Home | ME/CFS | Poems | Photos | Futures | About me | Links | Search | Contact me |
New Poems |
Abstract |
People |
Love |
Nature |
Other |
Goodbyes in a Coffee Cup I play "God Bless America" on the rim Of a fire porcelain saucer, the bitter Sweetness of two cultures, dark and light, Satanic and white, fresh on the tongue Puckers my lips into a question mark Somewhere in the hazy recesses. Today, This day of British Mandate past, swift As the spinning earth. This mixture shudders And forms a puddle of sugar-sapped sand. The spoon I hold leaps from my fingers Turning the spirals of a stricken gazelle As it replays reflections of the bleeding sky. Time Holds Itself. In the sequined sky twin tanks of kerosene Powder their noses in metal and glass Those whose minds at critical pin-points Are already three steps up heaven's stair While the asphalt blank beneath shivers In the manner of something dying again. Close by three bodies, limb in limb, dive Making origami semaphore of their fall A code scribing two wishes in the sky:: a) that this falling never end its fever and b) that the haywire bodies remain unkissed By those whose images now tempt their God Onto pavements these pledges clack Unsettling the calm sea of my coffee cup Whilst I hear the soft-crack pillow-thud Like poems thrown from an open window Dancing chiaroscuro pyres of confetti Down into the street, and painting epitaphs As they butterfly here and there like worn Phrases of a million Victorian headstones. Time Holds And the concrete and steel bends like butter Scythed into bandy legs by the sluttish heat And trading floors begin to make ticker-tape Of the wind as the whispers of smoke flutter In the wake as if the whole city stops. Dead. And waits until it can breath again And slowly, one by one, lights come on Paving the broadways and boulevards With the slow handclap of sweet revenge And the portraits of loved ones flap On the windshields like the billet doux Of some stranger fictions of the once-loved And the smoke of demons, rising like Some toxic morning opiate from the sea Seems to rinse the sky with memories And the crush of each man and woman Now stumbling like winter-wakened wasps Coated in the guts of mighty minarets Creases itself into nothing living. Nothing. Lungs teach themselves again to breathe © David Incoll 2001 |
||
Back to New Poems index |
Home | | | Search | | | ME/CFS | | | Poems | | | Photos | | | Futures | | | About me | | | Links | | | Contact | ||
Copyright by David Incoll 2001 |