2

The RikVerse Volume 1 – hardcopy version

Consisting of several series of poems committed by

Rik Roots over the course of decades

3

Copyright © Richard James Roots 2005, 2010

The rights of Rik Roots to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in the United Kingdom and worldwide in 2010 by Rik's Sparky Little Printing Press

Published without an ISBN

The RikVerse is a living book,

updated regularly and available for viewing online at the RikWeb website

4

yu cuep tcisye Niedxel tcaebate te

I made this book for Nigel

5

Contents The RikVerse website is a living book – an ever-changing display of poetry written and presented by me, Rik Roots. Started in 2000 (under the name Rik's Poetry Pages), the website has continued to expand as I write and improve the poems included on the site. The RikVerse website is my answer to the publishing revolution that has swept across the world over the past 15 years or more: I rarely publish my poems elsewhere. The website is built around a number of sections, including my online chapbooks: these are collections of 22 poems each which I release beyond the website in a number of electronic – and hardcopy – formats. This book includes the first four chapbooks; no doubt others will arrive in eBook form in due course:

Play Time 6 First published online at Rik's Poetry Pages March 2002

22 Facets of my Father 39 First published online at Rik's Poetry Pages May 2001

Skull Story 63 First published online at Rik's Poetry Pages November 2006

Poems to Quote to your Lover 84 First published online at The RikVerse website June 2007

Some of these poems have been published in various hardcopy and online magazines – for which I can only thank the likes of Magma Poetry, Avocado and the Shit Creek Review. When reading the poems, try to remember that reading – and writing – poetry is, first and foremost, a fun thing to do. If you can keep that in mind, everything else should fall into place. Oh, and thank you for investing in my work: it is very much appreciated indeed!

6

Play Time Play Time is my first collection of poems. Well, that's not strictly true as I uploaded the pdf file to the website some time after releasing 22 Facets of my Father into the wild, but that was more of a poetry sequence than a collection of poems, so this is my first proper collection. These 22 poems are some of my earlier work, from the poems that survived the post-puberty bonfire up to around the turn of the century. There's no over-arching theme to the poems as such, but if you look carefully you'll be able to spot the various experiments and approaches I was trying at the time.

Appreciation 8 » In the kingdom of time suspended Cusp 9 » On the last morning of Summer Commuting 10 » Whitechapel, 8:38. We shuffle-pack onto the train, a mix Art 11 » It was speeded and slowed: Beachhead 12 » Here lie brittlestars, evicted from deep-channel muds Shot 13 » The fox is shot: Daisy 15 » Where is Daisy's baby? After Class 16 » After the first class, we went to the bar. Introduced Candle 17 » In an island of hard-polished desk

7

Autumn 18 » This year autumn arrives in August: Perhaps 19 » The desk sits square on the side of the room. Menses 20 » A new year: my goodwill drains away with the dregs Traveller 22 » To remove the shirt as Man examines, God 27 » My God has skin that tints alongside time: History 28 » Here lies the portrait of a woman long lost: Consent 29 » It is contrived to a practiced degree: Drafting 32 » I suppose a pen and a scrap of envelope Home 33 » When the wind was warm and the day Postcard 34 » Molyvos must be Priss 35 » A shadow has stalked from the room, Sustainability 36 » I wake, dead. Five foot six Vampyr 38 » Dogs have knocked the coffin down

8

Appreciation In the kingdom of time suspended I see the dancer arched: a foot is grounded, a thigh is tense-taut. The second swings free. A shaved chest congeals into arms, into fingers circling a bar above a stubbled, arrogant head. A grey-toned face shades from highlights to perspiration to spot reflection in grain-hazed eyes. In the kingdom of time assumed I could cruise, perhaps meet this icon, fleshed in colour and cloth. He would walk with the ease of a cat, animate friends with words, or maybe act the Jimmy Dean – cool to desire. His jeans would pucker across his legs and his jacket sway easy on the hooks of sweat – erected shoulders. He would have a name from me – sweet fuckable, but I am trapped in a third, united kingdom, where time is commodity, and by law my desire must be tethered, controlled. Appreciation is tempered: an appropriate statement, a critical word – shadow and light. Form and space. An artisan perusing another's art before moving on.

9

Cusp On the last morning of Summer I walked, automatic, to Leyton station. Over the graveyard wall chestnuts rained, spiked balls smacking onto pavements rimed by an early, watery frost. Cleaved, the pods tantalised boys with glimpses of polished, wood-veined eggs. Magpie-uniformed, the boys claimed their prizes, leaving me to follow, kicking husks. On the first morning of Autumn I diverted my course to tread the gravelled paths that meandered beyond St Patrick's church. Deep mists silenced Leyton's coughing growls, whitened my sight. Swaying from verge to verge I searched for a russet jewel of my own. As I passed, shadows grew branches – leaves hung drying in the painted air, browning, then bleaching as I passed on. Silence was breached with creaks. The mists began to clot, stirred by an inquisitive breeze mazed by the trees. A pocket of sight caught me. Ahead, granite angels stepped from pedestals, gathered in henges by slab mausoleums. Weathered mouths whistled conversations, lichened hands picked moss from carved hair. One saw me: frowned. I froze as its hand chiselled to the ground, hurled a smooth grained sphere into the side of my head. A darkness left. Splashes on my cheek roused me. I lay between Eileen Murphy and her sister Maude Both gathered with Jesus in ninteen fifty four. The mists were gone, flushed by the rain. I sat up, shaking my head, touching a bruise above my ear. A distant train rumbled into a tunnel. By my foot a small conker lay, glowing in the grass. I picked it up: rubbed its cool leather dry. Uncertain, I remembered work. Pocketing my prize, I slipped away.

10

Commuting Whitechapel, 8:38. We shuffle-pack onto the train, a mix of suits and office-skirts, backpacks, and I, heaping towards seats. I lose that race, and stand – my adidas joggers catching on a belted mobile phone. Its owner is young, unsure. A cute suit. I turn to allow the nipples beneath my t-shirt to scrape against his off-the-hook ready-to-wear back. As the train jolts towards its tube our faces swing closer, too close: stubbled cheeks brush, lungs share air – I apologise. Aldgate East, 8:40. Adverts parade the length of the carriage. I sight an army recruitment poster. Its controlled agression sits uneasy alongside the carefree cartoon dog offering cheap travel insurance ad. Mansion House, 8:47. I eddy in the stream as station and train exchange bodies. My hand grabs a support strap above me as I claim space near the door. Young suit press-touches past as he exits left, eyes hidden in a yawn. Blackfriars, 8:49. I rest my head on my upraised arm. I sniff my skin: salt with heat, clean, tainted by the petrol taste of rush-hour London. Chinning the flapping cloth back to the shoulder I smell the round of the muscle. I lick, taking long, slow tongue strokes along the length of the arm, spit-flattening the black hairs into rows across my peach-blushed skin. The suits and skirts ignore me from the corners of their eyes. Backpackers stare. St James's Park, 8:55. Escape. I stretch limbs across the platform, jog stairs. Authenticate my right to commute at the ticket barrier. I emerge to shops, crowds, delivery vans, to Victoria Street. To work.

11

Art It was speeded and slowed: I had left the station, imitating vacancy as I brazened my way to the street bazaar, passing the morning muster of vagrants. There was one, possibly young, laughing. The mouth was slit taut, lips slabbed by teeth as uneven as the paving I crossed. He gambolled his way into the road, vehicles screaming annoyance, their dominion challenged.

Hawkers distract me, smells of the bazaar tapping an anticipation...

Right is more interested in other things: Liechtenstein, is Right's first remark – then comments on continuing lines, forms of brush strokes. WHAMM! Dot dot. Seconds stall past before Left sees the object of Right's observation semi-circled by open mouths, hammered into the warming tarmac. Warhol is too obvious a conclusion – Right adds. Left cannot agree. Left's vision casts a different scene. In the manner of a passionate Van Gogh. A desperate arrangement of offal spun across the canvas. Reddened sun-slants digging, dragging rays across bleached corn. Rags and boots hinting at distant structures to a foreground glory – and congealing clouds promising a shepherd's warning as I walk on.

12

Beachhead Here lie brittlestars, evicted from deep-channel muds by a winter storm – now gone – onto the Dymchurch littoral in drifts of outcast mating waves. Morning breezes grit-skit across the tide-abandoned sands, dessicating bootlace legs searching, curling in prayer. Seagull clouds scream, spear-hunting the sex-spent discs.

Such star strewn scenes are a memory for me here. This city's streets are blotched by populations scurrying from path to path: coloured currents of flow and tide streaming through my sight. Paddling by the kerb I wait for an ebb, dive deep within the scene. As the torrents take me, I ply the storms that brew in the city heat, ride the rapture foams that smack me further from home.

Walking tall, I make belief: a god in a sometimes land. The sea's detritus stacks the tide mark, cities of weed and cans woven with life. Between the piles sandstorms rage, blasting the walls of flotsam halls. With brown hoods and razor beaks, gulls patrol the expanse, interrogate strands for easy prey. Pluck lice from the wracks, crabs from their shells. Wait to see me fall.

Summer. I walk with my lover the length of Mare Street. Heat powers a breeze that picks dirt from the streets to make dust devils dance their crazed vortex formations between the bustling, bricked parades of Hackney Town. Fire catches the rubbish heaps, heaving black belches into the skies through which lost gulls sail, white in the mire. As we pass through crowds I catch his hand in mine, blow him a kiss. Above us gulls circle: shriek insults and tongue gossip. I smile as he puckers his response. Our beachhead is built on small gestures and dreams: today I watch the gulls starve.

13

Shot The fox is shot: I find it hidden in Victoria Street between the mists of diesel and spring. I crouch. Touch its pelt. It wakes, licks my fingers. City smog thickens, killing protest; shapes walk by, shadows of aliens. I lift my eyes. See the houndsman. He lumbers towards me and kicks his prey. Vermin, he sneers. Give it me. I'll see it's thrown to the dogs. My arms encircle it. Blood stains my groin. He lifts his chin, yodels: Haa Whoah! They muster beyond the brick cathedral veiled in scaffold to save its facade. The dogs pack in, tongues slavering their chests, yelps stripped from snouts fixed in fighting grins at the smell of easy work. The fox would panic, but it is shot: it paws my shirt, tearing the seams. Fleas flip allegiance; hammer thumps smacking in my airless chest. Obscenity, the dogs growl. Rip it. Dirty. Not one of us. I find a voice: no, I whisper. Leave it be. Yet my eyes flinch at a bugle halloo and horsemen ride in from Parliament Square. They laugh at me. Get away, lad. We have business to attend. Fox ears flatten: bones shiver in skins. Bait him, calls a shape from the mist. Hush, whispers its mate. Avert your face. Move along! Commands a policeman and ushers bystanders towards Victoria Station and the carriages waiting to truck them home. A helmet doffs the horsemen by.

14

Help comes from pious tones. Not in front of the Lord's House, choristers chant. My cry of relief is choked in incense fumes. Bishopric frowns pinpoint the fox. Hate the sin. Forgive the sinner. The horsemen chuckle, raise their whips, slip hipflasked brandy into the shepherd's plate hands. The bishop turns back to the brick stack sanctuary. The hunt advances: the fox that is shot whines it last breaths, motionless. I try to stand, escape with the fox clutched in my arms but cannot move – blood on my legs congeals like callipers: my eyes fix on sulphur fangs. Disposal by numbers: first dog, snout foamed, leaps in my face. Second crushes a fox-haunch, wrenches it away from my grasp. As fox is disembowelled I watch the horsemen cheer, the bystanders jeer, I watch houndsman and policeman exchange approving looks. Then they are gone. I am hidden between mists of diesel and spring in Victoria Street. With tears silent on my face I lick damp fox clots from my fingers, lick the hairs on the back of my hand. Hear Westminster bells chime, and a rifle bark distant in Pimlico. Unflexing my shoulders, I pad away.

15

Daisy Where is Daisy's baby? Is it in the cardboard box? Perhaps it is wrapped in Daisy's coat? No. Here it is. It was sleeping in Daisy's plastic bag – The Sainsbury's one: they are big and strong. Daisy takes baby out and cuddles it. Baby is cleaned and fed and burped and dressed up warm in Daisy's scarf, ready for the day. Holding baby tight, Daisy wheels the trolley through Strutton Ground market to Victoria Street. Daisy talks to baby. Talks of tall buildings and cars; about buses and people, walking past. Baby listens, quiet, as a day watches Daisy go by. When it rains, Daisy makes baby a place to sleep. Here is a cosy alcove – safe and dry. Daisy settles, places each bag all in their proper spots, close to hand. Then Daisy un-scarfs baby, washes its face, its button nose, before tucking it up neatly in a new Tesco bag, with its fluffy ear and pretty orange eye poking through the handle. Sleepy and warm. Now Daisy says her goodnight prayer: God bless Jesus. God bless Mary. God bless baby, and Daisy too. And baby sleeps.

16

After Class After the first class, we went to the bar. Introduced our personas by the drink in each glass. You scared me. Eyes feared to focus on your face, forced to look when you spoke. Twice you smiled at my jokes. Froze my stomach with the first grin. Melted my legs with the repeat. I remembered to breathe now and then. To celebrate my birthday I bought chocolates to class, saving your favourite centres from grabbing hands. Our hands caught across a nut cluster: I did not shake when you thanked me. Raised your rum to my health. Yet your smiles are spread evenly between classmates, and my flushes go unnoticed in the dim light of this bar. Dozens of crumpled sheets pile by my feet. Though we talk each week I cannot communicate my need for your laugh, your glance. Your breath by mine. I have even surfed wires to ask code to generate love lines: "vestigal degeneration dies triumphantly," sentenced my screen. "Tribal party burns expectantly." As does my temple, my forehead, my dry throat. My heart. For class tonight I have trimmed my nails. Shaved. Taken care to crease my casual gear to a cleaner, upmarket degree. Once study is done we shall walk to our bar, where I shall ask you to look at me. Notice the lust-struck wreckage within this cool shell. Discuss my healing in a group of two. You. Good wine. This poem, and me.

17

Candle In an island of hard-polished desk squats the stump of a candle, wax spat on the green, chipped dish. Once it was tall, hard: a column of opportunity. The flame has stroked too often, the bright wick is aged too soon. The sun is guttering and my windows are smeared. There is no clock on my wall to tick me to grey. I am sat before a mirror to watch my face fade to patterns in reflected walls. When the sun surrenders, I am gone: un-mirrored, I cannot be. Somebody stole the moon, leaving half a milky mug-stain where once the silver tureen overflowed. Now that I am not human, I can smile, creasing what was once a face. I do not know who stole the moon, but they stole my clock and my candle too.

18

Autumn This year autumn arrives in August: blows shit-shaded leaves past my head, under my feet – scrunch-muffled in the rain. Damp rots the fruit in the market, rusts trolleys abandoned in the street. Skin chills. I daydream hibernation. The colours of autumn are not rich: they are tweeds misted in drizzle, functions of an attar-trap rapping my windows, tapping my gutters. My pity renounces wars, victims, tips reflexive. Turns to self. Dreams are forfeit. I cannot fight seasons. Pity drips like fetid catarrh, drops from nostril to tea mug, gets sipped, swilled into the maw, swallowed. Drizzle stipples windows whittling colours from my view: greying bricks in my walls, thoughts in my head. A hand writes. Monochromes scream.

19

Perhaps The desk sits square on the side of the room. Touch polished panels meld with the dusk. Hard drawers grin half-shut and gabbled papers stray, confused between cups and pens edging to cascade on the floor. Midway, brass handles spit brass reflections across the bed – unmade – towards the door, unlocked. Behind the desk stands the oval mirror, baroque curves and tainted glass. In the mirror of the desk, papers are stacked. Pens line the rim of the cup in stout regiments, headless stalks. In the mirror of the room, curtains are hung, the floor is swept, carpet tufts are spright. The bed is made, the door is locked and I am not here.

20

Menses

January A new year: my goodwill drains away with the dregs of a festive hangover. Today I commute by a new route. My room is lost: I lodge with family. Carpets are dustless, clothes are laundered, bedsheets are free of stain. Midday, I go to the bank, obtain a statement. Count the costs and the benefits, shrug, return to work. Today's tray fills with yesterday's work. I count the hours and bend my head. Shuffle papers into folders, folders into drawers. Colleagues leave after the sunlight fails. I light a cigarette, blow fumes at the door with the No Smoking sign, sit in the dark watching the tip smoulder bright when I suck. I consider options, make a choice, take a lift to the foyer and enter the night.

February This one's a face. Face stands by the bar. It's raining outside. It's good to be drunk. I speak with face. He kisses my lips. Puts a hand on my groin. My groin sleeps. Fat man throws us out. My hair's wet. We howl past Trafalgar. Catch a tube east. Face plays games. Spot the shirtlifter. Laughs at the skinhead. Sucks my tongue as we sway. I vomit in Liverpool Street. Face's grin screams. We stamp in the juices. Frighten commuters. Face rubs my hand. Right in his groin. Feels good. I want to play. Face wants to sleep.

March Muscles: a coverlet wraps around this source of heat, as do my legs. I wake, wipe eye-grime onto the pillow, feel the form in my grasp. I finger his stubble, watch orbs dance in their lids. Touch brings a murmur. Muscles straightens his spine, his back hairs teasing my cold nipple out.

21

Reaching down, I draw patterns with a digit across the muscled thigh that promised so much. On the ceiling foreign cracks outline alien landscapes. Night traffic herding west of London muffles through the broken double glazing. I am lost in the city: the hangover that finds me won't lead me back home. Dressing, a warm pain hints at last night's pleasures. Unheard, I move away from Muscle's life, checking change in my pocket, choosing to walk. He told me he dreamed of camoflage skins, of ropes, of boots, of watersport games: I dream of tongue touch, a room of my own.

April Today a lesson is learned. I learn it well. My teachers are blood tests. Four swabs and a scrape. Outside I see bluebells arch in their garden. Fountain sprays swept on the breaths of the wind.

May There is an empty space, man shaped, that walks by my side. Once it lived in my guts, but now I can see it when I look in the mirror, razor touched to my throat. It moves when I move, sits when I sit. It watches me crap and leans on my shoulder when I check the newspapers, looking for lets. In the evenings, space and I watch a television: hold each other's hand when the pictures turn dark. As we drink cocoa, I tell it the shapes of my future room, describe the shelves of paperbacks, the pots of greenery. Carpets that don't show the dust. Sometimes we argue colour schemes, sometimes we don't. I turn off the family lights and go to bed. I feel a hand on my stomach as I undress. When the duvet covers me, before I sleep, I smile to myself and renew the certainty. Tomorrow, my mouth shapes. Tomorrow my space will be filled by flesh.

22

Traveller

London, England To remove the shirt as Man examines, to unlace the boots, unclasp the belt, is a task my head would run from. But my need holds me in this room, assists my hands unbutton my jeans, expose my feet when the socks slip off. Man watches: assesses from the door. No words are spoken. No explanations. I know why I came. Even my need dampens as I stand centred on rough carpet, hands ahead of a cottoned crotch. I am looked in the eye. Slowly, thumbs are raised and that last item drawn down, falling, until I step away.

Naked natives are rare on these streets. Dalston moves to its own dim pulse, masked by the moans of stop-start cars daisy – chaining their journeys past rain topped gutters gargling to my dreams, as I tight-walk kerbs.

Man moves, reaches to me: takes wrists, hoods eyes in a velvet bag. Fabric irritates a cheek. I am led elsewhere, prod across wood, tripped on steps. My toes count paces from habit.

Es Canar, Ibiza This space is sharper, the air knobling my skin. On a cool silk of ceramic I am showered, dried with aged wool. Powdered. Then sat on plastic cold to my back. Shackled and left.

23

From the rosemary hill I can see the shore. Sunheat is quelled by a breeze that flicks watermounds from the depths into cliffs. Resorts are gone from memory: cicadas chisel new thoughts in my head. From the cliff top I watch a boat round the rocks. Sailors prepare friends for their work below.

Soft boot-falls alert me. The dressing dance starts. A finger traces talc across the hair of my thigh. Reaches down to massage the instep – my response is admonished, bound tight in chill hoops. Slowly, with textured suggestion, each acre of skin is encased. Soon latex masters the curve of each leg, tenses against the chest when I breathe. I blink when the hood is removed: watch the mask approach. Swallow when a first strap tightens across the crown of my head. Then a second. Another snakes around the neck.

I am the diver, ready to descend. I can see Mediterranean waves waiting to swell across the sweep of my suit, kneading the waters within.

Bound in shining black, I am shouldered to another place. Back-lain, my calf is tied into a boot nailed to wood tight so each vein-beat whips an ankle angle trussed. The other foot follows. Man pulls pulleys. The plank is raised. I swim in air.

24

Thessaloniki, Macedonia The play starts. A camera whines. Man considers each act before applying a pain. Building patterns, pains paint across the swinging meat, artistic swirls gloss the sweat bathed skin. I cannot scream: a gag in the mouth presses the tongue, but still howls heave down from the lungs to whisper their way into the mask. Foot-strung, swing motions are built: testicle halters controlling the pendulum's arc. Zips are untoothed, displaying choice zones for applications – clip props and weights to tune the tension.

The glitter of the sun touching on water burns my sight. I have walked far through shaded streets leading to the promenade where I sit: watching dross ebb across the bay. From here I can see the white tower squat on the waterfront. Greenery shawls each side of that hunchback of masonry buckled from too much history. Aching, I rise: sun-dodge along the pattern paved decks towards Salonika's pride

Swing becomes top: I spin. Cramp grabs at my thigh, tears basphemies from a pinioned tongue. The ache-rhythms increase their tempo, merging and parting until they swarm from crotch to navel to nipple to neck.

In the tower, the sun is barred. From the ground door, I circle my way through historic displays: old tombs dug from the earth, their paintings protected from damp airs. Up I climb, ingesting the theories of Alexander and his sire. Too soon I am near the top, dizzied, wandering past ikons pasted to plasterboard. Each hero touched in gold. Each devil cast in blood.

25

One catches my eye. He hangs reversed from a cross, legs tied to the strut. His hair falls wild and his forehead glints. I can feel his tortures, his broken legs. I can feel the ropes that clasp his wrists. He hangs alone, sways from nails in his feet and preaches his pain for the glory of God. His name is beyond me, yet I ache for his love and I suffer in brotherhood, take his pain into my heat and carefull – so gently – I kiss his goldleaf lips

and all motion stops.

Corralejo, Fuerteventura When the cloud base lifts from the land, desolations surround me. Across the track cold magmas heap in defiant stances, clinkers making walls and turrets: outbursts of an old anger. There is no sound but a faint hiss of waves breaking across the tumbled shore, stashing its cache of white sand – grits wherever the rocks fault; slowly combing the cauterised wounds under a sunseeker's smooth bed.

Skin lightens as implements detach. What was sharp now glows. Heat travels within to touch each organ: a scan of pleasure drawn deep in the pit. Between the legs a coldness arrives. Lubricant leaks through the tight gate.

I close my eyes: still the blacks and reds of this alien place fill my head; frozen threats waiting to crush skulls. Eyes open, I see the Atlantic sky as blue as varicose veins. Weeds squat in cracks, leafless stems shake in the heat.

Body-quakes break when Man touches the hole. Muscles resist: a pressure builds.

I tire of the track and branch away, pitching across furrowed stone towards stark cones grown from a dead vent.

Arse kisses rapture. Licks and engulfs.

26

The island shivers: rocks crack. Clutching my stomach, I scream.

Dalston, London We rest chest to chest, our arms tousled across our forms. In the corner a video recounts recent pleasures. Smiling, we fondle with lips, enjoying the tastes of exhaustion. Outside, evening clouds turn bitter, blanketing skies with brutal storms. In the house a fire burns, warming waters to churn past each room: radiators whine their rusting complaints. Before the video finishes, I fall asleep on his shoulder. There are no dreams.

27

God My God has skin that tints alongside time: it darkens from daybreak pink through midmorning mediterranean olive to ebony noon, then coasts through afternoon teak to dusk and twilight and moonlight white. God's hair plats and scrambles across the brow and builds a rainbow halo of yellow, orange, brown and black. The mane frames God's face: tears cascade down cheeks and drip from the chin to water the world. To paint my God, I site my belief on a rock in the river. In dance God's fingers hoist the sky to the void: toes tap my earth's root. The wind lifts the forest's leaves in chorus and my brush sings. But details beguile me. I cannot paint God's face. When I come to the mouth, I see rips across the lips, scabs sealing the maw shut. I ache to see my God's eyes but lids are sewn tight: the sockets hollow. Waxmelt earlobes drum the jaw in time with my tapdance lungheaves: a gale gust strips the leaves, the forest bank. My horizon tightens. Tips me across my rock. My God grows taut, the strain shakes bones separating my salvation from my sin. Time finds a voice in me: they say you don't exist and God shatters. My pillar. My support. My black from white. My right from wrong. Gone. The forests along the bank sink, shrink from sight in my river run wild. A newborn sea swamping my life.Yet

the sky fails to fall, and my rock remains. I scream. Sob. Grow still. See: my ocean has waves that tint alongside time.

28

History Here lies the portrait of a woman long lost: the chin juts a touch too far, the hands fold neatly on starch-pleats of the sweeping summer-Sunday skirts. She is intelligent: a stare crosses glass to puncture masks. The thin smile acknowledges my presence. I am read – un-judged – by a photograph developed with old alchemies, by human hands as much now dust as the skim on the frame. I think I know you, woman. I don't know your name, but your blood clots my healing scabs. Dressed cheeks shape your face into prosaic folds: your smile appears now in current scenes. Familiar history is failed in this age: I do not need it. I have your eyes.

29

Consent

1993: Time It is contrived to a practiced degree: laces tense across the boot, turn-ups fold to my muscled shins. With straightened braces and jacket shoulder slung, I take the world. Tonight, I drink alone. I lean on walls, slips of barlight playing smiles on my face. I sip drinks to basebeat disco rhythms as potential sex staggers past my space. Thoughts meander – holidays, a promotion at work. Perhaps a solid love to hold week after week. I review the bar's crowd – licquor improves the sight. When time is called I number my chances, mark heads to hunt: strut into my future preening my scalp.

1991: Bruise This mark has a tale to tell. It was not the first to be born that night, neither the last, and it wasn't the biggest to bloom in that bed. Its story lies in its beauty. It entered red, a heated pain racking the thigh where it sat. Later, cooler, it blushed darker, back-lit dark blue. Soaping my thigh, I remember its style. Oval, not round: its edges bent – a defiant comma thumbed on the page, creating a space in the act. Flanneling the site, I review its life.

30

Later, it gathered a rainbow around its form, aching azures circling maroon. Green tinged yellows framing the stage. I tire of the tale. Towel myself dry. It ended, as all things end, healed. Sometimes it remembers its home, a merest hint of discolour marking its fleeting visit. Then we reflect. Relaxed, less dirty, I leave the room.

1989: Hysteria I find him in the cave where I had left him and beg forgiveness. His arms cross his guts and he rocks on his heels, his thighs muscled taut. On my knees I edge closer, almost to touch his slack face white in the gloom. I reason. Offer disclaimers in words choked on sorrow but he rocks on his heels, thighs muscled taut and breathes in and breathes out as required. I find them on a stall in Camden Market and beg for answers. The woman takes my money and spreads them mute across the board. I point and demand a finish to this pain. The cards in their symbols dance in their ranks, claiming tales of love and money while the woman who spreads them, mute, across the board fails to hear my need. I find her in the sky reflecting wisdom and beg for a word, a reason, but she will not consent. The moon is dead, the cards lie silent and the innocent within me breathes and rocks.

1988: Control Guru said: Drink and bottles were drunk until the walls were buckled and a bladder grew fat. Guru said: Walk and a path was taken, a door was opened and a lock was clicked shut.

31

Guru said: Desire and Need and a bruise was applied and clothes were torn across seams. Guru said: Drop and a carcass fell and a kiss of control was fixed to a mouth. Guru said: Relax. Be silent. Consent. And it was done.

1994: Storm The future I choose leads me deeper into Soho, deep into the heat of the stagnant evening air. As I walk St Martin's Lane and dodge between tourists packing their way through Chinatown the skies shatter, weaving liquid sheets across the town, reflecting my sight. Head tilted, I stand in the light of a sulphur lamp and watch the fat gobbets drop, line after line into my face. Tongue out, I taste their cold story, feel the rivulets trigger scalp-nerves as they deflect their passage around my velvet skull. When the deluge eases, I return to my purpose: breathe the scrubbed air deep into my chest, allow the fresh vapours time to cleanse the dark recesses within me. I stretch, strip, accept the cool stacatto upon my flesh. Breathing out, I laugh. Then I run. Typically, I am late. When I finally arrive, we have words though I smile as you list my faults. I apologise with alcohol, you accept with a leer. Together we sit and chat, watch steam heaving from my jeans to dance with the coiling twine of your cigarette smoke. When you take my hand in yours, I look hard at your eyes and know trust.

32

Drafting I suppose a pen and a scrap of envelope will do, for scribbles that hit mid-amble along the street, or on a bus. And a keyboard can take a good pounding of angst, or a tap-peck for a milder bout of the muse. But nursery scripts demand to be spelt on alphabet bricks across the carpet. Competitive strophes must be gridded with Scrabble tiles, rhyme sacrificed for the triple word score. And the joys of play dough snakes pressed into sentences across the dinner table (or the workstation when the boss is away), verse upon verse coursing across the surface, punctuated with multicolour dinosaur stops. Historical epics demand quill and parchment: the local college offers courses in do-it-yourself writing kits, supply your own pigeon wings and kitten skins. Epigrams are built for clay tablets, baked in the oven alongside the pot roast. If an image hits as I walk along the shoreline then a stick and sand will do, big poems decorated with seaweed and conch shells to be seen by seagulls until the tides of time scrub my visions back into the beach. Or for that one-time invitation only performance piece, a neighbour's wallpapered lounge and a set of day-glo crayons: it's art, I cry, as policemen smash through windows, unbind the audience, muscle me out of the house. And then those special times, late at night, when I creep to the kitchen and settle in for a feast, and indulge in my secret vice: chocolate, vodka, and magnetic fridge poetry. Drafting while the rest of my world snores.

33

Home When the wind was warm and the day longer than the reach between my arms, I sat on Dymchurch beach and built a child of sand: a head of turrets and broken shells, a necklace of seaweeds hung about its bucket neck. I gave it senses – pebbles for eyes, a hermit crab's home for a nose. For hours I sat, telling the sand boy all I knew of my world, and listening, learning the littoral laws of a different world: tales of the kelp-flies and the wars of the lug. But the tide turned, wavelets racing over sandbars, each reaching further before the beach-hills sponged them dry. I ran, my footfalls geysering seawater from razor shell wells beneath my toes. The breeze turned cool. Clouds shawled the sun. A larger wave caught me, pushed me behind the knees. I turned to see a pioneer crest crash to kiss the sand boy's belly. I hurled myself through ankle lagoons and dug mazes of moats ahead of my friend, trying to lose the tide in channels that curled like the kelp in a storm. And it worked! With the sea mazed, the sand boy stood, a hermit claw waving hurrah at my deeds – until the first fat drops fell from the sky. I stood and watched the sand boy sink home as the rain beat increased, the necklace splitting as it swelled. Lightening fingered Martello towers, making me think of the sand boy sitting below the sea, shivering when the storm-winds blew.

34

When I left, I buried my vest and my shorts, so the sand boy would be dressed if the storm crashed it away to the walls of France. As the storm showered sand grit from my body, I clambered the curving concrete of the Dymchurch defenses, threw a stick at the wheeling seagulls, and charged home.

Postcard Molyvos must be the essence of Greece. We're living in a house on a cobbled street with steps, but no cars – him next door parks a donkey in his dry stonewall garage. We even have a view of the bay, complete with picturesque island and fishermen in old boats teasing the sea for octopus – which then hang in tavernas to dry on nylon washing lines, tempting wasps.

35

Priss A shadow has stalked from the room, diminishing to the sway-flick outline of a tip-broken tail as the cat that owns it pads along a corridor newly sensed. Whiskers alert, her raucous calls still echo in my ears, her backskin sharpened claws sheathed, the damage done with an unplanned rent in the time-toughened fabric of my love. I didn't plan to cry: the task of fixing the mischief made by my demanding, dependant, eating, crapping demon of purr and fur keeps catching on flashback memories – tripping over string-tied mice, cracked ping-pong balls rediscovered in the corners of rooms. I claim to have developed an allergy to her moulted hair. Dare others to look beyond the surface of my reddened, streaming eyes.

36

Sustainability I wake, dead. Five foot six and three quarter inches of rage. Tunnels take me to the light, to love. In trust, I am judged, reviewed. I remain rage. Take the long leap back to my corpse. I stare at the stiffening smile. Choose a future as the rictus sets my face. Landfill is the familiar fate. I would lie man-long in my grave. Rot. Interlink my limbs, my ribs, with yew roots. Hear hoar frosts crack across my tomb, etch my epitaph clean from its stone page. Incineration, then. A dignified exit into the flame, curling the bones before the marrow cracks. Neither option offers peace. Sustainable waste management requires the eastern means – recycle dead flesh atop the silent towers, watch vultures pick at the carcass before bones slide down roof tiles to shatter in the pit. Though vultures are rare, here in the Isle of Angels. Dogs are no substitute, and lack wings.

37

Higher, then. Re-use. Let surgeons take their steel and slice my cooling flesh to liberate my offal: kidneys, corneas. My heart and my lung. I shall live in others, leaving my cast-iron stomach on a pedestal at my memorial, its lining scraped into milk: mourners shall feast on my junket. This too I reject. I must be more in death than in life. I shall minimise waste. Reduce. Become the pinnacle of sustainability. I will keep my dead flesh strung to my frame. I will claim the eternal flame, sign Faust's forms, take a Dutch mariner's gamble. Borrow Baron Samedi's hat. Unlive. Desert the day. Suckle upon the dark side of the force. Become Unfree.

38

Vampyr Dogs have knocked the coffin down to the ground in search of his bones. While the lid holds, the last slants of the ebbing sun catch his face through dryrot panels, rashing his skin. Nightfall. He unhooks the security latch and levers the squealing lid open, winces, then stretches. Checks the room for stakes and stakeholders. Stands and shakes the soil from his cloak. Sunrash has singed his cheeks, hatcheting across forgotten laughter ley-lines. By touch, he applies a white foundation, thick, panning his visage. A cherry lipgloss soothes his parchment lips. Fangs are flossed. Beyond ablutions, he breathes deep and takes the shape of Wolf. Calling the hounds of hell to heel, he leaves his tumbledown crypt and pads through municipal burial fields. Aims for the edge of town and the cultivated deserts beyond. Food is scarce in these declining decades. Beef and long-pork are both contaminated prey. He settles for short-pork, ripping the pig before it can scream, tossing torn haunches to his black pack. He gulps ruby fluid. Unglamorous, yet safe. Leaving the factory farm, a glance of moonlight shivers his spine. He checks for cats before shaking his form into gargoyl faced bat. Takes wing across wheatfields, arcs across pearl clouds. Watches farmhands wreck profits with circles in corn.

39

22 Facets of my Father I first had the idea for the facets series of poems in January 2000, produced first drafts fit for criticism in March 2000, and continued to revise and review over the following months. Final drafts started to be produced late in 2000, with the last poem completed (if these things can ever be "completed") in May 2001. I could not have honed these poems without the helpful advice and critiques of a large group of regulars (you know who you are!) over the past year and a bit, in particular from the rec.arts.poems and alt.arts.poetry.comments newsgroups, and from the pffa and Gazebo discussion boards – thanks, peoples, for putting up with me and my old man for sooo long!

Fool 41 » The present you conceived for my mum Showman 42 » I am wonderstruck by the way Priestess 43 » A friend of the family had a donkey Empress 44 » The night your mum died I slunk Emperor 45 » You bought the first calculator Hierophant 46 » This morning we work together: I need Lovers 47 » Your habits are a comfort. Tonight, Tuesday, Chariot 48 » In grey overalls, you are the greatest car Strength 49 » Evening arrives with a clear sky and a hard frost

40

Hedgeman 50 » We wake before dawn, a welcome-mat frost laid Fortune 51 » I cracked the foundation of mum's love. Ten weeks Justice 52 » On the carpeted court I place the players. First you. Hangman 53 » I'm hunting you down – drafting a list Death 54 » I wake to find a ladybird trundling Temperance 55 » Winter Sundays are the best time. I rise Devil 56 » Wally's World is a wonder of the art, Tower 57 » The martello gun points to France, a long Star 58 » Blackmanstone: your first home, a tumbled house Moon 59 » You share a little secret with me, a monstrous Sun 60 » You made me in the end. You found Judgement 61 » This was not the way for a man to die, Worlds 62

» A long while later I found (The images accompanying each poem show the major arcana cards of the Tarot of Marseille pack; all images are taken from the Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain).

41

Fool

The present you conceived for my mum one deliberate-drunk new year's eve came early morning, scorning your breakfast routine. Women draped the dining room in clean white sheets to welcome me home. When more neighbouring wives came to take control, you barked – but slipped back into your manly role, your concern no more than labourer's sweat, soon wiped away. Your mum said it would be quick: she was right. The screams breached barriers and I arrived, slimed and quiet. You took me later, held nine pounds of chaos in your grip. Only then, mum tells me, did I cry.

42

Showman

I am wonderstruck by the way two people live within your eyes. Neighbours adore you. Take your face for its value. Welcome your smile. I keep my face guarded, my fear of your limits sharpened by years. I learn to read you, your rages foretold by the level of blue pills in your bottle – one taken each day to take the edge from you.

43

Priestess

A friend of the family had a donkey whose stone coat would change hue to measure the weather. He said the tail would part from her arse to mark the start of an earthquake. A blue-vein, wet, windstrap day takes me walking broad Dymchurch Wall. The wave chopped sea ebbs, exposes the renovated sands and shingles where cousins once exercised donkeys on winter days like this. I'd run, too, with my dog. Watch as she chased seagulls through the gusts. You never chased me here: this beach was my beach. Renewed each day by the grey Channel tide. Bright shells to collect, rank kelps to kick. A time for thoughts to tick in my head. Navigate between sand and silt, land in water quick to suck a foot deep. But today I keep to the wall, walk away from the village, balance between brown fields below the tide line and the salt foams beyond my yellow strand. I balanced too long. Settled, like the wall, between you and the wife strapped in your coastcarving, shapeshift battle. Waiting for the brush of a donkey's tail, detached.

44

Empress

The night your mum died I slunk after you to watch you cry, hiding from family, bolted in your shed at the end of the yard. Your head backlit by the bare bulb picking out tears and saltflats matched on each side of your screwed, stubbled face. I cried, dad. Sobs surprised me as school gathered for lunch the day you disposed of gran. I sat, breath pressed in a chest coopered in unseen hoops. Tears shunted across my kid skin. Mates stared at my face shading red. Laughed at me, fingers pointed, and I laughed at me, too.

45

Emperor

You bought the first calculator the village had seen. A brick of a machine with hard plastic buttons and American batteries. All the way from Texas. We took turns to test the new toy: magic arithmetic at the clack of a click. The smallest telly money could buy was yours. Four inches of screen packed between radio and tape deck. We lined up to view the almost picture, guess at the grey-grain shapes flattering within. Your eight track tape cassettes still saw good use, even after the fashion passed. You liked the music, the shape, the selection switch. You left us too soon: computers are constructed with you in mind.

46

Hierophant

This morning we work together: I need school books, you want beerchange. As we enter the stables to fork horse dung into corners I listen to the way you speak, flat vowels flagging statements in the flow: must have a wife, then sons come. Work for a wage to pay the rent, a roof overhead. Food on plates – yes, I nod, hungry to finish the job, straw stalk between my teeth. Moving to the next job you string up more thoughts. I look to where you point: a pond hedged in yellow iris, puckered out of the marsh by bombs that failed to rocket London. We hang hay for the horses on the fence by the train tracks and I ask you, why? You sigh, remind me of familiar facts: place makes money, money makes status. Your brothers fighting out of England for fuck-knows-what and you digging roots for farmers. You try to explain, how for a while it worked, the world worked but then it stopped, a man rocketed to the moon yet no-one would tell you why, or how to fix the world, except to take the pills that raked out your feelings, made you sweet like rotting hay and horse shit – clipping your sentences now to bare clause, word on word, repetitive like the piston chudder of the little train rushing past us to Dymchurch station. The smoke stings your eyes to tears and haychaff makes your lungs heave.

47

Lovers

Your habits are a comfort. Tonight, Tuesday, I watch you drink your six o'clock tea, slurp it from the side of your mouth. The teardrop snot dangling from your nose hypnotises me, a translucent pendulum, a gamble to guess where it will fall: the carpet, the cup. The other curve of your maw clamps on a hand rolled splinter of tobacco, sucked every minute or so. Ash drops onto the pools coupon you complete, the same each week, regular ranks of crosses bet to bag a million quid: Stockport County, Manchester City, York. I leave to eat in the lounge, switched to BBC. You settle where you sit, clamp headphones to your ears and zone out to ABBA, Queen: disco dazzlers who shimmer across the carpet, hips loose and hands held high. By seven your head slumps: a doze before you tour the pubs.

48

Chariot

In grey overalls, you are the greatest car mechanic of all, fingers lubed in oil as you tweak and tinker, fix and fine tune village engines to precision in our yard. Neighbours watch in awe as you restore the roar and the purr to aged, upholstered frames. Early morning sees you leave your devotion in the yard and choke your way to work, moving fuel to garages across the county, road lord in your yellow, six axle articulation, daring the men of Kent to compete with you in the only race that counts.

49

Strength

Evening arrives with a clear sky and a hard frost to etch white glass scabbards on each grass blade. Horses graze in their stables, too cold to start at my dog, running her rheumatic hip to warm ease. Your caravan is warm – chilblains itch when I enter. You force your bones to stand, to greet me: our backslaps hug us tight. We speak easily this evening: records and radios, school, work, food and fodder. Other men's wives. You mention doctors, a bladder infection. No fright in your voice, a rare acceptance of your current state. An odour vents from under the sink. A commode of piss and clotting blood. No worry, you say: herbs will clean the air.

50

Hedgeman

We wake before dawn, a welcome-mat frost laid across the floor. We dress quietly. Break shotguns and shells from their safe place. Leave home with the dogs and drive winding marsh lanes to a farm. Beside the bullock pens you meet friends, discuss the hunt. When talk is done we shiver away, trek across ploughed fields to find a hide deep in a reed bed or willow thicket: you reject several as the wide skies flush red. We settle in a wet ditch, mostly silent. Your whisper points me to an owl, a bat. Fish waking to feed between the reed roots. Your hand signs teach me the rules of this, your real world: baptising me in the mists of Romney Marsh. I stuff my hands deep into dog fur, her warm head resting on my knee as I listen to your litany. Above us, ducks honk their formations seaward: a few fall to shots in the distance. You miss. I sit still, dreaming of food, a fire. My bed.

51

Fortune

I cracked the foundation of mum's love. Ten weeks after you smashed her face, I stopped running. I told her, with my teenage certainty, no more sofa beds, guest rooms, launderettes. She didn't cry. You said: the sun shines on the righteous, when I asked to come back. That you had won. Mum negotiated her return two days later, her conditions set out in a quiet, even tone. This isn't home anymore. It's like the house has grown a new front door. I check each knock and redirect visitors to you hiding in headphones in the dining room, or to Mum chat-polishing friends in our lounge. I go out more: meet friends each evening by the storm-worn shelter on the seawall, no longer the big prize, nor your referee.

52

Justice

On the carpeted court I place the players. First you. Starting with your fist, sinews bunched across your arm, shoulders driving you to the centre of the scene. Your face is slack. Your eyes, white rimmed, say all: you know it ends here. Others square up the room: brothers bursting from the sides, heroes caught standing, adrenaline barely pumped through veins. The dogs are quicker. I hang them carefully, mid-leap now, teeth tearing the air, not caring what they attack. Mum is mid-tumble towards the table that will break her fall. She doesn't scream. Her mouth slits in a grin of shock. She sees nothing, her vision blocked already by your act, the cut brow flushing red, her broken lenses hinged away from her ear. I am here, too. High behind the stairwell banisters, a fifteen year face around a stretched, silent mouth. Eyes caught stranded between "watch" and "know", trapping a tableau where two decades of seeping rage end, when the purpose for my birth fails, my family shatters, the maelstrom stops.

53

Hangman

I'm hunting you down – drafting a list of events and evaluating you in my memory of them. To verify my truths I turn to independent proofs. Super eight cine film was the craze when I was six. You filmed everything: edited and spliced. Directed. Topped and tailed the evidence with credits. Dates. I squirm as I watch again my fat legs trot through the safari park. Here, we are a family. Mum smiles, I giggle. You laugh. We feed ostriches with sandwiches, dodge their preening beaks. We watch elephants bathe, wallabies graze, peacocks display. We tame each other. As a finale you film me pissing on the trunk of a sycamore tree in Windsor Great Park. In the film I watch, your thumb is shadowed in the lens, hiding my naked quarters. Perhaps that was planned. Perhaps I remember you wrong.

54

Death

I wake to find a ladybird trundling across my arm. Another trots the length of a finger laid straight on the blanket, hunting greenfly. More cascade from my hair when I shake my head, a red hail bouncing onto the hard, tan lawn. Beetles are everywhere, blood-glazed shells spotting yellow piss on mum's laundered white bedsheets hanging on the line. This everlasting summer is baking change into every leaf and crack. You've changed. As if planting gran in the ground last spring has set new sap seeping through your veins: hair creeping past your collar, sideburns spreading across your cheeks. You work on a friend's car wearing a string vest and fresh gold chains. I turn the volume down on anarchy – punk rockers spitting through my radio, and see you've grown four inches: another pair of wedge soles, cream against grey overalls dotted with oiled, dying bugs. I relax back on my front, arse to the sky, tanning a line for fashion. I don't want to move. New uniform for a new school. New music, shouting into my blood: kick it up, smash it out. Fuck, I've got down tufts sprouting where yours are bleached, like a fungus erupting over my puckered skin. Soon I'll be bald like you, wrinkled like you. Cooked by this bastard summer into you and I hate it. Toss you! Burn my hide red, with black hair swirls and piss the sheets yellow in a dream.

55

Temperance

Winter Sundays are the best time. I rise out of bed with the smell of burning bacon and twitch my passage through the day by smells. Music floods the house. Mum tunes her ears to easy listening radio, sets her hands to dicing carrots, peeling taters. Dressed, I hide in books, chasing bookworms across the pages of fantasies and monsters. Gusts of iced air alert my back to the open and close of the front door, tracking your departure to set England right with friends in pubs and the arrival of neighbours who pop by for the gossip, sharing mugs of tea with mum as she stuffs the chicken with sage and onion, crumbles the stock cube into oil, rips cabbages into pots. They soon steam, heating the atmosphere, gauzing the windows in a fine mist: I break from picture books to finger-sketch on the panes: stick models, happy families. In time the cooking is completed. Plates are heaped with meat and greens, fed back into the oven to keep warm. The family arrives back in drabs, to be sat at the table for the weekly ritual. My brothers joke, make bets on your behaviour. You will soon be back home, determined to sit at the head of the feast, act the part of Dad when the blue pills balance your brain. Or dangerous entertainer, if the kilter is bad.

56

Devil

Wally's World is a wonder of the art, its ingenuity held together with scaffold and cable, pins and paint. We can erect this show in fifteen minutes: homecrafted lightboxes, secondhand strobes, the decks, the great front board, with Wally's World written in red across its length. And we are set. Afternoon or evening, birthday or wedding we pack halls across East Kent with our rhythm, entertaining spruced, scented hordes with disco and soul, with two-tone and motown. You start on the light and bitter, to oil your joints. I start with a shandy and a shaking fit, knowing the hall will watch me play, waiting until the alcohol kicks in and the chat gears up. You work the front: kiss bride or birthday girl. Assess your audience, drink, then dance. Snake your neck chains across your chest. Whip your hips tight in their jeans. Swing. Pick the lady. Pounce. I play. Professional in my intros, my dedications. Master of the microphone. Devil of the decks.

57

Tower

The martello gun points to France, a long sleek defiance, and I astride its breech. Nothing in this ribbon village can top its crumbling guard: from this roof I can see the curving line of dressed wall, built to deny a tide whose storm blown high mark would bury my own birthspot in four feet of cold brine. Dymchurch straggles alongside, a heavy traffic clotting the High Street. I ignore it all. Fix instead on your home, a van in a field past which the toytown trains roar. I want to turn this cannon to the land. Aim at the road, the shops, fairgrounds and fire: level and clear. Heal. I have you in my sights.

58

Star

Blackmanstone: your first home, a tumbled house at the crossroads where the tracks march flat by miles, sketching their courses around ditches and boundaries long forgotten, like the churchland mansions that once gloried beneath this rounded sky. Orgarswick, where I was conceived, carried, birthed into a land grand in its narrow time. A street named for a farm that was once a village, living by the tides and mists and the endless breeze. Bricks in fields break ploughshares, prove the land has changed. Churches pucker the Marsh into spires, their arches wide to span the leagues of life and death that litter our once and sometime world. Weeds grow high within the boneyards. Colour spotting between the factory fields of sulphur rape. In the ruins of Blackmanstone, I can stand at the centre of the galaxy, watch the earth change. I asked you once, here: why do villages die? You smiled, said nothing. Let the Marsh echo her misty gusts through my head.

59

Moon

You share a little secret with me, a monstrous gift, padded sweethearts holding hands under a nylon moon. You show me inside its front door, where you've painted a question mark, then spelt out below: with love from Wally. Allowed by your rules, you say. Two days before the big dart date you task me to deliver the gift, sheathed in its lilac box. Edgeways, the card is taller than me: two rubber boots and a bobbly hat pushing the wall d'amour against a bucking wind to the post office squat centred in Dymchurch High Street, in front of the turfed sea wall. Inside the office, a duffel-coat queue of old women and gossiping men nudge me as I wait for the counter, test me: who's the card for, lad? Who's it from? But I won't answer, hide the address tighter to my chest. Wish I was walking on the moon, like a secret.

60

Sun

You made me in the end. You found a key, tuned it to my lock and then, without knowing why, I opened for you. Chatting music and snapping exotica we learnt to talk together. There, in the zoo on the hill, perched over the Marsh, we fed peacocks and flashed cassowaries. Together we discovered the restored house, its history and gardens. We rebuilt our past during that summer as we touched the tame elephants, when I stopped hiding from your eyes, accepted your story in me.

61

Judgement

This was not the way for a man to die, tied to your cot in a room away from sight, tubes trickling relief from pain into your veins, guiding your mind deeper into morphine dreams. I tried to listen to your wandering conversation, but all I could focus on was your tongue, bitten blue as you chewed your words, your fears, scabbing around your mouth, tipping truths and lies past yellowing teeth – a reptilian rogue in your head. Six weeks it took, from father to corpse. Forty five days for that new life to spring from obscurity to attention, to feed on your blood, squeeze your bowels, stretch your stomach tight and round to flatten even your navel at the end. That last night you regained your youth. Visioned the abattoir in which you once worked. You woke the ward with your terror: convinced the bed opposite was a bullock bought to the cull, and you to drag it shitting and baying to the stall to shatter its head. Its carcass to fall, hooves clattering the gutters and you left to shovel gore from the floor. Doctors would not let me witness your final fight. Instead you were tied tight to your cot and wheeled to a solitary room, to let the morphine drip evenly into your arm, to let your scabfucked tongue slip still, to let nature take its paced time to ease you from life.

62

Worlds

A long while later I found your sixties-style wetsuit, rubber disintegrating as quick as I touched it: an aged, grey skin of yours. You told me you did it for the peace. Diving was your release from the noise of the world. You took me with you, sometimes, to the flooded gravel quarries at Hythe, or Lydd, with your friends. Land-safe, I would watch you skin-up, strap bottles to your back and a mask to your face, wave, and then sink. Gone from sight, your bubble stream diminishing until no sign remained of your place in that lake. I'm gay, Dad. There. Said it now. I bet you're spinning in your plastic ash pot. You, who made it your life's remit to refurbish the female half of East Kent: no wife safe from your guile. I'm gay, and I can't swim, and I've never had a driving lesson in my life. I live in the biggest city I can find and still it's your exact face that stares back from the mirror – except for my mother's eyes. Like I'm bound within your skin, no escape, none sought now. I am your legacy, you my history. Done and dusted. Stored with love. One day I will drive back to Romney Marsh, dive deep into that pit. Check for myself our depths. Watch my bubbles heave towards the surface, perhaps to leave a trace, perhaps not. But not yet. London calls me: no man is safe from our smile.

63

From Each Skull, A Story Welcome to this, my second collection of poems. This set of poems may (or may not) be about marginal people and marginal societies. None of the people described in these poems are real – they've all emerged fully formed from my imagination. Feel free to draw whatever conclusions you like from this admission.

Faith 65 » His fortune lies in heaps Acolyte 66 » He's tall in his pew, this ladding man: Dad, Something's Wrong with Nanna 67 » Son, you know it takes some time to see Stanley in Moonlight 68 » He lopes slow-motioned, each footstride Coots 69 » Look at you, sloven shortwings, your nests The Place Maker 70 » I met Mother Drum when she came for beer, Serving the Muse 71 » I chose to dine at A's establishment: Rogues 72 » A grift of sunshine teases bulbs to bloom Harry 73 » Harry has found a niche for the afternoon. Roadkill 74 » Carhorns on Christmas Eve: a feather slaps the road Mad Mary 74 » She plucks history from the soil –

64

She Forgets and Remembers by Touch 75 » She hums for Jesus as she cleans Lucy Plays with her Friends 76 » She lines them up in rows, The Knife 77 » She's messed me up, again: my shiny blade The Micro Mule 78 » There must be laws against this sort The Charity Collector 79 » She stands in the wind with a tin in her mittens City Hall 79 » A welcome now for London's fair unlauded Mayor Hutton 80 » Now the fair lord has parsed the story's text and let Sniper 80 » Focus just here – I'll frame you in the street. Culling a Dog in June 81 » Put down the messenger, the dog who barked Whitehall 82 » When I walk drunk through Saint James's Park Trespasser 83 » My Gran, she warned me of you:

65

Faith His fortune lies in heaps before her front door. They sit like old lovers to watch the sun paint clouds.

"When we burn the offerings, do You consume the smoke?"

She pours them wine from the jar, drinks her portion unwatered.

"I married You when I was nineteen; I was a virgin, once".

His hands that heal choose not to smooth her wrinkles. He sips her libation, watches her eyes recycle the world.

66

Acolyte He's tall in his pew, this ladding man: his eyes are constant, blue beneath a buzz of hair, soft as the sins the preacher warns him about. He listens with concentrations of lines embossed faintly around the edge of lips wasted on kissing: they want to worship God – his God – with shapes and sounds.

"... this evil works by magic. Look! It moves by curse to curse and teach a lesson. God can not be bought by sinners praying. God will not "forgive the hateful sodomites their lecheries, nor welcome home the scum who rip the innocents from wombs. For God will not forgive ..."

An image of fire curls in the eye of the lad in his pew, a fire to take the snoring congregation out of their comfort, sloth. Redeem their souls like the preacher riding his pulpit now: a stallion galloping across the hills; a trawler hauling fish from the storm; a martyr thanking the Lord for his tortures.

"... that we atone for Adam's sin, forsake our knowledge, learning; start afresh, become as pure as steel and sharp as swords. That we become "His instruments to cut away the cancer – slice the sins from flesh to heal the people, strip apart the souls of Idolators fit

67

"to clean them, make them fit for His inspection. Nothing less will do! The world is sick and we must make it better! God will love us then!"

His fingers grip and bend the book, his knees are locked: he will not bow to worship – God demands he cleanse his life; he knows the world must burn.

Dad, Something's Wrong with Nanna "Son, you know it takes some time to see the truth from fiction: Tom don't die for real and Jerry's just a cartoon mouse. He feels no pain when caught beneath a knife. But we are real: you bleed when a door traps your thumb and bumps don't disappear when tea trays smack your head (and I apologise for that – an accident I swear!) So please, my son, re-latch the safety, lower the gun and tell me what your Nan has done to make you mad like Butch who's lost his bone? And why insist on silver slugs? I know Nan smells a bit like dogs, and yes she howls. It's sad! But she's your Nan, and you are part of our tribe."

68

Stanley in Moonlight He lopes slow-motioned, each footstride matched by the seesaw dance of shoulders humping over his nape. He keeps his ears pert: black tips scanning tufts and twig-tumbles for scuffles, volesqueak. The morsels whistle warnings ahead of his thoughtless trek – then silence. Odour sources tangle colour through his greytone bush-scapes. He sits, sniffs his tailpit tag glands, tongues clean his fur-pursed wolfhood: still the gift-disk shines. When he howls, his bones recall the loss, the pain of change, complexity; the moult of flesh.

69

Coots Look at you, sloven shortwings, your nests a dereliction of twigs poked in sludge beyond the gardened soils of the pond. Tourists gather to watch you fornicate, those grub-chain toes scouring oil from plumes: her head dives to avoid his bloodeye leer. Last year I watched you hatch four cuties, bundles of floating chirrups, watched you peck each to death in turn when you tired of them. Still you flirt your jaundiced legs, squabble as you wave your saddle-white heads like liars while scrumping breadcrumbs from goose-beaks.

70

The Place Maker I met Mother Drum when she came for beer, her hair in a net and her tongue in gear: she believed the mayor took backhanded cash and offered his friends good contracts for trash; she knew that the sewers were stuffed with snakes which fed on pet cats and poisoned the lakes; she witnessed the vicar steeped in sin teaching the alterboys how to drink gin; she heard that the doctor killed on demand and sold newborn kids for ten thousand pounds; she once found a needle stuck in a bun bought from the grocer who had a bent son; her son was a waste of time and good space – one day he'd kill her, inherit her place.

71

Serving the Muse I chose to dine at A's establishment: a restaurant well marked for style, panache and quality, a place for nourishment of soul and sense – at least they kept the trash at bay when one's inclined to eat good food – or so I was informed. I ordered boar and settled back to contemplate the crude parade of riff-raff shambling past the door. "My deeply felt apologies," a voice beside my elbow murmured. Looking down I saw the chiselled bones of service hoist into my view. "Why so?" I asked, a frown across my brow. "We've had to bar the boar," the waiter cringed: "It charged around the place creating havoc, carnage! Such a chore to clear the mess – we turfed it out, disgraced!" Nonplussed, I checked the menu once again. "What else is there to eat?" The old man smiled, his lips a gruel of soup. "The chicken, plain, is rather good – a filling dish, par-boiled." "But rather boring, I'd have thought?" He shook his head and said: "You do not understand, young sir, but plain is best – no sauce to hide the look, no herb or spice disguising taste! The bird served bland delights the plate. Just try a breast or two." I was intrigued, I have to say: "You use no salt? No stuffing? Just undressed?" "Oh yes!" he said. "It is the only way to exercise the muse! We don't allow ingredients to spoil the meal, the chefs must work in peace and comfort – once the row of discontent is banished, gone, they're left

72

with harmony in which to hone their skills and arts! A space where they can learn to shape their honest, soul-full heart-wrought chicken meals to feed our guests: a dish you can't escape!"

Rogues A grift of sunshine teases bulbs to bloom through snow, whose cold wheeze huffs through a jemmied window; men with badges paint the frame, looking for clues. Who dumped the fridge across the driveway, let its vapours heist ozones from the sky? Breeze-blocks hold up a car where kids play out their game of cops and fathers – they'll harvest the world for a laugh.

73

Harry

Ecce Homo Harry has found a niche for the afternoon. He has furnished it in card and now houses himself beneath the starling roost close to the cathedral piazza; attempting to close away the buses churning their fumes yards from Harry's head, and hunger stammering Harry's stomach, and so sleeps.

Rus in Urbe Harry coughs in his slumber, squeezing out the diesel motes trying to tarmac his lungs. The sharp hacks break the lullaby clatter of London's August siesta, distracting a mob above Harry's form from politics. They rise in purpose, a unity dabbling concretes in guano showers, and wheel their shadows across Victoria Street's pedestrian brick artwork, then settle once more.

Post Harry Harry is gone. He woke to the shunting groans of London's evening stampede and has migrated to richer streets: alleys behind bakeries and takeaways, scrying cascades of bagged garbage waiting for collection day, or Harry – whichever claims them first.

74

Roadkill Carhorns on Christmas Eve: a feather slaps the road as traffic snuffles through the windchilled rain towards Whitechapel. Fox'll 'ave 'im, see me right. The croak of nicotine and MaxStrength lager rasps a throat, coating my face in spittle. I kneel back from jaws – a smile of yellow teeth in whiskers, cotton coat caught up on shoulders thinned to bone. I touch the sores that screen his face and ask: can angels really fall? Faces can lie, my mother told me once and this one's stubble over bliss. It hides nothing from me: my vendor's eye has scraped it up for sale in bottles, tinctured grace priced for a festive gift. A useful find of angel camouflaged as car-trashed tramp.

Mad Mary She plucks history from the soil – a poison-blue bottle here, a clipped coin for which a man was hanged. Each gives her fingers a fuzz of images, a chain daisying back from disposal to creation. She does not touch people: the immediacy of their sweat hurts her temples. Instead she collects their detritus to review their stories; keeps a library of her favourite episodes in her pocket.

75

She Forgets and Remembers by Touch She hums for Jesus as she cleans the bath, sponges and wipes, strokes dust from shelves and loops towels on their proper rails. An orchid arches in bark on the window's ledge, straining to bloom. Soon leaves are polished clippings trashed, and Vera turns her mind to sprucing herself. When she steps from her shower she towels dribbles from her skin, takes care to wipe the soft cloth along the lines of her folds. Veins in her hand arch through her skin, their net morphing as she wipes lower, slower to take pleasure in the scrape of wool through white wire. Today she will call herself Betty, and she'll make an effort to forget the names of her nephews and nieces. A memory taps her cheeks, tightens her lips. When the sun slips a beam through the window she smiles, knuckles her puckered fingers into the cloth and polishes, polishes until she hums: petals unfold.

76

Lucy Plays with her Friends She lines them up in rows, pretends to be a teacher. Today she'll teach her friends about the world of adults – the need to shout and cry and writhe and snort in bedrooms. Her friends look on and nod, agreeing. One has dustmites; another's eye droops down unthreaded from its socket. One asks: does Lucy play these games? 'Oh, no', she whispers. She much prefers to let her fingers make her happy, but only when she's safe and hid beneath her table.

77

The Knife "She's messed me up, again: my shiny blade a tarnished map of haemoglobins. Look at how she spoilt my spine, my bolster glued with fingerprints! She's crying now, as if the cuts are my responsibility – like I should care; she hasn't sharpened me in days, not since she last kissed me, my scales and tang held fast between her breasts. I know she can't love me – I'm just the tool. But still there must be something there, a hint of care in choosing me repeatedly to mark her skin with messages, her runes of loss and hurt and farewell notes, the secret pains she takes to wrap me safe in swaddling cloth."

78

The Micro Mule (or, On Hearing The News That Scientists Have Discovered A Way To Harness Single-Cell Organisms To Perform Micro-Scale Mechanical Work) "There must be laws against this sort of thing! I mean – there's me, you know, right there in the Spot, the sugarmill just ticking over nicely when some bastard 'god' just pops along and sticks a stack of beads across my back, you know? Like I'm a giant of multicellularity! Yeah, right! And then the bastards steal my heat and light, evict me like some virus scum. And now they play their games – a sweet light here, a smell of toxins there and I'm away: go up this channel, round that bend – it's like a bloody maze in here! My poor flagellae beat like strips of, well, flagellae I suppose and if I had a set of nerves I bet they'd scream in pain by now! I mean, I ask you, mate, for what? Nirvana ain't supposed to be like this!"

79

The Charity Collector She stands in the wind with a tin in her mittens and calls for donations – some coppers will do. Shy shoppers are caught with their purses mid-pocket: they clatter their change in the pot and move on. Though eyes will exchange a brief lock of compassion, the gale is too chill to allow a quick word and somehow the act doesn't mend the impressions that photos of children in rows in a pit have lodged in our heads. But still that tin rattles, now loud as I put my bare hand on loose change and add to her pile. Her smile is infectious: a spread of the lips to reveal crooked teeth that tell me that though we can't stop the tsunamis we still change the world with a copper or two.

City Hall A welcome now for London's fair unlauded Mayor and his new house that slumps its arcs by Tower Bridge: this tit beside the Thames, its windows strung in scales of tinted glass upon the structured spiral stage; this glint of governance so kindly offered us by Foster's Follies, landmarks offered at a price; this grand metallic bollock landscaped in a truss of path and park environmental in its grace. No ravens fly across the Thames to guard its flank and old Magog still grins his spell in London's heart. From power plants flows art, and cash breeds gilts in banks and I still walk, my step unchanged by this new start: an office grown to service London – hamstrung serf. A beacon of our city shackled at its birth.

80

Hutton Now the fair lord has parsed the story's text and let the peasants view his judgement. Kelly is dead, the hand that slashed is still, no shame of mind for a man who set the story right, who barked at giants, stalked the lands of Ur and Muscovy for sight or sign of death in tubes of flame. Who teased the facts from steppes and sand and set them down in statements sought by princes, truth pinned down and bound. A wholesome work by a trusted man. Watching the lord as he mouthed his words of silk I feel we've lost – the facts are spinning apart already, clipped in soundbites, highlights flashed across the globe in headlines, bullpoints: feel the story crash across the newsdesks, spurt in columns inching from the op-eds to the trash.

Sniper Focus just here – I'll frame you in the street. A question: did you choose to wear that dress, that cardigan this morning? Or was its leaf knit pattern just there, slung across a chair as you hurried past, an afterthought plucked and strung around your shoulders? And your shoes – they look un-scuffed, the polish hints through dust. Your basket kept its shape as you fell, culled. A camera stops. From a shop a hen waves her wattle into the air, steps from the door, clucks once, then pecks. A man runs to the corpse, his angle feet kicking some apples away – apples bought by his wife a minute before spilt from her wicker basket, witnessed by all.

81

Culling a Dog in June Put down the messenger, the dog who barked a phosphate storm: tearing this foot from this leg, slipping a shoe from a strawberry sock; dusting that kid in a film of concrete and glass, still eyes open, snapped in the act of gathering. Leash the mutt and cull it, the tightly trained weapon who listened to a master's voice – sniffed out and tracked down, took out the hate-full enemy. Then sat, loyal dog, through the courtroom storm. His pleasure mute at his attested translation into the Lassie who never came home.

82

Whitehall

"A fire destroyed Whitehall, the largest and ugliest palace in Europe", Duc de Saint-Simon, 1698

When I walk drunk through Saint James's Park late, late at night I can smell the flames. There was a map of this palace, but it burned with the Dutch maid who fired her master's bed. The ambassador kept an office above a room where pigs were stalled; they paid a better rent. I see these things when I'm drunk in Whitehall, walking straight within the machine gun's sights. Ghosts pack this street like grenades in a box: horses trot through taxis soliciting trade. I wave to Guido. He's waiting to be strung up and disembowelled. Charles shakes in the cold air. Still the starling cloud wheels, their parliament an exercise in precision, beauty and noise.

83

Trespasser My Gran, she warned me of you: 'an absence of a man', she said. 'A taker of breath and life'. And here you are outlined at my door. Back away, I think. Jump! My legs don't shift. They lie in sheets, slack meat strung on hingeless bones. Wake up – but I'm not asleep. My hands won't lift. I sweat as you trespass, my breath lung-tight. You come near, a wireframe face skinned in shadows. 'This death is a bastard', Gran told. Your hands touch my chest and press down hard, the weight a stroke of pain, a stripe of fire along my arm. You grin a question: "do you want me?" Yes, I agree. You I can love. You freeze; your lips – so close – crack. My hand grasps your head as you collapse, a slow avalanche of skin and hair. Bone arcs across the room, flakes and breaks down to the knots of the carpet tufts. I heave cold air inside my ribs, consume it. Snarl it out. Jabs and stabs grief my arm as I turn and clasp my lover tight, claim his sweat, his traffic-in-the-distance snores.

84

Poems to Quote to your Lover Welcome to this, my third collection of poems. In this collection, I am proud to present you with some love. These poems deal with loves and relationships in all their wonderful and woeful manifestations. Some of the poems are a little raunchier than others, but there's nothing (too) offensive or smutty in them!

Summersex 86 » We step barefoot across the still-wet humps Cliff 87 » As the hovercraft puffed its skirts First Love 88 » You're drowning me: water Transaction 89 » My friends ask me: how much does that special smile Eating Out 90 » When he laughs his tongue Nothing Much 91 » Look how quiet the room is: a cat Accessory 92 » Such a stupid hat. When the Battle Ends 92 » Look out of the window: see how An Office Acquaintance Offers Advice 93 » He said: love is Trade 94 » You grab my hand and net aside First Night 94 » It was your eyes that sobered me: ice

85

The Cartographers 95 » You promise me treasure, offer Exhibits 96 » She was skipping over the rope, her body Morsels 97 » When I fed you I set you three courses: Stood outside the office, smoking 98 » Winter spit taps on my skull: Take this Man 98 » I married you on a couch in Clarkenwell, Language 99 » So when did we begin to evolve Puppy Love 99 » When I heard that song on the radio Token 100 » I buy a rose to mark Joy 101 » You're fun! Not as funny as the time Renewal 101 » We severed the band together, took a saw Respect 102 » It's strange how our fingers

86

Summersex We step barefoot across the still-wet humps of Dymchurch beach, its moonlit streams an etch of curves connecting each abandoned stretch of sea back home. I catch your hand, my thumb a chat-up telegraph of taps and strokes – two strangers newly met at the party fires, shared beers and jokes beneath the stars; desires like this are best kept secret from our folks. And after – after grit and groan and sweat and lick amid the leathery strands of kelp – I find a mermaid's purse among the threads of nets and cans, the dog inside unwhelped. You gift me one last kiss, a whisper: "tide's about to turn – I'll see you round sometime."

87

Cliff As the hovercraft puffed its skirts against the concrete apron, so I flew – Dover harbour a spray of images behind my brother as he swung me over the salt-crust lawns, the edge of the unguarded cliff, a handgrasp away from learning the dangers of trust. Now the last hovercraft has been scrapped for spares, I can discover new seductions: the dangers of windy walks through stiff grasses to watch the sea bolster Dover below; the feel of rain spattering my neck, my back as I dance with you, tonight's friend, on the edge of the cliff – eyes forward not down – each step an experiment in my trust of flinty contact.

88

First Love You're drowning me: water blisters over the river's dirt bed – a borewall of branches, snakes, garbage dumped in the forgotten course. This flood of you pistons me through storm drains. "Change must come", grumbles the corpse of a dog flushed from its grave of dust and tyres. Now the surge sings, percussion streams harmonised with outlet gargles. Nerves get pinched, pressed in my skin – the hands of a giant who luges alongside me, holding me safe in his great grasp; he pushes my form through sewers, curving me into the sea. You scare me; cleanse my veins in chemicals and drown my lungs. "Breed", squirm the maggots in dogmeat – "Breed like the gods have smashed the skins of the world!"

89

Transaction My friends ask me: how much does that special smile of yours cost? I'll warn you now it's pricey: not a trinket stacked on shelves in giftshops trading junk. You cannot wipe my palms with coins and watch it swipe its muscly tricks across my face, nor will enticements bag you that act – for a drink I'll swap a grin, and for food I'll pack a leer into our dialogue. But my smile, my honest sweat-on-face with blushing grace stretch of lips and crowfeet tracks towards my ears, deserves a deal only you can strike, my love, when you look at me with lids half-drawn across your eyes.

90

Eating Out When he laughs his tongue splits his lips, spider lines compressed like the accordion serenading the the diners; the veins across his bow-nose beacon his joy of fine malts. Her joy is sedate, her oatmeal hands clasped to the linen where she hides her smile, her beige eyes tuned to his face; I watch her water-stretched heel stroke along the curve of his calf. I carve designs on the tablecloth with the steel of my knife, quiet amid the clatter. As I wait for your late arrival I refuel on cheap house white and the sight of the waiter's tight groin.

91

Nothing Much Look how quiet the room is: a cat whiskers behind sunlit curtains for spiders; noses cold rice from a plate in search of meat. Shadows shoal the tank, each a life behind the green scum growing on the glass. Tide rings in the mug mark the slow sips of a cold coffee. You activate me remotely, the song of the phone triggering animation, audio smiles and shrugs as we chat for a while about nothing much at all.

92

Accessory Such a stupid hat. Not you, the way it falls across your eyes, the brim sieving dust mites; a swatch of orange without feathers – felt, maybe, or shoddy. So many rags and snags rolled tight to fit in this cupboard. Dress up for me. Let fall your hat, your shirt – wear me, tonight, my supple leather laced tight to you.

When the Battle Ends Look out of the window: see how the sparrowhawk plucks feathers, how the pigeon flaps grit over the path? I bought a brace of feathers once, tied them to my arms and flapped – elbows held acute above the shoulders. Look at you, crying. Why cry over the carcass of a bird you've never loved? You need new eyes to see beyond the unzipped barbs along the quill.

93

An Office Acquaintance Offers Advice He said: "love is a sport of both skill and chance, strategic planning must become your core competence." I said: "why render these chemicals into a game?" He said: "you have to compete, my friend." I said: nothing. I watched his tongue moisten his underlip, a quick slither of spittle between words to gloss his looks. He smelt of sharp spices. I watched him cock his head, his eyes remained symmetrical, blue – electrodes pushed through my forehead. I watched his throat form thoughts; a rhythmic rise and close, rise and close. Curled hairs caressed his larynx. He said, oh, something or other. I wasn't listening.

94

Trade You grab my hand and net aside the camouflage and walk into the murk: there's ghosts in here – they moan in whispers, grunts; the shunts and smacks of fruitless, faceless love; anonymous entanglements of slugging tongues. I slip my hands around your waist, then down into your jeans to cup your muscled arse, pull our groins together. Can you see the devil set within my eyes? I can suck the wisdom teeth from jaws, the snot from lungs; I can gnaw through sweat-built chests to lick the hearts of warriors, my fifteen minute friend who asked to dance astride some tumid tail.

First Night It was your eyes that sobered me: ice at the end of the world; the ghost of a fox staring down his hare across the tundra; a chilled air vaulting through the sweat of men as they drank, posed, assessed. That glance of shivered blue left me feral. I was in the bar and then I was in the bar with you. When you passed me lager, I spied iceflake glints on your dew claw. We danced, I think we danced; or possibly you stalked my tracks through the snows of our private ecology – new ground frozen from the polar seas.

95

The Cartographers You promise me treasure, offer your body as the map that leads to riches. I search for symbols in the folds of your skin; intercept clues on tasks to perform morsed by white eyeflags, semaphored by curls and angles at the edge of your mouth. Your hands challenge translations – they fly to sift through the world. I have to vector them, pin each digit with a symbol: here be dragon lairs, unicorn trails, wells of gold coin. My finger sketches your face's edges, the cream henge of pegs cradled within lips. "The map is not the thing", your tongue hints. But I know this – I dismiss the adipose spoils midriffing you, mere landscaping that can't disguise the designs etched in your marrow. I could finish exploring this map, but instead I let you fold me tight inside your elbows, watch you build a map of me in the pits of your eyes.

96

Exhibits She was skipping over the rope, her body a basket and her face an embrace of garbage. We laughed like the monkey laughed, his snout two model lorries axle to axle, though his laugh was silent while ours staccatoed across the boxed up exhibition space, disturbing frowncast students and mumbly aficionados. "Why can't these idiots see how funny he was?" you wondered. But then Picasso sold his bits and pieces so idiots could mount them in ice bright halls while he mounted whores in Paris. I'd have mounted you there and then but the gallery staff had our number and our hour in the company of genius was almost done.

97

Morsels When I fed you I set you three courses: oysters from Whitstable, a carnival of slime singed with lemon, edged from ashtray shells and gulped; a testicle of truffle, shaved into a soft scramble of eggs and cream and served on toast – crumbs knocked from your chin by my thumb, each morsel followed by a froth of champagne; figs stuffed with mole, the bitter chocolate squeezed from the fruit as you bit the sweet flesh. When we fed guests you set me: rings of calamari around a candle guttering its wax into my navel; frets of watercress stems woven through the down between the hooks of my hips, dripping from the rinse; a pharaoh's necklace – layers of mango intersliced with pear flesh, molded to the folds of muscle and fat and bone lacing my heart within its cavity, safe from the scavengers snuffling through our home.

98

Stood outside the office, smoking Winter spit taps on my skull: cold drops print "you don't belong out here" on the paving slabs. These shoes I borrowed pinch my toes and your coat's too thin to keep the wind at bay. Still, this morning's kiss still warms my lips. I puff smoke between the rain and respond: "you don't belong in me."

Take this Man I married you on a couch in Clarkenwell, its stuffing the curls of groin-hair that Sebastian had buzz-cut from clients. We held hands as he dabbed the needle in vodka, pressed its exquisite point through the seam of my glans. Not once did you glance from my face to watch my testicles dance to the pain. We swapped our vows in white-hard hand grasps and later we kissed, my trousers loose on my waist and a dribble of lust on my newest ring.

99

Language So when did we begin to evolve a different tongue? That first night of friction, perhaps, our growls new sounds for acts and thoughts; or weeks later, meeting in pubs, shifting lexemes to build a space between us and the crowds who admired our mutual lusts? Or did we develop our idiolect browsing shops for sofas and linens, partners in style crimes? I speak you as well as you talk me, and sometimes we'll even chat silently, conversations conveyed by touch, look. Observe how my shoulders type: 'I love you!'

Puppy Love When I heard that song on the radio I became a silver jubilee younger. You look good in my head, the shaving cuts barely crevassing your sheen of cheek. Lavender was your smell, as soft on my nose as your clothes against my hands when by chance I stroked you: I still want to peel you of them. We drifted – my lust got hidden in text books, equations, exams. You were too tidy in the end, I was scared and the song was derivative, cheap.

100

Token I buy a rose to mark our anniversary: stout, black thorns erupting through the stalk in whorls; the sawtooth leaves nestling the tight bud – sheets of peach and cream rolled in green folders. You smile, take my palms and lag them round the stem, pluck a petal and press it inside my mouth with kisses: "Love", you whisper, "is what we do with symbols, yes?" I nod and grin, and bite the lips that feed me.

101

Joy You're fun! Not as funny as the time we stood in the gay bar and watched the fat drag act fire a replica cannon which had, as his performance droned on, slowly drooped until its dulled mouth was level with the audience. "That will teach queens to douse in lacquer on a Friday night," you said. I burned your hair, once, when we made a game with candles and ropes. In those days we would play twice a day: we'd pounce each other for instant satisfaction. Nowadays, gratitude comes in tea bags and interrogations. I could have given you up a decade ago, but somehow we found a slow burn that keeps us chuckling still.

Renewal We severed the band together, took a saw to its dulled sheen and rasped atoms of metal into the air. Soap had failed to ease its passage. Later we shopped for a larger token. I would not sacrifice a single digit of yours to an oval symbol of our expanding love.

102

Respect It's strange how our fingers interweave when we cross roads, shop for carrots, newspapers, cartons of milk. Sometimes I'll fold my palm around your knuckles to keep them warm while we wait for the bus, or walk to town. Sometimes you knuckle my hand away: decisions are shared in this space, we both must agree to risk the spits of strangers, haters, sometimes.