I
e-mail to the deep breaths department

five goodberries unsampled

the river brackish,

        or perhaps actual bracken
(slides around us)

like koi, not good eating
first taste of real life exclusion

                in small gloves
                couldn’t read the sandlewood fan codex 
        lift both hands to fax home
politically incorrect across the fen

                sexist, but gorgeous

                        – your Elvis-face carpet
it’s old technology

so if they won’t re-make it

        in different materials

        we forget the prompts,

a telephone is mostly

                        more talking 
I realise this is no way

to get the product division to notice me

hours spent gathering

        then fusing household objects:

bed-computer,

        mop-pan,

                a letterbox that is also a stapler

                        & a middle-child 
when the time came to vote

        we bolted for the door
sent round the hat

for a smear campaign

targeting ferns

                – their floppy politics
swing a hammer into a fence post

                – mark out your patch, you always have



II
nice to see you

even in the cleaning aisle

        light a cigarette from the little pops

                                of window panes 
you can lift up a piece of the road

to compressed dust; a packet of ovalteenies

                later your cordial spills on the sky
a cloud sticks to your shoulder

        which I follow between hills

where the shrubs have rusted 
truck is floating carousel 
                jonquil = petrol
full mouths change word shapes

        rain keeps you in

                keeps you hung over
someone takes a highlighter to the field

        & you imagine the aerial view
but looking at the thumbnails

        of the same trees making different shadows
(my school of photography

is get in the frame & get going) 
        water rushes up to the waist
        lino-cut branches against the sky

different trees pool in the same shadow



III
his need to kick open trees

until the applause

makes me want to stay in bed 
but a package of light arrived on my lap

                wrapped in a vine leaf 
this is your

mediterranean plate 
        old pretzel taken with a

                spout of liquor
kiss ‘head of a giant youth’

        in split white marble
set up shop in atrium

be bad at goodbyes

change your personality

        to suite your basin face
during a party the most action is in the smallest room
locked outside

the interior of the flat

(each separate component)
is exquisitely remembered

                                like all lost objects 
later, thin coffee upon ecstatic entry

shaving tiles with a foam brick
you love that baby so you shorten its name

this is a well-known process

                but it does not work for everyone
nostalgia for your time as a node & earlier

living as a small, volcanic archipelago

how you covered the trackmarks of an about-turn
factory job involved a regular

        provision of sideways glances 
bruises are such easy metaphors

        think of something else
what goes on at the tap during warm weather

2 pet guinea pigs, both named Philip
I did not know about this ‘shoe incident’

at the Institute of Hair and Aesthetics



IV
hot lunch eaten standing

wheeling your reservations up the manmade hill
the athletic djs sport cool tracksuits

olympic fly-over & are the royals in vogue now? 
pour yourself a heart-starter

assume there’ll be English

                but feel bad about it 
busy & lightly iced in the manuscript room

woman seeking bubbler

                crackle-glaze, impasto
minor scuffle on the digest

a granule of earnest disco

        that summer you became “political”

                        spent more time in the shade



away from the archives

        gutter-bird: “I like larking up kicks”
        muster a scoupon of traction for your

silly, inflatable readymades
thought-image collects in a puddle

(under the sign of)

        your sneakers which make me giggle
books hard to part with

(paint with?)

        haptic tautology 
“when I think about you I quote myself”

        but nobody chooses a patriarchal tattoo