UrbanLove

The voices yell over themselves, It’s a sea of madness down here. A great many people, all with opinions And wills and theories. Screaming out to whoever will listen As if the end were nigh, With a desperation, desire And hunger that I envy. Through all the requisite channels The sparks travel, The need to speak makes itself known. Yet the signals are empty; I have no hidden messages. I reach out with limp fingers. Among the babbling horde, I have nothing to say.

It is a bizarre duality; the most profound of systems made, seemingly, of chaos. And propelled by atomistic notions of something and nothing. Each with our measure of space-time, granted in secrecy and self-affirming (with Cartesian reason ready at hand) and spelling the motion of our days in the very first spasm of life. We construct all the roads and all of the bridges, designing the form of the formless to lead us, continually, to the other. We will conduct the void like private gods, to always defer to the other. To the void we look only to find channels to the islands. To the form we extend all our fragile fingers of lif

The lights have negated in the hall, Agents of time traverse my lair. The open evening is sallow and dim As my Icarus takes to the air.

All I need, she says, Are my artichokes. Need stands about awkwardly, Foreign to this silent house. Her crumpled smile, heaped onto her jowls Surfaces lazily To show little hardened beads Of yellowed milk. Her body makes an overhang, Her limbs form alternate bows and crevices. Her voice hisses and wavers like an anxious kettle. Her woollen jumper is articulated By ellipses of backbone. Wrapped in her stained fingers, A little kitten blinks and mews confusedly, Synchronised with her senility. The kitten knows more strangers than it does familiars, Settled into the camouflage of silence. The house kneels down to peer at this

What I hold, These two hands are like stone Holding this pool of water. Like sand, frail and minute, My thoughts creep from me from gaps I cannot seal. The quiet of your leaving is obtrusive. A mental hollow bows around me. Formless and dim, I search for concrete. For the object of something enduring. - one thing, only one thing. A form to make my life. One thing, one fucking thing! I will be whole, me. I will sleep. What I hold is hold’s opposite. A shadow’s ghost, a paradox, I can feel I’m defeating myself. Tangent leads me into your house, To the womb of my thought, To the darkened sanctum. There’s

The day when dust streaks the ground from the monuments; cracked and fell. The day that appeals to the darkness of hell; when grief claws across the sky. It’s another day in the times of the House. The airless House, of no mystery. The House of infallibility, that knows not of the grief in the sky. Midway between sun and stars, we are dead, in dead orbit, the dry husk of what came before it; the grief hanging from the sky. The new world thrived from its death, armed with excuses of the pedigree and the cur; hidden from realisation of what had to occur to bring grief to the sky Borne to death, without audience; similarly

As light falls intermittent on the stair, Around the smooth curl of the rail, Over the lick of the windowsill Of this old house Passing frequent with the rising sun, Tiptoeing away when night crashes home Drunk and brazen, grinning from the door Of this old house We speak so quietly, quickly, guiltily In hushed tones around the sound Of time's heels marching through the halls Of this old house Glimmering in through the cracks of the wall, Morning shines again, startling on Your fading smile, the paramour Of this old house

Teeth grinning all across her face A parade of bright new bass drums Amongst a mass of curly orange, Reaching down to grasp her face, With hints of green from the St Patrick's Day When she dyed her hair and went to school Fingernails shuffle awkwardly Against the overgrown, bulbous tips of her fingers Not admitting growth, shielding age at bay, Keeping her hands entertaining and young As they snatch and dig at a hasty sandwich, (While scritching the invisible itch bugs in her hair) The lunchbox strewn in bits over her knees The school bus skitters on, with its young, The boy beside her brushing her crumbs away

On her own set of tipping toes, Like a dancer's, poised, flexed and sure Against the bracing shards from the splintering glass To the window of our world Scraped and hardened, almost completely, She can withstand the obligations of being the phosphoresce Seen elusive and subtle, through the telescope lens, And beyond our collective consciousness Touching faintly, occasionally, onto the glass Like tapping to see what the fish will do, She makes a moment to contact, to spread spores of epiphany, Making impossible whorls in the clouds, Almost forming an eleven letter word A moment breached and scattered to the sea, Like ashes, or

Treading with a swagger, unassuming Against the ticklish abrasion, and the assault of flies, The beach is reverent and at low tide, a sweet and giggling froth Moving up to cup her feet and drop back to its chair Bouncing away off her windmilling hands, Withdrawing the premeditated launch dedicated to the eyes And the almost mournful smile that she dedicates To the avoiding sea So the flies refuge in her hair To the back, a sprinkler motion of flesh and sleeves flapping Admitting brief patches of damp and shadowed armpit, dark and adventurous to the soldiers; The flies batting the swatting hands, for admission The food plates illus