Into an Anglo-Saxon sleep | or along a mirror’s edge | what was lost | or left behind | in the search for love | Here is the place they pile the shoes | here, the books | for paramours and moneymen | students and burning | a tornado demon | the ogre of | disinterest | a rumble of dust mites | in rustling herds | grazing on nocturnal carpets | in cheap motels | on the shore of a dream | scooped up in a nap | a place you remember | with nets and racks | outrigger canoes | tumbled locks | magnesium lakes
You return, but the way back doesn’t bring you | back | You sleep in Deutschland | with a near stranger by your side | You half wake and wonder | how you have drifted into your teens, again | a net curtain’s August breath | of air | stirs in the corner of your brow | Cornish skies | a chapel’s haul | of mounted sermons, peaks of emptiness | puzzles | ad infinitum | books you fell into | as into strange cave systems | half-finished books | half-asleep truths | Her flight was not for three hours yet | she flitted round the room | like a trapped butterfly | stared down from the window | over the half- | finished city | the perfect location | for her half-finished life | And here is the place they pile the books | the books for tearing and for losing | settings for superb equations | lions’ odes | recipes for decadent cakes and other | items of confectionary | On the mantel | books you read long ago | idle and moulder | mothballed revolutions | and their words are like trapped butterflies | sewing the constricted space | of lifeless rooms | with flakes of sapphire and pollen | no cleaner for days | Beneath your sexy head | there is a faint, impenetrable vibration | the engine of unknown connections | working in the stillness | of the winter evening | the sound of settled loneliness | in a merchant seaman | slumped reading in his bunk | on board a Danish container ship | carrying consignments of cars | through tropical waters | the sea | totally useless with no re-invention
from the series fleeting pixel (series of 1,000 poems, 2012–2016)
(this poem, December 2014)
hypergram 