i
I intellectualize the sky
that feels like it’s opening up
but that is just my mind
following a ratty heron
as it blows through open space
towards a bad bit of cloud
more cerebral than I’d like.
+
The heron watched changes
into a mucky bubble
the dirty-linen colour of gum
and with that old chemical smell
of gum. Sere scenery all around.
I lie under the meshed structure
of the sky, in the bloodbath
soil of the racecourse
where the mechanics of a pure-bred
horse leg are oiled and machinic
synchronicity, and thank god
I am grieving while the climate dims.
What an effort otherwise.
§
Are you
done with it?
Fly in the buttercream of a plastic rose.
I stand where we first met
and am inconsolable.
The river is moving too quickly and
the bloated strands all at once.
The river and the wires above it shaking like a fit
that perfectly matched my mood.
Crazed moon options in the sky.
Coastal grains
solar noon.
A catastrophic resistance to other people
that comes after a great saturation
of feeling, an adrenal failure.
I’m leaving Europe while the clouds look British.
History just goes binge purge binge purge
like me and like me it’s heart busted by the river.
I’m knackered.
As knackered as the
Madonna della Misericordia.
*
Emotions are zooed into the borehole of a tree.
Even as I look in on them they are becoming extinct.
I would have had your children.
Beneficial and tempered,
marital, as water boatmen on the surface.
No-no really.
It’s winking, this disaster horizon, walking backwards into rain
with only one emotional cloud. One emotional cloud and
the red outline of trees.
Price the tree’s worth, that hosts a government of microbe wet-nurses
that supports a sequence of systems that lean on me (a man; a gut).
§
Green lawn, peppered
blue steak, burning intensely,
like an insect combusting
in one of those restaurant machines;
the dying egg in such an insect
is its ignited inflight system.
±
I am keen to pick back the cuticle of the earth
and see what’s underneath, pick out the emblems
of woodlouse, parasite-fossils, the loads
of skin pregnant with old cells, deteriorating.
—
The fresh, camphoraceous
odour of car spills like
thick drink on the plastic-hot dash.
Driving as the sun banks
on a kidney-shaped lake
with the pine-smell swinging.
Heat is a trust-fund sustenance,
epochs ballooning and measured
in the BSL-3 lab.
What does all this feel like
(from a car).We see; black cows slope
their shapes like witches’ capes
bent over on a riddling green.
Fields: greens of interlocking shades
regimenting into purple.
I am a fly on the end of a rod
and in that moment, an indeterminate
species, dead fly a prophecy
in the undead mouth of a fish.
<3
What is it? Connectivity.
A screaming figure flailing
their torso on a concrete altar.
Mythical, an undiagnosed condition.
Blemish on your neck the shape and mark of a religious burn, I did that.
I call it the worship condition.
What’s a taste in the mouth
like a body under the tongue
all purging out like gods purged from mountains.
§
Red alert sounds in the fake suburb built
to practice catching terrorists
who gut real suburban homes
for their myriad developments.
Military base on the edge of the beach
near the shoreside ring range
and o shore rigs, which look
as though they’re moving slowly towards land.
</3
Home abortion with pineapple.
I knew with the first pain
I was sentenced. A search engine
apocryphal and winged.
My god was unnervingly resourceful,
I fell like a dog on the spike of a tree
failed heirloom of surname heraldry,
and died fast.
The civilians of the future collapse
in tandem, like when an old spine
craves dignity, and the world gets smaller.