Listening to the cuckoo
looking up into trees
I step on a snail.
Spaghetti cuts through the pan’s boiling skin
I wind up time
and count backwards to dinner…
Smeared grease on kerbstone. Cobble fists hard into shoe soles. He avoids eye contact with pigeons pecking at fag buts and spit. Diesel engine taxi rumble. Walking home he glances back to the office. Second floor above the shops. Soot stained brick cliffs. Spider web windows. A microwave and cupboards for staff.
He smells coffee and mixed grill from the café. Open late. Conversation at tables with friends he doesn’t have. A woman with her husband tight at the hip steer their way around him. Articulated into the café. Laughing. Kissing.
He pushes open the muggy heat. Into Kev’s for kebabs for one. Pink meat revolutions. Skewered grease. Drip.
Scaffolding scrambling over shop fronts. I walk beneath them. Rattled by bass bin stampede. Toy car drag strip. Caps on backwards. Brake light wheel spin. Look at me look at me through tinted windows.
I glance back at the office above the clothing shop. Nefertiti. Plastic models in summer dresses. Stars for being good girls. Windows reflect, shouting off shop fronts. Voices from the café. Diesel engine taxi mumble. A distant car horn.
Seat outside the pub with cool beer. Smell perfume as a perfect woman walks past. Short sleeves short skirt kebab in hand. A smile. Warm skin dreaming. Evening heat. She looks up at a seagull hanging on a thread of air. I take a sip and the world expands.
Spring borrowed from winter
daffodils hang their heads
crumple with a colour of cut apple
held by the gas fire
I dream of you coming home
to candle flames
and red wine
smell moonflowers on your neck
warmed by your carotid
I feel your pulse against my kiss
and rest my hand
in the nest of your back.
Tattoo buzz white noise scribbled onto puretone whistling – harmonics, reminiscent of turbines and trains in tunnels. The bouquet is ultrasound clang; pebbles tied into the continuum of the sea – roaring to form a cone that projects from my ear. The unceasing froth is nailed into my auditory nerve – subsonics polished into silver strike.
Numb.
