Ocean

PROPHECY

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 4 Comments

A karst landscape of limestone

Mineral, skeletal, cold

Holds holes,

Where the ground eats itself

Dissolves,

Into the blackness

The weight of space

Of bone pressed into stone.

 

There is matter

That can pass through you like water

There is death

That cannot rest

Only hangs

In the gape

Of annihilation,

Expanding

 

There will be no ivy

No gravestone

No robin singing in the springing

Of wild garlic

No mole-country melodies

 

To the worms we will leave nothing

But bodies in the Tide-Wrack

Guts, throats, full of us

Spools and nets of synthetic

Of plastic

 

There will be only ash

We will leave

An ungiving

Unloosening

Continuing beyond us

We will leave it to the titans

Of Before

Landslide, drought and wildfire

The arms of the Ocean.

MERCY

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 2 Comments

I can hear the sea

Three floors up in Paris

A dripping thunder

A black out lightning strike

Our shoe-box sized flat

Filling with water like a tank

Bloating my dreams

With floating fish

Eyes wide in ecstatic mortality

Rising

From their own bodies

Like reverted raindrops

Millions of ghosts ascending

Into the gravitiless hook

Of a night sky

Inhaling its own clouds

 

JONAH

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 1 Comment

He is rock and how untouched

Bound tight in his own permanence

The moon’s indifference.

He envies the hard, shining pebbles, licked smooth

And spat like teeth from the Sea’s lips.

 

Somewhere in all that skull ringing blue

There’s a Whale sifting through gloom

Humpbacked, Her

Barnacled lips agape

Her tongue a harpoon

Guts a great net

She can teach him to bleed with the moon,

In blindness

From between her pillaring ribs

Grieve every wick he has lit

Every slick of soap he’s scrubbed himself with

And beg his forgiveness.

 

She will dismantle him to shingle

Fill his pink hollows with echoes

Of the tide

There will be parts of him and Her

Across shorelines that know only too well of oil spill

 

WHEN GHOSTS SLEEP

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 6 Comments

I can’t help where I go in my sleep

Into the damp paving slabs of a different city

Up your moss clogged gutters

To suckle the smoky spit from the concrete

Of your sill

Wait by the window you will open to breathe

Wind my way inside your nostrils,

Down your windpipe

A snake in possession of your insides

Or sit beside you

Mouthing wordless songs

Settle into the warmth of your bedsheets

To await your return

I wonder if you do the same with me

An infinity

Of you within me within you within me

We don’t coach journey here

We travel by submarine

Arrange to meet just before unconsciousness

Where the Ocean takes us

Back to back staring out at monsters

Rippling behind glass

Daylight hanging before fangs

Whales the size of Regent Street

And sharks shining like wet Birmingham concrete

LEAF EULOGY

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 2 Comments

There is no shame in undressing

But I can’t help feeling

If the trees had teeth they’d be gritted

Down to the gums

As the cold licks them clean.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hurricanes

People and possessions and cars

Torn away on unknown currents

Houses buckling and spilling their contents. Exorcisms

Everything gone with one sweep of tide

pollution spat into a swirl of Godawful senselessness.

How our losses end up in landfills or tangles of wheezing gulls and turtles.

Our impermanence fossilised in plastic

Junk that we’ve buried in the frenzy of squirrels

Knowing the winter will starve us

Knowing as we wait on the roofs of our lot,

No one has sent the boats or helicopters for us.

And wood, wood knows how to rot,

Even rock doesn’t know how to let the tide

Scape it so smooth.

If we could lose our bones like beachwood

If we could slip out of our hair and teeth

And ability and family and homes

The way trees release their leaves

Rot that smells so sweet

Ripe with pips and seed

The concrete filling live

With curled spirits

of bugs and frogs and mushrooms and mice and

I never learned how to conker

All these tiny losses

Mouse curved and twitching all over with whiskers,

Skin dried to bird’s-chest fineness,

Tail loose with sleep,

Frost at its nose,

So brittle you can see skeleton

Too fine to be bone

What will be left of you?

Not even a pip at the centre, not even stone.

 

 

BEACHED

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 2 Comments

Bare chested to the sun

I realise my body as spheres

In orbit of sensations

Held together by tendons

As snippable as gravitational pulls

 

I’m trying to driftwood each bit of me stripped

Clean by disbelief of morning

Bleach their bones

Their afterlife can still hold warmth

 

The flies are coming for me already

Suckle this satisfaction from my capillaries

I can’t drip-feed happiness but I’m content

To share in my morsels

Like the crumbs the birds dainty picked

from around our sandy toes

Tiny shells

Beaches full of sunbathing ghosts

Blanched by sun and sea

They’re claiming my paleness

Driftwood, shingle

Hallucinations shared

 

What tiny possession have these flies injected me with

What pocket of their own shadow

Itching like larva sacks beneath my skin

This is why I don’t have the strength

To let more than a few at my flesh

I’m more than a blood bag

I’ve my own infestation of shadows

Itching for lemons on the grass

And crescent moon scabs

And rust on stones

BACK TO THE BEACH / SKINNY DIPPING

~ Putting the Dog to Sleep ~ 2 Comments

Lightening shock our travel sick

Bodies back to the beach

Wind whip our snapped tent

Around our sleeping heads.

Rain drench, drip, drive

The city from our skin.

This is how electricity was born

A wall dismembered in storm

For stones to anchor our canvas home.

 

Jellyfish hearts shocking at the cold

Of river dragged bodies smacking into

The Ocean’s frothy lips

Veins tentacles electric

Jolting our offering of nakedness

Scaped as clean as the pebbles

We didn’t have the pockets to fill with.

When we climb out

Numbskulled as cavemen

Our songs will get trapped in the shells.

We are evolution

The rock forgot our fossils

But remembers our footholds.