Excursions

I sit in the dark, awake yet aware of another inner death. I breathe in the dark with a disinclination to the cold crimes of my mind. My skin senses the failure of evolutionary processes; a certain kind of abandonment. There is no iron cage of atonement, no ethical religiosity by which I might advocate for redemption. My bones hang my cloth of skin, an exhibitor of shame. Delusory extractions. Residue. Pivot. Edges.

What if I were the archeology of allegory, the site of erasure. Anapaestic: Would I breathe in balled blank couplets? Could I acquiesce to Krishna’s demand of duty? Might I escape this intellectual heritage of scrutiny to fair foreward and forwardly succumb to the Eliotian disregard for the fruits of action, faring forward rather than a fare well? Could I craft out an identity of material predicament such that immortality remains nothing less than a predicament of material limitations?

I could conjure the invasion of Ideas: The syntax of an occupying ideology; hollow popularity versus governance. Words would hug to the Dumasquian bride of bereavement. The plasticity of narrative prying the contemporary inequality of voice from fingering normative participation: Such intravenous cruelty. acknowledgement. recognition. acceptance. affimation. equity. parity. The anatomy of Fear. Verification and identity, politicising irrelevance, monetising the vacuous.

And I breathe in the dark heat of red grass: unwritten. Discursive stasis. join the rank and file… all that subcutaneous blarney. I mouth the vowels of synaptic dysfunction, feeding the need to be right. I dine out and desecrate the mystery. Oscar Wilde stalks my art of intimation: “Every bad poem springs from genuine feelings”. Do I seek along with everyone else, the permission of existence and suffer the impoverishment of intolerance and pretend my independence is everything but the paradox of choice, embedded in the industrialised western canon — perhaps it takes a certain kind of dying in me to learn how to read you . . .

I am nothing but a dimension of a man’s mind. A gesture of inscription. Razor-thin deceptions percolate. We kiss and grind the sky to dust.

Aphrodite swallows flowers of chalk, carrion lies unchartered; vagrant, wild to hesitant hunger: Bitten. Under a briar sun, I eat the struggle, tearing the cultural fissures of biography. candid. no camera. Unfold my body of its deep speculation. Dimensions, pigment. Time sheds loose into consonants of mellow bone. Salt-rakers in line for a delicate lunacy: Unrequited architectures carve. Cultures in sustainable redundancy; foreshortened threshold. Nothing is enough and enough is not worth revisiting.

Graze the grass of my sky detached from ceilings of desert air. I write between the lines waiting on word of you. Coming and going. On the outskirts of attraction, I step out to a falling in among dishevelled shadows. I’ll take the arrivals from Elsewhere. Outside, in the deep swallow of long grass, the constant poem lived on high hopes.

He speaks of winning her over, as one who scales walls for a living. He’d craft her into vignettes of external outcomes. She’d wrap Saturdays in a straightjacket and turn it up into Vimeo. He slices chaos with precision. division, alienation, obsession, Loss. Canto. Fragmentation of meaning into emotive artefacts. Curios for the Incurious. Art as the displacement of memory. The bait of a hundred flowers. Strident. To mitigate, aggravate: To speak in large manipulable abstractions. The strident eye of skin.

Without our certainties we would never be the same. He would keep her a keelless ratite while he nurtured his penchant for raising hazel grouse. A deeper Life.

I shelve my excursions with catalogues of dialogue. Condescension dries my tongue; all conquests left to moss. Tie me to Ambition’s floor, moored to soap rings. Let my hair loose to dance with the froth, falling short of limbs and gentle mocking. Cut solace. sliced into reclusive skins. Dilute my colour cityslick and murk, to contest the drowning sentiment. Unpick my sleight of hand and leave frailty unaccountable, for all this water damage . . .