Broken Glass

On one side of the mirror, me, myself, in doubt.
On the other, the man I mostly want to be.
See us clear as we turn and turn about.

***

I hold out my hand to the rain,
as if that ‘simple act’
were something I might do again and again.

***

These are the saddest snaps I’ve ever seen.
My father in khaki. My father in khaki. My father
in khaki. Yes. My mother in bombasine.

***

Pi-dogs. A lemon sky. A Judas kiss.
A moment in some shebeen. The view you get
from behind the gun. I dreamed all this.

***

A room hanging in silence. A sunstruck window.
Doors to left and right.
A sense of decorum tells you which way to go.

***

She kicked off her shoes. She unzipped and dropped her dress,
then stalled on a vacant look.
Next night the same, and the night after that, more or less.

***

Why not grub up a smidgen of turf from his grave?
Cultivate it. Trim it as you might
toenails or hair. Soon you’ll know how to grieve.

***

A teardrop mask. White gloves. Crowds in the street.
She is running a fever; she’s ill.
All the more reason, she thinks, to be indiscreet.

***

The ocean at night, where something tremendous leaps.
Did I say ‘sleeps’?
Who knows what the darkness discovers?

***

A word unsaid, a withdrawal, a second guess
right at the wrong time…
The dry clack-clack of the abacus.

***

After all that, milady’s final choice:
‘Not bloodstone – moonstone.’ And then:
‘They say my true instrument is voice.’

***

Waking, again, in tears for the moment lost
to the moment of waking;
all day long you walk with that same ghost.

***

The footfall of the uninvited guest.
The EntriCam.
Teeth and hair and pixillated lust.

***

The colour green, as if no other colour would do.
She was going through snow for sure,
so a long time back. So it might have been brown or blue.

***

A stipple of spit on the tiling. A snatch
of song. Machinery cranking up.
Rain-clouds as far as . . . Catnap. Mix and match.

***

Cock-crow. Clean linen. A sea-mist.
Tulips one side of a limestone wall.
Given time, I could complete this list.

***

A man steps off a tall building. Your task?
To remember the slinky undertone
of shoe-leather on brick; not much to ask.

***

This word from the edge of sleep: abandonment.
Oh, very clear since you ask.
And clearer still what it meant.

***

She could touch you now, if she wanted. She could find
the little rub of blue where she touched you last,
not a bruise, exactly; not quite. She could do it blind.