Early rising

It’s early, and you are

probably still asleep.

Warm and safe and

soft

in your bed.

I could come

and join you.

Creep in and

slide home beside you.

Swathe you with my body,

the covers hot and semi-

stifling on top of us, and kiss

you lightly. Wet your lips

and stroke your sides and

feel you come awake

all over,

underneath me.

I could slide

down the bed and

open up to your taste and

get you to stir and rise

like the winter sun

just gleaming in

through the curtains.

But it is very early. And you

were probably up late, and you

are likely still in bed.

Soft and safe and

warm,

asleep.

Distraction

How am I meant to concentrate

when I know what you’re like

when I know what you like

when I know what

makes you

shiver.

When I know what you

sound like and

the noise you make

in the back of your throat

when I touch you

just like this

just

there.

Poetry workshop

Had a go at the Guardian's poetry workshop for the first time, which was an interesting exercise: Jo Bell asking us to consider what will survive of us in 'Digging deep: personal archaeologies'. I'm not sure I'd say I'm 100% satisfied with the result but reasonably happy at least; there's a line or two I'm quite pleased with.

And hey, I got a finished poem out of it! 'For once then, something' :)

Remnants

My personal footprint in history is likely

to be light.

All my most loved things have

been someone else’s in their time. I’m

just their latest keeper.

And will anyone be able to sense the thin

strata of self I leave behind on

second hand books and vintage hand-me

-downs? Will someone else see the beauty in these

poor man’s object d’art, this ephemera that will mean

nothing to those not me?

Perhaps I will, somehow, deposit

a few molecules of my joy onto

these copies of Durrell. Mayhap a

hollow echo of wonder will ring

from the cracked pages of Holub, of

Beckett, Wyndham or Oliver.

Surely the pleasure I took from it

will add to the patina of this bowl filled with

pebbles, turned quarter profile

to the light, sun motes of dust

dancing on its rim?

Someone, I am sure, will desire these sunglasses;

round and delicate, from the era of flappers, of

waved hair and waved morals. Someone will,

like me, question what’s been seen

through that dark glass and maybe their

careful fingers on time-cracked, tortoiseshell

plastic will feel the ghosts of mine

under their tips.

But my individual relics will be few. I will

leave no fossils in my wake. I will be

the pigment in the slate, the faint

shadow taint of blurring

in the outline of the landscape, signalling

some barrow of the long dead.

It will be my absence that tells you I was there.

A way of saying what you mean....

...without saying it

The mask's slipped.
   Slid down and
                            wont fit anymore.

The foundations shake.

Let the cat
                   out of the bag
and
                   into the box, but

          things are decaying.

The poison seeps through and
kills you,
                      Pet.

Till all you're left with
                                     is
                                        bones
and moth-eaten fur that's
never going
                   to keep nobody warm.

Equilibrium

We are at that
                     awkward stage

betwixt and between.

Expanding out of love
                                  but
not yet contracted into hate.

Our possibilities haven't
collapsed and
taken us with them yet.

The past remnants of
happiness and
the future relics of
                           bitter words
are both exerting their influence;

colliding with us in the dark.

And, oh,
        which one

will knock us
from this careful,
                       breath-held
                                   

   balance?

Old poetry

...very old poems. do forgive...

Not taken

You didn't mind science.
Preferred music and film,
books and art,
but had a certain appreciation for the
stricter disciplines. Especially
chemistry
and the botanical arts. We never spoke about
physics that I remember.

In the quantum theory of the multiverse
there must be worlds
where the ice was never pushed back.
Where the dinosaurs won.
Where the wheel
was never invented and there was
no car for you to climb into that morning
and you never died.

There must be worlds
where you never existed,
and no group ever gathered
there in our living room,
to drink whisky in shocked silence
and look up with tired, blank eyes
as someone says, almost pleadingly,
"No, really. It is a joke, right?"

A man dies
on the way to his grandmother's funeral.
Just the sort of dark jest
you would probably have enjoyed.
And maybe,
somewhere,
there is a world
where you're laughing.