In a portable wilderness, we met | We had mountains, larches, snow in winter (and it was bitter cold) | There were reindeer, sharks | there was Mahler and great sex | and churches with the spirit in them | Of course, there were pinches of paradise, but these weren’t | too piquant | the naturalists with their toucans and marmosets | weren’t particularly | ostentatious | we still had time | for the railway stations and the long farewells | Then we fell out, and the wilderness | grew civilised | It was just that the meaning altered | really | all the other components were the same | but of course | the meaning was everything | You slept with the mountains | under your pillow | the new megacities creaked and groaned | spewed their cogs and bytes | but I was nostalgic | I kept yearning for the summers with the bike rides in the country | thistledowns | floating through the warm evening air | and the Giacometti shadows | and Jarvis with his fine | Jamaican lilt | The reindeer were toys and the sharks were weighed and their skulls displayed | and people wrote poems about them | the final | insult | We learned new skills | became curators of vanished peoples | I shifted product | you paid the bills | The wind blew the calendar’s pages | the years went 90, 91… 93 | What we saw, we don’t see | What we grew, we no longer sow | And if we didn’t have to keep talking, talking, talking | do you know, I think | there’d be no more to say
To crush the | skeleton of sleep inside | my body
A glamorous parasite | glitters and won’t | let me go | Moonlight fans / across the bay and / the trees are all / in blossom•
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from the series fleeting pixel (series of 1,000 poems, 2012–2016)
(this poem, August 2015)
hypergram 