Slip Stream

By | 1 September 2013

I

The ship is lost, a minor nothing
Tossed on tempest harassed seas________________BOOM!
BOOM!______BOOM!______thunder brays.

The master of creation sprays the deck with spume and wrack;
Answers with a galeforce screech
And lightning blaze astreak a brindled sky.

Our wretched hearts echo
boom-boom-boom
Blind against the windblown night,

A stone’s throw away
From land that waits and glowers
fool’s gold fool’s gold

The ma
Of sound
Fills cracks in the bowl with gold.

Jewels shiver the ground:
Tormaline, malachite and lapis lazuli,
Sparks upon Mata Hari’s

Immensely prolific breast, lungs, chest.
The heft of her voice rings bells clarion cornelian carillon

glimmer and echo

II

How is it that the bells don’t show
Where the heart lies heart lies
Where mica chips and flakes.

The bells ring slagheap
The bells ring brassbucket
wellwater

Through the grain, the grass blows, the stone speaks. I nod
To shades of green and grey and inbetween the voices
Twine like bells, like the meadow, bells between

III

Allow the world to sink, the sun to cease, the moon to fold
In half, his poor stained face turned away from us

I claw
My way through the territory of inner breaks, the territory of wind
Adjusted windmills turning in the galeforce roar of winds
Blown from the fat full cheeks of giants bent on giving sail to
skiffs
O
what a lovely world is born
a sprout upon this lake of sound, this wave
of time and scrape
this minute blinking of an eye
ai-yai-yai

Mine blinks
Back tears, a smile upon my ears. No harm done! The scrape
Does not escape the vision. The stone upon my finger
Waits to break the news. It’s good. The empty tin is full

IV

The deck of the ship keeling,
Voices bellow from below
The same story every time the story of the world is Dreck

The tragic track, the murdered margin, the border crossing,
The foldout coast, the squiggle, the prayer,
The fumble united in the field

That pitch
A note too difficult to identify
Moving through to bliss white hot bobbins, flowerheads,

The spineless manner of the proposition
From some other story . . . The flag is
red white and blue
The flag is red
black and gold
The flag is yellow
green and red
The blood

V

Ships pass in the night,
Fragments of a cliché
Caught in their wake.

The sky resounds
To a fine saxophone,
A soft slow snog

Come hither, play your tongue
Across the reed, crease me,
Crack me open like a seedpod.

The ship sails on.
The ship leaves
Slip stream

in its wake

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