voice

V.45

The guitar is a universe
that grows in the air. It is here
in the park, in the trees raptness
to the wind. It is in the move

beneath us, of the dirt and stone
bassline. The voice also becomes
a timeless concept, borne with time
when space itself became vocal

and elements harmonised from
the raw newness which was pouring
from the gaps between strings. A voice
of violin becomes a strain

of primitive object in the
clearing between trees. I claim this
origin of tones to be so
essential as to be veinlike.

You cannot take it from us and
leave us with eyes. The grass has bent
under thousands of intentions –
each competing for the title

of the most complex object in
the real. And each most beautiful.
Nutrients flow in paths that forge
bright thoughts and so I am heavy

V.25

What poems are are opinions
dressed up ready to go out. Yet
I fall in love with the woman
that speaks. But not to me. A muse

who has a muse already. Yet
a poem shouldn’t get it’s joy
from its content, only from form!
And when the content makes no sense

this is true. I open youtube
to watch the faber poets speak.
One with a brown jumper, a rough
brown jumper with relief lining.

I imagine speaking with her.
She brushes me off, rightfully.
As surface bounces off surface.
It’s surfaces all the way down.

I should give up the word, lay down
and let her voice walk over me,
perhaps the weight would stop my breath.
But if I give up, aren’t I wrong?

If I give up I assume that
my continuance would cause things.
I submit to continue, then
one day, silence falls out of me

V.14

How your voice comes to me through doors
that shut too soon and leave me spent
ammunition on the pavement.
I hear each consonant as fire

crackles on a summer beach
beyond the waves a jellyfish
moans and those are vowels of your throat
singing, of your hair which hangs like

for like, eye for an eye, my eye
which is hooked like the subtle fish
wife in barbaric times. I want
to talk to you about Rosa

Luxembourg, about just how right
we are about the large, inapt
empty spaces between the clouds
where no thought interrupts the flat

tones and gradients of the air
in its wider form. Free of life.
Barbarism it seems is willed
by the people, and so we cut

onions to pretend we aren’t despair’s
pawns and playthings in an open
gambit. I want to hear your crisp cough
as we laugh too much while drinking