infatuation

01/07/2018

I can only think of
your blue bathing suit
over the brown sands
with their holes and emulsions

I can only think of
your legs lit by crystal shallows –
of the bruise by your knee
and the flat beach you gazed at

I can only think of
you at different intensities
as if a shell sound lodged in my mind
and the waves of you repeat

I can only think of
you, and your sunburnt lower back
you shouted, it was so sunburnt
I almost evaporated

When I try to think of
other things
you come riding back
standing on a wave

Us

I

you bite your nails outside
the coffee house – you sit
next to me your perfume
hums through me like a bird
flock sat on my black wires
your hair curls up – I look

deep into its spiral
I sit – across from you
you eat sweets – your tongue floats
on my pool like tadpoles
gulp it – each time you change
my want for you goes on

II

god If all I could eat
were the crumbs from your mouth
That fall, I would rejoice,
And survive, I swear it
A diet of your voice.
If it were my only,

choice, my only choice
to be smashed by your car –
the car of your body…
I would giggle loudly
as I registered each
sacred injury’s pulse

III

What can I say? I am
an anechoic room
Your clothes might as well be
vanished along with all
your skin and bones and me
for all the attention

I give them, your language
just the tongue, floats, hovers
still in the centre of
clearings in woods by nests
warms nests, damp nests, we talk.
The city crawls with us

V.43

With this poem, we will approach
obliquely, a statement about
beginnings and introductions.
We will take the correct approach

not taken by the author in
their own preface, which was written
by an entirely different crux
of forces than the text itself

and let’s not start on how poets
enhance and distort the way words
arrive from the constellations
by talk of love and stars and more

distortions. We will take up more
than the text itself; biographs,
scans, scansions and resonances
autopsies, trials and physics

also the being of beings
themselves. We will make it present
in a way pure and crystalised.
Just the thought of you crossing this

road ten years in the past is quite
enchanting to me. This poem
will confuse, and then begin to
make sense, I promise. To begin,

Cupid II

How it was that Cupid arranged this
I do not know. That little fucker.
But you know when you wear a jumper
you only wear to bed, and feel it –
the softness of all mornings hanging
there in the cathedral of your sleep.
You feel it brushing against your mind
the way that dry grass blows in sunlight
on the warm hillside, silent morning

over the city? Well quelle surprise
Cupid weaponised it and bullseye –
I was on the bus, tired from walking
I was barely thinking, distracted
by a handful of small cares and time
that had nothing in it. What a shot.
Ricocheting out the café door,
it blew my mind out my eyes. I stared
as this woman sat there in that light.

She was eating green soup, and talking
on the phone. And I’m damned to suffer
yet again this fear that I’m a creep.
The bus stopped there for moment and
the world froze. I watched her spoon moving.
I felt at peace, with my brains dripping
off the stop buttons and commuters.
My day was ruined. Goddamn Cupid.
The bus moved, time resumed. I slumped down.