Day on its side, leaking out | We’d just watched Zigeunerweisen | now the clay pots were very still | on the shelves | in autumn everything | has a certain stillness | don’t you think | you feel the poise | in living? | Branched | rapidly away | my boy, Jan, on the Shinkansen to Kyoto | bright zip and fire brought to ancient capitals | a little flash and chutzpah! | innocence breathing in a temple garden | with camellias and maples | writhing pines | snapped by Canon to a dreamy | bokeh effect | dew-points to washed-out memories of stars | diamond dreams | And Cal | painting her room blue and blue and blue | by text I tell her | “blue” is one of my favourite words | and she agrees, likes the rhymes | like “glue” and “zoo” and “hullabaloo” | I love that last one! | As the cancer advances | language dies off | in the coma stage | they lie and gradually | deteriorate | the details begin to go their own ways | back to the place they first formed | out of nothing | turn from Special Foreground Radiators | to General Background Integrators | their lion moments, their sun moments | over | And inside the vases | the shadows, the dead insects | the air | balanced on a calm Gestalt | brakes breaking | while we | delayed into vision | do our similar thing | we brake breaking | and brake breaking | and brake breaking…
A fading franchise | declining brand | Reading a book on Romanticism | super-lush roses on the cover | and I kind of feel | I’ve become so bookish, too | it’s like I’m wearing a dust jacket | more text than speech | more print than breath | more style than substance… | The web expands in graceful lines | a silver of Airstreams and modish living | archaic hipsters out in Bisbee | or for the night at XOYO in Shoreditch | sepia leaks in and a | superior morality | Stretch my legs | get away from the rush and the roar | the nominal relativity | the ego and sublimity | they say there is this other world | where you can use the word | “just” | without feeling ashamed | as in | “I was just taking my time, we’d gone | back to basics” | but I don’t know if that’s true | Assembling my team | putting together my arguments | jumping in the sack with a new | inamorata | with a deflated heart | totting up the total | keeping up the appearance | building up | to the grand | climax••
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from the series fp2 (on-going sequence of poems, commenced 2016)
(this poem, September 2017)
hypergram 