For S
The city lights always invade the night:
I just want to fuck you in pure moonlight
or beneath a furious storm,
but the city forever prevents me.
I dream of our escape, but first
we must learn how to be caged
together.
Expensive mistakes made to wait
for the cancelled screening of lost futures.
Never mind,
just watch the trailer;
sentence brought forward for bad behaviour,
particular particulates chosen
for both air & water.
Which method of suicide would you like?
No need for haste,
we have a decade to waste first,
& anyway
the decision was already taken
from us.
We just failed to notice.
****
Desperate times & desperate measures,
insanity as reflex against insanity;
a litany
of clichés & new prescriptions
for yet more medication.
Don't question
the efficacy, or the necessity
or the cause,
just take what you're given & be grateful
someone is pretending to listen.
This is how our problems are solved now…
****
Pull out the roots & the flower wont grow,
just like weeds won't;
to consider
weeds to be as beautiful as flowers,
is to consider the power of words
to change the world.
To hold contradictory thoughts,
is to survive
& thrive, like weeds become flowers.
To speak of flowers is to disappear
into the ideas of others but this
is consistent with the insistence that
nothing can be
new until it's too late:
words no longer matter on the page.
Now only screens change the world
& dreams are as useless as a pearl necklace,
draped around the neck.
****
Those of us for whom the drugs don't work
are told to focus
on the small things
& ignore the world dying
all around us.
So:
crouch down to a round, purple flower,
notice the green-tipped wing of a butterfly
upon it.
Reach for the phone as reflex
to take a photograph,
& watch as
the butterfly
flickers away…
Here in the light
that forever fights the darkness,
we exist. Incomplete
objects;
nothing more than sentience yet
always there’s a surplus;
effervescence of neurological excess,
&
the contingent biological flesh
deceived
by the thoughts that haunt us
&
always finding ways to evade our gaze.
We call this thing our Self.
We can never own it, never know it,
by demanding
or calmly asking
but we can find it,
sometimes,
in other eyes.
For S
When the world reclaims you,
& I am left alone again
in my bedroom,
I will take the bloodstains
from the bedsheets & turn them
into roses…
Later, as I sleep surrounded
by the threads that fell from your skin,
I will dream
that each thread is a feather
of white,
impossible
iridescence
& a breeze,
heavy with heat
will breathe
from the window,
as one
by one,
your feathers
fill my lungs…
*Dreaming of You – Cigarettes After Sex
Words for Ghosts 