Innisfail

Our ring gear is shot through and those plans of mountains and waterfalls, of unfurled roads like bowling alley balls, pelting into the distance - they are sitting in broken pieces, waiting to be scrapped. We are in the north, somewhere large enough for a garage but too small for parts. The town’s industry is banana picking, and the banana pickers rise at 6am to go to the banana fields. By 9pm there is nothing but quiet dogs and wet dust air, and on the main road a drive-through store with a laminate sign the size of a lorry: SUPER CHEAP LIQUOR.

We buy rum in a brown bag, walk to the banana fields which are silent and night time. There is a dog, but he is too concerned with things which concern dogs in hot climates; his sweat, the insects, fireflies with wings like drunken bats. There are stars, so we place bets on them; play bluff, exchange constellations, look serious into the long night. We drink. The rum is like running through a field of striped candy canes, hand in hand with a ruby haired Egyptian. We drink it lying in the earth under the great wallowing bananas.

I raise him; three sisters and a Great Bear.
He, confident; the Milky Way.

By the time we get home, the van is wheezing gasoline tears into the sky of our spoils.

blue tramp-piss shoes

Dribbles of tramp expelled Tennents Special are sketching maps of Malaysia
across the Clerk Sreet pavements
waiting for blue heels to stumble
tsunamis and earthquakes through the cigarette butt cities
on the way home
from the pub

45 minutes from now those blue shoes will be tangled in sheets
that should not have tramp urine ground into their pillows
and it will cross my mind to tell you, seconds before you take
the shoes
in the tangles
with the legs
and I forget

47 minutes from now these thoughts of blue shoes etiquette
will be replaced by a peripheral vision
of television static
and the citizens of Malaysia will suffer as
civilizations are drenched in new pavement expulsions.

Meanwhile the stained blue shoes kick and scream and twitch
around anatomies,
unconcerned.

mistranslating rimbaud

Mistranslating Rimbaud
on the Northern Line
in the back alleyway cobbled death streets of Pere Lachaise
along the swaying stuttering riverbanks
wine sodden
and terrible

sir, when it is cold in the desert
when, in the dripping abattoirs,
the sometime angels are with you…
nature will deflower
all arbitrary and huge acts
the precious, cornered, and delicious

This, with too much sunshine for November,
clutching coffee cups which make a mockery of scale

This an impulse which can be taken home
to the grey building, Lemsip streets
to line the herbal tea, double duvet winter
and make it through till spring

swiss

I learned to drink beer
up scaffolding
with red geraniums
(the realisation of 2 childhood dreams)

It was hot enough to make lifting crates seem like a sweated and romantic notion
like calloused hands or checked shirts
of mice and men

Later, I went to the park, rocked back and forth on the swings
trying to match stereo lyrics and birdsong

It got dark

The beer and the sunshine had soaked through my clothes
leaving me cold and damp with the residue
lonely for red geraniums
and lyrics about buses

When I got back the room was peering out over the nightline mountains,
a room with bed linen whiter than ironed shirts at 7am.
I slept softly on thoughts about swings and long months of summer

Dreaming a bed of fallen red petals
like nosebleeds in snowfall

dream

Paris.
We dine on mussels braised in garlic heads
and horses tears,
conduct cobbled sociology projects
with a picture of a monkey printed in biro
on a lined notebook

- the terrorists have attacked Syria with fireballs
and a rushing wind-plague;
the old and infirm are falling -

In the restaurant, a waiter reads Russian tragedies
and loops famine repeats from the evening news

The horses sob.

porkies strip bar, 4am

George tells us about playing Scrabble with his mother
as a salt-and-vinegar eyed blonde
offers surround sound views
of knees, ankles, breasts

They have a navy bound book to record their scores, although if they get less than 800 they don’t bother.

Crotches waft by, naked, hairless, innocuous as collarbones.
Whisky is spilt.

George would like to buy me a lapdance
and watch.

Tangle knuckleless fingers through his fly,
fumbling wet thoughts of
triple word scores.