Kleptomania

All those tiny, rotating fins
like a single machinery singing to itself
of loss: the thought of your fifty watches
ticking in their case, brother, bright with obsession;
like ideas competing in a forum
that’s forgotten why it was convened.

They might be spawning new time zones:
now the last is off your wrist
the watches leak power and run down
to an abrupt, unnegotiable halt
one at a time, each a different time —
until only the plumpest ticks.

A Wyf is a Goddes Yfte

Having lived alone for so long you decided
you wanted a woman. Not one your age but younger
and beautiful, you said — preferably freckly.
When you looked at her, you wanted the glass

of a glorious mirror which might conspire with you.
And yet you hadn’t quite understood how
you slurred your way through the least exacting sentence;
how the slur moved ahead of the words,

how it arrived several seconds ahead
of the intention you had to speak, like a blunt prow.
By now the slur was audible to everyone
but the slurrer, brother, and the collapsed roué’s charm

you assumed was there had been left
way back with your looks in a place where fog
crawled along the river, trying to catch up and overtake
the slow-as-a-Thames-barge, womanless slur.

“… I Thought it was a Fucking Earthquake”

Said the milkman, whose mug of scalding tea slopped
into his lap as you drove your car
straight up the float’s rear end, from which a bridal train of milk
flowed to the kerb-edge of the circle that
was the grassy island outside our mother’s house
and might lead you back, by a few more degrees,
to where she waved you goodbye. In half an hour
your bosses would be glancing at their watches, ten miles away.
But the pattern was scratched in the brain, and you
were already back indoors perfecting
the mirror-mime of a tremble.

Black Rain

The words in the mouth of the bullied boy
were such mysterious melting butter they disturbed
the dogmas of the bullish, which meant
because half the school took him for boy-Christ his flail-wounds
would regularly get to open again:

you alone, of course, took it on yourself
to pick him up and ditch him bodily
through the expanse of the toilets’ frosted glass
and have him land on a bed of fresh thorns — bent double —
as if the affront he offered were only to you.

The blood smell brought everyone leaping
and yelping towards the sickening sound.
All I recall’s the sound — and the conviction
you were at the source of it — the boom
of his body mass as it passed through the window
and drew us out like children over the abyss

of sudden ferocity, like something older
jumping in our cells — which had us hover there awhile —

the cloakroom coats inflated by the blast.
And then the black rain of frosted slivers

settling everywhere. And then a sort
of stillness. And then the possible nuclear winter.