I wrote a poem about a fucking river (for Tom Chivers)

(my new poem)

woman on the pebbles will kill or be killed

asphalt river hear ye

though I have sat where torrents recall no slush

I am drawn by your ceramic explosions

your waves snapped underneath and smoothed over

with clothes laid in respect.

there are beads of patience in this fell river

not where ants carry ants, but where between bites

enamelled flesh can be tapped

to purge freezing oils

where the cuff lavender is brought alive to claw to earth

where we are buried to stay cool and grow white hands

to reach and tuber

and come to fruition and bask without a song.

so be drowned or drown over exposed leaves shaking

restless lover, who’s keeping their feet wet

carved sweat

& toes resplendent knife upwards through satin

to coil imprints around the upright stones

& mark an embrace before evaporation

I am repeating on you.

this body is a factory,

this room, a weaker shade of tea.

molluscs have been sun dried and clasp to the billowing wood

margined by choke

unchinked and unshafted

flecking tremulous

& I had rather root without

than soot in synthetic barbered grass

and smiles of parcelled glue

when there are births of teased and tortured glimpse

to be tweezed or cuticled from the corpse of morn.

I will not dive unless I know the pebbles are not rasped

nor fill a cup with oil

or clothe a gasp in brick

or seek respite in lists and chat

or segway to a revolution, while

my love has gone amongst the flids

to fashion me a yearning -

he was half buried

in tarmac when we met

to make himself chaste.

with his lute fricking he charms scimitars!

he is a silver fish in the backwash!

& how am I to explain

this beetle on my breast?

go easy on the glory hole

cracked forest!

its arc is in tatters

boats full of stones

are held and sunk by knotted necks, green swans

nappies round catkins

the soft rabbit’s fingers of the weeping willow shorn at the wrist

shredded by pikies

spike dog shit three times thus.

this creased and sweated life we live beneath pages, in surfaces

we air condition panic and

would rather waste ink than miss a chance to bite.

(this volume is dirty)

skirts can only rustle now

peel winter off in cracks,

& wrinkling hours, jellied, impoverished

spoilt milk and spilt sleep.

better the life in the bubble of privilege, between pages,

basking fingers in slipped through sun

in the crease in the wall from the half cut window.

better the cack femme manages fate

than banal judges grid us to oblivion.