if like this, like this

hands in your hair

your hair your hair of olive wind
if a language flowing outward

if filaments of memory if even the trees
if everything here warm slow
wild and slow-wild if how you come to life

in my hands your hair flows out
if all morning so flowing out descending bright birds
inside us calling long ago this moment keens

your contours your hachures your rising and falling
your planes your whirling your little Sufi gasp

if like this, like this

heartbeat and breath and hollow ground
and midnight morning and all day and dusk that arcs between
blue spirit flames, radio crackles

and if along our hillsides
like this, like this, we start to collapse

in the fading red shadow of this our body

then this, this is the spray of night

[duende, red-black, in murmurs]

.

that's one dead uncle

the uncle has died the top hat

the high hat the cartwheeling

avuncular aunt in her/his sleeps

the last lap before Runcorn and Rainhill

he has gotten/taken off at Edge Hill his

hat that flies afar afield I swear

he was alive when last his face

his bomber sheep convertible

slowmotion dunes crowd out

his face a sort of function a sort

of etcetera a sorting and clipped

masonic scouse that elides the top

hat the vat the fatcurled cat the scat

and scant the cant the pant eek the rant

of garage sexpower the whole

damn shower nothing but a chair

lies he there the brother wyght

eek know his fernal troth and plight

a sort of half-love of which were made

this shade in Lancs half-glade and clade

the chair still warm impres't the rest

to rest to rest enough the high hat

on which he sat long and did rat

all things earthly 'neath his beastly bat

.

brown water at the weir

if only you had seen this
with its light that sprays the water
like a childhood machine-gun
and where we sit
when we are done with the races
and just wait in the mud
with our oh-he's-doing-it-again  faces
by that pool
and how he still wants to jump
up that wall, all lichened
and mossy are they the same no
all over his knees
for ten minutes we on the bridge
lost him in the shade downstream
as he tried so hard to win
there in the race

this ancient and aching shade

so much love in this: a new animal leaps
from of all of it

.

hitting one's head in the schoolyard

a tropopause to all things a place
where emotion stops
temperature is regulated
the wind suddenly ceases
in a long blue band of nothing
and forever we fall
into softness

oh I am such a zebra with this

.

slow-motion by a canalside at midnight

beyond normality or Rock and Roll
this music of night and ejection
these ghosts that hover and splash
hover and splash
almost we can reach out and touch them
their green marsh-gas, their haunting
but no they are gone and will not come again
down there their drowned faces
vapid as the unborn
no, they whisper
we will not come

.

the omen-bird
bounces the canal at noon—
strange koans ripple
.

the petrichor of what is lost

sun and rain that hiss equally as they stoop
their equivalent rainbows on the grit, washing
into the heather scoops, and thereafter

through the smoke of this he walks away
—rain and sunlight that carve new
ruts to the past in his face

breathe in, and think
of how the mind-camera will pan and pan back

then be still as a moonlight hare
in the scent of yourself
.

infinite commas discovered near Stratford etc

is this a long lake, he asks
no I say, it is called a canal
and so we proceed

into a similar level of unknowing
almost Martian and from early space-science
as though a man with purple scissors
ruled the world

and all that dwelleth etc. look now
how such precision is required
to enable one plant to operate
along the canal bank, faced with
so much contusion—what
does contusion mean in this world
of meagre plant-life, clinging
as the boats laugh along

yes, what does plant life
what does canal
what does head wound
we did all that already

now just this: only an ape
would ever use a comma in poetry,

,

.

these collisions by the river by the wood

it's like getting mirrors involved in sex
suddenly
the Sun bursts over your new shiny oh for
the love of
nothing you know or will ever know
beyond that
moment when two tiny things suddenly
occupy
the rest of your lives and your children

your now dancing far fairy children
alone in the wooded wiles by the fires

looking aloft into twigs and smoke

all bets are off with mushrooms now
around here
.

This may be my favourite by the almighty Ramones

Sirius

are you too serious?
am I too serious?
has the world just fallen out of a tree
and landed
in a brown paper bag
attached at the mouth
to a panic attack?

.

there's no reason
for that cow that fell from the sky
it was just cow time

.

a while in the mist

all your fear is gone
your once-broken heart is nestled
there in the warm grass
near the waterfall
that cascades in your memory/body

your children of the past
and those to come they
are here too for this is the warm place

wait a while in the mist
that spreads cool as tall trees
over the mosses
wait here, lie

as a shade in shade
for all the world is fearful
but not here
where there is no time

where all is secret
in the walled garden
with its pulse
its butterflies that alight upon
your fingers
which are roots

back to the cascade
of beginning
stretch here, breathe in
the sacred the broken
air beyond air
light fills everything

there is nothing to think

it is time: at last
and at first
it is time

.