My knees do not carry

We are come again
To love's desire.
Stricken by you,
Paingiver,
My knees do not carry.

Mythweaving
We speak to each other
In thinvoiced
Ghostly
Soundbytes.

Be my ally.
Speak to me
Clearsounding.
Make your voice as fat and full
As a plum.

I am swollen with blame
And you have the salve:
Pour it.

I want to suffer.
In myself I am
Aware of this.

But still
Let there exist for us not one single
Further sorrow.
Let us be delivered
Undamaged
From every care.

- - After Sappho

Bridge

Across the chasm is a bridge

Where find ourselves

For just a while.

We wobble up and down, testing the links.

There is not much ground to stand on, here.

The sun moves. And we sit

Side by side

On the same level

Surprised

To find each other.

Your side and mine are a continent apart

And there is a lot more chasm than bridge.

We part ways.

Bridge, honour to you,

Frail marvel.

Kindness hopefully built into your slats

Quietly swinging.

May I be safe

Inner, unfolding

Landscape. Wide open Heart. May

I be safe this night.

Space Hopper

When I was young I had certain ideas about the penis.

What it should look like. A heavy slung thing like an elephant’s trunk

Which would inflate very slowly, and silently

Dark, ruddy colours

Slightly monstrous, off-putting.

Your cock is like a work of art.

No strange ruddiness here, smooth pale and rosy pink-purples

Like a princess’ rain-jacket.

At first quiet and modest

And then later a stately dance

A waltz, 

one-two-three, one-two-three,

Sweeping asymmetrically up your thigh

Loosely stuck there

back between the legs, wobbling

Springing like a space-hopper

You are 
Just walking to the curtains

And it’s a 50's dance hall down there.

It twitches

Knock-knock

Against my pelvis.
Not demanding, nor persistent

Your expression serene

I smile at your eyes

And let each of you

Take different parts of me

To the floor.

What fish are you?

What fish are you?

Are you this autumn-yellow tree?

Or the bank of dark clouds,

across the car park?

I’m blindfolded. I grope and pin at you

This, a red shoelace,

This, a rosette, pink heart

This, an image of a studio flat

Nobody to tell me I missed the spot, yet

Or hit, stick.

The heart

the hungry bugger

Becomes a hot mess, preoccupied,

Fed one embrace

A quiet moment sharing grapes

And the dark, beautiful city

                the people flickering through the streets

Oh to stop the slipperiness.

I am the timer, ticking on the kitchen counter.

Are you rising

in the oven?

Ode to my young lover

You are a young man, and you love me.

I love you, at nearly 30.

You lay on me brash and casual

Loving me gaily, freely, joyfully. Playful,

With nearly a decade of potential between us.

Like a charge, a time-bomb.

Built into the very fibres of you

Soft, pliable.

I look at myself, carved and etched.

Nearly a decade

In stark relief.

When you hold me,

And I see how fragile it is

That our worlds meet.

It’s as if everything is already lost

My arms the orb of an oracle

You are not looking for someone to die with.

Who am I, to even make you think of your own death?

I thought I knew most ways to love.

Bedsheets

That hot summer

We worked hard, sweating:

Darker patches

on dark sheets.

When you are away,

I clean them solemnly;

Scent them, and the pillows

Where we breathed together, hard.

Smoothing each surface, neatly.

If we are one – which,

As much as anything,

We surely are –

This fabric is our skin,

Vessel, shell, interface

With a Universe, playground,

Quarry

Where we know how to play

And toil.

The man who taught me to love again

The man who taught me to love again

Looks at me and his face

Is as clear and open as a lily.

I think weakly:

I am glad I have this body

Any, body.

Transformed, I do not recognise myself.

I do not need to recognise myself.

I am released.

Tree

Asked what tree you would be,

You chose your native Norway Pine

Sometimes called Scots Pine

Always deep, blue-green over darkness.

But my love, to me you would be the Sycamore

And you would line my long walk home.

Spring

Springtime,

And there are flowers on the trees.

White, and pink.

My love,

In my darker times

I am contracted

To almost nothing.

To almost nothing.

And still, you can raise me

Bright, awakening

With purpose and essence, again

And not finished; no.

If I stretch up high enough

I can almost see

You standing by me

And many other things too

I look down.

‘Enough’. You tug me to the light.

Your long, human torso is proud with it.

Enoughness

Throwing and being thrown

You never loved me back.
At least, not the way I loved you.
You were in control of it. I was not.

I learned to love the teaching
As much as you. More.
I almost learned to not mind
that I don’t know you, can’t know you.

But I have almost known you.
When I throw you, when you throw me, there is a moment
Of complete focus, of harmony
Of balance.
You taught me that.
It is an amazing feeling - One we train our human bodies
and minds for.

You showed me:
When we practice, our bodies are not our own.
They are heaven, earth, thunder, mountain.
With the sweat
We are water, fire, wind.

There is magic in it, you know.
The heart crashes into the mat.
It is the heart’s pleasure.
It rises to fall again.

- for my martial arts teacher.

Radioactive Girl is surprised by love

Radioactive Girl is surprised by love

What must you have thought?
When I closed my eyes, it was
To protect myself.

It must have been the impact of you
For my heart suddenly reached critical mass
And I felt like I was going go nuclear, immediately
My coal-darkness shattering –
The blooming burst of it, the ravaged atoms going haywire,
Leaving radioactive waste all over your bed

Repercussions lasting for ages

And the saddest kind memory, which is darkness, into light,

Into darkness.

Timid skulk out in the morning
Without even a puff of gusto left
And you smile faintly as I go, 

with glowing flecks in your hair.

Did you even notice?
I closed my eyes tight but could still see you
And my insides turned to green glass.

Three Poems

Cleanliness

I would like to wipe myself clean,
Like the way one cleans the screen
Of a mobile phone.

Scrub
With paper
Until the greasy fingerprints
Polish the glass.

Passion

I would like to unwind in your wet heat
The way this dry leaf
Unlocks itself
In my teamug.

I would like to be Big Brother
And have a panoramic view
Of your movements in your bed.

Longing

There are great distances of silence, inside.
I would like to float along them, and come back to this body
Only to sing myself sadnesses
All in hollow vowels.

Oh, Aah, Aaw.
I don’t understand my own song.
The vowels are not only those found in English.

I would have that world

I would like if there was a verb for the action of holding something, like science, or love,
in the mouth.


Sometimes I find science in my love-mouth.
I can press it between my tongue and my palate
like sweet leaf.

I have read of the million universes.
Find them hidden in the perpetual soup of non-existence
Tripping under your heels,
Dripping off your breakfast spoon.
But, I couldn't care less.

I think of all the minuscule details
Of how I might love you elsewhere than here.
I think of worlds where you want me.
When a concept is so big
It becomes boring.

When I can't help myself, I think of a world
Where you just took my hand.
I would have that world.
I pick it out
the way the eyes finds a single firefly
on a dark beach.

The goldsmith's daughter

- After Rumi


The goldsmith's daughter, dearly loved,
Did not love herself.

But one man failed to love her
And she, marveling and relieved, loved him.

She went to his door
And knocked. He was brewing tea
And she was jealous that it might burn his lips
Where she wished to sear herself.

He said,
"Who's at the door?"
She said,
"I can no longer see my face, please look for yourself"

He said,
"My door is no mirror, and it has no peep-hole"
She had seen enough of mirrors, wanted no more of peep-holes.
She said,
"I am a girl"

He said
"what do you want?"
She said
"To be whole"

"What do you bring?"
"My loss"

"What have you lost?"
"This that you see."

He said,
"Such claims require a witness"
She said
"This longing, these tears"

He said
"Credible witnesses"
She pointed out
"I am still crying"

He laughed
"Who puts the tears in your eyes?"
She said
"The same who draws them out again"

How to clean the eyes? Fill them up.
How to cure the self? Send me back to you.

Of you, my Kung Fu Master

Glasses off,
you would look as you were:
A farmer’s grown son
A strong child of China.

You would say ‘Your eyes, they must look like this’
But mine are not so dark, you know.

You rode a girl’s upright bike.
I would for you rise at 6
And you would be angled against the bath-house wall
Pulling your tight morning calf-muscles
Waiting coldly for my coming.

You always wore the same sweater that winter.
We would slip on the icy tiles, and eat hot pork baps before class.

Spring, you asked me why I was so happy
And it was because I had dreamed that we ran,
Flying, really, the dust of comets on our heels.
Somewhere beside me, you asked if I was ok,
And I laughingly swelled in delight at my legs,
And at you, my fearless leader,
At the sunlight slanting, sparkling, on us.
In life, you never spoke to me that way.

Summer, I would practice in the cool nights
Alone on the badminton court, but for the bats.
Eyes closed, I would occupy you,
Hear the rustle of your coat
Finding your movements in the arcs of my hands.

Rehearsing your coldness
I would miss you less.

Your skin isn't smooth

Your skin isn’t smooth. It’s white sky and peppered birds.
The trees in it hung with black gloves and red talismans,
Your carried luck, your sharper guide.

We are not lovers
But you have drawn on my face with your fingers these past mornings, so
I try to press yours with my darker autumn colours:

I am not your paperpaste wings, and you are not my sparrowhawk
(Although
seated next to me
you say (you look down) you might fly, and I,
all eyes and no breath
am also thinking you might)

We run the fields separately
And return to each other bashful:
Hoping it will be enough.

I wrote you a haiku:

I hold your wrists, locked,
Unlocked, us both ensnared
By their faultless red.

I won’t show you. We might be lovers, one day.
For now I will content myself
Plucking at the stars,
Putting them in your already-glowing hands.