northern – ataraxicat

The romance of doing nowt

let’s chill here for a thousand years
lounge like Hollywood vampires who yearn
light a candle to be dead romantic
and not watch a second of its slow burn

let’s not talk or try to learn anything
about anything, but be still as a stare
go nowhere, see how long we can lay like this
matted and tangled together like hair

let’s stretch out our limbs ’til we touch the wall
finger the paintings until they all fall
and imprint on our skin, then move the colours
or we could stay still, and not move at all

but if one day we do want to go, get up slow
drift together until the sun explodes, then
float like poplar seeds, the summer snow –
that might actually be nice, you know

Alex watched a large brown fly circle the sticky perimeter of his glass, and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. The heat was stifling, and his focus had long since shifted from his parents’ conversation to the distant, silver spatter of the municipal fountain on the far side of the smouldering plaza. He imagined himself beneath its aquamarine deluge – feeling the cool water sweep into his armpits, and slick down, across the backs of his knees. He fancied he could smell the scent of chlorine and pennies from where he was sat, but the fantasy soon fell apart in the heat of the airless day.

He turned his attention back to his parents. His father was three minutes into one of his recapitulated monologues on how the game had all changed since the 1970s, and how Alex’s generation couldn’t possibly hope to recreate such a prodigious era. From the bits and pieces that he had tuned into, Alex knew that his father had already covered the problems with digital refereeing, and obscene player pay packets – “It just beggars belief, son.” – and would soon circle back to good old-fashioned love of the game.

Breakneck

old-time-1416949

It was brief –
and nothing really happened –
but if I could do it again

I’d get it right this time
wouldn’t fight this time
think you might this time

and you’d want me all over
again.

Nightmare

Vocalion 4306 B Label Nightmare, by Artie Shaw and his Orchestra.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W59FzOwYIs)

The sound is smoky and
close. The trudge comes:
a march through honey.

I can feel my rusty heart
align itself to the heavy
thunderous pulse, as

the scorched pitch of the
trumpets wheeze out their
melodies with dry throats.

From nowhere, a narrow
squealing clarinet pours up
and down the stave, like oil.

Your kind of jazz beats me
over the head and shoves its
fingers into my open throat.

Relic

I am found,
just by chance,
in the clammy, whitewashed hours
of morning: laid
upon the earth.

My sunken heart
is rolled around
behind the quick-closed door of death:
a silent bell in
a baby’s rattle.

Soon after, I am
lifted into a box,
which is stuffed like a fat goose
with offered elegies,
and then sealed.

Sodden and limp,
the smell of me gone off,
the lamplights of my eyes put out:
all my body,
dun and done.

Language

th21-630-istock-language-dictionary-learn-book-630w

My mouth is a treasure chest
a pit of language

my tongue stirs this cauldron

sounds swell
and drop out of my mouth

like heavy stones

each a swollen fruit
of differing flavours

too rich to swallow

puce
plump
pearl

colossal marbles clacking
against my palette

I savour all

sunk in the noise of it
and too drunk on sound

to climb out

Quilt

Lay down
on my quilt

wrap yourself in
the tale it tells

feel nothing
in feeling everything

stretch out your hands
feel the weight
of yourself and
thread your veins
into the patchwork
bound beneath you

stitch yourself in

Closure

For just a minute
let me pretend
you aren’t there
and that the sounds
I can hear
are the sounds
of trees
softly brushing
against the sky
of rain
softly sousing
the earth
and not your
beautiful hands
softly closing
the door
between us.

Plums

plum-1690494_1280

When we were kids we’d sometimes
sneak out into the plum orchard
and steal our parents’ wine to drink.

In the dead of night, like jailbirds hidden
beneath the trees, we picked at branches
and planned for foreign days ahead.

It’s funny now to think we never seemed to
eat a plum in time, being always so
bitter, or sick and wet with ferment and rot.

Each season brought a purple harvest;
the sweetly cankerous smell
hanging low above the slack, damp ground.

Even now I sometimes remember
us, and how the whispers of
anxious leaves would rustle up the dawn.

Though we don’t know each other now –
and isn’t that always the way? –
I remember when we weighed our futures

and how for us, the dark, rank fruits
burst their vernix jackets, and spilled
violet ink beneath a chasmal sky.

SaveSave

Ophelia

john everett millais (Ophelia by John Everette Millais)

Limply sails Ophelia, whose pretty mouth
imbibed the river’s liquor,
now she wears her rue with a difference;
the flowers venture slowly south –

long past her hung-wide jaw –
coiled about her seeping flesh;
her tongue’s gone bad and
she’ll sing no more.

Tag: northern