said. the girl laughed.
all eyes are
white, she said. these were different. a hot,
wriggling sort of white, like maggots
on meat. his mouth, then. that

was a foetus like a fleshy scar
in a metal bin. soft to the touch, it gave way
a little
but paused at the bone. his cheeks were slabs
of raw thigh on the butcher’s table,
his tongue an electric eel with the skin
sliced off and the flesh diced down into tiny cubes
of effortless, effortless pink.

they god, she said. you need to

get out more.

bromyard

a buzzard gyrates in the sky,
crawling like a homesick angel
up the ladder formed by countless swarming clouds,
a sickly whirlpool of whites and greys.
below in the mud we are cutting
grooves in the sludge with our feet,
and clasping our arms
around each other’s backs so we resemble
a coin broken in two and after many years
soldered back together, rough metallic seams
winding over old scars.

we carry the festival fields home
in the folds of our jeans and the pleats
of our grubby hands. mile upon mile of filthy sky
grants a wedge between our bodies
and leaves us flailing, spitting out
the weekend grime from the roughly dug pits
of our mouths:

yesterday these dank holes were pressed
chastely together, as if the world had folded over
and two rabbit warrens had for a moment
become one long twisting river of mud,
rushing together with no way out,
no way in,
just a jumble of grime seeping through
cracks in our skin and
fixing itself to our warm internal organs.

when the mud dries it goes hard and stale,
tracing filthy fractures across our bodies
which in the right light resemble maps, but
impossible, impossible to follow the routes laid out
and find our way back to the mud-soaked moments
of the festival weekend in bromyard.