Poems from Orbiting

Flood
I thought if I waited,
if I left wine, small purple flowers,
a polished coin, if I made secret prayers
and with rituals
blessed the dirt that would cake your boots
when you came
then you would come.

I thought if I wept,
if I fucked with the thought
of your face masking the face of the one
who has taken your place
and made of my bones
a terrible shrine
then you would come home.

And I thought if I drove
my children away, and drove
myself mad, and cut through my palm
and bewitched the windows of your friends
with my watching -
or if I stayed numb, silent and orderly,
beached and counting the sum of your acts
with white and black pebbles, one by one,
then you would come home.

But you didn't come.

Eight stars out
and the station is calling.
Not much to eat, the clock tower is gone.
And where the river mouth was
now there's a market -
the people seem surprised
when it floods.

In the Beginning we Played Games to Kill Time

This place is a shit stain.
Neither of us can sleep.
We play games; that's our way of sleeping.

I invented a game called 'Polypropylene Abattoir'.
Your prefer to clean.
You move some rubbish, I move some rubbish,

You move some more rubbish -
It's a way of sleeping, as I said.
Shadow puppetry is out of the question.

Puns have been abolished.
I invented a game called 'Active Ingredients',
You invented a game called, 'I Keep Finding Packets of Unsmoked Cigarettes

And I don't Smoke.'
There are too many places like this.
Only the rubbish is different, in minor details,

The same brands, but larger or smaller wrappers,
Or different plastics.
We should have a hundred words for plastic.

*
You don't like my game
'Looking Through Bins for Some Decent Pornography'
So I play it undercover while you're looking

Into unsealed letterboxes.
You think every letterbox should contain a poem.
You're looking for poems by Caroline Bergvall

And Marjorie Wellish.
And I'm looking for pornography.
All the pornography I even owned was printed on bark

Or grease-proof paper or dental floss or filmed
With a bamboo camera
In the time of a plague of locusts.

I invented a game called 'Why You Despise
Pornography.' But you won't play.
I've been crying a lot lately.

*
You don't call for three days.
You've been watching a sit-com about rape.
You say I'm the only person you know

That can't see the funny side of rape.
I don't know any more.
You don't want to play a game.

You want to get back to the box-set.
There are nineteen more episodes to watch,
Each named after a famous sado-masochist.

"You'd find 'Burroughs' funny. You like Burroughs."
As I said, I don't know; all the flats
Along the seafront to the brim

With ironic perverts and
Ghost tenants gouged out in mezzanines.
They set off the fire alarm eight times last week.

Love Song
For Sally

I can force my way out of bed.
I can come to see you, your rainy roof.
I can press my eyes open,
the loud dream that tornadoes
around here, shut out for the afternoon.
And I can speak like a flute.
I can hang your breath on the gnats
sewing up a tiny piece of the sky.
Or I can cry a little, to loosen the clay
from your lashes, all this because I love you
in the way poor, sleepy things love.

Inside my body there are marching men
bruising the earth with their boots.
I cannot reveal the things they chant
as the sea can pull back
and show off its earnings -
but I can press, tenderly,
a star blemish through eyelids
with my lips I can tease out a galaxy.