“To my last beautiful stranger, Love Maggie” (tranlsated by Stiglitz)
For our penultimate date
I took her up the Fish Bar
On Whingate and Barden Green,
Suggested to her it was working,
Would she like to meet my folks…
She murmured
What I thought was scraps –
A subtle grace –
But turning:
What if death is beautiful, regardless?
For a first date, well I…
Interstitial.
Years later took the bus with Blessing –
The smell of anachronism
Pressing autocratic Saturdays, there
Mike’s Carpets, splaying subprime, felt-tip
Exclamations: “What We Were!”
A tyre shop nearby?
Regardless:
The clenching, the asbestos that
That lifts away!
But on a first date.
And my broken wrist.
Now, hereat
The Cheeses Shop in Hawes,
Your own homophone pejorative’s why I dwell,
(till Facebook tells me who you married, that you bore).
And the loop (the flue) of half-requited illiaisons,
Jacket dedications…
If someone had told me that kids won’t diminish,
These sidling cock-thoughts;
But that nature, in trickle-down relief, a pact with God,
Well I…
My purpose sheer and splendid.
Plumb sadness
Disdaining ghosts
Beautiful compost.
"OU"
Will history forgive us buildings,
Like it does terrorists?
I stand on squares, a red-brick square,
An open flank, dog-hose quarters.
A curve-ball rots in the roadface,
Gravity-fed thermostat,
It’s pomegranate, ratted pearls, gravel-printed,
Knowledge quarters, ‘clever
And a superb skier’, devolution.
Here, the hedge. Rain-forest encroachment.
And droplets lodging like
A tipped spoon,
A water-feature,
Or a shoot.
As Peace beat War.
It’s always so,
The home support are most obliging.
My back-seat with infrequent forays.
The 25 pound matchball deflates.
Their hefty striker breaks my hand.
"Shift"
We lie back together:
My head above the water,
Toes at 10 to 2 on the overflow;
You bopping, gasping, refracted,
Pitching from the frosty stickle-down.
If death is real-time,
Then I’d prefer the truth of my inconsequence
In other futures
Than to watch (again) the grip I had
(that toadying internal rasp),
The silverfish,
Your unprepossessing eye…
You;
Of all the appendages I mistreated.
The water, unsullied for her.
