Midwinter Vesper Stomp

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Once, walking, alone
street, night-time, right?
booted toes pushing like arrows through rotted snow and iced
leaves,
once, leaving, running, you know?
only light orange, fake, bright.
stars inchoate and old, slushed winter still cold
and holding on to crack of bitumen and slabbing frost right side of road

I think of you, lost, I think of
mile-long tracks of sand and I think of the nefarious past,
grand, set against me as flakes of browning vegetation, I take now
five, six heartbeated breaths and drip out memory along into
the snow

I have got fat, you know.
Dear allejandro,
like a maggot, I suppose, a grub, white, bulbous, the
sight of me twinned in glass is not right, neither does
memory let me forget that night
of muscle and strength, of us, taut bone, endless words repeating
the language of below, I have now a heavy
ring of silence to show for English love – all vegetables that grow
and soft, decaying fruits fertilized by ecstasy or ketamine,
and perma-tans and blond frosted hair – no,
I lost you, and, in the ultraviolent glow of my return
home, in the almost-purple, in the blue
of butchers lights and market signs,
I lost my own reflection, I, lost you


the closest I could be was coast, west, wales,
last month I pushed the boundary to the edge,
for days, rain-wet, I’d stand on crags of land, ocean-wrack,
free of field and hedge,
our only truth left: basalt, calc, water sprayed, salt strewn, sea sprung and hewn,
atlantic ledge, feet shook on boulders few
I would raise both weak arms above a weakened head
and I would remember the bulge of steel and lead,
the piston irons and drone of spinning fan that brought me back
from sand-drenched south america to cold England, dead through the air
my allejandro, my ghost,
oh,
still, arms high,
with crash and draw of wave beneath, I would pray to be as stone and wait
for continental drift to lift my body, petrified around my bones, through
the bitter saline separation, from one old rose-garden of a nation to that
single central station, to that rio, rio, allejandro,
or better yet, to break my form into a hundred million shards
and as soft sand I’d sift back to your land and nestle in your toes
but as it stands,
there is no ovid, yet, who can
no metamorphosis as grand,

and so I cross some double road
and pray that at that ruby light, that red that
holds back the purring, snarling cars
that, like burning tigers loosed on prey they snap their
leashes and explain their motor-fury
with sharp and unforgiving claws
across my static, fattened form
and rend me down to bone
and soul as a testament
to life alone.

you know, this
endless, windless english solitude, this half-wet winter
the blight upon the neat, allotted gardens, the fungus in the seed,
the moss in tarmac, the algae and the weed,
proves nothing of me
except a willingness to
love only memory and,
neglect all else, neglect and see
fly agaric-like, lipid white,
red-spotted with black-bile I
stomp midwinter in the night, I
breathe, I
kick through grit and
rot amongst the
frosting on the leaves


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