In the evening i don’t recognise the face
of your house, or the way you part
the mousy curtains with a finger
like hair.

Notice how you splay the room,
arm an X like coats
of arms bone’s grate tip, meet pooled,
a globe.

In the Bush the stars
placed tape-white, a type of decoration
found in children’s rooms.
Under a plate-glass moon
the wind embalms the night.

Notice how you mouth a breath in the thud-light,
a cloud like a scuff of skin between joints.
Above the heath ducks beat neck-long across the moon.

The action of dust
on a blessed books’ cuff.

Something about
those plays on myth,
the art of making refuge
a cage.

Circling
the pillared city states
we trade in the pulp of turned-down
paper

nesting non-lettered in code,

As the sun shows,
so the Yew smokes
medieval

the sieve strains the dregs.
In time the truthful sink gives
[a] way to dryness

The outlook is skeletal
take another bet from the bag

Slipping into language you express
a train //
the space between missing
a place and
what is missing

-

Walking the edge
and how it looks from the top

when navigating the wet-ledged drop
of the earth, wonder

is this the curve-ball your parents
mentioned? Does it catch well?

-

When we met in a mall of umbrellas
what was the name of that Koan
concerning fingers?​

The high blue streets are fuller tonight
than ever in my life

The way Forest Fields appears
in the fog,

the talk of traveller’s dogs through
space,

lorries tangled
in a lace of snagged-leaf smog

-

How do you make a sound with /of one hand?
and the same question -

a stadium, Europe, autumn-rust,
smelling food through
still dusty air -

of the two hands, which
sound do you trust?

Fish. Dead on the bank, where the river’s bend
curves like a hand
and you left me faster than the sky.

They have us
to thank

for this
un/fortunate state

in which our
height in space
is fate

and where
an I
is not an I-am-waiting-for-you-and-the-ferry-is-strange-on-the-steaming-water I,
but rather, rocky and moss-drenched in a park, by a still
green pool.

Playing some music with Hogan at his place on the borders. This shot was taken a couple of months before I set off for Australia and the trip was a time for reflection, conversation and music. Later on that night we drove my old van up to a remote pub on the ridgeway to play some pool. Even though it had been a year since our last visit the guys at the bar remembered us, particularly my friend Jake’s open mic performance (a crazy modern rewrite of an old folk tune).

This is your city

A subtle distillation of wisdom

Standing there by the stripped sea

We are announced one by one
  we feel like Miss World contestants.

Between the clack-clack of heels on the catwalk
another sound

It’s like Janet Leigh in Psycho

It whispers “expensive” on the breeze.

Soon your friend will leave the path of the Samanas

They think we wander about drinking champagne

But even Spielberg outgrew his Peter Pan syndrome.