Seville

SEVILLE

In golden hues, and byzantine blue, vidriado tiles
greet the lost and weary traveller in Seville.
Sunlight momentarily emolliates the new year’s winter

in a halo of light behind the orange trees.

In Tiempos pasados the bitterness softens
When Old Acquaintance should be forgot

And that’s what you’re doing: forgetting; as though the frigid air could make forgot

Make slick, like the world-weary cobblestones and tiles

To slip, unnoticed and unoppressed by the traffic of profane tourists, skeletons softened

By the drudgery of their cumbersome packs and manuals of facts: Seville

Cathedrals and Visigoths and orange trees

Enthralled by hues of pink in the halo of winter.

Your own passport is stamped with promise yet the winter

Cools within your entrails, not forgot

And the rotten muck of decomposing fruit beneath the Valencia trees

And the throbbing white of a hotel room encased in tiles;

Is your Seville

Dull in loneliness; the piquancy of sleeping pills softens

Until the new morning in a new year, breaks and softens

You sit in a bar eating deep fried phallic totems against the winter

One day to recover your social media felicity: in Seville!

You won’t let the world think you’ve forgot

Those Andalusian villas with their pink and apricot tiles

A myriad of selfie smiles digitally remastered against the dark silhouettes of trees

You post a golden canvas that fades towards darkness and fairy lights in the trees

Signal to the World-wide web that the tumult softens

Inside your head, the fragments might tessellate perfectly like tiles

Or crack you open in great ice-sheathes like winter

You have not forgot.

Even amidst the beauty of Seville

You are the lost and heartsick traveller, ambling through Seville

Sick to death of Rossini’s frantic overture curling through the trees

In days to come, you will have forgot

How byzantine blues and the verisimilitude of orange hues and dirt might have softened

Had only you given yourself to the history and winter

Depart now from winter in Seville; whose tiles crack under trees laden with bitter hopefulness; where memories soften but cannot be forgot

Untitled

For your life to be ending like this no lights on
The trolley screeches in the hall and you don’t care

That cordial is all that’s left now

I thought you’d scream blue murder for one last wine

Instead I rub your feet as you look through me

Past me

A void of forget me not blue

Where you don’t know my name


A good death is humble, fast, noble
Which of these is yours as they take your shit away

In a pan; 
dress your bruises – you sleep on the floor now

The slightest descent of all, from a distance of mere inches

Yet it takes forever
The world seems suspended above you
Photographs of people out of reach

I feed you mangoes on a spoon

Sunshine dripping down your chin

Sunshine 
in your smile – so loving

Fumbling back to conversation so infrequently now:

How's my job, how's my car, how's my
identity - wrapped in fog, in the incessant screaming
Of a tv in the common room

Life dwindles down to this:
Mango pulp pulsing in a cerebral blender 
Where you've got no idea that everything we've been through
Goes beyond the last 20 seconds
Like the goldfish in the waiting room
It's all so incongruous
The will it takes to find you 
You still don’t remember me
Yet I’ll love you forever

Belonging

The neuronal idyll,

The metamorphosis,

Comes solely from reaching

to the outstretched branches

Of the candy floss clouds

of like-minded people

Perfectly just like you

Ode to the spoon

Behold the spoon

Whose limbless form is tribute to our own –

Its usefulness variant upon its steely brain

Or silver, if it pleases you

To have something so useless as to lie in a box

Of crushed velveteen

No sustenance in its wide lips

Except at Christmas.

No, behold the humble spoon

Proud, erect as a solider

Whose duty is to vitalise  

From once a wee child

To the grizzled infirm

With soup and gourds and gruel

Erstwhile guarding the tributaries forming

On one’s chin.

The spoon is a true chameleon:

The poor man’s castanets

Retired to lay side by side,

Knowledge of the other’s round form

Intimate and blunt

It will gouge your heart out with the bluntest blade

And serve it up so beguiling

For someone else to feed on

Shoulda

The mandate that "I should"

was not the golden ticket:

Instead the switch you've flicked, it
pulses electric 
paroxysm

vibing down my neurons
Circumventing safety valves
melting down the wire

into bat shit fucking crazy

The mandate that "I should"

was not the golden ticket:

Instead you've flicked

My neurons

into bat shit fucking crazy