FILIGREE

For what gainsayers say will stand as testament

To the profit of further gainsaying, regarded

Carting ingenuous poetics

To the tip of neutral talent

Mercy in penmanship

Not in fellowship

I now have a position on everything

Within your innings, heart lift

Ended

I wait for some desire

To pass from now

To the event

OUTCLASSED

Why’d you do it with nothing to round the fact

As you would say, “Drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes!”

As a matron of the Temperance Movement, a participant

Not really participating, but enjoying the quotations of vice

For their sake, as a teacher eating her chalk to spew lessons

Or my racket, beyond every girl’s Rubicon: outclassed

THE GIG IS UP

The gig is up

for your troubles

and fake jewellery

that you sweated for once

under the moon in your bed

JULIAN SHOWED

I had now given the Greeks to the grave
game of spurring. Ajax had played his
jacks for tonight.

Their equations lost to a stark-eye lull.
A riptide anxiety broke the exchange
of warm beer, recall and focal laughs.

Retreat: the enclosure of a mystic.
That wooden-fixed anchoress that
never fixed her hair for love, never
toiled the earth for a showing, but
pitied herself to recollect her Trinity.

Fallen men became breakfast, stuck to
a ruined bed that was her square for
an uncomfortable bliss that was sure
and the vehicle for our heaven.

EARLY MORNING

Sleep and fawn the memory

You sold for a vertical drip

They call a cure

Your recovery

You’re laughing

At the lighting

GENTLY DEPRESSED

Gently depressed

I tow to her bind

As alabaster soils

THESE BIRDS

The birds flutter between brick and tress

I’m all palms for their disinterest –

I know the birds, I don’t know the Name

I bend the brick dangerously in influence

But they’re there and I’m here, so nearby

The dappled beams they register not

I’m so close to blindness and enough

Of wanting to seek, reach, handle

Their security, they all call

But not for me

But I never stand

To address

Their borders stronger than mine