the question is...

I could touch the table with my fingertips, and taste, taste it...

I could see her shoulderblades beneath her shirt, her brastrap as she glanced away. My heart was afraid. I was left, again, to corridors and footsteps, emptiness of humour blasted away. My dreams were full of her. Every darkness welcomed her presence, as if death were her very face. There are words i could speak now, that would make the world itself halt, as if retarded, with its traffic, its winds, its empty suburban houses on Saturday night about five o clock. The laughter of children used to resound on such nights, along with the bone-dry canned laughter of forgotten televisions. Do i want her? I ask myself, alone in streets, a minimal, uncertain smile, sad, wandering eyes.

There are times when i wish i could enscribe my love on the wall, but i guess i haven't the necessary tools. Only sleep is better than life. Instead i should write, on every available surface, these five words- "I am no longer sad". The question is am i in love. The answer is yes.

The only plaintive note the belly-voice can scream is "give me!". How odd, then, that it should be thwarted every time. And yet how natural, bare, animalistic. Loneliness is a marketable taste like strawberry vanilla. Do you know what the great philosopher hears every day? "Give me, give me, give me!" It turns out that that is the only voice one is able to hear.

Every day i knock on a different door, and am refused. Something poetic even in failure. What good will it do to write "she had blue eyes" or "she blushed, laughing"? We are all transformed into corpses as we write. My heart is not another's.

I will go downstairs, and put it in my hand, put it to my lips, put it in my heart. Never tell me its name. "If i'm going to die then i should die for a reason". Repeat that to yourself in rooms lit by cheap lamp-bulbs.

Give it to me in the wind. Transmit it in a voice. Let me sleep on a mountaintop, or let my ghost drop in the high street. Let me be in the graveyard in the afternoon. Don't even give me sight. I am strong enough to die every hour for you. Repeat, "i am no longer sad".

And to think some still dare to say that there is a light that shines.

suburban reflections part 2

Pink, soft-faced, lipsticked girls alone, always alone, in loneliness sanctified, made whole, renewed! Windows, t-shirts, magazines, circumstance, swearwords and sex-jokes, all your's like TV and bedsocks, all the massing signs of death as you exult in life.

How stale, shallow, silly it all is! How it saddens me and makes me turn away! We have no creation here, nothing to do, no tales to tell. Instead, the screaming television, the happy, blooming, murderous box screaming its insanities, as if madness was the status quo, as if hatred were OK for participants, voyeurs, the last heroes seduced, and made dumb. I am dumb along with them.

Can love, the love that made the great cities, pounded up mountains from dust, carved great sculptures, composed the most beautiful songs, survive here? We want no more of love now. We think no more of it than of the last soggy fagpacket or sweetie wrapper on the pavement, trodden underfoot in lamplight.

We have no need for it. The boys turn their stallion-like, hair-flopping faces away from it to grimace in a tobacco-stinking joke. The girls are so soft and complacent in their breasts, silken hairs, and gossip magazines that they have lost the will, in shadowy bedrooms, for anything but editorial cyncism and electronica.

An empty laugh just echoed in the street- Words no longer mean anything. On every door is written "there is no such thing".

suburban reflections part 1

There is nothing worse than colour. Nothing more i wanted to spit out of my mouth, and i could only find destruction at the end of my good intentions. Never mind. Cracked knuckles, broken hands. The fact that i have ceased to believe in my vocation.

/

Grins softly, makes no sound. Has as it were a grimace, an absence of sound. Speaks instead of shadows and empty courtyards. Silly facades of fate on flickering television screens, the aborted foetuses of backyards. Wants grim council estates, or phantoms in rainy nights tracking down the latest fashionable hatreds.

We are their children, you and I. We are the true lost roses, the kids defiled, the unborn satirists of a neglected dream. We are the children of the skies and the ferris wheels, autumn nights outside the playground in nineteen eighty-six.

How we could dance if we were only joyous children! What words, poems, curses, we could whisper to each other, waiting, as if in rigours of love, for the phantom of childhood and easy steps home... To lit chambers, untold duvets of awful bed.

There are no paths left where once we wandered. The girls we loved have all grown up, have gone home to sleep or be happy in grimoire pubs with landlords and bright lurid flowers of electric light like semen blooms, that pristine white. Instead we have a series of empty rooms, and emptier streets, lost even now to their last inhabitants, who are afraid even to dream.

Poem written in June 2009

That girl that spoke of greyer days
Than those we now discover,
Who told me of her stolen rays
That now arrayed another:
I saw more clearly than i dared
Where ran her weary steps
Even to the heights and to the depths.
"That dream that came to you, when hopes were few,
That we could win, and would win, through
To places where the storms are stilled:
Such is a hope that will be fulfilled."
Like this, i tried to win her heart,
Repeating every line i knew:
But even as i played my part,
I felt the sullen lies depart
And, in that instant, every word was true.

from a god unknown (poem)

Fair are fallen all the days that i had thrown unwillingly away,

And the screaming of the friends and faces never to come again,

Blown like money at the dogs and doldrums of a vacant game,

Known and unknown, remembered, disremembered, waxing dull and grey.

I had known the names of knaves and villains, fools and princes,

Kissing and blessing, loving every one by name, seeing their faces

Shatter and reframe,

The full surfeit of life's expenses

Spurned and sundered all the same.

I am cold cities like a rock is solid, i am lone streetlight like a sea is deep,

I am the question mark scrawled over knowledge, i am the drunken loner in the street.

I walk from here to urban deserts, where, like a joyful column, pilgrims meet;

I am not sad or dully cowed, i see the limits of the crowd,

Full of still movement and with joy replete.

No, no, no, it is not sad, to be so full of spirits and of doubt,

Couples in shadows that fully yearn and drag, and never cast their eyes about;

There is a diamond in the desert, there is a summer in the fall,

Only the precious hope is holy, only the heart can never pall;

It's hard, hard, soft reality, mother and mistress of us all,

That kicks and kisses, hits and blesses us with gall.

So in the silence of the moment i can give up tones,

Those chords that grow melodiously, dischordantly from men alone,

So frightening and foolish, so deftly thrown

To mortals in their sorrows from a god unknown.