for sale or rent

 

for sale or rent  

 

buy me   I’m a story for sale   to view

a happiness distilled for the future

pure in the bricks and the mortar

porous the laughter passing through 

                                                             

vacant possession    previous owners evicted

for lack of means   of meaning   restricted   bereft

yet each stripped me bare before they left

carefully ripping out the veiny wires

that fed my soul   stole the arterial pipes

that emptied my sins and desires

abandoned the garden   lapsarian and diluvian

peeled the paint from each room

each wall and ceiling each window and door

down to the bone leaving me raw and unhomed

as if they could erase undo reverse

the narrative the discourse the course the cause

staunch and stop the bleeding   the source

 

buy me   I’m for sale    I’m a promise   I can heal

wrap me in the bandage of belief    put me in your pocket

to retrieve    to steal   like a lover   like a thief

in the alleyways of the heart

keep me from harm   keep me warm   turn up the heat

plug me into your socket   turn me on   turn me on

 

or just rent me   stay   stay awhile   time can be bought

on a lease if you please time is short it’s on the house

look around   breathe   breathe the air   all is fair

you’ll be gone   you’ll have moved on   up or

down the stairs   a flight or two    to grieve

turn me off before you close the door   lock it

  

douse the light   when you leave

naked

 

naked 

 

Imago is riding up the escalator

in a shopping centre   naked again

a hand shielding his penis

as if this lessens the totality of his nakedness

as if this is the seeming centre of his nakedness

no one really notices   this after all is his dream

the dream itself is where imago undresses himself

where he is temporarily stripped of interpretation

where he is really naked   exposed to himself

as a self   an animal in its own skin   no hat to wear

nothing up his sleeve   just him   a me   the fear

both subject and meaning   a tree losing its leaves

is still just a tree in a forest of trees

Cupid's bow

 

Cupid’s bow 

 

the day we never meet

everything carried on as usual

 

water swirling down a sink

a sun setting to rise again

 

in the space between there were stars crossing

doing their best   the competition fierce

 

and you looked up and I looked up

facing the same sky   framing

 

constellations already named and mapped

indifferent for millennia   just the light travelling

 

and the cosmic dust falling and burning

and all those wishes   all those fishes

 

in the sea swimming   swimming

to futures   to you and to me

 

oceans apart   the flight of thought   blowing a kiss

arrows to the heart   skimming the air     falling short

spoor

 

spoor  

 

then there’s the walk

the pulling on of the boots

the tightening and tying of the laces

the tracks they’ll leave in forest

the pattern of the tread

the length of the stride

the measure of the gait

traces in the soil   in the snow

of himself and other animals

somewhere to be    somewhere to go

…

then the pulling off of the boots

of the trick of perspective in the forest

like something approaching absence

and all that’s left

is the dirt on his hands

the sweat in his armpits

the stains upon the carpet

the snow melting to pool on the floor

in the distance from his chair to the door 

extra

extra   

Imago in the background  

sitting in a life at a table busy with

 

untouched food    the dregs of wine

a man awaiting direction  

 

cue laughter   take 5   cut

part of the crowd   always

 

crossing a road on the way to somewhere

walking out of the frame

 

man getting off the bus

to join a queue as man with wife

 

the camera panning away   always

shifting the mise en scène

 

in the end credits

old man alone on bench

 

and that one time he looked straight into the lens

his lips moving   not even making the final edit

 

equity denied

I was alive when Kennedy died 

a thin disguise

Manor Crescent (aged 12)  

 

Imago remembers sitting in the window

he’ll be there a long time   just watching

 

the discovery of other people   people he knows

suddenly disconnected having lives outside of himself

 

himself as observer   this is a new trick this invisibility

the radio is playing    he is sitting on the sill

 

knees drawn up under his chin   he’s

perched on this surprising sense of his being in the world

 

how he is in it and how he is not the centre and how his

seeing it makes it real but is unnecessary in making it so

 

the music is invisible too and only seems addressed to him personally

and is therefore perfect for the illusion of the imaginary connection

 

how the world shrinks down to the size of you   just to fit you in 

just to leave you on a shelf   wrapped in the thin disguise of yourself 

cold war

 

cold war (Berlin)  

 

he has told the story often enough

around the age of five   Christmas time

he was losing faith in Father Christmas

snow fell that Christmas Eve on RAF Gatow    

his dad was elsewhere eavesdropping on Soviet plans

for troop movements over the Yuletide celebrations

and his mum took him out onto the balcony to see Santa in his sleigh

being slowly driven around the streets of the camp

leading to the urgent declaration

“I do believe   I do”

his mum told him this story   her truth of it

made it a memory   over time

music was added   carols   the sleigh stopping

just yards from their flat and Santa waving   waving

to him    and the flakes of snow

grow fatter and thicker falling and settling

and covering his tracks   and he did believe  

 

later   years slow then the rachets slipping   days to decades

when they talked his sister and he and he said Dad …

his sister stunned at the idea that his mum their mum his dad their dad

and it was her mum and her dad and the remembering and experiencing

and remembering the experiences and experiencing the remembering

were all topsy-turvy    a turvy-topsy truth of who was good and who was bad

a mummery of the time and place   the shaken and the stirred   the decayed

 

and the Russians moved their soldiers here and they moved them there

(but mum’s the word)  

carry on

carry on teaching (excerpt)

 

(1^st and 2^nd years not beyond   and not

an age preference   just defence

by thirteen you’re a different animal

another self kicks in   kicks against)

 

he knew who he could touch

experience   a skill   a radar of recognition

the blips on his screen   one of which was you

he would have picked you out

called you out to the front to his desk

to question your sums   your figures

whilst the others were to carry on

 

there’s no trauma   forgotten by playtime

just the memory to parse   a boy’s grammar

not a moment   nothing written on the skin of time

his hand resting lightly unmoving on your arse

your own tense muscular reflexes feeding

the electric current of his impulse   pulsing  

 

and at home alone in his study marking

his wife upstairs in bed alone in front of the TV

the children doing their homework in their rooms

the Polaroids in his diary   the days blank with wanting

in one there’s Tommy Atkins across his knees

smiling into the camera   you’re all smiling   posed

the teacher beaming his hand poised for the slap

you press the button   snap   and you’re all caught 

in a bit of fun for his uncle/brother/friend in Australia

the picture in your hand develops slowly    remains

unresolved   your story   what this says about you

then and now

 

in the bathroom he washes his hands   washes his hands

before going into his kids   the kiss goodnight

tucking them in safe and tight   don’t let the bedbugs bite

his hand resting lightly on the softness of a cheek

the warmth of the breath on his fingers

undeliverance

undeliverance  

 

the cart stumbling over the rutted track

losing a wheel   the world keeps on turning

the letter not arriving   distant gunshots 

 

and no difference

 

except maybe the tiniest of tears

in the fabric of time and space

the inaudible hiss of air escaping

the world unmeasurably smaller

 

an eternal unnoticed silence

pushed to the side of the plate 

on the near death of Dostoevsky

Polaroid

 

Polaroid  

 

it’s underexposed   dark

taken on the run

but while I’m alone

you’re still there   a snatch of starlight

the flash in the window behind me

and somewhere in the space-time continuum

    the curve   the move

a planet that devolves itself to a moon

bedsit 2 continued

 

it starts again with the search for adjectives

for example seedy sordid squalid shitty

which collocate with a number of nouns

for example the room with its subterranean

daylight gloom   even the cold felt filthy

the mattress with its atlas of stains

of borders crossed into another body

the shared toilet on the half landing

the discomfiting comfort of the warm cracked seat

an intimacy lost regained pinching the skin

the familiar stink in your nostrils

the one shared working shower 3 floors down

down the queasy creaking stairs past the greasy

flaking walls an uneasy cakewalk in a haunting

house to the spider of matted pubic hair in the plughole

the shared DNA    the shared host   the guests

the landlord and the other mostly unseen unseen to

bickering and barking ghosts   lost souls

and the meanings touch and diverge

dirty unpleasant lacking moral hygenie

and in the in-between where the assonance appeals

the surge of synonyms soiled spoiled  spilled

and shabby   the sibilance of sleepless nights

the hissing vicissitudes of verbs   the ups and down

in the active and the passive   appals

then the drunken indifference of the weekend

pissed down the sink

the bravado the dissemblance the doublethink

the essence    of a room a home a life   grows dark

 

Imago feeds another 10p in the meter   the light flicks on

sharp as a knife   the room reflected becomes a theatre

and in some stark present-future   the forms unchanged

there’s another lonely actor alone upon the stage

 

so far from Helsingør in 13 Denmark Terrace  

“Berwick Court” etched on the fanlight above the door

 

in a name a remembrance and a performance

     

and the rest … “the rest is silence”