One...

From everywhere else to a first memory

I come from, and sing of, green carpet
up the side of the bath and false memory
of the feel of that. I come from a bed I slept on for years

as a mattress on the floor, from the painting of a tree
in the corner above me, from a wonderment for the thrill
of the wind and its movement through leaves. There is more to me

than this, you understand, but impediment is rife. I come from
house parties and sitting on my dad’s tapping feet
while he played sessions in pub after pub and our own front room.

None of these is first because some will always be wrong
I am germolene on my first spot, hands-and-knees-horses,
poems and poems and back-tickled songs sung in the dark.

I am in a room in a dream I have no memory of otherwise
and so come upon the idea that this must be the first: fear
and a resolution I am told it is impossible to engineer.

Three...

Dissection

The eyes are prominent as would be expected
in an animal as wary was the rabbit. Note the position
of the eyes on the head and how this compares
with the position of yours. The movable upper and lower eyelids
are provided with eyelashes. You will also see the edge of a third,
the nictitating membrane, which is whitish and fairly thick.
Draw it across the eye with the forceps.

The white of the eye is not visible until the upper lid is raised
or the lower lid drawn down. The size of the iris
and the pupil will depend upon the extent to which the iris
is contracted. The pupil is a window through the iris.
You will be able to note the presence of glands
that are pink due to the presence of blood vessels.
Take the upper eyelid in the forceps and roll it outwards.

Four...

Holding hands

How it becomes an easy regularity
is a mystery to me, but it seems strange,
now, not to be attached from one side.

How is it that something so easily abandoned
becomes something so readily missed
when it is a possibility again with you around?

All I can think is that my hand temperature
is normalised now only with yours in it.
Without it I am colder than I thought,
even with gloves on.

Five...

Colour co-ordination

It is not about the colour, but the naming of it.
We stand around gesticulating with arms spread wide

for brights, our posture closed in for cosy reds.
One girl stands looking up with one arm out and one by her side

and we all take this to be blue. But our room is only blue and green
by circumstance of naming: it is not about the colour

until we read out the shades we find: Pepper Grass,
Green Trance, Treasure Isle, Cozumel.

I can barely keep my eyes open.

Quiet revelation

It’s the sort of tired that makes everything almost,
and nothing for sure. Even air has negative connotations
on a tickly throat, and sleep is no guarantee for tomorrow.

There is nothing I can think of that is entirely without
the influence—except perhaps what you said to me today
and how it changes everything, knowing that.

Very near the end, now.

Ad for a partner

You want somebody who can land
just like that, with the air shooed
to the curls in their hair.

You want somebody who can stop dead
in your arms with their weight gone
hovering somewhere.

You want someone who proves
a point in the flair
of detail.

I'd like to say you want someone
like me; but it's never as simple as that.

No, really... a backlog perhaps but I haven't forgotten!

Thoughts on kitchens

You are the breeze that shoos garlic skins
to underneath the fridge. I watch them drift
urgently to their resting place, dream lazily
of a future when they are finally discovered again,
brittle and crackled. It will be many years
from now, I think, as this house is home and home
means not cleaning under permanent appliances.

Your hands are pungent and you’re dressed
in a pinny I used to wear for Home Economics at school.

Time treats us well, I think, in the end.
Even if we end up papery and brittle like your favourite Grandma’s hands.

Do you know the difference?

Do you want to sail the stars, or the universe?

I am told the difference is political
but don’t know which way round I’d be if
it was me. Perhaps I would know the meaning of serene.

It must be the brink, an existence like that,
the Earth hovering and the blackness
elsewhere. My own paranoia

would be tenfold: at every creak and whistle
the threat of nothingness and implosion
from the very idea of it. And free from gravity?

The pull of my body would not exist,
the tugging, the nagging—gone.
Only functions would be left. Basic need.

In light of all of this it would seem irrelevant,
perhaps, to choose between the stars
and the universe. Do you sail for the sights,

or for the inbetween? Choose your side,
they’d say. Astronaut,
or Cosmonaut?

Unabashed false optimism

It is the sort of weather that carries voices

It comes as a surprise, to hear it like that,
and it changes everything. It changes the fundamental
smell of things; it matters. It is weather that is longed for
from behind windows, that is perfect for bike rides
and relies on a cool breeze to keep it realistic.

You are not in it, but it needs a winter coat.
You only know all this because of how the blackbirds sing
compared to how they used to; and from the frozen puddles
you walk past at night holding hands against the bite.
It is the sort of weather that forces optimism you are not used to.

Just a small observation

Hello morning, you say, every day

And to be sociable with the concept, it takes tea
which you describe as delicious

even though it goes straight through you
like eggs, which you conversely avoid.

Got some dreams back!

Waking from a dream of air-trombone impressions

it is the wall of Wispas (59p each, 7 for a pound)
that stays with me. And it is early, so early, and I am waking
of my own accord and turning alarms off in advance
of their ringing. I am not as clean as I would have liked,

but my dreams don’t take this into account, only my height
and how the smaller objects are easier except
they’re out of reach, and it is only the big concepts
my short arms have any hope of carrying home.

Distracted, but all to the good.

Unexpected shift of outlook

Distracted, full of unprecedented smiling,
I am trying to conceal my cheek movements

with a turn of the head. I don’t know what any of this means,
only that it is a difference I had not accounted for

and the sun is so much warmer
on days when the smiling is like this.

A form of time travel in resurrection

The notebook tells a story of me over again

It was here that I found it, already half full
with the potential. If I couldn't have
locked the door I wouldn't have
read it but of course, it knew that,
and lay in the only cubicle with an easy bolt.

Just an unconventional form of time-travel,
of course, but it's strange
that it happened on the day they happened to say
on the radio that going forwards in time
is uncontroversial. It enjoys controversy, takes the trouble
to transport me to all the places
I used to know and used to go, and

here, with my pants round my ankles,
there's no need for avoiding the rules of time
by camping on a star
with some of the pull of the universe at my feet
or in my ears or on my inadequate
metabolism. Here, it
and I commune in timelessness and out of sync
with one another, and I can leave it,
when the time comes
to be found by myself again: just another poet
with the same urgent need to be locked in,
and the same urgent need for two hands.

I don't even remember writing the first version of this...

I arrange myself artfully

as if the sheets of my bed were not cold
and hard with first frost. I
frame my poseable limbs
as if the brush of my hair falling here
is natural; as if the balletic point of my toe
is effortless; as if,
as if, I assume that he won't notice
and am just preparing for sleep.
I find myself unable to expect what really happens:
the gentle tipping of time and the spread
of a thigh relaxed to twice its size.

Rediscovered, sent somewhere.

Optimist

A man across the road is moving in.
I note his possessions as signs of love:
the loose white shirt he's wearing and the pink
one he unfolds; the DVDs he moves
from shelf to box; the full bottle of gin;
the undressed bed that wears its ageing stains
like cow skin; how he holds his stomach in
and stands a while to finger familiar curtains
open and closed. He isn't moving in.
A woman stands in front of him and moves
her mouth like she is talking but the man
sees only lips and shapes he used to love.
There is no understanding on his face.
The room's half empty and a different place.

From a small point of view.

The Curious

It is around us, deep and dark, the potential
and we are such unseen that it is hard to know
how far it is possible to go. We are incapable,

in the grip of muscle that stretches to others’ will.
Sometimes it is too much scented space, too far
to travel; temptation for our inability to influence

but put us elsewhere and we are lost entirely.
We change colour, but this is not distraction
only function and circumstance. We are made up

of your in-between, and you do not see us.
We have no voice. We are palpable time
because we count it, document and expect for change.

We do not know what makes us look beyond
but huddle together in this deep and dark
changing colours, changing shape, fitting in.

Waiting for a trick of the light, or perhaps
of time, to loose us.

As requested.

The naming of the clowns

Are the eggs blown? It is always the first question,
whispered over these scentless hollow eggs; diagrams
of faces in red and white. Next word is usually creepy,
but it is all a grinning comfort for me.

You picture a hallway, with shelves and little stands.
It is not that. It is padded drawers and curating. It is cataloguing
and checking. Sometimes they need to add an extra tear,
take away an outline of black. I can help them with that.

I do not keep their wigs, or stick on tufts of hair.
Their outfits do not matter much to me, though most
like spots. We keep a note of employability elsewhere.
It is just the faces here, fixed and personalised. Named.

There must be easier ways of doing it, yes. But I like the feel
of the eggshell under chalk-white paint; the ritual
delicate hollowing. Nothing says ‘face’ better than an egg
for me. I always paint the eyes in last.

I have hardly left the house today!

What’s in space.

Everything we want to be: beauty
and timelessness, the unknown. We are,
and our first words still echo
in intelligible clicks and whistle. Space dust

and our own junk. Violets; yes, even their delicacy
exists in space in as much as anything does
on this rock of ours. Everything we have ever been:
small and significant, timed and irrelevant, a blip.

A need for justification and delight; the first time
your mother called your name.
It is all there, waiting for someone to make sense of it
and its uncanny similarity to a face when you squint,
and angle the picture just so.

weekend habits! terrible, muriel!

Roboctopus

The peculiar motions of an octopus tentacle
cannot be copied, but are mapped in diagram form
on your wall. You dream of the ability to squeeze
through holes smaller than your own head;
change your limbs, boneless and elongated, caress
eight things at once, or one thing intimately.
When I ask why, you cannot answer, except to lose
your definition as human, a faraway look in your eyes.

Sooooo tired, again. But why?

Forced perspective

I am all skewiff with plans and unplans.
It is longed-for, this feeling of small, and we create it
by making our world ever bigger, the space
to explore ever more expansive. Your expectations

of me are verging on the ridiculous, but still
I try to fill them in with experience and detail.
I even sleep under a king size duvet; type poems
on a screen big enough for five; wait for the sun on my face

before I can wake properly, small and aware
of how enormous the weight of the dawning is.