Resident other,
resident at the mercy
of ghosts and nostalgia,
Of days that reek of drama and bad moves,
Animated by car headlights –
A ventriloquist act that dissolves in passing.
The Western winds temper the movements of all people;
If we all have rights what’s left to copy?
“Can you see the city lights from here?” a hand, taken up in preventable curiosity.
“What is it this time?” the strained voice shakes irate music from walls.
Resident other.
***
Self serving living only come to silence the dead.
who are you talking to, my love? Is it yourself?
A question of universality turned to obsessive compulsion;
“Are you stil taking 9 showers a day?”
Open asphalt worms through an eternity of backstreets
Before spilling into the river.
And just beyond the bank unthinkable characters
Barter the raw, isolated flesh of youth.
A witness replaced by escapism, responsibility replaced by absence,
Resistance replaced by complicity-sceptical world translated into Sceptical words!
Words With which we are taught obedience- “i don’t think so”
I hear you say it, believe me, i knew you would!
Water never leaves- it simply takes the least trying path.
Possessed yawns of early commuters move into the bleached dawn.
Coins are lovingly placed on the eyes of the dead,
Absorbed once again into self serving living;
” go back to sleep for a bit my dear, we still have a few hours.”
Opaque images fall through a dawn the colour of pickles,
The translucent hands of a pensioner tend a bonsai as the school kids walk past in a morning
That, moments earlier, was the colour of pickles.
Years ago – other furies, other losses.
***
I align myself with you in this life, and draw up common traits over boiled bloods, and a deficit in good lovers, an even bigger deficit in good sex, but what comes of all this small talk, my friend?
I have been made over twenty five jaded years, with anxiety and fecundity, and allowed myself the hope of a dream that came before me; and how do i reason in my failings?
I align myself with you in this life.
Once again-primus inter pares; ….so now i find myself wake from a dream that was older than me, me! With no part in the history of the world, no antecedents, just in love with the rising smoke and the dissipation of dreams
to perpetual flames that ravage the skin in paradise alleys where money is begged For the chemical memory to shine through what was and won’t be again….
These people are confessions carried on the western winds, inoculated from the history of their lands as London burns in the distance for the first time -
a great conflagration.
***
In the busiest places silence is always the most ominous,
Like a swarm of locusts before harvest. Enough of this!
Where I tread you should, even washed up and burned out,
You should tread With me, cut though cackling like hyenas, you won’t regret it!
Give up the idea of righteousness in this life, its desolation was
Foretold on western winds long ago, in omens we are no longer able to read,
Scattered forever among us like mystics torn in pieces and dried to dust under harassed suns….
They headed down to the underground-where a burst of rusted heat abounds- She thinks of the IVF,
She thinks of daily concerns, broken, compliant, and surrendered- a phrase from a magazine
Remembered, and she starts to hyperventilate down there, turning blue
“I thought I’d lost you” he said
“I thought so too”
How much more unreal can she get? You and the rest of the world.
“If fear takes me over can we still be friends?”
But no promises-words fall short, music doesn’t come, the skin gives in.
No promises of still looking young and beautiful to spare you the silence
Before it strikes you down.
Thirteen melancholy weeks spent like the Yankee dollar-”IN GOD WE TRUST”-
Money will always changes hands, hands stained like glass.
I came over today, after calling you over and over and over. I came over
And shouted up from the street; Are you still sleeping all day?
As violence and fashion lays cities to waste, how can you?
Later on, I went past the park we spent so much time in starcross’d and underpaid –
When disillusion came it came in milligrams and broken hours.
(This summer won’t be kind to us)
Going through the motions like lamenting automation, a hurricane of birds blacks the sky – I’m not sure why.
(This summer won’t be kind to us)
***
On the longest day of the year, yellow ochre omens, the grass has a strength that paces laziness, headstrong and barefoot in the electricity of the world, laughing hysterically as a plane scorches the sky….
she is explaining architecture to him, may as well be double Dutch, brick turned to limestone, galleries of laterite, twisted to sound like Israelite, stone turns into marble at a bad joke….
Blood turns to alkaline in faces leering into the unopened pharmacy,
Breathlessly desperate faces mocked,
And already in the streets the commuters are floundering…
Blood turns to alkaline in these streets,
Smouldering like oilfields, under constant stars at the edge of the world,
And they fell down the fire escape, leaving blood on the plastic dahlias.
A landlord speaks bitterly to his tenant:”it’s your problem if you can’t pay this month-
we both have mouths to feed
And I like mine better.”