VIEW INCLUDING CABLE CARS

glowing cherry strip-eyes
highlight the neatly spaced
robotic fist-bundles slinking
across spider wire; call them
omen-paths, a syncopated
ceasefire, stream of kinetics
spindling certain towards
conclusion like a mind,
then halt in unsustainable
conditions, unlike a mind.
i keep getting the sense
something big is going to happen
but it never does. the mechanical
worm of the dlr charges past
below, singular and disjointed
car-stars, parallel, mid-flight.
i swear i’m always waiting ages
for the train. from up here
there’s always one passing.
these eyes swell with mild
and weary epiphanies. i’m
watching because who else
is at this hour and there is no
view unworthy of attendance.
apparently i’m the universe
observing itself but lately
i feel like a grub predating
other grubs, like, i can’t look
in the mirror but i can stare
at the sun. no feeling goes unfelt!
including the one which suggests
if every one of these cars
tumbled into the black dock-
water i wouldn’t even flinch.
every feeling. coffee’s done
and i turn away and that’s
when i hear the splash.

A GROWING THING

surrounded by the sloughed ribbons of me
i take the long way home and find you there,
girl.
banner in a rioting wind,
capricious little grouch
starved for something unknown
to everyone, especially you—
of course you’re angry.

watch as you eddy the tadpoles
thinking yourself some omnipotent god;
from the pond skaters, the foxgloves,
you’ll accept prayers until lunch,

scent awash in green,
raking at tree bark knees,
a growing thing.
it’s you, really, in the murky water
and the mason jar—

you’re a relic of a soil-buried epoch,
phosphene-drenched kaleidoscope of days
which yawn so deeply
they wrap round the other side,
too dizzying to hold from anywhere but a distance

when we meet i hold your face in my hands
(my face your hands)
you smile like swelling yellow spring and plead
take me with you, finished thing
and how, then, can i not piece
myself back together?
she’s wrong.
still flowering, same baby-wrists encircled
by blades of grass,
same metallic ring of bird bones:
so how can i not look at myself
(in the reflective universe behind our house,
off the silver-tinged powder of august haze)
and love her, too?

SPRING OF THE BODY

on the darkened strand, i’m still thinking
of the changes. a six-feet stampede into
charing cross, trail of smoke behind, or maybe
just breath, mingling with the iron-chill
and almost-frost. the wind hasn’t let up

for weeks. now a character
in the individual series of our lives;
the wind! we keep acknowledging amongst ourselves
for no apparent reason. maybe to prove we all
have something in common. this morning,

i had no plans, but i spent the night wrapped
in piano keys and cobbles with mainly strangers
and to my rigid home-body, this feels like progress.
i’m past the point of thinking growth an up and up
act, more forward and back, undulating along vinegar

waves—occasionally, sprawled open-mouthed along
the supple rubble of the tide, crunching on grit-
teeth—always, out to waves again. occasionally flung
by unseen current near atmosphere where below is only
a frothed suggestion of somewhere i once might have