Generation

Suddenly we saw
In the glimpses between things
A series of openings
Leading to nothing

There is no honour anymore
Nor anyone to do the honour to

Saying
“I hope you find yourself alone
Through a whole generation
And lose all hope.”

There is no honour anymore
Nor anyone to do the honour to

Suddenly we were not the people we'd been
Or I had thought we'd been
The well and badly loved / muddling along

I hope you've stopped taking your mother's advice.

Look Again

It was not your open face I failed to love
If it was not and then the rapture that
I failed to hold or compensate
What was the slipping point upon which
We tipped and repeated old mistakes again

If it is not your broken features now that
Keep attention at your feet or elsewhere
Always shifting attention never sleep
If it is not the failure of a love
never learned by heart to play then what

Look again Look and in that looking
Find your heart's opposite a stranger's love
A stranger love still secret secrete upon the heart
That's heavy then light without warning
An emphasis enboldened before early exit

No loss

House

In the open-mouthed pause
Of a new beginning, the held breath
Of hope. So many rooms to fill.

There, in silence, we learnt at last
To be lonely. And alive.
You stretched your mind and soul
Beyond previous estimations
And your heartbeat shooting.
Long nights of interruption
and your body swarmed with ache.
Possibility, connection, invention.
Goodbye squeezed in, boxed-up caution.
You made a home for a time out of time.
Made days out of futures already begun
And now being undone.
You made, made, made out of love, light, need
and the long dark night that held you.

Fragment

And when the hour came

The man I loved did not remember

Hurried whispers caught in time

A horse after its own tail

Timeless love

A late night journey through a foreign country

All language past

Maybe we will be together forever

Or else pass each other in the street

After the years

If and when anything finally happens
I'll find it's like the call I made to you
When you were all nonsense

I couldn't stand

Great stuff you say and I believe it
Because I want to, need to, feel it

I am nothing except the thing we were
Loss in the morning
2am and legs askew again

This is confusing

After the years of longing I know
The longest journey is yet to come

All night I'll wait for you and then some

Return to Sender

We knew they would come back some day,
turning up in the morning post,
all the things we gave away.

The day turned plain after a time and
we no longer noticed when night came
or the weather changed
or we ran out of things to say.

So many things remain unsaid.

We climbed into bed,
hunting for language like dreams,
or dreams that might speak,
and in the silence made love,
like a ladder through the clouds,
love in the spaces between us,
searching for heaven or somewhere
dark to hide which is like night
or love or somewhere we've never been.

I forgive you all the hours you were away
and promise to start again.

My Father's Breath

I hold my hand over the candle flame a few seconds and then it is too hot. Earlier today, on an underground train, the tears pouring down my face. All of the memories, always at work but often silent, how they can surface, ah, without warning, and turn a solid day into dust, into dust, turn me into us. A holiday in Paris aborted following the disintegration of my personality. Ah. These may not be the right words but they are the way it feels expressed exactly. Love. All of its manifestations. Memory. All of our hallucinations. Are we just ghosts of a history ah we've been playing out all these years? I remember watching A Question of Sport ah sat on my father's chest - I am five maybe six years old - watching Ian Botham but focusing on breath big man / little boy - same blood, same breath going in going out the breath of my father's chest and me tiny and helpless on the rising island of him Loving it loving it like nothing I've known since the peaceful hopeful body truth of curled up on my father's chest breathing in and out in unison and school tomorrow perhaps and a lifetime ahead no knowledge of pain or modernity - no heartbreak / no search engine and implacable love unparalleled big man / little boy no sense of what's coming of what will come I have remained that child (in many ways) Have remained and today when everything feels so sharp and bright and like I've been asleep for so many years and here in this body is the memory of a time when nothing was named and things just happened and simply breathing was enough. We are just a history of ghosts a bedtime story repeated ad nauseum my love for a man who no longer exists my heart a search engine returning no results.