The scribbles of red and blue neon light never quite manage to lasso

each other on the aubergine of the evening harbour’s water. So sea

registers nausea. Poignant as the bobbing cork that’s never going to

make it up to its bottle. Nor the bottle to its message. Moments like

these, they make you want to commit a little weather. But it’s not as

easy as the statement ‘I froze my buns off’ might suggest. Think pins

& needles. Any sensation that’s different from the thing it’s of. Any

sensation. Seeing stars in the city’s harbour. All at sea. Am I trying to

say that it’s attachments I can’t fathom? You ask people not to send

them, but you want so much to have one once and for all. Really have

one. Next thing you know you find yourself craving facial graffiti. A

shot of her face, say, in front of a Henry Moore sculpture in a field.

The shot arranged so the face is cast perfectly in the bronze stomach’s

absence. Where this experience exposed itself as time you didn’t have,

there in the album it will set. Or maybe you’re just continually

standing for her? Mostly in queues. Whether for buses or meat.

Standing for her in line for her ticket, say, and you’re no longer sure

where the chain of analogies is heading—or if it even is an analogy or

a chain. For example, consider the following directions, are they a

recipe for analogy or domestic disaster?: take an egg and make two

holes in its shell the size of pupils in the dark; suck all yolk and white

out; insert a length of string; inject molten beeswax; wait to cool; your

candle now awaits you. What were you thinking of in doing that? ‘I’m

not sure, I’ll have to think about it for a bit’. Maybe you’ll light the

wick. You can already see it cast your hand into a rabbit’s shadow on

the snowy white wall. Now watch the rabbit clench itself into a hole

down which it vanishes. A hole like the snow’s own pupil. Your own

vision, bolted. So things break their get-away to you. Form their own

attachments in the time you thought you’d taken. Make room for

themselves as a no-man’s land in the blink of an eye. As if desire were

arranged between your desk and your fire. For things to abscond with

your sense of them is no less a matter of taking place. Nor are these

premises any less your own deduction. It is the going things keep. In

waves and waves and waves.  

On Vacation

A photo of a horse’s wet sweaty head against a white background—

            it sure brings things back.

I too have the sweaty head, you just can't imagine. But if I said I

            wasn’t attached to it, I’d be lying.

Perhaps I was lucky to inherit the trait of sweaty head from mother?

I recall her once resting her own sweaty head on my shoulder

            while a debt collector pored over all her jewels.

Without getting a sweaty head some kids often hit my sweaty son—

            as if punches might make their own insides redundant.

Usually we’re both only half awake when I can smell his little

            sweaty head.

They haven’t seen the sweaty head beneath the skin.

The other day I had to pop my sweaty head in the office—hopefully

            they won’t ask me to show it for a while.

Having the strong sweaty head smell can create an atmosphere

            in a room like a vast helmet.

I think I will make that yoga beanie hat for my bald friend whose

            sweaty head slips in Setu Bandhasana.

My sweaty head; our sweaty head; his sweaty heads, which?

Sweaty head, relax; it’s a purchase on things.

Take a deep breath. The sweaty head is just the price of admission.

Don’t scan the side of the sweaty head that’s been resting on the

            pillow. Read the instructions first on how to scan.

Such words ring through my sweaty head when I can’t face your

            music and so turn my mind to shopping.

Then again, there was the quandary over buying a silk shirt that grew

            for you into a sweaty head.

O, would that you were the only sweaty head and I the only wig

            available to go to town on you.

Back in my kitchen by midnight I saw a sweaty head in every

            packaged thing—it was then I started trembling.

My dearest sweaty head, with all we have in common how come

            you never leak the same?

Remote Control

It’s so long since we’ve met, I’m trying to gather myself,

            but then this news unfolds on the terminal’s television:

A bio-tech company has implanted two dwarf African goats

            with spider DNA so they can lactate trademarked

Fibres of ‘Bio-Steel’; fibres ‘we’ll use to make ultra-

            light bullet-proof vests and maybe ropes for stopping

Jets when they land on air-craft carriers out at sea’. Isn’t

            nature amazing, I think, before catching hold of myself:

The effects of a bad cause are surely cause for concern.

            Then I see the fingers of one of my hands are drumming

Away at my leg as if it were air. I know I can’t count

            on myself in these situations. Losing the plot again?

Bruises are fists bleeding into sunsets of skin, mauve.

            A horse running through a wooden stable is a violin’s

Bow rubbing its strings better. The weight you bear in this is

            partly your breath weighing in the balance. Earmarked

As the neighbour’s tick-tock tick-tock that tucks you in

            to hours through the walls. Just listen to the coughing

Fit in the room. The shanty-built extension in the lung

            is the fruit of one fibre of asbestos. My health

Is all the replies my letters draw as blood for themselves.

            And this feeling in the air; it’s the words we’re putting

Into things. Isn’t any coffee cup upset to be a hand’s spasm?

            Yes, each effect sheds its cause as light, time and again,

And so we happen on it by chance as something new.

            Phew. But how often does that prickling of the skin

At something like news of spider-goats end up feeling

            Like old guilt? You can even find yourself remarked

On by reports about the tax fraud of The World’s Strongest Man.

            So it’s just as well we’re meeting up. As a shoo-in

For The World’s Strangest Man I can see you now suddenly

            giving me just the right slap to make any guilt I felt

Fall off the shelf inside me. ‘Blame and a rabbit

            are not of the same order’, you’ll tell me, tucking

Into your rabbit over lunch. Then I’ll remind you of how

            you once found the hugest slug coiled up in one

Of your ‘lucky’ pairs of trousers, and how it instantly made

            your hands feel as unhinged as the sound of your laughter

In the room. Here we’ll gladly leave a clock to count on some

            Silence. We’ll be back, better, right where we started.