it’s not about mathematics in the way we think

the decisions are there (a dark stone, a pale stone)

the cogs of the living turn with precision

casting, we seek the soft mess of tomorrow

looking back it was all so clear

what lay before us was a poseidon sky

only blown enough to metabolise time

it sheltered itself in the vessels we were

the strips of my insides, like the colour of cattle

if I could pull warm saline into glassy taffee, I’d

settle down with my salt lick, reclining and satt

(rain seems always an excuse for the herding of traffic).

will the future also be black and white

like the days of my child-mother in a northern city,

when skateboards hurtled towards bitumen seas

and where some things – papery – hardened forever?

do the suds in me amount to that old-fashioned, four-letter feeling?

we do what we do, hold and refuse. Sixty-percent, we mused

(and I followed hips in jeans down a dog-legged hall). only later

he mails through instructions for machines that face the world sideways.

a gangsters’ view of paralysis indeed

she and I besides and I, a minefield

parasol lips ask then if she might touch it…

initiative is rarely the origin of deeds.

In the face of each other we've indeed been mute.

Your rainbowed feet, my puffy sleeves…

That boat goes past from hour to hour.

I've chosen touchless adjacency over wrangled seams.

lie down, lie down, do stay, please do!

our blackness creates a very bed,

against our faces, our hands. like moss

it maps in soot our ghostly hues.

across the laminex, we’d trade our vegetables.

lisa (the oldest) got the desired carrots, justin the peas

i’d get all the pumpkin while my youngest cousin’s raw deal

was a grey, enormous, debilitating pile of brussel sprouts.

as a child swimming in seas before

glass nipples arrived to flood the sands

(the end of a holiday always feels like this)

some trees are unclimbable, others take your hand.

clarity at its edge is blinding

(four days I was a fumbling storm)

calendars count our daily concealings,

‘though blotted, our scrawlings have still remained warm.

Eating leaves of flowers, skins of trees,

we peel back the sky for tracks of muscle.

Running at the sun, our feet are fleets

of motes migrating to a weightless home.

in japan the sky is drunk with perfume

in certain seasons, and the light blooms.

we kneel before the offerings of women

at low tables, hiding fires in their bellies.

that stacking tediousness, words piling up

like wood. against stale windows, I

hurl shoulders, breath, water, decision –

pellucid arcs dissolve mind-lace to sky.

over the cobbles he clattered and clashed,

a father's memory unfailingly steady.

enamelled hide hides the feint of marks,

in another life, my eyes were soft already.

Like children reading black on white,

I move furniture, aligning edge with line.

Pressed like proper shortbread with

insignias of us, my ether chimes.

That weather could be translated

into fabric equations, today it seems

a storm rides the weave, and the barometer is

a searing basket full of colourless things.

Those magnificent things. Things

that hold the memory with their pillars of white.

I’m not always grand, will not apologise for this.

Cupped to the possible, I tend the overlooked.

in a sleep like oz, I push myself

against a surface resembling thought.

what covered me, unravelled you –

so why am I now ashen cold?

pac-man (blond) seeks pac-friend or

will bleep sad bytes for giga-years.

needs transplant for his pac-man heart,

and a coat of paint for firewalls.

tears squeezed hot like berries, our

skin is a crypt with breathing walls.

these face-rains come so delicately sour.

bells on a hillside, we are small sounds travelling.

adding oil to salt, is it shell that forms?

is it a kind of coral to shield against light?

four times in one morning, I was a tide

of mew-plaited liquids disentangling themselves.

and if I can’t feel the edge (of water,

of speed), do you think it matters, will I

learn my weight? – over time and via you –

the things that shine are not unbreakable.

I’d walk labyrinths for you, and do.

The order of things is what makes sense.

In its absence we speak of ghosts, the past,

of skin dissolving, quiet fjords, and truths.

distance measured in the tracks of gods

like maps palmed flat over starched

months. straight lines lead me to notice

lack. you were neither tearing seam nor sleep.

rays in the wash, I search for

gaps in the weave of something we have

made, something we have lately seen. a label

can help to find what’s inside: time? sky-sap? cloud-key?

Monochrome hands against her spectrum.

You gave food to the body’s basket demands.

Laid out across the linen-gentle, if

vision falters, our day is lost and planned.

co-ordinated (but only just)

I cover myself with frothy stuff;

movement’s become the garb of stillness

going nowhere uses so much energy up.

Dorsally disguised, something drags the mark

from left to right, something turns a darkness

and names it ‘nature’, laid out along a spinal ditch.

(In corners of me, frail pigments sigh, anticipating pitch-forgetting. )

It drops in a steady repetition – sweet –

long days alone but also nearby.

Turned somehow by the grand impossible,

we make weightless biro lists, the colour of eyes.