All the best men are interested in other men, or their forearms are strong and lightly haired.

All the best men are already without that which they need no longer.

So it is that each woman, adrift, ends up with me.

So it is that each woman pretends she is happy with me.
How many times am I going to be told I feel so good?

That before I came along it was so hard?

That I’m so big? That I do it so well? – all without any reference to the facts.
I could be scaling a volcano that’s posing as a snow-capped mountain.
I could be scaling a volcano, a breathing volcano, scaling its rocky chest,

while the conical beast breathes quietly.
I could be on a giant breast of molten, fuming, breathing matter.

I could be trudging through an ephemeral, snowy skin.
How many times will I be told?

About the sting and cough of sulphur.

About the slow admissions of geology, the truth trapped in the rock.
I could be scaling a snow-capped lie,

a lazy, glacial tongue,

a smoky ode to my own burning questions.
This could all come back to who I am.
All the best men are young men

and despite the years I am not yet sure if I am a man.
To be young and to be a man!

Sitting completely on the seat of a bus or overcoming it slightly,

the body and its occasional hairiness.

To be strong and to suck on hangovers with gritty relish,

munching on savoury biscuits early in the morning.

To eat up the world, thrilled by blood’s sweet circus,

paying scant regard to the view.

To be eager and oblivious to the pit of the night.
As for me, I’ve neither riches nor righteousness.

I’m no smart-casual, golden credit card man.

I’m not grins and strong arms at a Sunday barbecue, light beer guzzle.

If I’m something women haven’t seen before then I am

hardly something they wanted to see before.

And they are moving…

The women are moving with the men.

The women are moving with the men behind walls of impregnable laughter,

while I am a bottle filled with thirsty salt and left to warm on the patio.
I am not youth; I’m not bristling hints of knowing.

I’m all the liminal variables.

I am incomparable because I dissolve amidst comparisons.
The collision of plates: so many secrets spraying out

then hardening.

To strip off my clothes and run, feet slapping the soft earth.

To leap with my delicious limbs, soar brilliantly and splash into

shady rivers, isolated coves.

To be a body wanted by bodies, to be nothing more than muscle, slick ski

and obvious yearning.
So, who is the man I might have become?

Or, who is the man I might be that I am not?
I’m no oasis, no waterhole.

I am not what you might like to come to.

I’m a traveller on a road of a size somewhere between a minor highway and a suburban street.

I emerge only when speech cracks open and illuminates me;

in this sense I’m certainly not geological.
If I were anything, it would be a plant or a lizard with skin the colour of rock.

I have skin the colour of rock and it screams colours and colours of sound.
You see, the more one knows, the less and less one knows.

        How to tell each woman from herself?

        How to tell the telling from my own halting speech?

The more one hears, the less and less one hears.

        Deafened by explosions, when will I learn to see?

        – the tremendous, fire-dark storm

        of vision’s certainty, of contorted faces unravelling themselves, of trees and

lizards unravelling themselves.
I’m still too far below; I’m still scaling the snowy breast.

I am planting footsteps with my crampons’ frail nails and ascending

at the rate of a life.

A life could be a bubbling tomb upon a floating yolk.
From time to time, ghosts of forests gather and burst into the night,

burst stringy traces of yolk across the black pan of the night,

across sierras and their valleys,

across oceans and their limbs of kelp.
The women’s bright particles keep floating towards me:

their shimmering tongues lapping against the surface,

initially cautious of the steaming debris

then learning something of its vulnerable smoke.

Here I am, changing phases, escaping like the earth escapes,

through fissures of young, restless, twitching muscle.
If I were anywhere, it would have to be here.